krispy kremlin_ wrote:
Stagger Lee wrote:Ironically, you are advocating for the same kind of moral progressivism that conservatives generally rail against.
Hardly.
More like an unassuming, historical pre-modern moral relativism that is modest enough to know that we hardly have the complete story even if we really think we do and practical enough to understand that shredding historical figures that were the genesis of the world we live in today is an unnecessary exercise at best and a divisive wedge in a fracturing society at worst.
The comment about red meat was to suggest the point that if in one hundred years the slaughter of cattle is deemed morally unjust, then you and I and much of our society are as much a "barbaric butcher" as your ilk claim Christopher was. Would that sit right with you?
Barbarism has been regarded as wrong throughout history, in every era, by many different peoples. While ancient morality centers more around the happiness of the moral agent (virtue ethics, or "what makes a virtuous person?"), and modern ethics tends to focus more on the negative (a series of restraints against others' property), these ideas have existed for millennia. But, again, you are setting up a morally relative shell game here. So:
Person A: I oppose all brutality.
Person B: What's brutal can't be judged because what's not brutal today could be construed as brutal tomorrow. We have to look at the context because we can't really understand how it was in the past. We don't have the "complete story" of why the brutality occurred.
Let me propose a scenario for you. A conversation in the 24th century:
Person A: I oppose the brutality of the Holocaust.
Person B: The Germans' brutality in the Holocaust can't be judged because what's not brutal today could be construed as brutal tomorrow. We have to look at the context of post-World War I Europe because we can't really understand how it was in the past. We don't have the "complete story" of the Holocaust and why Hitler ordered the brutality that occurred.
To your other point, the meat argument is a bit of a straw man; we have to judge the morality of each act on its own merits. While ethics had come far enough by Columbus's time to recognize that murdering people was wrong (these were Catholics; see Exodus 20, for example), the morality of using animals has not yet been fleshed out ethically. For example, we cannot fault Europeans in the 14th century for bloodletting because they did not have germ theory.
The Spaniards had prior knowledge that killing people was wrong, and they did it anyway. It is implied that because some of us don't aspire to Columbus's cult of personality that we want to tear down the very fabric of Western Civilization and all of its accomplishments and leaders is ridiculous. I find it funny that your ilk think I'm a "liberal" because of this; I'm far from it. I just don't agree with holding a known and admitted murderous hoard on a pedestal.
As an aside, you should look into how Columbus Day became a national holiday in the first place (keywords: Catholic Lobby, Knights of Columbus, Columbus Day).