Moral Judgments of Foreign Cultures and Bygone Epochs
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3 Breaking up the Question: Judgments of Institutions and Judgments of
People
Moral judgments can be formed with different goals in mind. They can
be formed for the purpose of conflict resolution, which is the case
when a judge decides a lawsuit. Or they can be formed merely with the
aim of gaining a well reasoned moral opinion on some subject matter.
This is the goal of historians when they judge historical persons and
their actions. The former requires that we reach definite and unambiguous
solutions, while the latter allows some amount of ambiguity. If it
is just for the sake of forming an opinion, we may look at the issue
from different angles without reducing the different perspectives to
a single ultimate decision. The following discussion is primarily concerned
with well reasoned moral opinions. How the cases where definite decisions
must be made are to be dealt with will only briefly be considered later,
in the concluding paragraphs of this paper.
What then are the reference points that we should look out for in order
to form well reasoned moral judgments of strange cultures and bygone
epochs, if we are to avoid the extremes of imposing our set of values
(moral absolutism) and moral relativism alike? The
solution that I would like to propose is to make a fundamental difference
between the judgment of social institutions, including moral codes,
and the judgment of people acting within the social institutions of
their time and culture. While the former may be valuated rigorously,
only taking into account the objective possibilities for having other
institutions at a certain development stage, the latter should be judged
against the background of the moral common sense of the respective
time and culture.
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