Guest post: Stuck in presentism
Originally a comment by Sonderval on Activists shocked to learn of other views.
Well duh, what would you expect it to reflect? Your views?
Yes, people probably expect exactly that because they think that different from all people in the past, their current moral and ethical values are the endpoint of ethics evolution. It is totally inconceivable to most people that some things we today take for granted may be viewed as horribly wrong in the future. Even if you point out that people 200 years ago thought the same thing, they still do not see the relativity of the situation.
Furthermore, they also do not see how they stand on the shoulders of past people to actually arrive at their moral values. They all assume that, had they lived 300 years ago, of course they would have been horrified at cat burnings or public executions. Ask any scientist and they will most probably tell you that back in the days of Galilei, of course they would have immediately been convinced by the arguments that earth moved around the sun. (Many of the same scientists will also tell you how “sex is binary” is of course wrong….)
Almost no-one tends to ask the question “Which practice that is common today will horrify people 200 years from now?” or “Why, if I had lived in the past, do I believe that I would still have my modern values despite the fact that they agree with and were formed by the world around me?” The closest they may come to this is talking about “the right side of history” and assuming that in the future, all of their values will be seen as the correct ones.
But actually thinking about the fact that all of us are probably doing something that “the right side of history” will view as wrong is rarely done.
I think you’re painting with too broad a brush here. I do think a lot would, but not all of them. Just a nitpick.
As for our views being formed by our world – they do seem to grasp that when it’s convenient. They constantly scream about ‘social constructs’, but they don’t apply that to their own views. And they have a stupid habit of assuming that EVERYTHING is a social construct – except, of course, the innate sense of gender and their knowledge of right and wrong. Those are things anyone can see, so all the people in the past, all those who came before them, were evil people, not people who came from a different world where things were viewed through a different lens.
I used to make the point to my students that societal values change. They were skeptical – until I pointed out to them that it was once see as morally right to own slaves, and that saying women should have the vote was seen as a moral evil by many, and society accepted both these views in at least parts of the world. I could name off a lot of other things that have been that way, but on this site, I doubt I have to.
It was only with Kepler’s elliptical orbits that a heliocentric model predicted planetary motions *better* than a geocentric model.
Galileo’s observation of Jupiter’s moons showed that there are at least some objects that definitely orbit something other than the earth. The phases of Venus are hard (impossible ?) to explain in a non-heliocentric model.
For a non-dogmatic thinker, it was really only the combination of all of those developments that would remove reasonable doubt about heliocentrism. Though the lack of observable parallax of stars bothered scientists until measurements became good enough to detect the parallax in the 19th century.
Similarly in the case of continental drift/plate tectonics. There was reasonable doubt until the 1960s. It was accumulated data better explained by plate tectonics that tipped earth scientists into general acceptance of plate tectonics.
Honest present day scientist can try to look at what evidence was available to their predecessors of a given time to judge what they might have believed under the circumstances.
How to apply similar considerations to ethical issues is another matter.
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