to think "everyone did it back then" isn't an excuse?

[taaay]

This comes up quite a lot whenever people discuss things that were commonplace in the past.

People say husbands beating their wives was normal, children were routinely smacked or caned, racism was widespread, homophobia was accepted, and so on. Often the defence is that people were simply products of their time and didn't know any better.

But were they really?

Not that long ago, police often treated violence against wives as a private domestic matter and were reluctant to get involved. Marital rape wasn't even recognised in law. Racist attitudes were commonplace and children could be hit in ways that would be completely unacceptable today.

Yet even then there were people saying these things were wrong. Women campaigned against domestic violence, people fought against racism and discrimination, and some parents chose not to hit their children despite it being socially accepted.

I sometimes wonder whether too much emphasis is placed on "that's just how things were". Were people really incapable of thinking for themselves? Did they lack an internal moral compass? If your neighbour was regularly beating his wife, or a child was being routinely thrashed, did it genuinely not occur to people that this was cruel and wrong simply because society tolerated it?

I understand that social norms are powerful and that people are influenced by the world around them. But surely "everyone else was doing it" can explain behaviour without excusing it.

I think people are speculating about what your angle is OP because lots of people have given quite reasonable, non-goady answers to your question, but none of them quite seem to be the ‘right’ answer for you.

Anyway, my take is, on any issue, society in the past and present is usually a mix of:

• people who actively engage in behaviour X
• people who don’t engage in behaviour X but aren’t bothered if other people do
• people who don’t agree with behaviour X but don’t think it’s their business if others engage in it
• people who disagree agree with behaviour X, but don’t have the time, capacity, power etc to do anything about it
• people who disagree with behaviour X and have the time, resources, motivation, position etc to actively challenge it

As for why a person may fall in a particular category, that can be for a range of reasons. If you look at examples of people who have stood up and said ‘this is wrong’ in Victorian times, it was often middle/upper middle class Christians like Elizabeth Fry. Their faith-driven values motivated them, coupled with having the ‘space’ to think about and question the issue and the resources and influence to actively do something about it.

If you read my previous comment, it would answer your question. I think..... I am now internally rasing an argument which will not be hounded by the wolves as being racist.

People born and bred in the evolution society or migrated to an evolution society like uk & europe, ill even say USA.....our way of life compared to Africa, India etc is above the parapet. We (as the majority) dont believe in underage or forced marriages, female mutilation, etc they will catch up but then we will be on another different page again and so the cycle will continue. But we will be ruled by AI then so doesn't matter

Ill humour you, even if you are AI.

So where do you think evolution of "what is right" comes from? Big bang, Adam and eve (so why is incest unlawful, besides the now know genetic downfalls)

Did Egyptians build the pyramids and there are no structures 100s metres below ground? Is the earth flat??

If 500 years from now, eating meat is seen as unforgivably awful, people from that time can say "there were vegans in 2026, it's not like no-one was pointing out that this was a moral issue." But I am not a vegan, and even the most hardcore vegan's I know don't think that meat eaters are irredeemably evil.

In general, I think it's a mistake to think that what separates good and bad is an insufficient desire to do good. I think figuring out what is good is a genuinely hard problem. The fact that some people already had the "right" opinion doesn't change this. I am not at all confident that of all the ongoing debates, I've figured out which is the more ethical side. I'm definitely not confident that if I had access to the information that people had in the 1800s, I'd have "thought for myself" and figured out the morally right answers.

I think you're taking "responsibility" to mean punishment, and that's not what I mean.

People can be responsible for something even if there's no practical consequence attached to it decades later.

If someone says, "My dad used to get drunk and beat my mum. It was awful, but he was a product of his time," I'd say both things can be true. He was influenced by the attitudes around him, but that doesn't remove his responsibility for what he did.

Otherwise where does the logic stop? Every action has a social context. Every person is shaped by their upbringing, culture and circumstances. If being a product of your time is enough to remove responsibility, then nobody is ever responsible for anything.

No, I'm not suggesting we dig up dead wife beaters to give them a stern talking-to. Responsibility doesn't have to mean punishment. Sometimes it simply means being honest about the fact that someone made choices and caused harm, rather than treating them as a passive passenger of history.

What I find odd is that some people seem to think the only options are either "they were evil monsters" or "they couldn't help it because of the era they lived in." Human beings are usually more complicated than that.

This thread is turning into the very definition of labouring a point

To me, the more interesting question is why some people challenged accepted norms while others didn't. Simply saying everyone was a product of their time doesn't really explain that.
The same question could be asked today and will likely be asked by future generations. I think unless it directly affects you, you just get on with your life and pick your battles.

Nobody expects every individual to spend every waking moment
campaigning against every injustice. Of course people pick their battles.

The issue is when people go from "most people just got on with their lives" to "therefore nobody can be criticised for what they believed or did."

And of the adage about motes in eyes.

I think some people are reading far more into my question than is actually there.
I don't disagree with your categories. My point is that people seem very willing to use them to explain behaviour, but then often use that explanation to remove responsibility altogether.

I also don't think it was only a handful of privileged reformers who could recognise something was wrong. There have always been ordinary people who disagreed with what was considered normal. They may not have started campaigns or changed laws, but they still made different choices.

That's why I struggle with the idea that people were simply products of their time. If everyone was just following the culture they happened to be born into, where did all the people who challenged that culture come from?

To me, saying "that's how people thought back then" explains something. It doesn't settle the question of whether it was right or wrong, or whether people should be held accountable for it.

Otherwise we end up in a position where nobody is ever really responsible for anything because there's always a social, cultural or personal reason why they believed what they did.

Please stop! I think you have explained yourself enough now!

Even the concept of harm is less clear cut than we’d like to think. The idea of objective harm is a difficult one because there are things that we recognise as harmful over time as our knowledge changes, things that are harmful but we choose to do to achieve a particular end and harms that are debated or harms that are done to avoid a greater harm. So I may have done X, which you experienced as harmful, to try and avoid Y which was also harmful.

I don’t think it’s always easy to identify harm, determine motive, foreseeability and then apply a current lens to historic harm.

Overton Window innit? 🤷🏼‍♀️

Also, there are quite a few situations where there just wasn’t really a workable option to do anything counter to the culture. Like, in the 80s where I lived, the only things you could recycle were glass and newspapers / telephone directories. So you might have WANTED to not just throw something in the dustbin, but there was no other place it could really go.
And things were just the way they were. Girls and women didn’t like being catcalled by every random man on the street that felt like it, but what could you do?
Lots of us didn’t like Heat magazine and its ’Circle of Shame’, or topless women in the Sun, or the Pirelli calendar in full public view in the garages we took our cars to, but what could we do?
There were so many instances of sexist, misogynist behaviour, if you decided to combat it decisively wherever you found it, you’d have had no friends and been seen as a reactionary loony in no time. And probably been attacked too. Men in those days tended to turn hostile very, very quickly if you took them to task for catcalling.

Things have gradually changed in lots of ways. A ton of stuff is better now.

Humanity’s consciousness evolves I think, due to a host of factors. I rewatched Avatar the other day for the first time since it came out, and was horrified! (Generalising wildly, but) We were all so wowed by the spectacle and the 3D then, I think the storyline and the narrative insistence on us seeing Jake Sully as a hero managed to slip under our collective radar.

I’m big into speaking up now, signing petitions, saying when something’s not ok. People do grow and early experiences of the negative consequences of not speaking up can be very transformative over time.

Good thread OP, thank you.

I was brought up in the same environment. It never occurred to me growing up to question it. It was, what it was. Thankfully things are changing. Thinking back yes my attitude was wrong, but at the time it was just normal.

But that’s why we have laws, social contracts that determine what we as a society deem acceptable behaviour irrespective of knowledge or motive. Because people always have a reason for behaving the way they did. We may not like the reason, or agree that it was reason enough or even based in reality but there’s always a reason. We have processes to determine harm, and to hold people to account irrespective of their thinking at the time of offence.

Because “his responsibility” is meaningless?!

You are welcome to leave or hide the thread anytime!

I got the occasional “good hiding” from my parents growing up in the 1980s and at the risk of sounding like a cliche, it never did me any harm and I have a perfectly good relationship with my parents.

I wouldn’t dream of doing the same with DD, but that doesn’t make my parents morally compromised. They’re just of a time when that was acceptable.