Ethical Judgments in History: Are they wrong?

Recently I have begun working on a research study with my PhD supervisor Dr. Peter Seixas, and Dr. Kadriye Ercikan that focuses on developing and validating a tool for assessing historical thinking of students in Grade 11. The data collection involves a large-scale administration of the assessment tool to approximately 500 grade 11 students in British Columbia and will be used to investigate the relationship among the tasks, and the three concepts of historical thinking (historical evidence, historical perspective taking and the ethical dimension) that are assessed by the tasks. (For more information on Dr. Seixas’ conception of historical thinking see the Historical Thinking Project).

After administering the assessment tool to a group of grade 11 students last week I got into an interesting discussion with one of the classroom teachers about the acceptability of ethical judgments in the discipline of history and also in history education. The teacher I talked to felt that ethical judgments had no place in the historical discipline, and were not something that teachers should be doing in the classroom either.  

This conversation reminded me of the arguments historians, historiographers and philosophers of history such as Herbert Butterfield, Marc Bloch, George Kitson Clark, E.H. Carr and Geoffrey Barraclough have forwarded to argue that ethical judgments should not be an accepted part of history. Below is a brief summary of these arguments.

1. The quest for objectivity: Historians and philosophers who opposed the making of ethical judgments were part of a European philosophical tradition that maintained that the past is only accessible via evidence leftover from the past and ethical judgments seemed too temporary, too subjective, and too easily manipulated.
2. Ethical judgments are irrelevant to the purpose of history: Herbert Butterfield was emphatic that the role of the historian is “to describe”, “to stand impartial”, to provide “history without bias, history that is partial to nobody”

   (Cracraft, 2004, p. 31)

   . More recently, Megill

   (2004)

   argues that the fundamental tasks for history are to describe events in the past; to explain these wherever it is possible and interesting to do so; to offer arguments and justifications for the truth claims made; and to comment on the significance of what has been claimed

   (p. 61)

   .

3. Ethical judgments are not part of a historian’s training or responsibility: Butterfield argues that assigning "responsibility lies altogether outside the particular world where the historian does historical thinking" (Oldfield, 1981, p. 263). Similarly E.H. Carr argues that there is no tribunal before which men of the past can be held responsible, and it is no part of the historian's task "to pronounce moral judgements on the private lives of individuals who appear in his pages" (Carr, 1962, p. 75-76).
4. The historicist argument: Making moral judgments is impossible in history because times impose their morality upon lives and there is no point condemning individuals for the circumstances in which they found themselves (Gaddis, 2002). Sheehan (1985) argues that the greatest risk in making ethical judgments is judging the past by the standards of another age, or by standards that claim universal applicability (p. 37).
5. Historians know too little: George Kitson Clark (1967) stated that, “I ought to say that I do not myself believe that judgements on dead people can ever be satisfactory. It is not in my belief possible to know enough of the circumstances of those on whom they are to be pronounced, nor is it possible to detach oneself from the issues of any historical conflict sufficiently effectively to be capable of doing equal justice to all the people concerned."
6. Historians know too much: While it might seem like a strange argument, Butterfield suggests that we can know or at least claim to know too much to make ethical judgments. Butterfield believed in social physics—the idea that knowledge of the social laws governing historical development would show that the actions of persons in history could not have been other than what they were, so since they had no real choice, it is beyond the point to make any ethical criticisms of them

   (Vann, 2004).

7. Moral judgments lead to poorly written history: Moral indignation and snap ethical judgments can blind historical understanding, and inhibit the imaginative endeavour. Butterfield states that offering repeated, occasional, or “spasmodic” ethical judgments when writing history is inadequate

   (Vann, 2004)

   .

These are the main arguments forwarded by historians, historiographers and philosophers of history to explain why ethical judgments have no place in the discipline of history. Do any of the arguments have any merit? In upcoming weeks I will continue to explore the issue of ethical judgments in history education. Next time I will discuss the main arguments for ethical judgments in history.