The Impossibility of Avoiding Ethical Judgments

In her November 8, 2011 blog about Remembrance Day fellow THEN/HiER Blogger Katherine Joyce asked how we as teachers should teach about war? Should we try to remain objective, teaching ‘just the facts,’ or, should we take a stance, either pro- or anti-war? Joyce’s question gets at the very heart of the issue of the place of ethical judgments in the history classroom. In my previous two blog entries, “Ethical Judgments in History: Are they right or wrong?" and the uniquely titled “Ethical Judgments in History: Are they wrong?” (Reminder: always check your previous blog titles before naming your next one) I discussed what ethical judgments are, and the arguments historians, philosophers and historiographers have used to argue that ethical judgments have no place in the discipline of history. In this blog I am going to briefly discuss the key arguments why ethical judgments are an important part of doing history.

Ethical judgments are inescapable: Dray observes that "the accounts we find in history books generally seem to be thoroughly value-impregnated” and notes that most historians feel it is psychologically impossible for them to avoid making moral and ethical evaluations in their writings (Dray, 1967, p. 27). Ann Low-Beer (1967) is one of the few history educators who discussed the issue of ethical judgments in history education. She concluded that “History is written in everyday language which is rife with moral connotations and implications, and it is impossible to think of a narrative that is written in neutral technical language” (Low-Beer, 1967). Similarly, most historians would admit that their values influence their choice of topics to study, their perception of sources, their selection of relevant facts and their hierarchies of explanatory factors (Bedarida, 2000; Boobbyer, 2002). In his writing historian of the Shoah Raul Hilberg, made an effort to avoid value-charged language, eschewing terms  such as "crimes" or "murders", however after trying this for awhile he gave up because “he couldn't keep it up” (Vann, 2004, p. 13).

Moral judgments are the end results of historical inquiry: Although I agree with Herbert Butterfield that immediate moral indignation to a historical event or action inhibits historical understanding, I also recognize like Boobbyer (2002) that historians and philosophers who argue that moral judgments are unacceptable confuse moralising with moral judgments. To make ethical or moral judgments about individuals or a society is not the same as reporting one’s subjective responses to that morality. Ethical judgments, like all value judgments, should be the end product of the historical endeavour, and historians who make them before this point are guilty of shoddy practice. Similarly, most historians accept that all historical judgments require constant revision as new evidence emerges and new analytical positions develop that cause us to perceive the moral dilemma differently (Oldfield, 1981).

Overcoming the historicist problem: as discussed in the previous blog, the most substantial problem historians encounter when making explicit ethical judgments is that “the past is a foreign country”—there may have been different moral codes in the past than today. Historians commonly agree that it is impermissible to make presentist or anachronistic ethical judgments using contemporary frameworks that do not and cannot be applied to the past (Oldfield, 1981). Like today, cultures in the past did not necessarily have consensus about their moral and ethical values and how they should be applied (Vann, 2004). When historians “visit” the past they must make their best effort to understand the moral precepts of the people they are studying, and then balance these with what would have been fair today (Barton & Levstik, 2004). Gaddis suggested that getting inside other people’s minds requires that one’s mind be open to their hopes and fears, their beliefs and dreams, their sense of right and wrong, their perception of the world and where they fit within it (Gaddis, 2002, p. 124). In his view, the only way to face the problem of anachronism and presentism in making ethical judgments is to accept the historian’s engagement with the morality of his or her time, but to distinguish that engagement explicitly “from the morality of the individual, or the age the historian is writing about. We need both angles of vision if we really are to triangulate the past” (p. 128).  

I have presented the arguments historians, philosophers of history and historiographers have used to explain why ethical judgments are an acceptable part of historical practice. In my next post I will discuss how ethical judgments might look in schools and how students might be taught to make thoughtful ethical judgments about the past.