Can We (or Should We) Moralize the Past?

Event:  Can We (or Should We) Moralize the Past? 

Speakers: Hannah Hoffman (Classics); Sama Mammadova (History); Charlie Mayhew (History of Science); Hwei Ru Ong (EALC)

Abstract: In his 1982 essay, “Nonmoral Nature,” the historian of science Stephen Jay Gould meditated on the role that morality should or should not play in our understanding of the natural world. Animals are neither evil nor kind, in Gould’s view, and morality has no part to play in evolutionary thought.

What Gould didn’t ask is whether scholars of the human past should embrace or reject the same moralizing impulses that motivated Victorian commentators. This roundtable discussion features four graduate students who work on early historical subjects. Our speakers have been asked to consider the question of whether we can, or should, moralize the past, using examples and counterexamples, where relevant, featured in the scholarly literature in their fields.

Sponsored by the several workshops in early historical eras.