This post is not a plea to abandon Our morale codes, rather to discuss whether they belong in historiography.
well...... according to the father of history, Herodotus, history is:
"... putting on record the astonishing achievements .... and more particularly, how they came into conflict."
So Herodotus believes that history isn't just what happened but how it happened. Ethics is all about context and as history is the most context driven science on the planet it surely the ethics of the time must be taken into context to even begin considering it a part of history. Why must ethics be kept in a contextual sense? Because the inventor of history Leopold von Ranke says:
"To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, ..... To such high offices this work does not aspire: It wants only to show what actually happened."
Of course you could argue that an historian can validly discuss ethics in two ways:
ReplyDelete1.' Judge the past' by the values of contemporaries.
2. Write histories of ethics (without judgement).
'Moral Combat' is an attempt to write the latter for WW2 and includes sections on strategic bombing in general and Dresden specifically. 'Among the Dead Cities' takes a different approach - but at least the intention is clear. Sometimes more interesting is when judgement is implied - 'equivalence' is an interesting concept here. Taylor is an interesting example of a writer who comments on the events by WHEN and where he begins the story.