Good and Evil

[Hatshepsut]

Now, the question here is: are good and evil truly points of view?

Yes, they can be nothing else as ethics are subjective.

Oddly that ethics is largely subjective, yet it does admit analysis using measurable and meaningful criteria, giving it an element of objectivity you wouldn't see in art history, for instance.

I would suggest that had the culture been interested in basing their ethical systems on an appreciation of harm, they would have been able to judge their actions in the same way that we do now, in Europe in the 21stC.

But their very conception of "harm" may well have differed from ours. For ancient peoples, the safety of family or tribe was more important than the safety of the individual. The latter could be sacrificed if needed. And there were good reasons for it to be that way: The world didn't have strong central governments or police in that era, leaving people to band together for their own protection usually under a system of kinship ties. Most of these child marriages were arranged to cement alliances between one group and another. High-status people of any age weren't allowed to marry for love, and the marriages had to take effect while relations were good; waiting risked the possibility the groups would become enemies in meantime. (Though curiously, low laborers may have had more freedom of mate choice since no one would be concerned with diplomatic results.) Basically the individual wasn't safe unless her kin group was. Which makes me careful regarding anachronistic projection of contemporary moral standards onto earlier eras.

I won't style myself a child psychology expert, and freely concede the known hazards of child sex you have listed. Yet I doubt these hazards were well appreciated in medieval times, especially given that individuals were expected to subordinate their own welfare to that of their kin groups. It took more self-sacrifice and pain to live in that era than it does in ours. I can see an argument where sexual use of others by powerful people became excessive even by whatever standards they did have, so that Muhammad may not be completely off the hook.