(October 4, 2021 at 4:35 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: @Spongebob
As for lincoln - he never considered himself an abolitionist and had alot of typically shitty views on the subject of racial equality. You may be wondering what accounts for the legend of lincoln..and that, might be our moral intuitions. Of imagining what the best version of the man was,..and, being generally well regarded, shifting him in memory closer to that picture of a better thing. Had the south won, would you believe him to have been a simple villain as a citizen of The Confederate States? Slave labor was detestable, but the sudden imposition of poverty and economic disruption was also intolerable - for many of the same reasons. It became a feature of his public speaking that he saw the whole thing as a shit sandwich and would do whatever was better for the country. It was the union he had in mind, not the immediate welfare of any of it's constituent groups...and, we're talking about a person who by consequence of his position made more than one abhorrent decision with vast and far reaching moral import. When we introduce the fact that not every situation has a morally acceptable outcome, we dispense with the binary thought attached to objectivism and the need to lionize our heroes to conform to that standard at the same time.
Actually this is 100% irrelevant to my question regarding Lincoln. What I asked was why would someone who grew up surrounded by a culture that accepted slavery in every way choose to reject slavery as immoral. Lincoln himself expressed this, it isn't revisionism from historians. According to Lincoln own words, he despised the practice from as long as he could remember. Now it's possible there was some revisionism going on in his own memory, but its clear that he was never an advocate of the practice and the older he got the more he opposed slavery. Thanks for the unsolicited history lesson but it's not relevant to this particular thread. It's about morality, not civil war history. Read the OP.
Why is it so?
~Julius Sumner Miller
~Julius Sumner Miller