[1] https://corpaccountabilitylab.org/calblog/2025/8/7/widesprea...
Judge people by the ways in which they push their society's morals forward, not retroactively after hundreds of years of morals evolving.
I refuse to accept "it was just the way things were at the time" when there were people opposed to slavery thousands of years ago. Aristotle wrote about them:
> others however maintain that for one man to be another man’s master is contrary to nature, because it is only convention that makes the one a slave and the other a freeman and there is no difference between them by nature, and that therefore it is unjust, for it is based on force.
There were abolitionists in the first days of the United States through to the civil war. People knew it was wrong or had ample opportunity to hear it argued that it was wrong, and furthermore, the inherent wrongness of it should be obvious to anyone that encounters it, and I don't give a moral pass to anyone that brushes it off because it was common any more than I do for American politicians that brush off school shootings because it's common.
Really, not much different from how we view factory farming today.
Would you like to argue that it isn't? The floor is yours. Otherwise your point about consensus is moot. Evil then, evil now, evil forever.
If you think you can judge someone by the morals of today, you must then accept you are evil as well, since societal morals will continue to evolve.
You never answered the question: are you vegan, or do you contribute to the immense suffering and death of ~70b sentient beings a year? The suffering hours inflicted every few days exceed that of any atrocity in human history. It is the industrialized torture of billions of innocent beings for your pleasure.
If veganism becomes the norm, is it fair for future humans to judge your whole life by your consumption of meat, leather, or other animal products when there are so many people today that recognize it as a "unique and horrifying evil?"
It is a strange form of exceptionalism for you to judge those in the past but not yourself, because the delta will be similar over long enough timeframes, and if you do partake in any of these things you won't be seen as much different.
We can judge them by their peers at the time. The U.S. founding fathers didn’t unanimously support slavery, many of them opposed it but were committed to the idea of unity against England. Part of why we can be comfortable judging the slave owners is because their position was primarily based on greed - if we suddenly discovered that cows were sentient, a ton of people would stop eating beef but there was no doubt or ambiguity about black people in that regard, only ruthless awareness of how rich you could get without paying your workers.