Can (or Should We) Moralize the Past? A Roundtable Discussion

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. Even if one believes, with Gould, that some things cannot be moralized, it is not easy to know where to put the before and the after on the historical timeline.

In this roundtable event, sponsored by the Medieval History Workshop, the Early Modern History Workshop, and Ancient Studies at Harvard, four graduate students working on early historical subjects in four different fields—Hannah Hoffman (Classics), Sama Mammadova (History), Charlie Mayhew (History of Science), and Hwei Ru Ong (East Asian Languages & Civilizations) will consider this vexed question: can we, or should we, moralize the past when we study it?