Vann Historians and Moral Evaluations

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History and Theory, Theme Issue 43 (December 2004), 3-30 © Wesleyan University 2004 ISSN: 0018-2656
HISTORIANS AND MORAL EVALUATIONS
RICHARD T. VANN
In dem Gebiet der Geschichte liegt die ganze moralische Welt.

—Schiller
ABSTRACT
The reappearance of the question of moral judgments by historians makes a reappraisal of

the issues timely. Almost all that has been written on the subject addresses only the pro-
priety of moral judgments (or morally charged language) in the written texts historians
produce. However, historians have to make moral choices when selecting a subject upon
which to write; and they make a tacit moral commitment to write and teach honestly.
Historians usually dislike making explicit moral evaluations, and have little or no train-
ing in how to do so. They can argue it’s not their job; they are only finders of fact.
Historians holding a determinist view of actions do not think it appropriate to blame peo-
ple for doing what they couldn’t help doing; for those believing there is an overall pattern
to history, individual morality is beside the point. Finally, since earlier cultures had val-
ues different from ours, it seems unjust to hold them to contemporary standards.
This essay modifies or rejects these arguments. Some historians have manifested
ambivalence, acknowledging it is difficult or impossible to avoid making moral evalua-
tions (and sometimes appropriate to make them). Ordinary-language philosophers, noting
that historiography has no specialized vocabulary, see it as saturated by the values inher-
ent in everyday speech and thought.
I argue that the historicist argument about the inevitably time-bound limitation of all
values is exaggerated. Historians who believe in the religious grounding of values (like
Lord Acton) obviously disagree with it; but even on a secular level, morals are often con-
fused with mores. If historians inevitably make moral evaluations, they should examine
what philosophical ethicists—virtue ethicists, deontologists, and consequentialists—have
said about how to make them; and even if they find no satisfactory grounding for their
own moral attitudes, it is a brute fact that they have them.
I end with an argument for “strong evaluations”—neither treating them as a trouble-
some residue in historiography nor, having despaired of finding a solid philosophical
ground for moral evaluations, concluding that they are merely matters of taste. I believe
historians should embrace the role of moral commentators, but that they should be aware
that their evaluations are, like all historical judgments, subject to the criticisms of their
colleagues and readers. Historians run little risk of being censorious and self-righteous;
the far greater danger is acquiescing in or contributing to moral confusion and timidity.
Of all the standard issues in the critical philosophy of history, the problem of the
propriety of value or moral judgments by the historian is the one that for almost
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4 RICHARD T. VANN
forty years seemed to disappear—either solved or forgotten.1 In the highly

charged moral atmosphere that lingered from World War II, which seemed to the
victors a struggle of good against evil, when everyone in occupied Europe faced
a choice between resistance and collaboration, the question whether historians
should focus on moral dilemmas in the past was salient. From the mid-1960s,
though, few philosophers who wrote on historiography paid it any attention,2 and
even fewer ethicists turned their minds to the issue whether moral censure, or
praise- or blameworthiness, could or should still attach to people who are dead.
Historians sometimes wrote on the topic, but often in the mode, as C. P. Snow
puts it, of “sending the old sonorities around the table.” When they ventured to
discuss the usefulness of history—another almost taboo topic—they had to
approach, in a gingerly fashion, its possible moral lessons, usually via the vexed
issue of objectivity.
In the past few years, however, the problem of value and/or moral judgments
has re-emerged in reflections on historiography, to the point where François
Bédarida could claim in 2000 that “questions of value . . . have taken up a cen-
tral position in contemporary debates.”3 The shift to the rubric of values rather
than moral judgments is noteworthy. It may signal a sense that the old discourse
on moral judgments has played itself out. Indeed Marc Bloch, Herbert Butter-
field, and Isaiah Berlin, who wrote in the 1940s and 1950s, produced almost all
the arguments that subsequent writers reproduced—albeit usually with no appar-
ent knowledge of what their predecessors had said. Both the adjective and the
noun in the phrase “moral judgments” have old-fashioned connotations, remi-
niscent of such high Victorian moralists as Lord Acton, who famously declared
that the historian’s duty was to “suffer no man and no cause to escape the undy-
ing penalty which history has the power to inflict upon wrong.”4 “Value judg-
ments” seems to carry less baggage—at least when it is not used interchangeably
with “moral judgments.” This terminological change has opened up the topic,
and perhaps helped historians overcome their inhibitions about discussing it, at
the cost of increased vagueness. All morals are values, to someone at least, but
not all values are morals. I am interested in the ones that are, so I shall not con-
sider such values as technical competence; and, for reasons I shall explain, I pre-
fer to speak of evaluating rather than judging. I shall first canvass the arguments
for and against moral evaluations, trying to address the full spectrum of profes-
sional responsibilities of historians.
1. I was able to find only nine articles and one book in English that directly addressed this topic
in the years from 1959 to 1994. There was also a philosophical treatment of the relationship between
historicism and morality in Conoscenza storica e coscienza morale (Naples: Morano, 1966), by
Pietro Piovani. Although I wouldn’t claim that this search was exhaustive, I doubt that I missed too
many titles.
2. I have found three exceptions: besides the work of Piovani, these are William Dray, “History
and Value Judgments,” Encyclopedia of Philosophy IV (1967), 26-30 and Adrian Oldfield, “Moral
Judgments in History,” History and Theory 20 (1981), 260-277. It is a melancholy but unsurprising
fact that no historian has cited either of these two articles.
3. François Bédarida, “The Historian’s Craft, Historicity, and Ethics,” in Historians and Social
Values, ed. Joep Leersen and Ann Rigney (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2000), 69.
4. Lord Acton, “Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History,” reprinted in Essays in the Liberal
Interpretation of History, ed. William H. McNeill (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 351.
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HISTORIANS AND MORAL EVALUATIONS 5

I. THE SCOPE OF EVALUATIONS
In the literature about “moral judgments” performed or avoided by historians,

emphasis has fallen almost entirely on their finished historical texts, which of
course are accessible to critics in a way that most of the performance of their
other duties is not. However, some of the most delicate moral decisions actually
arise when letters of reference have to be written. Is it your overriding responsi-
bility to make the best case for your student, or give a balanced appraisal of her
abilities? Should you say what you really think about the work of a candidate for
tenure—with all the risks that discovery in a lawsuit may deprive you of your
anonymity—or should you just avoid as much as possible making specific com-
ments, knowing that the language of such references has become so inflated that
even the mildest criticism may be taken as a sign that you really think little of the
candidate. Even though such letters almost never pass into the public domain,
everyone whose duties involve reading them will have opinions about the refer-
ees as well as about the candidates.
Teaching, it seems, offers—or at least used to offer—an opportunity to histo-
rians who might try to avoid moral evaluations in their publications to expose
their students to them. In 1953 Dexter Perkins, for the first time devoting a pres-
idential address to the American Historical Association entirely to teaching,
declared that “we need not be afraid to speak of moral values.”5 In 1974 the
Committee on the Rights of Historians of the same association surveyed 8,000
historians—the great majority of the college and university historians in the
country—and found that almost half (49.2 percent, to be exact) “thought it
impermissible to introduce extraneous materials for the purposes of indoctrina-
tion.”6 Slightly more than half either had no opinion or positively allowed this.
Butterfield—a staunch opponent of moral judgments in historical texts—pointed
out that history has to be taught at different levels, with the best way to teach the
very young being “the mere telling of stories . . . with possibly a side-glance at
some moral that may be drawn from the narrative.”7 As students become more
mature, he thought this drawing of morals should drop out.
It appears strange that almost all historians should not condemn “indoctrina-
tion” in the classroom, or think it appropriate to present their moral values to
children who are too young to make their own judgments of them (though of
course parents regularly do this). This seems the hardest case to make in support
of moral evaluations. It is surely incoherent to hold that published texts should
be entirely free of moral evaluations but that it is acceptable to make them in
teaching children or adolescents. One of these beliefs must be false; our next step
must be to investigate which it is.
5. Printed in the American Historical Review 59 (1953–1954).

6. Quoted in Gordon Wright, “History as a Moral Science,” American Historical Review 81
(1976), 8, fn. 2. I found this difficult to believe, especially the word “indoctrination,” but Wright’s
source is a mimeographed document from Princeton that I have been unable to locate.
7. Herbert Butterfield, “The Christian and Historical Study,” in History and Human Relations
(London: Collins, 1951), 154-155.
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6 RICHARD T. VANN
II. THE CASE AGAINST MORAL EVALUATIONS
There are a number of grounds on which it has been argued, or at least asserted,
that moral evaluations are inappropriate in historiography. One, perhaps the most
basic, is based on a simple aversion to the role of moralist. As Gordon Wright
remarked long ago, “The idea of consciously reintroducing the moral dimension
into history runs counter to the basic training of most historians, and probably to
their professional instincts as well.”8 If we can judge “basic training” from the
introductions to historical studies that are frequently published, references to moral
valuations disappeared a hundred years ago and show no signs of reappearance.9
This aversion can be worked up into an argument based on a division of schol-
arly labors. Historians are supposed to be confined to establishing “what hap-
pened.” The fullest development of this argument was made by Butterfield, who
claimed that moral judgments of the “good men fighting bad men” sort were
characteristic only of the “heroic” or rudimentary stage of historical writing
about a given set of events. As historians do further work, he argued, they can
enter the mental world of all the participants, and when they do, a simple
dichotomy of good and evil looks increasingly crude. It is the task of what
Butterfield calls “technical history”—and the only task appropriate for the histo-
rian—to reach that higher level of understanding.
Bloch, who is with reason almost idolized by contemporary historians, used
different metaphors to make a similar point. He speaks of two kinds of impar-
tiality, that of the scholar and of the judge: “When the scholar has observed and
explained, his task is finished. It yet remains for the judge to pass sentence.”
Judges act impartially by submerging their personal inclinations and passing a
judgment according to law; but the law “no longer refers to any positive science”
and there is vast diversity among cultures as to what should be punishable as a
crime.10 Jurisprudence would of course be overturned if judges in pronouncing
sentence had first to survey all cultures to see if there were some that did not con-
sider murder worthy of punishment; but judges can do what they do, so long as
scholars don’t mistake themselves for judges.
Simply stipulating that historians are debarred by their profession from mak-
ing moral evaluations in their work requires a further argument that it is improp-
er for them to do so. This is supplied, after a fashion, by the related view that
moral evaluations can properly be made, but historians should not make them.
Once they establish what happened, they should leave any evaluation of this
either entirely to their readers or to other, more qualified experts. A well-known
American historian, Henry Steele Commager, has claimed that it would be futile
for historians to make moral evaluations, since readers would have their own
scale of moral values that would be impervious to any influence that a historian
might exert.11
8. Wright, “History as a Moral Science,” 2.
9. Ibid., 3; I have recently read eight history primers published in the last five years, without
encountering any discussion of “the moral dimension of historiography” to which Wright referred.
10. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, transl. Peter Putnam (Manchester, Eng.: Manchester
University Press, 1954), 139.
11. Henry Steele Commager, The Search for a Usable Past, and Other Essays in Historiography
(New York: Knopf, 1967), 300-322.
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Despite his invocation of the progressive character of “technical history,”
Butterfield nevertheless believed that no historian can understand the mind and
character of a historical agent sufficiently to conclude fairly that “one man is
essentially more wicked than another.” Any such judgment merely marks a fail-
ure of understanding. But while arguing that nobody can know enough to con-
clude that any man is morally worse than any other, Butterfield in fact comes
close to the opposite position as well, as expressed in the old maxim tout com-
prendre, c’est tout pardonner: “though I assume there are limits, I do not know
where to place the limits to the operation of the truth that we condemn where we
do not understand.”12
Butterfield also questioned whether “there is any meaning or purpose in ethi-
cal judgments directed against actual people in respect of an action once that
action has been done.” Furthermore, the historian can’t be constantly making
moral judgments, so “the occasional dip into moral judgments is utterly inade-
quate to the end it purports to serve.” Such “spasmodic” fits of morality don’t
have to be taken seriously or accorded “pontifical” character, he went on, but
when the moral viewpoint is introduced a priori, it can inform and thus distort
the entire narrative.13
While Butterfield felt that we will always know too little to make moral eval-
uations, he did intimate that the same conclusion can be reached from an oppo-
site premise. We can know, or at least aspire or claim to know, too much—that
is, to achieve the “social physics” dreamt of by sociologists such as Comte. Such
knowledge would reduce psychological or moral analysis of historical agents to
irrelevance, since social physics would be deterministic in the way that the laws
of natural science were once believed to be. Once we discover these laws, we
would see that individuals were bound to do what they did. Even if no such law
has yet been discovered—as it certainly hasn’t—the idea that they must exist can
make otiose the search for individual motivations to evaluate.
The idea of a providential oversight of history, or as Hegel puts it, a “secular
theodicy,” can lead along another route to the conclusion that historians should
not meddle with moral evaluations. There is a long tradition within Judaism and
Christianity of providential reading of history, in which God displays the ability
eventually to turn evil actions to good outcomes.14 Hegel and Marx did not deny
that human agents have at least a limited freedom of action, but in a sense dimin-
ished responsibility, since they are incapable of fully understanding what they are
doing.15 Marxism, as Karl Popper pointed out, is a species of “moral futurism,”
because Marx believed that the eventual communist revolution and elimination
of the class struggle would bring such great benefits to everyone living at that
12. Herbert Butterfield, “Moral Judgments in History,” in History and Human Relations (London:
Collins, 1951), 110.
13. Ibid., 103-110.
14. The first example is the way Joseph interpreted the meaning of his life, in which his brothers
inadvertently set in motion the chain of events that elevated him to “ruler over all the land of Egypt”
in Pharaoh’s court (see Genesis 45:4-11).
15. For Hegel, only the philosopher can attain this understanding, and then only after the owl of
Minerva has taken wing in the twilight of an era; for Marx, false consciousness blinds all but him-
self, Engels, and the most advanced part of the proletariat.
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8 RICHARD T. VANN
time that the local and temporary inconveniences of the overthrow of capitalism
would pale in comparison.
One implication of “moral futurism” is that actions that seem immoral now
will be seen eventually to have produced the most desirable outcomes.
Shortening the birth-pangs of the revolution may be admirable, and the deter-
minism of Marxism has notoriously inspired vigorous activism; but even greedy
capitalists are doing their bits for the dialectic, since the more they “suck the
blood of living labor,” the more quickly they bring catastrophe upon themselves.
Presumably if they were to take up altruism, they would be lengthening the birth-
pangs and would be liable to moral condemnation—if Marxism did not present
itself, implausibly, as purely scientific.
Butterfield is distinctive in not making the argument that has been so troubling
to many historians—that values in earlier times were not only different from ours
(which everyone would accept) but so different that any moral evaluation of past
actions or people amounts to an unjustifiable imposition by historians of their
own time-bound moral views. Butterfield believed that “life is a moral matter
every inch of the way,” and, I suspect, was too good a Christian to entertain the
possibility that morals varied between civilizations as much as Bloch believed.
However, many historians hold that it is some sort of injustice to the dead if they
are held to a moral expectation they would not themselves have regarded as rel-
evant, much less as binding; yet the task of recreating the entire normative world
of past agents seems extremely difficult. Furthermore, there may be future his-
torical discoveries that will invalidate anything we now say. And as usual, his-
toricism cuts both ways. Just as we must recognize that past agents had different
notions of morality than we entertain, so we must allow that our own moral con-
ceptions will look peculiar, if not aberrant, to future generations. This will viti-
ate the supposedly “undying penalty which history has the power to inflict upon
wrong.”
The most robust advocacy of this position comes from Bloch. He asserts that
for the historian to judge that some people or actions were good and others bad
is a category error, like a chemist’s judgment that chlorine is a “bad” gas and
oxygen a “good” one. Furthermore, in trespassing beyond the professional
boundary, the historian can find no acceptable basis for evaluation. Bloch poses
a rhetorical question:
Are we so sure of ourselves and of our age as to divide the company of our forefathers
into the just and the damned? How absurd it is, by elevating the entirely relative criteria
of one individual, one party, or one generation to the absolute, to inflict standards upon
the way in which Sulla governed Rome, or Richelieu the States of the Most Christian
King! Moreover, since nothing is more variable than such judgments, subject to all the
fluctuations of collective opinion or personal caprice, history . . . has gratuitously given
itself the appearance of the most uncertain of disciplines.16
Where these assertions—that considering murder culpable is “only an opinion,”

or that no criteria can be applied to “forefathers” that are not “entirely relative”—
can lead can be seen in the writings of Geoffrey Barraclough. Barraclough is an
16. Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 140.

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enthusiastic promoter of the historicist argument against moral evaluations.
Reveling in relativism and raison d’état, he asks what good it does to castigate
Hitler, Stalin, or Charlemagne. Evil actions sometimes have good consequences,
he contends, and there is no way to tell whether a virtuous action that was not
undertaken would have turned out better. Hitler, he claims, “was certainly not
immoral in seeking to impose German hegemony on Europe,” and besides, some
good might have come from such hegemony, as in the beneficial consequences
of the Roman Empire.17
In summary: the case against moral evaluations by historians has been sup-
ported by the following array of arguments. Historians have no training in mak-
ing moral evaluations from their professional preparation. In any case moral
evaluations lie outside any responsibilities that historians ought to be asked to
meet. They must confine themselves to findings of fact. Any moral evaluations—
if they must be made—should be made either by experts in ethics or the histori-
ans’ readers (who are indisposed to accept any moral guidance from historians in
any case). There is no reason to evaluate an action if it has already taken place.
Historians know either too little or too much to make appropriate moral evalua-
tions. They can never understand the character of a historical agent well enough
to judge it. Knowledge of the social laws governing historical development
would show that the actions of the personages of history could not have been
other than they were, so since they had no real choice, it is beside the point to
make any moral criticisms of them. Even if they did have limited freedom of
action, our evaluations of them should be in abeyance, since their contributions
to history can only be judged in the light of its eventual outcome (whether this
be the realization of freedom, the classless society, or the Last Judgment).
Finally, historicism demands that historians be sensitive to the difference
between moral ideas today and those prevalent in the past or which can be antic-
ipated in the future. This makes it is unjust to invoke any contemporary moral
notions that would not have been perceived as relevant to past conduct, espe-
cially since such evaluations are liable to become obsolescent in the view of
future generations.
Nevertheless, while they are uneasy about making moral evaluations and can
find a number of arguments against making them, some historians—among them
the same ones who advance those arguments—also feel that it is necessary, in one
way or another, to make them. This apparent dilemma requires further analysis.
III. ARE VALUES INESCAPABLE?
Several historians emphasize the difficulties, and even the impropriety, of mak-
ing moral evaluations, but also claim that it seems impossible for historians to
avoid doing so. George Kitson Clark, who insists that the primary duty of histo-
rians is to establish as nearly as possible the truth about what actually happened,
nevertheless says they must record that “men and women have been inspired by
motives, or cultivated habits of mind, which must be called evil, if the word evil
17. Geoffrey Barraclough, “History, Morals, and Politics,” International Affairs 34 (1958), 6-7.
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10 RICHARD T. VANN
is ever to be used by one human being of another. . . . History cannot be silent

about this [the Shoah], and, unless the tribunal of history is a phantasy and a
myth, it must pass judgement.” However, citing the difficulties which were
encountered in the trials of war criminals, he concludes, with some appearance of
relief: “Fortunately these problems can perhaps be left with propriety to people
who are not primarily historians, to jurists, to philosophers, to theologians, or per-
haps psychologists; the historian’s task is completed when he has described what
he thinks happened and, as far as history can reveal this, why it happened.”18
Bernard W. Sheehan begins his treatment of moral evaluations with the com-
ment that “Most historians are uneasy about delivering moral judgments in the
course of their work” and that “Rendering moral assessments can be a risky
(albeit necessary) business.”19 When we ascend the hierarchy of American histo-
rians to attend to the eminent Commager, we find him also in a bit of a quandary,
since he thinks the question of moral evaluations is “difficult and perhaps insol-
uble.”20 His approach is to list arguments both for and against. The latter we have
already encountered: that people in the past can’t have “due process” and there
will never be enough evidence to judge them; that historians are like judges, ref-
erees, and teachers marking papers in being required to set aside their own moral
opinions; that there is no universal standard, so imposing our own amounts to an
ex post facto law; and that readers would ignore any moral judgments they found.
On the other hand, he alludes to Acton’s view that the moral law is eternal as one
of two supports for moral evaluations. Commager makes no effort to evaluate the
merits of these arguments (despite confessing himself “frustrated” by reading
“comprehensive studies of controversial subjects which reach no conclusions”)
but it certainly seems that his sympathies lie with the antis. He gives them fuller
treatment, and the rhetorical advantage of arguing last without any rebuttal from
him. However, it turns out that historians have a “professional duty” that obli-
gates them to make such judgments as that “the conduct of the Crimean War was
characterized by criminal folly” and that “the violation of Belgian neutrality in
1914 was an error of the first magnitude.”21 It would be possible to treat these as
purely technical appraisals of incompetent generalship or statesmanship, but
words like “criminal” and “violation of neutrality” show how difficult it can be
to purge historical judgments of any moral implications. Since Commager claims
that historians are duty-bound to make judgments like these, but since he does-
n’t say whether he thinks they have a moral component, he remains coy on the
central issue raised by his article.
The other argument for the inevitability of moral evaluations to which
Commager alludes was developed by Isaiah Berlin. Berlin defends the necessity,
and certainly the propriety, of evaluating human actions from a variety of view-
points: moral as well as aesthetic and political. He begins his argument by attack-
ing the kind of asceticism or self-emptying advocated by Butterfield and others:
18. George Kitson Clark, The Critical Historian (London: Heinemann, 1967), 208.
19. Bernard W. Sheehan, “The Problem of Moral Judgments in History,” South Atlantic Quarterly
84:1 (1985), 37.
20. Commager, The Search for a Usable Past, 305.
21. Ibid., 321.
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In describing human behaviour it has always been artificial and over-austere to omit ques-
tions of the character, purposes, and motives of individuals. And in considering these one
automatically evaluates not merely the degree and kind of influence of this or that motive
or character upon what happens, but also its moral or political quality in terms of what-
ever scale of values one consciously or semi-consciously accepts in one’s thought or
action.22
In other words, the events themselves are charged with values imparted by those
who participated in them such that descriptions of them and their agents neces-
sarily morally evaluate them. The alternatives he proposes to this “automatic,” if
perhaps “semi-conscious,” evaluation are determinism and relativism. He identi-
fies determinism with the aspirations of sociology to discover laws of social (and
therefore historical) development, which would cause “doctrines of individual
responsibility” to “melt away.”23 Berlin does not deny that such historical laws
might be discovered in the future; but they are now literally inconceivable:
Social determinism . . . may, indeed, be a true doctrine. But if it is true, and if we begin
to take it seriously, then, indeed, the changes in our language, our moral notions, our atti-
tudes toward one another, our views of history, of society and of everything else will be
too profound to be even adumbrated. The concepts of praise and blame, innocence and
guilt, and individual responsibility . . . are but a small element in the structure, which
would collapse or disappear.24
Historians must use generalizations in their explanations, he acknowledges, but

argues it is a category error to try to assimilate the generalizations that historians
use to scientific laws, because “the valuations which they embody, whether
moral, political, aesthetic . . . are intrinsic and not as in the sciences, external, to
the subject matter.”25
Berlin deploys the same appeal to our existing conceptual structure as embod-
ied in everyday language—to “the normal thoughts of ordinary men”— against
relativism. Since history employs “few, if any, concepts or categories peculiar to
itself, but broadly speaking, only those of common sense, or of ordinary speech”
it follows that moral evaluations will necessarily be found in historiography. If
the man in the street calls Pasteur a benefactor and Hitler an evil-doer, or takes a
position about what Oliver Cromwell did for (or to) England, he is not doing
something “hazardous or questionable.”26
Berlin doubts that moral language can simply be stripped out of historical dis-
course, leaving intact such “non-moral” categories as “important,” “significant,”
or “trivial”—all drawn on as the historian selects what problem to address and
what to say about it. “Is it so very clear,” he asks, “that the most obviously moral
categories, the notions of good and bad, right and wrong, so far as they enter into
our assessment of societies, individuals, characters, political action, states of
22. Isaiah Berlin, Historical Inevitability (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 6. This sev-
enty-nine-page book, replete with sentences over a hundred words long and with continual reformu-
lations of the same few points, is described as the first Auguste Comte Memorial Trust Lecture deliv-
ered at the London School of Economics; but even so rapid a talker as Berlin can scarcely have
uttered the whole text within the confines of a single evening.
23. Ibid., 48.
24. Ibid., 75.
25. Ibid., 54.
26. Ibid., 49-51.
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12 RICHARD T. VANN
mind, are in principle utterly different from such indispensable ‘non-moral’ cat-
egories of value?”27 He grants that it might be maintained that the category
“important” might be more “stable” than more obviously ethical valuations, but
not because these are more “objective.” There is no way that historians, or any-
one else, can make a hard and fast distinction between “what is truly factual and
what is a valuation of the facts.” In such fields as chemistry, however, such val-
uations would be genuinely irrelevant (as in Bloch’s “good” and “bad” gases).
Given our present conceptual world and the ordinary language in which histori-
ans must write about it, he concludes, historiography cannot be practiced with-
out an element of moral evaluation.
A critic of Berlin would doubtless come upon the objection that he is talking
about the (now rather old-fashioned) type of history that emphasizes actions by
individual agents, particularly statesmen or generals. However, it can be argued
that even in quantitative history, where we would look first for value-free histo-
ry, we wouldn’t find it. Eckart Schremmer has shown that while a time series for
a single datum, like wage rates, can be considered value-free, as soon as the his-
torian must make selections, values inevitably come into play. This is even more
true when several series have to be evaluated in order to answer such questions
as the degree of industrialization in different countries at different times. To
judge this, the data must be given weights for which there is no adequate theory
or decision rule. Schremmer gives the timely example of how to assess national
success in the Olympic games. Should gold medals count for five points, silver
for three, and bronze for one? Or gold for three, silver for two, and bronze for
one? Or should all medals, no matter how base the metal, be simply summed?
He has no difficulty showing that nations assign weights that enhance their sense
of success. When Norway had five gold medals to three for the United States, the
U.S. newspapers went to the 3-2-1 weighting. There is no way to eliminate this
evaluative element, he argues, short of something like a general field theory for
the human sciences, which is certainly not on the horizon. In the meantime,
“Value judgements are the price we pay for incomplete knowledge.”28
Berlin made his case at a time when “ordinary language” philosophy was dom-
inant at Oxford, but I think it has retained its cogency during the half-century since
it was propounded. It helps explain the observation of William Dray that “the
accounts we find in history books generally seem to be thoroughly value-impreg-
nated.” Dray notes that most historians feel that it is psychologically impossible
for them to avoid making moral evaluations in their writings. He raises the philo-
sophical question, however, whether it is logically impossible for them to do so—
in other words, whether they are intrinsic to historiography. To establish the pos-
sibility of a value-free historiography, he imagines alternatives to Berlin’s position.
Perhaps, he suggests, the moral saturation of language is only a practical difficul-
ty that could be circumvented if historians made great efforts to purge their lan-
guage of its moral connotations—speaking, for example, of murders simply as
27. Ibid., 56.

28. Eckart Schremmer, “Value-Judgement and Measurement in Quantitative History,” Studia
Historiae Oeconomicae 15 (1980), 73, 78.
Vann 10/25/04 12:02 PM Page 13

killings. As for the problem of subjectivity in the choice of subject and evidence,
could not the historian select materials at random, or just whimsically?29
These speculations suggest that historiography entirely devoid of moral eval-
uations is conceivable, without being logically self-contradictory. Nevertheless
the “practical problems” in writing such works of history appear at the present
time to be insoluble. Few historians, it is safe to say, have ever made a consistent
and thoroughgoing effort to purge their work entirely of moral language, and
there is no evidence of success. Raul Hilberg, the great historian of the Shoah,
does say that he made an effort to avoid value-charged language, eschewing such
terms as “crimes” or “murders,” just as Dray suggests a historian might do; but
Hilberg says that he couldn’t keep it up.30 The response of historians to the idea
that selection could be made whimsically or randomly, as Dray grants, would be
“But that’s not history.” Even chronicles, whose organization is annalistic and
whose choice of events to mention sometimes seems to the modern reader
extremely odd, have some criteria of selection, even if it is not one that modern
historians would endorse or even recognize.31
A recent article by Jörn Rüsen makes the case for the necessity of moral eval-
uations in a novel and ingenious manner, in which historical professionalism, so
often used to exclude moral evaluations, is enlisted to support them. He points
out that historians prior to any research that is intended for publication must com-
mit themselves to joining an intersubjective community of readers (some of them
experts) who are prepared to appraise the work. These readers have the right to
assume that there has been no plagiarism, that no references are faked, no events
or conversations invented, nothing presented as a fact that is utterly unsupported
by evidence unless they are specifically warned that this has been done.
There is also an inescapable moral dimension to the initial decision the histo-
rian makes about what to study. François Bédarida points out the choice of top-
ics, along with the illumination of sources and facts and the creation of hierar-
chies of explanatory factors, is inevitably colored by the historian’s values.32 He
does not elaborate, but at least two considerations suggest themselves. The first
is that the significance of the topic should be justified in the context of the con-
siderable over-production of works of history, which is widely recognized, but
seldom treated as problematic.33 Much historical writing is simply created for
exchange, not for use; it is an essential item on a curriculum vitae if an American
academic author wishes lifetime employment. Ph.D. thesis supervisors general-
ly appraise a thesis proposal in terms only of the available documentation, any
specialized language training required, and the like. This at worst can lead to
something like the two-volume Ph.D. thesis once submitted to Harvard on the
29. Dray, “History and Value Judgments,” 27.

30. Bédarida, “The Historian’s Craft,” 75. In the titles of his books Hilberg does avoid the word
“Holocaust,” speaking instead of the “destruction” of the European Jews.
31. On this see Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” in The
Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
32. Bédarida, “The Historian’s Craft,” 75.
33. Frank Ankersmit is an exception. He emphasizes the excessive number of historical mono-
graphs now being published; see “Historiography and Postmodernism,” History and Theory 28
(1989), 137-139.
Vann 10/25/04 12:02 PM Page 14
14 RICHARD T. VANN
Franco-American pork trade in the decade following the American Civil War,
about which the first reader began his comments by saying “There are some
things about which it is possible to know too much.”
Just as there may be subjects too trivial to repay reading about, much less
researching and writing, there may also be subjects about which nobody should
write. As J. M. Coetzee has written, “There must be some limit to the burden of
remembering that we impose on our children and grandchildren.”34 The common
belief is that any well-done piece of scholarship “advances the frontiers of
knowledge” and thus is obviously good; but it is at least possible that there might
be subjects about which it would be ethically preferable for historians to rein in
their curiosity or suspend the application of at least some of the rules of histori-
cal method.
Two examples suggest themselves. The first is the story of the successful
insurrection of enslaved Africans against the crew of the Spanish ship Amistad in
1837. The Africans took over the ship, but did not know how to navigate it, and
it finally wound up in New London, Connecticut. Eventually the court decided
that all the Africans should be freed, and they returned to Africa. Their leader,
Cinque, became a hero of the civil rights movement. In the 1990s Steven
Spielberg made a movie about the Amistad uprising, a replica of the ship was
built, and a housing development in New Haven was named for Cinque.
Spielberg’s film ends with the Africans leaving the court as free men and the
bombardment by the British navy of a slave staging area on the West African coast.
The glow that the audience probably felt as they left the cinema35 would have been
diminished had they known that there is a possibility that Cinque, after returning
to Africa, went into the slave trade himself. Should Spielberg’s movie have carried
the story a bit further? Should historians—assuming they have the necessary lan-
guages and command of the possible archival sources—devote themselves to
investigating the possible implication of Cinque in the subsequent slave trade? I
can imagine moral reasons for not conducting such an investigation and letting the
story end as Spielberg did. To do otherwise would inevitably be an exercise in
debunking or muckraking, and if successful it would besmirch an exemplary fig-
ure who had shown African-Americans that resistance against the horrors of the
Middle Passage was not altogether futile. Yet I can imagine another historian of
equal moral concern who would believe it worthwhile either to exculpate Cinque
from the charge of becoming a slave trader, or, if convinced that he did become
one, would be able to draw the moral that not even Cinque was able to escape the
universal contamination of the slave trade. What I cannot imagine is a conscien-
tious historian making a decision without a thought for its moral implications.
The second example, taken from much more recent history, raises the question
whether historians are morally obliged to do absolutely everything to insure the
accuracy, as well as the completeness, of their accounts. Timothy Garton Ash
tells (and writes) of his experiences in studying the Stasi, the enormous state
34. J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (London: Secker and Warburg, 2003), 20.
35. A glow considerably facilitated by the emphasis of the latter part of the film on benevolent
whites. John Quincy Adams, played by Anthony Hopkins, the bankable name in the cast, was the
attorney for the Africans.
Vann 10/25/04 12:02 PM Page 15
security apparatus maintained by the late German Democratic Republic.36 Ash,

who was an English student in the GDR, had been told by East German friends
that the voluminous files of the Stasi were full of false information. He wanted
to evaluate the accuracy of the files, and since there were so few other sources
that he could check, he procured his own file. As he read it he realized that
although informants almost always had been given code names, it was clear that
one of his best friends, among others, had given the Stasi information about him.
He felt he had to confront her with the record of what she had said about him.
She was an elderly Jewish woman who, in 1935 or 1936, had joined the (then
outlawed) German Communist party. She and her husband, also a Communist,
fled to Russia shortly thereafter, but he was caught up in the aftermath of Stalin’s
purges and spent fourteen years in a labor camp. She was drafted into a labor
brigade during the war. In the 1950s, despite—or as Ash speculates, perhaps
because of—these experiences, she returned to East Germany still a convinced
Communist. Shortly before the Berlin Wall was erected, her eldest son went to
the Federal Republic. When Ash first met her she had not seen her son in ten
years, and this gave the Stasi operatives an opening to recruit her. They said they
knew she was a loyal comrade, and if she would only give them some innocuous
information about some of the people she knew in the theater and arts world, they
could arrange for her to see her son. Gradually she was asked for more detailed
information, about a wider circle of her acquaintances, including the young
English student who, the Stasi assumed, was really working as a spy for MI6.
When Ash produced a copy of the file, she nevertheless denied being a Stasi
informant. She glanced at the file, threw it on the table, and asked “Well, what
do you want me to do? Jump out the window?”37 In the ensuing conversation, as
she recounted details of her life, Ash found himself “within minutes” telling her
“I have no right to sit here as [your] judge. [Your] secret will be safe with me.”
As Ash subsequently described it, “I went in feeling like the victim; I came out
thinking she was more a victim than I” and wrote “I now almost wish I had never
confronted her. By what right, for what good purpose, did I deny an old lady, who
had suffered so much, the grace of selective forgetting?” He decided to allude to
her in his published account, but under the name “Frau R.”
The first version of his account appeared in The New Yorker, which is famous
for its rigorous checking of the non-fiction articles in its pages. Soon Ash
received a telephone call from one of the fact-checkers, who asked for the real
names and telephone numbers of all the people mentioned in the article. As Ash
recounted it, he could imagine the fact-checker ringing up “Frau R.” and saying
“I understand that you informed on your daughter on February 2, 1971. Can you
please confirm that?” He refused to give any of the names or telephone numbers,
on grounds of the additional pain that such an interrogation was likely to inflict
upon them.
36. I rely here not only on Timothy Garton Ash, The File: A Personal History (London: Harper
Collins, 1997) but also on a lecture given by Ash to a Royal Historical Society colloquium on 16
February 2002.
37. In The File Ash devotes pages 126-129 to the conversation with her under the pseudonym of
“Frau R.” There are slight discrepancies between my notes on the lecture and the text of the book.
Vann 10/25/04 12:02 PM Page 16
16 RICHARD T. VANN
This was surely a decision, whether right or wrong, that was made—and
should be judged—on ethical grounds. Its context also illustrates how complex
such decisions would be. Ash hoped to give Frau R. “the grace of selective for-
getting” and risked publishing inaccurate information in order to spare the feel-
ings of his informant.38 He felt that this grace of benevolent amnesia justified
leaving some historical questions unresolved.
To sum up: I am convinced by the arguments that historians cannot avoid mak-
ing at least some moral evaluations. Given that they are inevitable, though, are
they desirable? Or shall we regard them as the impure residue of historiography
that cannot be entirely removed because historians can never be sufficiently aus-
tere or ascetic to refrain from using them in describing events that are charged
with values, or in deciding which events to describe? Pursuing answers to these
questions requires a further consideration of the grounds on which moral evalu-
ations have been queried or rejected.
IV. EVALUATING EVALUATIONS
The weaker arguments can be readily dismissed. The mere statement that histo-
rians feel uneasy about making moral evaluations has little weight. They also, as
Sheehan and Commager betray, feel uneasy about not making them—or at least
they should, if it is necessary for historians to do so. The assertion that historians
should not meddle with morals because this is not part of the professional job
description begs the question, since it builds abstinence from moral evaluations
into the definition of professional historiography. It must be accompanied by an
assignment of this responsibility to someone else; but it seems odd to hold that
moral evaluations should be made, but only by philosophers or the readers.
Philosophers undoubtedly have much to contribute to any discussion of moral
actions. Historians would benefit from adding some acquaintance with this dis-
cipline to their repertoire. Philosophers are very skilled at contriving examples of
ethical dilemmas to bring out the merits or awkward points of ethical theory; but
the examples are usually highly artificial. While historians are probably, by and
large, less subtle reasoners, they have invaluable knowledge of the complexities
of real historical situations. Also, historians have more tacit knowledge relevant
to moral evaluations than they need to, or even can, put explicitly into their books
or articles. It thus seems unlikely that merely delivering to philosophers a text
with an accurate account of some past actions would by itself equip them to make
the best possible moral evaluations. These are much more likely to emerge from
dialogue between the two.
As for the readers, they are in the last analysis the discerners of the meaning
of any text, but this doesn’t imply that ordinary readers are better moral evalua-
tors than either the historian or the philosopher. Moreover, I see little evidence—
certainly not from histories aimed at a mass readership—that the wider public
38. Incidentally, Ash, even after making a strenuous effort of memory and consulting all his
diaries, concluded that in some respects his Stasi file was a more accurate source for his life during
that period than he could supply himself. As he puts it, “What a gift to memory is a Stasi file. Far bet-
ter than Proust’s madeleine” (The File, 10).
Vann 10/25/04 12:02 PM Page 17

longs for nothing but the facts. Indeed, as Kitson Clark notes, people who take
an interest in history “want to praise and blame.”39 They may not, furthermore,
be able to identify elements of moral evaluation, if we accept that they are inex-
tricable from all the other exercises of historical judgment.
There is no need to recapitulate Berlin’s case against social determinism. It,
like secular theodicies, is for almost all historians a non-starter. Even if one were
to believe in it, it might still be possible to assign moral responsibility, since some
philosophers at least have contended that the causal determination of actions is
not only compatible with responsibility of the agent but necessary for it.40
The claim that, since the deeds with which the historian deals have already
taken place there is no point in making any moral evaluation of them, would
make any further discussion of this question unnecessary. At first glance it looks
like what philosophers are fond of calling a “knockdown argument”; but let us
see whether something can be left standing. The argument depends for its plau-
sibility on a number of unstated assumptions: that moral evaluations can be
strictly separated from all the other judgments historians make; that the person
about whom they are writing has already died, or at least retired, so there is no
chance the person will benefit or suffer from having any praise or blame for past
actions; and that the purpose of a moral evaluation is entirely to heap praise or
saddle blame on that person. We have already reviewed the arguments against the
belief that moral evaluations can be so isolated and removed. It is typical of
opponents of moral evaluations that they look far back in time for their examples
(Catherine de Medici, Richelieu, or even Sulla) without considering that histori-
ans often write about people who are still active and who might mend their ways
if reprimanded or be supported in them if lauded. Statesmen, in particular, like to
be well thought of, and so can become extremely sensitive to “the judgment of
history” (as President Clinton was said to be).41 Finally, it would be curious if
historians thought they could, by a severe or laudatory judgment of the actions
of those who have died inflict a posthumous injury or confer any benefit on them.
The dead cannot be libeled, and if they face any more judgments, it will be one
last one, far better informed than any historian can be. Even criminal punish-
ments, according to the philosopher J. R. Lucas, are primarily communications,
mainly as a message to the convicted, but “overheard also and importantly by
others.”42 Moral evaluations of the dead are made for the living.
39. Kitson Clark, The Critical Historian, 207.

40. R. Jay Wallace has produced numerous arguments for the position that even if people have no
free will, they can be held responsible for their actions. See his Responsibility and Moral Sentiments
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).
41. J. R. Lucas, while pointing out that people in public office like to be well-thought-of notes that
“historians record the follies of politicians and the consequent misfortunes of mankind, but take for
granted their wise decisions. . . . This lack of recognition is not due just to perverseness on the part
of historians, but to the logic of the responsibility of office, which tends for the most part to be a neg-
ative responsibility, while our concept of success is dominated by a means-and-ends analysis.” While
it is reassuring that in Lucas’s view the perverseness of historians is not totally responsible for this
state of affairs, it should be noted that he doesn’t expect more from statesmen than that they hand on
things in no worse condition than they were when they began (Responsibility [Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1993], 205, 189). It would seem that more searching for the wise and even virtuous actions
might not be amiss, if only to mitigate the implication of perversity.
42. Ibid., introduction.
Vann 10/25/04 12:02 PM Page 18
18 RICHARD T. VANN
The great stumbling block for most historians is reconciling the historicism
with which they have been indoctrinated—emphasizing the differences between
past epochs and our own—with moral evaluations that are believed to be neces-
sary but must be made in the moral climate of the twenty-first century rather
than, say, the nineteenth or the twenty-third. But the argument that we must not
make moral evaluations because subsequent exculpatory evidence might turn up,
or that we can never know enough to make them, would prove too much.
Believing this would stop historians making any judgments at all, for every judg-
ment—or, for that matter, every theory in the natural sciences—must be made in
the awareness that subsequent generations will know more and that the future
may hold some surprises for us.43 To claim we must withhold every judgment,
provided we have done the best we can with all the evidence at hand, is a coun-
sel of self-stultification.
The variability of past views of values poses a more serious problem. We must
acknowledge that historians are right to be on the alert against the importation of
anachronism into their accounts of the past, and that a scrupulous concern for just
treatment of dead historical agents is itself a moral position, although its benefits
accrue to us and not to them. Just how difficult it can be for a historian to cling
to this position and yet justify some sort of moral evaluations of those agents can
be seen in the intellectual writhings of Sheehan. As we have seen, he thinks these
evaluations are “risky (albeit necessary).” As his arguments develop, all the risks
and none of the necessities crowd in. It is the relativity of values that bothers him,
and by the end of the article he takes his stand on the
quite moderate principle that even an erroneous conscience binds, a principle that at once
recognizes the existence of an objective moral law (otherwise a conscience could not be
erroneous) and accepts the value of human autonomy. Moreover, it assumes that the indi-
vidual conscience takes form under the guidance of a culture that other moral critics are
bound to respect. People can be condemned morally only on their own ground, not on the
basis of a value system foreign to their loyalties, and certainly not on the foundation of a
universal code which fails to concede the legitimacy of culture.
He thus concludes that “cultural analysis, or perhaps a judicious probing of the

psyche, will replace moral evaluations that rest on an inapplicable code of con-
duct or a false universality.”44
If I have understood his argument aright (no easy task), Sheehan seems to be
saying that there is an “objective moral law” that, despite its objectivity, is cul-
turally determined, and therefore presumably variable. Furthermore, a person
with an “erroneous conscience”—that is, perhaps, one who has made an error in
moral reasoning even though this erroneous conscience has “taken form under
the guidance” of that culture—is nevertheless “bound” (obligated? determined?)
by it. Or is an “erroneous conscience” a conscientious adherence to some moral
standard that in some way errs? There is an easy way out of this quandary, one
that would gain support from many philosophers: drop the idea of an objective
moral law. But this, Sheehan apparently thinks, would vitiate any moral evalua-
43. This point is made by Oldfield, “Moral Judgments in History,” whom I follow closely in these
paragraphs.
44. Sheehan, “Problem of Moral Judgments,” 49.
Vann 10/25/04 12:02 PM Page 19

tion that a historian makes. Nevertheless, being unable to shake free of rela-
tivism, he winds up prescribing that “cultural analysis” and “judicious probing of
the psyche” is what the historian should do. How to make any “necessary” moral
evaluations remains unclear.
I cite Sheehan not to stigmatize him for making a muddle, but because he has
put the issue of the relativity of values at the forefront and illustrates the longing
for a transcendent moral law. In fact he deserves praise for having opened up this
topic in such a candid way and for having illustrated, perhaps somewhat inad-
vertently, the difficulties that it poses. No doubt many other historians share his
longing for an objective, or at least rationally grounded, moral law. This makes
it worthwhile to pursue this matter further.
Lord Acton’s belief that there are such moral laws would surely be endorsed
by the vast majority of humanity today. It is only in western Europe that most
people seem to have abandoned traditional religious groundings of moral behav-
ior. Of course, believers disagree about the content of moral laws based on reli-
gious teachings. For some they prohibit contraception, for others simultaneous
consumption of milk and meat, or women letting their hair be seen in public.
Furthermore, even the literalist devotee of the Hebrew Bible, the Qu’ran, or the
New Testament faces varieties of interpretation, although there is a core of
almost perfect consensus. Butterfield made no effort to conceal that he wrote out
of his own Christian commitments. More typically, other writers do not under-
take to refute views based on religious convictions. Those who notice them sim-
ply dismiss them. They assume, or, infrequently, assert, that grounding moral
commitments on a sacred text is now hopelessly passé. Thus Wolfgang
Mommsen criticizes Ranke’s belief that the historian must “efface himself” and
simply let the historical sources speak for themselves on the grounds that this
view rests on a prior belief in the intrinsic meaningfulness of historical events,
which in turn was based on his religious world-view that guaranteed this. “Such
a world-view can no longer command our opinion nowadays,” he comments.45
There is a fallacy of composition here, but Mommsen has made a legitimate
move in any philosophical discussion. Once God enters the other participants
tend to exit. This should not, however, dissuade religiously committed historians
from drawing on their own tradition and its insights.
Though different cultures have different values, it is easy to exaggerate the dif-
ferences. Bloch’s claim that preferences for or commitments to values are “sub-
ject to all the fluctuations of collective opinion” and even “personal caprice”
surely goes too far in this direction. He says “That one man has killed another is
a fact which is eminently susceptible of proof. But to punish the murderer
assumes that we consider murder culpable, which is, after all, only an opinion
about which not all civilizations have agreed.”46 I have not trawled through the
Human Relations Area File—and neither had Bloch—to discover whether there
45. Wolfgang Mommsen, “Moral Commitment and Scholarly Detachment: The Social Function
of the Historian,” in Historians and Social Values, ed. Leersen and Rigney, 46-47.
46. Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 139. One should bear in mind that Bloch was deprived of any
chance to revise this (unfinished) manuscript, and had he done so he might have thought better of
some of the things that he says in it.
Vann 10/25/04 12:02 PM Page 20
20 RICHARD T. VANN
were “civilizations” (or cultures) that had an “opinion” that murder was not cul-
pable, but the difference to which Bloch is referring must be that some acts of
homicide (in a feud or duel, for example) would be considered murder in some
cultures and not others. For Bloch’s view to be convincing, he would have to pro-
duce an example of a culture that considered no homicides to be culpable and so
had no conception of “murder.” I very much doubt this can be done. A medieval
historian as great as Bloch, F. W. Maitland, believed that observing its trials for
murder would give the best insight into the values of any culture.
We need to distinguish between mores and morals (a distinction that is not
always carefully made). This problem is as old as historiography itself. Herodotus
knew that Greeks did their duty to their dead fathers by placing their corpses on
a funeral pyre. He also knew of “barbarians” whose custom was (or so he says)
to eat the dead bodies of their fathers, and who recoiled in horror from the idea
of burning them. These are certainly very different practices, but only at the level
of modality. Both Greeks and barbarians acknowledged a duty to pay last honors
to the bodies of their fathers in the culturally mandated or preferred manner. That
mores vary widely does not mean that moral ideals are equally dissimilar.
If, say, murder, treachery, or cowardice are universally held to be blamewor-
thy, this does not bring us very far. These are spectacular moral failures that the
historian would seldom encounter, and evaluations of them would be trite. Acton
clearly meant more than this when he said in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge
that “Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is
written on the tablets of eternity.”47 Can we go any further along this path? The
answer might lie with those philosophers who have attempted to find a founda-
tion for ethical behavior that would be independent of varying cultural values.
We can examine three schools of ethicists. The first, virtue ethics, focuses on
character. It does not seek to supply decision rules for making correct moral deci-
sions, but trusts to a proper upbringing to create a person who habitually does the
virtuous thing.48 A singular contemporary example of virtue ethics is Philip
Hallie’s account of the behavior of villagers in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in the
Haute-Loire department of southeastern France, under the German occupation in
World War II. Hundreds of Jews fled to Le Chambon in hopes of getting assis-
tance to cross the border into Switzerland (which was none too disposed to
receive them). Assisting Jews to escape was a crime potentially punishable by
death. Nevertheless, the villagers took the Jews into their homes, gave them the
needed assistance, and by various acts of social solidarity managed to keep the
occupying forces from razing the village and massacring its inhabitants (with
some assistance from the major in command of the local Wehrmacht unit, who
blocked efforts by the SS to take over the village).
Hallie was an ethicist, but, as he says in the preface to his book, he wrote it not
“to make Le Chambon an example of goodness or moral nobility.” His goal was
rather “understanding their story” and he “was going to use the words of philo-
47. Lord Acton, “Inaugural Lecture,” 351.

48. The most famous upholder of this view is Aristotle; for a modern introduction, consult
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981).
Vann 10/25/04 12:02 PM Page 21

sophical ethics only as a means for achieving this goal.”49 The villagers them-
selves were just as resistant to “the words of philosophical ethics.” At some point
in almost every interview, Hallie found, they would demand: “How can you call
us good? We were doing what had to be done. Who else could help them? And
what has all this to do with goodness? Things had to be done, that’s all, and we
happened to be there to do them. You must understand that it was the most nat-
ural thing in the world to help these people.” Far from not seeing anything unusu-
al—certainly not saintly—in what they did, they probably never gave any seri-
ous thought to doing anything different.
Examples of behavior that is virtuous in this sense are not easy to find, espe-
cially if historians concentrate on the history of statesmen. Hallie’s reasons for
choosing this particular story to tell, however, deserve attention. He had com-
pleted a book on evil as a philosophical problem, and found no shortage of exam-
ples from twentieth-century history to illustrate it. When he came across some
mention of Le Chambon as a place where, as he puts it, “goodness happened,”
he felt morally impelled to investigate further. Despite Hallie’s initial intention
not to make the Chambonnais examples of goodness or moral nobility, their story
inevitably is one, and the more so since they would not have accepted that it
should be. Hallie was, in short, doing what used to be regarded as a respectable
historical task: to edify readers through recounting especially virtuous deeds.
It is a sign of our times that we would probably suspect that historians who
made a conscientious search for examples of character or behavior that they
could commend were aiming at an audience of children. Would any such suspi-
cion attach to one whose aim (conscious or unconscious) was debunking the sup-
posedly good? A similar asymmetry can be found in the literature about moral
evaluations, since it is usually assumed that they will all be censures of evil peo-
ple or wrongful actions. The possibility of approbation never seems to have
entered historians’ minds—though it certainly should.50 Since there is little rea-
son to revise Gibbon’s view that history is “little more than the register of the
crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind” this asymmetry is not altogether
surprising, and it makes it likely that the historian seeking guidance from phi-
losophy may be edified by examples of virtue ethics (when they can be found)
but will find other ethical theories more relevant. These bear the technical names
of the deontological and the consequentialist.
Both of these focus on the individual’s moral decisions; they make no attempt
to move to an appraisal of the overall character of the agent. They both offer to
agents philosophical grounding for decision rules that can be invoked whenever
a moral decision needs to be made. But the rules are quite different, and there is
no sign or prospect of a consensus among philosophers as to which is preferable.
If that is what historians seek from the philosopher, they will not find it.
Nevertheless, some acquaintance with what ethicists are saying should clarify
and refine historical thinking about morality.
49. Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (London: Michael Joseph, 1979), 4. For the help
given by the German major see Hallie, Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm (San Francisco:
Harper Collins, 1967).
50. This is not true of the philosophers I have read, who usually discuss the appropriate response
to good behavior “beyond the call of duty” (that is, works of supererogation).
Vann 10/25/04 12:02 PM Page 22
22 RICHARD T. VANN
The “deontological” position, associated with Kant, holds that moral decisions
must be made entirely without regard for their consequences. They should be
made so that the agent can without logical contradiction will that everyone—and
Kant means everyone—acts on the same principle that he or she is employing.
This is the famous “categorical imperative.” It looks like the Golden Rule of
Leviticus and the gospels in philosophical dress—Nietzsche called Kant “a
sneaking Christian”—but Kant thinks there are duties to oneself as well as to oth-
ers, such as developing one’s powers to the fullest and abstaining from commit-
ting suicide.51 Any decision made on any other grounds Kant calls a “hypotheti-
cal imperative,” calculating the likely results of alternative courses of action and
easily sliding into treating other people as means to an end desired by the agent,
rather than ends in themselves.52
Kant’s position is one of absolutes, allowing no excuses, exceptions, or
exemptions. He defended the proposition that one must never lie, since universal
freedom to lie would destroy all trust, and therefore the possibility of making any
assertion whatsoever, and thus the possibility of lying—so that to universalize
the principle that it is permissible to lie is self-contradictory and therefore not
something one can indeed will. So even if killers came to your door, intending to
murder someone who had taken refuge there and demanding to know whether he
was there, your duty is to answer truthfully. Truthful hosts could not be sure what
would happen if they told the truth, but this is not their concern as moral agents,
which is to do the right thing (that is, to act in accord with the Categorical
Imperative) no matter what the consequences. Such hosts would not have a moral
responsibility for evil actions the killers might do.
There is no point in further commentary about this example, but the view that
acts must be made and judged in accordance with some principle that is inde-
pendent of its consequences may have some relevance to historical moral evalu-
ations. If, as has been argued, history is about the unintended consequences of
actions, and if historians must think themselves back to the situation in which
actions were pondered, the failure of agents to foresee the unintended conse-
quences of them may be morally excusable. The effort to re-enter or recreate the
mental world in which actions were taken is often urged upon historians. It is, as
is well known, what Collingwood saw as the essential task of historiography and
the basis of historical knowledge. Some historians have carried this principle to
the point of making strenuous efforts to sever a decision from any of its conse-
quences. C. V. Wedgwood, for example, treats as a “continuous obstacle to the
development of a sense of the past” the fact that “by his position in time, the
modern student knows too much. . . . None of this knowledge formed a part of
the situation at the time. Yet it is nearly impossible to expel it from the mind and
to study a problem in the past as though the outcome was still unknown.”53 She
51. Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten [1785], translated by H. J. Paton as
The Moral Law: Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (London: Union Hyman, 1948),
especially 63-68.
52. Ibid., 78.
53. C. V. Wedgwood, “The Sense of the Past,” in Truth and Opinion: Historical Essays (London:
Collins, 1960), 37.
Vann 10/25/04 12:02 PM Page 23

wrote a history of the English Civil War that began with events of 1637; it bore
the title The Happiest King in Christendom (no foreshadowing of the catastrophe
that twelve years later was to cost Charles his head). Similarly, Conrad Russell
premised his “revisionist” account of the onset of that war on the methodologi-
cal rule that no idea could be claimed to have been in circulation until it appeared
somewhere in print. For him, as for Wedgwood, the historian should never look
forwards.
In this respect the pure historicist and the deontologist join hands; but Kant was
propounding a decision rule of timeless validity. Action on the “hypothetical
imperative” would always be wrong, even if the agent meant all for the best. It
would be a rigorous moralist who would hold all historical agents to his maxim,
especially statesmen, whose private moral standards are almost certain to conflict
with the demands of raison d’état. Moreover, Wedgwood acknowledges that the
effort to “expel from the mind” any knowledge of historical outcomes is “nearly
impossible.” Until someone achieves this feat, the adverb can be disregarded;
Wedgwood herself does not quite pull it off. It is not only too stringent a self-
denying ordinance; historiography without outcomes, without what Arthur Danto
called “narrative sentences,” would be insipid if not unintelligible.54 For this rea-
son we need to examine the third school, that of the consequentialists.
Consequentialists come in several flavors. The most familiar to most historians
is Jeremy Bentham (he of the infamous panopticon). Whereas Kant judged an
action only by the universalizability of the principle behind it, Bentham, as is well
known, argued that an action should be evaluated entirely from its consequences—
namely, its capacity to produce “the greatest good for the greatest number.” He dif-
fers from other consequentialists by thinking of “good” as happiness: enjoyment
of pleasure and avoidance of pain. “The greatest happiness for the greatest num-
ber” could be determined by operating the “felicific calculus,” computing the
pleasure or pain incurred by the agent as well as all the other people affected by it.
Thus the torture inflicted on a felon, during which he reveals information that
leads to the capture of other villains, is justifiable since such miscreants would oth-
erwise inflict greater pain on the victims of the crimes thus forestalled.
The precision with which such a calculus can be made is somewhat illusory,
since misery or happiness is difficult to quantify, but it is the psychological reg-
istration of pain or pleasure that counts. Watching cockfights or operas, so long
as they give equal pleasure, counts the same in the calculus. If determining the
greatest good is not always easy, determining who should count among the great-
est number is even more dicey, since different sets of people could be included.
Should it be the greatest number of humans, or should it also include non-human
animals? Should it include only those alive at the time who are entitled to bene-
fit from actions undertaken to maximize happiness? Or should it also include
beneficiaries in the future—and if so, how far in the future?
In a classic essay Carl Becker showed how the decline in the belief in an after-
life in the eighteenth century disposed the philosophes to begin looking to the
54. See Arthur Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University
Press, 1965).
Vann 10/25/04 12:02 PM Page 24
24 RICHARD T. VANN
good of posterity as the criterion of moral behavior.55 One of the most pressing
ethical issues of our time is whether we have any obligations to future genera-
tions—such as, for example, moderating our consumption of fossil fuels so as to
leave them a habitable world. The ethicist Michael Zimmerman concedes that it
is “perhaps plausible” to “ascribe desert to entities that do not exist, have not
existed, and perhaps never will exist. For example: ‘Members of future genera-
tions deserve a clean environment.’”56 Our total posterity (unless there is some
nuclear catastrophe) will be vastly larger than the number of people now alive,
but since they don’t yet exist (or vote) and will live in the more or less remote
future, there has been comparatively little consideration of what they might
deserve. This is no less a problem with any other group of “greatest numbers”
with whom it is hard to empathize. They are easy to leave out of our calculations,
and in any case it is difficult to ascertain what weight to ascribe to them in con-
sequentialist calculations.
Consequentialists must calculate the outcomes of present actions, so their view
of ethical decisions is as much future-oriented as that of the deontologists is pres-
ent-oriented. However, inasmuch as the future cannot be an object of knowledge,
consequentialists must call on many more or less speculative predictions, and
evoke imaginary worlds based on contrary-to-fact conditions. This could allow
for kinds of “moral futurism” (like that of Marxism or, for that matter, free-mar-
ket fundamentalism), promising that ultimately an action taken now will lead to
future bliss that will far outweigh any pain inflicted at the moment.
Consequentialists take the awkward position that the results of inaction must
also be calculated. It is not just simple negligence in the performance of a job that
would be culpable (such as, for example, failure to insert the screws in the rails,
which causes a train accident). The person confronted with an appeal from a
charity must compute whether the pleasure that comes with retention of fifty
pounds for future consumption outweighs the pain suffered by others from whom
that money is withheld—perhaps offset, in turn, by the pleasure in having per-
formed a philanthropic act.
Historians have the advantage that at least the more immediate consequences
of actions undertaken in the past have already manifested themselves. They also
may be able to form a more extended set of “the greatest number” than was avail-
able to the agents at the time. For these reasons, despite the problems I have out-
lined in applying it and the critiques that have been advanced by other ethicists,
consequentialism offers more guidance to historians, though no prescriptions for
them.
Unfortunately, except for those historians committed to an ideal of moral law
grounded in religious doctrines, there seems to be no foundation for moral action
agreed upon by all or almost all philosophers that could be applicable at all times
or places. Although there may be some well-nigh universal cultural standards,
these are of limited applicability to the sort of complex questions that historians
55. Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1962).
56. Michael Zimmerman, An Essay on Moral Responsibility (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield,
1988), note 19.
Vann 10/25/04 12:02 PM Page 25

almost invariably treat. Stories of straightforward villainy or heroism are most
often found in melodrama. Does this then mean that the diversity of values in
other times and places fatally undermines moral evaluations of persons, actions,
or institutions?
There is a halfway position that would obviate at least one of the problems
raised by the warning that “the past is a foreign country” that when visiting we
must not assume that what seems right to us also seems right to them. It should
at least be possible to avoid making anachronistic moral evaluations. Even if we
rule out every other kind, we can still make our best efforts to understand what
moral precepts the people we are studying would have accepted as their own and
then evaluate them by these standards. This should not prove impossible, since
historians are usually confident that they can work out the prudential reasoning
that went into past actions, making the assumption that practical syllogisms were
roughly the same in every culture. Discovering how their moral reasoning
worked need not present any more difficulties than finding out how their practi-
cal reasoning worked. As W. B. Gallie has asked,
If it is possible for historians to establish the rationality, prudence, efficacy, etc. of actions
performed against the most varied social and intellectual backgrounds, why should it not
be possible to establish the rightness or goodness of human actions performed against
backgrounds that vary in respect of inherited moral preferences, articulation of moral aims
and development of methods of moral instruction?57
Examination of past sermons, diaries, private letters, conduct books, court cases,
and the like—a necessary step in reconstructing the moral climate—would cer-
tainly bring to light variations in moral ideas that Gallie mentions; but besides
differing from present ones, they would differ among contemporaries. In any
complex culture there is no reason to think there was much more consensus about
what moral values were and how to apply them than there is in our own. Even
so, some deeds of historical agents, when judged by the standards of the time,
were blameworthy (or praiseworthy) and historians need not fear anachronism in
evaluating them as such.
In fact, failure to acknowledge that some such actions outraged the conscience
of contemporaries would amount to an incomplete if not tendentious representa-
tion of the historical record. In the mid-nineteenth century, when historians need-
ed to apologize for not making moral evaluations, William Hickling Prescott
prefaced his Conquest of Mexico as follows: “To the American and English read-
er, acknowledging so different a moral standard from that of the sixteenth centu-
ry, I may possibly be thought too indulgent to the errors of the conquerors.” He
had, he continued, given the conquistadores “the benefit of such mitigating
reflections as might be suggested by the circumstances and the period in which
they lived.”58 However, some of the evidence he used—and it carried a heavy
moral charge—came from the writings of Bartolomé de las Casas, a contempo-
rary of Cortez whose career and writings were devoted to defending the cause of
the indigenous peoples of Mexico at the time of the conquest (and whose num-
57. W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
University Press, 1964), 203.
58. William Hickling Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, Preface and I, 425, quoted in Commager, 301.
Vann 10/25/04 12:02 PM Page 26
26 RICHARD T. VANN
bers were reduced by an estimated ninety percent within a generation after it). As
the writings of Las Casas make clear, the sixteenth century did not have a single
moral standard that justified, for example, forcible conversion of the Indians
(accompanied by an occasional execution pour encourager les autres) or their
virtual enslavement to work in the silver mines.
It can be objected that the people who ordered these things and carried them
out simply did not agree that there was anything morally wrong with what they
were doing. “Even an erroneous conscience binds,” we have already been told.
This of course slides from historicism towards utter relativism. If we consider
only what the agent did without thinking it was immoral, we deprive ourselves
of any standpoint from which to criticize “values” such as slavery or Nazism.
Also, we will easily be led to the circular argument that the very doing of it
shows it must have been accomplished without any qualm of conscience—espe-
cially since people seldom leave evidence that they think they have done wrong,
except possibly in speeches from the gallows.59
V. STRONG EVALUATIONS
My analysis has already, I hope, established that there is an irreducible element

of moral evaluation in historiography. It can be found in teaching, in all the
preparations for research, and finally in the finished text. It is complex, because
it involves both appraisals of other historians, by standards that are generally
agreed upon, yet inevitably also of the historical agents about whom they have
written, by standards that are eminently contestable.
What I shall term “the weak claim” for moral evaluations is confined to this irre-
ducible element. It sanctions a moral evaluation of other historians (as well, of
course, as a technical one). Even those who would like to minimize any moral eval-
uations of historical agents have not found it inconsistent to criticize bias or preju-
dice, self-importance, and even self-righteousness when they have caught other
historians in the act of morally evaluating. Of course, such criticisms are them-
selves morally charged; they depend on the idea that some standard for fair, mod-
est, and accurate moral evaluations must exist, since otherwise there would be no
basis for charges of bias and the like. Rüsen has shown that historians make a moral
choice when they assume the responsibility of writing honestly and submitting
their work to the community of their peers, which all historians surely should do.
Those wishing to go no further than the weak claim must advocate heroic if
foredoomed efforts to purge their language of all its moral implications. They
may favor an attempt to consider the decisions of their subjects without regard to
the consequences to which they gave rise. In any event they would not criticize
or praise any of their actions except in consideration of what their ideas of moral
behavior were. They would, however, tend to allow a moral evaluation of obvi-
ous atrocities. Kitson Clark believes history must judge the Shoah, and Butter-
field says it is “always legitimate” to condemn massacres “as such,”60 but neither
59. Though Zimmerman points out, with respect to crimes, that the greater the crime, the less likely
the person who committed it is to think that it was morally wrong (Essay on Moral Responsibility, 177).
60. Butterfield, “Moral Judgments in History,” 123-125.
Vann 10/25/04 12:02 PM Page 27

think that moral criticism should turn on the overall character of those who
authorized them or carried them out.
These are the characteristic weak claims for moral evaluations. I would like to
put forward a stronger claim, requiring historians to undertake greater responsi-
bilities in considering with greater rigor the moral implications of their work.
I start with the problem of the criteria to be used in evaluating past actions. I
believe there are no compelling philosophical arguments that establish uncon-
testable grounds for such criteria. Only religious faith can do this—and then only
for the believer. This no doubt helps to account for the appeal of the view that
only the moral ideas of the past agents should be used in evaluating their con-
duct. However, although the quest for a compelling philosophical grounding con-
tinues, perhaps until the Greek kalends, many writers on ethics now simply take
it for granted that there are not such grounds. But this has not put them out of a
job, nor should it utterly baffle the moral sense of historians.
Since we have ruled out divinity, we must see if there are any resources in
humanity. We can start from these facts. The philosopher Peter Strawson, treat-
ing this as a virtual commonplace, notes that “we attach very great importance to
attitudes and intentions toward us of other human beings.” It thus “matters
whether they manifest good will, affection, or esteem or on the other hand con-
tempt, indifference, or malevolence.” Certain actions provoke in us resentment,
guilt (directed at ourselves), and indignation; others evoke gratitude and praise,
and we hold the agents responsible for doing them.61 Furthermore, we extend our
perception of our own reactions to those that others would feel if we behaved in
such ways to them, and to situations where we are not directly involved at all.
Strawson traces the moral sentiments we all have to these “vicarious reactive
attitudes.” It may seem strange to invoke moral sentiments, which have an emo-
tional as well as a cognitive content, as a basis for moral evaluations. It is impor-
tant, though, to emphasize his comment that “The existence of the general frame-
work of attitudes itself is something we are given with the fact of human socie-
ty. As a whole, it neither calls for, nor permits, an external ‘rational’ justifica-
tion.”62 In other words, we need not look for some sort of metaphysical ground-
ing for our views on morals and, failing to find a satisfactory one, conclude that
they are just a matter of our personal taste. Certain basic human reactive attitudes
are sufficient to guide moral evaluations.
True, we cannot achieve certainty about them, but in this respect they are no
different from historical interpretations in general. This should induce a modest
posture in urging them upon others, which is why I think terms like historians’
“judgments” or “tribunal” are inappropriate. They convey a sense of finality and
certitude that the nature of historiography does not really allow. I also think we
should reject analogies of the role of historians to that of the detectives and attor-
neys who prepare a legal case, which is eventually adjudicated by a judge and
jury. If we need analogies, I like the “opinions” of the justices of the American
61. Peter Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment” [1962], reprinted in Free Will, ed. Gary Watson,
2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 75-76. Wallace devotes much of his book to the
issues raised by this article and the large philosophical literature that it generated.
62. Ibid., 91.
Vann 10/25/04 12:02 PM Page 28
28 RICHARD T. VANN
Supreme Court. The word “opinion” unfortunately lends itself to the view that
moral evaluations are mere opinions; but those of Supreme Court justices are,
ideally at least, prepared as thorough works of scholarship. Even more important,
no single opinion can decide a case unless at least four other justices share or
concur with it, and that presumably can happen only after mutual discussion and
criticism. Historians’ opinions on moral evaluation are similar proposals; they
are not edicts.
Though I hope to advance on the weak claim, this does not mean that I reject
some of its elements, much less condemn its adherents for moral obtuseness. It
shows generosity of spirit to seek out all the extenuating circumstances to which
past agents might be entitled, and I endorse Butterfield’s appeal for charity to
them. It should be clear, then, that the stronger claim for moral evaluations would
not extend to determining which were the “good men fighting bad men” that
Butterfield gives as an example of moral judgments—much less to a history full
of Good Kings and Bad Things, like that classically parodied by Sellar and
Yeatman in 1066 and All That. (They were both schoolmasters, which further
suggests that moral evaluations are particularly prevalent in the classroom.) True,
it is impossible to make too strict a separation between persons and their actions.
The existentialist slogan “You are your deeds” is pertinent, especially if we are
making an essentialist evaluation of ourselves;63 but we encounter so many dif-
ficulties even in a comprehensive assessment of ourselves that it is hopeless to
think we could assemble enough information to make such an assessment of
someone in the past.
Another valuable aspect of the weaker claim is its emphasis that moral evalua-
tions should be made at the end of the historian’s work and not at its beginning.
Partis pris should always be avoided, especially when they configure the entire
research and writing process before any of it has actually been done. As Oldfield
puts it, moral evaluations are “not the point from which we start, but the point at
which we finish—at least provisionally, for no judgment, moral or otherwise, lasts
for all time.”64 The danger of starting with the moral evaluation already fixed in
the historian’s mind is real, since as Kitson Clark notes, “People do not normally
go to history simply to understand; they are incurably moralistic.” They appeal to
history because “very often the only vindication which helpless right can have
against triumphant wrong is before the judgement seat of history.” Though it is
good that the conception of justice be maintained in human society, often “the
desire for human justice is in essence a sombre and heavily moralized desire for
revenge” and “the demand for justice at the bar of history is no exception to
this.”65 Some of the genres of history developed in the last half-century, which can
be classed under the rubric “history from below,” are vulnerable to this observa-
tion, although it probably applies chiefly to the historiography produced by
oppressed ethnic groups. No matter what historians’ sympathy with these groups
might be, their moral evaluations should be as far as possible free of ressentiment.
63. Cf. Garcin, the hero in Sartre’s No Exit, whose self-image is maintained despite the consistent
cowardice shown in his actions.
64. Oldfield, “Moral Judgments in History,” 61. This is also a point made by Butterfield.
65. Kitson Clark, The Critical Historian, 207.
Vann 10/25/04 12:02 PM Page 29

The essence of what I term “the stronger claim” is that historians should
embrace the role of moral commentators. They should free themselves of the
uneasiness that, as we have seen, has often surrounded this role. They need not
trouble themselves about not studying history “for its own sake” or abstaining
from judgments on the dead for their “sakes.” Only a person can have a “sake,”
and the “sakes” of the dead were laid to rest with them.66 When evaluating what
the dead have done, we are only communicating our moral opinions to our read-
ers, and implicitly inviting them to enter into a dialogue with us about them.
It is important to expand the subjects about which such a dialogue can take
place. Butterfield is probably right that a simple description of massacres and
persecution is enough, since readers know well enough that these are wrong
without the historians telling them so.67 This, however, allows moral evaluations
of actions only when they are unnecessary. There is a great range of behavior that
falls short of mass murder, yet calls for moral comment. The multitudinous
frauds and falsehoods that infest our present public life are only the most obvi-
ous examples. Equally important is opening the discourse of moral evaluation to
encompass praise, with the ultimate aim of inspiring emulation. There are few
enough people who may have actually transcended the moral climate of their
times (which usually boils down just to “common decency”) that it would be well
worth knowing as much as possible about them.
The stronger claim rejects the view that only the moral opinions of historical
agents should supply the criteria for evaluating them. I have heard in the class-
room more often than I would have liked the statement that “it doesn’t matter
what you believe in, as long as you are sincere.” Sincerity is overrated,68 espe-
cially sincere adherence to the ideological foundations of slavery, fascism, or
whatever other doctrines the reader cares to insert in this sentence. Proposals that
these are evil should not be ruled out on categorical grounds.
It should go without saying that no part of the stronger claim compromises the
performance of all the duties of the “technical historian,” and that evaluation
should be made subtly and sensitively. Simply tagging the moral evaluation at
the end of the account, like the moral of Aesop’s fables or Perrault’s Mother
Goose tales, would not only be inartistic, but also unlikely to be fine-grained
enough for an adequate characterization of historical actions. Heightened atten-
tion to the language used and the narrative genre chosen would provide much
better vehicles. The plainest diction (as Hilberg suggested) is best for exhibiting
such appalling evils as the Shoah, but historians should have no inhibitions about
employing satire or mockery as well. (Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire is not a bad
example.)
Whether the stronger claim seems acceptable may depend on our appraisal of
the world today. If we still lived in Acton’s world, confidence in the sound moral
sense of readers might be justified, and historians would be in danger of being
66. I believe this language about “sakes,” so frequently encountered, is a confused way of con-
tending that we should not seek any practical lessons from the study of history and that we should be
careful not to introduce anachronisms in this study.
67. Butterfield, “Moral Judgments in History,” 120.
68. Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University Press, 1972) still has
something to teach us.
Vann 10/25/04 12:02 PM Page 30
30 RICHARD T. VANN
censorious and self-righteous. Those are still dangers, but there are those who
believe our world was presciently described by Yeats almost a hundred years
ago: “The best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensi-
ty.”69 Those who accept a recent claim that we are living in “a dark time of need,
a time of attack on moral intelligence”70 will want historians to do their part in
repelling this attack.
Wesleyan University
69. William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming.”

70. Made by Ted Honderich in Terrorism for Humanity (London: Pluto Press, 2003).

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HISTORIANS AND MORAL EVALUATIONS

In dem Gebiet der Geschichte liegt die ganze moralische Welt.

The reappearance of the question of moral judgments by historians makes a reappraisal of

forty years seemed to disappear—either solved or forgotten.1 In the highly

HISTORIANS AND MORAL EVALUATIONS 5

In the literature about “moral judgments” performed or avoided by historians,

5. Printed in the American Historical Review 59 (1953–1954).

II. THE CASE AGAINST MORAL EVALUATIONS

HISTORIANS AND MORAL EVALUATIONS 7

Where these assertions—that considering murder culpable is “only an opinion,”

16. Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 140.

HISTORIANS AND MORAL EVALUATIONS 9

III. ARE VALUES INESCAPABLE?

is ever to be used by one human being of another. . . . History cannot be silent

HISTORIANS AND MORAL EVALUATIONS 11

Historians must use generalizations in their explanations, he acknowledges, but

27. Ibid., 56.

HISTORIANS AND MORAL EVALUATIONS 13

29. Dray, “History and Value Judgments,” 27.

HISTORIANS AND MORAL EVALUATIONS 15

security apparatus maintained by the late German Democratic Republic.36 Ash,

IV. EVALUATING EVALUATIONS

HISTORIANS AND MORAL EVALUATIONS 17

39. Kitson Clark, The Critical Historian, 207.

He thus concludes that “cultural analysis, or perhaps a judicious probing of the

HISTORIANS AND MORAL EVALUATIONS 19

47. Lord Acton, “Inaugural Lecture,” 351.

HISTORIANS AND MORAL EVALUATIONS 21

HISTORIANS AND MORAL EVALUATIONS 23

HISTORIANS AND MORAL EVALUATIONS 25

My analysis has already, I hope, established that there is an irreducible element

HISTORIANS AND MORAL EVALUATIONS 27

HISTORIANS AND MORAL EVALUATIONS 29

69. William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming.”

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