Well you can't say they were great people who did nothing wrong. It's fair to say that people sometimes did and didn't know better as there were factors like lead paint in makeup made ppl a bit crazy or the long lines of mad rulers who were thought to be of pure bloodline. Who, in reality suffered horribly from genetic diseases and psychosis.

I suppose there were environmental causes like life stressors or honestly believing in the devil due to culture.

However, at what point do you know what you're doing was wrong when you cut off black children's hands for not meeting rubber quotas like the Congo?

Or that letter Columbus's friend wrote in which described intricately detailed summary of a black slave woman who clearly ran away from him and he just had to whip the feral thing, he wrote or something to that extent.

Something wrong with your brain that you can look at another human being scared for her life and think she's just doing that cos she's merely shy rather than kidnapped, how bat sh t do you have to be.

Like for real what's wrong with people he wrote that letter as if it was some dog running away from him.

I do believe in environmental shaping things but I dunno at what point people clearly know they are doing wrong if outward actions clearly look like it. That's more the question from me.

Don't think it is possible to do so they wouldn't even have understood why we were doing so.
Things had to evolve and people had to learn- the shame is when they don't learn even though it becomes obvious what they believe is immoral.
Somethings are pretty obvious ,I get that ,but other things were not and no matter how we scratch our heads they just did not think the same we do.
I believe if you could observe it, like human suffering ,in real time then, yes I think they did know better and just subdued their conscience because of convenience sake.
Thinking of slavery.
But ,they didn't always understand example:
I doubt they realized that keeping apart from their children would damage their psyche they thought it was normal to have a nanny take care of them all the time and to see them a couple of hours a day of course that seems neglectful now.
The mental health care that they thought was human we now know to be quite inhumane, but they really thought that it was helpful.

I still respect the work of Thomas Jefferson. He was a known slave owner and exploited the ownership of his “wife” but the Declaration of Independence was and is a key document of our country.

What moral standards do you speak of for us to compare?
I suppose the standards are now so low that the future will have nothing to judge.

Yes. If something is wrong to do then no excuses should be made.

Not when examining their impact on their time, but we should when considering whether to celebrate them in our time.

Well, now, that depends. Are we talking about like HP Lovecraft, who thought it was okay to name a fictional cat a slur? Or are we talking about Thomas Jefferson, who had nonconsensual relations with his slave and called it a marriage? Because one, I'm a little more forgiving of. Just sayin'.

Ask yourself if the inventor of the wheel was known would he still responsable for any wrongs caused by the wheel?

Everything builds upon other things.

Descartes was known to be a womanizer and a drunkard.

Yet you can still love the person yet deplore their actions.

In general, I think not.

Assuming these are people who did not actually break any laws or do anything seen then as bad in their lives, we cannot "judge" them. Instead we should recognise their having done things common then, but subsequently recognised generally as deeply wrong.

After all, we cannot do anything about it. No-one about now was involved. We have to see the wrongs as wrong now even if not then, learn the lessons, but accept them as how things were. Apologies and financial reparations now, as some orgnaisations perform or call for, are really rather empty gestures, even more so if solicited.

However...

Alongside the flawed historical figues, we should also recognise those of their own contemporaries already questioning, even campaigning against, those wrongs. Evils like organised slavery, child labour and apartheid did not end overnight, and even when still thought "normal" there were plenty already fighting them.

Perhaps future historians will examine our own times and wonder why we allowed this, or why so-and-so did that, which we think normal but will be rejected in that future. And perhaps point to those now beginning to see what is wrong.

Why. We don’t judge modern ppl by morals and ethics..

We judge those who do.. and call them names

Why would / should we not?

Especially when their own contemporaries knew the difference between right and wrong.

Especially when the offenders themselves even privately acknowledged they knew what they were doing was wrong, yet they were going to continue with the wrong in spite of knowing it was wrong (e.g., Thomas Jefferson admitted his owning slaves was wrong, but that didn't cause him to stop owning slaves, nor to insist slavery should be abolished before the US could be founded as a single country, without any artificial advantages like the electoral college, the Senate, and counting slaves who could not vote in the census to determine representation in the House given to slave states, nor prevent him from still treating the people who were in "America" first as, in his words, "savages" and putting them on a course for normalized genocide by the invaders from Europe).

He is deified by some delusional people for absolutely no reason when it comes to morality.

There's no reason to give anyone a pass because some people normalized a wrong during a given point in history, we all still have brains (well, except Trump voters).

No. Next ...

No. I think they should be judged according to the norms of the era they lived in. To do otherwise would be grossly unfair.

Hmmm, that isn't or at least doesn't feel like a one answer fits all type of question. I'd say it's contextual.

No…times were different.
Hell…I remember being taught that countries coloured red on the map were British.
We invaded these places.
What we now know to be wrong shouldn’t affect our knowledge of the past.
They renamed a theatre in Bristol.Ridiculous.

We ought to be knowing where they fall short, but understanding of the times they lived, not expecting them to be as we would have them to be.

and why not?

In some cases, yes, we can (and I do).
I believe that we can judge the things they did by reasonably considering how they would’ve accepted those actions directed against themselves or their loved ones.

Some things are not subjective.🥺

No. We can regret actions such as slavery, the Inquisition and other historical things, but they occurred in different times, when attitudes and cultures were different and thus you can't really sit in judgement. If we were alive then, our attitudes and culture would almost certainly be exactly the same. Therefore we should acknowledge the past and learn from it, but not condemn outright. Who knows what our future civilisations will condemn us for?

There's an old saying... The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there..

Not if we want to understand the past, no.

No

No

Nope, different times different vibes. Of course if they were a pedo, that's not acceptable any time period