Moral Blind Spots and Future Condemnation

On a rainy July 1st 2020, a crowd gathered along Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia to cheer on construction crews as they lifted and lowered a statue of the Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson from its pedestal. For many onlookers, the toppling of Jackson’s figure in their city, formerly the capital of the Confederacy, symbolized a step toward reshaping its racially oppressive past.

Today’s American society broadly condemns practices that were once widely accepted, such as slavery, the legal subordination of women, and many forms of sexual violence. This shift has prompted renewed debates over monuments, place names, portraits, and other public commemorations associated with those practices or the people who defended them.

These debates raise a broader question: Which practices accepted today might future generations condemn?

History offers many examples of damnatio memoriae (“condemnation of memory”), a practice most closely associated with Imperial Rome. It refers to attempts to erase or diminish a person’s public legacy by removing monuments, inscriptions, portraits, and official honors.

In the US these includes the toppling of King George III’s statue in New York City. The removal of statues of Confederate leaders (such as Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis) and of Christopher Columbus. The changed names of sports teams or venues.

Although complete erasure was rarely achieved, the practice illustrates how societies periodically reassess whom they choose to celebrate. As historian and Imperial Rome specialist Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer has argued, controversies over monuments reveal that societies continually revise their moral judgments about the past. What one generation honors, another may reject.

Future generations may therefore look back on the early twenty-first century with similar disapproval, concluding that while we condemned many historical injustices, we failed to confront others that were deeply embedded in our own society.

Areas Likely to Face Future Condemnation

• Environmental Degradation

The continued emission of greenhouse gases, destruction of ecosystems, and loss of biodiversity may one day be viewed as a profound act of inter-generational injustice.

Future societies could regard the failure to mitigate climate change, in full awareness of its consequences, as a deliberate failure to protect the planet’s long-term habitability.

• Systemic Inequality

Persistent disparities in wealth, housing, education, and criminal justice may eventually be viewed as moral failures comparable to other forms of institutional discrimination.

Practices such as mass incarceration, unequal access to opportunity, and racial disparities in legal outcomes are already the subject of extensive criticism and may receive even harsher judgment as standards of equality continue to evolve.

• Industrial Animal Agriculture

The large-scale confinement and slaughter of animals for food may be regarded as ethically unacceptable if future societies place greater moral weight on animal sentience and a healthy planet.

Industrial farming could come to be viewed not only as environmentally damaging but also as an unnecessary source of suffering, much as previous generations came to reject other once-normalized forms of exploitation.

• Digital Exploitation

The widespread collection, commercialization, and analysis of personal data without meaningful informed consent or even a meaningful purpose beyond commercialization, may be recognized as a serious infringement of individual liberty.

Future generations may see pervasive surveillance and behavioral manipulation through digital platforms as fundamental violations of privacy and personal autonomy.

• Democratic Institutions

Future societies may condemn practices that weaken democratic representation, including gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the deliberate spread of disinformation. At the same time, history cautions against assuming that moral change always follows a single direction.

Some democratic principles that appear foundational today (like one person, one vote) could themselves be reconsidered, as political institutions continue to evolve.

• Healthcare Disparities

The inability of affluent societies to provide basic healthcare to all citizens may eventually be regarded as a profound ethical failure. Future historians may question a system in which access to life-saving treatment depends heavily on income, employment, insurance status, or geography.

The growing acquisition of hospitals and physician practices by private equity firms may also receive increased scrutiny. Future observers could conclude that financial incentives were allowed to outweigh patient welfare, creating a healthcare system in which fiduciary obligations to investors often competed with the duty to preserve human life.

• Geographic Inequality

The dramatic variation in life expectancy and opportunity associated with where someone is born or lives may eventually be viewed as unacceptable. Residents of rural healthcare deserts and economically disadvantaged urban communities often experience substantially worse health outcomes, educational opportunities, employment prospects, and quality of life than those living elsewhere.

Future societies may regard such disparities as systemic failures rather than unavoidable consequences of geography.

• Artificial Intelligence and Algorithmic Bias

The rapid deployment of artificial intelligence introduces ethical challenges that are only beginning to be understood. Future generations may criticize not only algorithmic bias in hiring, lending, policing, and healthcare, but also the excessive delegation of important human decisions to opaque automated systems.

They may further question the concentration of power among organizations that control increasingly capable AI technologies and the insufficient protections afforded to individuals affected by those systems.

Complicity in Injustice

The common thread among these examples is the normalization of harm: practices that impose significant costs on one group, whether marginalized communities, future generations, animals, or the natural environment, while benefiting another.

Because these arrangements become embedded in everyday life, they often appear ordinary rather than ethically exceptional. As Daniel B. Rice argues in his article on judicial moral prophecy, societies frequently fail to recognize their own complicity in injustice until cultural values have shifted. He observes that American judges decry past moral lapses as intolerable.

History suggests that moral blind spots are not rare exceptions but recurring features of human societies. Just as previous generations struggled to recognize injustices that now seem obvious, future generations may judge some of our accepted institutions with equal disbelief. The lesson is not that today’s moral consensus is necessarily wrong, but that it is inevitably incomplete.

As a guiding instruments, courts should contemplate, indeed heed, the moral judgments of coming generations and not exclusively consideri only interpretations of current law.

A historically informed society should therefore approach its own norms with humility, remaining open to the possibility that practices considered ordinary today may one day be remembered as profound ethical failures.