Do Virtue Ethics still have a place in the modern world?

Why debate still matters: should we judge the past by today’s standards?

Tilda Hardman, Year 10

Picture this: the crowd is jeering as they haul the ropes; more than two centuries after his finest hour, Admiral Lord Nelson is tumbling 50 metres to the ground, a one-time national hero overthrown by radical activists. Is this scenario so far-fetched in our statue-toppling society? Perhaps not.

For decades, historical apologists have defined history on their own terms, masking white supremacy as heritage. Others, however, have decided that their own moral values trump all others, past and present, giving them the right to abolish historic landmarks. Yet the fine line between right and wrong that we profess is so plain is under increasing scrutiny. Will the seemingly moral actions of today be deemed depraved later on?

We should not become complacent and believe our morals are superior to those of the past as we will undeniably be condemned by our descendants not just for our destruction of the planet but for other things such as our opposition to multi-sex lavatories.

Equally, figures of the past should not escape exposure to the prejudices they held. Lord Nelson himself was the owner of slave plantations in Nevis, a failure of virtue and a victory of greed. He also defended Britain in multiple battles culminating at Trafalgar where he died for his country and defeated the “irredeemable racist”, Napoleon, an acclaimed warrior but also a harbinger of strife who enslaved great swathes of the world. In his own words, Napoleon aspired to “annihilate the government of the Blacks”.

However, my stance that it is unjust to revoke the statues of such figures is not because I am subverting their moral defects in any way. I simply believe that in doing so, we would be eradicating the memories of such faults and risk the recurrence of them in the future. Toppling these statues only acts as a Band-Aid for our ignorance of history, one that will later peel away, just like our recognition of the corrupt prejudices our society once held. We also make the myopic assumption that we can impose our moral framework on an entire society, which surely is a moral shortcoming in itself. By ruthlessly redefining everyone’s morals in this way, we are effectively saying there is no room for debate or analysis.

If in this welter of moral revisionism we demolish the statue of one leader, like Lord Nelson, what about all his European contemporaries who also advocated such bigoted views or even the White House and the pillars in Rome’s Forum that were built by slave labourers? How do we break the vicious cycle?

Our political outlook will always affect our views on right and wrong; we cannot survey the past as neutral observers. When navigating the thorny dilemma of morality, I believe we cannot claim the moral high ground as, while some things are clearly evil and wrong, there cannot be absolute moral certainty about everything.

Context is all.

Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square