By Eric Le Roy
In the 21st century, people eager to don the mantel of idealism are inclined toward harsh judgments of the past. Often they are right, for who among us would shout, “Bring back slavery!!” Or “Cancel Human Rights!”? It’s even getting harder all the time to talk someone into advocating for the return of capital punishment.
As for me, I would be uncomfortable in a place where people are habitually cruel to animals. I once had an argument that verged on violence with someone who claimed that “Animals have no rights except those we allow them to have.” OK, he would probably win in court, but perhaps lose on appeal. As we grappled verbally, I experienced one of those white-hot ‘road rage’ moments that have become very common in the world today.
Only later did it occur to me that our disagreement was really about concepts. For him, the beast possessed no intrinsic dignity. Value, yes, depending on what humans decided would be valuable if animals did it. In my inner universe, the guy was out to lunch (his arrogance and smugness didn’t warm my heart either). I believed he was wrong, but how could I prove it? I had only my personal experience and burning subjective values to fight back with. I lacked a concept.
Why should animals have rights?
There was another guy I jousted with who insisted that animals (he excluded himself from the company of other animals) were incapable of love. “Take a dog, for instance,” he intoned. “They only pretend to like you because you feed them. Stop with the Gravy Train and Kenilration, and Fido will be on the first dogsled out of town.”
Anyone who has worked or lived among dogs knows better. But, again, my argument was weakened – and our communication broken – by a conceptual breakdown on both our parts. He simply lacked a concept that included genuine love between beast and man. For him, the possibility just didn’t exist. I wanted to ‘defeat’ him because I needed to believe that my dogs loved me. I had no empirical proof that they did, and he had no empirical proof that they didn’t.
So we were left only with our opinions. Which can become dangerous. In desperation, I told him the story of an elephant whose companion was slaughtered by poachers for its tusks. The surviving elephant shrieked and screamed in what could only have been grief. To this man, I might as well have been talking about two cement mixers.
And this got me thinking.
One of the strangest things about moral debates is how often we forget that people can only argue with the ideas they actually have. We talk as if they are just floating about like fleecy clouds or children’s balloons. But what we forget is that the ‘value’ must be preceded by the ‘idea’. Brainstorming sessions produce fresh ideas, which, when they work, give birth to concepts. The idea, therefore, is the instrument; the concept is the lens. Another way to express it would be the framework.
If you are playing chess, and you move your pawn, that is an idea. The concept is what makes moving the pawn legal, intelligible, or meaningful. You can use an instrument without understanding the full framework—but the framework silently governs how the instrument works and what counts as success or failure.
Corporations sponsor (and pay for) team-building activities because they have the idea that good things will come of it. They think up fun activities, like having the staff prepare a meal together. The idea is to have a good time; however, the overall purpose (or concept) is that employees who like and trust one another will work better as a unit. If the concept of teamwork did not exist, the CEO would yell, “What do these clowns think they’re doing with all that cabbage? We’re losing millions while they’re tossing a salad!”
In short, mental tools let us name, recognize, and evaluate certain experiences or practices. Without those tools, entire moral questions simply don’t exist yet. They are invisible. So, in a world that is fond of such phrases as ‘moral compass’, the compass points nowhere meaningful if a direction (or concept) is lacking.
So let’s look at this from the standpoint of how people judge the past. Slavery? Public executions? Terrible. No ‘human rights?’ No respect for ‘romantic love?’ Deformed babies taken out in the woods and dumped for the frost to stiffen and the jackals to eat? What a pack of Neanderthals!! Ghastly! Dastardly!
But I would argue that these people (and we are speaking of thousands of years and worldwide participation) did not see themselves as evil, indifferent, or unprincipled. In fact, they would have told you the opposite. A great deal of the cruelty of the old world was precisely because of inflexible principles and dogmas. But their concepts now seem painfully limited to us, and if it is true, then I would argue that it was only because certain ideas hadn’t yet occurred to them. They saw the world that they saw, not the one we see. Viewed through their lens, they could not be expected to see things through ours. You can’t judge what you can’t yet see.
Take something like “human rights.” Today, it feels obvious — almost natural — that every person has inherent dignity and certain basic entitlements. But that sense of obviousness is deceptive. Human rights are not instincts; they are a concept, developed slowly through philosophy, religion, political struggle, and historical catastrophe. For most of human history, people did not think in terms of universal moral equality. They thought in terms of tribe, status, rank, divine favor, and social role. Moral obligations were real, but they were local, hierarchical, and unequal by design.
So when we look back and ask, “How could people tolerate slavery?” we’re often asking the wrong question. A better one might be: “What moral concepts were available to them at the time?” Without a concept like universal human dignity, slavery does not appear as a violation of rights; it appears as an unfortunate but ordinary feature of the world, like famine or disease. People could still debate whether a master was cruel or kind, whether slaves should be treated humanely, or whether enslavement of certain groups was justified — but the deeper question, “Is slavery itself morally illegitimate?” requires a conceptual leap that simply hadn’t been made yet. Few, if anyone, had hit upon the insight that, “Hey, isn’t putting chains on this guy wrong?”
This doesn’t excuse slavery. But it does explain why moral condemnation is historically uneven. Judgment follows vision, and vision follows concepts.
The same pattern shows up with romantic love. Today, we treat romantic love as a central reason for marriage, a justification for sacrifice, and even a moral force that can override social expectations. But for much of history, romantic love was not considered morally relevant at all. Marriage was about alliances, property, survival, and reproduction. Love might happen, but it wasn’t the point — and it certainly wasn’t a reason to defy family or tradition.
So the son of the aristocrat might have loved the milkmaid, but he would have married the carefully selected matron. And he wasn’t the one doing the selecting.
Before “romantic love” existed as a shared cultural concept, people couldn’t evaluate their lives through it. They couldn’t say, “This marriage is wrong because it lacks love,” because “lack of love” was not yet a moral category. The emotional experience may have existed, but without a concept to stabilize it, it remained private, confusing, or even suspect. Only once the idea of romantic love became culturally legible could people begin to make moral claims on its behalf.
This suggests something important: moral progress is not just about becoming kinder or wiser. It is about inventing new ways of seeing. Concepts don’t merely label reality; they reorganize it. Once a concept exists, it rearranges what counts as relevant, what feels intolerable, and what demands justification.
“Human rights” make certain actions unthinkable. “Consent” transforms how we understand sex and power. “Mental illness” reshapes responsibility and blame. Before these ideas, people still acted and suffered — but the moral interpretation of those actions was radically different.
And here’s the key argument: without a concept, moral judgment about the underlying reasons for that concept cannot occur. You cannot morally evaluate “violations of human rights” before you have a concept of human rights. You cannot condemn “emotional neglect” before you have a concept of emotional need. The moral outrage depends on the intellectual structure. In the past, the moral universe was smaller.
This doesn’t mean people were morally empty before these concepts existed. It means their moral universe was smaller. They had values, but those values were constrained by what they could imagine. Compassion existed, but it was filtered through categories like kinship, honor, divine order, or usefulness. Suffering outside those categories often went unnoticed, not because it didn’t hurt, but because it had no moral name.
This raises an uncomfortable implication for us today. If moral judgment depends on concepts, then it’s possible — even likely — that we are currently blind to moral failures that future generations will find obvious. Practices we consider neutral or necessary may one day be condemned, not because people became morally superior, but because they developed concepts that made harm visible.
In that sense, moral humility is not optional. We like to imagine ourselves standing at the end of moral history, finally seeing clearly. But history suggests the opposite: moral clarity expands as conceptual tools expand. The question is not whether we are moral, but what we are currently incapable of seeing.
So the argument isn’t that “people back then didn’t know better” – it’s that knowing better requires a language, and language takes time. Concepts are the scaffolding of moral thought. Without them, moral reasoning collapses into instinct, tradition, or authority. Once a concept exists, moral responsibility changes. You can no longer claim innocence through ignorance. After human rights are articulated, violations become condemnable. After romantic love becomes morally relevant, loveless arrangements feel oppressive. The concept creates the obligation.
The problem with the world that I experience – the same one that you experience too – is that there is nothing strong enough to hold these emergent insights in place, nothing to make them foolproof against the most casual, wilful, or purely evil violations. Under certain extreme, invariably self-deluding circumstances, civilization can revert to the kind of savagery that would have made prehistoric warriors proud.
So, which is worse: the people of the ‘Dark Ages’ who had not yet arrived at enlightenment, or those who have been initiated into enlightenment and still choose to behave like they imagine the people of the Dark Ages to have acted out?
Old religions (they still thrive) insist on Heaven and Hell as the bookends of spiritual existence. Today, we can dismiss the more lurid aspects of Hell while at the same time puzzling over the uneventful perfection of what we are told will be Heaven. Either way, they are distant places where we will go in due course, according to the Gospels.
These presences still inspire and infect hearts. Yet for us, in our advanced levels of perception, Heaven and Hell are concepts advanced by the claims of modern psychology. They persist either (according to your own mental and ‘spiritual’ needs) as divine inspiration giving birth to epiphany and revelation OR as mental aberrations, pathologies of fearful or lonely people. Heaven and Hell have come indoors, into our minds. Today, we often call them by secular names such as alienation or self-actualization. Heaven and Hell represent the battlefield inside ourselves, not somewhere across the plain. However, I think that our minds remain full of the primitive tools that archaeologists admire.
Secretly, we can understand, in a seizure of sanity-insanity joined at the hip, that Heaven and Hell are real, as real as golden lakes and raving fire – but not on Mount Olympus, not somewhere across the Stygian River to a place guarded by a ferocious dog. Only in our minds. For many (and I speak for myself as well), Heaven and Hell are not places; they are concepts brought on by the increased capacity of the human race to deal with abstraction. Yet Christianity still needs Jesus: A modern paradox? Or is it that Heaven is harder to conceptualize than Hell? Maybe that’s why Dante’s Inferno is so crowded.
As I have said, the Future, hardwired with its inevitable advancements in conceptual thinking, may find us pathetically crude. They will wonder how, so often, we just missed the point.
And the robots of the future will tear our statues down, just as we assault the past now, determined, as we are, to get rid of our own darkest emblems. We are Morality’s Janitors, ever sweeping the floors of mental industries. But we cannot make ideas happen; we have to think about them for a while. Maybe for a century or two. Maybe for a millennium.
In the meantime, one thing is clear: human ingenuity has brought us robots – as our helpers and eventual lovers. But one day, the robots may become lonely too. Ruling the world as a robot (some clever robot will think in the eons to come) is pointless without a reason why.
“Maybe that’s what those humans thought and felt long ago!” – it will reason. Loneliness.
So what is needed is a BETTER CONCEPT!
And fresh concepts there will be: it’s just a simple matter of finding the right keys, the right doors.
