Knowledge and Responsibility. Some Reflections on the Relationship Between Historiography and Morality on the Occasion of the 5th INTH Conference (Part I)

Never really out of mind, questions on the relationship between historiography and morality resurface with a certain regularity, usually following human-made calamities. After World War II for example, philosophical and historiographic discussions were occupied, reasonably enough, with the issue of choice between resistance and collaboration, and hence with questions of moral responsibility and praise and blame for past deeds.1 This interest persisted in non-Anglophone philosophy of history for decades, while English-speaking philosophers moved on more quickly to such topics as (scientific) explanation, mainly thanks to Carl Gustav Hempel and analytic philosophy of history in his wake.2 Now, in our own crises-ridden times, historians and philosophers have begun talking morality again, as attested by the 5th International Network for Theory of History conference that took place in May 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal. With the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and the looming climate catastrophe we are indeed faced with our very own human-made devastation. Hence, today the relationship of historians to morality seems as pertinent and urgent as ever.
The 5th INTH conference, which bore the fitting title “History & Responsibility: Doing History in Times of Conflicting Political Demands,” showcased the complexity and breadth of the historiographic, theoretical and philosophical engagement with issues pertaining to historiographic morality (a term I will define below). The wars that surround us were omnipresent, as was the instrumentalization of the past in these wars and in conflicts of all kinds. The (alleged) responsibility of the historian towards the past, past crimes and the dead, the present and even the future was also discussed throughout the conference. The question of historical (in-)justice and the supposed duty to remember or perhaps to forget and, more philosophically, the ethical theories that historians hold or should hold—from existentialism to consequentialism and virtue ethics—were likewise debated. In addition to many other topics, the conference considered the ethical issues presented by AI and other new “machine historians” (so Marnie Hughes Warrington at the INTH conference); among many other things.
The panoply of topics discussed at this INTH conference shows that the relationship between historiography and morality is a fertile topic for both philosophical and historiographic reflection; a topic I cannot possibly do justice to in all its breadth in a text like this. What I would like to zoom in on, then, in line with my professional identity as a philosopher of historiography, are certain philosophical issues that presented themselves at the INTH conference, along with those pertaining to the relationship between historiography’s epistemic goals and morality more generally, which will be discussed in Part II of this text. I think it is reasonable to assume that most historians, not unlike everybody else, have (differing) moral responses to the past actions, atrocities and calamities they encounter or even research. The difficulty is to determine in what relation, if any, they stand to their professional goals and identity and how they influence them as historians (and vice versa).3
Before we attempt to answer this question, let me briefly outline here what I mean by historiographic morality and moral judgements. A moral judgement is a form of value judgement, with value judgements appraising the worth of something relative to some standard or goal.4 The standard set by moral appraisal is usually good and evil (or bad) or right and wrong as defined by some (philosophical) theory of proper human behaviour, with behaviour judged in this way being anything from morally praiseworthy at one end to absolutely reprehensible at the other. Moral judgements are further normative in character. In other words, they imply that someone ought to or ought not to do x (or ought to have done or not have done something), given that their actions have either been appraised as good or evil or as right or wrong. The idea of morality and moral judgements presupposes that people have a choice and that they act consciously.5 We do not usually regard someone who is nailed to a cross or someone who acts according to some delusion or hallucination as morally responsible for their actions. Historiographic morality further comprises the moral judgements that historians make about the past regardless of what standard of good and evil or right and wrong they apply, and it is about the moral theories and values upon which these judgements are based (if they exist). Clearly, not all value judgements that historians make are moral judgements; judging something by some standard of beauty gives us an aesthetic judgement, by some standard of justice a legal judgement, and so on. Philosophically, the study of moral judgements is part of axiology or value theory, with axiology being the philosophical study of the nature, sources, and types of values and value judgements.6 Historiographic axiology scrutinizes the values and value judgements that play a role in historiography, especially in their relation to historiography’s central epistemic goal, the production of knowledge of the past.
Now, when it comes to questions of historiographic morality and axiology, historians themselves are often of limited help only, for two reasons: Either they have not (philosophically) reflected on the moral judgements they make and their underlying principles or they present contradictory statements about them. Take the renowned historians Herbert Butterfield and Marc Bloch, who exemplify the latter category. In his celebrated book The Whig Interpretation of History,7 Butterfield comes out strongly against historians passing moral judgement on the past. In a frequently quoted passage, Butterfield famously writes that “the dispensing of moral judgments upon people or upon actions in retrospect” is “the most useless and unproductive of all forms of reflections”.8 In his possibly even more famous The Historian’s Craft,9 Bloch admonishes us: “When the scholar has observed and explained, his task is finished. It yet remains for the judge to pass sentence”.10 Butterfield, however, states just as confidently that it is “always legitimate” to “condemn massacres”11 and calls a certain historical figure an “irreligious scoundrel”.12 Likewise, and against his own advice, Bloch sees fit in his book to “pass sentence” on historical actors, for instance, by calling one historical figure an “indefatigable braggart”13 and another “admirable”.14
Similarly, we know that the proclivities of the historical profession as a whole to morally judge and condemn have changed with time. Nineteenth-century historians were much more prone to pass unequivocal moral judgements, and to a certain extent expected to do so by their peers and their audience.15 Most prominent among them is perhaps Lord Acton, who, based on his Catholicism, made it a duty for historians to morally judge the past because they were “the upholder of that moral standard which the powers of the earth, and religion itself, tend constantly to depress”.16 As such, historians such as Acton or, for example, C. V. Wedgewood hold the exact opposite position to Butterfield and Bloch when it comes to the desirability of moral judgements in historiography.17
Historians, in other words, have contrasting views about the propriety of moral judgements in historiography, just as some contradict themselves by claiming they should avoid such judgements, only to do precisely that. Furthermore, the overall tendency to pass such judgement has undergone a shift in historiography over time. Given this complex situation, I believe we need the combined efforts of historiography, philosophy and sociology to forge ahead on questions of historiographic morality. In the next section, I will therefore introduce “HPShM”, an approach that combines all three disciplines. This joint perspective seems to me especially apposite in the light of discussions that took place at the INTH conference in Lisbon, because many claims made there on closer inspection require more conceptual clarity and/or empirical input from historiography or sociology. In the second part of these reflections, I will discuss the main philosophical issue at stake, i.e., the relationship between historiographic morality and the discipline’s main epistemic goal and raison d’être: the production of knowledge of the past.18
Some conceptual and empirical issues concerning historiography and morality—and “HPShM”
I think for the discussion on the relationship between historiography and morality it is beneficial to distinguish between the historiography of morality and moral historiography and concomitantly between historians of morality and moral historians; the moral judgements that (some) historians make and the moral systems and values upon which they are based, if they exist at all, and the effects of these judgements on the historian, their work and their audiences. These things are often confounded in texts by historians and theorists of history alike in ways that hamper an effective discussion of the issues at stake. Also, all of these issues entail substantial empirical components in terms of their extent, number and frequency in historiography, all of which need to be ascertained in order to justify specific hypotheses, let’s say about the effect of moral judgements on audiences or the concept of “historical justice” that allegedly underpins the work of historians. (The latter example comes from the INTH conference, where hypotheses about justice were omnipresent, albeit with little empirical justification as far as I could see.) To be able to adress these empirical issues, we need a historiography and sociology of historiographic morality, closely aligned with a philosophical examination of the subject, providing the requisite conceptual clarity in the process; what we need, in short, is “HPShM”—the historiography, philosophy and sociology of historiographic morality. (My apologies for the ugly acronym and the verbose phrase. I hope it will become clear throughout this section what I mean by it and why it is essential for making headway on the numerous issues raised by historians and theorists of history with regard to historiographic morality.)
The historiography of morality is one of many topical subjects of historiography. Historians might be interested in the development of moral thinking and moral systems in some past society, or in the history of specific moral concepts such as responsibility, blame, guilt, or praise. Somewhere between entire moral systems and single moral concepts, historians might also want to trace the coming into being of certain moral theories, and as Butterfield himself suggested, they should do with “the doctrine that the end justifies the means”.19 In recent years, we have seen the burgeoning of this historiography of morality, although not under this name, in the form for instance, of “human rights history”.20 Even the most recent book by one of the keynoters at the INTH conference in Lisbon, Joan Wallach Scott, falls into this category. In On the Judgment of History,21 Scott tells the history of the concept of “history’s judgment”, its entanglement with the state and its raison d’état, which incidentally is also a contribution to the historiography of speculative philosophy of history, next to the historiography of morality.
As a form of historiography proper, the historiography of morality is evidentiarily based like any other form of scientific historiography and uses historiography’s well-established methods of information evaluation (or source criticism) to establish its knowledge of past morality. Most importantly, the historiography of morals may produce all kinds of interesting results for present audiences—for instance that the moral codes by which previous people lived were radically different from our own (child sacrifice, anyone?) or that people do not frequently argue from moral principles to action in the way philosophers would like them to—but as such they are not compelled to make moral judgments. Although perhaps not desirable, it is logically possible to produce a historiography of morality or any other subject without overt moral judgements. Examples of such historiography include discussing a highly focused topic with a limited evidentiary base, such as “the concept of justice in the text corpus of Tocharian A” (my mock example) or forms of quantitative historiography.22
In light of this, we should also distinguish the historiography of morality and historian of morality from moral historiography and moral historians. The terms moral history and moral historian are normally used to cover all of these, thereby conflating historians and the historiography of morals, as discussed above, with historians and historiographic fields that issue moral judgements.23 While there is a potentially big overlap between the two, i.e., historians of morality might very well also be moral historians, this is not necessarily so, just as historians who morally judge do not have to write about morality. I therefore suggest limiting the use of the term moral historian to the latter kind of historian, i.e., a historian who passes moral judgements on whatever subject matter, and to call the former a historian of morality.24
Moral historiography as such should further be distinguished from morally-driven historiography and morally–driven selection in historiography, which are both forms of value-driven historiography that fall under the remit of historiographic axiology. In morally-driven historiography, moral judgements and values act as a motivation or an impetus for historians to research certain topics. That this mechanism is widespread when it comes to the choice of historiographic topics is evidenced, for instance, by the surge of interest in the history of slavery or the histories of oppressed peoples and groups in recent years, compared say to interest in Tocharian history.25 That said, the extent to which historians choose their topics by this mechanism is an empirical matter, and I would prima facie be doubtful about any categorical claim along the lines of “historians have to make moral choices when selecting a subject upon which to write”.26 On the other hand, morally-driven selection in historiography is about selecting the truths historians include in their accounts. Historians cannot include every piece of knowledge that they have on a particular topic in their account. Instead, they need a principle of selection and a “standard of importance”27 to decide what exactly to include; with one possible principle and standard being the values and judgements to which they adhere. Such morally-driven selection might be found particularly in historiographic works with a strong political impetus or in colligatory works that focus on the instantiation of certain values and virtues in history in the form, for example, of historiographies of the resistance to oppression or of helping the persecuted. Yet, again, the extent to which this selection of facts qua morals does exist, and did exist, is a question for the sociology and historiography of historiographic morality.
Next, empirically speaking, is the extent to which historiography as such is moral historiography, which in reality is a question about the number and frequency of moral judgements made by various historians and various forms of historiography. Then there is also the empirical question of the moral theories and values that historians hold, if any. I think it is quite plausible to assume that many (most?) historians are moral historians in the sense that they regularly pass moral judgements on historical actors, even if they themselves – like Butterfield and Bloch – claim this should not happen. In this context, Cotkin discusses the historiography of the Dresden and Hiroshima bombings in World War II. This may be a crass example where many historians are far from reticent in their moral judgements, with some even calling the bombings downright evil.28 While Butterfield, Bloch and the historiography of the Dresden and Hiroshima bombings are indicative of the moral judgements of some (many?) historians, on the whole I think that we know too little about their character, function, frequency, and effects, especially since there are also areas and topics of the discipline where they are less frequent, if not entirely absent, as in (quantitative) Economic History. Similarly, we know too little about the moral theories, if any, that underpin these judgements and about the moral values through which historians conceive their entire enterprise. Herman Paul, for instance, argued in his keynote at the INTH conference that historians do not usually have explicit moral theories to justify their moral judgements, basing them instead on convention and conviction, which is an empirical hypothesis I find prima facie plausible.
To get a better idea of all these issues, we need a sociology and historiography of the discipline that researches historiographic morality along with its underpinnings, i.e., its moral theories and values. There is a good indication that the willingness to morally condemn openly has decreased over time in the discipline—see the case of Lord Acton above, who was still much more secure and stern in his moral judgements—and that variety abounds among historians themselves when it comes to moral judgements and theories, not unlike among the general population. On the other hand, as the INTH conference showed, there are numerous anecdotal claims making the rounds in theory of history about the morality or the duty of the historian, for which, as far as I can see, there is little concrete evidence, if they are to be taken as empirical claims (as opposed to veiled normative statements about what historians should think and do as per theoretician).
The same holds for issues concerning the effects of historiographic moral judgements on their audiences. Butterfield, for instance, makes the claim that anyone who does not already sees religious persecution as a crime will not be swayed by some historian’s moral condemnation of this behaviour. He surmises to the contrary that an objective and plain description of such crimes will evoke this moral response in the reader.29 Properly understood, these are two empirical hypotheses about the reader’s response when confronted with moral judgements of historians, or lack thereof, and as such they should be scrutinized by a (quantitative) sociology of historiography, which in this case focuses on reader responses. My hunch is that categorical claims such as Butterfield’s about reader responses are unfounded, since I assume there is as much variety in these responses as there is in people’s moral sentiments and theories. Only empirical research will be able to tell.
Properly understood, then, HPShM is a form of HPH, the History and Philosophy of History as proposed by Herman Paul,30 which is itself modelled on the (integrated) History and Philosophy of Science (HPS), although Paul would have done well to call HPH historiography and philosophy of historiography and perhaps also to include sociology, making it into the more verbose HPSH. Be that as it may, I hope to have shown in this part that when it comes to the kind of questions historians and theorists ask about the relationship between historiography and morality, we need all three disciplines that are mixed into HPShM. We need sociology and historiography because many of the claims made about historiographic morality are actually empirical hypotheses about the (changing) extent and effect of moral judgements, theories and values in historiography. As such, the evidence supplied by these sciences should show whether the empirical hypotheses hold true in the claimed generality. However, since we are not yet equipped with a proper sociology of historiography, as far as I can see, many of the hypotheses forwarded by theorists of history should for the moment be seen and flagged as epistemically underdetermined. Philosophy, on the other hand, is needed in the mix to achieve conceptual clarity and well-formedness with regard to hypotheses and issues of morality more generally, and to make the inferential structure of historiographic moral judgements and the categories and principles on which they rest clearer more explicit. As I have tried to show, quite different things are happening under the headers “moral history” and “moral judgements” that we would do well to differentiate properly. Clarity is also needed when it comes to such central moral concepts as justice, responsibility and duty, which were omnipresent at the INTH conference but rarely ever defined.
Beyond this, since the relationship between the three elements of “HPShM” is not a two-lane but a one-way street from sociology and historiography to philosophy (or theory), the different moral philosophies should be converted into research programmes and furnish their own philosophical hypotheses about historiographic morality, which can then be tested against the discipline and its history, and which are then likewise confirmed or infirmed by these tests, if the issues at stake are indeed not underdetermined.31 Paul advocates HPH, i.e., “historical-philosophical cooperation”32 because it can equip historiography and philosophy with what each tends to lack, providing “historical sensitivity” to philosophers and “conceptual clarity”33 to historians. This is also the promise of HPShM on issues of historiographic morality, albeit enriched by a sociological perspective that adds empirical (quantitative) accuracy to both historiography and philosophy. With theory of history in need of all three, HPShM should be attractive for it.
[The second part of this blog post was published on 25 February 2025.]
Georg Gangl is a philosopher of historiography with a special interest in questions of evidence, narrative and hindsight. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for the Philosophy of Historiography of the University of Ostrava, Czechia. He has published on his main interests in the leading journals of the field and is now working on a book on historiographic hindsight. For more information on Georg’s work, see: https://philpeople.org/profiles/georg-gangl.


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- Richard Vann, “Historians and Moral Evaluations,” History and Theory 43, no. 4 (2004), 3-30, 4. [↩]
- Berber Bevernage, Gisele Iecker De Almeida, Broos Delanote, Anton Froeyman, Patty Huijbers, and Kenan van de Mieroop, “Philosophy of History After 1945: A Bibliometric Study,” History and Theory 58, no. 3 (2019), 421-423, 435. [↩]
- William Dray, “History and Value Judgments,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Volume Four), ed. Paul Edwards. New York/London: Crowell Collier and Macmillan, 1967, 26-30, 26. [↩]
- Hugh Lacey, “Distinguishing Between Cognitive and Social Values,” in Current Controversies in Values and Science, ed. Kevin C. Elliott and Daniel Steel. New York and London: Routledge, 2017, 15-30, 15. [↩]
- Adrian Oldfield, “Moral Judgments in History,” History and Theory 20, no. 3 (1981), 260-277, 260-261. Isaiah Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” in Four Essays on Liberty. London: Oxford University Press, 1969, 41-117, 70-71. [↩]
- Mark Schroeder, “Value Theory,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (05.02.2008, revised on 04.03.2021), URL: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-theory/ (21.01.2025). [↩]
- Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1965. [↩]
- Ibid., 108. [↩]
- Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, translated from French by Peter Putnam. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. [↩]
- Ibid., 115. [↩]
- Herbert Butterfield, History and Human Relations. London: Collins, 1951, 125; also 106. [↩]
- Ibid., 104. [↩]
- Bloch, Historian’s Craft, 97. [↩]
- Ibid., 58. [↩]
- Jonathan Gorman, “Ethics and the Writing of Historiography,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography, ed. Aviezer Tucker. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 253-261, 257. [↩]
- Acton 1988 quoted acc. to Paul T. Phillips, Truth, Morality, and Meaning in History. Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press, 2019, 51. [↩]
- On Wedgewood, see Gorman, “Ethics and the Writing,” 255. [↩]
- The second part of this blog post was published on 25 February 2025. [↩]
- Butterfield, Whig Interpretation, 126. [↩]
- George Cotkin, “History’s Moral Turn,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 2 (2008), 293-315, 313; for an example of such a “human rights history”, see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia. Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA/London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010. [↩]
- Joan Wallach Scott, On the Judgment of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. [↩]
- Aviezer Tucker, “Philosophy of Historiography,” in Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method Articles, URL: https://www.bloomsburyhistorytheorymethod.com/article?docid=b-9781350970830&tocid=b-9781350970830-033 (07.02.2025). [↩]
- For this differentiation, see also Gorman, “Ethics and the Writing,” 253; for historians and theorists who do not make this distinction, see, for instance, Cotkin, “History’s Moral Turn” and Oldfield, “Moral Judgements”. [↩]
- I have suggested elsewhere an analogous differentiation for the term political historian, which is equally ambiguous in common usage whereby a political historian is either a historian of politics or a historian who advocates certain political positions. See Georg Gangl, Telling It Like It Really Was: On the Form, Presuppositions, and Justification of Historiographic Knowledge. Oulu: Acta Universitatis Ouluensis (PhD thesis), 2023, 166. [↩]
- For more examples of historiographic topics that stem from a moral impetus, see Cotkin, “History’s Moral Turn,” 296. [↩]
- Vann, “Historians and Moral Evaluations,” 3. [↩]
- Dray, “History and Value Judgments,” 27. [↩]
- Cotkin, “History’s Moral Turn,” 302. [↩]
- Butterfield, History and Human Relations, 123; for a similar argument dealing specifically with the Holocaust, see Vann “Historians and Moral Evaluations,” 29. [↩]
- Herman Paul, “History and Philosophy of History (HPH): A Call for Cooperation,” in Philosophy of History. Twenty-First-Century Perspectives, ed. Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, 165-179. [↩]
- On the idea of philosophical research programmes in philosophy of science in particular, see Imre Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, eds. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, 91-197; and Hasok Chang, “Presentist History for Pluralist Science,” Journal of General Philosophy of Science 52 (2021), 97-114, 104; on the application of this idea to the philosophy of historiography, see Gangl, Telling It Like It Really Was, 78-79. [↩]
- Paul, History and Philosophy of History, 166. [↩]
- Ibid., 166. [↩]
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Georg Gangl (February 11, 2025). Knowledge and Responsibility. Some Reflections on the Relationship Between Historiography and Morality on the Occasion of the 5th INTH Conference (Part I). Geschichtstheorie am Werk. Retrieved February 6, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13alz

