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

[Read part 1 here, published on 11 February 2025.]
Some philosophical issues concerning the relationship of historiography and morality—or knowledge first for as far as it goes
Having advocated a three-pronged historiographic, sociological and philosophical approach towards questions of historiographic morality in the first part of this text, I will now zoom in on some of the philosophical issues that for the most part have to do with morality’s supposed (negative) impact on historiography’s prime goal: the production of knowledge of the past. Historiography, along with other historical sciences, is arguably the only practice in society whose main purpose is to produce knowledge of the past as an end in itself. This is the differentia specifica of historiography and the historical sciences more generally.1 Many historians oppose moral judgements of the past because they see them as incompatible with that prime goal of historiography.2 Moral judgements that hamper historiography’s epistemic goals are often called moralistic in common parlance, with the corresponding (fallacious) intellectual position referred to as moralism.
However, not all moral judgements in historiography are moralistic in this sense, whereby the criteria for the differentiation between epistemically licit moral judgements and those that are epistemically illicit arise from the epistemic process itself. Just as there is an evidence-based historiography of morality (see part I), there can also be evidence-based historiographic moral judgements. Calling some politician from the past a “habitual drunk” or a “philanderer” or a past action a “human rights violation” is to describe someone or something with thick concepts that, in addition to their descriptive content, contain a moral evaluation. Yet, they are illicitly moralistic only if the concepts used were not applicable in the past.3 And if they were, the same holds true if the evidence is insufficient to justify referring to the politician or action as such. In the former case, the moralism also happens to be a vicious form of anachronism, with anachronism being a description or analysis of the past that, for whatever reason, could not have been provided during the past in question itself.4 Not all forms of vicious anachronism stem from the misapplication of moral judgements and values, nor are all epistemically illicit moralistic judgements anachronistic.5 An example of a moralistic judgment that is not anachronistic is when a former politician, who might well have been a habitual drunk or a philanderer by the standards of the time, is called such despite our having insufficient evidence for such a statement.
That we must be careful with even seemingly epistemically grounded moral judgements becomes clear if we remember that many people in the past lived their lives with moral standards unlike our own—something we know primarily through the epistemic practices of historiography itself—so that our concept of sexual faithfulness or sober public duty, for instance, may not apply to them. This also holds true for the phrase “human rights violation”, since inalienable human rights are only an invention of the last century.6 Not to be misunderstood, however, I am not arguing for a blanket ban on anachronistic moralistic judgements here. All I am saying is that historians and others who feel compelled to pass such moral judgements should make them explicit for what they are, i.e., the moral (dis-)approval of some past actors or actions from their present moral point of view, which is not backed by evidence from the past. And they should also think hard about what purpose they (want this to) serve. Otherwise, they cease to be scholars and become ideologues who twist the past for an ulterior moral and often political purpose.
This issue is somewhat complicated, however, by hindsight and the retrospective judgements, moral or otherwise, that the historian is repeatedly afforded by this perspective.7 Under epistemically favourable conditions, the historian knows much more about a situation than a historical actor knew or could have known—about their circumstances, but also about the intended and especially unintended future consequences of their actions. Historians may want to judge historical actors according to some moral standard they think was prevalent in the society they study, or by the particular outcome of an action they consider these actors should have foreseen. That said, they need to make sure that the foreseeability and prevalence of the standard they assume are not artefacts of their own hindsight perspective, one that has allowed them to know far more than historical actors could possibly have known. Otherwise, their moral judgements will again be moralistic statements of the viciously anachronistic sort, against their best intentions. But again, it is in the process of knowledge production via the evidence and background (information) theories that such moral ascriptions must prove themselves.8
The question of moralistic misdescription of the past qua hindsight or some presently held (anachronistic) moral values is to be distinguished from arguments about the centrality of moral judgements for certain conceptual distinctions historians regularly make. Such distinctions apply to the responsibility for some event and the differentiation between causes and conditions, and to arguments for the moral imbrication and effect of all historiographic language because historiographic language is a form of ordinary language. The former issue has been raised cogently in the philosophy of history by William Dray and the latter more famously by Isaiah Berlin.9 (For Hempel and other more scientific- or scientistic-minded philosophers of history, moral and other axiological issues were at best sidelines and not part of the philosophical analysis of historiography proper.) Differentiating causes and conditions in historiography is theory-laden and dependent on the research question. In the human sphere, where the notion of cause is frequently fleshed out in terms of responsibility, it can also be value-laden, as Dray has shown.10 Moreover, in many instances there is a pragmatic and contrastive element to the singling out of causes as opposed to conditions. In other words, some things are called the cause(s) of a historical phenomenon rather than mere conditions, since they occurred in one situation but not in another, thereby acting as contrastive, while (most) other causal factors were common to both situations.11
Now, that these judgements about the cause(s) of historical events are not only value-laden at times but moral-laden is evident from the historiographic usage of the concept of responsibility. There is a “moralistic conception of cause as free action”12 at work in some forms of historiography. This means that historical actors the historian considers to be more free, and who also tend to be more powerful, are said to be solely responsible for some event. In contrast, other actors involved in the creation of an outcome are portrayed as merely reactive. They do what they have to do, and in this sense are not the cause of what has happened.13 Now, the extent to which this “moralistic conception of cause” is found in various forms of historiography is an empirical question (see part I of this text); that it occasionally plays a role in the historian’s attribution of causes seems clear enough from Dray’s work, who analysed the historiography of the so-called Anschluss and the Mexican-American War in this respect.14 The moralistic determination of the cause(s) of some historical event is only one value-laden way to single out a causal factor as particularly important. A historian might also call someone the cause of or responsible for a specific act as a result of the non-moral values they hold, say some political, legal or even aesthetic values. The issue here mirrors the one raised in part I, where we discussed the value-driven selection of historical facts in a number of historiographic fields, although now key concepts such as cause and responsibility are themselves found to be (sometimes) value-laden. Also, to the extent that these judgements on the cause(s) of historical events are due to underdetermined theories and non-empirical value judgements, it is unlikely that they can be solved by the evidentiary methods of historiography that produce knowledge of the past. In this sense, they remain the subjective if perhaps reasonable impositions of different historians and, not unlike epistemically ungrounded moralistic judgements, they should be made explicit for what they are.
Now on to Isaiah Berlin’s argument about the need for moral evaluation in historiography qua historiography’s use of ordinary language. Berlin thinks historiography “employs few, if any, concepts or categories peculiar to itself” and instead is obliged to rely on the common sense of “ordinary daily intercourse” and “ordinary speech,”15 with the consequence for Berlin that moral evaluation in historiography is unavoidable. While I believe that up to a point he is overstating his case here—concepts coined by historians such as Renaissance are not part of common sense or ordinary speech as such and neither are behavioural descriptions of people who are culturally alien to us—he is of course right that words such as good and bad or right and wrong, which are the basic terms for any moral judgement, are often shared between historians and their audience. This point is especially important because “what the historian may imagine to be a value-free expression may nevertheless make a moral or emotional impact on the reader”16 precisely due to the use of basic terms and thick concepts as they occur in ordinary language and the interference of that very language and its associated common sense. Epistemically speaking, however, this issue boils down to the question of moralism we discussed earlier. Either the historian’s moral judgement is moralistic in this sense, or it is not. If the former is the case, the historian might very well share some moral concept anachronistally with their audience with which they judge the historical actor. If so, they should make the anachronistic nature of the judgement clear, if they insist on making it. In the latter case, if the moral judgement is borne out by the evidence, they should preempt any expected interference from modern language and common sense by being equally explicit that the judgements they make using everyday language are not necessarily those associated with them today. Once these issues have been taken care of, it is more than likely that any remaining moralistic misunderstanding is a receiver’s problem that cannot be easily fixed.
Moralism is merely one form of epistemically vicious value judgements that obstruct the epistemic goals of historiography. Other analogous value-induced impediments to knowledge of the past are, for example, politicism, aestheticism or legalism. The logic of these value-induced epistemically vicious judgements is similar to that of moralism: Political, aesthetic or legal values and categories are (anachronistically) misapplied to the past in order to pass positive or negative judgement on that past, given the respective (presentist) evaluation standard. As with moralistic judgements, people will undoubtedly make these kind of value-induced statements, too, if they have to, but they should be clear and explicit about what these are in reality, subjective modern impositions with no grounding in the evidence. (And indeed, judgements of this kind may cause no real harm, as numerous anachronistic aesthetic judgements show.)
Regardless then of the political or other motive, if any, behind moralism in historiography, it seems clear that indignation, outrage and affect frequently go hand in hand with moral judgements.17 And whatever else their usefulness, these strong degrees of commitment and passion tend to cloud our judgement, and as such add to the potential of moral judgements to raise epistemic issues. Moralism in historiography can therefore be epistemically vicious in two ways, descriptively and motivationally. It can both distort our descriptions of the past and undermine our status as epistemic agents, whose goal it is to diligently produce or acquire knowledge of the past.
In this part of the text, I scrutinized the relationship between historiography’s raison d’être, the production of knowledge of the past and historiographic morality. I differentiated between evidence-based moral judgements of the past as products of the knowledge production process of historiography and (anachronistic) moralistic judgements that are not. I further discussed hindsight as a possible complication in deriving evidence-based moral judgements. Beyond this, moral considerations sometimes enter into the attribution of (sole) responsibility for past events to certain historical actors as opposed to others and, with that, into the differentiation between causes and conditions. I also examined Berlin’s more general argument that historians nolens volens make (or transmit) anachronistic moral judgements by using ordinary language. While recognizing the problem, I argued that this can be overcome if historians are reflective enough about moral judgements and the potential interference from ordinary language on the part of their audience. Moralism is furthermore not simply an impediment for the production of knowledge of the past, it can also be a motivational hindrance to accomplishing historiography’s epistemic goals, since it is linked to strong emotions, affects and commitments that tend to hamper our status as epistemic agents in the pursuit of such knowledge. In all of this I have not counselled the avoidance of moralistic judgements. Their true nature should, however, be made explicit, i.e., they are subjective impositions by the historian that have not been justified by the epistemic processes of historiography.
Finally, a word on the epistemic status of moral discourse itself, both in historiography and beyond. I think it is nowadays commonly accepted, at least among scholars and philosophers, that there is no transcendental moral law instituted by God, Rationality or some other entity to firmly ground our moral judgements. Instead, we are faced with the choice to act morally according to a chosen moral theory (or theories) and some fundamental values that we embrace and which may well be in tension with each other theoretically and practically in our daily pursuits. What we need therefore is theoretical and philosophical reflection and a weighing of the various aspects and goals of our actions, and their reasons, in terms of the kind of person we want to be and the society we want to live in;18 in short, what we need, to use a word that betrays my own ethical choice and predilection, is phronesis.19 Beyond the epistemic issues I have discussed in this section, where moralism impedes the central epistemic goal of historiography, there are no hard and fast rules that make an ethical approach to the past—be it utilitarian, deontological, virtue ethics, or otherwise—more appropriate, as is the case with our moral judgements in the present. At the same time, however, many historians firmly believe there is a kind of “moral imperative to truth and objectivity in the practice of history,”20 a position I indeed consider reasonable. This apparent contradiction and the values that are constitutive of the historiographic enterprise should be at the core of any future research into historiographic axiology.
[Read part 1 here, published on 11 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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- Aviezer Tucker, Our Knowledge of the Past. A Philosophy of Historiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Peter Kosso, Knowing the Past. Philosophical Issues of History and Archaeology. Amherst: Humanity Books, 2001. [↩]
- See, for instance, Richard Evans, “History, Memory, and the Law: The Historian as Expert Witness,” History and Theory 41, no. 3 (2002), 326-345, 345, or the historians’ statements collected in 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; along with the Butterfield and Bloch quotes in the introduction of part I. [↩]
- On the ascription of implicit concepts to historical actors, see Gal Prudovsky, “Can We Ascribe to Past Thinkers Concepts They Had No Linguistic Means to Express?,” History and Theory 36, no. 1 (1997), 15-31. [↩]
- Georg Gangl, “The Essential Tension: Historical Knowledge Between Past and Present,” History and Theory 60, no. 3 (2021), 177-194; Nick Jardine, “Uses and Abuses of Anachronism in the History of Science,” History of Science 38, no. 3 (2000), 252-270. [↩]
- I wrote about moralistic and other forms of anachronism on this blog already on the occasion of a “shitstorm” against the now former president of the American Historical Association, James H. Sweet. See Georg Gangl, “History Now! On Presentism and a Strange Online Debate in American Historiography (Part 1),” Geschichtstheorie am Werk (15.11.2022), URL: https://gtw.hypotheses.org/9274 (11.02.2025) and Georg Gangl, “History Now! On Presentism and a Strange Online Debate in American Historiography (Part 2),” Geschichtstheorie am Werk (22.11.2022), URL: https://gtw.hypotheses.org/9526 (11.02.2025). As it so happens, much of the outrage in that debate was created by misplaced moralism, but in the second part of the text, I also talk about other, epistemically virtuous forms of anachronism. [↩]
- Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia. Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA/London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010. [↩]
- On the uses and abuses of hindsight in historiography, see Gangl, “Essential Tension”. [↩]
- For a philosophical reconstruction of that process and a justification of its epistemic goodness, see Tucker, Our Knowledge of the Past, 92-140. [↩]
- William H. Dray, “History and Value Judgements,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (vol. 4), ed. Paul Edwards. New York/London: Crowell Collier and Macmillan, 1967, 26-30; William H. Dray, On History and Philosophers of History. Leiden: Brill, 1989; Isaiah Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” in Four Essays on Liberty. London: Oxford University Press, 1969, 41-117. [↩]
- Dray, “History and Value Judgements”, 29. [↩]
- Tucker, Our Knowledge of the Past, 192-197. [↩]
- Dray, On History and Philosophers of History, 109. [↩]
- Ibid., 59-60, 102-103. [↩]
- Ibid., 59-61, 100-110. [↩]
- Berlin, “Historical Inevitability”, 89-90; see also 95. [↩]
- Jonathan Gorman, “Historians and Their Duties,” History and Theory 43, no. 4 (2004), 113-117, 114. [↩]
- Adrian Oldfield, “Moral Judgements in History,” History and Theory 20, no. 3 (1981), 260-277; see also the online “shitstorms” so characteristic of our age, one of which has already been analysed on this blog in Gangl, “History Now!”, Part 1 and 2. [↩]
- Gorman, “Historians and Their Duties,” 104. [↩]
- Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Illusion of Self-Sufficiency,” in Conversations on Ethics, ed. Alex Voorhoeve. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 111-131. [↩]
- Cotkin, “History’s Moral Turn,” 296; see also similarly Gorman, “Historians and Their Duties,” 103. [↩]
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Georg Gangl (February 25, 2025). Knowledge and Responsibility. Some Reflections on the Relationship Between Historiography and Morality on the Occasion of the 5th INTH Conference (Part II). Geschichtstheorie am Werk. Retrieved January 22, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13d8m

