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Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 6190297" data-attributes="member: 3400">I believe that morals definitely do change and are relative, but they tend to color our perceptions so pervasively that we have a hard time not ascribing some kind of absolute, universal, permanence to them. By doing so, however, we're imposing our own moral views on the situation and the actors involved, perhaps even judging them by a moral standard they haven't or possibly even cannot have developed. It's shocking to read about a Roman army slaughtering tens of thousands of Celtic women and children trying to migrate, en masse, into northern Italy. But from the Roman perspective, it was probably not at all an immoral act at all - and may have even been lauded as protection of Roman/allied society from invaders bent on destroying their way of life (or at least eating all of their food and leaving everyone to starve). Thanks to our more modern morality, in which individual rights are supposed to be given much more respect, we believe this sort of thing to be immoral, and obviously so. But not so obvious to most cultures in antiquity, I would wager.As far as the prisoner scenario goes, I don't see the likelihood of a POW being released for compassion under the condition he returns flying with current expectations. I don't see it working with WWII expectations just a generation later, either. That's not because anybody is less moral. It's because the morality has changed. In WWII, it would have been more in line with a soldier's duty and honor to do anything reasonably in his power to escape the enemy in order to return to the fight and that would preclude honoring an agreement to go back into captivity. Such a promise probably would have been seen as a promise made under duress and thus null and void. I don't consider any of that to be in any way less moral or less honorable - rather, the definitions of those have shifted.</blockquote>

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