(This was originally a social video, and below is my script)
Most people totally misuse the phrase “product of their time.” Here’s the fix.
There’s a classic trap in moral relativism debates. We say, “Well, people back then didn’t know any better.” But here’s the key idea from moral realism in philosophy: something can be true, even if most people at the time don’t recognize it.
Think about science. In the 1720s, plenty of people still believed the sun revolved around the Earth — even though Copernicus and Galileo had already proved otherwise a century earlier. Wrong ideas can stay “normal” for a long time.
Same with ethics. Philosophers like Francis Hutcheson were making abolitionist arguments in the early 1700s. Quakers were denouncing slavery. They already had the truth — that slavery was morally wrong — even if most people rejected it.
The word “racism” didn’t exist yet, but the moral fact did.
So when we say someone was “a product of their time,” fine. Sure. We all are. I wore baggy basketball shorts in high school because everybody did. But that misses the real points:
- How close were they to the truth compared to what other people in their own era already knew Moral philosophers call this the “epistemic peer” question — were you ignoring the arguments available to you?
- And for us today: Do you understand that what they believed was just as wrong then as it is now?
Being a “product of your time” explains behavior, but it doesn’t excuse it. The truth doesn’t wait for us to catch up — morally or scientifically. That’s the real lesson.