Problematic history..

 

In an extraordinary move, Edinburgh University has symbolically renamed the "David Hume Tower" to "40 George Square" in response to a petition (signed by 1700 people) claiming that the comments of the philosopher 300 years ago on race cause "distress" today. Like most people of his age (i.e. 1700's) pre-Darwin and pre-Mendel their views on race were simply wrong, coloured by prevailing religious and cultural ideas and not facts regarding evolution and genetics, which confirm our close relatedness to all other peoples. For us to judge 18th century opinions from the comfort of the post-enlightenment 21st century is problematic, it would even be difficult to judge people's opinions from the 1970's without some account of context, so for that it's is difficult for me to see how we can seriously judge the feelings, opinions, intentions or recorded internal monologues of someone that far back in history. 

On the other hand I think it's much more valid to judge people (of any era) based upon their actions, so long as they weren't coerced, I think it's OK to have a pop at what they actually did. Hume is well known for being tangentially involved in the transatlantic slave trade, he is on record as being involved in at least one transaction regarding human slaves, albeit only from a financial involvement. For this I think it's perfectly reasonable for people today to criticize him and to perhaps avoid venerating his memory without that important caveat. Hume was clearly a great thinker (some might say genius) in many ways, his views on many things have molded our views on philosophy and ethics for at least a couple of centuries now and so that cannot be discounted. But, we must also accept the fact that he was clearly also an individual with moral flaws and certainly didn't always practice what he preached! It's a matter of record that he turned a blind eye to practices (i.e. slavery) which we can justifiably feel there is no way such an intelligent and well read man could not reason as being wrong, the question is, what would you or I have done in his place? We have no way of knowing, and put simply, that is the dilemma of every future generation to wrestle with.