: Re: How do you make characters relatable if they exist in a completely different moral context? Usually when I read books in ancient-like settings (settings that are either in real ancient civilizations

@Annie587

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I think it's mostly a modern delusion that ethics today are dramatically different than they were in the past.

Yes, ancient Persia routinely tortured political prisoners. So do modern China and North Korea and many Arab countries.

Modern Americans pride themselves on equal rights for women. Yet the US has never had a female president, while many ancient countries had a queen.

Ancient Rome was brutal to prisoners of war and conquered people. And many ancient Romans agonized over this. A major message of the Iliad, the classic Greek book about the Trojan War, is that the Greeks questioned their own behavior in that war.

I saw some statistics from a Christian organization a few years back claiming that more people were killed for being Christians in the 20th century than in all previous centuries combined. The Holocaust killed more people for being Jews than in any other comparable period of time in the past. I don't think it was more than all past history combined, but it was murder on a massive scale.

The largest mass killings in history include the massacre of real and imagined political opponents by Stalin and Mao, and the massacre of unborn babies in America in the 20th century.

Etc.

And of course, when you judge the moral standards of a society, how do you decide whether Society A or Society B has the better moral standards? To say, "Our society has better moral standards than this other society, which we determined by evaluating each against the standards of our society" ... well, duh. On this controversial question, A says one thing and B says another, and we conclude that A is right because we asked A and they said that they were right.

For example, many 21st century Americans say that modern America is superior to America of 100 years ago because we have greater tolerance of homosexuality. Ancient Greeks would agree. But 20th century Americans would say that they are superior because they fight against this practice that they believe to be immoral and self-destructive. One could say the same thing about other issues where the consensus has changed.

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