Quote Originally Posted by Sasaki Kojiro View Post
Why needs a system in order to make judgements? Do you have a system for telling whether a book or a piece of music is any good? Can you tell?

And more to the point, why act like "right" and "wrong" are some special end stage of judgement? All they are is a clumsy generalization. Do you have a system for deciding whether someone is callous, vacuous, nice, hateful, creepy, etc? We understand those things perfectly well. Attempts to awkwardly squash them into one category or another should be avoided.
A system OF Right and Wrong is a completely different thing to method for differentiating between them. If something is "right" it is right at any given time and in any given place. If what is "right" is mutable then you are talking about what is "accepted", not what is right.

It is perfectly possible to rank civilisations according to how "Right" you think they are, the trick is working out whether you are Right.

Quote Originally Posted by Gelatinous Cube View Post
Was anyone saying Washington was perfect? I certainly wasn't.
Traitor, megalomaniac, political and social oppertunist and a mediocre and general and statesman. His main virtues were bull-headedness, the ability to transfer the same to his men and a general lack of material averice.

History judges him favourably because he won, and as a result he is a cult hero in the US. If he had lost he would just be a rebel militia officer piqued over his failure to secure what he most coveted, a regular commission.