Moral Blind Spots We Outgrew

Moral Blind Spots We Outgrew: Societies repeatedly defend practices as natural, entertaining or even virtuous until a later generation looks back with shock, and studying these reversals helps explain how ordinary people go along with what history condemns.

Tyburn Gallows: Eighteenth century London hangings at Tyburn drew crowds in the tens of thousands, with vendors selling food and printed ballads in a carnival atmosphere.

Robert Damiens: His gruesome public execution in Paris in 1757 drew a vast crowd and opens Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish as a symbol of punishment as spectacle.

Eugen Weidmann: His 1939 execution outside the prison at Versailles turned into a chaotic spectacle with crowds and cameras, and France ended public executions within weeks.

Cruelty To Animals Act 1835: Britain banned bull and bear baiting only in 1835, after centuries in which watching dogs attack chained animals counted as ordinary entertainment.

Burr Hamilton Duel: Alexander Hamilton had lost his son in a duel and opposed the practice, yet he still accepted the 1804 challenge from Aaron Burr, because refusing would have cost him his honor.

Marshalsea Prison: Debtors in Victorian London could be jailed until they paid, which made it impossible to earn the money, and Charles Dickens's father was held there in 1824.

Pollock V Williams: As late as 1944 the Supreme Court had to strike down a Florida law that let employers imprison workers who failed to repay advances, ruling it a form of peonage.

Lewis Hine: His photographs of children working in mills, mines and canneries between 1908 and 1918 for the National Child Labor Committee helped turn public opinion against child labor.

Climbing Boys: English master sweeps sent small children, some as young as four, up narrow chimneys, and it took Parliament until 1875 to finally enforce a meaningful ban.

Bloody Code: By around 1800, England had more than 200 offenses punishable by death, including stealing small items, and judges often issued death sentences for things we now view as minor.

Carl Hagenbeck: The Hamburg animal dealer began organizing shows of people from Africa, Asia and the Arctic in the 1870s, which pulled in huge crowds across Europe.

1904 World's Fair: The St. Louis exposition displayed more than a thousand Filipinos in a recreated village, one of the largest human exhibits ever staged in the United States.

Ota Benga: In 1906 the Bronx Zoo exhibited this Congolese man in its monkey house, drawing crowds and prompting outraged protests from Black ministers in New York.

Walter Freeman: The American physician popularized the transorbital lobotomy in the 1940s and traveled the country in a van he called the lobotomobile, performing thousands of the procedures.

Egas Moniz: The Portuguese neurologist won the 1949 Nobel Prize for developing the lobotomy, an award that remains deeply controversial today.

Mary Ellen Wilson: In 1874 a New York child was rescued from abuse in a case often told as having been argued under animal cruelty law, and it helped inspire the first societies to protect children.

Ingraham V Wright: In 1977 the Supreme Court ruled that paddling schoolchildren did not violate the Eighth Amendment, and many American states still permitted corporal punishment in schools long afterward.

Buck V Bell: The Supreme Court upheld forced sterilization in 1927, and tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized under eugenics laws that were then considered progressive science.

Tuskegee Study: From 1932 to 1972, US health officials observed hundreds of Black men with syphilis without treating them, even after penicillin became available, an abuse that reshaped research ethics.

Saint John's Fire: Parisians once burned cats in baskets as part of Midsummer celebrations, with French kings lighting the bonfire until Louis XIV in 1648.

Colosseum: Rome opened its great arena in 80 AD with 100 days of games that reportedly killed thousands of animals, and gladiatorial combat to the death was mass entertainment.

Delaware Whipping Post: Delaware kept whipping as a legal punishment until 1972, with the last whipping reported in the early 1950s, making it a surprisingly recent holdover.

Foot Binding: For roughly a thousand years in China, families bound girls' feet to meet beauty and marriage standards, and it took a determined campaign and a 1912 ban to end it.

Bethlem Hospital: Until 1770, London's famous asylum let visitors pay a penny to watch patients, treating the suffering of people with mental illness as a public amusement.