During war in the Middle Ages? Ethnic cleansing? What did they consider at the time?
BTW: it’s a pretty American (or western) value that children are somehow more sacred than adults.
Eventually we will realize in 100 years or so, that direct human-computer implant devices work best when implanted in babies. People are going freak out. Some country will legalize it. Eventually it will become universal. Is it torture?
By "torturing babies for sport" I mean inflicting pain or injury on babies for fun, for pleasure, for enjoyment, as a game or recreation or pastime or hobby.
Doing it for other reasons (be they good reasons or terrible reasons) isn't "torturing babies for sport". Harming or killing babies in war or genocide isn't "torturing babies for sport", because you aren't doing it for sport, you are doing it for other reasons.
> BTW: it’s a pretty American (or western) value that children are somehow more sacred than adults.
As a non-American, I find bizarre the suggestion that crimes against children are especially grave is somehow a uniquely American value.
It isn't even a uniquely Western value. The idea that crimes against babies and young children – by "crimes" I mean acts which the culture itself considers criminal, not accepted cultural practices which might be considered a crime in some other culture – are especially heinous, is extremely widespread in human history, maybe even universal. If you went to Mecca 500 years ago and asked any ulama "is it a bigger sin to murder a 5 year old than a 25 year old", do you honestly think he'd say "no"? And do you think any Hindu or Buddhist or Confucian scholars of that era would have disagreed? (Assuming, of course, that you translated the term "sin" into their nearest conceptual equivalent, such as "negative karma" or whatever.)
I don't know if it's American but it's not universal, especially if you go back in time.
There was a time in Europe where children were considered a bit like wild animals who needed to be "civilized" as they grow up into adults, who had a good chance of dying of sickness before they reach adulthood anyway, and who were plenty because there was not much contraception.
Also fathers were considered as "owners" of their children and allowed to do pretty much they wanted with them.
In this context, of course hurting children was bad but it wasn't much worse than hurting an adult.
Many people in the Middle Ages loved their children just as much as anyone today does. Others treated their own kids as expendable, but such people exist today as well. If you are arguing loving one's children was less common in the Middle Ages than today, how strong evidence do you have to support that claim?
And mediaeval Christian theologians absolutely taught that sins against young children were worse. Herod the Great's purported slaughter of the male toddlers of Bethlehem (Matthew 2:16–18) was commemorated every year in the liturgy, and was viewed as an especially heinous sin due to the young age of its victims. Of course, as a historical matter, it seems very unlikely the event ever actually happened – but that's irrelevant to the question of how it influenced their values, since they absolutely did believe it had happened.
You don’t need to go back to Middle Ages, just back a century in Africa.
When I say "torture", I mean acts which cause substantial physical pain or injury.
(I'm just BSing on the internet... I took a few philosophy classes so if I'm off base or you don't want to engage in a pointless philosophical debate on HN I apologize in advance.)
...
> I don't think you are using "torture" in the same sense as I am.
Just throwing this out here, you haven't even established "Universal Moral Standards", not to mention needing it to do that across all of human history. And we haven't even addressed the "nobody disagrees with" issue you haven't even addressed.
I for one can easily look back on the past 100 years and see why "universal moral standards, which essentially nobody disagrees with" is a bad argument to make.
Exposure and infanticide was also very common in many places.
Can you? Sources, please. And pay attention to the authors of those sources and how they relate to the culture in question.
But we are talking about specifically torture for sport, not just burning them alive. You can find many firsthand accounts of this throughout different times and places in different cultures. Steppe peoples and groups like the Comanche were particularly notorious for it, they seemed to find it funny.
I'm not saying that "torture for sport" of children never existed, just that any account should be treated with skepticism, and that it was far rarer than you would think if you just take every text at face value, especially since it's the kind of thing that gets repeated (and embellished for shock value) far more than other historical accounts.
What exactly are you actually trying to say? That propaganda didn't exist back then? That it was never written down?
What do you think "Carthago delenda est" was?
> I assume you think genocides in modern times are just propaganda too?
And why would you assume that?
There is in fact a modern time example for exactly the kind of thing we're talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
Nearly all the time this is the entirety of the evidence. That is, there is no actual evidence, just people churning out papers because we live in a publish-or-perish world that well, maybe he would have been hypothetically motivated to lie or embellish. So therefore, he totally did. It's all fake!
The most notorious examples of this sort of pointlessness are claims that the Phoenicians and Carthaginians did not practice human sacrifice and it was all made up by Roman propaganda, nevermind the third-party information we have and now the archeological evidence. Rarely, in ancient examples, are they exhibiting much outrage over it.
Same for the Aztecs, another frequent target - we have non-Spanish evidence, and we never had any reason to doubt them in the first place. Part of the problem is exactly that YOU think it is particularly horrifying when most of the time (as in the Roman example) the cultural tenor was probably something much closer to the US abortion or gun control debate, or at least from peoples who saw this happening regularly enough they were substantially number to it than you or me.
Do you have a specific example for such a paper that has "no actual evidence", in an actual scientific magazine?
Considering author bias is absolute standard baseline practice in historical research, and OF COURSE it is only a starting point for a comparison with alternative sources.
> Part of the problem is exactly that YOU think it is particularly horrifying when most of the time (as in the Roman example) the cultural tenor was probably something much closer to the US abortion or gun control debate, or at least from peoples who saw this happening regularly enough they were substantially number to it than you or me.
Tertullian, Apologeticum, Chapter 9:
"Babes were sacrificed publicly to Saturn in Africa till the proconsulate of Tiberius, who exposed the same priests on the same trees that overshadow the crimes of their temple, on dedicated crosses, as is attested by the soldiery of my father, which performed that very service for that proconsul. But even now this accursed crime is in secret kept up."
Does that sould "numb" to you?
(I'm not opposed to vaccination or whatever and don't want to make this a debate about that, but it's a good practical example of how it's a subject that you can't be absolute about, or being absolutist about e.g. not hurting babies does more harm to them)
it's irrelevant for this discussion, as it's not for sport but other purpose