Obviously I don't know what points you fear I may be making.

What examples were there of anti-colonialism in those times? What influence would they have had over the monarchies and the church of their day? What influence did they exert?

I would contend that the moral compass of Columbus and Cortez was fundamentally different than yours or mine. They were products of a world vastly different than ours. You and I have modern morality; they did not. Since we cannot change the actions of the past, we can only hold them up as examples of how people were, and how they differ from (or are similar to) what we are now.

My complaint is that, to my eyes, you are criticizing them as if we moderns have some power over their actions. How can we expect them to have behaved as we would? We cannot change them or what they did. I'm not sure means "cutting them some slack." They did what they did; we can only observe the consequences and hope to do better.

I agree, their beliefs were wrong. Nonetheless, they believed what their culture taught them to believe. Yes, people of any era are responsible for their own actions, and if they act wrongly according to their culture, they should be punished for it. But if their culture sees no harm in what they are doing, they'll be rewarded. We certainly can't punish or reward them from 500 years in the future. We can only hope that what we believe, and how we act, is better.

> My complaint is that, to my eyes, you are criticizing them as if we moderns have some power over their actions.

We moderns have power over our own actions, and those actions are informed by the past.

In this thread we're talking about risk/reward analyses and for some reason, you and other people here seem oddly insistent that we not discuss the ethical implications of the actions on question.

And all-too-often, that's what happens today: companies look at the risk/reward in financial terms and ignore any ethical concerns. I would characterize the corporate approach to ethics as "complete disregard". The business ethics classes I took in college were, frankly, reprehensible; most of the material was geared toward rebranding various corporate misdeeds as miscalculated risk/reward tradeoffs, similar to what is being done in this thread. This is a huge problem, and it's pervasive in this thread, in HN as a whole, and in corporate culture.

Your complaint is rather hypocritical: given we have no power over their actions, why defend them? Your complaint applies as much to your own position as it does to mine. What problem are you addressing?

> you and other people here seem oddly insistent that we not discuss the ethical implications of the actions on question.

Hmm, I don't think that's my actual intent; only that we discuss them as they apply to modern morality, not as if we can influence them to be different than what they are.

If I defend them (which I don't think I do), I do so to help explain their attitudes and actions, not to excuse them. We need to understand where they are coming from to see the differences between them and us.

Distancing ourselves from historical people is one of the worst possible mistakes we can make when studying history. We aren't different. The entire 10,000 years we've had anything resembling civilization is an evolutionary blip.

The reasons that Columbus tortured, killed, and enslaved indigenous people are the same reasons for Abu Ghraib: racism, lack of oversight, and greed. The exact details have changed, but the underlying causes are alive and thriving.

Thankfully, I think humans as a whole understand these things better and I think things are improving, but if we fail to keep that understanding alive and build upon it, regress is possible. Certainly the startup culture being fostered here (HN) which looks only at profit and de-emphasizes ethics enables this sort of forgetfulness. It's not that anyone intends to cause harm, it's that they can rationalize causing harm if it's profitable. And since money makes the same people powerful, this attitude is an extremely damaging force in society. That's why I am so insistent that we not treat ethics as a side-conversation.