amadeus amadeus wrote:
>
> The "should" is what's so moralistic. (Common sense,
> as we know it, is dependent on the social milieu of
> the time: in 17th century America, it was "common
> sense" that black people were inferior, and meant to
> be slaves.)
(I am in agreement with the whole of a a's post; this is just a qualification on this particular example.)
"Common Sense" is, as you suggest, a pretty good synonym for "ideology." But your example would be more accurate if you wrote "late 18th c. America" rather than "17th century." For the most part the common sense rationalization of slavery (which in the 17th c. still included many white bond servants, most of whom died off in the tobacco fields before their period was up) was a deep assumption of the hierarchical nature of the universe itself, echoed in social relations. As late as the year 1800 a white man was hanged in North Carolina for the crime of kidnapping a free black and selling him into slavery. But as the meaning of the Declaration of Independence sank in ("All men are created equal") this age-old hierarchical assumption lost its grip, and "scientific" racism grows as the rationale for slavery. And then what you write above becomes wholly true.
Carrol