If you have no ideals you have nothing to hold people to account, and without that you reduce them to animals that have no resposibility of their own. I get that it's appealing to pull others down to one's level and imagine we're all the pitiful vicitms of the same unjust gods. However, people and societies with ideals grow and thrive, and the ones that don't are mainly just nihilists in simulated zero-sum attrition games.

I’m not knocking ideals, and I will take for granted that humans are fallible. The key question is whither humility — not a lot to be found in this article.

Jefferson’s business was enslavement. Lonsdale’s business is killing people. Lots of words about ideals can’t paper over those facts.

It's a bit of a street hustle to invent a condition where someone has to defend slavery to reason about another idea. I'll give this line of criticism some standing when its proponents lift a finger to type something against its current incarnations and its beneficiaries. It's like me saying it's impossible to consider your argument seriously because it was typed on the backs of Congolese child laborers in cobalt mines and unless your comment justifies their suffering, you might as well be chaining them there yourself. It a trolling tactic for policing weak minds.

Sure. But that is an easy snide remark that does not consider the simple truth that humans are fallible and, well, human.

For an example, I do not subscribe to any particular denomination, but on average I can see long tail benefit to society as a whole from people trying to be better humans than they were yesterday.