Writing in Quadrant, Dalrymple takes Lord Acton as his subject—the great Victorian historian who insisted that murder is murder regardless of the century in which it is committed—and uses him to explore the unresolved tension between moral absolutism and moral relativism. He admits to feeling the pull of both positions and warns against the modern presumption that we have at last arrived at indubitable moral truth.
I am irritated when a great figure from the past is decried because he did not live up to our latest moral discoveries. This is not only unjust, it is ridiculous, for the evidence of all history is that our own ethical standards may be decried in due course, and perhaps not in very many years’ time, given the pace of moral discovery (or alleged discovery).