We look for stable values mostly for economic reasons: deliberation takes time, attention and other similar limited resources. Thus, even though successful deliberation delivers the right kind of legitimacy we seek, we cannot keep deliberating with everyone every time there is some form of substantial (epistemic, moral, political, aesthetic, whatever) disagreement. Thus, we fix the results of some deliberations as definite, even if they are really never totally non-revisable. Thus, our moral outlook evolves like a boat of Theseus and we have a hard time understanding how these small changes can result in hugely different axiological outlooks with enough time (or any other form of distance). Thus, we need, for practical reasons, to sometimes sidestep deliberation, even though doing so implies loss of legitimacy. But there it is important to recognize, as Williams does, that legitimacy comes in degrees. Thus, even though it is right to say that every use of power is an abuse of power, we can see how the question of how much power is required to keep some values operational is inversely proportional to the legitimacy of those values.

The main challenge for historical or any similar sort of tolerance is to render the moral outlook of long past (or sufficiently distant in any similar sense) societies both understandable (as counter-actual)  but unavailable (as counter-factual) as a current moral option. This seems like an impossible task because whatever criteria make past moral outlooks understandable to us cannot be  but criteria that we ourselves would recognize as legitimate. Relativists have tied themselves in knots for centuries coming up with ways out of this paradox. Williams’ proposal of solution at least as I understand it in Ulrich’s exegesis, is epistemic: put everything in terms of what some people know and others do not, so that we can see that those in the past did not know things that we now know and we do not know now much stuff that they knew back then. Consequently, the difference is no longer exclusively moral, but also (and perhaps, I suspect, in the end, only) epistemic. Thus, the moral outlooks of the past become understandable because of our mutual ignorance – where epistemic lacks are excusable in a way that moral deficiencies are not – but not available to us now because of what we now know, i.e., because even though we can imagine what it is to not know something (again counter-actually), we cannot consider (counterfactually) that we do not know (about us, here and now) what we actually do or that we know (about them, there and then) what we actually ignore when we decide how to act.

Fabiola Rivera and Juan Espíndola point out that there are also other shortcomings of an epistemic solution, i.e. even if we want to recognize that we do not know a lot of things that they did not know and vice versa, it is very difficult, if not completely impossible, to know what it is that we know and what it is that we ignore, i.e., we also do not know what it is that we know and what it is that we do not know. If justice becomes truthfulness and honesty and injustice falsehood and deception, then justice and injustice become epistemically inaccessible to anyone. But Ulrich wants to keep truthfulness at the center of politics because, well, in my humble opinion, it has become fashionable among academics in the global north. And it has become fashionable because it paints academics as the good guys in the political fight for justice without requiring us to do much actual politics.

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