Tangent: people tend to want a lot of purity in their moral heroes. Impurities get brought up to dismiss past accomplishments and especially to dismiss people who are in the messy business of expanding the moral frontier. It’s been helpful to me to remember that MLK cheated on his wife, Gandhi did even more questionable stuff, and their progress was still real and good.
Tangent: people tend to want a lot of purity in their moral heroes. Impurities get brought up to dismiss past accomplishments and especially to dismiss people who are in the messy business of expanding the moral frontier. It’s been helpful to me to remember that MLK cheated on his wife, Gandhi did even more questionable stuff, and their progress was still real and good.