Ok. well. I was thinking about the moral seriousness of Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. Many seem morally shaky. Hume and Kant were both racists and misogynists. While there was no notion of race in the time of Aristotle, he still saw no problem with slavery, and he held condescending views on women. Newton was a misogynist and never cared about the social brutalities of his time (silence equals harm). Only Einstein was morally serious on social issues, but he still was arguably a male chauvinist in his personal life. 

I used to think of all these figures as heavenly, with halos around their heads. Now they seem more like mortals. If I imagine them today in a room (perhaps with modern attire), while I'd still marvel at their useful ideas, I'd chuckle inside myself to notice how they still missed noticing some obvious seeming truths due to the social conditioning, and how their genius was useless in some respects and hid them behind the curtains of comfortable illusions.

In that sense, to me they may seem no different, if I met them today, than a smart colleague who made some good observations and reasoning in some problems but made completely wrong observations and reasoning in other problems. 

I wonder if even the seemingly best public intellectuals of today may, in 400 years' time, look as confused as Aristotle, Kant, Newton, or Hume seem in some respects. In what respects might they be seen as not morally serious enough? I think the movements of the present that seem hard for some people or life, but manageable or ignorable for others, give us hints. I think climate justice, immigration, the LGBTQ movement, digital manipulation and attention theft (such as algorithms’ addictive design), and industrial gauging of a human’s worth are possible prime cases.