Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics.

What will future generations condemn us for?

Our prison system

Our treatment of animals in food production

Our isolation of the elderly

Our treatment of the environment                                                                    

The question is artfully posed by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the Washington Post.