Since my previous writing on the centrality of empathy in history has been linked (thank you /u/silverappleyard!), I thought I'd add some more thoughts here.

The issue is one that – unsurprisingly – a lot of things have been written about previously. Marc Bloch e.g. in The Historian's Craft discusses how the historian is not a judge to cast judgement upon historical actors. But then again, Bloch for all his greatness and his rejection of a Hegelian paradigm argues from a position that essentially seeks to discover wie es eigentlich gewesen ist (how it actually was) – a Rankean idea that presumes that there is one and only one truth out there for the historian to discover.

However, with the proliferation of ideas inspired by cultural history, sociology, poststructuralism and many more, the process of "presenting the facts as I discovered them and expertly interpreted them" is one that is understood as already influenced by who we are in the sense of what values we hold and what our socio-political context is. The reason for this is that every historical inquiry begins with a question – a question we seek to answer through a combination of sources and theory, specifically of a set of sources viewed through a lens of theory and crafted into a sensible narrative. What questions we ask and what sources we look for and discover and what theories and methods we employ to craft sources into narratives; all these decisions are not solely influenced by what is best historical practice but also by judgements we make.

This is because oftentimes, some questions and methodologies are not necessarily intrinsically better suited or more worthy than others. Thus we must chose between them based on factors that are not intrinsic to them and not not guided by one being "objectively" better. The reasons why our approaches are structural, cultural, historical anthropology etc. are already rooted in – sometimes moral – judgement calls we make.

Furthermore, we as historians do not operate in a vacuum but in a socio-political context; a socio-political context to boot that draws legitimacy from history. We live in countries, systems, and communities that use history to justify their existence, their mode of rule, their legitimacy, and their claims and demands. E.g. monuments exist for a reason, what and how we learn about history has its reasons deeply rooted in socio-political context.

Thus, we as historians are practically always and consciously or unconsciously forced to position ourselves vis-á-vis the socio-political context we operate in. And that, both, is always a political and thereby moral decision as well as forcing us to make political and moral calls in how we write about what. Because what we as historians and we as the public at large understand about history and what not, because we are socialized and educated along the lines of certain historical narratives, our quest for a deeper understanding of history is and inevitably must be shaped by these and other considerations.

Hence, I believe, the moral judgement call of the historians is not so much located in the undertaking of the understanding of historical actors – e.g. trying to get a glimpse into the thinking and understanding of the world of, say, a Nazi perpetrator – but in active choices of what to write about and how to write about it.

/u/sowser, once wrote in a superb answer:

I don't believe historians should be utterly and unfailingly objective - like most historians I don't believe such a thing is perfectly possible anyway, but even if it were any history (at least of slavery) completely devoid of moral philosophy is fundamentally bad history. The transatlantic slave trade, antebellum slavery, slavery in the Caribbean - these were indefensible crimes committed by one group of people against another for equally indefensible reasons, and that understanding must shape how we engage with the historical record and who we prioritise in our work. We have a moral obligation to do whatever we can to give a voice to those who were made to seem voiceless; to make that extraordinary effort to bring the experience of oppressed people back from the margins and into central focus. It is not a moral obligation we have to our readers or to historians, though we certainly have those obligations as well - it is one we have to the very real people who lived through those experiences.

But we must also be careful not to write history that is basically accusatory or excusatory (if such a word exists!), either; good history tries to achieve authentic understanding, or as close to authentic understanding as we can manage. Historical narratives must not cast their subjects neatly as heroes or villains bereft of complexity and nuance. That way lies disaster for all involved. They can accept that people did bad and terrible things and condemn those things, whilst also appreciating that the explanation for why they did those things is much, much more complicated than 'because they were bad people who should know better'. If we do that, then we not only fail to do justice by them as people who also deserve to have their story told as authentically as possible, we fail to do justice by everyone - by the people who suffered at their hands, our readers and ourselves.

With this in mind, our quest for understanding the past by way of historical interpretation can become something that rather than seek some ideal of knowledge for knowledge's sake rather seeks human emancipation from circumstances of domination and oppression. Hence, we should aim not mere accumulation of knowledge but at the application of knowledge and understanding as a tool of criticism with which existing circumstances of oppression and domination can be changed into a direction that more closely resembles the liberatory ideas of the enlightenment of equality, freedom, and solidarity.

I think you’d be interested in this Monday Methods discussion a while back: Empathy as the central skill of historians, kicked off by u/commiespaceinvader. The discussion gets into objectivity and the moral obligations of a historian.

Cotton Mather (in)famously referred to himself not as an advocate, but strictly as a historian, in recording the events of the Salem witch trials. Lots of modern advocate-style historians have blamed him for not being more of an advocate: they wish he would have objected to the use of “spectral evidence” in particular.