[threatofrain]

The problem is there isn't a culturally agreeable calculus to know when someone is trustworthy, and that the "punishment" here is one of withdrawing from relations through the free exercise of association. The main intervention you can do is to tell people to stop exercising their freedom of association.

> That goes for most actions too: Even if you murdered someone 30 years ago, if you served your time and reformed, you ought to be able to have a normal life now.

If a person molested one child 30 years, should a label of "sex offender" follow them as they attempt to regain their life as a youth educator? Should they never ever be allowed near children again?

If someone wrote in their youth on the violent nature of the negro and their intellectual inferiority, should they be entrusted with a leadership position over black Americans?

[whatshisface]

Pragmatically, the trust we should give to a former criminal should scale with where we think their crime lies on the "innate" to "acute" spectrum. For example, teenage joyriding is something we can expect people to get over, so you would probably feel okay letting a 50-year-old with that (and nothing else) on their record valet your car. I would suggest that ideas are some of the easiest things to change.

[wegs]

I think key in my post was "and reformed."

There were plenty of, for example, KKK members who then became anti-KKK activists. If you were born in 1915, and your parents were a member of the KKK, odds are pretty good you might have written something like that in the 1930's. It's how you were brought up. We don't have permanent digital records of everything that happened, but I'd say it's almost guaranteed you would have expressed such views.

If by the 1950s and 1960's, you had renounced those views, and wanted to be a civil rights activist, it's important you can do that. If anything, familiarity with the opposition would make you more effective.

Without the ability to do that, the civil rights movement would have needed to wait for a lot of people to die (or at least retire). It happened when it did in part because people could and did change their minds.

So to answer your question: In all of the cases you listed, it's possible for people to grow and reform. It's a question of what evidence is available that they have, in fact, reformed. To go with the KKK example, sharing KKK secrets with the FBI, taking the large personal risk of publicly denouncing the organization, and joining the civil rights movement would be pretty darned good evidence.

[arkades]

> I think key in my post was "and reformed."

Is there good reason to expect that they reformed?

Is it as or more reasonable to expect they've simply learnt to hold their more objectionable views close to the vest?

If the answer to the former is "no," and to the latter is "yes," then I don't really know how you'd expect anyone to work with a leadership that openly views them as a hindrance to the workplace.

If he'd made a public anti-semitic article 20 years ago, and didn't undertake very significant acts of reformation, certainly I would take for granted that he's still an anti-semite. There's no reason to imagine otherwise. And I'd feel very uncomfortable working for a company where the leadership includes and accepts a publicly professed anti-semite.

[wegs]

I'm not close enough to this situation, but the evidence I have is:

(1) He said so. (2) There weren't any allegations of improprieties in the past decade or two in the articles I've read. (3) 30 years ago, likely a majority (and certainly a near-majority) of people had at least some level of discomfort with women serving equally in the military. Today, it's an extremist view held by a tiny minority. Most people who held those views 30 years ago did, in fact, change views, not closet them up.

What you're describing is a symptom of exactly this cancel culture. People DO learn to hold their more objectionable views close to the vest, and that's a problem. People can't actually change views without open and critical conversations.

I live in an extremely progressive city with a lot of racism and bigotry simmering just below the surface. It's bad -- many people in positions of power hold extremely bigoted views. That never plays out in the open, but those people act on those views, either without articulating them, or articulating them as abstractions.

I see no way to address any of that without honest and open conversations, which we can't have. Saying the wrong thing leads to career death, so everyone says the PC thing.

And when racism happens, in most cases, people depart quietly, and move into a similar position at another company / school / police department / etc. It's pretty rare that anything goes public. But if it did -- someone was closed out of the economy because of a perception that they were racist -- what do you think the result of that on racial tensions would be?

It's important to have systems to address and resolve problems. If you have a racist, the desired outcome should be that in a few years, they're not racist anymore. Start there, and work backwards to how to build out systems to do that.

There's also a longer post about the value of due process, and of innocent-until-proven-guilty (which is not the same as NO process, which is what we often have right now).

As a footnote, your discomfort is not the paramount issue here. We have laws to protect former felons, people with bad credit records, etc. from employment discrimination. Even if I might rather not hire a former felon, or someone who can't manage their finances well, I'm not allowed to ask those questions in a job interview. That allows people who've made mistakes -- often much bigger than this one -- to return as contributing members of society. That's a good thing. Otherwise, we end up with revolving doors to jails. Indeed, I'd argue those are the laws which ought to be expanded -- they're not nearly strong enough, and that disproportionately impacts vulnerable populations. We want paths to remediation for everyone, rather than for no one.

[xboxnolifes]

> If a person molested one child 30 years, should a label of "sex offender" follow them as they...

> If someone wrote in their youth on the violent nature of the negro and their intellectual...

They should be judged based on their current opinions and actions.

[Volundr]

Serious question... How do we know when someone's past actions are no longer relevant? Obviously if someone wrote a bunch of racist crap yesterday, they shouldn't be given a pass because they didn't write any today.

I agree there needs to be a path forward for people to move beyond their mistakes, but it's not clear to me that time since last known offense is the only qualifier.

[jhanschoo]

You can evaluate people by their more recent actions. Of course, the more distanced you are from them the harder it is to evaluate them well. So it's a balance of evidence and risk.