A none-too-bright inquirer and perhaps an officious busy-body who wants to ruin people’s lives writes “The Ethicist” (Prof. Appiah to his friends and students at NYU)…

“I recently reneged on an offer to buy a house because I discovered that a registered sex offender lived across the street….Now that I know about it, should I keep it a secret…? ….I feel uncomfortable telling my friends the truth about why I dropped out of the contract that I had entered for this house, because I feel I have discovered private information that I should keep secret. In the end, I think I would rather not have made this discovery in the first place.”

That last sentence is what strongly suggests that the writer is an idiot. It’s a childish sentiment: in “War Games,” the teen who discovers that a rogue computer program is about to start W.W. III says that he wishes he didn’t know, and that he would just be suddenly fried in the coming nuclear Armageddon. But because he does know, the kid is able to stop the disaster. More knowledge, even knowledge that creates dilemmas and conflicts that must be dealt with, is preferable to ignorance and misapprehension.

The writer’s reaction to learning that the individual (whom he has never met and knows nothing else about) is to be feared and shunned is also an ominous sign. It has been 14 years since Ethics Alarms delved into the problem of registered sex offenders. My coverage of the topic reached its climax with a guest post, from a friend, who authored, “’I Am One of Those Untouchables’ : The Unethical Persecution of Former Sex Offenders.” My introduction read, “No ethical person can read this and conclude that such treatment by society is fair, responsible, compassionate or American. It is the ethical duty of every citizen who believes in our society’s commitment to the freedoms guaranteed by the Declaration and the Constitution to oppose efforts to persecute former sex offenders, because our elected officials will not oppose them. It is, in the end, a matter of choosing national integrity over bigotry and fear.”

A crime was committed, the proscribed penalty was served, and the citizen has a right to begin with a clean slate, a presumption of good will, and an expectation that the community will treat him (or her) based on the content of his character, not based on the past. This is especially true because, as “The Ethicist” correctly notes, being made a registered sex offender can mean anything from sexually abusing a child to having sex with an underage hottie who represented herself as 21, to urinating in public.

“What began as a law-enforcement tool has, over time, evolved into a system of prolonged public punishment, treating vastly different cases as if they were the same,” Appiah writes. “Some people are on the registry for horrifying, predatory acts. Others wind up on a registry for nonviolent conduct committed when they were children or teenagers, including a 10-year-old girl who “pantsed” a classmate. But that’s what the system has allowed. Teenagers in a relationship who consensually swapped nude pics, adults who got busy in a car parked in a municipal lot, a drunken undergraduate who went streaking across the quad — all may be subject to lengthy registration mandates. Even those no longer on the official registries may find that for-profit data-collection websites still display their names and photos, demanding payment for delisting.”

Bingo, and I have personal experience helping victims of this pre-crime system who had to deal with many of these features. Later, the Ethicist adds,

You didn’t mention what the offense was or how long ago it occurred; presumably the person’s mere presence on the registry was enough for you. That’s your prerogative, of course. But it’s worth pausing to think about what your decision was based on.

How dangerous is this neighbor, really? That depends on details the registries rarely convey: what happened, how long ago it happened, how old the person was at the time and what the person has done since. A quarter of people currently on the registries, it has been estimated, were minors at the time of their offense. The presence of a name on a list tells you very little about your actual risk.

It is interesting that one of the allegations against the new Pope is that he neglected to alert a community that a pedophile priest was living nearby. I concede that the problem of how to deal with individuals who have an uncontrollable impulse to harm children (or anyone) pose a very special, and so far unsolved, policy problem for society. Until we have a better and more reliable system of identifying such individuals, however, we should be able to agree that making it difficult for many harmless citizens to live their lives in order to insulate our communities from the rare monsters isn’t reasonable or fair.