I’m sorry you have had experiences that make this your view, but I just don’t believe this is true. (Which is not, you understand, the same as saying “*everyone *cares”.)
It destroyed my best friend. His name was Mudd, he immediately dropped out of school, and went back to the decaying Rust Belt inner city he had previously escaped. There, he fell back into the crowd of bad *friends *he had previously escaped. One day, after they committed a burglary, they got hopped up on meth and got paranoid that “college boy” was going to rat them out to the cops. So they shot and killed him in cold blood, dumped his corpse under a port-a-potty, and went around snickering to everyone about how *hilarious *it was that his last utterance had been “ouch”.
This is an interesting question. I’ll have to give it some thought. I will say that I think people should refrain from making serious allegations without proof, and people should refrain from *believing *serious allegations without proof; but I’m probably trying to empty the ocean with a thimble on that front.
That’s a dodge, based on a technicality. The legal system is not some mechanism that exists independent of society. It is a formalized version of the kind of thing you are talking about: collectively shunning people or otherwise making their lives more difficult based on a societal perception of wrongdoing. And if we go along with inflicting punishments comparable with, or even worse than, the criminal justice system metes out, without giving someone due process, then we have made “justice” into a sham. At that point, it becomes like we used to see with “issue ads” that were thinly veiled campaign ads. They would insert some kind of verbiage “Call Senator Smith and tell him not to be such a bad person”, but it was an incredibly thin pretext. If we ruin someone’s life without giving them due process, protesting that “this is outside the criminal justice system” rings hollow. At least to me.