I didn't say anything about farting. I don't want to board an airplane with someone who has a history of assaulting people. If airlines could build an accurate list, I would have no problem with them sharing the list and effectively banning those people from flying. The "accurate" part I admit is the hard part to get right. As another replier suggested, maybe base it on public arrest records or something. But assuming it could be done accurately, of course it should be implemented. Do you want a loose cannon who has assaulted people in the past on a tin can with you at 50,000 feet?
This isn't about having your best day. I've had many bad days, yet somehow never assaulted anyone.
And I'd rather live in a society where the punishment for assault is meted out by a court of law, via a trial if necessary or appropriate, and not via some privatized blacklist with no means of due process.
> I don't want to board an airplane with someone who has a history of assaulting people.
> Do you want a loose cannon who has assaulted people in the past on a tin can with you at 50,000 feet?
If this someone paid whatever price a competent court of law imposed on them, then I have no problem boarding a plane with them. People make mistakes, even grievous ones, and even ones that you or I wouldn't make on our worst of days. The law encodes the penalties for those. Beyond that, what you're advocating for is extrajudicial punishment.
Maybe farting isn't on your list. Maybe it's on somebody else's list.
That's a key problem here. People don't agree on what's acceptable and what the proper criteria for forgiveness is.
If somebody did one of your more unambiguous transgressions, like assault (proven to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, i hope?), but reformed themselves, how do you know and who decided that? Maybe they did it because of a drug habit, mental illness, some other extreme condition that they've now worked past. Maybe they really don't want to do it again, and would not.
These are the types of problems that can arise when you split the world between good and bad people. Not everyone who does something you disapprove of is irredeemable.
A big problem here is, what is the airline's incentive for the list to be accurate? If it has a whole lot of false positives, in absolute numbers it's still too small to put any real dent in their business - there are millions and millions of other customers. What you really need is transparency, oversight, an appeals process, and guarantees that human judgement is in the loop - all things that come "for free" with the court system, but would have to be recreated from scratch in any corporate-run extrajudicial penalty system.
A community of people aren't built around absolutism. They are built around give and take.
You can't have your best day, every day.