I mean, you can even go “this person, a key figure in the founding of America, was a slaveholder. Was he good or bad?” And I’d reject the implied premise of the question. I’d say holding slaves was bad, and a lot of the ideas in the declaration of independence are good. People are a mix of good and bad, and do things during their lives that are both good and bad, and don’t have to be binary-sorted into one category or the other, we can just say “the thing you/I did yesterday was bad, but the thing you/I did today was good”, and that is a perfectly logical position to hold. And similarly, “colonialism and democracy, or no colonialism and no democracy, take your pick” could be an option-set someone offers me, and I’d reject the premise and pick democracy but no colonialism. The fact that “no colonialism” might not have been a choice on offer to people in the past who wanted to found America, doesn’t force me to endorse colonialism. I’d hope that good people in the past would accept the existence of colonialism if they couldn’t do anything about it or chose to focus elsewhere, without calling it good.
I mean, you can even go “this person, a key figure in the founding of America, was a slaveholder. Was he good or bad?” And I’d reject the implied premise of the question. I’d say holding slaves was bad, and a lot of the ideas in the declaration of independence are good. People are a mix of good and bad, and do things during their lives that are both good and bad, and don’t have to be binary-sorted into one category or the other, we can just say “the thing you/I did yesterday was bad, but the thing you/I did today was good”, and that is a perfectly logical position to hold. And similarly, “colonialism and democracy, or no colonialism and no democracy, take your pick” could be an option-set someone offers me, and I’d reject the premise and pick democracy but no colonialism. The fact that “no colonialism” might not have been a choice on offer to people in the past who wanted to found America, doesn’t force me to endorse colonialism. I’d hope that good people in the past would accept the existence of colonialism if they couldn’t do anything about it or chose to focus elsewhere, without calling it good.