What is the main conclusion , and both intermediate conclusions in this passage?
1 Several government ministers in European countries have recently resigned their high-profile positions because of things they did many years previously. A single ancient misjudgement has robbed them of their livelihoods and deprived vulnerable, hard-working citizens of all the benefits these ministers would have achieved for them. They claim that their behaviour was acceptable by the standards prevailing at the time but would be considered objectionable now. It is unfair to hold them responsible for those actions now, since they did not know at the time that they were doing anything wrong.
2 Expectations of moral and polite behaviour have evolved over the years. Thirty or forty years ago, it was normal for people to say and do things which today would be condemned as discriminatory. So even the most humane and charitable heroes of the past would lose their reputations if we judged their words and actions by today’s standards.
3 Some people claim that when they judge issues of the past they are not tied to the standards of a particular time; however, we cannot free ourselves from the limitations of our own historical context. So judging the past by the norms of the present is a form of bias. Actions should therefore always be judged by the standards of the time in which they took place.
4 In the US and the UK, there have been several proposals to remove statues and rename public buildings honouring philanthropists of the past, because they owned slaves or were involved in the slave trade. Yet once you start judging rich people by the way they acquired their wealth, no one will escape. The great industrialists of the past became rich by exploiting workers, including children. Today, people become rich by manipulating the money markets, without producing anything. Even people who inherit wealth have done nothing to deserve it. So people should be judged on what they do with their money, not on how they acquired it.
5 If we criticise our predecessors, we should expect future generations to judge us. To be consistent, we have a simple choice. We must either tolerate all the attitudes and actions of previous generations or implicitly consent to living with the threatening knowledge that everything we think, say or do will be mercilessly condemned by our great-grandchildren.