Some buyers might be deterred by the fact that a previous occupant had AIDS, that the house is believed to be haunted, that there’s a senior-living facility in the neighborhood, that there’s a mosque at the corner or that a mentally disabled person lives across the street. Depending on your pool of prospective buyers, these things could affect the home’s resale value. So you might think that these facts should be disclosed as latent defects, akin to poorly insulated pipes that freeze in the winter. Yet by doing so, you’d be acquiescing to prejudice and superstition.

I’m not talking about the law here, but it’s notable that a number of states don’t require you to disclose the presence of sex offenders in your neighborhood or the fact that your home was once a murder site. Owing to fair-housing laws, there’s a general prohibition on discussing the ethnic or religious composition of a neighborhood. (The disclosure of some of the other circumstances I listed earlier could be prohibited, too.) Legislators, guided by moral concerns, have decided that transparency isn’t the only value to be considered.

In this welter of things that you must disclose, may disclose and must not disclose, where should we situate your neighbor’s troubled past? Obviously, most buyers would want to know about it. But there are reasons for doubting that they have a right to be told. One is that the legal system has judged the murderer next door to have paid his debt. We need to rehabilitate offenders, even murderers. That is one aim of a decent system of criminal justice.

Calling him a serial killer suggests that you think he’s mentally ill in a way that poses a continuing threat to others. But if that were so, the courts should have committed him until psychiatrists were convinced he posed no danger. Putting aside the movie stereotype of the serial killer, what you really know is that this is someone who killed two people. A sane person who has just spent a quarter of a century in a prison cell for murder would know that he’d be the first suspect if anything happened near his home. Reoffense rates for people like your neighbor are hard to come by, but in her 2012 book “Life After Murder,” the journalist Nancy Mullane identified a thousand convicted murderers who were paroled in California over the previous two decades; not one was rearrested for murder.

The likelihood is that buyers would react irrationally to the information about your neighbor. That is emphatically true if you were to call him a serial killer, which evokes an image of someone meticulously planning the murders of innocent strangers. If a buyer asks a question, you ought not to lie. But you can certainly say, for example, that you don’t want to spread gossip about the neighbors. Only if you have reason to think that the fellow next door poses a significant threat do you need to talk about his history.