What enables horrific situations like the Diddy or Epstein situations, is that even good people don't specifically evaluate every situation around themselves, but mostly gauge their response to whatever is going on by what others around them seem to find acceptable. We rely on the unspoken consensus. In fact, if a person did routinely attempt to evaluate and act on all the sketchy goings on around them, most of us would think they were insane and they would be driven out of the group.

As a practical matter, morality is a tiny component of behavior--what actually motivates people's correct behavior is almost entirely aversion to embarrassment. In any group behavior, we trust the unspoken consensus of those around us and bucking it comes at a high social cost. Perfectly ordinary guys, guys you'd trust your kids with, do horrific atrocities in wartime because that's what the group is doing.

I think that's what's happening in Diddy-like situations, or in the West Wing, or in wartime, or even when businesses do horrific things. People aren't seeing how the world would evaluate the situation in broad daylight--they see only the responses of the people near them, who reinforce each other's tolerance for what's going on. It's how you get a Jan 6th riot by people who are mostly pretty ordinary nice people. Concerned citizens, in fact. Individually, most of them would have been horrified by the behavior they engaged in, but when everyone within sight is doing it, it seems ok, or even heroic.

It's a hard problem, because while not going with the crowd is characteristic good people, it's also characteristic of criminals, the insane, and children.

We depend on the few who speak up to keep the world from going insane, but paradoxically, we can't have too many of them or the world doesn't function at all.