Philosophers have long wrestled with what to do about the onlookers and profiteers surrounding those who have done terrible things.
As millions of pages from the government files pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein continue to be surveyed, the scandal has taken shape both as ladder and maze — a hierarchy of crimes with the serial sexual violation of young girls at the top, devious financial machinations a few rungs down and the web of willed ignorance and sycophancy beneath it all.
That only one person — Ghislaine Maxwell — has been prosecuted for involvement with Mr. Epstein’s abuses has left the recent toppling of members of the elite professional class look like karmic retribution for failures of judicial reckoning. The shunting aside of this implicated academic, or that executive or statesman, has emerged, in some sense, as its own bourgeois vigilantism. Activating the ongoing assault is at once the mass revulsion over Mr. Epstein’s sins and a broader anger at the impunity so often enjoyed by the rich now tagged as the complicit — a knotty army of the enabling.