OT: Child Abuse, Evil, Jerry Sandusky, and Why the Response to the PSU Emails is (kinda) Wrong.

If you witness a murder and don't report it, quoting the bystander effect will not absolve you of wrongdoing. No, these choices are NOT easy for them to make, but the right ones rarely are.

Not to get policitical, but Hitler thought he was doing the right thing with the Holocaust. He believed that killing all of the "inferiors" is what would be best for the world. Being able to justify it does not make it right.

It's difficult to address this without getting into a discussion of an "absolute morality." Killing is wrong. But there are some times when it is justified. Does that make it right? Well, no. Extinguishing a life is never the "right" thing to do, but sometimes it is accepted as the only action. Not talking about this was not "the only option" here. It was their way of covering their own asses and the University's, too.

Maybe it's not child molestation. Maybe it's a friend who drives home a bit loaded but you think he'll be okay. Maybe it's a guy who you think probably roughs up his girlfriend when he's angry. Or any number of other things. The consequences of intervention are so incomprehensible (lost friendship, court, prison) that we find excuses not to do it, and since we're not wearing Joker make-up we figure we're not doing badly.

In any of those situations, there is no question as to what's "right." Driving drunk is bad. Hitting your girlfriend is bad. No, it's not easy to say something, but it's the right thing to do. If your friend hit someone and killed them while driving drunk, you can say "I thought he was OK to drive" as much as you want, but you are still responsible because you did not take the keys from him. If your friend beat his girlfriend to death, and you say "well, he normally just punched her in the stomach so I didn't see this happening," that does not absolve you of wrongdoing. Inaction is not as bad as the actual offense, but sllowing someone to come to harm from your inaction is not excusable.

I agree that it isn't always black and white, but that's where it stops. There are (assumedly) very few truly evil people in the world. That does not mean that people cannot make selfish decisions, or not act because of whatever reason they see fit. The truth of the matter is that EVERYONE who did nothing about this is complicit. No, they did not rape little boys, but their inaction allowed others to be harmed, and for that, they are also at fault.

I hate to take moral advice from movies, but I think this is the perfect place for it. From Boondock Saints:

Now, we must all fear evil men. But there is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men.

In my personal opinion, your logic is extremely faulty.  You believe that somehow the people involved convinced themselves that it was not that bad and nothing happened or was happening.  The evidence and, admittedly, circumstancial evidence leaves the impression with most that the people involved knew or suspected what was going on and ignored because they were protecting the football program.  This is what has caused the anger on this board, the people invovled had a choice to protect the kids or protect a football program/university and they chose football.  The email itself sends that message, although it is not definitive in any way.

In addition, this was not a one off report.  The 2001 incident was the second time they dealt with a report of this nature.  Why he was not charged in 1998 is beyond anyone, but given his sudden retirement the next year at a fairly young age for a football coach, it screams cover up to almost everyone who you are complaining about.  (I would note the super conspiracy theorist would also cite the strange dissapearance of the prosecutor of that case in the 2000s.  They also note the extreme rise of McQueary and unusual path he took from grad assistant)

Either way, these guys had a job to do and it was to report this to the authorities.  It was that simple.  No matter how murkey the story may have been, the law was clear.  They went on to cover this up and lie to the courts over the last year.  The same courts that were trying to convict Sandusky.  In other words, they had a chance to do the right thing in the last year to convict the guy when the story became a lot less murkey and they chose to lie.  They may not be evil, but they certainly do deserve every bit of anger they are getting on this board.  If for no other reason than that anger directed their way is still nothing compared to what the kids went through that they chose not to protect. 

There are some actions you can never defend, ever.  Sandusky's actions and the actions of those that helped protect him are on the very top of that list.

The dreaded double post, sorry.

Ummm...no. These were helpless kids that just needed ONE person to stand up for them. Decades of abuse were enabled by so many at Penn State. Pure evil.

It seems to me that, on an individual basis, plenty of people at Penn State, knew that what they were potentially enabling was very wrong. Indeed, the e-mails that were mentioned on Anderson Cooper 360 last night more or less say as much. You get the feeling that they were uncomfortable - to varying extents - on a personal level. Still, it was allowed to continue. 

They didn't want the headache of outing Sandusky, nor did they want to deal with the years of damage control from victims (as well as other people and entities), and the more this was passed along and the more people did nothing, the less personal responsibility became part of the decision-making process - that's pretty much diffusion of responsibility, or "the bystander effect". Yeah, it's a terrible thing, but surely someone among the hundreds with either direct or administrative involvement in the program will do the right thing, yes? Apparently not. 

One of the frightening things about this , in retrospect, from a purely organizational standpoint, is how Penn State was seeing just how beholden that program felt to one man - Joe Paterno. Those who worked  directly with him and his assistants were all from the culture of PSU football, so you had a very cohesive group, all with similar values and desires. Paterno even picked Curley for the AD job,  I think - how many employees pick their managers? That's not objective leadership, and that's another danger that unfolded in all this. Worse, when people in the group started bringing up these wrongs, there's no way to deal with them effectively, and no one feels like it is their responsibility to deal with them effectively. Therefore, no one does. Indeed, under such stressors, such groups circle their wagons more than anything else.

All that being said, their are also plenty of groups and organizations that foster feelings of empowerment and individuation  (indeed, the reason phenomena like these are studied is so they can possibly be avoided), and in such groups, the likelihood of someone such as Sandusky not getting to commit these acts for as long as he did would be substantially less (but not zero, of course). Penn State did not have such a culture. 

I think you could have made it shorter by stating:

Good people sometimes make poor decisions and pray that you are never put to the test.

Isn't that essentially what you are saying? Or is it more an assumption that ALL people are capable of evil acts (to quote from The Shadow, "Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men?")? Ultimately, some of this gets down to fundamental beliefs about good and evil that may not be appropriate for discussing in this board. If one is Christian, for example, are the weeds scattered among the wheat or can the wheat turn into weeds? Avoiding religion (which really isn't possible), the philosophical idea would be that of freewill.

In any event, all people (right or wrong) will justify their actions. I don't believe most people posting are demonizing, I think they are exhibiting righteous indignation at those who would wash their hands from their guilt.

Peoples' judgments of these individuals are unaffected by our opinions of "goodness" and "evil." The way I know that is that the thread you linked (which currently has 113 posts) does not mention evil one time. None. And the reason is that the rightness or wrongness of their actions do not depend on their intent. The ACTIONS are wrong, independent of the intention.

These were powerful men with a legal and moral obligation to report this information to the authorities. They knew that. They may not have had 'evil' intentions, but does that matter?

I do not deny that the choice was a complex one. But can you deny that at the end of the day, these men made inarguably the wrong choice? And don't misunderstand; I'm not saying it was the wrong decision because Sandusky turned out to be a monster. It was the wrong choice because these men were told "Jerry Sandusky is using a kid's charitable organization to molest children in showers," and they decided NOT TO TELL ANYONE.

I don't think he was defending those who did nothing.  He was explaining or observing why they may have done nothing.

I think Brian mentioned this when he wrote about it after it happened: The hierarchy at Penn State gambled that no one would find out about what was going on with Sandusky and  they lost. 

I believe it was a case of easy vs. difficult. The easy move, if you were Paterno, Curley, Spanier, etc. was to do nothing. Pretend you never heard anything, hope it goes away, move on. After all, it was just some kid you don't know and is it really worth giving the university all that bad publicity - and God forbid, the football team - over some Second Mile child? Who wants the cloud of a child rape scandal involving a university legend hanging over a football season? Sounds unpleasant to me. 

The difficult move would have resulted in a media frenzy that was about 1/10 of what occurred anyway 10+ years later. And instead of being lambasted as evil, the men involved would have been looked at as real leaders and heroes, instead of being dead or on their way to court. 

Everything that is coming to those involved is well-deserved.

was brave. And well done. Thank you.

"When evil people are abetted it is usually not by third parties who want them to continue; it is usually by good people who never make a conscious choice to do wrong."

Let's Go Blue" touched on this ^ part of your argument already, but for me, this is where you go wrong.  You apparently do consider Sandusky evil.

But Sandusky seems to have justified his actions as being good, and that he was "helping" these boys in some way, so in his mind, he never made a conscious choice to do wrong either.  We can always find ways to justify evil actions; does that justification make the actions (or us) less evil?  Haven't the large-scale actions throughout history that most people consider the most evil been perpretated by people who have justified their actions as being "good," often for the "greater good"?

I do think you are right, though, to point out that while Sandusky is far different from the rest of us, but if any of us were in the PSU administrators shoes, there is at least a small possibility that we could have acted in a similar way. 

Let me take a slightly different approach from some of the other posts:

It may very well be that the people implicated by these emails are otherwise good people. It's just that they don't have enough courage. Let's be honest, it takes some serious guts to be a whistleblower. Why do you think whistleblowers are such a rare breed?

In some situations, though, being courageous is the ONLY right thing to do. And these admins were guilty, not because they're some heinous, sociopathic individuals, but because they they couldn't compell themselves to act. And that is sufficient to make them morally culpable to an extreme degree. 

The takeaway, then, is this: We all think we'd be the whistleblower. But evidence shows over and over again, in a variety of situations, that very few of us actually would be. The OP articulates well some of the rationalizations might be. But I doubt that most of us would have the guts to bring attention to it, and then follow up. McQueary was caught halfway in between indecision and action; he brought it to the administration, but when they sat on it, he didn't escalate it further. I wonder how many of us would do the same?

That same "it can't happen to me" feeling of moral superiority is closely related to the "it can't happen here" feeling of invincibility, which is exactly the rationalization that otherwise good people use to do nothing. 

It CAN happen to me.