By: Oded J.K. Faran and Walter E. Block
See Part 1 HERE
What a Consistent Standard Would Look Like
A truly egalitarian approach would treat all suspects as autonomous moral agents unless evidence proves otherwise. It would not launder old prejudices through new jargon. It would not assume that a Jewish financier is a scheming manipulator or that a black music mogul is merely a product of structural dysfunction. It would not excuse anyone’s crimes through identity, nor inflate them through stereotype.
Structural connections exist in every arena of power and influence. One could easily have analyzed Epstein as a product of elite cultures systematically insulated from legal accountability, of prosecutorial failures rooted in deference to wealth, and of institutional systems designed to protect those with connections to power. That framing would be no less accurate than the structural critiques routinely applied to the entertainment industry. Yet it remains largely absent from mainstream discourse about Epstein.
This absence is truly revealing. Structural analysis is not being applied on the basis of evidence, but deployed selectively according to which narrative fits preexisting emotional and ideological frameworks. On one side, there is the ancient fear of the scheming outsider, the cosmopolitan manipulator who operates through hidden networks. On the other, there is the legacy of intergenerational guilt and the emotional appeal of narratives that emphasize systemic oppression over individual culpability.
In Epstein’s case, the mythology of individual malevolence satisfies a visceral need for a villain who embodies calculated evil. To contextualize his crimes within broader failures of elite accountability would dilute that narrative, spreading responsibility too thin across institutions and systems. It is emotionally unsatisfying. It does not provide the clarity of a single bad actor.
In Combs’s case, the structural framing serves a different emotional function. It allows progressive commentators to position themselves as opponents of systemic injustice while softening the moral weight placed on an individual from a historically marginalized community. The implicit logic is that to hold Combs fully accountable without structural caveats would be to ignore the forces that shaped him, and thus to participate in a kind of cultural insensitivity or historical blindness.
What this reveals is not a principled commitment to structural analysis, but rather its selective deployment to align with pre-existing biases. If the goal were genuine consistency, we would either apply structural critique universally or withhold it universally. Instead, we apply it where it resonates emotionally and withhold it where it conflicts with entrenched narratives.
This is not a call for “colorblindness” or pretending that context does not matter. Social structures shape opportunity and behavior. But they do so for everyone. If we are willing to contextualize Combs within the music industry, we must be equally willing to contextualize Epstein within the failures of prosecutorial discretion, elite impunity, and institutional negligence. If we emphasize Epstein’s individual agency, we must do the same for Combs.
The alternative is a moral framework that reproduces the very hierarchies it claims to dismantle: one in which some people are granted the dignity of full personhood and others are reduced to symbols, whether of victimhood or villainy.
The Test of Consistency
So far, we have focused our attention upon only two men. Is it possible to extrapolate from this small sample to a larger statistical universe? Unfortunately, it is.
Since April 2023, Sudan has been engulfed in a civil war that conservative estimates suggest has killed over 62,000 people, with U.S. Special Envoy Tom Perriello testifying that the death toll may be as high as 150,000.8 More than 12 million people have been displaced, making it one of the largest humanitarian catastrophes in modern history. The conflict features systematic ethnic violence, mass sexual assault, and deliberate starvation as weapons of war. Yet where are the 31 Harvard student organizations that held Israel solely responsible for the events of October 7, 2023?9 Where is the global outcry proportionate to the scale of suffering?
Climate activist Greta Thunberg, who organized multiple flotillas carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza in 2025,10 has been conspicuously silent on Sudan’s catastrophe. Her foundation made a general donation to refugee causes in 2022 that mentioned South Sudan among other conflicts,11 and she posted once in support of Fridays for Future Sudan against military oppression in April 2022.12 Yet there have been no flotillas, no dramatic protests, no sustained campaigns for Sudan comparable to her Gaza activism. Ironically, her June 2025 flotilla to Gaza rescued four Sudanese refugees fleeing Libya, yet this encounter with Sudan’s suffering sparked no pivot toward addressing that crisis.13
The pattern reveals itself starkly. Media organizations that devoted endless coverage to Gaza have largely ignored Sudan. Student activists who mobilized en masse for Palestinians have remained dormant for Darfur. The international community that demanded immediate ceasefires in the Middle East has offered tepid statements about Africa.
Why? The explanations offered invariably circle back to structural factors: Sudan lacks geopolitical significance, media access is limited, the conflict is complex. Yet these are not explanations but excuses. Gaza presented its own complexities, its own access challenges, its own geopolitical entanglements. The difference is not in the objective difficulty of coverage or advocacy. The difference is in the assignment of moral agency.
On the macro level, we see an analogy to the micro cases of Epstein and Combs. This is not an equivalence, of course, but the parallels are difficult to deny. In one case, a community defending itself after a terrorist attack is assigned near-total agency and therefore near-total blame. In the other, a community experiencing genocide is stripped of agency and therefore stripped of attention. The asymmetry seems to have little to do with facts on the ground. It is entrenched in preconceptions about who acts and who is acted upon.
It is an insult to Combs, and to black Africans in Sudan, to in effect deny them agency, free will, and responsibility. It reduces them to passive objects of historical forces, incapable of moral choice or meaningful action. Conversely, it is an offense to Epstein, and to Israel, to exaggerate their agency into omnipotent malevolence, particularly when the latter is defending itself against terrorism. Both distortions serve the same function: they allow us to avoid the uncomfortable work of treating all people as equally capable of both good and evil, equally deserving of both context and accountability.
If we truly believe in equality before the law and equal moral standing, we must abandon the essentialism that assigns scheming to some and circumstance to others. Otherwise, we are not fighting bias. We are just updating it for a new audience.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.