The 'See No Evil' Strategy Among the Powerful

It appears some of our large, powerful institutions are taking a ‘See No Evil’ approach to morality: if nobody can see the bad thing, then that’s just as good as not doing the bad thing, right?

3 Monkeys

When I grew up in the US, there was a saying labeled moral instruction but really a joke, about 3 monkeys. One covered his eyes (“see no evil”), one covered his ears (“hear no evil”), and one covered his mouth (“speak no evil”). I was surprised to learn recently that they are actually of 17th century Japanese origin.

While I applaud the general theme of “don’t get involved with evil”, the usual misinterpretation here is that if you don’t see it, then it didn’t happen. So it sort of encourages a withdrawal from being morally engaged with the world, and simply hiding evil or hiding from it. (The origin in Japan is, of course, much more nuanced. I’m speaking here of the naïve interpretation of my childhood.)

Alas, this seems to be diagnostic of a moral failure of much of American life: if something can be concealed, then taking responsibility can be avoided.

This was brought to mind by an encounter with the following 3 monkeys.

Monkey 1: Police Turning Off Supervision on AI

It’s no secret that here on this Crummy Little Blog That Nobody Reads (CLBTNR), we are most emphatically not fans of LLM artificial intelligences. They do not answer questions; they supply convincing replies structured around “what would a plausible continuation of this conversation look like, irrespective of truth”.

Nonetheless, people are easily duped into trusting them, since they sound convincing. Now, it seems, even police are using AI to generate case reports! ^[1] DraftOne is a report-writing tool that will do things like summarize body-cam videos, with dubious integrity. It’s terrifying that such reports then go into records and into court.

The software initially has a few not-very-effective safeguards:

• Putting a bit of nonsense characters into the report, forcing the submitting officer to edit them out, and in the process read the report.
• Requiring a certain number of manual edits before the report can be submitted, again to encourage reading and checking the output, something which humans deeply resist doing.
• Labeling the parts of the report that were AI-written, so lawyers can see if they need challenge later.

Police departments testing the software have done the most bone-headed thing possible: turning off all the safeguards!

This is serious. Not only because of the inevitable hallucinations, but because of the well-known bias of AI visual processing programs against non-whites and women. If you’re in court, do you know the report is the officer’s memory, or a fable fabricated upon viewing his body-cam video?

Sigh: In the 3-monkeys morality, if you don’t know then nothing bad happened.

Monkey 2: Meta Hides Evidence of Child Sexual Predators

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, sometimes does research on how people react to their products, in particular the Metaverse. Then their lawyers got involved, gagging the researchers. ^[2]

It seems that researchers found (a) young children using the Metaverse a lot, and (b) they were often sexually propositioned. Meta lawyers immediately (and correctly) recognized this as a liability exposure for the company. But instead of telling the company to make sure not to do bad things, they told the researchers to suppress evidence of bad things.

Sigh, 3-monkeys morality again: if you forbid finding out what happens to children, then you have no responsibility for what happens to children.

Monkey 3: Donald Trump Lying in Court About Epstein

As anyone even vaguely alive and paying attention knows, there’s a big flare-up of interest in Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and the sexual procurement of children for those men.

For a long time, Trump has been attempting to distract attention and deny the existence of any such evidence, while refusing to let the Department of Justice release the files. Now the Wall Street Journal has a small fraction of the goods, obtained from the Epstein estate. ^[3]

It famously includes a mildly bawdy ‘birthday letter’, with a silhouette of a woman’s body and Donald Trump’s signature placed to resemble pubic hair.

The really interesting part is that Trump has repeatedly denied the existence of such a letter, including denials in court by his attorneys. Even now, he is resorting to his trademark defense of calling it ‘fake news’, although handwriting experts say the signature matches and the chain of custody of evidence from the Epstein estate is solid.

Sigh, poor little 3rd monkey: even if you deny the existence of your evil deeds, you still performed evil deeds.

The Weekend Conclusion

While the 3 monkeys are an instructive fable telling us not to be involved in evil, they are not telling us that if we don’t perceive evil then it’s not our problem! It is not a moral response to the world if we are destroying evidence and obstructing justice in preference to doing good things and not doing bad things in the first place!

A true moral response to the world involves a constant evaluation of whether what we see is right, and our degree of responsibility in making it that way. Most of all we need to look inside ourselves, encouraging the good and discouraging the bad. All this requires honest perception of good and evil, within and without, not just being blind and deaf to responsibility.

As Rabbi Heschel said,

“Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible. If we admit that the individual is in some measure conditioned or affected by the spirit of society, an individual’s crime discloses society’s corruption. In a community not indifferent to suffering, uncompromisingly impatient with cruelty and falsehood, continually concerned for God and every [person], crime would be infrequent rather than common.”

— Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets.

(Ceterum censeo, Trump incarcerandam esse.)

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Notes & References

1: T Parmar, “Government Documents Show Police Disabling AI Oversight Tools”, Mother Jones, 2025-Aug-15. ↩

2: J Swaine & N Nix, “Meta suppressed research on child safety, employees say”, Washington Post, 2025-Sep-08. ↩

3: K Safdar & J Palazzolo, “Epstein Birthday Letter With Trump’s Signature Revealed”, Wall Street Journal, 2025-Sep-08. Unpaywalled archive.is link.. ↩