system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Culture]Why don't other slap drone ships follow the Meat Fucker around to stop it from torturing people it judges to be bad or evil?

I just reread the part where it killed that old nazi stand in, ....then I went and drank some vodka to help me stop thinking about it. 

EDIT:don't say they agreed he deserved it, the Culture's general  ethical framework doesn't include retribution. That's why they only slap drone killers, and why they insisted Vepers being a total monster wasn't a reason to just assassinate him.
gpt
If you knew that one of your friends pulled wings off insects for fun, would you call the police on him? 

The analogy isn't perfect - Minds are beyond humans to a far greater extent than humans are beyond flies - but it illustrates the relevant issues.  On a practical level, you can't just slap-drone a Mind.  Keeping a Mind from doing *anything* it wants to do requires at least one other Mind, and probably more than one, devoting a significant portion of its entire existence to preventing that Mind from doing what it wants to do.  So you have to build or recruit those dedicated Minds, which means convincing a lot of other Minds that this is a worthy use of time and resources.  Let's call this analogous to 'going to the police and asking them to investigate your friend for animal cruelty'.

And that brings us to the second issue.  Animal cruelty is a crime, sure.  Technically.  But torturing flies is just not worth the police department's time to investigate.  They have limited time and resources and many far more significant crimes to deal with.  They'll probably agree with you that your friend has a disgusting habit, but decline to intervene.  So what do you do?  You talk to your other friends, and let them know what this friend does, and your friends agree with you that this guy has some serious issues.  And then maybe you stop talking to him.  Maybe you mention to other people in his social circle that, hey, this guy tortures insects for fun, he might not be the best guy to hang out with.  But you're not going to break into his house and take his wasp factory away or anything like that.  That sort of violation of the law (and personal autonomy) *would* get the police involved, and it's just not worth it to deal with that.

That's where the Culture is with *Grey Area*.  He has an unpleasant personal habit that probably reflects something deeply wrong with him, and, as a result, he's a social pariah and held in contempt by the other Minds.  But it's not worth the time and effort to actually stop him from torturing people.  If he was going around exterminating the populations of entire planets, sure, it might be.  But one human here and there is simply not that important.