A society can forbid cruelty while rewarding the distance that makes cruelty easy to ignore.

Rules can outlaw the act while leaving intact everything that lets people not see the act. Distance does the work: layers of process, contractors, other countries, statistics instead of names, and nobody involved ever does anything forbidden. Cruelty does not need advocates when it has enough intermediaries.

Look at the distances in your own life, the things you use whose making you have never had to think about, the decisions you delegate to a system. You cannot close all of them. You can pick one and close it deliberately: find out how one thing you rely on actually happens, and let what you learn change something small.