I think your point about him not understanding is interesting, but I think it could be both ways- Yes, he's very mentally ill, but he seems to function and understand things to some extent. we will never know, since we can't get inside his brain.
He has the function and understanding of roughly a 5-year-old child. A 5-year-old child with an adult's body and an adult's sex drive. Like most 5-year-olds, he can't distinguish truth from fiction, he'll believe anything that adults tell him, he won't bathe unless forced to, he'll try to lie and manipulate his way out of trouble, he doesn't understand right from wrong apart from fearing punishment and he will throw tantrums when he doesn't get his way. I'd estimate his IQ as being in the 50s. That makes him really fucking dangerous and he should not be allowed out in public unsupervised.
Dan's behaviour makes much more sense when you think of him as a small child, he behaves exactly like one. Do we judge 5-year-olds for being the little shits they often are? He's a genetic disaster who won't be able to mentally advance beyond that age. People judging his character (like those zoomer shitheads) haven't been around proper retards. I had an ex who worked in a care home for retard adults and it was a building full of Daniels. ALL proper low-iq tards behave like Daniel. 5-year-olds don't understand consent, their brains haven't developed enough theory of mind to understand a concept of that complexity. He knows that having and expressing sexual urges towards children is "bad" and will get him in trouble, but he does not and never will understand
why it's bad. Is it right to morally judge him by the standards of an adult? Would you troll and stalk a 5-year-old who was wandering the streets getting into trouble?
I don't think, on a philosophical level, that what Dan does is
wrong, morally, because he doesn't have the required level of insight to be a full adult moral actor the way you or I might be. But, and this is important, what Dan does is
harmful and
dangerous to the public at large, because he is a small child with an adult's body and fully functional gonads that are telling him things he doesn't understand. 5-year-olds don't understand sex, and filling them full of testosterone doesn't make them any more mentally capable of understanding it, but it does give them urges that they don't have the intellect to restrain. Most tard wranglers in care homes spend most of their time trying to stop the residents from raping each other. They masturbate like gibbons because it feels nice, they don't understand why they shouldn't do it in front of people, because it's just something that feels good like scratching an itch or eating tasty food, why is that pleasure bad but not this other one? A tard will never, ever grasp that. They just can't. That's why you need to watch them like hawks because they have the capability to do horrifying things to themselves, each other, and the public.
Dan needs to be locked up. Eventually, when he does something really awful, he will be. He ought to go to a secure mental unit, but given the state of society and the justice system, who just see someone who is roughly adult-shaped and judge them just based on that, and the fact that they have been alive for 18 years even though they stopped mentally developing after 5, he might end up in prison, with no idea why he's there or why everyone is being so mean to him. He'll never, ever, understand what he did wrong.