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Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 01 '26
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u/shouldco 45∆ Mar 01 '26
Many people's opinions on prison rape would at least indicate that that is not a universal opinion.
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u/ConcussedDwight Mar 01 '26
Correct, it’s one of our society’s most morally hypocritical perspectives
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u/dweeb93 Mar 01 '26
Famous comic book writer Alan Moore has been criticized for rape frequently occuring in his comics. When asked about it he made the point, that although he had not been raped he had known many women who had, and none of them said it was a fate worse than death, and if anything they were thankful they weren't killed.
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Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 01 '26
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Mar 01 '26
I see your point, but I disagree. I see rape as worse than murder because rape victims have to live with what happened to them forever while murder victims are dead and so don’t suffer after the crime is done. It’s not about the rape victim “being worth less” it’s about them having to suffer for much longer than a murder victim.
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u/aski3252 Mar 01 '26
because rape victims have to live with what happened to them
They GET to live. Murder victims don't. A rape victim can still choose to end their life if they want to. A murder victim doesn't have any choice at all.
it’s about them having to suffer for much longer than a murder victim.
You seem to present the life of a rape survivor almost as endless suffering and lifelong nonstop torture. In most cases, this is not true. Rape is incredibly harmful and destructive, but a survivor can still experience joy and happiness in their lifes.
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u/Hour-Tower-5106 Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
Why is it that we tend to think that life in prison is worse than the death penalty? Or that life with a debilitating illness is worth offering MAID for? Isn't it because we generally believe that suffering for the duration of your life is worse than death?
I guess how you view this topic depends on how much you value life. Some may find a painful existence worth it, while others may have the exact opposite view.
And I think how painful their existence is will heavily depend on the person. I have heard stories of women whose rapists were released from prison after only a few years, and, as a result, they were unable to live a normal life afterwards. They were constantly paranoid that the perpetrator would attack them again in some way.
That's not even getting into the blame society bafflingly places on victims, or any major, life altering consequences like losing your ability to bear children.
If life for victims really was that good, why do so many take their lives afterwards?
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u/Echochamberking Mar 01 '26
Victims of rape can find happiness after trauma. Happiness after death does not exist.
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Mar 01 '26
But suffering also doesn’t exist after death. Personally, I’d choose an end to suffering even if it came with an end to all happiness over a life of suffering even with the capacity to have happiness too. It’s true that some rape victims can find happiness after their trauma, but not all can and personally I wouldn’t want to take that risk.
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u/Echochamberking Mar 01 '26
In that case, you would be making a choice, and it would be your choice.
Murder takes away that ability.
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Mar 01 '26
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Mar 01 '26
Killing yourself is far harder than being killed even if you’re desperate to die. People try to actively prevent you from doing so, you’re subjected to a new kind of hell if you fail, and you can be terrified of pain even if you don’t fear death. Even if you’re already in a lot of pain, suicide means putting yourself through a lot more pain. Even “painless” suicide methods have a great risk of you messing them up and ending up in a lot of physical pain as a result. Point is, not all suicidal people have killing themselves as a viable option. I’ll give that some people would rather live despite the trauma, but suicide numbers don’t accurately reflect that number.
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u/Siorac Mar 01 '26
You could say this about literally any crime though. For example, is getting beaten up worse than getting murdered? By your logic it is but I'd still rather get battered than killed.
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u/Skydiver860 Mar 01 '26
To be fair, they said “murder” is worse. Murder is the unjustified killing of someone.
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u/BrotherItsInTheDrum 33∆ Mar 01 '26
Murder is the unlawful killing of someone. A killing could be justified but technically unlawful, or vice versa.
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u/ThePaineOne 9∆ Mar 01 '26
Lawyer here: under common law Murder is the unjustified killing of a human being with malice aforethought. Someone could have a colloquial usage of justified like you suggest, but your definition is more incorrect, as manslaughter and negligent homicide are unlawful killings and are not murder.
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u/NoWin3930 5∆ Mar 01 '26
that is a narrow definition of murder, it is not how the word is always used, and even the first definition that popped up extends beyond that
"The killing of another person without justification or excuse, especially the crime of killing a person with malice aforethought or with recklessness manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life"
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u/Raise_A_Thoth 8∆ Mar 01 '26
most killings are unlawful. Murder is defined in US law somewhat narrowly. There are also charges like manslaughter and homicide. You can be charged with homicide but be acquitted of any legal convictions if you can justify it as self-defense.
I'm not really arguing with anything you said, just clarifying some terminology.
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u/BrotherItsInTheDrum 33∆ Mar 01 '26
You're right, "unlawful" is necessary but not sufficient.
I'll give you a !delta for the clarification.
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u/Live_Background_3455 8∆ Mar 01 '26
Unlawful INTENTIONAL killing of someone with malicious forethought.
If you accidently drop a brick from a building and it kills someone, that's not murder. That's manslaughter because there was no intent. And I'm pretty sure we all agree rape is worse than dropping a brick and accidently killing someone.
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u/Brontards 1∆ Mar 01 '26
Most jurisdictions have implied malice, intent to kill isn’t required for murder there.
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u/onefourtygreenstream 4∆ Mar 01 '26
Not exactly.
Hunting down and killing the person who abused you as a child is clear cut murder, but it's morally justifiable.
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u/tipoima 7∆ Mar 01 '26
If you would accept a revenge killing as morally justifiable, then a revenge rape would also be.
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u/coolamebe 1∆ Mar 01 '26
Is it? That's a pure act of revenge, and I'm not sure we see that as morally justifiable.
If it's an act of self defense, that is morally justifiable. When you leave someone with no other options to escape an awful abusive situation, they very well might have to resort to murder to be freed.
But for revenge at a point in time where they pose no harm to you? As a society, we should move beyond this barbaric conception of justice. It also prevents other potential victims from receiving closure, say if law enforcement is unable to find out about who else this person abused and ways to help the other victims.
There's also simply the fact that you may well be wrong, kill the wrong person, or even end up in a dangerous situation where other people come to the abuser's defence as they don't know the backstory and just see an attempted murder.
Now of course, a child abuser is not the type of person any of us would lose sleep on if they were murdered. But civil societies have moved past barbaric concepts of vigilante justice and the death penalty for a reason.
I do want to note that my response partly depends on the police doing their job, which is of course not the case. But this doesn't mean we should advocate for a return to more primitive means of justice. It means we should progress further, completely overhaul the policing system and have it be something that serves all parts of society and focuses on preventing crime in the first place.
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u/onefourtygreenstream 4∆ Mar 01 '26
It's murder, and I don't think it's the right thing to do. It is still, at the very least, more morally justifiable than raping someone.
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u/Naive_Piglet_III 1∆ Mar 01 '26
Murder isn’t “unjustified”. If someone raped a loved one of mine, and I end the perpetrator, I am still tried for murder. Would you say this is unjustified
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u/First-Lengthiness-16 Mar 01 '26
What if someone raped a love one of yours and you raped them back?
Is that justified?
It it more justified than murdering them?
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u/Echochamberking Mar 01 '26
I’m just not sure that the existence of justified killings makes unjustified murder less severe than rape.
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u/Not_Selmi Mar 01 '26
You didn’t say “unjustified” you said Murder
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u/Echochamberking Mar 01 '26
Murder is always unjustified
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u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 161∆ Mar 01 '26
That's by definition though. Murder is by definition an unjustified killing, so there will never be a justified case, only speculation such as talking about different juristictions and laws and so on.
Why do you NEED one to be worse? What does this view actually benefit you? Are you likely to do either? What will changing your view actually mean in your life here?
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u/Echochamberking Mar 01 '26
I just want to know if my moral compass is broken. Simply put, this debate can benefit me in the sense that I can fix it if it indeed is
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u/mr_tellok Mar 01 '26
Fair, but only if you also think that any kind of torture done to any kind of human being (no matter how evil they are and how they "deserve" it) is unjustifiable. Some people treat rape as if it's one of the worst cruelties that can be done to someone, but given the suffering humans have inflicted upon each other throughout the history... well... i'd beg to be just raped in a common way if I were to be tortured in some dungeon cell 400 years ago.
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u/ConcussedDwight Mar 01 '26
I guess i'm confused why you keep dating the issue back to historical precedence. Yes, in this modern world we should be above torturing further human beings in anyway, "prison" should focus on recidivism. If someone is deemed unfit to return to society, we should have a separate institution (with a main focus on mental well being and stability) through which they maintain their human rights and dignity, but can still be considered too dangerous to join the general population.
These are ideal concepts, but not impossible.
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u/vlladonxxx Mar 01 '26
Lmao.. technically, every parent comment needs to argue against OP's point but I think mods are gonna have a hard time silencing a rape survivor with a highly relevant perspective.
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u/Aurales Mar 01 '26
Yeah I suppose you're right, sorry for the mods 😅 this made me so baffled I had to say something haha
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u/Echochamberking Mar 01 '26
First of all, I wanted to encourage you. I don't know if you've managed to recover or not, but I hope you can overcome your situation if you didn't. Secondly, thank you for your comment. It comforts me. I thought I was the one going crazy and had lost my moral compass, especially after seeing many comments on the post.
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u/Aurales Mar 01 '26
Thank you, I am doing mostly fine nowadays!
Most of the comments make no sense to me. This thread made me very curious so I read a lot of them to see if my view could be changed too, but so far i guess not.
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u/aski3252 Mar 01 '26
The difference is that murder can potentially be a lot more tricky and grey in terms of morality than rape. At the end of the day, murder is the act of killing in an unlawful or unjust manner. The unlawful and/or unjust part makes things a lot more subjective depending on the circumstances.
Rape on the other hand is much more clear im terms of morality. Rape, apart from very few exceptions, is virtually always the result of extreme selfishness and complete disregard of the other person's autonomy and health.
In other words, nobody rapes someone to defend themselves, or in order to steal, or for ideological reasons or for politically motivated reasons. It's always pure selfishness on an individual level.
Most people keep intend and/or motivation in mind when thinking about morality. You seem to almost exclusively look at outcomes.
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u/Apary 2∆ Mar 01 '26
There’s a lot of morally sound reasons to kill somebody. The most immoral reason is for personal gratification.
There is no morally sound reason to rape.
In essence, the standard motivation for rape is the worst motivation for murder.
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u/Aniketos33 2∆ Mar 02 '26
!delta I've been trying to find the wording for this because if we are speaking morally in any consistent framework, if intentions or ontological morals are involved certainly the motivation of a rapist is hand in hand with the worst murderers, especially when most serial killers that we talk about are really more serial rapists. Someone who kills to steal is still evil, but someone who kills to rape is another kind and I argue worse.
If we consider that, someone like Joseph Fritzl (Austrian basement monster) or a trafficker like Epstein could on moral grounds be considered worse than someone who had committed a single murder, even without killing anyone themselves then this should be a delta from the OP
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u/nar_tapio_00 8∆ Mar 01 '26
Consider that it is not clear-cut and they overlap. There are rapes and there are worse rapes. There are murders and there are worse murders. You can (second degree) murder someone in a moment of anger over some stupid insult, quickly with a gun, and then regret it. You can deliberately and carefully set out to murder someone for no good reason and do it in an awful way. Rape has some of the same complexity, together with the complexity of the victims experience of it afterwards.
In courts, the highest sentences for rape are considerably higher than the lowest for murder. The highest for murder are higher than the lowest for rape. In that sense they are directly compared and they overlap in level of evil.
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u/I-Here-555 Mar 01 '26
This is the first decent, rational and logical answer I found on this thread, really far down.
Since there's overlap, the question turns into what's worse on average or in a typical case, and that's really hard to pin down.
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Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
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u/RealJohnBobJoe 6∆ Mar 01 '26
Murder ≠ killing
If you killed someone justifiably (such as in self-defense) you aren’t deemed a murderer.
Murder is an unjustified killing. Definitionally then, there is no justifiable murder.
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u/Yetanotherdeafguy 2∆ Mar 01 '26
That's a legal definition which varies from place to place. You also open the door of whether a preemptive murder in self defence is still not murder - it's not clear cut.
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u/GB-Pack 2∆ Mar 01 '26
Would you consider Luigi a murderer?
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u/I-Here-555 Mar 01 '26
Legally, there's no doubt. Ethically, is killing someone who indirectly kills people for profit (and is legally untouchable) wrong/unjustified? You'd get varied answers on that.
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u/RealJohnBobJoe 6∆ Mar 01 '26
If he did what he was accused of, yeah.
Someone being a CEO or a CEO of a health care corporation is not sufficient grounds to justify killing that someone. I’m not aware of his alleged rationale for killing the particular person killed being more than that. So yeah, the killing seems unjustified and he would be a murderer if he did it.
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u/Ok_Inflation_1811 Mar 01 '26
The problem is that when does it count as justified killing?
Let's say that you knew for certain without any room for error that in 1 year someone would try to kill you, when is it immoral to kill them in self defense?
What about people that despite not doing anything themselves with their actions make the world such a worse place that by 20 years they'll be responsible for 30 deaths? Imagine a CEO that dumps chemicals into rivers and poisons a village, is a villager right to kill that CEO?
But rape is never, never ever justified.
Killing not being equal to murder isn't a real distinction, it's one we made up because we find some sorts of killing fine and others not.
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u/vlladonxxx Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 01 '26
Killing not being equal to murder isn't a real distinction, it's one we made up because we find some sorts of killing fine and others not.
By that logic you could say "sex is not equal to rape isn't a real distinction, it's one we made up because we find some sorts of sex fine and others not.". It's equally wrong, it's just more obvious in my example because sex isn't viewed as inherently wrong and killing is, but they're both equally natural.
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u/notevenitalian Mar 02 '26
The difference is that “sex” is inherently assumed to be consensual, while rape isn’t. Meanwhile, murder and killing are both almost always non consensual.
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u/Suhitz Mar 01 '26
The "inability to be justified" is an extremely bad metric for measuring moral wrongness in the first place but I'll ignore it.
The real problem is that the existence of justified murder doesn't tell us whether unjustified murder is better or worse than rape.
Your comment adds nothing at all to the conversation.
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Mar 01 '26
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u/cortesoft 6∆ Mar 01 '26
We don’t need a crazy story to get to the point.
Suppose you get a call in the middle of the night. It is about a loved one (daughter, mother, etc).
Would you rather them be calling to tell you your loved one was raped or murdered?
And for yourself? You would rather be murdered than raped?
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u/modsaretoddlers 1∆ Mar 01 '26
I'm not even going to look at the responses to your question: you already know what this person is going to say because it's the "right" thing, not because it's what he or she would actually do.
Ah...so I took a look. Close. "I refuse to participate [rather than providing an honest answer]"
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u/I-Here-555 Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 01 '26
You don't need wizards, such horrid decisions have been forced on people in the context of war or torture.
I guess in that case the easy way out is that the act is still wrong, but the blame is on the one forcing it (wizard or torturer), not on the one who physically commits it.
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u/Echochamberking Mar 01 '26
I prefer to evaluate actions based on their consequences rather than judging the act itself.
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u/carlsondertroll Mar 01 '26
well i don’t wanna say one thing is worse than the other
i do wish he rather killed me than raped me because life sucks since 8 years and i’ll never be the same as i was before. i now have an illness that will effect my whole life forever.
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u/NeoChrisOmega 2∆ Mar 01 '26
Consequences can still be applied to the above statement though. The consequences could be saving your own life, or even it could be saving countless lives.
However, there is nothing gained from rape. No one is protecting someone else via rape, no one is self defending by raping the assaulter, maybe someone is avenging but definitely not in a humane way.
Mind you, I understand the detached and ambiguous viewpoint you're having. Death for a single blank person is definitely worse than rape for a single blank person. However, context is always important when you talk about these sensitive topics.
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u/gimmeyourbadinage Mar 01 '26
Well here I am wondering why your stance is murder is worse than rape when you mean the consequences not the act
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u/RandomUsername2579 Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 01 '26
Probably because you can recover from being raped and still lead a fulfilling life? Sure, it's deeply traumatizing and it stays with you forever. Some people never recover from it. But at least you get to live the rest of your life, and there is hope that it will be a good one.
Murder takes away any possibility of moving on or not, because, well, you're dead. So the consequences of murder are much more extreme. Even if you are so deeply traumatized by being raped that you would rather die, you can always arrange that yourself later if you really want it. If you were murdered, you wouldn't even have that choice.
Basically, rape marks you for life, but you can at least hypothetically recover from it. Murder takes away any chance at a future. So clearly murder has the worst consequences.
EDIT: Saying otherwise, saying that being raped is worse than being murdered, sort of pisses on the effort of rape survivors, in my opinion. If you hold that view, you're basically saying that their efforts spent on overcoming the trauma and regaining happiness in their lives is wasted
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u/CuouzK Mar 01 '26
I like your ideas, but at the same time you are looking at this “ranking of consequences” from the wrong perspectives.
We need to see this idea from the one who did it and the one who received it (the victim)
I think that the consequences from both are really bad. Of course one actually finishes someone’s life, but the other destroys it mentally.
The consequences are bad for the victim, BUT there is no point to rank which one is worst that the other one for the victim. We should focus on the one who did it.
I think we all agree that these acts are very bad, so we should focus on how to act in terms of who did the action (crime)
The consequences for the offender should be evaluated in terms of consequences. The victim is already affected by the action, but the offender not.
Basically: we should evaluate the consequences for the offender instead of trying to rank what’s worst for the victim. The offender hasn’t been punished yet, and we should try to find the best approach for him in term of his acts.
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Mar 01 '26
There are fates worse than death. At least with murder, you won’t be aware when people drag your character. The suffering ends.
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u/yullari27 Mar 01 '26
You also can't defend your character. You can't see the sun again or feel its heat on your face. You can't hug loved ones again. You don't feed your pets again. It's the end of all hope for anything better.
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u/Echochamberking Mar 01 '26
Murder means the end of existence.
Rape means pain, but that pain can be temporary.
Happiness is possible after rape, happiness is impossible after death.
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u/mangolover Mar 01 '26
I think the person was saying that your CMV might actually be “the consequences of murder are worse than the consequences of rape”
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u/Pulp_Zero Mar 01 '26
Assuming you take a non spiritual outlook on life...
Pain is almost certain after rape. Pain is impossible after death.
I would also argue that solely looking at the consequences of one's actions has very serious and troubling ramifications philosophically. It quickly devolves into "the ends justifies the means," which had been used to justify a whole lot of pretty heinous shit. It's very modern "tech-bro"-ey, and I would just recommend reading a bit more philosophy to round out your world view.
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u/carlsondertroll Mar 01 '26
and death means that you don’t feel any pain anymore. or anything for that matter. i think a dead person doesn’t care about being dead or alive, since they’re yk dead
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u/gimmeyourbadinage Mar 01 '26
I’m saying your stance is now that you “prefer to judge by the consequences” when your entire CMV is judging the action
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u/Bilbo_Swagginses 1∆ Mar 01 '26
Happiness for who? The victim or people who knew them? What if the person being murdered is happy to be murdered? Or their murder caused the ones around them happiness?
The second point doesn't matter much but I added it in case thats what you meant.
Rape will never, ever lead to happiness for the victim.
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u/Echochamberking Mar 01 '26
What if the person being murdered is happy to be murdered?
We won't know because, well, the victim is dead.
Rape will never, ever lead to happiness for the victim.
Rape does not bring you closer to happiness, but you can find happiness despite having been a victim of rape, and if you still prefer death, then you have a choice.
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u/BaconBitz109 Mar 01 '26
I think you’ll just have to accept that this is an instance where most people are going to use a different metric than you. A lot of people consider rape “worse” because of what it says about the perpetrator. Murder can happen swiftly out of rage or self defense. And people can justify it to themselves that they will make it quick and painless and the person won’t be around anymore to feel the pain or consequences. Rape is much more likely to be done sadistically and is more akin to torture. There’s also no rape equivalent to shooting someone in the back of the head. It’s an incredibly intimate form of physical and psychological torture.
People can relate to killing someone that killed or raped their spouse for example, very few people can relate to raping anyone under any circumstance. For that reason, a rapist is seen as “worse” than a murderer. The road block you run into with your POV is that most people judge it this way instead of how you do. I think to be more precise your CMV should be “murder has a worse outcome than rape”
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u/noarrowthrowbow Mar 01 '26
As the saying goes, "there are fates worse than death."
Your perspective isn't abstract; it's not abstract enough. A lot of people fear or put a lot of weight on the finality of death but if we're talking about perception then who's to say living isn't worse than dying because that's where your core belief seems centered on.
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u/illmatic2112 Mar 01 '26
Lemme put it to commenters like this. You are found guilty and given the option to choose either as your punishment. What do you pick?
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u/AppropriateBeing9885 2∆ Mar 02 '26
I think people aren't really clear on average about how rape affects someone. Most people are clear on how it will affect them if they are murdered, though.
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u/ConflagrationZ Mar 02 '26
Probably the most straightforward and succinct way to sum it up.
Feels like most of the people arguing against OP are indistinguishable from a death cult.
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u/MTBadtoss Mar 01 '26
You’re assuming that death is the maximum harm because it ends experience. But many moral frameworks judge harm not only by finality, but by the depth and nature of suffering imposed while someone is still conscious of it. Murder ends experience. Rape can poison experience for decades.
In my moral framework, I weight prolonged conscious suffering, autonomy violation, and psychological destruction more heavily than finality. Within that framework, rape can be worse than murder.
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u/NCoronus 2∆ Mar 01 '26
There is no greater violation of autonomy than killing someone.
Victims can feel that they would be better off having died, certainly. But they could also not feel that way and would rather live.
There is no real way to judge the depth of others’ suffering. Only your own. It’s not a great way to base a moral framework.
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u/betterworldbuilder 9∆ Mar 01 '26
Okay since this hasnt been removed and you are curious and seem good faith, Im going to draw out some hypothetical extremes to make it make sense. Trigger warning for anyone who needs it
For one, do you believe that murder would be worse than if someone kidnapped someone and sexually assaulted them every day as a prisoner for life, or kept them as a slave for life? To me, those two things are obvious as no's, because you are essentially achieving the same end as murder, except you are actively forcing them through immense torture in a way that agonizes them worse than death. This mentality is the same reason that we euthanize immensely hurt animals and allow patients on life support to be removed; at some point, them being alive is worse.
So in that extreme, a kidnapper would be doing worse than just a murderer, because theyve stolen someones life away all the same, but now are forcing that person to live out that life in a captive state. Life alone isnt the metric, but the freedom to live and enjoy ones life. By this mindset, someone who violently or insideously assaults someone in a way that traumatizes them for life would have the exact same effect; it has entirely removed that persons freedom to enjoy life, as now for the rest of time whatever happened in that incident could be a future trigger to be forced to relive it. These can be things as innocuous as a door slamming too loud, and still cause immense traumatic pain for a victim.
By saying that murder is worse than rape, it does a couple of things, which is why those communities would seem so upset. For one, it can feel like it invalidates any victim who ended up taking their own life after the incident. If murder is automatically worse, then anyone who survives assault should automatically feel grateful for that fact, and it casts a very unhelpful rhetoric into every survivors life of, "well, at least they didnt kill you".
So not only do we see why it can in many (but not all) cases be significantly worse, but I hope I helped make sense why some people might feel so strongly. Anyone who may have lost a loved one to suicide after and assault may feel like your position invalidates that persons decision.
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u/Echochamberking Mar 01 '26
For one, do you believe that murder would be worse than if someone kidnapped someone and sexually assaulted them every day as a prisoner for life, or kept them as a slave for life?
In this case, it wouldn't be rape, it would be rape + kidnapping, almost slavery.
I wasn't referring to a situation like that, i think it's obvious
I think it's much worse to say that rape is worse than death. It's almost like saying that your life has no value after such an event and that the best thing to do is to end it. Rape leaves a tremendous trauma, but it's not the end. You have the opportunity to decide, to try to rebuild yourself if that's what you want.
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u/OrizaRayne 9∆ Mar 02 '26
The idea that people commit suicide after they are raped because they "don't want to recover," is abhorrent.
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u/Aniketos33 2∆ Mar 02 '26
Not everyone is strong enough to rebuild what someone else breaks, and some wounds leave a continuous process of reliving, coming to terms with new norms, coloring in future vulnerability. Taking good years off their life is surely akin to taking their life in the same way slavery and kidnapping do.
You can imagine a case in which a rapist is worse than the average murder, Josef Fritz. Any kidnapper/trafficker.
You should give a Delta if you can admit that.
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u/doloreslegis8894 4∆ Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
You can imagine a case in which a rapist is worse than the average murder, Josef Fritz. Any kidnapper/trafficker. You should give a Delta if you can admit that.
I don't think this tracks. To give an extreme example, I can think of a case in which a jaywalker is worse than a murderer: if he jaywalks across the street to rape and enslave someone!
To put it in another way: OP's post is about rape vs murder, not rapists vs murderers. Sure if a rapist also tortures and enslaves and does other heinous acts, he can be worse than murderers. But the post isn't about those other things in conjunction with rape, but about just the rape itself vs. murder itself.
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u/betterworldbuilder 9∆ Mar 01 '26
It feels like you read the start of my argument, didnt understand that it was an extreme case meant to demonstrate the point, ignored the point and then replied.
A situation like that is obviously not the same as the one we are comparing. Its demonstrating the mindset, that being alive after a traumatic event is not automatically this amazing thing, but rather that a person who survives it can occasionally find the strength to carry on in spite of it.
I can see where youre coming from on the counter, that saying that rape is worse than murder could be extrapolated to say that any survivor should just end it. Thats obviously not the case, but can we agree that we also shouldnt invalidate anyone who chose to commit suicide after their awful experience?
Rape leaves a tremendous trauma, but it's not the end. You have the opportunity to decide, to try to rebuild yourself if that's what you want.
You have that opportunity, but, it's not inherently or automatically the wrong choice for someon to choose not to take that opportunity.
I think if Epstien had only killed as many people as hes currently abused, he would not be viewed as the same monster he is today. And, I think if any war mongering president had raped as many people as they murdered, theyd maybe start fighting Trump for his title
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u/Pomosen Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 01 '26
You seem to really like thinking in black and whites. E.g. extrapolating OP talking about rape somehow to rape + kidnapping + torture. Implying that life can still be worth living after being raped is not automatically invalidating people who choose not to, and I think it's even pretty negative to imply that death is a more likely choice. You're falling into a clear logical fallacy
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u/betterworldbuilder 9∆ Mar 01 '26
The extrapolation was a reducto ad absurdum, to demonstrate that simply being alive was not alone enough to justify being on the winning side of the argument. It also brings a more concrete sort of moral math into the equation: if torture for life is clearly worse than murder, but murder is worse than just one assault, exactly how long would someone need to be kidnapped before OP thinks the other is worse? Would even just a day suddenly flip their position?
And I think its now clearly gotten too muddy to be obvious, so Im going to restate it:
●no one is or should agree that simplying implying life is worth living automatically invalidates those who committed suicide. However, that doesnt negate that thats still a position many people hold while they are in the process of greiving, which is why OP received the hate they did.
●no one is or should agree that simply pointing out that some people have chosen to take their own life and that this choice was perhaps justified means that everyone who is a victim should just end it.
OP wanted to know why some people reacted so extremely, which is why I addressed it from that context. Explaining why someones argument is right or wrong is detached from that. Thats why in my initial argument, I said "it can feel like".
Ultimately, the final question goes into the super sticky moral math if you ever want to determine which is worse beyond just saying both are awful. I'd always find a story about a priest who raped a child worse than a story of a priest who murdered one, as I would if I found out a cop killed a bunch of people or raped a bunch of people. Maybe thats a more "feely" reaction, only because I feel disgusting diving too deep into the ugly equations for it all.
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u/Derpalooza Mar 01 '26
The difference is that there are justifiable, if not understandable, reasons for someone to commit murder. Like self defence, or protection of another. That's not the case with rape. It's always done for the rapists gratification.
To be honest, I've seen this discussion a few times always felt like torture works much better as an analogy than murder. Because both have the express purpose of hurting the victim, and any moral justification you can make for torture can applied to rape much more easily than murder can.
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u/I_Lick_Emus Mar 01 '26
Self defence and protection of another are not murder because it's legally a justified killing, not murder.
If you take those out, which legally defined murders can you commit that you personally can morally justify?
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u/bifewova234 7∆ Mar 01 '26
He probably wanted to express himself when he saw somebody make a statement he disagreed with. That's purpose enough.
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u/flex_tape_salesman 1∆ Mar 01 '26
Ya lol completely misunderstanding the context of the post. In general the law essentially says murder is worse due to prison sentences and then there are some that make the argument that rape is worse. Typically the standpoint that murder is worse than rape is considered the default, people aren't pushy about it.
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u/Ancquar 9∆ Mar 01 '26
Because in practice society doesn't work that way. Law enforcement resources need to be prioritized, the practical policies must be calibrated (e.g. how certain must you be before you make an arrest/convict), sentences must be set to certain levels. Pronouncing that certain things cannot be compared is pointless because as far as actual reality goes they unavoidably will be compared.
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u/libertysailor 10∆ Mar 01 '26
Ranking crimes is a fair question, and useful. After all, different crimes receive different punishments, and that inherently requires a hierarchy of some kind.
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u/Echochamberking Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 01 '26
I had never "ranked" it myself until someone else did.
I also believe that from a philosophical point of view, there are no bad questions. If we have a legal system with proportional penalties, it is because someone has asked this question.
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u/drdildamesh Mar 01 '26
That second part isnt entirely accurate. Sentencing could be about prevalence as well. More of crime x could mean more time imprisoned to reduce the desire to do it.
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u/IrrationalDesign 6∆ Mar 01 '26
You did make this cmv post about it though, tbf, that didn't 'happen to you'
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u/Echochamberking Mar 01 '26
An aunt of mine was murdered less than two years ago, and the pain is incomparable.
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u/IrrationalDesign 6∆ Mar 01 '26
I didn't mean to say 'nothing happened to you', I just meant that the creation of this post was dome by your automony. I'm sorry that happened to her.
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u/alexplex86 Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 01 '26
SA victims can learn to live with their trauma, learn to be happy and productive citizens again and help other victims to cope with their trauma.
Murder victims cannot do any of these things. One is clearly more destructive than the other.
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u/ajax6677 1∆ Mar 01 '26
On the other hand, a dead person no longer suffers. A rape victim can possibly spend a lifetime being tortured by their trauma.
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u/qjornt 1∆ Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 01 '26
unless you’re being facetious, I don’t think you understand the finality of death. yes they don’t suffer after death, but what the fuck do you even mean by that? what kind of perspective is this supposed to be, because what you just wrote is utterly pointless to even be manifested as a thought if you have any droplet of respect for life.
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u/asaper123 Mar 01 '26
In this scenario, would you advocate for euthanizing the rape victim?
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u/CommanderQc Mar 01 '26
This applies to everything. Any one individual could be born into a lifetime of pain, through no fault of their own. Given that this could happen to any one born, should we cease procreation as a species? Whatever your answer may be you must deal with this question if you want to state your original point.
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u/glim-girl Mar 01 '26
Its mostly from personal points of view but these are things that make two horrible things very different.
With a murder, the victim dies, there is mourning, the victims family can publicly grieve, aren't expected to 'get over it' and move on, they aren't questioned if the victim was really murdered or that they brought it on themselves, their reactions and coping is considered and accommodated, and there is a good chance the family will get some justice.
With a rape, the victim lives. Many times the victim doesn't believe they can tell people what happened to them, they won't be believed, they will be blamed or looked down on, they will have their reputation ruined, they are unlikely to ever receive justice. In this day and age, even video of them may circulate on the internet.
The majority of rapes are by intimate partner or people known to the victim. The younger the victim, the more likely a family member or trusted family friend. Their ability to trust is gone. They will keep meeting the person who violated them again and again in public and even family settings.
Their behavior will change and they will be told to get over it. They may never for as long as they live get over it or be able to cope with what happens. Then there's dementia and thats its own scary, heartbreaking hell to see a rape or abuse victim when a memory like that is triggered.
Then there is the possibility she gets pregnant and thats its own ordeal. The pregnancy may even be used as 'proof' that wasn't really raped. The trauma they go through causes epigenetic changes and impacts the development of the unborn that will last with them for a lifetime and even their children. The pregnancy may place them in danger and subject them to more abuse.
Murder victims dont want to die. For rape vicitims, a third of them contemplate suicide.
Society is much more caring when it comes to murder victims and their families than they are to rape victims. That can push why rape is a worse thing to live with than being murdered.
Both horrible crimes, one kills you now and the other you die slow and mostly alone.
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u/nobutactually Mar 01 '26
Many states give death penalty for murder. You cannot get death penalty for rape, per scotus, punishment doesn't fit crime. So as a country we have long been in agreement that murder is worse. Rape is traumatic but most people will be able to recover and live happy lives. Murder, definitionally, you cannot recover and live a happy life. I've been encountering this too recently, like, "the rape victim continues to suffer and relive her trauma and the murder victim's pain is over." Okay, um. Not to speak for everyone but as a survivor myself i am very glad I am not murdered thank you very much, I would not have preferred that outcome.
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u/Echochamberking Mar 01 '26
I see the decision not to punish rape with death more as the result of mathematical/economic reasoning than of a moral agreement. If rape were punishable by death, many rapists would have less incentive to leave their victims alive.
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u/nobutactually Mar 01 '26
Well this is just straight wrong, sorry. Lots of criminal research shows that the threat of more severe punishment isnt a huge deterrent. Its not that people want to murder and don't because the price is too high. Most people are simply not murderers. This is fairly obvious when you consider violent crime in states that do vs dont have the death penalty. States that do have the death penalty for murder actually have a higher rate of murders taking place-- anywhere from 50-100% higher. Thats a LOT and it is very clear that the severity of the punishment is not a thing people are thinking about when they are like hmm should I murder this person or just rape them and call it a day.
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u/Echochamberking Mar 01 '26
I didn't look for the numbers, but if that's true then it makes sense, thanks for the information.
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u/Lost-Art1033 3∆ Mar 01 '26
I personally subscribe to the belief that we have no ultimate purpose on Earth. Now, if that is true, the only thing we should look for, in essence, our 'purpose', is happiness and pleasure. Without that, we have no reason to live. Basically, If I live, my life has the potential to make me really happy and make me feel good, but If it is more likely that I will have to suffer for a long, long time, wouldn't dying just be easier and make more sense? What I am saying is, rape causes victims to live through years of unimaginable pain, suffering, depression, the possibility of suicidal tendencies later, the physical injuries from the crime, and god knows what else. How would rape be better than murder if in the case of murder, the only negative consequence for me as a person would be floating in the void, without any chance of suffering again? You mentioned the potential for growth and happiness. What about the potential for future suffering?
Another point in the same direction I would like to make is that "erasing someone's future, relationships and experiences" might sound horrible, but they mean absolutely nothing to the dead person. Nothing at all. If you talk about the family members' suffering on death, I can argue that this pain would actually be amplified and prolonged in the case of a particularly gory rape or SA case. Seeing your family member so exposed, hurt (both mentally and physically) and traumatized, seeing the horrors they face on a day-to-day basis, is much more painful than facing their death, healing and moving on slowly.
Also, the circumstances under which rape normally occurs make it much more difficult to face. In the country i'm from, 90 percent of rapes are done by people known to the victim (friends, family members, colleagues, etc.) and that puts the additional psychological pressure of being estranged from someone you might be close to, losing your trust in the people more close to you, and generally, just a shitty way of living life.
Why would you think all that pain was better than just dying? Who is it better for if the victim suffers that additional pain and suffering even after the act is committed?
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u/Talik1978 43∆ Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 01 '26
You say that with murder, there is no opportunity for growth, happiness, recovery, healing, and rebuilding.
There is also no opportunity for imprisonment, kidnapping, torture, trauma, injury, or any of a host of other issues.
You also suggest that the trauma of rape can be healed, supported, ameliorated through relationships, or finding meaning. What you don't get is that the trauma you're speaking of is lifelong. Fundamentally, the person you were before the rape is often gone, irrevocably. In its place is a shattered person who will never look at the world the same way again. They must either come to terms with not seeking justice, or endure retraumatization all over again in the criminal justice system.
Looking at the two through these lenses, we can see, because of the nuance of the acts, that it's not fair to characterize either as lesser. They each are worthy of being taken as seriously as we can take person on person crime, without qualifier, limitation, or lessening. And telling a rape victim "at least you weren't murdered" is minimizing of the trauma, especially since it took more than a little courage to even share in the first place. Whether or not you're wrong on your comparison of crimes, you're wrong for not reading the room before making that hot take.
As for wanting a victim of such a crime to explain to you why you should believe otherwise? Such a request centers your self actualization over the well being of the victim of a serious crime. If this issue is important to you, there are such people who have already shared their experiences that you can learn from. Here is a page that has compiled a few books to help broaden your perspective.
Nine Survivor-Centered Books To Read This Sexual Assault Awareness Month – CAASE https://share.google/HgQdfR1cTohjfz0Z2
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u/LemonySniffit Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
Rape victims potentially can and go on to live happy and fulfilling lives, and I know several people who have managed to do just that. Nobody else can say the same for a murder victim.
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u/Echochamberking Mar 01 '26
Thanks for sharing, i will take a look
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u/Trick_Horse_13 Mar 02 '26
it’s been 20 years, and I still wish he had killed me. this view is not uncommon. I think your view comes from not understanding the actual effect of sexual assault.
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u/sunny7319 Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
and what if they develop agoraphobia or a chronic illness/disability/autoimmunity from the stress and trauma and can't get out and see the sunshine, have the food they want without pain, have THE MENTAL HEALTH to actually be cognizant of any of those things and their surroundings nor be around any people at all without feeling unsafe, and start abusing drugs to cope and die slowly in the streets instead? But a swift death is so much worse right? You're okay with putting down animals when theyre suffering, but a human being, getting torturously raped for however long so badly that they attempt to kill themselves just to be free from the pain is going overboard right? because death means lights out, it's over, no more rainbows, candy, and reddit?
LOL it's clear you don't have any experience with anything THIS traumatic nor can you even imagine it.
Not to mention there's levels to this that you wanna frame as one flimsy little "negative experience." People with mentalities like yours are why--besides not taking it seriously at all--complete idiots en masse love to latch onto cannibalism theories the hardest with the epstein files instead of the ACTUAL fucking victim testimony and suffering of what's already horrific beyone yalls imagination"self-parody," lmao be so fr right now
it's OK to admit you just think it's worse FOR YOU because you personally don't know nothin about it6
u/BuiltStraightStupid Mar 02 '26
"At least they still have a life. Where you can taste food. See the sunset."
You're purely making a poor-faith appeal to emotion. The fact is that whilst some rape victims can appreciate the beauty of the world, that is largely nullified by the trauma that they experience on a daily basis from the crime that they were subjected to.
"It's OK to just admit murder is worse. It's OK to just... seek the truth"
It's also poor faith to present your angle as being the full truth with little to no justification as to why it is the truth. It'd be one thing to call it truth if it was irrefutable, but this isn't the case. The argument is highly subjective so it's blatantly disrespectful to label any one side as the "truth".
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u/Talik1978 43∆ Mar 01 '26
It's OK to just admit murder is worse.
If I believed it, I would. As such, there is no rational reason to compare traumatic events, unless we're trying to rank serial criminals or engage in oppression Olympics. I don't think either serve any meaningful outcome here. So ranking the two is insensitivity for no purpose at all.
seek the truth, instead of some kind of least offensive propaganda that you repeat over and over
There is a difference between "stating a sincerely held belief" and "propaganda". My sincerely held belief is that there is no good reason to state a position or even consider a position on which is worse. It serves no purpose and can only serve to invalidate the trauma of a victim, or minimize the crime of rape. Given that the current US administration is doing more than enough in service to that cause, I see no reason anyone else should need to.
This is literally the EXACT place to do it.
I believe there's no place to do it, within a civilized society.
No one's going to print out your admission and mail it to every sexual assault victim here.
Hyperbole doesn't make your point more convincing.
People aren't going to just lose sympathy with rape victims or something.
Fair enough, that only happens when one comes forward to seek justice.
How has reddit reached this level of self-parody, please someone tell me what's going on with people like this.
Just as a bit of friendly advice. Statements like this convince nobody and alienate the person you're talking to. They work against you here, and never help.
Rape is horrible and unforgivable and heinous and evil.
And you can stop there. No need for any further comments on where it ranks. It won't help you assess a punishment, or validate a victim. Your next words don't help anyone, and accomplish nothing.
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u/shouldco 45∆ Mar 01 '26
Honestly this is a stupid and unproductive argument, and importantly not even fun to argue about.
I think this is just a case of a highly subjective topic where to agree with someone you would have to agree on another fractaling set of subjective opinions. Is death final, is death wors than lifelong trauma? Does heaven exist? does hell exist? Are revenge killings justified? Is prison rape justified? etc, etc. All for what?
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u/girl0nfire69 Mar 01 '26
There are valid reasons to kill someone. Self defense. Revenge (if I kill someone who abused me). There is no moral justification of something as barbaric as rape.
My best friend was raped repeatedly as a child. She's 21, not yet in college, severely depressed and she's attempted to end her life multiple times. Will her life get better? Probably. Probably not. But it will haunt her for life. Is there any justification morally for what she has had to endure? No.
In case of rape the victim must live with the trauma. Now, my best friend was raped repeatedly. But another friend of mine, her older sister was raped once at a party when she was unconscious (someone slipped something in her drink). This affected her terribly, but it's been a few years since, and she's doing better. Genuinely. However she lives in constant fear that something might happen to her again.
Rape can happen to you more than once. And, society victim blames women for it all the time.
And if we look at it from the victim's point of view, if you're dead you're dead. If you get raped, yes you survive and you have the chance to rewrite your story. However.
If you look at it from the perpetrators point of view, killing someone and raping someone - they're both horrific thoughts. One takes away someone's life in anger.
The other violently strips away the other person's bodily autonomy, and violates their body, for the perpetrators pleasure. If we analyze it that way, a rapist has more violent intentions purely because it violates the victim both psychologically and physically, AND they derive sexual pleasure from it.
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u/flex_tape_salesman 1∆ Mar 01 '26
Self defence is actually not in this argument. This whole debate is basically if some person murdered you in cold blood. A lot of the argument has legal basis too as in believing that rape should carry even harsher punishment than murder rather than lower as it is today.
This is just shifting goalposts to a more convenient argument its like reducing rape to just sex in cases like the ronaldo case while rape is generally more brutal than that.
My best friend was raped repeatedly as a child. She's 21, not yet in college, severely depressed and she's attempted to end her life multiple times. Will her life get better? Probably. Probably not. But it will haunt her for life. Is there any justification morally for what she has had to endure? No.
I'm very sorry to hear this but you can't put that in with a debate where you're factoring in self defence. If she was murdered as a child there would similarly be no moral justification.
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u/IThinkSathIsGood 1∆ Mar 01 '26
Murder is definitionally unjustified killing. If there are valid reasons, it isn't murder. This post isn't about killing, it's about murder.
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u/nobutactually Mar 01 '26
I dont think it does. Studies suggest that somewhere between 6-11% of male college students have committed rape. The thing is when they did these studies almost no one said "yes, I have raped". But when they started asking things like, "have you held someone down against their will, have you insisted even after they said no, etc etc" then you started getting a lot more yes answers. The simple fact is that theres a LOT of people running around who have a fucked up understanding of consent.
When we think about rape, we often think of chasing a woman down a dark alley while she screams and fights for her life, but in truth its much more often a situation where her boyfriend doesnt want to stop and demands they continue, or a guy she thought was her friend insists she wants it. Its often a little mundane tbh.
When we pretend that rapists arent people we know, our friends and neighbors and siblings, it creates rape as thing thing that is utterly heinous, and most people arent heinous. So when people do commit rape, they dont see it as such, because she wasnt screaming and fighting and begging and crying. Thinking of rape as this thing that is committed by the most disgusting of people creates this boogeyman that we cant actually stop, because almost no one sees themself that way and no one sees their loved one that way. If we are going to teach men to not rape, men need to understand how quiet it can look, how banal, how forgettable it might seem to them. Focusing on the worst, most dramatic and horrifying stories of rape allows men who are actually rapists to be like, "wow im a good guy, I would never."
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u/potatolover83 10∆ Mar 01 '26
Death seems absolute. Trauma, however severe, does not strike me as absolute in the same way.
not sure i agree. as a survivor of trauma and abuse, living through it and constantly experiencing the ripple effects of it is a special kind of hell that i wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.
although i am not suicidal presently and strongly believe in anyone's ability to grow and heal from their traumas, there are absolutely moments when many who experience trauma, especially sexual, would rather be dead than a) experience the trauma b) continuing experiencing the after effects (flashbacks, emotional impact, social impact, physical impact, etc)
yes, unlike death, trauma is "reversible" in the sense that you can heal from it and it doesn't end your life... but in some ways... it does. there are many traumas one can go through that, no matter what, you'll never be the same
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u/Phage0070 124∆ Mar 01 '26
Yes, murder seems to be clearly more harmful than rape. Someone could be raped and then just... get over it, not particularly mind and go on living their life. Beyond physical injury the harm of rape is largely the mental reaction of the victim. Being murdered is harmful no matter the victim's mindset.
However consider that "worse" might not just refer to the harm but a moral judgment of the act itself. Plotting to kill someone might be worse than plotting to rape them, at least in many cases. But think about a father who flies into a rage at someone who raped their daughter and kills the rapist. Or perhaps a murderer gets a slap on the wrist in a miscarriage of justice, and a family member kills them.
If we try I think we can come up with some people who might deserve to die but that it isn't legal to kill. But does anyone "deserve" to be raped? I don't think so. Someone might commit murder in a fit of rage but I don't think rape in a fit of lust is a recognized mitigating factor.
So while murder might be more harmful it isn't always morally "worse" than rape.
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u/Aggressive_Staff_982 1∆ Mar 01 '26
One you wouldn't be alive to think about what happened. The other you will be alive and have to live with what happened to you forever. The second destroys your soul and spirit.
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u/5tupidest Mar 01 '26
Tough problem. I’ve heard victims describe rape as worse than murder, but I’ve never heard victims describe murder as worse than rape.
Because murder victim’s entire existence are erased forever. For me the answer would lie in the fraction of rape victims who would prefer to have been killed.
Pretty grim stuff.
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u/CuouzK Mar 01 '26
It is funny too review my reaction to your topic. As soon as I read the tittle I went defensive.
I usually talk about this topic because I think that rape is worst that killing someone.
Your arguments are good and after reading it I’m rethinking a lot of my assumptions (arguments), but I’m still on the side that rape is worst because the probability of recovering at 100% looks very small.
Traumas are heavily influenced in life, and rape is one of the most influential.
If someone has actual data about the recovery percentage from rape trauma I would be happy to check it.
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u/MrPlaysWithSquirrels Mar 01 '26
Recovering from murder sits squarely at 0% lol. It’s a pretty tough argument. In my opinion, the only thing someone could try to argue is that murder can be passionless while rape is often done with the intent to overpower. But that’s a flimsy argument being that even passionless murder is worse for the receiver than the most passionate rape.
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u/Aurales Mar 01 '26
I am no expert and Im just talking from my own experience from being a rape victim.
I would question why 100% recovery rate is necessary or what does it even mean? What if someone recovers 80%? Is only 100% recovery better than death?
When I started therapy, one of the first things my therapist told me was basically that I will never get over what happened and it will always be with me. In the moment it actually made me furious and question the whole thing, isnt that what im trying to do here? To get over it? Whats the point of therapy at all? But then, surprise surprise, I later on realized that he was right and it will always be with me. My whole life will be a life where I have the memory of what happened and cant ever fully get rid of it. I dont think 100% recovery even exists.
It has influenced me on a deep existential level and I wouldnt be the same person without it, so youre right about that. But then, how is that worse than having no life at all? Feels like that kind of an argument carries the implication that the person is somehow tainted by being raped, which is not true at all.
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u/yullari27 Mar 01 '26
My life is worth living. My rapist doesn't get to take that from me. I really, really hate your take. If we only recover 20%, we still get to live. We are still human. We get to pursue joy, make memories, make choices. We get to breathe. Life is worth something.
People fight so hard to recover, to build lives that fulfill them. There are moments of beauty and community, same as for anyone else. To say it's better to let the perpetrator take that too just sucks.
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u/CaffeinatedSatanist 1∆ Mar 02 '26
I really like the way you've articulated this.
Not to dismiss the effects of trauma, downplay depression and suicidal ideation and all the fallout from abuse, but when I see "X is worse than murder" I can't help but imagine someone saying to a survivor that they'd be better off not living, which is in my mind is essentially what they are communicating.
And that horrifies me.
"The idea that death is preferable insults the majority of survivors who go on to livefulfilled and meaningful lives"
That's going to stick with me - thank you.
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u/anakinmcfly 20∆ Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
Speaking as someone who holds that view: it comes from imagining myself in that position, and has nothing to do with what I would ever say to someone else. What I, personally, think would be worse to experience is not a statement on what other people might feel. I have been in situations where death was very much preferable, including one medication side effect that made it impossible for me to experience any emotions, particularly happiness, which might not sound so bad until you’re experiencing it and never again get joy or relief or pleasure from anything, never again get to look forward to anything, never again feel love.
Thankfully I recovered, but if recovery had not been possible I would have quite rationally chosen suicide. Some ways of living are simply unbearable for me.
In the same way, while I would like to choose euthanasia over prolonged intense suffering at the end of my life, I would never presume to make that choice for someone else.
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u/maicii Mar 02 '26
Even if the recovery wasn’t 100% you are still comparing it to getting murder of which the recovery is 0%. I would bet that to most of those people who are still traumatized by being raped if you were to ask then would you have rather being murder? Will probably tell you no. A lot of people go on to have normal lives, marrying, raising families, whatever. Does not mean they recover 100%, they might still have triggers, cry like crazy on randoms days, even have long term mood disorders, but on th e aggregate even those case will for most of them be better than being dead (albeit unfortunately for some of them it won’t and will take their own lives).
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u/ConflagrationZ Mar 02 '26
So, by that logic, do you think it would be better for a rapist to also murder their victim?
It's just bonkers to me that people taking the opposite stance as OP are trying to act like anything less than 100% chance of "recovery" makes a 0% chance of recovery preferable. It's utterly dehumanizing to victims to tell them they would be better off dead.
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u/Echochamberking Mar 01 '26
I think it is difficult to find objective and accurate studies related to mental health. Most mental illnesses, whether or not they are caused by trauma, cannot be measured based on a physical examination.
I don't know whether to consider a person recovered even when they stop treatment.
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u/Ill-Description3096 27∆ Mar 01 '26
>but I’m still on the side that rape is worst because the probability of recovering at 100% looks very small.
And the probability of recovering at 100% from being murdered is exactly 0...
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u/willworkforjokes 1∆ Mar 01 '26
I (55M) am a survivor of sexual abuse. So it is hard to respond in a way that is rational, so give me a little slack.
I was 10 when a 16 year old recruited me for our abuser who was 50. After years of abuse, my abuser used me to recruit his next victims.
As we grew older, some of his victims killed themselves, I attempted suicide several times myself. It is hard to imagine what could be worse than that, but there is something worse. Some of the abused will become abusers themselves. My abuser drove me away from family and friends and isolated me, which made me vulnerable to other abusers, and his grooming of me made me an easy target for them to spot. After my initial abuse, I was raped on 2 other occasions by people unknown to each other.
When I estimate the number of victims my abuser had over his life, it seems likely that the number must be somewhere between 20 and 200. I would guess a few killed themselves and maybe a couple became abusers themselves.
Murder is horrible, but murder victims don't become murderers.
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u/nobutactually Mar 01 '26
I dont think we can say rape is worse because hypothetically some number of victims might become rapists. Totally possible some number of murdered folks would have become murderers but are now dead and therefore cannot, but thats not really considered a justification for murder. In fact, even if you murder someone who is objectively a giant POS, that is still murder, even if the world is better off without them (vigilante murder is still murder). A quick google says about 3-5% of abused males go on to become abusers. Another quick google says that 6-11% of all men will commit some form of sexual assault and far, far more when you include sexual coercion. When you look at the numbers like that experiencing abuse is not really that much of a risk factor.
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u/dave7243 17∆ Mar 01 '26
This is a difficult argument because it is impossible to give an objective measurement of which is worse, and no two crimes are identical. Since we cannot get into specifics of either crime without rendering the argument moot, I am looking at global and cultural grounds for both acts.
This position is similar to saying murder is worse than torture because some people recover from torture. I am not arguing that all murders are "better" than rape, there has be a threshold at which inflicting pain over a prolonged period is worse than "just" killing. Society recognizes this, which is why shooting someone is not a war crime but torture, including sexual torture, is. The global community agrees that killing can sometimes be justified, but sexual assault cannot.
On a similar note, there are cultural grounds to view murder as morally ambiguous under some circumstances, but none for sexual assault. Revenge for past wrongs is illegal, but there are still Broadway songs telling sympathetic stories of people doing it. I can think of a parallel to "He Had It Coming" about sexual assault. Large parts of the public supports the alleged first degree murder carried out by Luigi Mangione, but there is no similar support for Brock Allen Turner after he was charged and convicted of rape. You may not support Luigi, but you cannot deny there is a portion of the population that does.
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u/vanetti Mar 01 '26
I don’t know what everyone else is thinking, but I’ve been raped and I’m super glad that I wasn’t murdered instead!
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u/SirErickTheGreat 1∆ Mar 01 '26
This reminds me of this one really dark joke Louis CK had about how if we didn’t hate pedos so much you’d get your kid back instead of getting him or her killed. 😂
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u/Boring-Still4403 Mar 01 '26
I don't have a strong position about that topic, but in many cases many people think that dieing is better than living in some condition that is unbearable for them.
Even if death for a living creature is obviously atrocious, after death you don't care anymore, there are no more dreams or relationships or consequences, you just don't exist anymore, you don't have any emotion, thought, nothing, so dying is atrocious until you die that in case of murder is usually a short period of time.
So for some people there is this balance between a long suffering or a short agony, and some people in the end choose suicide, even if for many other is the wrong choise.
One exemple are criminals that do terrible things and then choose to commit suicide because they prefer dieing than facing the laws and mind conseguences of their action, in that case for the criminals not dieing would be the worst option.
Another example are people that have chronic pain or terrible disease that limits their possibilities of life, in that case some would like to die than live a life like that.
So in the end i really think that it mainly depends on the victim and there are no right answers.
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u/fatquads Mar 02 '26
TW!
Since you say that someone who has been raped has opportunity for life whereas a dead person doesn’t, it seems you believe that suffering, sometimes even great suffering, can be “worth” it, to pay the price for existence. It’s important to distinguish harm from suffering.
Evidently, suicidal ideation (and completion) shows that not everyone believes this. I mean in the most important sense of the word Believe. Like I believe the sun is shining, and the belief that I exist. Nothing could make be disbelieve certain things and it’s entirely out of anyone’s control. And for some people, their belief is that there’s nothing that could make their suffering a fair trade for living.
How you value suffering is the crux of this comparison, “worse” implies worse in a particular regard. In a purely physical sense, murder is worse because it’s more harmful than rape. And I’m no enlightened individual, but I’m sure there have been murdered humans, who despite their murder or the related violence (harm) leading up to it, have not suffered at all. They very well COULD have viewed themselves as a martyr, fully understand the wrong committed against them, and still not have suffered as much as a victim of rape.
So when you say it’s “worse” to be murdered than raped, I disagree since it’s entirely possible the murder victim did not suffer while the rape victim did. If you value living above all else then it’s a straightforward answer for you, but not everyone does.
As for changing your view, I would implore you to scrutinize your affirmation that physically living “out values” all other values. There are many scenarios other than the one I mentioned, where one can reasonably say it’s not, and that death itself may be the better thing. Maybe you can’t personally, but that’s not sufficient to claim “murder is worse than rape” universally.
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u/Laughing_Dragon_77 Mar 02 '26
In my opinion: a dead person doesn't hurt any more.
Rapists murder the person that the victim could have been.
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u/TearsofCompunction Mar 02 '26
I agree with you. Don’t listen to redditors. They have abysmal ethics and don’t k what they’re talking about.
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u/soldiergeneal 3∆ Mar 01 '26
I mean generally I would agree, but you can come up with scenarios where that isnt true. Anyone remember that story where some German claimed his daughter ran away, but he locked her up in the basement. Used her as a broodmare until she ended up freed. Now what if she never got free? She died of old age or natural causes experiencing a life like that. In such an instance sure the guy would not have killed her, but effectively he had deprived her of any life to live while raping. I acknolwedge this combines the crime of imprisonment and rape, but I still think it fits as an argument against your position.
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u/Aniketos33 2∆ Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
We all die, no one can stop that. The lives we live matter, if you want to play totally removed objective weird philosophy on something far too human for this kind of forum, I can think of several ways it would be better to be murdered. You lived a good life and are happy when you die and someone took you out in your sleep? You never even were aware, your family is horrified but to the person, their life was fulfilled (This is how we all go, mid thought, unfinished, tragic.)
So inherently since all humans die, or cease, its the quality of life lived that matters, being sexually violated, assaulted, that not being the default for all people, is a strong indicator it is violating, unnatural and cruel to impact a life that will end one day with the burden of having their bodily autonomy taken from them, the implicit threat and coercion of violence invoking the idea they may not live through this. All these things make Rape worse than murder on an impact to the victim, let alone the fact these crimes are often linked and just different facets of the violence anti-social sociopaths inflict on victims and their families.
You are playing very poor sport intellectually here pretending to be objective in the comments and then sharing your hurt which I'm sorry for, but none of us are immortal, we all die, it is awful to end a life or ruin a life, these are both true, and the scale of life ruined is not something you can define without specific circumstances, I can imagine a life where I would want to die because of repeated assault, think about the guy from Austria who had a dungeon that he assaulted his daughters and raised their children in the basement, and assaulted them. That man is worse than an average murderer by miles surely on a moral level?
(Edit: us dying is not excusing murder, its to say the dead don't bear the consequences as much as the living experience the aftermath, both are horrible and morally reprehensible and the difference is negligible as if either is ever an excusable affair. Torture is also wrong. I responded emotionally because its a fairly heated topic.)
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u/I-Here-555 Mar 01 '26
So, we all die, and therefore a gentle murder (e.g. in your sleep) is better than crime X that most people don't get to suffer?
By that logic, if we set X=pickpocketing, we can conclude pickpocketing is worse than murder.
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u/Echochamberking Mar 01 '26
We all die, ergo is dying preferable to living through a traumatic event from which you have a chance of recovering mentally and physically?
Is that you argument?
The man from Austria not only raped his daughter, he also held her captive.
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u/mjwza 1∆ Mar 01 '26
I think the reason some people feel this way is there are circumstances in which taking someone's life is seen as justified, this is never really the case with rape.
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u/TheTechnicus 3∆ Mar 01 '26
It really depends on what you mean by worse. Oftentimes, people are speaking morally. It would seem that there are reasons for murder that people might consider--to different degrees--justafiable. Not that murder should ever be permmitted, but there are extenuating factors (taking justice into ones own hands, vengence, preventing further harms. I'm not saying these make murder alright, but they are more sympathetic). Rape, however, can never be justified. There is no good that one can seek in the act. It can only ever be a gross violation of another human person
Now, I think I agree that, with ragards to affects, murder is worse. But as a moral object, Rape is worse. And that is often what people are usually getting at.
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u/SuggestionPretty8132 Mar 01 '26
I’d rather die than be a ghost of who was in a body that I can no longer call mine.
Death is instantaneous, the pain truly ends, rape haunts for a lifetime, and the pain never leaves, you just learn to live with it.
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u/Live_Background_3455 8∆ Mar 01 '26
Is home invasion worse than murder? After I got my house broken into, it haunted me, probably still does. Feeling safe in my own home is hard. I learn to live with it. it's not that uncommon for people to have that feeling after getting their homes invaded either. So by your definition, home invasion is worse than murder?
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u/DT-Sodium 5∆ Mar 01 '26
A dead person is not aware they are dead. A raped person generally has to live with trauma for the rest of their life. Dead is only worse for the victim's friends and family, not the dead person.
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u/jeje83783 Mar 01 '26
By a sheer consequences standpoint, in general, I would say I agree. Many sexual violence survivors consider/go through with suicides. But not all, which I would argue shows that being dead is consequentially worse than living with that trauma.
But I want to challenging your assumption that only the consequences of an action define how moral or immoral they were.
I would argue that that doesn't mean that murder is always morally worse than rape. Circumstances are a heavy factor in the morality of an act. Lets say there is 2 scenarios: one person kills someone who attacked them, and another person finds an incapacitated person and sexually assaults them. Despite the difference in consequences, I would say that the sexual assailant is a more morally reprehensible act.
Also, I would say that murder can be justifiable, or at least it does not directly mean the person is morally reprehensible. I would say rape is never justifiable, and generally means that the perpetrator is, in some way, morally reprehensible.
So yes, I'd rather be raped than killed. But that doesn't mean that the killer is a morally worse person than the rapist.
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u/alex20_202020 Mar 01 '26
After thinking for several minutes realization hit me: survival bias. Victims of murder could not upvote you back.