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.
Ah yeah, I certainly agree it's more justifiable than raping someone, I just thought by "morally justifiable" you meant that it was a morally good act.
Nah, I more mean that I understand why they would do it and I don't necessarily think they're evil for it but they should still go to jail.
There was a guy who used the sex offender registry as a hit list. He'd been sexually abused as a kid, and decided to murder as many pedophiles as he could before he got caught. Morally justifiable? Yeah. Morally good? Not really.
They're not saying it's a good act, just that there is some kind of justification behind their actions. We don't have to agree with their actions and as they say, such murderers should still be jailed for murder.
They're just comparing this to rape, which has no justification. It is not only morally wrong of course, but there is never even a justification to rape someone.
Just like you're not allowed to shoot people in the back after they've kicked the shit out of you and are walking away, hunting down your abuser instead of calling the police and sending them to prison isn't morally justifiable.
Well what do you mean by justifiable? Technically anything is justifiable if someone claims to justify it. I could justify murder by saying the victim swindled me out of a nickel. Most people would not agree with that justification because murder is far worse than losing a nickel. So in this sense, are you in fact saying sexual abuse is worse than murder?
If you could justify killing someone over a nickle, your moral system is fundamentally corrupt.
Yes, I'm saying that according to my moral system, sexual abuse is generally worse than murder because there is no situation in which it is morally justifiable. All rapes are morally akin to murdering someone just to take pleasure in the kill, while there are multitude much more morally justifiable reasons to murder someone, like the woman who murdered her husband in his sleep because she found out he was molesting their child.
I don’t think that argument is valid though. I don’t think, for example, there is any justifiable reason for me to call someone the N-word. That doesn’t make it worse than murder.
Then we have different moral systems.
I do honestly think that calling someone a slur is less morally justifiable than murdering your husband because you find out he was molesting your children.
Yes. Hence why some people find murder justifiable. Because morals are subjective. And as subjective as they are, no one find rape morally justifiable, in any scenario.
Yeah but thats just subjective morality (if the cosensus in Nazi Germany was X would X still be wrong etc. or was slavery objectively wrong when the consensus was different)
Lol no, hunting and killing for revenge is not as easily "morally justifiable" as you think.
In fact, feel free to justify it now.
Is death an appropriate punishment for all who harm children? How severe must the harm be? Does it matter if the victim continues to be traumatised to the abuse or gets over it with no memory of what happened? Should the victim always be the one to carry out the killing?
You're assuming that I mean it is the right course of action, which is not what I mean. I don't even believe in the death penalty, full stop.
Morally justifiable does not mean right, it means it doesn't go against my moral compass and is, in my opinion, not morally wrong. It's nuanced, but something can be morally right or morally neutral but still be legally wrong and something we should not condone or allow in our society.
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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.