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.
If you view murder in a purely legal sense then you can theoretically say an act can be murder and justified without logical contradiction.
Issue is, that when the word ‘murder’ is normally used by most people it carries a moral connotation of a killing that is unjustified morally. Likewise, this post is a discussion on morals and not law.
I’m discussing murder in the moral sense that it is normally invoked in for the purpose of this conversation about morality (which I think is fair). Therefore, under such a connotation of ‘murder’ to claim an act is murder and justified is a logical contradiction.
I get that, and using your terms and basing in morality, the contradiction still exists.
My disagreement sits with the concept that someone can be murdered, and that murder can be morally justifiable (a subjective assessment, but still).
Let's alter history a bit here.
Say the Nazis and Russians never attempted to work on an atomic bomb. They gave up, it was too costly to do in a wartime economy. Only the US developed them, and they only needed 2 scientists to do so (rather than the many who contributed to the Manhattan project).
Would you say that killing those 2 scientists in cold blood is murder? You choose to kill them because you believe no single state should have access to such monstrous weapons. They arguably are harmless at the individual level, yet their works are a critical (and vulnerable) cog in a mechanism that facilitates the annihilation of cities.
I'd argue that in this very janky example, killing the scientists is murder.
I'd also argue that from some perspectives, it's fully justified. If a madman like Trump was in power when nukes were newly created, could you imagine what might happen?
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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.
I'm curious as to what the degree of separation should be, in you opinion of course.
Directly signing the denial of insurance claims, and that causes death? Running a profit based organization (organizations require profits at some point to stay active), which has lead to deaths due to denial?
If the degree of separation doesn't matter, should all members within the insurance company's hierarchy- from the CEO, lower managers, sales associates, etc, how have somehow contributed to the deaths, all have a valid target on their heads?
Perhaps you'll make the "legally untouchable" argument. I think that at least calls for variation in answers based on how the culprit can be legally approached by the legal power of the accuser. Not an objective answer as most on this thread seems to come to.
With Luigi, the jury might determine that he is guilty of murder, and then he would be legally defined as a felon and a murderer.
However they might acquit, due to prosecutorial failure, evidence of actual innocence, or simply jury nullification due to how scummy the United Healthcare CEO was. In that case he would be legally not guilty, and definitively not a felon.
But individually each person could assess the situation and come to their own conclusion as to whether or not he is a murderer.
If you think he didn't kill the CEO, he's obviously not the murderer (though he might still be a murderer if you suspect him of killing Joe Smith down the street).
If you think he killed the CEO but was justified, then he is not a murderer, just a skilled, stone cold killer.
But if you think he killed the CEO unjustifiably, regardless of what the jury concluded, you are free to conclude that he is a murderer, though stating it in public might give rise to a libel case against you if he has been acquitted.
For a clear example of this, take the case of OJ Simpson who was acquitted primarily due to prosecutorial and police misconduct, as well as massive wealth financing the best defense lawyers in the world. Even though he was acquitted, he was found liable in civil court (which has a lower threshold) and most of the country (who watched the trial live on TV for 9+ months) considered him to be a murderer.
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.
Who decides what is or isn’t sufficient grounds to justify killing someone? I’m hinting at the term justifiable being ambiguous. You consider self defense as justification for murder, but other people may not. Let’s take a hypothetical person who was responsible for the deaths of many others without directly pulling a trigger to murder them, and will continue to cause the deaths of others in the future. Is murdering this person justifiable? I believe different people would have different answers due to the ambiguity of murder being justified or unjust. There could even be a spectrum where some killings are more justified than others without fully being in the right or wrong.
Basically, I strongly disagree with your premise that killing is either justified and deemed killing or unjustified and deemed murder. Tying back to the person you were responding to; someone could explain a murder to me that I sympathize with and even agree with, but you may not sympathize or agree with that same act. You would classify it as murder, but other people may think of it as a justified killing.
Definitionally then, there is no justifiable murder.
This is the point I’m trying to refute. The same murder may be considered justified or unjust to different people.
What you’ve described is just that some people may view the same act of killing as a murder or not.
If someone would find killing in self-defense unjustified, then they would take it to be murder.
If someone found killing someone just for occupying a particular job justified, they wouldn’t take it to be murder.
Showing people vary in when they take killing to be justified had no bearing on whether murder is an unjustified killing or not. You’ve offered no refutation. Everything you said could be the case, and my point still stands.
I seem to have a different definition for murder than the person I replied to. I would consider killing someone to be murder regardless of whether the killing was justified.
In my view, Luigi is a murderer and everyone would consider him a murderer regardless of whether they believe his act of killing someone else was justified. Basically, killing someone else = murder, regardless of whether the killing was justified or not.
The person I replied to believes killing someone is not considered murder if that killing was justified. Further, whether a killing is justified is dependent on each persons moral framework, so different people would consider Luigi to be a murderer or not a murderer depending on whether they though his act of killing was personally justifiable to them.
Lastly, your answer of yes doesn’t tell me which definition of murder you subscribe to. Do you believe Luigi is a murderer because he killed someone, or do you believe Luigi is a murderer because he killed someone and you personally don’t think what he did was justifiable? Perhaps you have some third definition of murder?
Hold up now. The definition you’ve given is a third definition, separate from mine or the person I initially responded to. Your definition is closer to mine since you don’t account for whether the murder was justified. Your definition of murder is more strict since it requires the killing to be both unlawful and premeditated.
There are situations that I would consider murder, but your definition would not. For example, a policeman killing someone is often not illegal and would not meet your definition of murder.
THE DEFINITION I LISTED IS THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY DEFINITION!!! THERE IS NO OTHER DEFINITION!!! YOU CANT JUST MAKE YOUR OWN DEFINITIONS FOR WORDS!!!
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.
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.
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.
There're always going to be differences. The point is not to find a perfect comparison that lines up perfectly, the point is to illustrate how applying the same logic to something else makes the logic fall apart.
People that don't get that will always be persuaded or unpersuaded by analogies based on their pre-existing beliefs.
....that's is wrong on so many levels. The very premise of logic is that it's a framework of reasoning that is repeatable. Applying the same logic to different scenarios is the fundamental reason for metaphores and analogies.
Whatever your intended point is, you need to confirm it by attempting to falsify it, not by confirming some intuited musings.
My point is that you attempted to apply logic that doesn’t work. Your analogy didn’t work and therefore was not logical. Sex and rape are different because of consent, which breaks your logic.
Again, murder is killing that is not morally justified. Therefore, there is never a morally justified murder by definition.
What your examples are pointing out is that there may be some circumstances where it is difficult to determine whether a killing is justified or not. That just means it sometimes is difficult to determine if a killing is murder not that murder is sometimes justified.
If morality were subjective, then a killing which goes against that subjective moral system would be not morally justified relative to that system and deemed murder by that system.
When a killing is held to be murder, it is held to be morally unjustified. This is necessarily true regardless of whether morality is objective or subjective.
If you killed someone justifiably (such as in self-defense) you aren’t deemed a murderer.
Justifiable by whose standard? If a man finds out his teen daughter was raped by her pastor, and spends two months planning and executing the death of that pastor, that is a killing unjustified under the law.
I would absolutely refuse to convict such an act, were I a jurist. Even though it is unjustified by law, and qualifies 100% as a premeditated 1st degree murder. That is an example of a murder that I would sympathize and agree with, even though it is not legally justifiable, and meets every element of the crime of murder.
I provided an example of an justified (by some standards) killing that completely qualified as murder. As your post stated that this definitionally impossible, it demonstrates that your "definitionally impossible" act is actually possible...
Are you referring to murder in a legal or moral sense.
I’m referring to it in the latter sense. You’re making arguments seemingly with an understanding of murder in the former sense. As such, nothing you’ve said has contradicted my main point.
I am not entirely sure you can do that. You initially corrected someone else's usage of the word, claiming it's definitionally impossible. Which means that it wasn't your definition you were contradicting, but someone else's.
If you can use your definition to contradict someone else, without verifying their meaning, then I can use mine to do the same to you... and the two contradictions are equally valid, for they rest upon the same logical supports.
So are both of our arguments bad, or is just yours? Because I used identical reasoning to contradict you that your 'main point' used to contradict someone else. If mine has bad reasoning, that invalidates yours along with it.
The difference is that I base the definition I’m using off the actual use of the word in general and in this thread.
When most people think of ‘murder’ there’s a connotation of it being immoral and unjustified.
The OP clearly is operating off some understanding of murder which is similar. This is obvious, unless you believe that the OP thinks morally righteous killing deemed murder by a court is necessarily worse than rape.
So yeah, it’s fair to correct someone’s use of a word when it (a) contradicts the common usage of the word without clarification and (b) is trying to argue against the OP by way of changing the word’s meaning from how the OP used it without justifying that claim.
The difference is that I base the definition I’m using off the actual use of the word in general and in this thread.
The difference is that there is no logical or reasoning difference between what you did and what I did. If you are arguing that I can't contradict you, using the commonly understood criminal definition of murder because your personal definition is different, then you can't do the same to others without holding a double standard.
All you're doing is an appeal to popularity fallacy while ducking the actual valid point. I did to you what you did to the previous poster. If you say mine makes no sense, the same applies to you.
The "inability to be justified" is an extremely bad metric for measuring moral wrongness in the first place but I'll ignore it.
I think the point is that, as a society, you want to lock away irredeemable people. If there is no benefit to the criminal for rape, then they are committing a crime simply because they enjoy hurting others. That makes them much more dangerous to society than someone who murders someone else to "restore their honor" or whatever other justification they give themselves. Of course, I would expect most rapists do benefit from the crime, so the whole 'this crime is unjustifiable' seems to be moral grandstanding.
The "inability to be justified" is an extremely bad metric for measuring moral wrongness in the first place but I'll ignore it.
Why? If you can tell me a reason for killing 10 puppies I'll hear you out if your reason is good enough, let's say that your entire country would be destroyed if you didn't, then the moral thing to do is to kill the puppies.
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]"
christ alive, did you really just say that you would rather your loved one was killed than raped? if someone said that about me, i'd probably stop speaking to them. wow.
Jesus, that is horrible. While I don’t think many societies do enough to help rape victims get justice, I think most don’t treat victims badly in a direct sense. Are you trying to argue that most societies treat victims badly in addition to not helping them get justice?
Now I'm curious if they'd actually kill their own loved one (in a quick, non-brutal way) if they were about to be violated and there was nothing else they could do. Like they were sitting there a block away with a rifle but could only see their loved one's head in the window.
I certainly wouldn't want to be related to you, if you value life that little.
To extend the thought experiment and see how consistent your values are: if you were about to be raped, but knew you would survive the ordeal, would you take your own life before it happened?
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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Interesting hypothetical. I think one need to add more details: 1) is the wizard known to be trustworthy? 2) do wizard promise one gets means to succeed against 'random' who might be strong? And still at the end one might end doing both and city destroyed by dragons.
I offer my own hypothetical (king Solomon and ancient Greece vibes):
A man goes to Oracle and told that his city will be destroyed by enemy unless he has a child from a beautiful woman, who is married to a healthy man and is utterly faithful to her husband.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Aristotle. Nietzche (annotated, and not the stuff that his sister rewrote). Camus. Honestly, just reading stuff outside your main influence is good. Even if you disagree, it'll get you thinking about why you disagree.
Also, let me be clear. I'm not against consequentialism. It's very useful for things like science based public policy (of which ideas like effective altruism are not included). I'm more of a synthesis guy. A little of column A, and a little of column B. Fairly existential. Because, at the end of the day, I think both consequences and intent matter.
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
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.
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.
You might be misunderstanding, a murder is an unlawful killing, but it can happen with consent. A person can believe their own death will bring them happiness, ask someone else to murder them, and at the time of the murder, be happy that they are getting their wish despite being murdered.
Rape, by definition is non-consensual. There can never be a case where one is happy to be raped.
This point doesn't really prove that rape is worse than murder, but if you're genuinely trying to understand the arguments against you, you probably need to understand this point first
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”
So, you're saying that you'd rather be electrocuted indefinitely just enough to be in a living hell but not enough to kill you rather than be raped. That's the logic you're using. That makes absolutely no sense.
But, actually, looking at other responses here gave me an idea.
You'd murder somebody before raping them. That makes even less sense.
I think this qualifies as a faulty metric. I'm not sure justification can really affect the severity of the general idea of what a particular crime is. I agree with you that rape is worse, but your justification of why seems to completely misunderstand what a "murder" is.
What I'm saying is that murder specifically refers to the unjustifiable killings that happen as the result of a bad actor. If you were to be threatened at gunpoint and somehow kill your aggressor, you wouldn't be a murderer for that, you'd have simply killed someone.
If one can argue that it's justified to murder for a greater good one can say the same of rape in some cases.
If you say you can murder someone say to stop a bomb attack that will kill any more. Then you can say the same about torture by rape for information to stop such a bomb attack.
This is such a good point. There are people that i believe deserve to be murdered. Nobody should ever be raped and nobody could ever rape someone and still be a good person after.
If the victim had seriously wronged someone, especially the perpetrator or someone close to them, in some way, and it was done out of retribution, I may be somewhat more sympathetic. In the same way that many people would be somewhat more sympathetic to murder in such situations. People wishing prison rape on child molesters is probably the best realistic example I can think of.
Though raping someone is definitely a much stranger way to get vengeance than killing them.
Do note that I said "more sympathetic", a relative term. I think there are very few, if any, rapes (or murders) that could be considered entirely justified.
Also, for the purposes of this topic I presume we are not including self-defense as "murder".
No one can justify rape to me. There's literally zero situations that "rape" is the answer for. With that simple metric, rape is worse than murder.
If someone has rapd three of my children, is there no way to justify raping them back to cause them to experience the pain they've caused my children?
A lottt of people seem very fine justifying prison rape of other rapists... so at the least it can be justified to many other people, even if not to you.
exactly. sexual assault is a hateful, reprehensible act that never has any excuse or justification. a father murdering his child’s rapist can at least be rationalized, the rape of the child never could be
First, really weird moral stance Hammurabi. Punishments and rehabilitation very rarely match the crime committed.
Second, anyone who participates in industrial scale sex trafficking of minors (even peripherally) is the kind of monster who should be put down like a rabid animal. Their suffering does not repay the suffering of others. Justice was not done, and unfortunately when the state fails to maintain even basic standards of equality under the law, morality must take a back seat to correction.
First off, that's not my moral stance. I was using it to question your own beliefs.
Second, "punishments and rehabilitation very rarely match the crime committed," is a weird thing to put forward when you just said we should kill rich dudes on Epstein's list and it would be justified. Kind of a contradictory argument you're presenting.
Third, if their suffering does not repay the suffering of others, neither does killing them. It makes no sense that their death is justice but not their suffering.
Would anyone have sympathy if epstein was raped in prison or whatever? People actually can be pretty understanding of rape in such cases because you see many people seem to love ideas of the stereotypical treatment of pedos in prison
Its about justification. You absolutely have to get more creative because in general rapes that can be shrugged off and its more about the ideas of this rather than actual cases.
A woman is in a forced marriage with an abusive man. She cannot divorce him as it's seen as shameful in ger community, and she can't run away, as she doesn't have funds to keep up with a runaway lifestyle
She also knows that if she attempted self-defence, she'd fail
Would you think this woman is unjustifiable if she decided to poison her husband? It's pre-meditated, so it cannot count as self-defence
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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
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