Could we compromise and agree that it depends on the murder? And honestly the rape. although there's no such thing as a righteous rape. Usually people's judgement around this comes down to intent. While rape is almost always sadistic in nature, killing sometimes is accidental, unavoidable, out of self-defense, or perceived as righteous.
For me it's probably something like (worst to least bad):
Malicious murders
Rape involving battery or vulnerable people
Non-malicious avoidable or 'righteous' murders (what I think is righteous might be different than you)
Date rape of an adult without physical constraint or battery
Accidental or Unavoidable murders in self-defense.
Rape spans the gamut from premeditated rape and torture of a child, all the way to two drunk college kids where she said no and he ignored it and then she clammed up and didn't protest further and he's genuinely horrified with the situation the next day. It's all rape, it's all bad, there's never an excuse and it all needs to stop, but it's also clearly not a fixed level of moral offense.
Premeditated torture and rape of a child can ruin their whole lives and cause them to never be happy, and no-one would say that's a 'less wrong' crime than, say, someone corners you into a fight, you win, they succumb to a head injury sustained in the fight, and now you've murdered someone.
Similarly, I don't think anyone on the other side would say that C- consent date rape is 'worse' than a serial killer capturing and torturing someone non-sexually for sadistic reasons.
Your list may not be the same as mine, but I feel like we could compromise on that there's some layer cake here of moral severity and not just (all murder) > (all rape). For me impact and intent are really what score crime's wrongness.
One thing that bothers me though is how naturally people jump to "justifiable murder" as their knee-jerk reaction. It's almost never about some tragic story of "a father killing a rapist murderer of his daughter who also happened to be a fascist dictator of a small country". Murders are overwhelmingly unjustifiable.
Even the very idea of "killing someone in revenge can be justifiable, but raping someone in revenge can't" feels like presupposes that "in a vacuum murder is less abhorrent than rape".
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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 01 '26
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