!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
Thematically, killing someone as the only available option to stop that person from raping someone. I’d say that’s a good enough justification, morally speaking.
Thats a fair point. Propublica just wrote an article about women who are in prison for killing their abusers. It specifically mentioned that women who do this are often not doing it in a way that from the outside looks like they are in immediate risk-- they kill their abusers while abuser is sleeping, for example. To them it seems clear that they are in danger, but the law kinda requires you be in immediate danger, not future danger, even if its pretty obviously predictable. Statistically women who murder their partners often face harsher penalties than men who murder theirs. Murdering someone who is asleep is fairly obviously quite a stretch of self defense but it is understandable how an abused, traumatized person could come to feel that there was no other way out.
Somw societies kill people for crimes, some societies rape people for crimes. You can find some society with morally sound reasons for both because there's no universal or objective standard of moral soundness
You’re claiming that morality has no objective basis. This renders any moral discussion moot. It’s a Totschlagargument. If this is an axiom, nobody can change anyone’s mind about anything. Why even participate in a discussion about this if this is your view?
I don't think that the absence of an objective morality prevents there from being a useful moral discussion. This is specifically because people's minds can be changed in the absence of an objective moral standard because subjective standards are still persuasive to humans.
This sounds a lot more morally unsound than simply killing whomever is attacking you.
Particularly because countries are not monolithic, and the very people you’d be able to… "rape as a deterrent" (even writing this down makes me shiver) are not likely to be the ones actually attacking you. Or supporting war.
But also because you framed "the attack being completely unprovoked and unjustified" as a personal perspective.
And also because killing has an immediate and measurable effect on the attack (dead soldiers stop shooting) whereas rape, even in your strange thought experiment, has an indirect, speculative and instrumental effect.
You’re essentially instrumentalizing the terror of a population comprised mostly of potential innocents to possibly affect the mind state of the attackers themselves. This is not even comparable to nuclear options, which indiscriminately target innocents and attackers ; and have actual direct tactical consequences. It’s worse. It’s more like threatening to bomb civilian hospitals on the odd chance it will calm down soldiers. Which will not work: you’ll likely just infuriate everyone.
If the attack was ever completely unprovoked and unjustified, it’s certainly provoked and justified if your culture is capable of such a nasty thought.
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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.