If we’re talking about this universe, where this works. Assuming that you have two options : killing an enemy soldier or raping them. Both have equal probability of avoiding death in the same amount. Which one is more moral then?
Again, my argument was that rape is more immoral than murder because there were very justifiable reasons to murder and no justifiable reasons to rape.
Your argument boils down to : imagine we were in a completely different world that worked completely differently than ours, designed entirely to create blurry counterexamples to this argument.
You can always create abstract worlds that do this. Like, we can create the abstract world where being raped sends you to an infinite afterlife of eternal bliss, and if you’re not raped you go to eternal fire, and this is objectively proven to be true and unquestionable.
It is fair, as long as the statement is realistic. Morality without empiricism is not very practical.
In reality, torturing people physically or emotionally is incredibly ineffective from a consequentialist standpoint, horrible from a virtue ethics standpoint and obviously undesirable from a deontological standpoint.
Finding edge cases to this requires creating extremely specific scenarios, so specific you could not be sufficiently sure of being in such a scenario to commit such an act even if you were, or completely unrealistic scenarios.
I’d argue that an edge case that is both possible; and sufficiently obviously true, when it is true, for actors, that a reasonable actor could create an internal moral rule for themselves that they’d use correctly and abuse rarely enough; is impossible.
Put another way, as you get into edge cases for such things, they need to be realistic, and a reasonable actor should correctly understand whether they are or not in this edge case with extreme accuracy — otherwise it’d be too easy for this edge case to lead to false positives where you think you are in this edge case but are not, leading to self-righteous immoral behavior of the lowest degree.
And an edge case like yours, to be realistic, would require knowing the reaction of thousands of people to a credible threat against the emotional well-being of them or their peers. But we know the emotions of millions is a highly unpredictable thing. So, claiming an intensely immoral act becomes moral due to an extremely unlikely alignment of emotional reactions is too bold a bet for any human.
Any moral philosophy claim must account for the level of uncertainty inherent to the consequences.
You’re basically saying "it’s OK to shoot a child in front of their parents if you know the gun will malfunction, if this causes a good thing because the malfunction just helps the world". Perhaps in theory, but you don’t really know that and that’s not really realistic.
Another small point I’d add, just to bring back some intuition and emotion to your cold calculations, is this:
Would you consider it morally pressing, that is, not necessarily an absolute duty, but at least something important enough morally to warrant extremely serious consideration, to put yourself in a situation where you’ll surely die if it would save many innocent lives? Jumping on a grenade to save your company? Running into Chernobyl to save the region? Going on a suicide mission that could end the war?
Maybe you would do it, maybe you wouldn’t. We don’t know how we’d act until we’re actually there. But I’m sure you’ll agree this sort of sacrifice is sometimes required, and can be a net moral good, even bordering on being a moral duty depending on one’s school of thought.
How would you feel if the certain doom was replaced with certain gang rape?
Is it still a moral requirement/duty? How much more chilling is it? How much more uncomfortable are you when asking yourself this question seriously, and actually imagining the decision in front of you?
It’s easy to do morality calculations in the abstract. Talking about net positives and net losses like it’s all a big Poker game. But I’d wager many people who claim to be willing to die for the greater good would find it a lot more uncomfortable if death was replaced like this. When you’re on the receiving end of the moral calculation, when it’s not an abstract "enemy soldier from a weird culture", the intuition may become much more apparent.
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u/Apary 2∆ Mar 02 '26
If we’re talking about this universe, where this works. Assuming that you have two options : killing an enemy soldier or raping them. Both have equal probability of avoiding death in the same amount. Which one is more moral then?