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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Another reason why it intuitively feels worse than murder is that I could imagine myself (if the conditions were sufficiently extreme) perhaps killing another person with my own free will. Not so with rape; even though the act of murder itself is worse in my ethical calculus, rape categorically reveals the base nature of the perpetrator in a way murder doesn't.

I'd compare it with somebody who has their pet cat put down so they could cook and eat it. Morally not much worse than cooking some calamari, but it really says something about how messed up the person is.

Technically, there are cases where rape could be justified; it's just that most of the ones that are actually physically possible* are also so bizarre that one can assume they're negligible. The most plausible one is probably "fuckhead kidnaps man and woman, fuckhead tells man that unless man rapes woman - and no explaining to get her consent - fuckhead will shoot both man and woman".

And of course, all of the above deals with dictionary rape, not statutory rape, which is a huge mess and can be totally free of moral turpitude (the case I know off the top of my head went "girl seduces boy, boy asks for ID, girl provides fake ID, boy has consensual sex with girl, boy arrested for raping girl over girl's protests"; I think some nations' laws even have the insane edge case where if a minor forcibly rapes an adult, the adult is guilty of rape because strict liability).

*I'm thinking cases like the myth in Africa that having sex with a virgin cures HIV. If this were true, which it is not, there would be some hard moral questions in the case of HIV-positive individuals whom no virgin wanted to have sex with.