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Supporting the death penalty.
Rape is worse than murder; murder can be justified in some cases, e.g self defense, but rape never can. Therefore on average, rape is more evil than murder (it's a question of 100% versus like 98.5% on the evil scale)
I think the first one is more contentious - yes it's mainstream but it genuinely gets people riled up. The second one sounds shocking but is mainly just hard to articulate.
I'm in a funny spot, because I think reducing the number of shitty people on this planet is great! ...But I don't trust a government to accurately determine guilt. So I'm anti-death penalty, but not mad at all that Luigi (allegedly) murdered that shit bag CEO who has an entire business based on getting mandatory payments from people to deny and delay their necessary healthcare.
Completely agree. People like Luigi are essential, drawing a line in the sand for evil to see. That's not to say we need vigilantes constantly... but it feels like times right now are when we need a few.
EDIT: It also troubles me how the USA does the death penalty. There's a big argument of 'what if we kill someone who was mistakenly convicted' - I think if you stuck to only executing people who CERTAINLY committed the crime, you'd make huge strides in ridding the world of evil destructive rampage killers, anyway.
There are a ridiculous amount of killers in america who confess, boast, are proud of having killed. Who were caught on cctv, or otherwise witnessed killing.
Some people read this as "Every man secretly wants to be a pirate" but to me it says "everyone has a point where what is legal becomes incompatible with what is necessary"
I hear "the social contract has been ripped in half".
Everyone is focusing on the first, but I'd like to focus on the second.
Rape can absolutely be worse than murder. To the survivors who lost their loved one? Maybe not. To the victim? Yeah, sometimes. And if you're reading this and vehemently disagreeing, take a moment to read about the permanent physical damage that can be done from sexual assault, nevermind even the psychological aspects.
But not just rape. Other forms of torture (yes, rape should be considered a form of torture) can also apply. Ruining someone's life (say, getting them falsely imprisoned) could also do more harm than murder. It's all very situationally dependent.
And, of course, there is the rare occasion when killing another person is the best course of action (defense, mostly).
Asking in good faith: what happens when the wrong person is sentenced to death? It's happened many, many times before.
I think we should be very careful not to sentence people when there is doubt over if they did it - we would still have plenty of people to execute. Also said this in my reply to Bytemeister.
Thanks for your reply.
We agree on the core principle: we shouldn't execute people when there's doubt. The disagreement I have is about whether the system can ever be certain enough.
I'd argue that even cases that seem airtight at trial have fallen apart later (new evidence, recanted testimony, exposed misconduct etc etc...) If we acknowledge that human judgment is fallible, then a system with no "undo" means we're gambling with lives we can never give back.
Maybe the real question isn't whether we could find enough people we're sure about but whether any government should have the power to make that kind of irreversible mistake.
To be clear: I understand we're fundamentally on different ends of the table on this topic (and that's okay). I wanted to share my thoughts on it with you, not tell you you're wrong.
I appreciate you hearing me out!
I agree that rape is abhorrent. What I find weird is that it wasn't always seen that way. Men were literally allowed to rape their wives until relatively recently. I'm sure most men didn't, but it was framed as a sort of duty of a wife to 'submit' to their husbands and many simply endured unwanted sex as a sort of duty. That's still rape to me, but the chances are some ancestor of yours just let her husband 'have his way' without her wanting it at all, but allowed it through some sort of societal obligation. That's still rape. Is that as bad as murder?
Yeah, the only way I can get my head around it is assuming that it was very rare for someone to do marital rape.
This a good and challenging question. I suppose, as with murder, some instances of rape are worse than others (e.g attacking a random person violently VS. your spouse couldn't consent because you're both heavily intoxicated).
But no, what you describe there isn't worse than murder... so really I need to be more specific and state that rape can be worse than murder, or "[X] sexual assault scenario is worse than the act of murdering someone is".
At which point it becomes a less useful statement, and probably everyone agrees with it so it's not controversial at all.