Guys: Would you ever rape and murder a girl?

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Simple. Hale was taught (part of the programming his sponge-brain absorbed, as I described above) that what he was saying was morally right, that he was in fact empathizing with the women because it's what was really "best" for them. His programming overrode his natural sense of empathy. That's a part of our evolutionary heritage, as well; it how we're able to go to war with the tribe over the hill, because our social programming has said that those Others aren't really people like us, but a threat. Politicians still exploit this loophole by trying to make us see the Other (whichever nation has political opposition to our national objectives or natural resources we covet) as a threat with which we no longer need to empathize. It's why the use of the word "animal" was sufficient to reduce the empathy of the test subjects in the Milgram experiments.

There are two systems at work, here. It is a battle between our group-instinct (social programming) and our natural empathy. It's why it's so important to attack the religions that claim it's okay to do X to someone because God.

Hale, having been programmed by his religion to override empathy for the person because God Says This Is Right, wrote a defense of the "place" of the wife. I have little doubt that he would have, if asked, said that what he was doing was for the good of those women, not seeing it as rape as we do, today, because to him that would have defied the order he believed God had imposed on the marriage relationship (the woman becoming property... no doubt he would also have defended slavery, then, as Biblical). It was when people with stronger senses of empathy than senses of social propriety began to say, "Hey, wait a minute, these women say this is torture to them..." that we began to change those social rules. The same happened with slavery. Empathy won over a bad program. We do what we do here because we hope that we can show people that their programs are artificial, and that it's more important to see that "wrong people" (e.g. gays) per the program still should be empathized with enough to be left alone without harming them, that the religion provides insufficient justification for overriding that empathy.

If you'd like to know more, I suppose you could start with the references section to the Wiki article on the evolution of morality:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_morality