Favorite Philosophers?

[Edwardo Piet]

Let me play devil's advocate then. A woman is attacked by a rapist (who only intended to rape her--not kill her). She defends herself by shooting him in the head with a 38 special. Justified?

I know you used that simply as an example but it does highlight difficulty in cases like this, if someone were to attack me I have no idea what the intentions are, so by instinct I'm likely to assume the worse case scenario.  I remember a judge in the U.K. arguing that in the case of a shoplifter for instance, the theft actually took place the moment  a person decides to steal and reaches out for it, but of course not being privy to a persons thoughts means that you have to wait till it's obvious the person is not going to pay for it through actions in order to have a case in court.
This is fine of course when what we are talking about is a bar of chocolate, but if someone is under attack, they clearly cannot afford to wait for it to play out.

Good point.

But of course in Vulcanlogician's question to me he says that the rapist does 'only' intend to rape her. Not that he might have been wanting to steal her purse and we assume he wanted to rape her. But he did intend to rape her. And scare quotes because I don't see that as an 'only'. In many cases I think I'd rather be murdered than raped. Again, it depends.

I think shooting someone dead in the head when they may have only been stealing a purse would be very bad. Because I don't think theft is anywhere near as bad as rape or murder at all. But if someone is clearly trying to rape someone then despite it not being legally justified I think killing them instantly with a shot to the head is morally justified because I don't actually think that's as bad as rape, at least in most cases, morally speaking.

Of course if we also have to factor in the consequences of the woman going to jail for manslaughter and having that trauma on top of the attempted rape, then I guess it depends really. Depends whether however long she spent in jail when being a victim would cause her more suffering than the being raped would have. And despite the fact that all rape causes huge amounts of trauma I do think some rapes are even worse than others. Some are more violent than others, some last longer than others, etc.

I still wouldn't think she did anything wrong morally because I think in many cases rape is so traumatic that it's worse than death. Maybe it wouldn't be worse than death if the attempted rapist had survived and had painful brain damage for many years, but again, even then I'm not sure. My best guess is that the psychological trauma would be worse. After all, we can experience great amounts of pain without necessarily being miserable and we can experience great amounts of physical pleasure and still be miserable . . . so overall I'd say that psychological pain is worse. Which is one of the reasons why I think that I'd probably even rather experience painful brain damage than experience being raped. Although I wouldn't really like to choose either to be honest!

It's certainly possible to be a rape victim and go on to live a fulfulling life despite that trauma, thankfully. But sadly it is not always the case and some people never recover, and lives are ruined. Whereas if someone dies instantly they not only suffer less but they don't really have any life left for there to be anything to fulfill or suffer with. I think death is morally neutral if you put aside the other people who grieve for the dead person. And my guess is that 1. People are less likely to grieve huge amounts for a rapist. 2. Even grief over death of a loved one may not be as painful an experience as rape. I guess, again, that depends. It's certainly a different type of suffering I think. And the experience of losing a child is probably usually a more painful grief than the experience of losing a parent, for example.

This all depends really. But at the end of the day I'm going to say that whatever causes the most suffering overall is overall the most immoral consequence.