Help me align my moral standards

[BiscuitTrouser]

This popped up in my mind after I saw a dicussion in another thread and now I want to know your opinion.

As far as I know:

Piracy is bad.
Murder is bad.
Rape is bad.
Child Rape is bad.
Tax Evasion is bad.
But of course they are not equally bad.

Questions:

Is child rape worse that murder? Why?
Yes? Then how many murders equals one child rape?
No? Then how many child rapes equal one murder?


Think of Nico Bellic (GTA IV) or that moron from Fable. Take the "evil approach" <let's slaughter some innocent civilians just for fun>. The game character (NOT the player, I repeat I'm not talking about the player) has an (almost) unlimited potential to be cold hearted bloody bastard of a murderer. He could do some good but he remains a murderer in the first place (if played in that way) So he is far worse than someone who would rape a 14 year old girl or something, is he not?


[Feel free to add your own details if you think I'm generalizing too much and you want to specify]

You see:

Piracy is bad - its theft and spitting in the faces of someone who slaved to make work you enjoy, those craven filth artists you hold in so much contempt that you would take while insulting them on their work and then demand more like its your god given right to make them produce things for you (hurrah youre a slave owner) have rights as well.

Murder is bad - its denying someone a future, where is the mercy when you decided you had more of a right to life than said person? Exactly, it assumes you are a better person than them, but anyone prepared to commit cold blooded murder is an animal and deserves as much mercy as they showed. Murders in the heat of the moment can be justified, not much, but i think a man who found his wife in bed with another man who stole is car, made him lose his job and caused his family to hate him has every excuse to be so blinded with rage he cant control himself. His murder isnt right by a long shot, but hell, i can understand the fury he must have felt. It makes the action more... human. Because to take a life without any kind of motivation other than selfish gain, without being threatened or angry to begin with is inhuman.

Rape is the worst crime i think can be committed - Imagine being violated so utterly it destroys you forever, someone takes something you used to hold intimate and precious and crushes it so much it scars you for life, replacing it with brutal violence and fear. I cant imagine something worse than that.

Child rape is possible THE worst crime in the above category. Raping someone 100% unable to resist, like date rape, or coma rape, is just horrific, how craven can you be to commit such an atrocity on someone so vulnerable, and someone with so much of a future. At least the above adult got to enjoy having that precious intimacy involved with that before hand (well maybe) this child will never know. Its still horrible for both parties, but child rapists are literally the filth of the earth.

Tax evasion - Someone put it awesome up here:

Tax evasion is bad because it is pathetic (It's only money. you don't support your government? Then be a man and try to overthrow them, not commit fraud)

You hate the government? Fucking say something, start a movement, go march up to the government building and scream at them, dont sissy out by hiding and preventing some poor old woman from having healthcare thanks to your cowardice.

Crimes do NOT have values. You cannot say "Is x murders worse than a rape". There is a limit for ALL crimes that borders unforgivable at which point it cant get worse, the punishment has to be death to be fair. Murdering ONE person in cold blood? Unforgivable. Raping ANYONE intentionally - unforgivable. DOnt try and maths a crime, its entirely based on circumstance, on intention, on many things, its not empirical, you have to compare on a case by case basis.

Stealing a billion dollars from poor people? Unforgivable, but since no one was personally violated and personally destroyed inside a life scentence would be the max you could give that person.

Also raping a 14 year old girl can vary. Is it a 60 year old man? Is it a 15 year old boy who "raped her" under statutary rape even though it was consentual?

 

[AngryPants]

Having them all lined up, is the same as saying all the conspiracy theorists believe in little green people equally as they believe multi-national-corporation conspiracy. It's one of the ways to manipulate someone's opinion using non-viable arguments: "You're patriot? Go kill someone we told you to. (despite the fact that it's even proven they done anything wrong). You don't want to kill someone for no obvious reason? Then you're traitor and a communist.". Same thing with software piracy being compared to rape and murder. Most of people in 3rd world countries will never be able to afford 60$ a game, simply because it's close or higher than their monthly wage. "It's a luxury and not everyone deserve to play games" you say? Well, next step would be deciding who got the right for such luxuries as right to live and to breath (One famous German politician once tried to).

Piracy is bad and illegal, but not necessarily amoral. People majority use to call pirates, are just hobbyists that are very good with coding that love competitive de-assembling of most sophisticated protection codes out there, trying to beat other groups in developing a hack faster. They don't sell it, they don't make any money of it. It's the people that download it to play games for free are the pirates. But who's being hunted? You know the answer...

Tax Evasion is bad, but if your government is using it to wage war, kill innocent people all around the world - it's not necessarily amoral either, while still illegal.

While...
Murder, Rape, Child Rape are all resulting in death penalty out here. Real crimes against real people are supposed to be punished appropriately.

 

[crudus]

Are you saying, it's not?

Not in that short sentence that is leading into a devil's advocate stance.

isn't that true tho... I mean yes murder is wrong regardless and all that but at 92 years old your already on the way out while as that 20 year old woman still has most of her life yet to go on a possibly do great things.

I'm not trying to be insensitive to elderly people getting killed or any thing, but i feel like there is a definite difference between killing some one at the end of their life and killing some one who is in the middle of living imo

Here's the thing: If it is better to murder a senior citizen than a college student, by how much is it worse? Does it take three senior citizen murders to equal one dead college student, or is it more of a two to three or one to two ratio? And since we are getting age involved, why not get the rest of the person's life involved? If the college student was a douchebag (at that point we would have to make an objective scale for douche-baggary) and the senior citizen was mother Teresa, how much does that skew the ratio? How would the fact that the college student wasn't a straight A student but helped with the community tip the scales? Is money a factor? Drugs? Whether they had kids? I could go on, but I think (read: hope) you get the idea. We would have to weigh everything each murdered person did in their life to figure out how "evil" of an act the murder was, and I do mean everything right down to their diets on a daily basis and wording of every conversation. Even then you have to figure out a baseline(i.e. murder is worth 25 years before you add in somebody's "life score" which goes from -100 to 100). Murder is murder.

 

[lacktheknack]

I generally don't rank my transgressions. If it directly or indirectly hurts someone, I try to not do it. Period.

 

[SidingWithTheEnemy]

I generally don't rank my transgressions. If it directly or indirectly hurts someone, I try to not do it. Period.

You don't rank them? I see.
So is everything equally bad then? It's confusing, it's not about what you try not to do. I think everybody tries NOT to rape someone (most of them know the consequences), though some fail horribly.

[...]

Rape is the worst crime i think can be committed [...]

Child rape is possible THE worst crime in the above category. [...]

Crimes do NOT have values. [...]

Is it just me or is this somewhat contradicting your own statement.

A very naive thought crossed my mind:
"If (child) rape is so utterly destroying why aren't all of the victims commiting suicide? Their life must be worth something. Something worthywhile must be there to have them continue their struggle"
So if their life is still worth something (though defiled and f*cked up in a very literal sense) it's not as worthless as being dead in the first place.

While some source say that the suicide rate is higher (Well call me Captain Obvious) it's not like every rape victim is doing it.

 

[BiscuitTrouser]

[...]

Rape is the worst crime i think can be committed [...]

Child rape is possible THE worst crime in the above category. [...]

Crimes do NOT have values. [...]

Is it just me or is this somewhat contradicting your own statement.

A very naive thought crossed my mind:
"If (child) rape is so utterly destroying why aren't all of the victims commiting suicide? Their life must be worth something. Something worthywhile must be there to have them continue their struggle"
So if their life is still worth something (though defiled and f*cked up in a very literal sense) it's not as worthless as being dead in the first place.

While some source say that the suicide rate is higher (Well call me Captain Obvious) it's not like every rape victim is doing it.

Id rather be dead than raped. End of. I cant really speak from a practical prospective since i dont know what either of those are like personally but i can pretty much see from imagining the implications that a quick shank to the chest is better than being violated like that.

Suicide isnt the only way of telling how fucked up they are - therapy, unable to get close to someone, fails school/work/family since it gets to them so badly. It can and likely will FUCK your life up. Hard. Forever. Suicide isnt the only way to tell.

One single crime can be worse than another single crime. But to compare it like "x murders = 1 rape" is silly. I can say "this guy who stole 10 dollers is better than a murderer" and thats fine, no numbers, just an observation. Im saying its fine to compare crimes and say "this ones worse" but to think that X of one = y of another is just silly.

 

[matrix guardian]

[sarcasm] piracy is worse than 3 murders and 2 child rapes combined. [/sarcasm]

But yeah, I'm with Crudus on this one. When you start comparing murduring which person is worse, it just gets too complicated to even be possible. Too many factors and too many different value weight scales. It's a different scale for each person who looks at it. Assigning value to a human life is cloudy territory. I tend to say the 20 year old woman has a value of "1 life" and the 92 year old man has a value of "1 life", so to murder either commits the same crime of destroying 1 life.

 

[SidingWithTheEnemy]

[...]
I can say "this guy who stole 10 dollers is better than a murderer" and thats fine, no numbers, just an observation. Im saying its fine to compare crimes and say "this ones worse" but to think that X of one = y of another is just silly.

I don't get this. For me this makes absolutely no sense. Your say something about 10 dollars vs. 1 murder but then you say "no numbers"
The way I see it, you just contradicted yourself again. But maybe I'm not getting your point. I'm sorry.

Oh and it's not silly because
a) otherwise the law wouldn't have included the term "repeat offender" to aggravate the sentence.
b) being raped every day by your step-brother is worse than being raped just once.
c) having your Mother killed by an homocidal maniac is not as bad as having your whole family killed.

 

[NiPah]

There are no moral standards, they are a sort of social construct that was invented through social evolution.

Pretty much society A has a certain set of moral standards and given enough time will do better then society B. These morals vary from location to location and individual to individual, but most have to do with the betterment of a certain society. Take the Inuit, allowing a daughter to die is ok since they wouldn't have enough food and women are not as good as men when it comes to hunting, something most societies of the Western world would find morally abhorrent. For an example of a failed moral standard look at the American Shaker's religious movement, they said all sex was a sin, they're gone now.

So yeah, there is no moral compass nor system to measure how bad something is against something else, just think along the lines of what will benefit your own society and yourself in the process.

 

[matrix guardian]

A very naive thought crossed my mind:
"If (child) rape is so utterly destroying why aren't all of the victims commiting suicide? Their life must be worth something. Something worthywhile must be there to have them continue their struggle"
So if their life is still worth something (though defiled and f*cked up in a very literal sense) it's not as worthless as being dead in the first place.

While some source say that the suicide rate is higher (Well call me Captain Obvious) it's not like every rape victim is doing it.

Id rather be dead than raped. End of. I cant really speak from a practical prospective since i dont know what either of those are like personally but i can pretty much see from imagining the implications that a quick shank to the chest is better than being violated like that.

Suicide isnt the only way of telling how fucked up they are - therapy, unable to get close to someone, fails school/work/family since it gets to them so badly. It can and likely will FUCK your life up. Hard. Forever. Suicide isnt the only way to tell.

What I think he was trying to say is that, if it is true that it is so preferable to be killed than to be raped, then why are there so many rape victims that don't commit suicied? If rape is worse than death, wouldn't they all want to kill themselves?

 

[BiscuitTrouser]

[...]
I can say "this guy who stole 10 dollers is better than a murderer" and thats fine, no numbers, just an observation. Im saying its fine to compare crimes and say "this ones worse" but to think that X of one = y of another is just silly.

I don't get this. For me this makes absolutely no sense. Your say something about 10 dollars vs. 1 murder but then you say "no numbers"
The way I see it, you just contradicted yourself again. But maybe I'm not getting your point. I'm sorry.

Oh and it's not silly because
a) otherwise the law wouldn't have included the term "repeat offender" to aggravate the sentence.
b) being raped every day by your step-brother is worse than being raped just once.
c) having your Mother killed by an homocidal maniac is not as bad as having your whole family killed.

Yes ok, lemme try and explain.

1.X of one crime is worse than x-1 of the same crime, because more the the same crime has been commited.

2. The repeat offender is to show they have no remorse, i feel that any crime that someone has done more than once shows this

3. Crimes vary so much in nature you cant say any one is better than another sweepingly without having the whole story. Its also unfair to say (without referencing the SAME CRIME) that x of one is worse than x of another since crimes arnt really that comparable with Eachother due to their, again, varying nature.

Obviously one murder is worse than 2. But is one murder worse than one rape? You dont have to decide, you call them both unforgivable and call it a day. My personal views show a rape is worse, but thats just me, we cant have law decided by personal views, in the eyes of the law crimes are unforgiable or they are not, regardless of "amount" done, assuming they are done without any understandable motivation.

To say "how many murders in a rape" i find very distatefull and to be honest can never grasp the complete difference in the two crimes. They both do very different things to a person, both are horrific, to compare them so bluntly in terms of numbers is i think, pointless.

Remember, two of the SAME crime, comparable to one of the SAME crime under the exact same circumstances. Two different crimes? Non comparable in terms of numbers. No amount of theft is a bad as a rape. No amount of murder can account for "one rape". You cant compare different crimes like that. If your going to do comparisons sweepingly i feel the same crime has to be used both times (ie 2 murders and 1 murder) or else you miss the nuance of each crimes different impacts on the victims life.

 

[BiscuitTrouser]

A very naive thought crossed my mind:
"If (child) rape is so utterly destroying why aren't all of the victims commiting suicide? Their life must be worth something. Something worthywhile must be there to have them continue their struggle"
So if their life is still worth something (though defiled and f*cked up in a very literal sense) it's not as worthless as being dead in the first place.

While some source say that the suicide rate is higher (Well call me Captain Obvious) it's not like every rape victim is doing it.

Id rather be dead than raped. End of. I cant really speak from a practical prospective since i dont know what either of those are like personally but i can pretty much see from imagining the implications that a quick shank to the chest is better than being violated like that.

Suicide isnt the only way of telling how fucked up they are - therapy, unable to get close to someone, fails school/work/family since it gets to them so badly. It can and likely will FUCK your life up. Hard. Forever. Suicide isnt the only way to tell.

What I think he was trying to say is that, if it is true that it is so preferable to be killed than to be raped, then why are there so many rape victims that don't commit suicied? If rape is worse than death, wouldn't they all want to kill themselves?

Because like all things, crimes and law have different view points in the public eye. Its called an opinion. I view rape as worse than death. Some people dont. Just because they dont doesnt mean i have to as well. Some do commit suicide, a large portion do, some dont. Varying opinions. Again im not sure ID kill myself if i was raped, rather that if given the choice of brutal rape or death id choose death.

 

[SidingWithTheEnemy]

A very naive thought crossed my mind:
"If (child) rape is so utterly destroying why aren't all of the victims commiting suicide? Their life must be worth something. Something worthywhile must be there to have them continue their struggle"
So if their life is still worth something (though defiled and f*cked up in a very literal sense) it's not as worthless as being dead in the first place.

While some source say that the suicide rate is higher (Well call me Captain Obvious) it's not like every rape victim is doing it.

[...]

What I think he was trying to say is that, if it is true that it is so preferable to be killed than to be raped, then why are there so many rape victims that don't commit suicied? If rape is worse than dead, wouldn't they all want to kill themselves?

Yes, thank you! That's it.
So, was it that difficult to grasp? I'm just trying to make sense here. Moral systems are bad for my health. If everything fails add logic and use math.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

I have no issue with tax evasion. It's a crime but I'd applaud anyone who can get away with it, more so if they can do so legally through a loop hole or good understanding of financial matters.

At the same time, if there was a news report of a daring corporate theft I would be impressed, not shocked. Maybe the Robin Hood myth has ruined me in this regard.

Don't care much about piracy either way. I think it's so commonplace it's hard not be de-sensitised to it. And regardless, in the UK at least, piracy is not a crime, it's an offence. It's a civil matter (copyright infringement), not a criminal matter.

Rapists and murderers are the apex of the criminal tree, no sympathy for any of those that perpetrate such crimes. Equal to these I would put those who prey on/steal from the elderly and suicide bombers. All are jointly the worst scum on the planet.

 

[SidingWithTheEnemy]

[...]
Obviously one murder is worse than 2. But is one murder worse than one rape? You dont have to decide, you call them both unforgivable and call it a day. [...]

No, you contradict yourself again, two murders are worse than one - but this probably is a typo.

[...]
To say "how many murders in a rape" i find very distatefull and to be honest can never grasp the complete difference in the two crimes. They both do very different things to a person, both are horrific, to compare them so bluntly in terms of numbers is i think, pointless.
[...]

It's not distasteful, it's a valid question to be examined thoughtfully. You may not like the involving process but considering the wide range of replies I got here so far makes it rather obvious that this is far away from pointless.
For me, numbers count, because 1 is a number as well. And there might be forms of thievery that are far worse than rape. Organ thievery for example. So we have to disagree here!

Honestly I rather be raped than having both of my kidneys being stolen! *Ouch*

 

[Helmutye]

I don't think you can take such a mathematical view of morality. Trying to assign numbers of even vague assessments of 'worse' or 'better' or 'X times worse' to horrible crimes like murder and rape seems like a hollow exercise that ultimately won't give you much--whether murder is worse than rape or rape worse than murder, you shouldn't be doing either. I think they're both beyond the point where severity really matters and it all just blends into 'evil.' It's kind of like trying to compare a 5000 ft fall to a 50,000 ft fall--neither is survivable, and at the end of both you're just as dead.

With things like piracy is gets a little fuzzier, because that involves theft of property rather than physical/emotional injury. Property theft can be very destructive--if a thief steals the money you need to buy your life-saving medicine, you will die--and I think the effect of the theft on the victim should be taken into account when determining the severity (so a person stealing $100 of office supplies from a global corporation isn't committing the same degree of crime that a person stealing $100 from a poor family that only had $100 to begin with). But unless the loss of property directly threatens your survival, I wouldn't consider it on the same level as crimes like murder and rape.

The other consideration is what to do after the crime has been committed. In the US at least we have a very slapdash, haphazard theory about crime and punishment that is basically just a collection of vague intuitive notions of justice and retribution. We don't have a clear idea of why we do things--for example, capital punishment is used partly because some people feel that retribution for the crime is important. Some people argue that it works as a deterrent (which of course it doesn't). Some people favor it simply for economic reasons--we are NEVER going to let Charles Manson out of prison, so why don't we just execute him and save taxpayers the cost of keeping him alive? But there is so much time between crime and execution that it definitely doesn't deter anyone from committing crimes. The appeals process basically extends the family's grief by decades--at every appeal they have to relive the horror they experienced, instead of being able to heal and make the most of the rest of their life. And considering how many times we have executed the wrong person, the idea of moral retribution is on pretty shaky ground as well.

People intuitively feel that a murderer deserves to be punished, but the fact is that no matter what you do to that murderer the crime has already been committed. The only thing you can do is try to keep it from happening again and restore peoples' faith in society so they can get back to living their lives. For example, a maniacal psycho who kills people for uncontrollable psychological reasons might warrant different treatment than a person who, in a fit of vengeful passion, killed their cheating spouse. For the spouse-killer, the crime was tied to a specific incident, whereas for the psycho the crime is almost an inherent part of their personality. And if the spouse-killer never killed again, is there any point to keeping them locked up?

To be clear, I'm not for letting murderers loose if we decide they probably won't do it again--I'm simply offering the point for consideration. I think we need to seriously consider crime and punishment more clearly, and settle on what we consider 'just' in our society.

 

[targren]

It all depends on your values. Preferably, ones you decide on your own, though it seems pretty popular to have them dictated to you these days by your parents, church, or political party.

Personally, I think applying "capitalist" ideals to the comforting of human suffering is more reprehensible than the killing of a single person, because it's systemic.