There are relevant differences between the rapist and the fetus conceived as a result of rape. If, after the fact, the rapist no longer poses a threat to the rape victim, then the victim's killing the rapist would be revenge rather than self-defense, and we normally take very different moral attitudes toward those two types of action. By contrast, the fetus still constitutes at least a burden, and perhaps also a threat, to the rape victim, and importantly a burden or threat for which the rape victim is in no way responsible. I think it's this absence of responsibility in the case of rape that makes the most important difference. Even if we assume that the fetus conceived by rape has as much intrinsic moral status as a normal five-year-old child, that wouldn't make the rape victim responsible for the fetus in a way that obligates her to allow the use of her body for its survival. There are many five-year-old children in the world for whose survival you and I aren't obligated to make highly burdensome sacrifices.
My co-panelist has drawn some genuine distinctions, but I'd expect many people to find his response unconvincing overall. One obvious reason: suppose I have a five-year-old child who poses a very substantial burden to me. Perhaps the child has a physical disability that makes extensive demands on my time and money. Most of us don't think this would provide even the slightest justification for killing the child. And unless I could be very sure that the child would be cared for, it doesn't even provide a justification for abandoning the child.
Now the analogy isn't perfect. After all, the rape victim is in no way responsible for the fetus. I may have chosen to become a parent; I may have accepted responsibility for the child. But even if we grant that those a re relevant differences, they don't seem to get us very far. Suppose the child wasn't mine but had been abandoned on my doorstep. It's hardly clear that this would make enough difference to justify killing the child or abandoning it once more.
It might be that with sufficiently subtle argument, we could wring out enough differences here to distinguish the cases. But that isn't my point. My point is that on the face of it, many people will find Stephen's reply unconvincing even if it can be defended at the end of the day. What interests me is what I'm guessing is the reason: if you reallu think of fetuses and five-year-olds as on par with one another, abortion is homicide. That said, I suspect very few people really think that a fetus and a five-year-old are moral equivalents. My guess is that this goes even for people who claim otherwise. For more on this point, see Peter Smith's excellent response to a question on abortion from 2011. You can read it HERE
From your last sentence, I take it that you at least think you think of a fetus and a five-year-old as being on the same moral level. I can't say for sure that you're wrong about your own views. (And yes: we can be wrong about what we really think. That's part of the point of the concept of self-deception.) But for anyone who doesn't see things that way, this will be a big part of the reason for the distinction: killing the rapist is murder; the victim is a person. Aborting a fetus isn't murder, because a fetus isn't a person.
It wouldn't follow from this that abortion is morally trivial. And it wouldn't follow that a fetus is nothing more than an object. But I'll confess that I find the view that a fetus is a full-fledged person all but incomprehensible. There are so many actual differences between fetuses and paradigm persons, not to mention so many differences (see Peter Smith's reply) in the ways we ordinarily think about fetuses and persons that I find the conceptual gap all but unbridgeable. Perhaps that puts me at the far end of the spectrum. But I don't think there's anything at all unusual in perceiving some significant gap here, even if one isn't prepared to admit it out loud. And if there is a gap, there's a big distinction between the two cases that potentially could do the work that I think Stephen's distinctions probably can't do.
I wanted to write this song because it felt so good to threaten his life, and I wondered if any survivors had ever done something like that. I am not a violent person, but I truly believe that when you are raped, underneath the shame, sadness, and utter loneliness is a murderous rage. When that rage remains buried, it leads to self-abuse. For me, it was eating disorders, drug addiction, depression, and suicide. I had the epiphany that I needed to kill the rapist inside me, instead of killing myself.
No it is not ok for you to kill this man. It is not permissible for you to take matters in your own hands like this. You would be extremely sinful for such actions if you carried them out and may have to face a similar penalty according to the laws of hudud in Shariah. Repent for the statements you have made since they have been said in extreme anger, and a believer needs to look at things with greater wisdom.
1. Allah will deal with this person for the grave sin and crime he has committed no matter where he is. He will deal with him in a way that none of us can and he will pay for his sins. Hence be patient and look to Allah for assistance.
2. In Islamic law, a rape or adultery can only be established through either confession or through four witnesses who have seen the act take place in front of them and are prepared to bear testimony in an Islamic court as to the sin committed. I am sure the victim or her family has since filed the case in the courts and it will be difficult for him to come back home.
3. There is absolutely nothing wrong in you marrying her if this is possible. In fact we would recommend it since she needs all the moral support she can and you cannot give her that without being married to her.
This answer was indexed from Qibla.com, which used to have a repository of Islamic Q&A answered by various scholars. The website is no longer in existence. It has now been transformed into a learning portal with paid Islamic course offering under the brand of Kiflayn.
Imagine if we fuck-this-shit-snapped en masse, and systematically killed men for no reason at all other than for being men. Imagine this culling starting in one country with five men a week. Then each week, this imaginary scenario would add more countries and kill more men in each of them. Fifty a week, then one hundred men, then five hundred.
Imagine an underground movement called Fuck the Patriarchy (FTP), which would claim responsibility and warn that it was putting the world on notice that it would keep killing more and more men until the patriarchy sent a representative to talk. We do not want money, it would say. We do not want a new president or prime minister to replace the current one, this imaginary claimant of responsibility would say. We do not want a few more seats in parliament. We do not want a pay raise. We do not want men to promise to do the laundry or to promise to babysit their own children. We do not want a few more crumbs. So send your representative, patriarchy, this imaginary claimant of responsibility would demand (I can imagine the infighting that would ensue).
How many do you think must be killed before patriarchy begins to be disbanded? One thousand? Ten thousand? One million? Is it barbaric? Is it savage? Many millions of men have been killed in wars begun by men against other men. Imagine this our declaration of war against patriarchy.
How would men feel when they saw so many of their fellow men, murdered simply for being, like them, men? Would they change their behavior -- walk together for safety, avoid certain areas of town, make sure they were not out beyond a certain time? How would boys feel, knowing that their gender made them walking targets? How would it make their parents feel? Would it change the way they raised or treated their sons? Would it change the way the boys behaved?
Unless we impose on societal consciousness just how rife violence against women is and how it is ordinary men who commit it -- and not psychopaths -- it will continue to benefit ordinary men. Denial of that enables men to distance themselves from the violence. Whether any individual man has ever beaten up or raped a woman is beside the point, because such violence, which is enabled and protected by patriarchy, helps maintain a social construct that privileges all men. They are beneficiaries of that violence because that violence upholds patriarchy. It is the foundation of patriarchy.
So, again, how many men would need to be killed in that imaginary scenario for patriarchy to take us seriously? And for how long would we have to wage battle before patriarchy begins to be dismantled?
Are my questions absurd? Yes, deliberately so. But we all must ask the absurd questions to fully take in the scale of violence that women consistently endure. How many women must be killed, raped, beaten, and emotionally abused until we do? And is self-defense the only form of violence allowed to women -- if at all? These are disturbing questions I know. I stand in the disturbance and discomfort caused by the questions I've posted. I insist you do too, because women, girls, and nonbinary and queer people face more than disturbance and discomfort than we can imagine -- they are dying, and patriarchy shows little concern.
The national U.S. average prison sentence of men who kill their female partners is two to six years, while women who kill their partners are sentenced on average to fifteen years, despite the fact that most women who kill their partners do so to protect themselves from violence initiated by their partners.
Women are the fastest-growing segment of the incarcerated population in the United States. According to the ACLU, as many as 90 percent of the women who are incarcerated for killing a man were battered by that same person and 79 percent of those in prison have suffered physical abuse before their arrest. Two-thirds of the women in jail are of color, and the majority of that population is also low-income, according to a 2016 Vera Institute of Justice report, Overlooked: Women and Jails in an Era of Reform. Further, according to the report, women represented just 13 percent of the jail population between 2009 and 2011, yet they represented 67 percent of the victims of staff-on-inmate sexual victimization.
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