I wrote this at my blog a day or two ago, and I'm going to reproduce it here--it sparked a couple of interesting comments, and I suspect Ruchira has a larger readership than I do:
In light of this story, Tigtog poses this question:
Should men who are not soldiers be held to the same standards [as the Nuremberg precedent]? It's tempting when one feels oppressed by our rape culture to say yes, always. But is it ethically defensible, in either the war crime situation or the gang leader coercing rape situation, to demand that someone die to save another from assault?
After all, the bank manager who is coerced at gunpoint to open the safe for the armed robbers is not considered to be an accomplice to the crime, let alone charged with the crime itself.
My own gut reaction to rapists is to grab the blunt butter knife and fantasise about castration. In terms of social order I feel that even men who are coerced into rape should be punished for the greater good of women's safety in society. It's entirely justified pragmatically, but that's not always the same thing as ethical.
I left a brief comment at her blog stating my opinion that it would be unjust to punish people who are forced to commit crimes (reasonable minds may differ as to whether the defendants in the linked story were truly "forced," however--not all coercion is created equal). That the law has it right in this case. That furthermore I question the premise that punishment of men who are coerced into rape would even prove beneficial for women's safety (the reasoning being essentially that [a] I don't think it would be an effective deterrent and [b] if we don't punish people for coerced crimes, I still don't see this leading to an increase in those crimes or people staging coercion to get away with sexual assault).
I think the understanding (including but not limited to the legal understanding) of offences committed when forced under threat of death would be that these offences are not crimes. And no just society can punish its citizens for crimes they did not commit, right? I mean, that's just a little too close to George Orwell's 1984. So where's the problem?
Well the problem is that we may want to hold these fellows morally responsible for these actions which in all other circumstances are criminal. I know that my knee-jerk reaction is certainly to say that nothing, not even coercive force, justifies rape (or, say, murder--it certainly would justify Tigtog's example of a banker giving the bank-robber money). I tend to be a deontologist like that. But my personal moral philosophy may be incoherent, because sometimes I also want to be a consequentialist. And if a guy holds a gun up to my head and says "shoot that dude or I'll kill you," and if I refuse, I'm probably going to end up dead and so is that dude. So what real good did sticking to my principle out of some sort of Kantian childish fit actually accomplish? Tigtog also seems to raise the interesting related question of if it would be ethically justifiable for X to sexually assault Y to save X's own life (which would draw a distinction with the scenario of X killing Y to save X's own life if we look at this like a utilitarian). Ordinarily I would say that rape is probably just as bad as murder, but in a very narrow situation like that maybe it weights out differently. As a man maybe it's not my place to say. Hell, as a human being maybe it's not my place to say, maybe the question's too difficult, and hence the sticking to my deontological principles.
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