http://tinyurl.com/5zwvt3
In his debate with Peter Payne, Dan Barker was asked:
"You stated that there are no actions that are absolutely wrong (such as lying, etc.), that there is always an exception. When then is rape considered okay? What is the exception to this action?"
Dan Barker's answer (56:25*):
Here's a hypothetical. And I just said it's hypothetical. You know how some species like cats like to play with mice before they kill them. I mean they have this weird thing about exaggerating the harm before they eat their meal. Suppose there was some advanced, powerful species outside of our solar system that came to earth and it was like that. And it was torturing people. And raping women. We thought how horrible, this is really bad. And suppose this culture for the fun of it said, "We're gonna kill the whole species. We're gonna kill all of you. We're gonna show how powerful we are." We think, "Boy, what an amoral group" right? We'd be afraid of them. But what if they said to you, "Before we're gonna kill everybody off, we just wanna have more fun here, if you will rape a woman, then we will let the rest of the species go, okay? We'll just leave. If you'll just do that one thing, and let us watch, because we're sickos, right? Then we'll save the rest of the planet." Now, I know that's not likely to happen but hypothetically something like that could happen. Nature is weird, right? In that weird case, which you and I would never see in our life time, you can make an argument - although it wouldn't be pleasant, and you wouldn't like it, and you would feel really bad about yourself, you would consider that to be the moral choice.
* - Audio here:
http://www.ffrf.org/about/bybarker/ethics_debate2.mp3
Related:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0baDyWo2tC0
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