I don’t believe that any intellectually honest discussion should be suppressed because the topic makes people uncomfortable. Think of how useful the trolley problems are in exploring the uniqueness and conflcts within the human mind and within our cultural values. But the trolley problems are hypotheticals about people being horribly dismembered by a runaway train. Why isn’t that a sensitive subject? Certainly there are people who have been hit by vehicles or had someone they cared about hit by who could be offended at the trivialization of a horrible gruesome death, but we have almost no taboos against discussing death and murder in this way. No one would get horribly offended at a trolley problem.
Morbid hypotheticals are interesting intellectal discussions to test the limits of our reason, empathy, ethics, and morality. They are not advocacy for doing horrible things, any more than the trolley problems trivialize or embolden people to run people over. They’re often also just interesting discussions, seeing where other people fall in extreme scenarios, and seeing where the limits and borders of our own worldviews lie.
I think the idea that we should avoid certain subjects, create safe spaces, and all that is unsuitable for the open, intellectual discussions this board should strive for. It should not happen at universities, it shouldn’t happen here. If a user is a problem because he seems to have a posting history to disguise advocating for some horrific pet issue disguised as a hypothetical, that could be a separate problem, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
I don’t think a hypothetical like “would you eat an infant alive if it meant ridding the world of COVID-19” would be banned and shut down in this way, even though the idea of eating an infant alive is probably as horrific as rape. So I suspect the difference is probably in line with the push the board has been making in recent years to protect women and to fight misogyny, and rape is seen as something done to women, whereas murder is something done generically to people, so it gets labelled as problematic and banned far before any discussions about murder or other equally horrific things. I don’t think that’s a good policy on a board that should be dedicated to open and challenging discussion.