Is this guy worse than Hitler in your opinion?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Normally I’m the first to say rehabilitation works, and that people who kill, rape etc shouldn’t necessarily be locked away forever and considered subhuman, but this crime is beyond the pale! And the fact that he blamed the mother shows that he isn’t remorseful at all and knew exactly what he was doing.

In a way this crime is more disgusting than killing six million people. Of course it’s not really worse in terms of scope but I would say in a sense it’s even more depraved than killing an entire race of people.

2

I don’t watch random videos.

Describe, please. Use words.

3

I suppose it’s asking too much for you to summarize the video so we don’t all have to sit through it?

4

I didn’t watch the video either, but the title is “Guy Rapes 15 Months Old Baby To Death”, which tells you pretty much all you need to know.

Anyway, still Hitler.

5

Obviously, raping a baby to death is pretty awful. But it’s still one person, vs millions.

I didn’t watch the video, so I’m assuming that’s the extent of this person’s crimes.

Hitler “wins”.

6

Well basically he raped and beat her to death. The title is technically slightly misleading since the rape wasn’t what caused her death, but I don’t think that makes much of a difference in how despicable what he did was. Just beating her to death alone would have made it pretty much just as terrible.

7

While Hitler might not himself have been that depraved¹, he pretty much enabled, ordered and approved of tens of millions of deaths and countless atrocities; and was certain to the end that they were good and right². No comparison to one heinous rape/murder.

¹ Although there are stories of various kinks
²Oddly enough, despite everything else they did, the Nazis disapproved of sexual “perversion”. Probably plenty of vanilla rapes but nothing “decadent”.

8

I’ll have to buck the tide here and proclaim that a person who abused and fatally beat a child is worse than Hitler. In fact, he’s worse than Hitler, Pol Pot and Stalin all rolled into one.

Unlike those three, he doesn’t have a snappy uniform to wear. And I’ll bet he doesn’t like dogs (as pets or dinner).

9

Would you rape a baby to death to stop Hitler?

Would you orchestrate the killing of millions to stop one baby rape?

10

And doing both isn’t a choice?

11

Isn’t the First Corollary to Godwin’s Law that a thread is over at the first comparison to Hitler?

So why is this still open?

12

  1. No, we would be deprived of so many great war movies.

  2. Yes, IF I can choose the millions.

13

Wasn’t Hitler a child rapist too. I think he had an affair with a niece.

14

Why rank them? There are plenty of despicable people and they all disgust me.

15

Yeah, these sort of “Who’s the bigger monster?” threads are really nothing more than an excuse to indulge in recreational morbid curiosity.

16

Hitler had many children murdered (as well as infants) and in many cases they were tortured before they died. So yeah, Hitler.

17

True… It’s a shallow pastime. But it does sometimes expose different thought patterns, different ways of evaluating costs, etc.

There is a truism among most of us here that even Hitler doesn’t deserve to burn in hell forever, and that, as bad as he was, his crimes were finite, whereas that model of hell is infinite.

But I have met people who don’t agree, and who think that infinite punishment for finite crimes is, in fact, morally justifiable.

So, dumb questions like that serve to highlight conceptual differences, some of which might not be mere abstractions but which might come in to real decisions. The questions about “Would you push a man in front of a train, if it were the only way to save twenty others” are, themselves contrived, but do focus on real moral questions. It’s a way of exploring the Hiroshima conundrum, for instance.

18

Serious question…

Do you honestly believe for a single moment that the motive of the OP was:

There are much better ways to start honest discussions of morality.
This is just another example of the “Stand By Me” syndrome where a juvenile finds something shocking and tries to score points by being the one who shows it off.

19

[quote=“zoid, post:18, topic:696334”]

Serious question…

Do you honestly believe for a single moment that the motive of the OP was: “to highlight conceptual differences, some of which might not be mere abstractions but which might come in to real decisions.”

I agree, of course. But that’s one of the good things about our deliberations here: we can build off of an OP, and develop it into more worthwhile ideas. All too often, topics degenerate, but there’s no reason they can’t evolve toward greater sophistication, every once in a while.

Is morality “well ordered?” Is morality “partially ordered?” Can we look at any two acts, and say, “A is worse than B?” (Or, perhaps, in rare cases, the two might be equal.)

Is there a transitive relationship? If A is worse than B, and B is worse than C, does it follow that A must be worse than C? Or could you have a circular arrangement, where C is worse than A?

Our criminal justice system implies a non-linear relationship to criminal wrong: someone might be sentenced to 15 years in prison for killing a guy in a bar fight…but he probably wouldn’t be sentenced to 30 years for killing two, or 45 years for killing three. This suggests that moral wrongs are not “well ordered.”

It is a truism on the SDMB that all moral systems are “irrational” at their base, as there can be no objective or scientific measure of “right and wrong.” We can, of course, test the effects of specific laws as far as achieving specific goals – but those goals, themselves, are only arbitrary. Even “survival of the species” is not objectively a “good thing.” We just happen to have near unanimity among us that it is.

I say, “Take a bad thread, and make it better.”

20

Fair enough, and a decent point.

I guess I sometimes get tired of “Look at this really gross thing I found” threads couched as something with actual merit.
At least kitten pic threads and recreational outrage threads in the pit admit to what they are.
You wanna pander, go ahead and pander, but let’s not bullshit each other.