Of course not. I think that saying a murderer deserves to be set on fire is as repugnant a thought as saying a woman deserves to be raped.
Can’t it be repugnant without being as repugnant?
Correct. Or if a person gets beaten with no intention of rape. Being beaten is worse than being “just” raped.
I consider them both violent crimes, as well. However, I consider a beating much more violent than a rape at knifepoint.
Absolutely, but that’s the problem. It may not be as repugnant to you as it is to me. This is exactly why vigilante justice shouldn’t be tolerated.
Why?
I’ve never heard this position before, and would like to know more.
Agreed.
This does not follow.
Nope. There is no such defense to homicide.
What if I think stealing a candy bar is as repugnant as raping someone, and decide to set fire to a thief? There’s no system for saying which vigilante justice is “truly justified” - it’s based solely on people’s fickle emotions.
What you or I or any message-board-posting biens pensants may think about our loyalty to our hypothetical rapist offspring, the plain fact is that there are any number of people out there who wouldn’t consider it reasonable that their father, brother, uncle or whoever should be summarily burned to death whatever they had done, and would be as willing to exact tit-for-tat-plus-interest retaliation just as this mother did, and, as stated above, the circle of life continues.
Gandhi said “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind”, but IMO an eye for an eye leaves *a proportion *of the world one-eyed, sadder and wiser. It’s when you escalate to “two eyes and a rock through the head for an eye” that the trouble starts.
And for those who’re saying “I respect the law as long as it does what I think it ought, otherwise I reserve the right to see justice done personally”, that’s just a fancy way of saying “To hell with the law, I’ll do as I please”.
I know they are cinematic references, but compare the rape in Kids (where a teen passes out at a party and another teen rapes her while she is unconscious but does not beat her) and the rape in Irreversible (where Monica Belluci’s character is anally raped at knifepoint and then brutally punched and kicked into a coma) and tell me which is more violent, the rape itself or the beating.
The rapist’s words can be a mitigating factor when it comes to sentencing, though- and might even be enough to get her charged reduced from murder in the first to a lesser one.
No idea how the Spanish criminal law system works, though.
I don’t fully subscribe to this view, but I believe the general idea is that a beating is administered with the specific intent to cause pain, while a rape is not.
The chance of death or permanent physical harm is the difference. A beating can cause internal bleeding, brain damage, etc. Rape in and of itself is not going to kill the victim, in most cases.
Why do actions have to be either completely bad or completely good?
My Calculus:
Raping a 13-year-old girl with threat of force = 100% bad, 0% good.
Burning the rapist of your 13-year-old daughter alive = 93.64% bad, 6.36% good.
IMO.
Agreed, which is why I have said that I am grateful for the judicial apparatus, and also that the mother should be punished legally.
I can’t speak for anyone else here, but I’m talking about moral rights, not legal ones.
I’m gonna have to adjust your second item to about 51-49.
Then what they should do is change the system. What they shouldn’t do is toss law and order out the window.
And I would have to adjust the second item to about 100-0. Unless we’re talking about feeling good. But that’s completely different from morally good.
e.g., The rapist did something morally bad for something that felt good.
Fair enough. As long as the second ratio isn’t zero, we’re cool. 
Why are you introducing a totally irrelevant tangent about hedonism into a debate about the morality and legality of vigilante justice?
If you think it’s irrelevant, then it’s obvious why you don’t think vigilante justice is a problem. I don’t see it as irrelevant, though. Not at all.
The legality of it? That’s easy - do the homicide laws in Spain say anything along the lines of, “The rapist will serve jail time… unless someone really thinks he should die. In which case, that’s ok.”
The morality of it? That’s easy too - we’re talking about setting a human being on fire.
All that’s left is: will we enjoy it?
Who writes and enforces laws?