Because biologically, marriage probably is an offspring of the pair bonding common in species that raise their expensive young together, and tends not to be seen in other species.
I imagine they would have a society, and friends, and quite likely have domestic arrangements that include multiple adults living together. But i don’t see any particular reason those domestic partners would also be sexual partners.
I suppose they might be in some ways; but it’s not going to include the sort of physical connection and hormonal release involved with the repeated sexual connection between humans in a good marriage. Asexual humans marry, sometimes even if their society doesn’t demand it; but for most humans the sexual relationship is a really big part of marriage. So in a society of people who don’t have that sort of sex, it would be different.
And if they don’t raise the young together, or for the most part raise them at all, that’s going to be quite a big difference also. For that matter, the evolutionary reason why sex is such a binding force in humans probably has to do with what a huge amount of time and energy has to go into raising our young; and the reason we want sex year round whether fertile or not is probably to increase that binding force.
I don’t think that you can have a society without some form of raising of young. Depending on the species, that might be done by the mother, or the father, or both together, or by some segment of society that does it collectively for everyone, but it’s got to be there in some form. And how that works will probably also be relevant for this question.
In humans (and other mammals), the burden of raising young falls disproportionately on the mother, because women get pregnant, and women produce milk. Men can help out, and women mostly try to select men who they think will help out, but there’s no guarantees. But in a species with external fertilization, I don’t think that there would be that asymmetry, and so I’d expect that either young would be raised jointly by their parents (of whom there might be more than two, if multiple females lay their eggs together, or multiple males fertilize the same clutch of eggs, or both), or by specialists (who would be comprised of both sexes).
Does this include a woman raping a man using penis in vagina sex? It would seem like another person can be the one providing the vagina to be penetrated, but IANAL.
There are many types of fish that don’t care for their young beyond finding a good place to spawn, who live as adults in large schools. I have to think that if an animal with that lifestyle were highly intelligent, it would have a complex society. Without necessarily caring for their young, especially.
When they do gain sapience, there is still a long way to go towards being a functional adult, for this species. They do the return-to-pond-of-spawning journey while still just pre-sapient, and attain sapience when they get there. So from then on, they would be taken up by adults.
So think of it more like gestation happens outside the body in the wild, and the successful returnees (if any) are the equivalent of human newborn. That should provide pretty much the same human look-after-babies social impetus. I think sapient subadults would be raised collectively by the groups that exhibit ownership of the ponds.
I think this is a case where the elements of a concept that inevitably cluster together in one context come apart when that concept is ported to a new context—sort of like how in math, a function extended via analytic continuation to another domain may no longer have some properties of the original, or no longer be unique.
So ‘rape’ for humans includes things like violation of sexual autonomy, violation of choice, violation of bodily autonomy, subjugation, and so on. Typically, these go together in the sense that if sexual autonomy is violated, so is bodily autonomy generally, but this ceases to be true for the scenario in question. One approach then is to single out some aspect as ‘key’ to what makes rape rape, and then adjudicate on that basis—but since different people might single out different aspects with equal justification, this often yields an impasse.
So there really isn’t an objectively right answer to this question: the question really is about what constitutes the ‘core’ of the concept of rape. But I’m not sure there even is such a core: the whole isn’t necessarily reducible to any of its parts. Thomas Nagel has defended the idea that morality, to a certain extent, is means-relative: while there are real moral truths, our access to these is historically and conceptually mediated, so our access to moral reality is a function of our situatedness (relative to time, place, and other contingent factors). We could perhaps add a ‘species’ indexical: while we, as humans, have access to moral truths in a particularly human way, your hypothetical aliens access them differently, through the specifics of their biology, history, culture, and so on—sort of like seeing the same world with eyes attuned to a different spectrum. This doesn’t lessen any moral judgment, but it does mean they’re not straightforwardly interchangeable.
These are a bit unusual, in that the immature Dwellers are fairly smart, and can even be trained to perform various tasks. But the young are certainly disposable, and little thought is given to their welfare. Dwellers are weird.
Of the list which aspects are the ones that have elevated it to a specifically horrific crime? To my sense it is the sexual autonomy/choice removal.
For this hypothetical species sex does not require bodily contact but it is still sex, and therefore is something that selection would attach huge importance to. The degree of importance in any specific species’ case (not individual’s) to my sense would be commiserate with how much investment was attached to the choice and to being chosen. Not whether or not bodily contact is required.
If the female of this species invests little in produce their eggs or caring for them and can spray them out by the thousands, then chances are the crime of taking away her choice is not on that horrific level. Whereas if males have to invest lots to be selected, then stealing that opportunity will be the worst possible sex crime.
Eggs are only a few score(say 50-60) at a time, and mates are very carefully chosen over a long courtship.
Probably also of relevance is that spawning ponds are not public land, they are group-owned private sites so interfering with the fertilization necessarily involves breaking into private property.
High investment on each side? This is this species sex. Just as intimate and meaningful as our physical penetration version is to us. IMHO it would experienced very much analogously to rape.
But to my sense it’s the violation of bodily autonomy, at least to the extent to which they can be separated. They seem to me to really blur into each other, for humans.
Do you think it would be a greater or lesser crime if committed by a member of the group? Not necessarily in the legal sense, maybe only in the moral sense — think maybe equivalent to ‘he cheated on me with my sister’ in a culture in which sisters don’t have sex with the same man?
Are mating partners chosen from within the same group, or only from different group(s), or can it be either?
It’s both. Rape generally requires penetration. If not, you are dealing with some other sort of sexual assault. What is described in the OP does not conform to to the “human” crime of rape.
That sounds like it would be an extremely serious and emotionally upsetting crime.
For humans a knife stab to the leg, a violent invasion of body autonomy, is not in same range of horrific of a crime as say rape by deception or by drugging someone is.
The group is all the mating partners, male and female.
Ah. So first they form a mating group, and then they in some fashion claim a mating pool, which is theirs only for that particular mating?
Can the individuals in that group be part of different groups for later matings, or is the choice for life?
Yes, that’s what I mean—different people will judge different elements of a concept important. But I really think it’s ultimately the whole of the concept, the gestalt, that carries the full weight of moral judgement, and an alien species with a different physiology and culture just won’t have access to that gestalt, anymore than we have access to a bat’s sonar, or a bee’s ultraviolet vision. These all reveal the same underlying world, but do so under different aspects, which aren’t readily interconvertible.
No, more like part of being a breeding group involves obtaining and managing a spawning ground. It has to be a long-term thing to receive the returning juveniles, for one thing.
Ah. Yes, I agree with that.
Ah again. That makes sense; I’d forgotten to think of the returning young.