Rape is wrong. It doesn't matter what your evidence or positions or logic are, you will not sway me on that point. I suspect that sort of thing is what GP meant.
Do you believe that you were already presented with evidence that compelled you to change your personal position on rape, and the only reason you didn't changed your position in spite of that was your stubbornness to stick with them in spite of you feeling your belief was already refuted?
Or does the rationale still holds?
I think you tried very hard to find a moral argument to try to refute the argument on integrity, but you unwittingly just proved the point.
This is why "#metoo" was so controversial.
I always though it was controversial because it did away with the 'innocent until proven guilty' argument...
Rather, central members of the categories of 'rape' and 'murder' are wrong for reasons, and while those reasons may differ depending on your ethical framework, pretty much all ethical systems agree on this point.
"That's immoral by definition" isn't really how words work. Some philosophers would call that a category error, others would call it meaningless, and yet others would call it equivocation.
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¹: For the record: I think the "don't rape" deontological principle is extremely reliable, and if anyone alive finds themselves in a situation where they think they should break it, they're almost certainly wrong about the facts. The dilemma faced by Lot's daughters was a false dilemma: many other options were available, including "talk about the dilemma and thereby acquire either consent, or a good counterargument", or "double-check with the supernatural being who created the otherwise-unlikely circumstance where you have good reason to believe everyone else died in fire and/or conversion to salt, to confirm whether you are in fact the last remnants of humanity". I can't think of a situation where rape is actually justified. Trolley problems don't occur in real life.
> in war, murder is often praised;
The killing of an enemy combatant, for example, is usually lawful, praised and not considered murder. Generally speaking, the killing of a civilian is sometimes a war crime and considered a murder.
You also have a lot to say on the nuanced ethics of killing and on sexual violence, but these deal with the underlying concepts themselves and the words don't matter; in fact philosophers frequently give common terms a specialized, ad-hoc definition when they want to discuss these concepts themselves.
If you asked any (non-bloodthirsty) soldier, officer or general whether they'd press a button to magically achieve their military objectives without bloodshed, they'd certainly take that option. Killing enemy combatants is praised as good because it is (considered) a necessary evil, but "necessary evil" is awful for morale. If you take people outside that situation, they tend to hold the view that "killing is wrong", or "killing non-wrongdoers is wrong" at worst.
You've (re)defined the word "murder" to exclude "lawful killings of enemy combatants", but whether we use your or my definition, that doesn't change the morality of the actions. You also observed that philosophers do that kind of (re)definition all the time. That's the point I was trying to make.
I am not responding to your discussion on the morality of killings, because your argument was primarily about the definition of the word "murder", and I wanted to point that you were not accurate either.
Wartime killing of the enemy could be any of these (except probably not the last one), but it's probably going to meet the requirements for murder. The main reason it's not considered murder is that in war, we use a different classification system for violent acts, because the social context of violence in wartime is very different to the social context of violence in peacetime.
If you're taking the perspective that the social context is bundled up in the definition of the word (Later Wittgenstein's "use" theory of language), then killing an enemy soldier in war is not murder. If you're taking the perspective that a word refers to a meaningful proposition, i.e. a family of states of affairs (Early Wittgenstein's "picture" theory of language), then killing an enemy soldier in war is a non-central member of the 'murder' category, and just nobody calls it that. Personally, I'm a "use" theory proponent, so, uh… hm. Guess I was inaccurate.
Indeed, I think that your original reply would have been more useful and less apparently combative if you had
1. replied with this definition, 2. showed why this commonsense definition that does not definitionally involve morality is useful, and gave examples of it, 3. finally showed marginal cases where murder is not a moral bad according to certain ethical frameworks, 4. acknowledge that it's OK to redefine the word so that it is definitionally morally bad, but since it differs from a commonsense notion, it needs to be signposted,
but I think you had a bit to figure out yourself.
RE 2: I just looked through a few country's English-language laws and cribbed (what I saw as) the consensus definition of "murder". I'm not sure the other definitions I gave actually correspond to any real-world legal system, but many of them have something similar.
RE 4: Defining the word as "definitionally morally bad" means you have to make a moral assessment before using the word – but that takes most people way longer than the language processing of two syllables, so it leaves you open to equivocating rhetoric. Appeals to "common sense" (which, in my experience, is far from common) aren't why I object to that definition (except as signposted technical jargon, narrowly-scoped to a particular context).
The post I originally replied to was equivocating in this way (probably unintentionally), hence the strong objection. Though in my experience, explanations are better than intensifiers: that's something I should look out for in my editing passes in future.
This is easily refuted: look up “murder” in any English dictionary and you’ll find a definition like this: “the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.” The inclusion of “unlawful” makes it definitionally wrong. You might want to quibble about legality vs. morality but in this case at least, the one entails the other. Perhaps you’re thinking of words like “killing”.