What to make of Rufus???

I hate this book. A large part of my reading experience of this book was full of uncomfortability and shock. Many times throughout my reading experience, I thought that the book had reached its peak in terms of craziness and disgustingness, and then I turned to another page and an even more disgusting scenario was there. I’m quite a sensitive individual which may explain my reaction partly, however I do think most people would agree that this book has an above average amount of crazy shit, and would also agree that Octavia Butler must have had some demons or something in order to write a lot of the content of this absurd book. While I do hate the disgusting nature of much of this book, I also love it because Butler doesn’t care that it's disgusting and prioritizes accuracy of portrayal. Making a traditionally one dimensional hated bad guy into a complex one is a common trope, however Butler creates complexities in characters that make me much more uncomfortable than usual ones and the book really made me think about slavery, morality, people, etc. 

The most disturbing stuff to me was Rufus’s whole character and such. I hear many arguments out there about why we shouldn't judge people, but what are the limits of these ideas? The argument I want to focus on is the environment argument. The question I find most interesting is “If you were raised in that environment, you would turn out just the same, so don’t you have no right to judge?” When you apply this logic to people of history or fictional characters such as Rufus, it can feel quite wrong. He rapes Alice multiple times, beats the slaves, and manipulates Dana a lot. I think it's best to lay out all of the options for judgment in order to choose the best one. The first that comes to mind is to put him in prison for the rest of his life or kill him or something along those lines. Second one is, oh well, he was just in a bad environment and got unlucky with his upbringing, let’s just let him go free and let the natural world judge him. Another possibility: castration. When judging someone, I think these are very good priorities to keep in mind: one, pain prevention from potential future victims; two, to set an example for similar people (pain prevention); three, mercy; four, justice. In trying to make this a simple answer, I have thoroughly confused myself and now I have significantly more questions. How should we judge Rufus?

Until I read a little bit of “Meditations” written by Marcus Aurelius, I would have immediately said kill Rufus or send him to prison for life. At one point in the book, Marcus Aurelius, a roman emperor from 161 to 180 was writing about rape in a really weird way. He was talking about the prevalent phenomenon at the time of rich roman men raping their slave boys, and he said something along the lines of “Ah look at these unlucky men, I’m very grateful that I wasn’t cursed with the urge to rape my slave boys”. Before reading this, I had thought of disgusting behavior like rape as behavior that completely damns a person, and that I was infinitely morally superior to people who committed acts such as rape or murder and such, but with Marcus Aurelius’s logic I’m just lucky. I haven’t raped, killed, stolen any large amounts of stuff, vandalized anything huge, or done much harm in general in my life, but is that because I’m such a great person or is that because I’m lucky to not have had strong urges to do any of those things? Obviously we gotta prevent people from doing disgusting shit, and shaming those behaviors is an effective way to do it, but I don’t think that that completely invalidates the logic.