Hmm, I was thinking understandings of autonomy was the key issue, but what you say here about the disagreement makes sense. (The conversation about intent was with Beccaelizabeth--I don't know if I'd put it quite the same way, but we generally see eye-to-eye.) Though I'm not sure I agree that intent is the issue. When people can honestly say, "I didn't mean to have sex with someone who wasn't fully and completely consenting"--perhaps because they didn't know that the person was drugged or underaged--than my sympathy is with them (even if in some cases they may still need to be prosecuted, just like with any other crime; intent isn't the sole determiner). But usually the retort is, "I didn't know that people thought that people thought an activity with somewhat diminished consent is rape!" which isn't an intent issue--they fully intended to do what they did.

I think a division between ethics and laws can be made here, and other ways of complicating the issue. I think there are plenty of cases where we can agree that a person performed a wrong action when there were reasons why doing so doesn't make them a bad person, so to speak, for example that they were mistaken about what ethics required of them, or they were posessed by an alien, or. . . .