[automatoney]

Or a consequentialist could respond that they accept that the specific hypothetical isn't wrong, but it's so divorced from practical reality that it isn't useful as a thought experiment.

I've also seen people argue that perpetrators of harm like this are also harmed.

Aside from all that, I know the instinct is to draw up thought experiments that provoke emotion, but using such a charged example is potentially alienating. I'm not saying we shouldn't be able to talk about hard topics, but that maybe bringing up rape (and such a specifically gendered one) as your thought experiment example in such a trivial discussion is a bit extreme.

[aragonite]

I get what you're saying, but making the example one about sexual assault is not gratutous but because it poses a unique problem for consequentialism: it's pretty much the only uncontroversial example of an act that is (1) widely agreed to be moral wrong (2) and to be so regardless of its effects on the victim.

Suppose the example had involved instead (say) theft. Then consequentialists would be able point to the fact that the act caused a reduction of the victim's assets as the "negative consequence" which renders the act morally wrong. Likewise if the example involved something as serious as murder, or as (relatively) trivial as property defacement. In all these cases, the wrongfulness of the act coexists with a negative difference (whether mental or physical) it makes to the victim. So they would not serve for the purpose of refuting the core consequentialist idea that an act is made wrong by its negative consequences (rather than say by its violation of moral rules).

If you can think of an example other than sexual assault that satisfies the twin desiderata above ((1) and (2)) equally well, I'm all ears.