Ong, Caroline There was once a strong belief amongst global HIV/AIDS organisations that the key to the prevention of the sexual transmission of HIV was condom use. Other measures such as abstinence and being loyal to one partner were seen as beneficial, but secondary. Thirty years later, the evidence is mounting that behavioural change is much more effective in halting the spread of HIV than condoms.

In this paper, I intend to deny the morality and instrumentality of the behavior known as bestiality, or the use of non-human animals for sexual gratification by human beings. While to most modern peoples, this hardly even seems like it should be in question, it should be the nature of the human mind to occasionally question long-standing traditional moray in the hopes of finding solutions to problems and the disbanding of superstition. It has been proposed that the moral question, (...) and by extension the legal question, of bestiality is based on traditions long outlived and unnecessary. In an IceNews.is article written in 2008, Norwegian lawyers were growing concerned over the prevalence of animal brothels in Denmark and the precedent it set for Norway [http://www.icenews.is, 2008]. The article, when coupled with the 2001 article title “Heavy Petting” by prominent Utilitarian philosopher, Peter Singer, proves that the issue of bestiality is no longer the purview of jokes and psychological discussions. I will argue against bestiality as a socially acceptable practice based on five standard premises. The standard premises I will present will contain notes in regard to: instrumentality; consent; disease transmission; deviance; and morality. There is significant work available on the harm done to the beast, so aside from brief summary; the question of the good of the beast is not in the focus. I will also ignore any religious concerns, either surrounding morality or freedom of practice. Instead, these arguments are in support of the moral identity of the individual and of society as a whole. (shrink)

I will argue against bestiality as a socially acceptable practice based on five standard premises. The standard premises I will present will contain notes in regard to: instrumentality; consent; disease transmission; deviance; and morality. There is significant work available on the harm done to the beast, so aside from brief summary; the question of the good of the beast is not in the focus. I will also ignore any religious concerns, either surrounding morality or freedom of practice. Instead, these (...) arguments are in support of the moral identity of the individual and of society as a whole. (shrink)

Medicalisation is a social phenomenon in which conditions that were once under legal, religious, personal or other jurisdictions are brought into the domain of medical authority. Low sexual desire in females has been medicalised, pathologised as a disease, and intervened upon with a range of pharmaceuticals. There are two polarised positions on the medicalisation of low female sexual desire: I call these the mainstream view and the critical view. I assess the central arguments for both positions. Dividing the (...) two positions are opposing models of the aetiology of low female sexual desire. I conclude by suggesting that the balance of arguments supports a modest defence of the critical view regarding the medicalisation of low female sexual desire. (shrink)

This article argues that access to meaningful sexual experience should be included within the set of the goods that are subject to principles of distributive justice. It argues that some people are currently unjustly excluded from meaningful sexual experience and it is not implausible to suggest that they might thereby have certain claim rights to sexual inclusion. This does not entail that anyone has a right to sex with another person, but it does entail that duties may (...) be imposed on society to foster greater sexual inclusion. This is a controversial thesis and this article addresses this controversy by engaging with four major objections to it: the misogyny objection; the impossibility objection; the stigmatisation objection; and the unjust social engineering objection. (shrink)

This encyclopedia article on the philosophy of sexuality discusses the main themes, concepts, and debates in the field, including the metaphysics (or philosophical anthropology) of sex, the morality of sexual behavior, pragmatic and utilitarian evaluations of sexuality, and sexual perversion.

In some cultures, people tend to believe that it is very important to be sexually exclusive in romantic relationships and idealise monogamous romantic relationships; but there is a tension in this ideal. Sex is generally considered to have value, and usually when we love someone we want to increase the amount of value in their lives, not restrict it without good reason. There is thus a call, not yet adequately responded to by philosophers, for greater clarity in the reasons §why (...) it might be reasonable for a couple to adopt a policy of sexual exclusivity. This article argues that we cannot justify the demand for sexual exclusivity by a need to protect the relationship from the risk of one partner ‘trading-up’, or by appealing to jealousy. However, sexual exclusivity can be intelligible if it supports the romantic relationship and helps to distinguish it from other relationships. Nonetheless, sexual exclusivity ought not to be the hegemonic social norm that it currently is in some societies because this diminishes the potential value it might have and gives the idea of faithfulness the wrong focus. (shrink)

The ‘yes means yes’ model of sexual consent and the political and ethical commitments that underpin this model have three fundamental disadvantages. This position unfairly polices the sexual expression of participants; it demands an unreasonably high standard for defining sexual interaction as consensual; and by denying the body’s capacity for expressing sexual consent this model allows perpetrators of sexual violence to define consent. I argue that a critical examination of Marquis de Sade’s novel Juliette can (...) provide the basis for a model of sexual consent that avoids these problems by refraining from pre-judging the means by which consent is communicated. (shrink)

This essay is a case study of the self-destruction that occurs in the work of a social-constructionist historian of science who embraces a radical philosophy of science. It focuses on Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud in arguing that a history of science committed to the social construction of science and to the central theses of Kuhnian, Duhemian, and Quinean philosophy of science is incoherent through self-reference. Laqueur's text is examined in detail in order (...) to make the main point; a similar phenomenon in the work of the feminist historian of science Evelyn Fox Keller is then briefly discussed. (shrink)

Communication is an inherently strategic matter. This paper introduces simple game theoretic models of information transmission to identify different forms of uncertainty which may pose a problem of trust in testimony. Strategic analysis suggests discriminating between trust in integrity, trust in competence, trust in (the will to invest) effort and trust in honesty. Whereas uncertainty about the sender's honesty or integrity may directly influence a rational receiver's readiness to rely on sender's statements, neither uncertainty about the competence of a (...) sender nor uncertainty about his willingness to invest effort has any direct impact on rational reliance on its own. In this regard, trust in honesty and trust in integrity appear to be more basic than trust in competence or effort. (shrink)

There is a conflict between a strictly political approach to LGBT rights, in which the battle must never cease. and the less encountered notion that individuals can let the battle settle into the background and simply get on with unpolitical life. at least unpolitical at home. The article takes the example of India as a salient place to view this conflict. As a democratic nation, India has had some limited progress in protecting LGBT rights. How its massively differentiated and traditional (...) society has adopted and tolerated this moral enjoinder is another matter. Certainly, acceptance is as important as legal recognition. But how are the politics faring at the individual level? One of the best media for feeling a nation’s political pulse is not internet or television but literature. Two current Indian authors exemplify how, at the personal level, some sexual politicking has already succeeded, in some social realms, by almost disappearing from the narrative. (shrink)

The author analyzes the origin and meaning of the expression ‘Ethics of Sexual Difference’ (ESD), contextualising it in the paradigm ‘thought of Sexual Difference’, in which the potentiality and aporias arising from the debate within the feminist movement are highlighted. Possible interpretations of these ethics, developed in the Italian philosophical context, are illustrated and evaluated. The author proposes a critical comparison with other models, for example, the queer theories, and attempts to show how the ‘Thought of Sexual (...) Difference’ (TSD) opens itself to destabilization produced by the emergence of new subjects (gay and lesbian, transgender, intersex) and their corresponding scientific knowledge. The author therefore proposes an update to the plural, ‘Ethics of Sexual Differences’ (ESDs), listing the possible methodological and content assumptions (including the development of a relational model in all scientific disciplines) and the disciplinary implications (also in the psychoanalytic field) of an ethics so defined. A reference is made to the discussion of socalled "gender ideology", in which the protagonists have often showed a certain difficulty in implementing an ESDs. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on Foucault, Butler, and video-sharing on sexual social networking sites. It argues that the use and prevalence of video-sharing technologies on sexual social networking websites has a direct impact on notions of sexual identity. Though sometimes pitted against one another and at times contradictory, the ideas of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler on the nature and expression of sexuality and gender identities in fact gel rather well, and both can help us to gain a (...) deeper and more rounded picture of the impact and importance of the burgeoning phenomenon of internet dating websites in general, and sexual social networking in particular. (shrink)

If you ought to perform a certain act, and some other action is a necessary means for you to perform that act, then you ought to perform that other action as well – or so it seems plausible to say. This transmission principle is of both practical and theoretical significance. The aim of this paper is to defend this principle against a number of recent objections, which (as I show) are all based on core assumptions of the view called (...) actualism. I reject actualism, provide an alternative explanation of its plausible features, and present an independent argument for the transmission principle. (shrink)

What kind of rhetoric frames French reproductive policy debate? Who does such policies exclude? Through an examination of the “American import” of gender studies, along with an analysis of France’s Catholic heritage and secular politics, I argue that an unwavering belief in sexual difference as the foundation of French society defines the productive reproductive citizen. Sylviane Agacinski is perhaps the most vocal public philosopher who has framed the terms of reproductive policy debate in France, building an oppositional platform to (...) reproductive technology around anthropological assertions of sexual difference. This paper engages with Agacinski to examine rhetorical claims of sexual difference and how such claims delayed passage of France’s revised bioethics legislation that extends access of assisted reproductive technology (ART) to “all women.” Though the “PMA pour toutes” [ART for all women] legislation was eventually passed, such rhetoric motivated the explicit exclusion of all trans person from its extension, thus hardly permitting ART to all women. (shrink)

In this text I would like to show two things. Firstly, that the so-called “timelessness” of the Freudian unconscious can be elucidated through an interpretation of the concept of Nachträglichkeit, and showing thereby that there is indeed a temporality specific to the workings of the unconscious. Freud’s analysis of early psychic trauma related to sexual phenomena pointed to a serious complication for all believers in the immediate transparency of consciousness. For the “wound” itself was constituted over time, and the (...) possibility of coming to understand the trauma (thereby achieving a certain freedom from its repercussions) was again only possible after the event had passed. The Nachträglichkeit involved in the psychoanalytical understanding of sexual trauma thus hinges on a threefold temporal process at work in subjective life. Secondly, I wish to show that Husserl, in his analyses of time and intersubjectivity, delivered the materials with which a phenomenological clarification of Nachträglichkeit can be given. Since Nachträglichkeit is essentially tied to the structure of repression (and thus the very constitution of the unconscious), what I am suggesting is a prolegomenon to a phenomenological clarification of Freudian repression. This clearly suggests the need for further investigations into the phenomenology of sexual life. (shrink)

In this paper, we assess the impact of extended reality technologies as they relate to sexual forms of harassment. We begin with a brief history of the nature of sexual harassment itself. We then offer an account of extended reality technologies focusing specifically on psychological and hardware elements most likely to comprise what has been referred to as “the metaverse”. Although different forms of virtual spaces exist (i.e., private, semi-private, and public), we focus on public social metaverse spaces. (...) We do this to better explain how the concept of sexual harassment must be adjusted to such spaces and how approaches aimed at mitigating harassment must be sensitive to the type of metaverse spaces users utilize. We then offer a typology of sexual harassment for the metaverse focusing on three distinct forms of sexual harassment: (1) invariant (2) mixed variance or modified and (3) unique or metaverse specific. Although existing normative and legal frameworks may function well with respect to the first and, possibly, second forms of harassment, we argue such frameworks will not helpfully address metaverse-specific harassment. Ultimately, the changing nature of privately owned public spaces (POPS) which metaverses are likely to represent pose distinct ethical and regulatory challenges. (shrink)

This paper reconnects the personal and the biological by extending the reach of parental causality. First, it argues that the reproductive act is profitably understood in personal terms as an “invitation” to new life and that the egg and sperm are “ambassadors” or “delegates,” because they represent the potential mother and father and are naturally endowed with causal powers to bring about motherhood and fatherhood, two of the most significant roles a person may have. Second, it argues that even though (...) God alone can create a spiritual soul, the human parents are not just the causes of their child’s body; they are the secondary causes of the whole child. In this way, God acts as a kind of “sponsor” who enables the acceptance of the invitation issued by the parents, and he accepts it on behalf of the new human person that comes to be thanks to their invitation. (shrink)

Kant on sex gives most philosophers the following associations: a lifelong celibate philosopher; a natural teleological view of sexuality; a strange incorporation of this natural teleological account within his freedom-based moral theory; and a stark ethical condemnation of most sexual activity. Although this paper provides an interpretation of Kant’s view on sexuality, it neither defends nor offers an apology for everything Kant says about sexuality. Rather, it aims to show that a reconsidered Kant-based account can utilize his many worthwhile (...) insights and that making Kant’s account of sexuality more consistent with his own basic philosophical commitments results in a compelling approach to the complex and complicated phenomena of sexual love, sexual identity, and sexual orientation. (shrink)

Reviews of studies on sexual orientation reveal that researchers have not developed a clear conceptual definition of sexual orientation and that most researchers have failed to provide a theoretical framework for their studies. While some scholars recognize the conceptual confusion that has plagued the development of a theory of sexual orientation, most researchers study sexual orientation as if it were an immutable, essential nature of an individual without questioning how social context influences categorization. The problem with (...) this approach is that components have been hypothesized to be part of the construct, but there has been no systematic study of how to judge the accuracy of the construct. The present study suggests that, because categories of sexual orientation are socially constructed, the study of sexual orientation would benefit from an understanding of how the ordinary language community defines and categorizes sexual orientation. The purpose of the present study was to test the semantics of various category labels of sexual orientation used in ordinary language. Three hypothesized components of sexual orientation , involving either same-sex or opposite-sex oriented behavior, along with a fourth stimulus condition were manipulated in a 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 factorial design. Subjects were 371 college students who completed a questionnaire in which they were asked to give a one-word description in response to written statements about hypothetical individuals described as male or female who engage in various same- or opposite-sex behavior. Contrary to what was hypothesized, results demonstrate that there were some necessary and sufficient conditions for categorizing sexual orientation. Also contrary to a proto-behavioral hypothesis, the results of the relative strength of the three components in predicting category label indicate that sexual attraction was the strongest predictor, followed by overt sexual behavior, and sexual fantasy, respectively. The most impressive finding was the overwhelming support for the impurity hypothesis in which descriptions with any same-sex oriented behavior appeared to be judged to contaminate the individual's sexual orientation resulting in greater frequencies of responses of "homosexual" compared to other category labels. Finally, as predicted, overt sexual behavior was least predictive of the sexual orientation of females with sexual fantasy being the most predictive. For descriptions of males, sexual attraction was the most important predictor. Provided in the discussion are possible explanations for the current findings, a description of the limitations and implications of the study, and recommendations for future research. (shrink)

Some of our reasons for action are grounded in the fact that the action in question is a means to something else we have reason to do. This raises the question as to which principles govern the transmission of reasons from ends to means. In this paper, we discuss the merits and demerits of a liberal transmission principle, which plays a prominent role in the current literature. The principle states that an agent has an instrumental reason to whenever (...) -ing is a means for him to do what he has intrinsic reason to do. We start by discussing the objection that this principle implies counterintuitive reason statements. We argue that attempts to solve this “too many reasons problem” by appealing to pragmatic strategies for debunking intuitions about so-called negative reason existentials are questionable. Subsequently, we discuss three important arguments in favor of Liberal Transmission, and argue that they fail to make a convincing case for this principle. In the course of the discussion, we also provide alternative, less liberal transmission principles. We argue that these alternative principles allow us to accommodate those phenomena that seem to support Liberal Transmission while avoiding its problems. (shrink)

Research on the use of propranolol as a pharmacological memory dampening treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder is continuing and justifies a second look at the legal and ethical issues raised in the past. We summarize the general ethical and legal issues raised in the literature so far, and we select two for in-depth reconsideration. We address the concern that a traumatized witness may be less effective in a prosecution emerging from the traumatic event after memory dampening treatment. We analyze this (...) issue in relation to sexual assault, where the suggestion that corroborating evidence may remedy any memory defects is less likely to be helpful. We also consider the clinical ethical question about a physician's obligation to discuss potential legal consequences of memory dampening treatment. We conclude that this latter question reflects a general problem related to novel medical treatments where the broader socio-legal consequences may be poorly understood, and suggest that issues of this sort could usefully be addressed through the promulgation of practice guidelines. (shrink)

Rape and sexual assault are major problems. In the majority of sexual assault cases consent is the central issue. Consent is, to borrow a phrase, the ‘moral magic’ that converts an impermissible act into a permissible one. In recent years, a handful of companies have tried to launch consent apps which aim to educate young people about the nature of sexual consent and allow them to record signals of consent for future verification. Although ostensibly aimed at addressing (...) the problems of rape and sexual assault on university campuses, these apps have attracted a number of critics. In this paper, I subject the phenomenon of consent apps to philosophical scrutiny. I argue that the consent apps that have been launched to date are unhelpful because they fail to address the landscape of ethical and epistemic problems that arise in the typical rape or sexual assault case: they produce distorted and decontextualised records of consent which may in turn exacerbate the other problems associated with rape and sexual assault. Furthermore, because of the tradeoffs involved, it is unlikely that app-based technologies could ever be created that would significantly address the problems of rape and sexual assault. (shrink)

One of the standard examples in contemporary moral psychology originates in the works of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He treats people's responses to the story of Julie and Mark, two siblings who decide to have casual, consensual, protected sex, as facts of human morality, providing evidence for his social intuitionist approach to moral judgements. We argue that Haidt's description of the facts of the story and the reactions of the respondents as ‘morally dumbfounded’ presupposes a view about moral reasoning that (...) is more substantial than he acknowledges. Drawing on the philosophical work by Iris Murdoch and Cora Diamond, we explore how different descriptions of human morality, sexuality, and family relations engage us in evaluations about distinctive features of human life and language that go deeper than Haidt envisages. Thus, we show the need to attend to the concepts used to describe the facts of human moral psychology and the pictures of morality these concepts reveal about the researcher's own understanding of moral experience. This points to the particular responsibility any researcher into human moral psychology has for ensuring that the descriptions they offer are attuned to the complexities of the lives of those they form theories about and that these do not appear conceptually confounding. (shrink)

The family is a social group. Its characteristics are among other things; common residence, co-operation and reproduction. The family has always been considered to be the foundation or nucleus of the society; the most basic unit of its organization. The structure of the family varies according to each society. In pre-colonial era, the family as a social group among the Yorùbá, was a large unit, and extended in nature. They were bound together by the realization of having a common ancestor; (...) alájọbí. All the members of the family see one another as blood relations, as such incest was (and still is) a taboo. Apart from this, sexual relationship among the Yorùbá is heterosexual and permissible only in marriage; between husband and his wife/wives. Though extra-marital relationships are practiced, it is frowned at for men, but intolerable for women. Homosexuality is also a taboo; punishable by public disgrace, with culprits liable to excommunication from the society, especially if unrepentant. It cannot be totally ruled out that these anomalous relationships were not secretly engaged in by few non-conformists among the Yorùbá, before coming into contact with the West, the fact remains that the magnitude by which they are practiced in present times is alarming; threatening the harmony and cultural heritage of the Yorùbá. This fear is expressed in the literary genres of the Yorùbá, especially the film, which is the contemporary popular theatre of the Yorùbá of Nigeria and other tribes in Africa. This study examined sexual relationship among members of the family, in randomly selected Yorùbá films that have family-living as their major or minor themes; to know how affected is the stability of family (sexual) relationship among the Yorùbá. This is in the light of evolving modernity; with its individualistic life-style of people globally, as against the inherited communal social organization of the Yorùbá; built around the virtuous ọmọlúwàbí principle. The plausible reasons for the anomalous behaviors are also examined. Our findings are that prevailing strict traditional conditions, living in private homes as nuclear family, not being properly oriented in Yorùbá cultural values, increased exposition to Western lifestyles and its more relaxed societal expectations, and non-realization of the possibility of anomalous sexual behaviors as mental and biological issues that can be medically treated; are some of the reasons why such behaviors manifest, and are becoming prevalent. We have suggested communal encouragement with empathy, to seek medical assistance for and by the ‘diseased’ person. One finding here is that prevailing traditional conditions, ignorance, poor orientation and westernization present the anomaly mildly and make people not to see anomalous sex behavious as a mental disorder which requires medical attention. (shrink)

In both popular and scholarly discussions, sexual consent is gaining traction as the central moral consideration in how people should treat one another in sexual encounters. However, while the concept of consent has been indispensable to oppose many forms of sexual violence, consent-based sexual ethics struggle to account for the phenomenological complexity of sexual intimacy and the social and structural pressures that often surround sexual communication and behavior. Feminist structural critique and social research on (...) the prevalence of violation even within consensual sex suggest that consent is insufficient to ground responsibility; a more fundamental orientation toward the value of sexual agency provides a better foundation for sexual ethics. Using feminist critical theory, phenomenology, and black feminist thought, this dissertation develops a socially situated and relational notion of sexual agency and diagnoses how such agency is neglected in prevailing discussions of consent in moral philosophy and legal theory. I argue that the ethical question of responsibility to another in a sexual encounter—apart from juridical considerations—should be reframed around the value of each person’s socially situated practices of agency. Preceding and extending beyond the obligation to gain valid consent for an action, responsibility demands adapting one’s intentions and behaviors in response to the wider range of another’s communicative expressions of agency. However, communicative expressions can be ambiguous or overdetermined by social context and cultural norms; they often offer only provisional traces of agency. To address this inherent uncertainty in intimacy, I propose drawing on insights from Emmanuel Levinas about the dynamic, open-ended nature of relationality, responsibility, and communication. Responsibility toward another does not depend on securing certainty about their “yes” or “no,” but requires responding continuously under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity, adapting behaviors and intentions to make room for another’s agency despite its opacity. (shrink)

Irigaray’s engagement with Aristotelian physics provides a specific diagnosis of women’s ontological and ethical situation under Western metaphysics: Women provide place and containership to men, but have no place of their own, rendering them uncontained and abyssal. She calls for a reconfiguration of this topological imaginary as a precondition for an ethics of sexual difference. This paper returns to Aristotelian cosmological texts to further investigate the topologies of sexual difference suggested there. In an analysis both psychoanalytic and phenomenological, (...) the paper rigorously traces a teleological and oedipal narrative implicit in the structure of the Aristotelian cosmos, in which desire for the mother is superseded by love for the father. Further, the paper argues that this narrative is complicated by certain other elements in the Aristotelian text—aporias involving the notion of boundary and the relationship between space and time, the fallenness of the feminine, and the ineliminably aleatory qualities of matter. The paper concludes that such elements may provide material for disrupting this teleology of gender, opening onto not merely an ethics of sexual difference, but providing space and place for a proliferation of non-normative, queer, transgender and intersex modes of sexed and gendered subjectivity. (shrink)

In 2012, the politician Todd Akin caused a firestorm by suggesting, in the context of an argument about the moral permissibility of abortion, that some forms of rape were. This seemed to imply that other forms of rape must not be legitimate. In response, several commentators pointed out that rape is a and that there are. While the intention of these commentators was clear, I argue that they may have played into the very stereotype of rape endorsed by Akin. Such (...) a response, I claim, actually obscures a range of sexual harms, including some that may not rise to the level of being a crime. I also offer some thoughts on the moral psychology behind anti-abortion arguments of the kind advanced by Akin. (shrink)

In response to three papers about sex and disability published in this journal, I offer a critique of existing arguments and a suggestion about how the debate should be reframed going forward. Jacob M. Appel argues that disabled individuals have a right to sex and should receive a special exemption to the general prohibition of prostitution. Ezio Di Nucci and Frej Klem Thomsen separately argue contra Appel that an appeal to sex rights cannot justify such an exemption. I argue that (...) Appel’s argument fails, but not for the reasons Di Nucci and Thomsen propose, as they have missed the most pressing objection to Appel’s argument: Appel falsely presumes that we never have good reasons to restrict someone’s sexual liberty rights. More importantly, there is a major flaw in the way that all three authors frame their positive accounts. They focus on disability as a proxy for sexual exclusion, when these categories should be pulled apart: some are sexually excluded who are not disabled, while some who are disabled are not sexually excluded. I conclude that it would be less socially harmful and more productive to focus directly on sexual exclusion per se rather than on disability as a proxy for sexual exclusion. (shrink)

In mid-2019, the controversy regarding South African runner Caster Semenya’s eligibility to participate in competitions against other female runners culminated in a Court of Arbitration for Sport judgement. Semenya possessed high endogenous testosterone levels (arguably a performance advantage), secondary to a disorder of sexual development. In this commentary, Aristotelean teleology is used to defend the existence of ‘male’ and ‘female’ as discrete categories. It is argued that once the athlete’s sex is established, they should be allowed to compete in (...) the category of their sex without obligatory medical treatment. Indeed, other athletes who possess advantageous genetic or phenotypic traits that fall outside of the human norm have been allowed to compete as humans without restraint. In both cases, if an athlete possesses the essential attributes of being a human or being male or female they should be permitted to compete in those respective categories; athletes’ eligibilities should not be based upon accidental attributes. (shrink)

This was a public talk given in the spring of 2013 during sexual assault awareness week. I believe roughly 800 attended. The philosophy dept was NOT expecting that but at any rate, this is the gist: While there are many different motivations for raising questions about the Sexual Assault Awareness Movement, at least one motivation comes from feminist controversies about what counts as consensual sex. Historically, this controversy arose between those known as "anti-pornography feminists", and "sex positive feminists" (...) whose proponents had very different understandings of what counts as sexual autonomy for women. It is important to understand that questioning the current definitions of what counts as an instance of sexual assault does not entail an anti-feminist agenda. There is not a unified feminist front on this topic. To assume otherwise is to risk silencing victims of sexual assault even further by imposing a particular conception of sexual assault upon them that they might themselves reject. If we are to properly address sexual assault as feminists we must listen to victims of sexual assault and develop a theory of consent in tandem with victims' own understanding of that concept. (shrink)

Receptive Spirit develops the thesis that the notion of self-induced mental activity at the heart of German idealism necessitated a radical rethinking of humans’ dependence on culturally transmitted models of thought, evaluation, and creativity. The chapters of the book examine paradigmatic attempts undertaken by German idealist thinkers to reconcile spontaneous mental activity with receptivity to culturally transmitted models. The book maps the ramifications of this problematic in Kant’s theory of aesthetic experience, Fichte’s and Hegel’s views on the historical character of (...) philosophy, the Fichtean model of philosophical communication, and Friedrich Schlegel’s theory and practice of literary communication and criticism. Drawing on Gadamer and McDowell, I argue that the conceptual framework established by the Idealists remains indispensable for orientation in the contemporary intellectual landscape. (See the PDF file below for a synopsis). (shrink)

There are two dominant approaches towards understanding medieval Muslim philosophy: Greek ancestry approach and religiopolitical context approach. In the Greek ancestry approach, medieval Muslim philosophy is interpreted in terms of its relation to classical Greek philosophy, particularly to the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. The religiopolitical context approach, however, views a thorough understanding of the religious and political situation of that time as the key to the proper understanding of medieval Muslim philosophy. Notwithstanding the immense significance of the two approaches (...) for understanding medieval Muslim philosophy, the question on the reason behind medieval Muslim philosophers’ preference for Plato’s Republic over Aristotle’s Politics in political philosophy is not accurately answered. This preference is usually attributed either to the availability or unavailability of the text or to the suitability or unsuitability of the text for Islamic theological views. However, this article shows that neither the availability or unavailability of text nor its suitability or unsuitability for Islamic religious and theological views can appropriately explain medieval Muslim philosophers’ preference for Plato’s Republic over Aristotle’s Politics in their political thought. This article proposes that the key to understand this preference lies in understanding the transmission of Greek philosophy to medieval Muslim philosophers. Contribution: This study highlights the significance of the thorough understanding of the transmission of Greek philosophy to medieval Muslim world as one of the important approaches towards proper understanding of medieval Muslim philosophy, particularly medieval Muslim political philosophy. (shrink)

In January 1995, at the age of 22, Annabel Chong (whose real name is Grace Quek), a former pornographic actress/director set a world record (which has since been topped) for having the most number of sex acts, 251 with about 70 men, over a period of about ten hours, for a film called the World’s Biggest Gangbang. Chong claims in subsequent interviews that more than anything else, she did it to challenge the stereotypical notion that female sexuality is passive—that women (...) like to be “seduced, kissed and cuddled, and [are] basically biologically monogamous”. She quips that “if a guy did 251 women in one day . . . everyone would think he’s a real stud”; But if a girl does the same “she’s considered a terrible slut.” This paper is my attempt to investigate what Annabel Chong’s dissent means for feminism: Is Annabel Chong the quintessential feminist, defying an oppressive system, asserting her individuality, redefining the parameters of a gender-determined sexuality? Or is she a victim of her own misguided ideals, objectifying herself in the belief that this affirms her subjectivity, submitting herself to domination to reclaim control, eventually propagating the same oppressive system she professes to end? I want to approach this inquiry using Foucault’s framework of power-discourse-sexuality for two reasons: First, I believe that Foucault’s genealogy of sexuality successfully exploits how sexuality as a discursive construct is used as a technique of control; Second, I believe that Foucault provides us a way of understanding how an individual responds to various systems of control, as well as a framework that explains the many power relations that determine an individual’s mode of existence. However, since in effect, I would be presenting a Foucauldian analysis of the gendered experience of a feminist subject, I find it necessary to first overcome what I consider as theoretical barriers, alluding to the ongoing debate concerning the usefulness of Foucault’s framework for feminists. To address this issue, I will present a brief survey of the criticisms directed to the inadequacy of Foucault’s theory of the subject posed by some notable feminists, as well as the proposed resolutions to them. This also establishes the framework on which I ground my inquiry. My contention is that to some extent these criticisms have already been resolved, and that it is now possible to present an analysis of the gendered experience of the feminist subject using a Foucauldian framework. (shrink)

Understanding the pervasiveness of sin is central to Christian theology. The question of why humans are so sinful given an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God presents a challenge and a puzzle. Here, we investigate Friedrich Schleiermacher’s biocultural evolutionary account of sin. We look at empirical evidence to support it and use the cultural Price equation to provide a naturalistic model of the transmission of sin. This model can help us understand how sin can be ubiquitous and unavoidable, even though (...) it is not biologically transmitted, and even if there is no historical Fall that precipitated the tendency to sin. (shrink)

The purpose of this article was focused on analyzing the adjacent factors related to human rights in women victims of sexual violence in the context of the armed conflict. The quantitative method of descriptive approach was selected under the systematic review technique using the PRISMA guide. As a result, it was obtained that women continue to be instrumentalized in wars, their physical and psychosocial vulnerability persisting in all spheres of life; This being a phenomenon that continues to growglobally given (...) the characteristics associated with political, social and religious structures. As a conclusion, it was identified that, although there are jurisprudential guidelines and policies, these are insufficient and do not protect the human rights of women victims. (shrink)

In this paper we propose the notion of “subjective reference” as a conceptual tool that explains how and why human-robot sexual interactions could reframe users approach to human-human sexual interactions. First, we introduce the current debate about Sexual Robotics, situated in the wider discussion about Social Robots, stating the urgency of a regulative framework. We underline the importance of a social-relational approach, mostly concerned about Social Robots impact in human social structures. Then, we point out the absence (...) of a precise framework conceptualizing why Social Robots, and Sexual Robots in particular, may modify users’ sociality and relationality. Within a psychological framework, we propose to consider Sexual Robots as “subjective references”, namely objects symbolically referring to human subjects: we claim that, for the user experience, every action performed upon a Sexual Robot is symbolically directed toward a human subject, including degrading and violent practices. This shifting mechanism may transfer the user relational setting from human-robot interactions to human-human interactions. (shrink)

Although the idea that sexual violence is a “structural” problem is not new, the lack of specification as to what that entails blocks effective responses to it. This paper illustrates the concept of sexual violence as structural in the sense of containing a type of moral wrong called “structural wrong” and discusses its practical implications. First, I introduce a distinction between two types of moral wrongs—interactional wrongs and structural wrongs—and I argue that the moral problem of sexual (...) violence includes both types, each of which calls for a different set of moral responses. Second, drawing on Iris Marion Young’s social connection model of responsibility, I argue that recognizing the structural-wrong element of sexual violence does not reduce individual perpetrators’ responsibility for it. Instead, it implies that a broader group of agents are required to join collective actions to reform the social structure. I conclude by evaluating some preventive programs against sexual violence through the lens of structural wrongs and providing directions to advance them. (shrink)

In this ground-breaking article submitted for publication in mid-1986, Lucinda Vandervort creates a radically new and comprehensive theory of sexual consent as the unequivocal affirmative communication of voluntary agreement. She argues that consent is a social act of communication with normative effects. To consent is to waive a personal legal right to bodily integrity and relieve another person of a correlative legal duty. If the criminal law is to protect the individual’s right of sexual self-determination and physical autonomy, (...) rather than simply to regulate the type and degree of force that may be used to obtain compliance from a victim, the point of reference must be the individual complainant, as a person who makes choices, not social norms or objective tests based on the ordinary person. To determine whether consent is voluntary, attention must be directed to the presence or absence of factors that had a coercive impact on the individual complainant, a specific person with a collection of social, cultural, and psychological experiences, needs, fears, values, and priorities. Individuals have the right to exercise self-determination in accordance with their own values and perceptions, not those of a mythical victim. Accordingly, Vandervort argues that the prosecution may show either refusal, the absence of affirmative voluntary agreement (including passivity or the absence of consent due to unconsciousness), or circumstances that invalidate any apparent consent. Any of these prove the absence of consent for the purposes of establishing the actus reus of sexual assault. -/- The definition of consent as the affirmative communication of voluntary agreement is also shown to have a variety of implications for the interpretation and application of the law of sexual assault and the handling of evidentiary issues at trial in sexual assault cases. Key among these is the pivotal significance of the legal definition of consent as a tool to bar availability of the defence of “mistaken belief in consent.” Vandervort argues that in many cases the defence of “mistaken belief in consent” is based on ignorance of the law of consent, mistake about the legal definition of consent, or a failure to appreciate the legal significance of facts that are well-known, and not on a mistaken belief in an erroneous set of facts. The broad proposition asserted here is that a statutory criminal law is enforceable only if all defences based directly or indirectly on belief in the validity of extra-legal norms that authorize infringement of rights protected by the criminal law are barred. This proposition and the characterization of some mistakes about consent as legal, not factual, are also shown to be useful to exclude rape-myths and stereotypical assumptions---the stuff of which “social” definitions of consent have long been constructed---from the decision-making process at trial. -/- . (shrink)

In this article, I examined the various ethical problems raise to morally discount homosexuality. I found that so far no moral argument proved adequate ground to discount homoeroticism. However, I have developed the ‘Two-Way Test’ (TWT) by which the social acceptability of any sexual relation should be tested for moral validity. From the analysis, homosexuality was found to have failed the test. That is to say, homosexuality is not a morally valid act. Despite that, the immoral status of homosexuality (...) did not constitute sufficient ground for its criminalization, because not all immoral acts are criminalized but only those that impede the right or liberty of others. In conclusion, the paper submitted that although homosexuality had failed the TWT it does not call for violence, criminalization and discrimination against persons of homosexual orientation but that homosexuals should be accommodated without deliberately discouraging heterosexual relationship. My advocacy for sexual tolerance is based on the grounds that ongoing biological research has so far shown the phenomenon as biological reality beyond the personal control of most homosexuals. (shrink)

In this article, I advance a novel hypothesis on the evolution of hominin bipedalism. I begin by arguing extensively for how the transition to bipedalism must have been problematic for hominins during the Neogene. Due to this and the fact that no other primate has made the unusual switch to bipedalism, it seems likely that the selection pressure towards bipedalism was unusually strong. With this in mind, I briefly lay out some of the most promising hypotheses on the evolutionary origin (...) of hominin bipedalism and show how most, if not all, fail in the face of the need for an unusually strong selection pressure. For example, some hypotheses maintain that hominins became bipedal so they could use their hands for carrying infants, food, or other valuable objects. But extant apes are able to carry objects in one of their front limbs (while walking with the other three), and thus it does not seem plausible that our hominin ancestors went through the troublesome transition to bipedalism just so they could carry objects a little more efficiently. After I show that past hypotheses are wanting in the face of this challenge, I argue that there is only one selection pressure powerful enough to instigate a strange and problematic evolutionary adaptation like bipedalism, and that is sexual selection. Specifically, from the fact that bipedal locomotion is an important strategy for intimidating others and ascending the dominance hierarchy in extant apes, I argue that for no particular selective reason bipedal locomotion became a signal for high fitness (much as a large and intricate tail became a signal for high fitness for peahens), and this led to the trait being continuously reinforced in spite of all its deleterious fitness consequences. (shrink)

In my 1991 paper, AAnti-Individualism and Privileged Access,@ I argued that externalism in the philosophy of mind is incompatible with the thesis that we have privileged , nonempirical access to the contents of our own thoughts.¹ One of the most interesting responses to my argument has been that of Martin Davies (1998, 2000, and Chapter _ above) and Crispin Wright (2000 and Chapter _ above), who describe several types of cases to show that warrant for a premise does not always (...) transmit to a known deductive consequence of that premise, and who contend that this fact under-mines my argument for incompatibilism. I will try to show here that the Davies/Wright point about transmission of warrant does not adversely affect my argument. (shrink)

The gray area of sexual violations generally refers to ambiguous sexual experiences that are not readily distinguishable from rape or sex. Such experiences are describable as ambiguous or complex in a way that, to some, seems to defy existent categories of sexual experiences. This leads some feminists to approach the gray area as a puzzle that must be resolved either by understanding it as a new category, or by upholding existing rape categorization. Rather than dispelling the gray-area (...) ambiguity by resolving conceptual puzzles, I assign the gray-area ambiguity a positive analytical role by attending to it in a historical and dialectical light. By tracing histories of feminist antirape discourse, I elaborate a way of understanding the “gray area” of sexual violations, articulating it as a historical condition affecting the interpretive possibilities of our sexual experiences. Such an approach underscores the potential of the gray area to inaugurate feminist critique in virtue of its status as a historically specific yet ambiguous horizon where our experiences can contradictorily seem not-like rape, but not-like sex. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the growing problem of unwanted sexual interactions in virtual environments. It reviews the available evidence regarding the prevalence and severity of this problem. It then argues that due to the potential harms of such interactions, as well as their nonconsensual nature, there is a good prima facie argument for viewing them as serious moral wrongs. Does this prima facie argument hold up to scrutiny? After considering three major objections – the ‘it’s not real’ objection; the ‘it’s (...) just a game’ objection; and the ‘unrestricted consent’ objection – this chapter argues that it does. The chapter closes by reviewing some of the policy options available to us in addressing the problem of virtual sexual assault. (shrink)