We consider the complex interactions between rape culture and epistemology. A central case study is the consideration of a deferential attitude about the epistemology of sexual assault testimony. According to the deferential attitude, individuals and institutions should decline to act on allegations of sexual assault unless and until they are proven in a formal setting, i.e., a criminal court. We attack this deference from several angles, including the pervasiveness of rape culture in the criminal justice system, the epistemology (...) of testimony and norms connecting knowledge and action, the harms of tacit idealizations away from important contextual factors, and a contextualist semantics for 'knows' ascriptions. (shrink)

Soon there will be sex robots. The creation of such devices raises a host of social, legal and ethical questions. In this article, I focus in on one of them. What if these sex robots are deliberately designed and used to replicate acts of rape and child sexual abuse? Should the creation and use of such robots be criminalised, even if no person is harmed by the acts performed? I offer an argument for thinking that they should be. The (...) argument consists of two premises. The first claims that it can be a proper object of the criminal law to regulate wrongful conduct with no extrinsically harmful effects on others. The second claims that the use of robots that replicate acts of rape and child sexual abuse would be wrongful, even if such usage had no extrinsically harmful effects on others. I defend both premises of this argument and consider its implications for the criminal law. I do not offer a conclusive argument for criminalisation, nor would I wish to be interpreted as doing so; instead, I offer a tentative argument and a framework for future debate. This framework may also lead one to question the proposed rationales for criminalisation. (shrink)

Social epistemologists use the term hermeneutical injustice to refer to a form of epistemic injustice in which a structural prejudice in the economy of collective interpretive resources results in a person’s inability to understand his/her/their own social experience. This essay argues that the phenomenon of unacknowledged date rapes, that is, when a person experiences sexual assault yet does not conceptualize him/her/their self as a rape victim, should be regarded as a form of hermeneutical injustice. The fact that the concept (...) of date rape has been widely used for at least three decades indicates the intractability of hermeneutical injustices of this sort and the challenges with its overcoming. (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)

Argument about changes in the law of rape are logically dependent upon a prior definitional account. For any legal definition of an act, one can sensibly ask if that definition is right. To know whether the law is sound, one must first understand of what it is that the definition is a definition. For many parts of the criminal law, and the law of rape is one, the definitions on which the law moves are concepts perfectly accessible outside (...) and apart from the law. I have two aims for this article. The first is to argue for a particular conception of rape as the best understanding of the constellation of acts we conceptualize as rape. The second, less direct, is to show that traditional methods of conceptual analysis can contribute to legal and social scholarship and reform. (shrink)

Empirical research has distinguished moral judgments that focus on an act and the actor’s intention or mental states, and those that focus on results of an action and then seek a causal actor. Studies indicate these two types of judgments may result from a “dual-process system” of moral judgment (Cushman 2008, Kneer and Machery 2019). Results-oriented judgements may be subject to the problem of resultant moral luck because different results can arise from the same action and intention. While some argue (...) luck should not bear on persons’ culpability, Victor Kumar has argued that the tendency to hold unlucky agents responsible for harm is justified by consequentialist aims of punishment (Kumar 2019). In contrast, judgments that focus on acts and intentions may be primarily retributive. Kumar claims that judgments focused on results track external, public harm because this increases the reliability of punishment and better achieves instrumental aims, including deterrent effect. In this chapter I examine rape cases using Kumar’s theory of punishment. Rape involves outcomes that are not publicly available. If judgments of punishment depend on outcomes, then we would expect such judgments to be less stable for those instances of wrongdoing that lack public outcomes such as rape, because such judgments would rely instead on often biased and unreliable inferential processes to establish the presence of mental states, which are essentially private. In this way Kumar’s theory actually predicts the way in which we see criminal justice institutions fail with regard to arrest, prosecution, and punishment related to rape; and we might expect similar failures for other crimes that lack publicly available results. In sum, a fundamental problem with institutionalized punishment centered upon results may be that some crimes sit within a moral blindspot. (shrink)

There is an undeniable tendency to dismiss women’s sexual assault allegations out of hand. However, this tendency is not monolithic—allegations that black men have raped white women are often met with deadly seriousness. I argue that contemporary rape culture is characterized by the interplay between rape myths that minimize rape, and myths that catastrophize rape. Together, these two sets of rape myths distort the epistemic resources that people use when assessing rape allegations. These distortions (...) result in the unjust exoneration of people we cannot conceive of as monstrous, while making it too easy to believe that some marginalized people could be rapists. I also argue that rape myths enable a novel kind of epistemic injustice. This injustice concerns how our assessments of trustworthiness and our assessments of plausibility interact. I argue that rape myths can result in runaway credibility deflations that can explain both why people fail to believe most women, and also why people may unjustly believe false allegations that white women have been raped by black men. (shrink)

The Victorian period was known for the social problem novel, dealing with problems such as those caused by industrialization and the large rich poor divide, but in more recent decades there are novels which approximate to what I call “the sexual-political problem novel.” Brought up in a political elite, with expertise in maintaining a public persona and strategic communication and symbolism and running campaigns, however does one solve the problem of having a sexual relationship outside of this class, beyond engaging (...) in crowd rape? (shrink)

Lack of consent is valorized within popular culture to the point that sexual assault has become a spectator sport and creepshot entertainment on social media. Indeed, the valorization of nonconsensual sex has reached the extreme where sex with unconscious girls, especially accompanied by photographs as trophies, has become a goal of some boys and men.

Stephen Schulhofer's book, Unwanted Sex: The Culture of Intimidation and the Failure of Law, provides a carefully constructed and powerful case for rape-law reform. His effort is distinctive in three ways: (1) it takes the basic question of reform to be the moral one of determining which sexual interactions ought to be the subject of the criminal law, (2) it takes the right of sexual autonomy to serve as the basis for any successful legal reform, and (3) it makes (...) a philosophically sophisticated case for his own reform proposal. Schulhofer's efforts should be of great interest to philosophers, especially feminist legal philosophers, interested in questions that bear direct relevance to the relationships between autonomy, coercion, and consent as constrained by the requirements of due process. His careful and scrupulously fair discussion of influential reform recommendations set the stage for his own position (discussed in section VII), a critical evaluation thereof (sections VII and VIII), and sympathetic recommendations in VIII and IX. Of special value here is Schulhofer's attempt to extend his analysis of coerced consent to include certain "offers" made in contexts (e.g., the workplace) characterized by significant power differentials between persons. Section IX offers suggestions, generally friendly to Schulhofer's overall reform proposals, for identifying wrongful sexual interactions occurring in certain institutional or professional contexts. (shrink)

Standards of reasonability play an important role in some of the most difficult cases of rape. In recent years, the notion of the reasonable person has supplanted the historical concept of the reasonable man as the test of reasonability. Contemporary feminist critics like Catharine MacKinnon and Kim Lane Scheppele have challenged the notion of the reasonable person on the grounds that reasonability standards are gendered to the ground and so, in practice, the reasonable person is just the reasonable man (...) in a gender neutral guise. These critics call for the explicit employment of a reasonable woman standard for application to the actions of female victims of rape. But the arguments for abandoning a gender-neutral standard are double-edged and the employment of gendered standards of reasonability is likely to have implications that are neither foreseen by, nor acceptable to, advocates of such standards. Reasonable agent standards can be dropped, in favor of appeals to the notion of a reasonable demand by the law. However, if reasonable agent standards are to be retained, gendered versions of such standards are not preferable to gender-neutral ones. (shrink)

In *Engaging Capital Emotions,* Douglas Berman and Stephanos Bibas argue that emotion is central to understanding and evaluating the death penalty, and that the emotional case for the death penalty for child rape may be even stronger than for adult murder. Both the Berman and Bibas article and the subsequent Supreme Court decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana (striking down the death penalty for child rape) raise difficult questions about how to measure the heinousness of crimes other than murder, (...) and about the role the pain suffered by victims and victims' families should play in this inquiry. In this Reply, I agree with the authors on the importance of confronting emotion's role in capital punishment, for reasons I discuss in Part A. However, I disagree with their claim that the moral outrage evoked by child rape supports making it a capital crime. Part B explores the difficulties of using the existence of moral outrage as a measure of appropriate punishment. Part C argues that the penal system should not merely reflect moral outrage, but channel and educate it. It suggests that the availability of the death penalty may create an anchoring effect, communicating the message that the death penalty is the proper way to express moral outrage and to honor the worth of murder victims. It explores the consequences of this message. Section II focuses on the role of emotion in deciding whether child rape should be a capital crime. Part A considers the problematic role of victim harm in determining whether the death penalty is appropriate. It explores the question, raised in Kennedy v Louisiana, of whether the effect of a capital trial on child rape victims ought to be part of the calculus. Part B argues that there are three particular problems with allowing juries to sentence child rapists to death: the deleterious effect of anger and empathy, the problem of generic prejudice, and the issue of race. (shrink)

This paper uses a dilemma presented by David Benatar to explore the challenges that ‘Sexual Liberals’ face in giving a satisfactory account of sexual ethics. A satisfactory Sexual Liberal account of sexual ethics must be able to fully explain the wrongness of sexual assault without implying that sexual activity should be restricted to those in love. The assumption that this is impossible may be due to mistakes in our thinking about sexual assault. However, even when such mistakes are resolved, producing (...) a satisfactory account of sexual ethics requires Sexual Liberals to confront the significance of the sexual in human life. I describe an account of sexual desire that explains the significance of the sexual in human life without forcing us to endorse a restrictive sexual ethics. (shrink)

Feminist critics of evolutionary psychology are often accused of committing the naturalistic fallacy, that is, of inferring certain normative conclusions from evolutionary psychology’s purely descriptive accounts. This article refutes the accusation of the naturalistic fallacy, by showing that evolutionary psychology’s accounts of human behavior are not purely descriptive, but rather grounded on biased value judgments. A paradigmatic example is Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer’s well-known book A Natural History of Rape. I argue that at least three biased judgments are (...) at work in Thornhill and Palmer’s evolutionary psychology account of rape: (1) adaptationist approaches to evolution, (2) willful ignorance of cultural and social context, and (3) binary understanding of gender and sex. In that Thornhill and Palmer’s account cannot hold without the three biased value judgments, it is not a purely factual description of rape. Therefore, feminist concerns over its normative implications do not commit the naturalistic fallacy, as it is not the case that they infer a normative conclusion from a pure description. (shrink)

In the law of rape, consent has been and remains a gendered concept. Consent presumes female acquiescence to male sexual initiation. It presumes a man desires to penetrate a woman sexually. It presumes the woman willingly yields to the man's desires. It does not presume, and of course does not require, female sexual desire. Consent is what the law calls it when he advances and she does not put up a fight. I have argued elsewhere that the kind of (...) thin consent that the law focuses on is not enough ethically and it should not be enough legally to justify sexual penetration. I advocate sexual negotiation, where individuals discuss sexual desires and boundaries and agree to engage in penetration before it occurs, except under circumstances in which the partners have a reasonable basis to assess one another's nonverbal behavior. I argue that not only is verbal consultation about desire ordinarily ethically necessary before most acts of sexual penetration, it should be legally required. Consultation to ascertain sexual desires and boundaries assures that both parties desire penetration. (shrink)

This article was written in the wake of the issue concerning Jyoti's rape and the documentary "India's Daughter".

Ephecticism is the tendency towards suspension of belief. Epistemology often focuses on the error of believing when one ought to doubt. The converse error—doubting when one ought to believe—is relatively underexplored. This essay examines the errors of undue doubt. I draw on the relevant alternatives framework to diagnose and remedy undue doubts about rape accusations. Doubters tend to invoke standards for belief that are too demanding, for example, and underestimate how farfetched uneliminated error possibilities are. They mistake seeing how (...) incriminating evidence is compatible with innocence for a reason to withhold judgement. Rape accusations help illuminate the causes and normativity of doubt. I propose a novel kind of epistemic injustice, for example, wherein patterns of unwarranted attention to farfetched error possibilities can cause those error possibilities to become relevant. Widespread unreasonable doubt thus renders doubt reasonable and makes it harder to know rape accusations. Finally, I emphasise that doubt is typically a conservative force and I argue that the relevant alternatives framework helps defend against pernicious doubt-mongers. (shrink)

Buddhism almost spread densely in India for about six hundred years and also got support of kings and states and it also flourished not only in terms of treasurer but also in state power like of Christianity after the downfall of Romans in Europe. Words of Gautama Buddha after attaining Nirvana were against of any religious rituals and practises but after His death, gradually his words become another religion. Buddhism flourished and flourished rapidly on the Aryan land and also prospered (...) and therefore also brought many evils in the then society and this new native ideology altered the Hindu race of Aryans. (shrink)

-/- ABSTRACT: The concept of beauty has been central to the understanding of Aesthetics, but most modern scholars examine and celebrate Aesthetics presupposing that beauty exists in this Universe, and that by merely being patrons and proponents of art, they can exercise their metaphysical-value judgment however they feel is fulfilling. Contemporary artists fail to realize the etiology and phenomenological value of beauty. The perfect exemplification of this can be seen in the veritable themes and allegories of Postmodernism. The fetishistic penchant (...) of Post-structuralists and Post-modernists has made the treatment of art and literature destructively convoluted and obfuscated, and offers infinite leeway for analysis of any kind. The trite adage ''Kill the writer’’ has been grossly misused and misidentified. Having said that, this essay also does not aim to blindly ridicule Postmodernism, and It will be apparent from the tone of the essay that I myself subscribe to the incontrovertible absolutism that Postmodernism offers, but only in the sense of axiom and logic. I, however, do not value and extol the senseless plurality and verbosity of non-analytical assessment that is ubiquitously pronounced in Postmodern content. (shrink)

Prolife theorists typically hold to the claim that all human beings possess equal moral status from conception and consequently possess a right to life. This, they believe, entails that abortion is impermissible in all circumstances. Critics characterize this as an extreme anti-abortion position, as it prima facie allows no exceptions, even in cases of rape. Here, I examine whether the prolife claim regarding equal moral status is compatible with a more attractive moderate stance that permits an exception in the (...) case of rape. I show that Judith Jarvis Thomson's analysis of rights can be used to modify the prolife position in this way, but that doing so involves concessions that prolife theorists are unlikely to find acceptable. (shrink)

In a recent essay, Donald Dripps advanced what he calls a “commodification theory” of rape, offered as an alternative to understanding rape in terms of lack of consent. Under the “commodification theory,” rape is understood as the expropriation of sexual services, i.e., obtaining sex through “illegitimate” means. One aim of Dripps's effort was to show the inadequacy of consent approaches to understanding rape. Robin West, while accepting Dripps's critique of consent theories, criticizes Dripps's commodification approach. In (...) its place, West suggests a more phenomenological approach. The author argues that neither Dripps nor West offers convincing critiques of consent-based theories; the alternatives they offer presuppose the vitality of a consent-based approach to understanding rape; and that both Dripps and West consistently conflate more general moral and political issues with that of the nature of rape. (shrink)

A critical review of a book on rape by Joan McGregor.

It is widely accepted that valid consent is a necessary condition for permissible sexual activity. Since non-human animals, children, and individuals who are severely cognitively disabled, heavily intoxicated or unconscious, lack the cognitive capacity to give valid consent, this condition explains why it is impermissible to have sex with them. However, contrary to common intuitions, the same condition seems to render it impermissible to have sex with robots, for they too are incapable of consenting to sex due to insufficient cognitive (...) capacitation. This paper explores whether the intuition that non-consensual sex with robots is permissible can be vindicated, whilst preserving valid consent as a general requirement for permissible sexual activity. I develop and evaluate four possible ways to argue that there is a morally significant difference between robots on the one hand, and insufficiently cognitively capacitated humans and non-human animals on the other hand, to substantiate and justify the intuition that it is permissible to have non-consensual sex with the former but not with the latter. (shrink)

This is a critique of "A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion" (Thornhill & Palmer, 2000). Lloyd argues that they have failed to do "excellent science" as required to defend themselves against criticism. As an example, Lloyd contends that they make conclusions which depend on rape being a single trait, while failing to prorivde any basis for such an assumption.

This paper briefly describes the life of Otte Gross and his thoughts on sexuality, society, and repression. This provides the basis to interpret the #MeToo movement as functioning in the same way as a repressed memory that breaks through to consciousness. Gross' suggestion that society "rapes" individuals and his assertion of a primordial matriarchal society are useful insights in understanding the #Metoo movement.

Deadgirl (2008) is based around a group of male teens discovering and claiming ownership of a bound female zombie, using her as a sex slave. This narrative premise raises numerous tensions that are particularly amplified by using a zombie as the film's central victim. The Deadgirl is sexually passive yet monstrous, reifying the horrors associated with the female body in patriarchal discourses. She is objectified on the basis of her gender, and this has led many reviewers to dismiss the film (...) as misogynistic torture porn. However, the conditions under which masculinity is formed here—where adolescent males become “men” by enacting sexual violence—are as problematic as the specter of the female zombie. Deadgirl is clearly horrific and provocative: in this article I seek to probe implications arising from the film's gender conflicts. (shrink)

In the field of human rights, expressions like justice and legal reform are closely linked to the process of harmonization of domestic and international human rights standards. Harmonization of human rights standards can be described as a process wherein international human rights are incorporated or given full effect to at the domestic level. [i] To harmonize the two set of standards i.e. domestic and international is viewed as both a commitment and obligation of states under international law. [ii] In terms (...) of state practice, the process of harmonization may entail a set of actions including adoption of laws and creation of mechanisms for enforcement and redressal of violations. -/- At the international level, the harmonization agenda is actively promoted at forums including the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) or during consultations between states and human rights treaty bodies, etc. Questions on whether states are in compliance with their international human rights commitments under treaties and other resolutions are to a large extent determined based on the extent of harmonization. Other pertinent questions being whether existing domestic laws are compatible with international human rights standards? What conditions obstruct and facilitate harmonization of human rights standards? Are there any parameters to measure harmonization? -/- While harmonization is widely promoted, its study and assessment is complex. (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)

This essay introduces the ‘she said, he said’ paradox for Title IX investigations. ‘She said, he said’ cases are accusations of rape, followed by denials, with no further significant case-specific evidence available to the evaluator. In such cases, usually the accusation is true. Title IX investigations adjudicate sexual misconduct accusations in US educational institutions; I address whether they should be governed by the ‘preponderance of the evidence’ standard of proof or the higher ‘clear and convincing evidence’ standard. -/- Orthodoxy (...) holds that the ‘preponderance’ standard is satisfied if the evidence adduced renders the litigated claim more likely than not. On this view, I argue, ‘she said, he said’ cases satisfy the ‘preponderance’ standard. But this consequence conflicts with plausible liberal and feminist claims. In this essay I contrast the ‘she said, he said’ paradox with legal epistemology’s proof paradox. I explain how both paradoxes arise from the distinction between individualised and non-individualised evidence, and I critically evaluate responses to the ‘she said, he said’ paradox. (shrink)

The epistemology of risk examines how risks bear on epistemic properties. A common framework for examining the epistemology of risk holds that strength of evidential support is best modelled as numerical probability given the available evidence. In this essay I develop and motivate a rival ‘relevant alternatives’ framework for theorising about the epistemology of risk. I describe three loci for thinking about the epistemology of risk. The first locus concerns consequences of relying on a belief for action, where those consequences (...) are significant if the belief is false. The second locus concerns whether beliefs themselves—regardless of action—can be risky, costly, or harmful. The third locus concerns epistemic risks we confront as social epistemic agents. I aim to motivate the relevant alternatives framework as a fruitful approach to the epistemology of risk. I first articulate a ‘relevant alternatives’ model of the relationship between stakes, evidence, and action. I then employ the relevant alternatives framework to undermine the motivation for moral encroachment. Finally, I argue the relevant alternatives framework illuminates epistemic phenomena such as gaslighting, conspiracy theories, and crying wolf, and I draw on the framework to diagnose the undue skepticism endemic to rape accusations. (shrink)

In this paper I will use sex by deception as a case study for highlighting some of the most tricky concepts around sexuality and moral psychology, including rape, consensual sex, sexual rights, sexual autonomy, sexual individuality, and disrespectful sex. I begin with a discussion of morally wrong sex as rooted in the breach of five sexual liberty rights that are derived from our fundamental human liberty rights: sexual self-possession, sexual autonomy, sexual individuality, sexual dignity and sexual privacy. I then (...) argue (against the standard interpretation) that experimental findings in moral psychology show that the principle of respect for persons—a principle that grounds our human liberty rights—drives our intuitive moral judgments. In light of this discussion, I examine a puzzle about sex by deception—a puzzle which at first may seem to compel us to define 'rape' strictly in terms of force rather than sexual autonomy. I proceed by presenting an argument against the view that, as a rule, sex by deception undermines consent—a position held by prominent thinkers such as Philippe Patry (2001), Onora O’Neill (2003), Rubenfeld (2012), Tom Dougherty (2013a, 2013b), Joyce M. Short (2013), and Danielle Bromwich and Joseph Millum (2013, 2018). As we will see, sex following deception to increase your chances does not always constitute rape. Lying about your age, education, job, family background, marital status, or interest in a relationship, for example, does not make your sex partner incapable of consenting, which is to say that sex by deception need not be rape. I even go so far as to say that sex with another person that is facilitated by withholding information about having a venereal disease shouldn't be classified as rape. Although sex by deception doesn't compromise consent, it nonetheless violates the principle of respect for persons, not by vitiating sexual autonomy and compromising consent, but by failing to respect other sexual rights, such as our rights to sexual dignity, individuality, and privacy. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that consent is a normative power. For instance, consent can make an impermissible act permissible. In the words of Heidi Hurd, it “turns a trespass into a dinner party... an invasion of privacy into an intimate moment.” In this chapter, I argue against the assumption that consent has such robust powers for moral transformation. In particular, I argue that there is a wide range of sex that harms or wrongs victims despite being consensual. Moreover, these cases (...) are not limited to those where con- sent is vitiated by background conditions. I start by calling this category of consensual sex Bad Sex. I then distinguish subspecies of this category, including psychological pressure, social coercion, and epistemically unsafe sex. I end by responding to an objection on which we should treat at least some subspecies of Bad Sex as rape. Though this alternative proposal is often motivated by ameliorative and strategic considerations, I argue that such considerations actually count against collapsing the categories of Bad Sex and rape. (shrink)

In their well-known paper, John Gardner and Stephen Shute (2000) propose a pure case of rape, in which a woman is raped while unconscious and the rape, for a variety of stipulated reasons, never comes to light. This makes the pure case a harmless case of rape, or so they argue. In this paper I show that their argument hinges on an outdated conception of trauma, one which conflates evaluative responses that arise in the aftermath of (...) class='Hi'>rape with the non-deliberative somatic responses of a central nervous system to a threatening event. In the first part of this paper, I elaborate this objection by drawing on the neurobiological model of trauma. This gives me an opportunity to illustrate the different ways that rape harms its victims, including the central way, what I call ‘threat-circuitry harm.’ This discussion of trauma invites us to rethink the wrong of rape, and sets the groundwork for my argument, in the second part of the paper, that the wrong of rape consists in its central harm. (shrink)

Pressuring someone into having sex would seem to differ in significant ways from pressuring someone into investing in one’s business or buying an expensive bauble. In affirming this claim, I take issue with a recent essay by Sarah Conly (‘Seduction, Rape, and Coercion’, Ethics, October 2004), who thinks that pressuring into sex can be helpfully evaluated by analogy to these other instances of using pressure. Drawing upon work by Alan Wertheimer, the leading theorist of coercion, she argues that so (...) long as pressuring does not amount to coercing someone into having sex, her consent to sex answers the important ethical questions about it. In this essay, I argue that to understand the real significance of pressuring into sex, we need to appeal to background considerations, especially the male-dominant gender hierarchy, which renders sexual pressuring different from its non-sexual analogues. Treating pressure to have sex like any other sort of interpersonal pressure obscures the role such sexual pressure might play in supporting gender hierarchy, and fails to explain why pressure by men against women is more problematic than pressure by women against men. I suggest that men pressuring women to have sex differs from the reverse case because of at least two factors: (1) gendered social institutions which add to the pressures against women, and (2) the greater likelihood that men, not women, will use violence if denied, and the lesser ability of women compared to men to resist such violence without harm. (shrink)

In this article Judith Jarvis Thomson's Good Samaritan Argument in defense of abortion in the case of rape is defended from two objections: the Kill vs. Let Die Objection, and the Intend to Kill vs. Merely Foresee Death Objection. The article concludes that these defenses do not defend Thomson from further objections from Peter Singer and David Oderberg.

Issues include attempts generally; the problem of outcome luck; the impossibility defense; physical movement and intent; and reckless attempts, attempted rape, and attempted theft. In the final section, I offer a hypothetical that challenges Prof. Donnelly-Lazarov's theory.

An analytic investigation of Antioch's "Sexual Offense Policy.".

The objection of horrible commands claims that divine command metaethics is doomed to failure because it is committed to the extremely counterintuitive assumption that torture of innocents, rape, and murder would be morally obligatory if God commanded these acts. Morriston, Wielenberg, and Sinnott-Armstrong have argued that formulating this objection in terms of counterpossibles is particularly forceful because it cannot be simply evaded by insisting on God’s necessary perfect moral goodness. I show that divine command metaethics can be defended even (...) against this counterpossible version of the objection of horrible commands because we can explain the truth-value intuitions about the disputed counterpossibles as the result of conversational implicatures. Furthermore, I show that this pragmatics-based defence of divine command metaethics has several advantages over Pruss’s reductio counterargument against the counterpossible version of the objection of horrible commands. (shrink)

What words we use, and what meanings they have, is important. We shouldn't use slurs; we should use 'rape' to include spousal rape (for centuries we didn’t); we should have a word which picks out the sexual harassment suffered by people in the workplace and elsewhere (for centuries we didn’t). Sometimes we need to change the word-meaning pairs in circulation, either by getting rid of the pair completely (slurs), changing the meaning (as we did with 'rape'), or (...) adding brand new word-meaning pairs (as with 'sexual harassment'). A problem, though, is how to do this. One might worry that any attempt to change language in this way will lead to widespread miscommunication and confusion. I argue that this is indeed so, but that's a feature, not a bug of attempting to change word-meaning pairs. The miscommunications and confusion such changes cause can lead us, via a process I call transformative communicative disruption, to reflect on our language and its use, and this can be further, rather than hinder, our goal of improving language. (shrink)

Despite being a prevalent theme in popular cinema, revenge has received little dedicated attention within film studies. The majority of research concerning the concept of revenge is located within moral philosophy, but that body of literature has been overlooked by film studies scholars. Philosophers routinely draw on filmic examples to illustrate their discussions of revenge, but those interpretations are commonly hindered by their authors’ inexperience with film studies’ analytical methods. This article seeks to bridge those gaps. The 2010 remake of (...) I Spit on Your Grave is used as a case study to illustrate the benefits of an interdisciplinary engagement with revenge. Philosophical literature on the topic has routinely posited that revenge is either appealing or appalling, and that impasse has stifled conceptual understanding. The interdisciplinary approach employed here elucidates that revenge is simultaneously appealing and appalling; this dualistic nature is evident in I Spit on Your Grave since it is built into the narrative design. I conclude that an interdisciplinary approach to revenge has the potential to advance understanding of revenge-qua-concept both within films studies and philosophy. (shrink)

There has recently been an expansion of anti-abortion measures in the United States. Within these various measures there is a divide over certain exceptions: some States permit abortion for pregnancies caused by rape while other States do not. This paper explores the underlying moral justification for such exceptions. I argue that within the dominant moral framework for reproductive ethics these exceptions are incoherent by their own lights. But this is not a defense of an exceptionless anti-abortion position. Rather, because (...) the typical way of making such exceptions is incoherent, this shows why the anti-abortion movement is dangerous: as these incoherencies are acknowledged, this may lead to ever stricter measures being put in place. I end by suggesting that those who are sympathetic to these exceptions should find it easier to move to a pro-choice position rather than to a more extreme, exceptionless one. (shrink)