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Re: Defining 'rape'
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Hmm, I'm not impressed by the idea that we need to give, or even that there
*are* necessary and sufficient conditions for something to count as rape
(Wittgenstein made the same point about the word 'game' - the suggested
necessary conditions are too weak and the suggested sufficient conditions are
too strong). Hence the need for common law!
Having said this I would have thought that the two examples where fairly clear.
1) Not rape, physical coersion was not involved. (Talking someone into sex does
not count as rape - imagine how many rape cases we'd have otherwise!!)
2) Not rape either, who is raping who? The verb rape is a two place relation: 'A
rapes B'. The three people you described have not entered into this relation.
"What about gang rape?" you might say - this is not a counterexample, we never
said that rape couldn't be a many-one relation while remaining two place. We can
define gang rape: ExEy[x!=y ^ Rxz ^ Ryz] (I would a prefer a formulation
involving plural quantification but that's going a bit over the top).
Andrew
> How do we define rape? No doubt there will be extensive literature on this
> topic, particularly in feminist philosophy. I haven?t read any of this; what
> follows is the result of discussions with friends and personal thought. It
> seems to me that ?rape? has a very vague extension. As a first attempt, I would
> be inclined to say that ?rape? means inducing someone to perform a sex act
> without their consent. There appear to be three terms in this definition which
> allow vagueness to creep in: ?induce?, ?sex act?, and ?consent?.
>
> Consider these problematic examples:
>
> 1. A man seduces a woman who has strong religious convictions that pre-marital
> sex is wrong. She agrees to have sex with him after he exerts emotional
> pressure, but only on condition that he promises to marry her the next day.
> When morning comes, he breaks his promise.
>
> 2. This one comes from a film I saw recently: a young mentally disabled man,
> Anthony, is encouraged to smoke cannabis by older people. When he is
> subsequently in bed sleeping off the effects, one of his ?friends? uses threats
> of violence to force one of the women present to have sex with Anthony. Here it
> seems that neither party involved in the intercourse gives their consent; we
> seem to have the bizarre situation where a third party is ?raping? two people
> from a distance.
>
> Example 1, if it really is a case of rape, seems to be a counterexample to the
> definition given initially, since consent is given by both parties. Example 2
> is not so much a counterexample to the definition as I have formulated it, but
> it has some strange consequences for what might be considered as rape. How
> would the law consider example 2? Would it punish the woman, or the third
> party, or neither? My intuitions are fairly clear that only one person is to
> blame, but he wasn?t even in the room when the rape occurred.
>
>
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>
--
Andrew Bacon
Lady Margaret Hall
07830048336
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lady1900
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