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Re: Defining 'rape'
"Rape" is surely vague, but then I think that the vast majority of terms are vague, and so this doesn't pose a particular problem for rape. All this vagueness must have something to do with the demise (or hoped demise!) of necessary and sufficient definitions and counterexamples school of philosophy. I'm just not sure what we're supposed to replace it with. Presumably just saying that
generally rape involves physical coersion, generally involves A, B and C doesn't tell us anything we didn't know already.
M.
On 25/04/06, Andrew Bacon <andrew.bacon@lmh.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
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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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