ABSTRACT

Anti-pornography feminists have famously argued that pornography silences women: specifically, pornography causes women to be illocutionarily disabled in some real-life sexual contexts so that they are unable to refuse sex by saying ‘no’. Call this view Silencing. Some philosophers object to Silencing because it seems to entail that, in some cases, a rapist’s blameworthiness is significantly diminished. If the woman cannot refuse sex by saying ‘no’, and this allows the man’s belief, that she consents, to be rational, then the man’s blameworthiness for rape is significantly diminished. The objection is that something must be wrong with a view like Silencing that allows rapists to escape the moral hook when, intuitively, they should not. In this paper, I defend Silencing from this objection by appealing to insights from the literature on moral encroachment in order to argue that it is not rational for the rapist to believe (or accept) that the woman consents.

摘要

反色情女权主义者有一个著名的论点，即色情使女性沉默：具体来说，色情导致女性在某些现实生活中的性环境中因言外行为而丧失能力，以致她们无法通过说“不”来拒绝性。将此视图称为“沉默”。一些哲学家反对沉默，因为在某些情况下，这似乎意味着强奸犯的应受谴责程度会大大降低。如果女人不能通过说“不”来拒绝性行为，而这使得男人相信她同意，这是理性的，那么男人对强奸的罪责就会大大减少。反对意见是，像“沉默”这样的观点一定有问题，这种观点允许强奸犯逃脱道德的束缚，而直觉上他们不应该这样做。在本文中，我通过诉诸有关道德侵犯的文献中的见解来捍卫沉默，以证明强奸犯相信（或接受）妇女同意是不合理的。