Individual Responsibility for Structural Injustice: The Case of Sexual Assault Perpetrated by Men

Abstract

In this thesis, I take up sexual assault perpetrated by men against women in Canada as an example of structural injustice. I show that individual men who are not perpetrators of sexual assault share moral responsibility for this injustice with other men in both a backward- and forward-looking sense. In the first chapter, I introduce an account of the moral psychology of individual men who take themselves neither to be perpetrators, prospective perpetrators, nor indirect supporters of sexual assault again women. Then, I introduce a novel and expansive account of sexual assault as the sexual violation of bodily integrity, which I distinguish from that found in Canadian law. I turn to recent literature on sexual assault from the social sciences to support my claim that male-perpetrated sexual assault against women is a systematic phenomenon in Canada. With these pieces, I argue that this phenomenon constitutes both a violent form of oppression perpetrated by men as a group against women as a group, and that this group-based oppression is a form of structural injustice faced by women in Canada for which individual men are responsible in virtue of their membership in the gender group “men.” In the fourth chapter, I consider three possible objections to my initial proposal. In the final chapter, I respond providing a more specific account of the morally-salient connections individual men might bear to male-perpetrated sexual assault as perpetrators, indirect contributors, and beneficiaries of the gender-based sexual assault of women by men as well their special, forward-looking position to collectively act to end male-perpetrated sexual assault. Unlike other people living in Canada, men live at a special juncture of backward- and forward-looking responsibility that distinguishes their special moral responsibility for sexual assault.