Individual Responsibility for Structural Injustice: The Case of Sexual Assault Perpetrated by Men
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".