Towards a conception of rape as a violation of constitutive autonomy in greek, christian, and new natural law theory
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2010
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Abstract
This thesis investigates an intuition which is present in public, academic, and legal thinking about rape: is the harm of rape unique in kind? Turning to three non-liberal accounts of sexual ethics to test the legitimacy of this intuition, we argue that new natural law theory, in its union of the ancient Greek emphasis on the essential role of the sexual body in the fulfillment of moral projects to the Christian accentuation on the universalism of the harm of rape, points us toward the conclusion that the unique harm of rape is its imposition on the freedom of the victim to constitute herself through sexual acts as an erotic being. While reforms to Canadian law have occluded this uniqueness by assimilating rape under the category of assault, international law demonstrates greater evidence of the practical operationalization of our judgement of rape as a crime against freedom of sexual self-constitution.
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Bibliography: p. 179-191
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Blake, R. (2010). Towards a conception of rape as a violation of constitutive autonomy in greek, christian, and new natural law theory (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/3680