Filipa Melo Lopes

Gisèle Pelicot's story outraged the world. The sickening parade of crimes to which she was subjected and her betrayal are dark pages in our history. Feminist philosopher Manon Garcia decided to attend the trial and to analyse its resonance for our future. It became the trial that demonstrated that trials will never suffice to serve justice. If the perpetrators, for the most part, seemed so unashamed of what they had done, can we see in their sentencing anything meaningful? If their lawyers defend their clients by relieving them of responsibility for their actions, how will these men, their families, their friends see this trial as anything other than an injustice? If, even as the most explicit proof streamed before the court, the victim was stonewalled with the bland denial of facts, what can juries achieve in cases when the evidence is lacking? The threat of incarceration will never be powerful enough to stop men raping. If trusting the justice system, as those who fret about feminist overreach counsel us to do, gets us nowhere, what do we do? Above all, one question haunted Garcia: under such circumstances, can we live with men? And at what price?

This paper offers an analytic reconstruction of Sartre’s theory of radical freedom. On the proposed interpretation, freedom is radical, because the freely chosen act and the reasons for choice are codependent: the freely chosen act grounds reasons by being based on them. Nonetheless, since freedom is embodied, there can be constraint on choice. Such constraint becomes intelligible once we properly understand the temporality of freedom. The chapter illustrates this through a close reading of Sartre’s example of the gambler and argues that it is part of the gambler’s mistake to think that all resolutions have to be remade at every instant _ex nihilo_.