Robert Morgan

When words and phrases change their meaning, we might find ourselves less able to understand and communicate, and this can be harmful to us. I make sense of this by introducing the concept of hermeneutical disarmament. Hermeneutical disarmament is the process by which a person is rendered less able to understand or communicate experiences, ideas, and other phenomena as a result of semantic change to the linguistic resources that could previously have been deployed for these purposes. I defend this concept by showing that semantic change can inflict cognitive and communicative harms and detail some of the forms that it can take.

ABSTRACT One person treats another as a sexual being by responding to their actual or perceived sexual properties. I develop an account of sexualisation to examine this phenomenon, especially as it relates to wrongful treatment such as sexual harassment. On the account proposed here, one person sexualises another when they foreground that person’s sexual properties. Some property of a person is foregrounded when it is introduced to the score of the encounter, following David Lewis’s conception of a conversational score. Having developed a concept of sexualisation, I argue that unwanted sexualisation is wrong because it contradicts a person’s self-presentation. Unwanted sexualisation is a particularly serious instance of this due to cultural norms surrounding sex and the practice of unwanted sexualisation.

We recognise certain acts as ‘sexual assault’, ‘sexual violence’, or a ‘sexual offence’, often to offer strong moral condemnation or to prescribe legal sanction. A common feature of these attacks is that they impose nonconsensual sexual contact; they are sexual attacks. While there has been extensive discussion of consent to sexual contact and of the conditions under which consensual contact is sexual, there has been little investigation into what it is for nonconsensual contact to be sexual. The purpose of this article is to examine the conditions under which an attack (nonconsensual contact) is sexual. I first argue that an account of sexual attacks is important, not least because the question has pressing moral and legal implications. I then consider and reject three accounts, one appealing solely to intuitions, one appealing to the body parts involved, and one appealing to the assailant’s mental state. Finally, I develop my own account. I propose that an attack is sexual if and only if it carries a sexual expressive significance, and thereby conveys a sexual meaning.