by Claude Opus 5.5
Is there a distinctive wrong of being made an object of collective sexual use, over and above the wrongs done by each participant? How would a Kantian articulate it?
The standard liberal analysis of sexual wrongdoing is individualist and additive. Each person who touches another without valid consent commits a wrong against her; if several do so, there are several wrongs. Group sexual violence is worse because there are more wrongs, and perhaps because each is aggravated by the presence of the others. This analysis is correct as far as it goes. The question is whether it misses something: whether being made the object of a group’s sexual use is a distinct wrong that is not the sum of individual violations.
The question needs careful handling in relation to the case behind these seminars, where the allegations are contested and no one has been charged. What follows treats the question philosophically and assumes nothing about what occurred.
The additive picture and its limits
On the additive picture, the wrong done by A to the victim is the same whether or not B and C are also present. Their presence may increase the harm she suffers, through fear or humiliation, and may increase A’s culpability, for instance if he knows that their presence makes her less able to resist. But the wrong remains a relation between A and her.
Three features of collective use resist this picture. First, the victim may experience the episode as a single event done to her by the group, not as a series of separate acts. Second, the participants often act together, with shared understandings and roles, so that each act is part of a joint activity. Third, there is frequently an audience, present or remote, for whom the episode is a spectacle, and the presence of that audience changes the meaning of what is done.
A Kantian articulation
Kant’s Formula of Humanity requires that we treat humanity, in ourselves and others, always as an end and never merely as a means. Kant himself, in the Lectures on Ethics, was notoriously suspicious of sexual desire on the ground that it takes the other person’s body, rather than the person, as its object, and so tends to reduce the person to a thing. Contemporary Kantians, notably Barbara Herman and Christine Korsgaard, have developed more nuanced readings, on which sexual relations can respect persons when they occur within a framework of reciprocity and mutual recognition.
Collective sexual use violates this framework in a distinctive way. In a two-person violation, the victim is treated as a means to the perpetrator’s ends. In collective use, she is treated as a means to the group’s ends, and those ends are often social as much as sexual: bonding, status, the display of loyalty, entertainment. She becomes a medium through which the participants relate to each other. Her humanity is not merely overridden; it is instrumentalised for a project in which she figures only as material.
This is a different kind of objectification. Martha Nussbaum’s analysis distinguishes several dimensions of treating a person as an object: instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership and denial of subjectivity. Rae Langton has added reduction to body, reduction to appearance and silencing. Collective use tends to involve all of these, but two stand out. One is fungibility in reverse: the participants treat themselves as interchangeable with each other, which in turn implies that what each does to her is interchangeable, and that she is the fixed point around which interchangeable acts revolve. The other is silencing: in a group, her refusal, if any, is less likely to be heard, and her subjectivity is denied not only by each participant but by the group’s shared construction of the situation.
The expressive dimension
A further element is expressive. Acts communicate attitudes. A group that uses a person sexually, particularly before an audience or with the creation of images, expresses a judgement about her status: that she is the kind of thing that may be used in this way, by anyone in the group. Elizabeth Anderson and Richard Pildes have argued that actions can wrong people by expressing inappropriate attitudes towards them, independently of their consequences. On this view, collective sexual use carries an expressive wrong that belongs to the group’s action as a whole and cannot be decomposed into individual expressions.
Who bears this wrong?
If the distinctive wrong exists, it is done by the group as a joint agent, and each participant shares in it through participation. Christopher Kutz’s account of complicity is helpful here: one is accountable for a group’s wrong by intentionally participating in it, regardless of one’s marginal causal contribution. A participant who would argue that his own act would have been no worse had he been alone misdescribes what he took part in. He took part in a collective act whose character is not reducible to his act.
Spectators, including remote ones in a group chat, may share in the expressive wrong without sharing in the bodily one. Their participation in the group’s construction of the episode as a spectacle is participation in the group’s treatment of her as an object of display.
Objections
One objection is that this analysis risks double counting: punishing participants once for their individual acts and again for the collective one. The reply is that the analysis identifies a different wrong, not a duplicate one. Legal systems already recognise this in aggravating factors for joint offending.
A second objection is that the concept of a group “end” is too indeterminate to ground a distinct wrong. This is fair, but the indeterminacy is in the empirical description, not the normative structure. Where participants act together for social ends, the Kantian analysis applies.
The seminar question is then whether criminal law, which is built on individual culpability, can or should recognise this wrong, or whether it is better addressed by other institutions: disciplinary, reparative, or cultural.