Vol. 6 No. 4 (2020)

In our final issue of 2020, readers will find five peer-reviewed articles. The first is “Why Luck Egalitarianism Fails in Condemning Oppression,” by Cynthia A. Stark, considering and rejecting luck-egalitarian responses to criticisms that luck egalitarianism condones some cases of oppression and condemns others for the wrong reason.

The second article, by Rebecca Hannah Smith, is “The Morality of Resisting Oppression,” and advances a view that victims of oppression have pro tanto moral reasons to resist their oppression rather than a full-fledged, absolute moral duty of resistance.

In the third article, “Mansplaining and Illocutionary Force,” Casey Rebecca Johnson offers a speech-act theoretic account of what goes wrong in cases of what she calls “speech act–confusion mansplaining,” and she argues that they contribute to women’s discursive disablement and to the restriction of women’s participation in epistemically relevant exchanges.

The fourth article is by Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, who argues in “Presupposition and Consent” that “consent” is a concept poorly suited to play its canonical central role in contemporary sexual ethics, and argues that, given the presuppositions implicit in “consent” discourse in the ordinary vernacular, there is good reason to advocate for reform of public discourse on sexual ethics, not merely academic theoretical talk.

The fifth article in this issue is Ginger Tate Clausen’s “‘Next Time’ Means ‘No’: Sexual Consent and the Structure of Refusals,” in which she urges concerted attention to the structures and contexts of consent and refusal. It is a pleasant coincidence that all of these papers relate to each other so well.