Sex, Discrimination, and Violence

Fascinating philosophy often seeks to generate strong conclusions from weak premises. Stephen Kershnar's Sex, Discrimination, and Violence is in this vein. Beginning with a relatively uncontroversial moral core of self-ownership rights and a widely accepted objective account of the human good, Kershnar claims that certain counterintuitive conclusions about permissible behavior cannot be avoided. Kershnar's book requires us to consider whether our rejection of practices such as enjoying rape-pornography and torturing wrongdoers is based merely on squeamishness, or can be given a principled foundation. Few will want to accept Kershnar's conclusions, but many will enjoy learning as they try to figure out where he has gone wrong. -- Thaddeus Metz, University of Johannesburg
I seldom agree with Kershnar, but I have long found his arguments interesting—both in the sense that they catch my interest and in the sense that they provoke me to think more carefully about questions I had assumed were closed. This book is no exception—except that (disconcerting as it is) I found his argument for the moral permissibility of some child-adult sex convincing. -- Michael Davis, Professor of Philosophy, Illinois Institute of Technology