This paper introduces a distinction that has not, to my knowledge, been drawn in the philosophical literature on moral responsibility and sexual coercion. Existing work on the communicative dimension of sexual violation has focused predominantly on structural conditions—the social and discursive environments that impair a victim's capacity to refuse—rather than on the specific communicative methodology employed by offenders in individual acts. Drawing on Langton's account of illocutionary silencing and recent work by Harrison and Tanter on the ethics of uptake, I argue that an offender who solicits consent, receives a refusal, and forces anyway (scenario B) commits a more serious moral wrong than one who announces intent without soliciting any response and forces (scenario C), despite the intuitive pull of the opposite judgment. The reason is that B creates an illusory choice: it activates the victim's communicative capacity for refusal and then retroactively nullifies it. I further distinguish, within scenario B, between offenders who acted with knowledge of the counterfactual alternative—who knowingly selected the more deceptive communicative format—and those who did not model that alternative. I argue this meta-awareness is relevant to the degree of moral responsibility attributable to the offender, in a manner consistent with Fischer and Ravizza's reasons-responsiveness framework. The distinction is philosophically novel and empirically testable.
Jazz Maurizzi (Fri,) studied this question.