Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

#MeToo & the role of Outright Belief

  • Published:
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In this paper, I provide an account of the wrong that is done to women when everyday people fail to believe allegations of sexual assault made by women. I argue that an everyday person wrongs both the accuser and women causally distant from the accuser when they fail to believe the accuser’s allegation. First, I argue that there are responses that we, as everyday members of society, owe to victims of sexual assault. A condition enabling everyday people to respond in the way owed to victims is that they have an outright belief that the accuser was assaulted. Actively suspending judgement about whether a crime occurred is in tension with the ability to respond to the victim in a way that supports and validates them. When an everyday person fails to have an outright belief in the truth of an allegation, they wrong the accuser because they risk failing to satisfy the conditions enabling them to fulfill their obligation to her. Second, I argue that everyday people wrong women who are causally distant from the accuser because in our social context, women are often treated in particular ways – especially in the sexual domain – because they are women. As a result, when women hear that an everyday person fails to believe a particular allegation, they easily project themselves into the accuser’s position and reasonably worry that if they were to be assaulted, they too would be met with doubt and disbelief by the people in their community.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. From: https://metoomvmt.org/get-to-know-us/history-inception/.

  2. From: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katiejmbaker/heres-the-powerful-letter-the-stanford-victim-read-to-her-ra.

  3. In Kimberly Ferzan’s 2020 paper, she argues for a way to reconcile #BelieveHer with the presumption of innocence from a legal perspective. Bolinger (2021) and Gardiner (forthcoming) also discuss the epistemic demands of the #MeToo movement. Freedman (2020) argues that #MeToo testimony has epistemic value for survivors and for society. Bianca Crewe and Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa also discuss this in passing in their (2021) paper “Rape Culture and Epistemology”; Ichikawa also discusses a similar issue in his (2020) paper “Contextual Injustice”. The Fall 2019 APA newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy also has extensive discussion of the #MeToo movement from a philosophical perspective: https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.apaonline.org/resource/collection/D03EBDAB-82D7-4B28-B897-C050FDC1ACB4/FeminismV19n1.pdf.

  4. See Singer 1972.

  5. It might be objected that if providing support is especially burdensome, then on the consequentialist approach, one would no longer have an obligation to provide social support to victims of sexual assault. The objection, however, is misplaced: this is a feature, not a bug, of the view. For example, suppose at work, a group are discussing their colleague’s sexual assault allegation. The majority of the group seems skeptical of the truth of her allegation. I think one component of providing support is that someone has an obligation to stand up for the accuser and validate the truth of her allegation. However, if someone is a junior person, while the rest of the group is more senior, and standing up for the accuser would jeopardize that junior person’s standing in the workplace and possible future employment or promotions, then it would be too much to ask for that person to validate the accuser. The other senior people, on the other hand, do have an obligation to offer support to the accuser because the benefit he could provide her greatly outweighs the cost of standing up to the senior person.

  6. One might point out that our duty not to assault others is a negative duty while our duty to provide social support to victims is a positive duty. Since it is typically thought that negative duties are stronger than positive duties, does this entail that our responsibility to provide social support to victims of sexual assault is weaker than our responsibility not to assault others? I am not convinced that the distinction between negative and positive duties makes much of a difference to my argument here; regardless of whether the obligation to support victims is weaker or equally as strong as the obligation not to assault anyone, it is a duty nonetheless and the failure to fulfill that duty wrongs victims of sexual assault. Thanks to David Boonin for pushing me to address this point.

  7. Personally, I am most sympathetic to the contractarian motivation for the duty we have to provide social support to victims of sexual assault.

  8. This specific terminology is borrowed from Staffel 2018; see also Daniel Greco’s paper (Greco 2017) “Cognitive Mobile Homes” which defends an account of belief with which I work here.

  9. See Staffel 2018 for a more detailed explanation of how beliefs simplify reasoning.

  10. See also Gordon 1987, Owens 2013 and Littlejohn 2017 for further discussion of the relationship between full belief and emotion or blame.

  11. See Miranda Pilipchuk’s article in the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy “Good Survivor, Bad Survivor: #MeToo and the Moralization of Survivorship” for an interesting argument about how the nature of disclosure in the context of #MeToo has led to an impetus to disclose and a hierarchy among those who chose to disclose compared to those who remain silent. Link in fn 3.

  12. In colloquial discussions, these are often referred to as ‘he said, she said’ cases.

  13. See Tom Dougherty’s The Scope of Consent (forthcoming) for the debate on consent.

  14. I want to briefly draw attention to the fact that, in addition to testimonial evidence in a particular case, we have statistical evidence which tells us that the vast majority of sexual assault allegations are true. Although this is an incredibly difficult number to pin down with precision, studies suggest that anywhere from 2.2 to 6.8% of sexual assault allegations are false or not corroborated. This evidence, along with an allegation in a particular case, seems to justify a high credence in the truth of the allegation (perhaps somewhere at or above cr(p)>0.9), even in the face of conflicting testimony from the accused. And even if we cannot precisify numerically how many sexual assault allegations made by women are false, we do not need a precise number to know that women are, in general, highly reliable sources of testimony regarding their own experiences of sexual assault. Just as we still trust doctors over naturopaths when it comes to our health even though we know that some doctors misdiagnose their patients, we do not need to know that every single allegation of sexual assault by a woman is true to know that women are highly reliable at attesting to their own experiences of sexual assault. So, even when there is conflicting testimony from the accused, the balance of probabilities still strongly favors the truth of the allegation over its falsity. See Deborah Turkheimer’s excellent over of this research “Incredible Women: Sexual Violence and the Credibility Discount”. She discusses the studies that provide evidence of how many allegations of sexual assault by women are false in footnotes 86-100.

  15. If one is sympathetic to the idea of doxastic wronging, then Ben’s failure to believe Caelynn could wrong her even if she never finds out about Ben’s lack of belief. Doxastic wronging is the idea that we can wrong others in virtue of what we believe (or in this case, don’t believe) about them. I am sympathetic to the existence of doxastic wronging, but I do not defend it here. I merely bring it up to acknowledge that this is a position that one could take, insofar as one is convinced that we can wrong others in virtue of what we believe (or fail to believe) about them. See Basu and Schroeder 2019 for a discussion of doxastic wronging. This is an avenue of further research that I believe would be fruitful to pursue in the future.

  16. Although I focus on the social category of “women” in my argument here, the focus of my discussion is merely limited by space constraints. In principle, I see no reason why my arguments here would not extend to the category of ‘sexual assault survivors’ causally distant from the accuser. This group could (and most certainly will) include men, women, nonbinary folks, trans folks, etc. This is an interesting avenue for future research. Thanks to an anonymous referee for asking about this issue.

  17. 1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men have been raped at some point in their lives. Statistic from “The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (Black et al. 2011): 2010 Summary Report”. See also Muehlenhard et al. 2017 for an assessment of the 1 in 5 statistic; they conclude that this is a reasonably accurate average rate of victimization for college students on campuses.

  18. Adriana Placani argues that being subject to risk can be harmful in the sense that “moral agents are bearers of interests in dignity, and when risk exposures impinge negatively upon these then they too can be wrongful and harmful” (Placani 2017, 88). I suggest that women like Ashley are subject to such dignitary wrongs when everyday people fail to believe Caelynn’s true sexual assault allegation against Jay. That is, Ben’s failure to believe Caelynn makes vivid to women like Ashley the fact that they live in a social context in which their allegation of sexual assault is unlikely to be believed; it is in that sense that she is wronged when she learns that Ben doesn’t believe Caelynn’s allegation against Jay.

  19. Thanks to Renee Jorgensen for suggesting this wonderful analogy.

  20. This is known as testimonial smothering, discussed in Dotson 2011.

  21. Just as with the case above, if one is sympathetic to the existence of doxastic wronging, then Ben could wrong Ashley without her ever finding out about his failure to believe.

  22. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to address this point.

  23. See Fritz and Jackson 2020.

References

  • Adler J (2002) Belief’s own ethics. MIT Press, Cambridge

  • Bolinger R (2021) #BelieveWomen and the Ethics of Belief. NOMOS LXIV: Truth and Evidence. eds. Melissa Schwartzberg and Philip Kitcher

  • Basu R, Schroeder M (2019) Doxastic Wronging. Pragmatic Encroachment in Epistemology. Brian Kim & Matthew McGrath. Routledge, Abingdon-on-Thames

  • Black MC, Basile KC, Breiding MJ, Smith SG, Walters ML, Merrick MT, Chen J, Stevens MR (2011) The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS): 2010 summary report. National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta

    Google Scholar 

  • Buchak L (2014) Belief, credence, and norms. Philos Stud 169:285–311

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Crenshaw K (2019) We still have not learned from Anita Hill’s testimony. UCLA Women’s Law J 26(1):17–20

    Google Scholar 

  • Crewe B, Ichikawa JJ (2021) Rape culture and epistemology. In: Applied Epistemology ed. Jennifer Lackey. Oxford University Press, Oxford

  • Dougherty T (ed) (forthcoming) The Scope of Consent. Oxford University Press, Oxford

  • Dotson K (2011) Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing. Hypatia 26(2):236-257

  • Ferzan KK (2020) #BelieveWomen and the presumption of innocence: clarifying questions for law and life. In: the University of Virginia School of Law Public Law and Legal Theory Paper Series, No. 39

  • Freedman K (2020) The Epistemic Significance of #MeToo.  Fem Philos Q 6(2), Article 2.

  • Friedman J (2013) Suspended Judgment. Philos Stud 162:165-181

  • Fritz J, Jackson E (2020) Belief, credence, and moral encroachment. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02799-6

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gardiner G (ed) (forthcoming) The ‘She Said, He Said’ Paradox and the Proof Paradox. In: Truth and Trials: Dilemmas at the Intersection of Epistemology and Philosophy of Law, eds.Zachery Hoskins and Jon Robson. Routledge, Abingdon-on-Thames

  • Gordon R (1987) The Structure of Emotion. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

  • Greco D (2017) Cognitive Mobile Homes. Mind 126(501):93-121

  • Ichikawa JJ (2020) Contextual injustice. Kennedy Inst Ethics J 20(1):1–30

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Littlejohn C (2015) Who Cares What You Accurately Believe? Philos Perspect 29:217-248

  • Littlejohn C (2017) Truth, knowledge, and the standard of proof in criminal law. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1608-4

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Manne K (2018) Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford University Press, Oxford

  • Muehlenhard CL, Peterson ZD, Humphreys TP, Jozkowski KN (2017) Evaluating the one-in-five statistic: women’s risk of sexual assault while in college. J Sex Res 54:4–5

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Owens D (2013) Value and Epistemic Normativity. Teorema: Revista Internacional de Filosofia 32(3):35-58

  • Placani A (2017) When the risk of harm harms. Law Philos 36:77–100

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Singer P (1972) Famine, affluence, and morality. Philos Public Affairs 1(3):229–243

    Google Scholar 

  • Staffel J (2018) How do Beliefs Simplify Reasoning? Nous :1-26. https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12254

  • Strawson PF (2008/1974) Freedom and Resentment: And other essays. Routledge, New York

  • Turkheimer D (2017) Incredible women: sexual violence and the credibility discount. Univ Pa Law Rev 166:1

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Boulder Philosophy Department, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

    Alexandra Lloyd

  2. Boulder, USA

    Alexandra Lloyd

Authors
  1. Alexandra Lloyd
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexandra Lloyd.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of Interest

The author has no conflicts of interest

Human and Animal Rights and Informed Consent

No research involving human participants or animals, no research requiring informed consent.

Additional information

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Lloyd, A. #MeToo & the role of Outright Belief. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 25, 181–197 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-022-10276-x

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-022-10276-x

Keywords

Search

Navigation