A Defence of Sexual Inclusion

This article argues that access to meaningful sexual experience should be included within our understanding of the goods that ought to be subject to principles of distributive justice. It argues that some people are currently unjustly excluded from meaningful sexual experience and it is not implausible to suggest that they might thereby have certain claim rights to sexual inclusion. This does not entail that anyone has a right to sex with another person, but it does entail that duties may be imposed on society to foster greater sexual inclusion. This is, admittedly, a controversial thesis and this article addresses this controversy head-on by engaging with four major objections to the idea of recognising the injustice of sexual exclusion: the misogyny objection; the impossibility objection; the stigmatisation objection; and the unjust social engineering objection.