Touching Through: The Puzzle of Mediated Contact

Abstract

It is natural to think that one person touches another when their bodies make direct contact. However, much interpersonal touch is not like this. We often touch people through things like their clothing. But this raises a puzzle: How can you touch someone without directly touching the surface of their body? Moreover, where particular moral violations and crimes essentially involve touch, an account of when one person mediately touches another is required to determine when the relevant wrong or crime has occurred. We introduce and articulate this novel puzzle before rejecting five plausible solutions. We then develop and defend our own account, on which one person touches another through some medium when the medium acts as a certain kind of person boundary determined by social norms concerning intimacy.