I offer an account of sexual ethics, and thus of an education in sexual morality, that tries to make some sense of how a view of consent as central to those ethics might be combined with an education in certain virtues. I do so by exploring what some see as the shortcomings of a standard of consent, namely, how it can deal with instances of prima facie bad sex. I consider and reject various attempts to show that consensuality is sufficient (...) for morally good sex. I then show how a needed supplement to the standard of consent can appeal to a broader view of why consent matters. This in turn connects to those personal and interpersonal virtues that the 2019 Department of Education guidance on relationships and sex education suggests should be taught. Finally, I provide an account of why more than consensuality is needed in the case of sex. In short, I insist on the critical importance of consent but supplement the standard of consent by an appeal to why consent matters and does so especially in the case of sex. (shrink)

I contrast a liberal and a conservative approach to the morality of sex, endorsing the former with a concession as to the special nature of sex, and note Pruss’ philosophical and theological endorsement of the latter. I criticize his argumentative strategy in three regards: first, he defends Christian love as equivalent to benevolence; second, he allows for only a moral evaluation of sex; third, he moves too quickly from some factual claims to others, and thence to normative conclusions. His account (...) of the moral impermissibility of non-veridical pleasures trades on ambiguities in ‘real’ pleasure.I respond to three arguments Pruss offers against IVF : gamete donors can discharge their parental obligations; reproduction need not only be by coitus; and those who use fertility treatment need not thereby do wrong in treating any resultant child as an ‘artefact’.I conclude with critical observations about the distance between Pruss’ views and those commonly held by most people, including increasing numbers of Catholics. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that consent is a normative power. For instance, consent can make an impermissible act permissible. In the words of Heidi Hurd, it “turns a trespass into a dinner party... an invasion of privacy into an intimate moment.” In this chapter, I argue against the assumption that consent has such robust powers for moral transformation. In particular, I argue that there is a wide range of sex that harms or wrongs victims despite being consensual. Moreover, these cases (...) are not limited to those where con- sent is vitiated by background conditions. I start by calling this category of consensual sex Bad Sex. I then distinguish subspecies of this category, including psychological pressure, social coercion, and epistemically unsafe sex. I end by responding to an objection on which we should treat at least some subspecies of Bad Sex as rape. Though this alternative proposal is often motivated by ameliorative and strategic considerations, I argue that such considerations actually count against collapsing the categories of Bad Sex and rape. (shrink)

I argue that “consent” language presupposes that the contemplated action is or would be at someone else’s behest. When one does something for another reason—for example, when one elects independently to do something, or when one accepts an invitation to do something—it is linguistically inappropriate to describe the actor as “consenting” to it; but it is also inappropriate to describe them as “not consenting” to it. A consequence of this idea is that “consent” is poorly suited to play its canonical (...) central role in contemporary sexual ethics. But this does not mean that nonconsensual sex can be morally permissible. Consent language, I’ll suggest, carries the conventional presupposition that that which is or might be consented to is at someone else’s behest. One implication will be a new kind of support for feminist critiques of consent theory in sexual ethics. (shrink)

Intuitively, rape is seriously morally wrong in a way simple assault is not. Yet philosophical disputes about the features of rape that make it the heinous act it is invite a general account of the difference between (mere) wrong-making characteristics and heinous-making characteristics. In this paper I propose just such an account and use it to refute some accounts of the wrongness of rape and refine others. Given these analyses, I close by developing and defending an account of a particularly (...) important heinous-making characteristic of rape. (shrink)

Greater public awareness of the occurrence of sexual assault has led to the creation of mobile phone apps designed to facilitate consent between sexual partners. These apps exhibit serious practical shortcomings in realistic contexts; however, in this paper I consider the hypothetical case in which these practical shortcomings are absent. The prospect of this viable consent app creates an interesting challenge for consequentialism – one that is comparable to the objection that the theory justifies killing innocent persons to prevent large (...) numbers of less serious harms like experiencing brief, painful headaches. I outline and reject the most straightforward way for consequentialists to address this challenge, and I argue that the empirical calculations at stake reveal something rarely appreciated: consequentialists ought to sometimes favour reinforcing deontological constraints in common-sense morality rather than seeking to undermine them. (shrink)

This paper uses a dilemma presented by David Benatar to explore the challenges that ‘Sexual Liberals’ face in giving a satisfactory account of sexual ethics. A satisfactory Sexual Liberal account of sexual ethics must be able to fully explain the wrongness of sexual assault without implying that sexual activity should be restricted to those in love. The assumption that this is impossible may be due to mistakes in our thinking about sexual assault. However, even when such mistakes are resolved, producing (...) a satisfactory account of sexual ethics requires Sexual Liberals to confront the significance of the sexual in human life. I describe an account of sexual desire that explains the significance of the sexual in human life without forcing us to endorse a restrictive sexual ethics. (shrink)

Various philosophers discuss perlocutionary silencing, but none defend an account of perlocutionary silencing. This gap may exist because perlocutionary success depends on extralinguistic effects, whereas silencing interrupts speech, leaving theorists to rely on extemporary accounts when they discuss perlocutionary silencing. Consequently, scholars assume perlocutionary silencing occurs but neglect to explain how perlocutionary silencing harms speakers as speakers. In relation to that shortcoming, I defend a novel account of perlocutionary silencing. I argue that speakers experience perlocutionary silencing when they are illegitimately (...) deprived of perlocutionary influence on a conversation in which they are active participants, where perlocutionary influence on the conversation relates to speech-related perlocutionary goals meant to influence the conversation or conversational direction. Thus, this account grounds perlocutionary silencing in linguistic phenomena and characterizes perlocutionary silencing in a way that explains why those who experience perlocutionary silencing are harmed as speakers. Moreover, this account explains how perlocutionary silencing harms speakers as conversational participants in a way that cannot be captured by illocutionary or locutionary silencing, for a speaker may be perlocutionarily silenced despite illocutionary success. Consequently, the account explains why “All Lives Matter” silences Black Lives Matter and “Not All Men” silences women sharing experiences of sexual harassment. (shrink)

Testimonial injustice occurs when hearers attribute speakers a credibility deficit because of an identity prejudice and consequently dismiss speakers’ testimonial assertions. Various philosophers explain testimonial injustice by appealing to interpersonal norms arising within testimonial exchanges. When conversational participants violate these interpersonal norms, they generate second-personal epistemic harms, harming speakers as epistemic agents. This focus on testimony, however, neglects how systematically misevaluating speakers’ knowledge affects conversational participants more generally. When hearers systematically misevaluate speakers’ conversational competence because of entrenched assumptions about what (...) speakers know, I call these conversational epistemic injustices. I argue the same epistemic harm in testimonial injustice arises for non-assertoric speech acts, generating conversational epistemic injustices. For across speech acts, deflated knowledge attributions create second-personal harms that prevent speakers from using their knowledge in linguistic exchanges, limiting their epistemic agency. These harms however are not reducible to linguistic harms, (e.g.,) silencing or discursive injustice. This article applies insight from how second-personal epistemic harm arises in testimonial exchanges to conversational exchanges more generally, demonstrating that epistemic injustices arise beyond testimonial exchanges and contexts of inquiry because deflated knowledge attributions undermine general conversational norms requiring participants assume each other’s conversational competence, generating conversational epistemic injustices. (shrink)

It is commonly argued that a serious right to life is grounded only in actual, relatively advanced psychological capacities a being has acquired. The moral permissibility of abortion is frequently argued for on these grounds. Increasingly it is being argued that such accounts also entail the permissibility of infanticide, with several proponents of these theories accepting this consequence. We show, however, that these accounts imply the permissibility of even more unpalatable acts than infanticide performed on infants: organ harvesting, live experimentation, (...) sexual interference, and discriminatory killing. The stronger intuitions against the permissibility of these ‘pre-personal acts’ allow us to re-establish a comprehensive and persuasive reductio against psychological accounts of persons. (shrink)

Sexual infidelity is widespread, but it is also widely condemned, yet relatively little philosophical work has been done on what makes it wrong and how wrong it is. In this paper, I argue that sexual infidelity is wrong if it involves breaking a commitment to be sexually exclusive, which has special significance in the relationship. However, it is not necessarily worse than other kinds of infidelity, and the context in which it takes place ought to be considered. I finish the (...) paper by looking at how the hegemonic norm of monogamy makes infidelity both more likely and more difficult to deal with. (shrink)

Under current UK legislation, only a man can commit rape. This paper argues that this is an unjustified double standard that reinforces problematic gendered stereotypes about male and female sexuality. I first reject three potential justifications for making penile penetration a condition of rape: it is physically impossible for a woman to rape a man; it is a more serious offence to forcibly penetrate someone than to force them to penetrate you; rape is a gendered crime. I argue that, as (...) these justifications fail, a woman having sex with a man without his consent ought to be considered rape. I then explain some further reasons that this matters. I argue that, not only is it unjust, it is also both a cause and a consequence of harmful stereotypes and prejudices about male and female sexuality: men are ‘always up for sex’; women’s sexual purity is more important than men’s; sex is something men do to women. Therefore, I suggest that, if rape law were made gender neutral, these stereotypes would be undermined and this might make some difference to the problematic ways that sexual relations are sometimes viewed between men and women more generally. (shrink)

This article considers the question of why labor income may be permissibly redistributed to the poor even though non-essential body parts should generally be protected from redistribution to the infirm – the body-income puzzle. It argues that proposed solutions that affirm self-ownership but reject ownership of labor income are unsuccessful. And proposed solutions that grant individuals entitlements to resources based on the centrality of those resources to the individual’s personal identity are also unsuccessful. Instead, this article defends a solution to (...) the body-income puzzle based on a novel conception of respect for the separateness of persons. This conception holds that the sphere of moral authority protected from interference by respect for the separateness of persons includes both the body and labor income. And the strength of the negative rights constituting this sphere vary based on these rights' importance to the personal identity of the right-holder. It is shown that a commitment to helping the disadvantaged tempered by this conception of respect for the separateness of persons can solve the body-income puzzle. (shrink)

There is an ongoing debate about the “ontology” of consent. Some argue that it is a mental act, some that it is a “hybrid” of a mental act plus behaviour that signifies that act; others argue that consent is a performative, akin to promising or commanding. Here it is argued that all these views are mistaken—though some more so than others. We begin with the question whether a normatively efficacious act of consent can be completed in the mind alone. Standard (...) objections to this “mentalist” account of consent can be rebutted. Here we identify a much deeper problem for mentalism. Normatively transformative acts of consent change others’ reasons for acting in a distinctive—“robust”—way. Robust reason-changing involves acts aimed at fulfilling a distinctive kind of reflexive and recognition-directed intention. Such acts cannot be coherently performed in the mind alone. Consent is not a mental act, but nor is it the signification of such an act. Acts of consent cannot be “completed” in the mind, and it is a mistake to view consent behaviour as making known a completed act of consent. The robust reason-changing account of consent developed here shares something with the performative theory, but is not saddled with a label whose home is philosophy of language. Certain kinds of performative utterance may change reasons robustly, but not all robust reason-changing involves or requires acts of speech, and consent can be effected by a wide range of behavioural acts. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss rape myths and mythologies, their negative effects on rape and sexual assault complainants, and how they prejudicially construct women qua women. The backdrop for the analysis is the Belfast Rugby Rape Trial, which took place in 2018. Four men, two of whom were well-known rugby players, were acquitted of rape and sexual assault in a nine-week criminal trial that dominated local, national and international attention. The acquittal resulted in ‘I Believe Her’ rallies and protests across (...) Northern Ireland. Of concern were the deeply sexist and misogynistic text exchanges among the acquitted about the complainant and women more generally. One month after the trial, the Criminal Justice Board of Northern Ireland commissioned an independent review of the arrangements to deliver justice in cases of serious sexual offences. The Gillen Review proposed 16 key recommendations, among them measures to dispel rape myths and the role that Relationship and Sex Education in schools could play in combatting these myths. I will explore these issues using Miranda Fricker's construction of epistemic injustice. I argue that there is little appreciation of the profound impact that routine testimonial injustice—where the credibility of a speaker is deflated or undermined on account of her social identity—can have on the wellbeing of speakers and how it ramifies with other forms of injustice. To illustrate, I draw on neurological explanations to show why attributions of sexual consent are unjustly sustained in cases of rape and sexual assault. (shrink)

This article offers an account of the information condition on morally valid consent in the context of sexual relations. The account is grounded in rights. It holds that a person has a sufficient amount of information to give morally valid consent if, and only if, she has all the information to which she has a claim-right. A person has a claim-right to a piece of information if, and only if, a. it concerns a deal-breaker for her; b. it does not (...) concern something that her partner has a strong interest in protecting from scrutiny, sufficient to generate a privilege-right; c.i. her partner is aware of the information to which her deal-breaker applies; or c.ii. her partner ought to be held responsible for the fact that he is not aware of the information to which her deal-breaker applies; and finally, d. she has not waived or forfeited her claim-right. Although we present this account in the context of sexual relations, we believe a virtue of the account is that it can be easily translated into other contexts. (shrink)

Humanoid robots used for sexual purposes are beginning to look increasingly lifelike. It is possible for a user to have a bespoke sexbot created which matches their exact requirements in skin pigmentation, hair and eye colour, body shape, and genital design. This means that it is possible—and increasingly easy—for a sexbot to be created which bears a very high degree of resemblance to a particular person. There is a small but steadily increasing literature exploring some of the ethical issues surrounding (...) sexbots, however sexbots made to look like particular people is something which, as yet, has not been philosophically addressed in the literature. In this essay I argue that creating a lifelike sexbot to represent and resemble someone is an act of sexual objectification which morally requires consent, and that doing so without the person’s consent is intrinsically wrong. I consider two sexbot creators: Roy and Fred. Roy creates a sexbot of Katie with her consent, and Fred creates a sexbot of Jane without her consent. I draw on the work of Alan Goldman, Rae Langton, and Martha Nussbaum in particular to demonstrate that creating a sexbot of a particular person requires consent if it is to be intrinsically permissible. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice and remedies for this injustice are widely debated. This article adds to the existing debate by arguing that theories of recog- nition can fruitfully contribute to Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice and can provide a framework for structural remedy. By pairing Fricker’s theory of hermeneutical injustice with theories of recognition, I bring forward a modest claim and a more radical claim. The first concerns a shift in our vocabulary; recognition theory can give a name (...) to the seriousness of the long-term effects of hermeneutical injustice. The second claim is more radical: thinking of hermeneutical injustice as preventing what I call “self-recogni- tion” provides a structural remedy to the phenomenon of hermeneutical injustice. Because hermeneutical injustice is first and foremost a structural injustice, I contend that every virtue theory of hermeneutical justice should be complemented by structural remedies in terms of recognition. Finally, what I argue sheds light on the seriousness of cases of exclusion of and discrimination against women in academia and helps to draw our attention to new ways to combat such problems. (shrink)

Reproduction is broadly recognised as fundamental to human flourishing. The presumptive priority of reproductive freedom forms the predominant position in the literature, translating in the non-sexual reproductive realm as an almost inviolable right to access assisted reproductive technology (ART). This position largely condemns refusal or restriction of ART by clinicians or the state as discriminatory. In this paper, I critically analyse the moral rights individuals assert in reproductive pursuit to explore whether reproductive rights entitle hopeful parents to ART. I demonstrate (...) that none of the protected actions performed, or entitlements generated are sui generis ‘reproductive’ rights, leading to the claim that there is no such thing as a right to reproduce. Under scrutiny, the reproductive right is a far narrower and weaker rights assertion than is recognised in the literature. I argue that the predominant position is grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding of the scope and strength of reproductive claims.I also highlight a significant conceptual inconsistency in the literature. On one hand, there is broad consensus that reproductive rights are predominantly negative, yet access to fertility treatment is framed as a component of the right. This wrongly contorts the negative nature of reproductive rights into a positive claim-right to ART. I conclude that this mistakenly frames ART access as sitting within the scope of reproductive freedom. I offer a revised conceptual paradigm of reproductive rights that has important clinical and policy implications for the provision and regulation of ART. (shrink)

In their well-known paper, John Gardner and Stephen Shute (2000) propose a pure case of rape, in which a woman is raped while unconscious and the rape, for a variety of stipulated reasons, never comes to light. This makes the pure case a harmless case of rape, or so they argue. In this paper I show that their argument hinges on an outdated conception of trauma, one which conflates evaluative responses that arise in the aftermath of rape with the non-deliberative (...) somatic responses of a central nervous system to a threatening event. In the first part of this paper, I elaborate this objection by drawing on the neurobiological model of trauma. This gives me an opportunity to illustrate the different ways that rape harms its victims, including the central way, what I call ‘threat-circuitry harm.’ This discussion of trauma invites us to rethink the wrong of rape, and sets the groundwork for my argument, in the second part of the paper, that the wrong of rape consists in its central harm. (shrink)

Increasingly, scholarship on moral injury is expanding to include non‐military personnel, and considers a violation of bodily integrity—for example, of civilian women who are targeted for sexual violence in warfare—as a particularly egregious harm. Moral injury discourse also extends beyond the individual to the social context in which moral injury arises, its relational effects, and its utterly devastating impact on personhood, an impact frequently characterized as a “soul wound.” The intersection of genocidal rape—both as an individual and a group harm—with (...) religion, as facilitating moral injury and restorative “soul repair,” exemplifies these trends. Although moral injury research rarely addresses the detrimental influences of religion or references the “soul” with precision, the discourse of moral injury does provide an opportunity for exploring the relationship between personhood and agency from the perspectives of those who inflict and are subjected to harm. (shrink)

Much of modern ethics is built around the idea that we should respect one another’s autonomy. Here, “we” are typically imagined to be adult human beings of sound mind, where the soundness of our mind is measured against what we take to be the typical mental capacities of a neurodevelopmentally “normal” person—perhaps in their mid-thirties or forties. When deciding about what constitutes ethical sex, for example, our dominant models hold that ethical sex is whatever is consented to, while a lack (...) of consent makes sex wrong.1 Consent, in turn, is analysed in terms of autonomous decision-making: a “yes” or “no” that reflects the free and informed will of our idealised, sound-minded adult. Whether such models provide adequate normative guidance for ethical, much less good, sex between neurotypical human adults is an open question.2 3 When it comes to the ethics of sexual activity between humans and non-humans—robots, say—or between humans who don’t fit the rational stereotype, we hardly know where to begin.4–7 It is therefore heartening to see a number of papers in this issue tackling the difficult question how to respectfully facilitate or respond to the needs, desires, and decisions of people with different kinds or degrees of autonomy.8 For example, Sumytra Menon and colleagues9 explicitly discuss the notion of “borderline capacity” and argue, in the medical domain, for shared and supportive decision-making practices to “foster the autonomy of patients with compromised mental capacity while being mindful of the need to safeguard their well-being.” Touching on a similar theme, Zahra Ladan 10 asks how we should conceive of liberty in the case of persons with certain inborn physical or mental limitations. Might it sometimes be necessary to …. (shrink)

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Volume 21, Issue 4, Page 393-414, November 2022. Sometimes, people consent to sex because they face social constraints. For example, someone may agree to sex because they believe that it would be rude to refuse. I defend a consent-centric analysis of these encounters. This analysis connects constraints from social contexts with constraints imposed by persons e.g. coercion. It results in my endorsing what I call the “Constraint Principle.” According to this principle, someone's consent to a sexual (...) encounter lacks justificatory force if they are consenting because withholding consent has an adverse feature, they are entitled to withhold consent without it being the case that withholding consent has this adverse feature; and it is not the case that the consent-giver has sincerely expressed that, out of the options that are available to their sexual partner, they most prefer to go through with the sexual encounter in the circumstances. (shrink)

To develop a theoretical framework for drawing moral distinctions between instances of sexual misconduct, I defend the “Ameliorative View” of consent, according to which there are three possibilities for what effect, if any, consent has: “fully valid consent” eliminates a wronging, “fully invalid consent” has no normative effect, and “partially valid consent” has an ameliorative effect on a wronging in the respect that it makes the wronging less grave. I motivate the view by proposing a solution to the problem of (...) characterizing the moral effect of consent that is given in response to minor coercion. (shrink)

Paternalistic behaviour directed towards a person’s informed and competent decisions is often thought to be morally impermissible. This view is supported by what we can call the Anti-Paternalism Principle. While APP might seem plausible when employed to show the wrongness of paternalism by the state, there are some cases of paternalistic behaviour between private, informed, and competent individuals where APP seems mistaken. This raises a difficulty for supporters of APP. Either they need to reject APP to accommodate our intuitions in (...) these cases, or provide grounds for thinking that paternalistic behaviour between certain private individuals is different in a morally relevant sense. In this paper, I explore several possible morally relevant differences, and find all of them unsatisfactory as grounds for maintaining the plausibility of APP. (shrink)

Consent theory in sexual ethics, Jonathan Ichikawa argues, has a Euthyphro problem. -/- It is widely held that sexual violations are explicable in terms of nonconsensual sexual contact. But a notion of consent adequate to explain many moral judgments typical of sexual ethics — a notion that vindicates the idea that consent cannot be coerced, that it must be sober, that children cannot consent to sex with adults, etc. — cannot, Ichikawa argues, be articulated, motivated, or explained in a way (...) independently of moral judgments about sexual wrongs. Consequently, if there is as tight a connection between consent and sexual violation as many people think there is, there is good reason to suppose that that connection must ultimately explain consent in terms of sexual wronging, rather than vice versa. The paper highlights some costs and drawbacks to this horn of the Euthyphro dilemma in sexual ethics. One central upshot of the argument will be that mainstream accounts of sexual ethics fail in their explanatory ambitions. Consent cannot play its canonical explanatory role. (shrink)

In both popular and scholarly discussions, sexual consent is gaining traction as the central moral consideration in how people should treat one another in sexual encounters. However, while the concept of consent has been indispensable to oppose many forms of sexual violence, consent-based sexual ethics struggle to account for the phenomenological complexity of sexual intimacy and the social and structural pressures that often surround sexual communication and behavior. Feminist structural critique and social research on the prevalence of violation even within (...) consensual sex suggest that consent is insufficient to ground responsibility; a more fundamental orientation toward the value of sexual agency provides a better foundation for sexual ethics. Using feminist critical theory, phenomenology, and black feminist thought, this dissertation develops a socially situated and relational notion of sexual agency and diagnoses how such agency is neglected in prevailing discussions of consent in moral philosophy and legal theory. I argue that the ethical question of responsibility to another in a sexual encounter—apart from juridical considerations—should be reframed around the value of each person’s socially situated practices of agency. Preceding and extending beyond the obligation to gain valid consent for an action, responsibility demands adapting one’s intentions and behaviors in response to the wider range of another’s communicative expressions of agency. However, communicative expressions can be ambiguous or overdetermined by social context and cultural norms; they often offer only provisional traces of agency. To address this inherent uncertainty in intimacy, I propose drawing on insights from Emmanuel Levinas about the dynamic, open-ended nature of relationality, responsibility, and communication. Responsibility toward another does not depend on securing certainty about their “yes” or “no,” but requires responding continuously under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity, adapting behaviors and intentions to make room for another’s agency despite its opacity. (shrink)

The notion that rape is an act of violence rather than sex is a central tenet in rape crisis support and education. A therapeutic benefit of this conceptualisation of rape is that it counters shame and guilt by affirming that the victim was not a complicit partner in an act of sex. However, this conceptualisation has recently been criticised for not capturing what makes rape an especially serious kind of wrong. This raises an apparent dilemma for rape crisis support. Recent (...) work in analytic moral philosophy on the nature of rape offers a way to resolve this dilemma. It is argued that rape is not sex, but is nonetheless sexual. This distinction allows for a charitable reformulation of the central tenet in rape crisis support, which can facilitate the dual therapeutic aims of countering the sense of shame and of recognising the especially serious kind of the harm suffered by the victim. (shrink)

This paper seeks to identify the distinctive moral wrong of stalking and argues that this wrong is serious enough to criminalize. We draw on psychological literature about stalking, distinguishing types of stalkers, their pathologies, and victims. The victimology is the basis for claims about what is wrong with stalking. Close attention to the experiences of victims often reveals an obsessive preoccupation with the stalker and what he will do next. The kind of harm this does is best understood in relation (...) to the value of privacy and conventionally protected zones of privacy. We compare anti-stalking laws in different jurisdictions, claiming that they all fail in some way to capture the distinctive privacy violation that stalking involves. Further reflection on the seriousness of the invasion of privacy it represents suggests that it is a deeply personal wrong. Indeed, it is usually more serious than obtrusive surveillance by states, precisely because it is more personal. Where state surveillance genuinely is as intrusive as stalking, it tends to adopt the tactics of the stalker, imposing its presence on the activist victim at every turn. Power dynamics —whether rooted in the power of the state or the violence of a stalker —may exacerbate violations of privacy, but the wrong is distinct from violence, threats of violence and other aggression. Nor is stalking a simple expression of a difference in power between stalker and victim, such as a difference due to gender. (shrink)

Sex robots are likely to play an important role in shaping public understandings of sex and of relations between the sexes in the future. This paper contributes to the larger project of understanding how they will do so by examining the ethics of the “rape” of robots. I argue that the design of realistic female robots that could explicitly refuse consent to sex in order to facilitate rape fantasy would be unethical because sex with robots in these circumstances is a (...) representation of the rape of a woman, which may increase the rate of rape, expresses disrespect for women, and demonstrates a significant character defect. Even when the intention is not to facilitate rape, the design of robots that can explicitly refuse consent is problematic due to the likelihood that some users will experiment with raping them. Designing robots that lack the capacity to explicitly refuse consent may be morally problematic depending on which of two accounts of the representational content of sex with realistic humanoid robots is correct. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that valid consent is a necessary condition for permissible sexual activity. Since non-human animals, children, and individuals who are severely cognitively disabled, heavily intoxicated or unconscious, lack the cognitive capacity to give valid consent, this condition explains why it is impermissible to have sex with them. However, contrary to common intuitions, the same condition seems to render it impermissible to have sex with robots, for they too are incapable of consenting to sex due to insufficient cognitive (...) capacitation. This paper explores whether the intuition that non-consensual sex with robots is permissible can be vindicated, whilst preserving valid consent as a general requirement for permissible sexual activity. I develop and evaluate four possible ways to argue that there is a morally significant difference between robots on the one hand, and insufficiently cognitively capacitated humans and non-human animals on the other hand, to substantiate and justify the intuition that it is permissible to have non-consensual sex with the former but not with the latter. (shrink)

Deception, like coercion, can invalidate the moral force of consent. In the sexual domain, when someone is deceived about some feature of their partner, knowledge of which would be dispositive of their decision to have sex – a dealbreaker – the moral validity of their consent is undermined. I argue that in order to determine whether someone has discharged their duties of disclosure in the sexual domain, we should ask whether, upon receiving a token of consent to sex, they have (...) a justified belief that their partner would consent to the sexual encounter given all the features that it has. I argue that whether an agent has a justified belief in this proposition is a function of the agent’s body of evidence and which alternatives uneliminated. (shrink)

This chapter sides with those who believe that a right to stay should be counted among fundamental human rights. However, it also acknowledges that there are good reasons for objecting to the most popular justifications of the right to stay, which are based on the assumption that people have valuable ties to their community of residence and that people’s life plans are located where they live. In response to these qualms, this chapter argues that the best way to make sense (...) of the right to stay is to conceive it as belonging to the category of “control rights”; these are the rights that protect people’s control over their own bodies and personal space, which is an essential condition for personhood and human dignity. This account of the right to stay can overcome the most pressing objections to its recognition as a fundamental human right. (shrink)