This paper deals with the wrongness of having sex with someone without her valid consent. There are good reasons to think that deception about deal-breakers invalidate consent to sex and that acting without valid consent wrongs the consenter. Tom Dougherty argues that it is always seriously wrong to deceive another person into sex by deceiving her. We should on his view therefore reject the view that doing so is in certain cases only a minor wrong. It will be argued here (...) that we should accept this view. I will argue against Dougherty that the lenient view does not presuppose an unacceptably moralistic view of sexuality. In addition, the lenient view can be defended by what I call the harm view of the wrongness of having sex without valid consent. If no or only mild harm is caused deceiving someone into sex is only a minor wrong. (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)

BackgroundThe existing literature on sexuality and intimacy in residential care tends to focus on either the question of rights, or the value of autonomy. Where the literature does reference values...

In the 2020 Yale Law Journal article, “Commonsense Consent,” Roseanna Sommers argues that deception is compatible with the layperson’s intuitive sense of consent. That is, unlike the canonical understanding of consent defended by legal scholars and philosophers, the notion of consent defended by the folk is not invalidated by deception. In this study, I find that while respondents do appear to attribute consent to victims of deception, they do so in a limited number of contexts – i.e., they attribute de (...) re consent to victims of de dicto deception and attribute de dicto consent to victims of de re deception. When the two varieties of consent and deception are properly disambiguated and matched type for type however, we see the reverse phenomenon – i.e., participants refrain from attributing de dicto consent to de dicto deception and refrain from attributing de re consent to de re deception. If this is right, rather than saying, as Sommers does, that deception generally fails to invalidate commonsense consent, we should refine our understanding of commonsense consent to include two varieties of consent, each of which is in fact invalidated by its own variety of deception. (shrink)

In this essay, I discuss why consent is invalidated by duress that involves attaching penalties to someone's refusal to give consent. At the heart of my explanation is the Complaint Principle. This principle specifies that consent is defeasibly invalid when the consent results from someone conditionally imposing a penalty on the consent‐giver's refusal to give the consent, such that the consent‐giver has a legitimate complaint against this imposition focused on how it is affects their incentives for consenting. The Complaint Principle (...) says that this consent is defeasibly invalid to make room for the Authorization Principle, which allows sincere authorizations to constitute valid consent, even when these are issued by an agent acting under duress. The Authorization Principle has application only in cases of third‐party duress because when the consent‐receiver is the source of the duress, the consent‐giver is not sincerely authorizing the action. (shrink)

In this essay, I discuss why consent is invalidated by duress that involves attaching penalties to someone's refusal to give consent. At the heart of my explanation is the Complaint Principle. This principle specifies that consent is defeasibly invalid when the consent results from someone conditionally imposing a penalty on the consent‐giver's refusal to give the consent, such that the consent‐giver has a legitimate complaint against this imposition focused on how it is affects their incentives for consenting. The Complaint Principle (...) says that this consent is defeasibly invalid to make room for the Authorization Principle, which allows sincere authorizations to constitute valid consent, even when these are issued by an agent acting under duress. The Authorization Principle has application only in cases of third‐party duress because when the consent‐receiver is the source of the duress, the consent‐giver is not sincerely authorizing the action. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 103, Issue 2, Page 441-461, September 2021.