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)

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)