Miller analyzes the relationship between consent and autonomy by offering three pictures. For autonomy, Miller distinguishes between procedural, substantive, and weak substantive autonomy. The corresponding views of consent are what Miller has termed as consensual minimalism, consensual idealism, and consensual realism. The requirements of sexual consent under consensual minimalism are a voluntary informed agreement. However, feminist critiques reveal the inadequacies of this simple position. Consensual idealism, which corresponds with substantive autonomy, offers a robust picture where consent and autonomy must be (...) based on non-oppression. However, this view is considered too ideal and it ignores context. Weak substantive autonomy takes into account the context in the sexual domain. Correspondingly, consensual realism takes into account the context and still fulfills the requirements of consent. (shrink)

Deception sometimes results in nonconsensual sex. A recent body of literature diagnoses such violations as invalidating consent: the agreement is not morally transformative, which is why the sexual contact is a rights violation. We pursue a different explanation for the wrongs in question: there is valid consent, but it is not consent to the sex act that happened. Semantic conventions play a key role in distinguishing deceptions that result in nonconsensual sex (like stealth condom removal) from those that don’t (like (...) white lies). Our framework is also applicable to more controversial cases, like those implicated in so-called “gender fraud” complaints. (shrink)

Consent, on a standard theoretical framework, is a way of giving permission or waiving a right. Dougherty’s book is about the ‘scope’ of consent: which acts are permitted by a given act of consent? Along the way, Dougherty offers a view about what consent consists in and why it does its morally transformative work. The book is an exemplar of careful analytic philosophy. Philosophers working on consent in that tradition will find it essential reading. Following are more specific reactions that (...) will, I hope, convey a more specific sense of the book, and also engage and critique it and the tradition it exemplifies. (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)

Rather than as a giving of permission to someone to transgress one’s bodily boundaries, I argue for defining sexual consent as feeling-with one’s sexual partner. Dominant approaches to consent within feminist philosophy have failed to capture the intercorporeal character of erotic consciousness by treating it as a form of giving permission, as is evident in the debate between attitudinal and performative theories of consent. Building on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ann Cahill, Linda Martín Alcoff, and others, I argue that (...) taking consent to be an intercorporeal and dynamic coexistence of desiring bodies opens up new ways of thinking about the role of consent in sexual ethics. I suggest that phenomenology’s theories of embodied consciousness, operative intentionality, and the direct perception of others provide a better groundwork for conceptualizing the role of ambiguity and subtle power dynamics in sexual encounters than attitudinal or performative accounts of consent. I also defend my view against Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa’s argument for doing away with the concept of consent in sexual ethics due to consent's stubborn and infelicitous presupposition of permission-giving. (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)

On a version of consent theory that tempts many, predatory sexual relations involving significant power imbalances (e.g. between professors and students, adults and teenagers, or employers and employees) are wrong because they violate consent-centric norms. In particular, the wronged party is said to have been _incapable_ of consenting to the predation, and the sexual wrong is located in the encounter’s nonconsensuality. Although we agree that these are sexual wrongs, we resist the idea that they are always nonconsensual. We argue instead (...) that it is possible for students, teenagers, employees, etc. to fully consent to sexually predatory encounters; denying as much renders survivors of predation vulnerable to compounding harms. Survivors face a dilemma: give up either their understanding of their experience as wrong, or their self-conception as an agent capable of consenting. We call the latter phenomenon _agential demotion_. (shrink)