Watching philosophy of sex.

We might say: A person consents to P when they understand what P is, agree to do P, and are not coerced, i.e. are not under duress. But what counts as coercion; what counts as duress? (for example, is saying, have sex with me or I will not give you some of my cake, coercion?)

A Nozickian account: X coerces Y into sex when:

1. X aims to make Y acquiesce to sex;
2. If Y doesn’t acquiesce, X will threatens to bring about some consequence that is less desirable to Y than acquiescing to sex;
3. X's threat is credible.

Then we can compare the two actions to detect coercion; if you go with the one that is not sex, but still being better with it, then it is not coercion (and therefor not a threat): you can go okay without a chocolate cake rather than being raped.

Problem: “Have sex with me or I'll break up with you.” Is than an acceptable threat? Mostly no. What about a woman that's not happy with her sex life and she tells her partner: we need to work that out or I'm going to leave. Sounds okay. But according to Nozickian's approach this is coercion because it's worse in this case not to have sex.

One way to fix the Nozickian account is to make coercion relative to what's normal or expected. Sex is normal/expected in relationships.

Wertheimer: “X coerces Y into sexual relations when (1) X proposes to make Y worse off relative to where Y has a right to be if she does not acquiesce and (2) it is reasonable for Y to succumb to X's proposal.”

Billionaire case: Frank is a billionaire, Sarah the mother of a child with a serious illness that she can't afford the treatment for. Frank offers to pay on the condition that she have sex with him weekly for a year.

On the one hand, Sarah has no good options, which seems to undermine her ability to make a voluntary choice.

On the other, we often have to choose the lesser of various evils. If you face either chemotherapy or death, doctors aren't coercing you into chemotherapy.

For Wertheimer, this is not coercion because Sarah doesn't have a right to Frank’s money.

Argument from the Chihuahua: In this example, the Chihuahua was brought into my house without my consent. Dougherty suggests that the same kind of thing is going on with Victoria and Chloe.

Argument from the concept of consent: To consent that X does P to you is to waive your right that X not do P to you. But how to determine which particular rights you waive?

Dougherty: the rights you waive are the rights you intend to waive.

Victoria has the right to refuse to have sex with people who don’t care about the environment. She can consent to sex with an environmentalist, without consenting to sex with somebody who isn’'t an environmentalist.

Victoria only waives her right not to have sex with an environmentalist. So Chloe's deception invalidates her consent.

Problem: isn't deception just part of the game? People lie about all sorts of things. It seems absurd to treat that as rape.

Subjectivism: consent is a matter of having a particular mental state, e.g. thinking something like “I agree to have sex with X."

Performativism: consent is behavioural; it involves performing certain actions, such as uttering “I agree to have sex with you.”

• Case 1: X is completely paralyzed, and desperately wants to have sex with Y but can't communicate this. To his delight, Y has sex with him anyway.
• Case 2: X and Y have just started dating. X falls asleep. While X is asleep, Y has sex with her. X is perfectly happy for Y to do this, but hasn't told this to Y.

The subjectivist would say that in these cases, X consented (Y just didn't know that X consented). The performativist would say that X didn’t consent.

1. The only way to assess whether or not consent obtains is by examining people’s behaviour. Response: deliberation is a mental process, but the only way to tell whether deliberation occurred is by examining behaviour.
2. Consent is morally transformative. If a person doesn’t know whether or not you consent, he acts wrongly if he has sex with you. On subjectivism, consent can't be morally transformative. Consent itself is impotent, since we can't read minds.

Your consent matters because of the difference it makes to what other people have a reason to believe. Response: distinction between harm and culpability. The subjectivist can grant that, if X hasn't expressed her consent, Y has acted wrongly and is culpable.

#Philosophy #Philosophy of Ethics