Consent and Its Limits

I am currently writing a book, entitled Consent and Its Limits: A Critical Ethics of Sex. It is under contract with Oxford University Press.

My book will bring together some of the ideas from my past publications on consent and sexual ethics, as well as developing new complementary ones.

Brief Description

My project focuses on the role of consent in sexual ethics. Consent is standardly thought to demarcate permissible sexual interactions from sexual assault. But in recent decades, there has been a tendency to appeal only to the concept of consent in explaining what makes sexual interactions non-violative. I shall argue in a new monograph that this is a mistake: while sexual consent is important, the assumption that it should play such a core role in sexual ethics is both inaccurate and harmful: it creates confusion and misunderstanding, and in some cases, it perpetuates additional secondary harms on survivors of sexual violence. My monograph aims to give a new direction to sexual ethics within philosophy, while also remaining engaged with the work of activists and policymakers, and accessible to all readers interested in thinking critically and skillfully about what makes sexual interactions morally permissible.

General Overview

Sexual consent, it is widely thought, requires a lot more than merely agreeing to have sex. The kind of consent that activists and theorists think is relevant for sex is what I call an inflationary approach to sexual consent. Inflationary consent theorists hold that for there to be real sexual consent, one’s agreement must be a genuine expression of one’s authentic desire, that it must be enthusiastic, that it must be explicitly and affirmatively offered, and/or that it must occur in a relationship with a certain level of power equity. My monograph will critically interrogate inflationary approaches to consent, which are widespread both among recent scholarly treatments, and also in the background of popular thinking about sexual ethics.

Inflationary approaches to sexual consent are typically motivated by the recognition that there are cases where minimal standards of agreement are met, but where the subsequent sexual interaction nevertheless seems violative. If the only way to be sexually violative is to be nonconsensual, then we need to craft an approach to consent that rules out all the possible ways sexual interactions can be violative.

I’ll defend a simpler competing model, whereby consent is connected much more closely to simple agreement. I’ll argue that this minimal approach to sexual consent still captures the most important role we should want consent to play in sexual ethics: it delimits one important kind of sexual violation, sexual assault. Shifting the focus to a minimal conception of consent doesn’t mean the extra features that inflationary consent theorists emphasize aren’t important to ethical sexual interactions — they very often are. But, I’ll argue, the consent framework is not the best way to illuminate their importance.

One aim of the monograph is to resist inflationary approaches to consent. I will also make a number of positive suggestions for what an alternative ethics of sex might look like. I do not advocate replacing the emphasis on consent with a competing general criterion; there is no one simple trick to ensuring that one’s sex life is ethical. The ethics of sex, like living well generally, is a complex project requiring significant and subtle wisdom. I’ll emphasize features like collaborative decision-making, respect for and attention to one’s partners’ interests and preferences, and socially-informed imagination and sensitivity as determinants of ethical and non-violative sexual interactions.

I hope to complete writing for the book by 2026.

Here is some of my past work on sexual ethics and consent: