Speaker
Tom Dougherty
Affiliation
University of Cambridge
Details
Event Description
ABSTRACT: How can coercion or pressure undermine someone's sexual consent? The standard view is that while valid consent releases another person from a duty, serious threats would invalidate someone's consent, with the result that it has no normative effect at all. I argue that to capture all the ways in which sexual consent can be undermined, we need to refine the standard view by introducing a middle category of "flawed consent." Consent can be flawed to varying degrees; when it is flawed, consent does not remove a duty altogether, but instead downgrades the stringency of the obligation.