Consensual Discrimination

What makes discrimination morally bad? In this paper, we discuss the putative badness of a case of consensual discrimination to show that prominent accounts of the badness of discrimination—appealing, inter alia, to harm, disrespect and inequality—fail to provide a satisfactory answer to this question. In view of this, we present a more promising account

The Privacy Dependency Thesis and Self-Defense

If I decide to disclose information about myself, this act can undermine other people’s ability to effectively conceal information about themselves. One case in point involves genetic information: if I share ‘my’ genetic information with others, I thereby also reveal genetic information about my biological relatives. Such dependencies are well-known in the privacy literature and are often referred to as ‘privacy dependencies’. Some take the existence of privacy dependencies to generate a moral duty to sometimes avoid sharing information about oneself. If true, we argue, then it is sometimes justified for others to impose harm on the person sharing the information to prevent them from doing so. This is a highly revisionary implication. Hence, one must either endorse a highly revisionary view on what one may do to protect one’s privacy, or one must reject the view that privacy dependencies can be used to justify a moral duty that constrains choices about sharing information about oneself

Proper address and epistemic conditions for acting on sexual consent

It has recently been argued that to permissibly act on someone’s consent to sex, the agent must possess firsthand evidence of the consent directly from the consenter. This view is motivated by a case where it seems impermissible to act on testimonial knowledge of someone’s consent to sex. Although we agree that it is impermissible to act as if there is consent in this case, we argue that the explanation in terms of a lack of firsthand evidence is unmotivated, fails to draw the right moral boundaries, and comes with the theoretical cost of abandoning the search for general epistemic conditions for permissible action. Instead, we propose an explanation in terms of an ontological deficiency: a necessary condition on morally valid consent is unsatisfied in the relevant case. This is the condition that A consents to B φ-ing through speech act α only if α is properly addressed to B. Although this condition seems implicit in some existing accounts of consent, it has never been explicitly stated or put to theoretical use. In addition to explaining the above case without introducing special epistemic requirements for acting on consent to sex, the condition gives communicative accounts of consent an explanatory edge compared to attitudinal accounts