Proper address and epistemic conditions for acting on sexual consent

Abstract

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