On Wed Feb 4, 4-6pm UK time (in the Law Library, and online), Elise Woodard (KCL) will give an SCLP seminar. Click HERE to join online.
The title of Elise’s paper is “Consent, Trust, and Sexual Ethics”. Abstract: “Consent plays a central role in contemporary sexual ethics and rape law, grounding both the wrong of sexual assault and the permissibility of sexual activity. Yet a growing body of philosophical work challenges the idea that consent is either sufficient or necessary for permissible sex. This paper focuses on the necessity challenge: the claim that, when sex goes well, consent is absent or redundant rather than morally transformative. I argue that existing defenses of the necessity challenge fail to provide an adequate mechanism explaining how sex can become permissible without consent. At the same time, I suggest that consent-based accounts face genuine explanatory limits in familiar cases of intimacy, long-term relationships, and spontaneous interaction. Such cases reveal that consent operates as a second-best normative tool. In ideal intimate relationships, the moral default shifts from consent-sensitive duties to dissent-sensitive ones: permissibility is governed not by explicit permission but by mutual trust and relational norms. This shift does not eliminate the moral importance of consent but explains an important asymmetry between its role in wrongdoing and its role in good sex. The paper concludes by clarifying how consent functions as a juridical backstop rather than the primary moral register of intimate life, with implications for both sexual ethics and legal theory.”