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53The Scope of ConsentOxford University Press. 2021.The scope of someone's consent is the range of actions that they permit by giving consent. The Scope of Consent investigates the under-explored question of which normative principle governs the scope of consent. To answer this question, the book's investigation involves taking a stance on what constitutes consent. By appealing to the idea that someone can justify their behaviour by appealing to another person's consent, Dougherty defends the view that consent consists in behaviour that expresses…Read more
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110Social constraints on sexual consentPolitics, Philosophy and Economics 21 (4): 393-414. 2022.Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Volume 21, Issue 4, Page 393-414, November 2022. Sometimes, people consent to sex because they face social constraints. For example, someone may agree to sex because they believe that it would be rude to refuse. I defend a consent-centric analysis of these encounters. This analysis connects constraints from social contexts with constraints imposed by persons e.g. coercion. It results in my endorsing what I call the “Constraint Principle.” According to this princ…Read more
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27Morality and Institutional Detail in the Law of Torts: Reflections on Goldberg’s and Zipursky’s Recognizing WrongsLaw and Philosophy (1): 1-37. 2021.In their brilliant and thought-provoking book Recognizing Wrongs, John Goldberg and Benjamin Zipursky offer a vindicatory interpretation of the law of torts. As part of this, they offer a justification for what they call the “principle of civil recourse.” This is the principle that “a person who enjoys a certain kind of legal right, and whose right has been violated by another, is entitled to enlist the state’s aid in enforcing that right, or to make demands in response to its violation, as agai…Read more
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48Why does duress undermine consent?Noûs 55 (2): 317-333. 2021.In this essay, I discuss why consent is invalidated by duress that involves attaching penalties to someone's refusal to give consent. At the heart of my explanation is the Complaint Principle. This principle specifies that consent is defeasibly invalid when the consent results from someone conditionally imposing a penalty on the consent‐giver's refusal to give the consent, such that the consent‐giver has a legitimate complaint against this imposition focused on how it is affects their incentives…Read more
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49The Grounds of the Disclosure Requirement for Informed ConsentAmerican Journal of Bioethics 21 (5): 68-70. 2021.In their important and insightful article, Joseph Millum and Danielle Bromwich distinguish two informational requirements for valid consent—the disclosure requirement and the understanding requirem...
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89Sexual Misconduct on a Scale: Gravity, Coercion, and ConsentEthics 131 (2): 319-344. 2021.To develop a theoretical framework for drawing moral distinctions between instances of sexual misconduct, I defend the “Ameliorative View” of consent, according to which there are three possibilities for what effect, if any, consent has: “fully valid consent” eliminates a wronging, “fully invalid consent” has no normative effect, and “partially valid consent” has an ameliorative effect on a wronging in the respect that it makes the wronging less grave. I motivate the view by proposing a solution…Read more
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549Coerced Consent with an Unknown FuturePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (2): 441-461. 2020.Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 103, Issue 2, Page 441-461, September 2021.
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900Informed Consent, Disclosure, and UnderstandingPhilosophy and Public Affairs 48 (2): 119-150. 2020.Philosophy & Public Affairs, EarlyView.
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535Disability as solidarity: political not (only) metaphysicalPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (1): 219-224. 2020.
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939Why does duress undermine consent?1Noûs 55 (2): 317-333. 2019.In this essay, I discuss why consent is invalidated by duress that involves attaching penalties to someone's refusal to give consent. At the heart of my explanation is the Complaint Principle. This principle specifies that consent is defeasibly invalid when the consent results from someone conditionally imposing a penalty on the consent‐giver's refusal to give the consent, such that the consent‐giver has a legitimate complaint against this imposition focused on how it is affects their incentives…Read more
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331Consent, Communication, and AbandonmentLaw and Philosophy 38 (4): 387-405. 2019.According to the Behavioral View of consent, consent must be expressed in behavior in order to release someone from a duty. By contrast, the Mental View of consent is that normatively efficacious consent is entirely mental. In previous work, I defended a version of the Behavioral View, according to which normatively efficacious ‘consent always requires public behavior, and this behavior must take the form of communication in the case of high-stakes consent’. In this essay, I respond to two argum…Read more
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597Deception and ConsentIn Peter Schaber & Andreas Müller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Consent, Routledge. 2018.
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716Expecting the UnexpectedRes Philosophica 92 (2): 301-321. 2015.In an influential paper, L. A. Paul argues that one cannot rationally decide whether to have children. In particular, she argues that such a decision is intractable for standard decision theory. Paul's central argument in this paper rests on the claim that becoming a parent is ``epistemically transformative''---prior to becoming a parent, it is impossible to know what being a parent is like. Paul argues that because parenting is epistemically transformative, one cannot estimate the values of the…Read more
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363On Wrongs and Crimes : Does Consent Require Only an Attempt to Communicate?Criminal Law and Philosophy 13 (3): 409-423. 2019.In Wrongs and Crimes, Victor Tadros clarifies the debate about whether consent needs to be communicated by separating the question of whether consent requires expressive behaviour from the question of whether it requires “uptake” in the form of comprehension by the consent-receiver. Once this distinction is drawn, Tadros argues both that consent does not require uptake and that consent does not require expressive behaviour that provides evidence to the consent-receiver. As a result, Tadros takes…Read more
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459Vagueness and Indeterminacy in MetaethicsIn Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, Routledge. pp. 185-193. 2017.This chapter discusses vagueness in ethics.
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15827Sex, Lies, and ConsentEthics 123 (4): 717-744. 2013.How wrong is it to deceive someone into sex by lying, say, about one's profession? The answer is seriously wrong when the liar's actual profession would be a deal breaker for the victim of the deception: this deception vitiates the victim's sexual consent, and it is seriously wrong to have sex with someone while lacking his or her consent.
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1435Vague ValuePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (2): 352-372. 2013.You are morally permitted to save your friend at the expense of a few strangers, but not at the expense of very many. However, there seems no number of strangers that marks a precise upper bound here. Consequently, there are borderline cases of groups at the expense of which you are permitted to save your friend. This essay discusses the question of what explains ethical vagueness like this, arguing that there are interesting metaethical consequences of various explanations
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929A Deluxe Money PumpThought: A Journal of Philosophy 3 (1): 21-29. 2014.So-called money pump arguments aim to show that intransitive preferences are irrational because they will lead someone to accept a series of deals that leaves his/her financially worse off and better off in no respect. A common response to these arguments is the foresight response, which counters that the agent in question may see the exploitation coming, and refuse to trade at all. To obviate this response, I offer a “deluxe money pump argument” that applies dominance reasoning to a modified mo…Read more
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544Aggregation, Beneficence, and ChanceJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 7 (2): 1-19. 2013.It is plausible to think that it is wrong to cure many people’s headaches rather than save someone else’s life. On the other hand, it is plausible to think that it is not wrong to expose someone to a tiny risk of death when curing this person’s headache. I will argue that these claims are inconsistent. For if we keep taking this tiny risk then it is likely that one person dies, while many others’ headaches are cured. In light of this inconsistency, there is a conflict in our intuitions about ben…Read more
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488Moral Indeterminacy, Normative Powers and ConventionRatio 29 (4): 448-465. 2016.Moral indeterminacy can be problematic: prospectively it can give rise to deliberative anguish, and retrospectively, it can leave us in a limbo as to what attitudes it is appropriate to form with respect to past actions with indeterminate moral status. These problems give us reason to resolve ethical indeterminacy. One mechanism for doing so involves the use of our normative powers to place obligations on ourselves and to waive our claims against others. This mechanism could operate through an e…Read more
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679Why Is There Female Under-Representation among Philosophy Majors?Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 2. 2015.The anglophone philosophy profession has a well-known problem with gender equity. A sig-nificant aspect of the problem is the fact that there are simply so many more male philoso-phers than female philosophers among students and faculty alike. The problem is at its stark-est at the faculty level, where only 22% - 24% of philosophers are female in the United States (Van Camp 2014), the United Kingdom (Beebee & Saul 2011) and Australia (Goddard 2008).<1> While this is a result of the percentage of…Read more
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873Why Do Female Students Leave Philosophy? The Story from SydneyHypatia 30 (2): 467-474. 2015.The anglophone philosophy profession has a well-known problem with gender equity. A sig-nificant aspect of the problem is the fact that there are simply so many more male philoso-phers than female philosophers among students and faculty alike. The problem is at its stark-est at the faculty level, where only 22% - 24% of philosophers are female in the United States (Van Camp 2014), the United Kingdom (Beebee & Saul 2011) and Australia (Goddard 2008).<1> While this is a result of the percentage of…Read more
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1264Future-Bias and Practical ReasonPhilosophers' Imprint 15. 2015.Nearly everyone prefers pain to be in the past rather than the future. This seems like a rationally permissible preference. But I argue that appearances are misleading, and that future-biased preferences are in fact irrational. My argument appeals to trade-offs between hedonic experiences and other goods. I argue that we are rationally required to adopt an exchange rate between a hedonic experience and another type of good that stays fixed, regardless of whether the hedonic experience is in the …Read more
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463No Way Around Consent: A Reply to Rubenfeld on 'Rape-by-deception'Yale Jaw Journal Online 123 321-333. 2013.
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871Rational Numbers: A Non‐Consequentialist Explanation Of Why You Should Save The Many And Not The FewPhilosophical Quarterly 63 (252): 413-427. 2013.You ought to save a larger group of people rather than a distinct smaller group of people, all else equal. A consequentialist may say that you ought to do so because this produces the most good. If a non-consequentialist rejects this explanation, what alternative can he or she give? This essay defends the following explanation, as a solution to the so-called numbers problem. Its two parts can be roughly summarised as follows. First, you are morally required to want the survival of each stranger …Read more
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96Altruism and Ambition in the Dynamic Moral LifeAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (4): 716-729. 2017.Some people are such impressive altruists that they seem to us to already be doing more than enough. And yet they see themselves as compelled to do even more. Can our view be reconciled with theirs? Can a moderate view of beneficence's demands be made consistent with a requirement to be ambitiously altruistic? I argue that a reconciliation is possible if we adopt a dynamic view of beneficence, which addresses the pattern that our altruism is required to take over time. This frees up theoretical …Read more
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