Abstract

How we determine the scope of consent – the range of actions that consent applies to – has implications on the discussion of deception in sex.

Some philosophers endorse the view that deception’s moral effect on consent can be, at least partly, explained by the fact that an act that someone consented to is not actually the act that is carried out (where the act carried out does not fall within the scope of their consent). If this is the case, then delineating which acts are within the scope of consent can provide us with a partial account of which acts could be morally impermissible as a result of deception.

However, this approach needs to be able to deal with cases where deception might be the only way in which to avoid discriminatory consequences, ideally avoiding the conclusion that deception in these cases are serious moral wrongs.

I will be looking at Dougherty’s approach to get around this problem, namely building in moral reasonableness into how we determine the scope of consent. I will be arguing that this approach fails, and that if we want consent to remain a useful moral concept which is able to protect people’s autonomy, the scope of consent should be an epistemically reasonable interpretation of the expression of consent.