Prof Victor Tadros’ Talk Series: Keynote Lecture- The Centrality of Consent to Sex

The idea that consent is at the heart of the morality of sex is under attack. There are difficult questions about how consent should be understood, when it is valid, and what its further ethical importance is. But the line of attack that this lecture is concerned with is more fundamental – it aims to show that consent is not necessary for permissible sex in central cases, and that the focus on consent distorts our understanding of what makes sex both permissible and valuable where sex has its greatest value – cases where sex is loving, mutual, and jointly intended for the right reasons.

I will argue that consent is central to the ethics of sex. That is because people have a duty to respect the control that each person has not only over what happens to them, but over the norms that govern what happens to them. And respect like that occurs only when people are responsive to a person’s decision not to consent to sex. This is so, I will suggest, not only in asymmetric cases where one person is active and the other is passive, but in cases of symmetrical mutual and active sex.