Description

What does it take to give morally valid consent? This question, concerning the “ontology of consent,” has received significant attention in the news recently, primarily in relation to consent to sex. Following a number of high profile cases of sexual harassment and sexual assault scandals, a heated public debate was sparked in the media, with movements such as MeToo and Time’sUp calling, among other things, for new attention to the question of when someone can be said to have given valid consent to sex. I will suggest that to answer this question we need to consider why we value having the moral power to consent. There is an obvious connection between how the power operates and why we have the power to begin with, but this connection has been overlooked in the philosophical debate. I will try to make progress in articulating this connection by considering the role played by the consenter and by the recipient of consent in cases of morally valid consent.

About The Speaker

Dr Massimo Renzo is a Reader in Politics, Philosophy & Law at the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London. Previously he was an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick and before that a Lecturer at the York Law School. He has held visiting appointments at the Australian National University, the universities of Virginia and Arizona, the Centre for Ethics and Public Affairs at the Murphy Institute (Tulane University) and Osgoode Hall’s Nathanson Centre for Transnational Human Rights, Crime & Security. He is an affiliated researcher at the Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War & Peace and the Honorary Secretary of the Society for Applied Philosophy. He is also one of the editors of the journal Criminal Law & Philosophy. His articles have appeared in journals such as Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, Philosophical Studies, Analysis, Philosophical Quarterly, Legal Theory, Law & Philosophy and the Journal of Political Philosophy. He has coedited the volume The Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (OUP 2015) and the five volumes of the Criminalization Series (OUP 2010-4).