Hybrid | Mistreating Consent

John Austin Seminars - Mistreating Consent

Speaker: Elise Woodard, Lecturer in Legal & Political Philosophy, King’s College London

Chair: George Letsas, Professor of Philosophy of Law, UCL Laws 

About the Seminar:

Consent plays a crucial role in our lives. Using someone’s body or property without their consent is typically a serious moral wrong. However, even consensual interactions can be morally problematic in certain ways. This paper explores an underexamined form of defective consent: moot consent. Moot consent occurs when an individual’s consent is given, but it ultimately makes no difference to how others act. (For instance, imagine Audrey consents to have sex with Brice, but had she not consented, he would have proceeded anyway.)

These cases are troubling, yet difficult to explain in a way that preserves morally significant distinctions among different forms of defective consent. I argue that while moot consent remains valid consent, the consent-receiver nonetheless wrongs the giver by failing to properly regard their consent. Specifically, the problem arises because the consent does not play a meaningful role in the consent-receiver’s reasoning or practical deliberation. Cases of moot consent highlight that our concern is not only with the presence of consent but also with the role it plays in shaping others’ decisions and actions.

About the Speaker: 

Elise Woodard is a Lecturer in Legal and Political Philosophy at the Dickson Poon School of Law and a member of the YTL Centre for Philosophy, Politics, and Law. She was previously the Stalnaker Postdoctoral Associate in Philosophy at MIT, after completing her PhD in 2022 at the University of Michigan. She is currently working on issues regarding consent, inquiry, and political epistemology. 

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