[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Victor Tedros, thanks very much for having this conversation with me. Oh, thanks very much for inviting me.
Great to be here. Now you have a forthcoming book entitled consent and the Sexual Revolution.
And you were very kind enough to send me the manuscript and give me a bit of a heads up.
And it's an incredibly comprehensive kind of. It's like a treatise on everything to do with the ethics of consent and sexual wrongdoing.
Um, but I guess in the broadest terms, you could say it explores the values of the sexual revolution and the way in which consent fits into that.
So I wondered if, to begin with, maybe you could just give me your take on what are the values of the sexual revolution?
What have they been and what are they still today?
Okay, so the sexual revolution, I think, as it was commonly understood, was a kind of liberalising revolution.
The idea was to try to remove restrictions on Sex.
And so it was really about, um,
trying to prevent the impact of pernicious social and legal norms which prevented
people from exploring their sex lives in order to improve sexual liberty.
And so the actual revolution, I think, was mainly about kind of negative constraints on consent, on, on, on sex.
So it was about repression and removing repression in order that people could explore their sex lives more freely.
And so you think about like, sex outside marriage or, or gay sex or, um,
sex with more than one person or conservative forces that all these conservative forces are oppressive.
And then we're trying to remove those conservative forces in order to achieve sexual liberty.
And you think about like, the kind of key challenges to, for example, the publication of what was considered,
um, problematic literature like D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and then the challenges to that.
That was all kind of part of the idea of the sexual revolution. So as the actual sexual revolution had it,
the main value was about promoting sexual liberty against the kind of repressive conservative norms that applied to people,
especially to women, but to other people as well.
But the way I understand the sexual revolution is to think about the values of the sexual revolution as it's best understood.
And very, very quickly, we got especially feminist challenges to understanding the sexual revolution as just about removing constraints on liberty.
And it was much more about sexual representation and the impact of social power, which was partly about producing sex.
So sexual power was about the way in which we could, um,
change people's attitudes to sex in a way that produced sex in a way that could be problematic.
So the person whose book I kind of really launch off is, is Kate Millet's book Sexual Politics,
where there's this challenge, which is partly about challenging conservative norms,
but it's partly also about challenging the production of sex through sexual representation,
sexual ideology, and where D.H. Lawrence became a kind of challenge to conservative norms.
On the one hand, Kate Millett challenges Lawrence as a kind of figurehead for representing sex in a way that was deeply misogynistic and sexist,
in a way that was about the production of sex, rather than about the the repression of sex.
On the one hand, we need to challenge conservative norms, but on the other hand, we need to challenge social power in a way that produces sex.
And that's the kind of two values that kind of underpin the book as it goes forward.
So you place a lot of attention on this idea of the power of production.
You say the things that produce sex and the various social influences that cause sex to happen which wouldn't otherwise happen.
Um, are there any particular social influences you have in mind in thinking about that?
Well, there's tons of them, but what one way of thinking about it is just think about marriage.
So marriage has two different kinds of effects on sex.
On the one hand, it's repressive because there's this conservative, um, restriction on sex outside marriage.
You have to be married to have sex with someone. And if you weren't married, then there was, uh, kind of social repression on on sex.
But on the other hand, marriage was also about the production of sex, that there was an expectation in marriage that people would have sex.
And it's particularly an expectation on women that they would consent to sex with their husbands,
or even that the fact that they got married amounted to consent to sex with her husband,
as we understand it, as it used to be, in the kind of legal norm which helped to explain why there was no,
uh, criminalisation of rape within, within marriage. And so, um, so marriage plays these two kinds of roles.
And I think typically it was understood in the sexual revolution as repression,
but production was equally important and equally pernicious that marriage was a way in which you could pressure people into having sex,
and people expected sex during marriage. It was it was about both of these things.
That's just one instance of a ton of instances where there was a bunch of things that produced sex.
People who didn't have enough sex were considered as being repressed. There was a lot of psychological literature around that.
Pornography encouraged people to have sex of a certain kind, lots of other things which are about the representation of sex and sex,
sexual power, which were about production, which were also really problematic.
And so the organising idea here is that although the sexual revolution removed a lot of these restrictions,
the conservative repressive restrictions that liberated people to have sex that they otherwise couldn't have,
it didn't do anything or maybe didn't do enough to address those forces,
those problematic forces and kinds of injustices that were causing people to have sex that maybe they didn't want.
That's right. So the, the, the kind of feminist movement which, as I say in a way, was part of the sexual revolution,
but also was critical to some of the way in which the sexual revolution happened was really about challenging those norms.
But I think it's fair to say that the liberalisation norms were much more successful
socially than challenging sexual production and problematic sexual power in that.
Now, you don't find anywhere near as many people who think you can only have sex within marriage,
or that gay sex is wrong, or that sex with more than one person is wrong. You know, most people are pretty open minded about sex.
And then there's the kind of slogan around consent that says, look, if people consent to it, you can do whatever you want.
That's like in a way, that's a way of understanding the slogan of the sexual revolution.
There's much less, I think, attention that's paid to the production of sex through power.
And the MeToo movement, I think, can be understood in a way As a challenge to that.
That's really one of the things that it was about,
was about highlighting the fact that the challenge to the power around sex had been inadequately understood.
And so thinking about the value of consent within that context, within that framework, in chapter four,
you write this as quote, sex with valid consent can nevertheless be depressing, unsatisfying,
upsetting, painful, and unequal, which is, I think, again, one of the things that the MeToo movement was,
was pointing out, um, and is of a piece with some other conversations I've had in this series.
So I guess my question kind of stemming off of that is where does that leave consent?
So if if it's true that sexual activity which is consented to can nevertheless be, you know, so problematic, so bleak,
caused by unjust circumstances and the like, how do we, in light of that,
then articulate the value that consent still has for the permissibility of sex?
You know, and maybe beyond that,
it's a one reaction to once we kind of highlight the significance of social power in in the production of sex and recognise that it's misogynistic,
homophobic, racist, ableist, unequally in all sorts of respects.
It's to say, look, you can't really have valid consent under those conditions, and consent just drops out of the picture as a norm.
And some people think even more kind of directly about consent, that it's really fundamentally problematic in itself as an idea.
But my view is much more ambivalent about consent than that.
I think it's much more complex the way we respond to consent under both unjust conditions and as a norm,
which we might try and realise as something which could achieve sexual justice.
So in in unjust conditions, I think that it's wrong to think that consent is never valuable or valid, even when it's morally problematic.
It could still be morally problematic, but still have some kind of force.
And one of the critics of what some people call sex negative feminists was that
they underestimated the significance of sexual autonomy under unjust conditions.
And you still want to value autonomous choices that are made by women, even when they're compromised.
And a lot of the reaction by what so-called sex positive feminists are, sex negative feminists was like, look, you still got a value.
The fact that people are making genuine sexual choices, sometimes those sexual choices which are to do with challenging power in themselves,
their kind of forms of resistance, sometimes they're not.
But even there, it's really important to recognise the significance of women's agency, even under those conditions.
And consent is a central way in which people express their autonomous agency around sex within the context of constrained conditions.
The idea is that being able to consent to something still gives you some control over your life.
Um, despite the fact that there are these unjust circumstances.
Exactly. So you're still expressing your views about what you want with respect to sex,
and also your attempt to kind of shape the way in which other people react to you in your sexual choices.
Consent is really all about that kind of this relational kind of idea.
And so you still value that even when it's expressed in unjust conditions.
One of the ways I would love to think about this was to think about my I'm half Egyptian and my Egyptian family.
They live in this extremely kind of sexist kind of culture.
My the women in my Egyptian family grew up under deeply sexist conditions.
And if you'd said to women under those conditions, look,
none of the consent you gave to sex was valid, even though that was part of your relationships.
They had children, they had marriages which were which they and they had relationships which they thought were valuable and said, look,
your agency just didn't matter at all because he lived in this really deeply misogynistic culture,
which no doubt it particularly was for the women of my dad's generation.
It still is now. But he said their agency just didn't matter at all.
I think they would really strongly reject that as an idea, even though their conditions, I think,
are much worse than the conditions of where we're at least some way closer to gender equality here.
Than, than than my Egyptian family are so thinking about that kind of basic claim,
then, that consent to sex in unjust circumstances could be valid, but might not be.
I guess your view is it depends, um, in the context of, say, coercion or pressure, which I think a lot of people think a lot about.
How how would we figure that out? How would we determine that across a bunch of cases?
Because, you know, they're obviously going to be clear cases, you know, gun to your head kind of situation where of course this is invalid consent.
Um, there may be clear cases of very, very minor pressure, which doesn't seem to make a difference.
And then a lot of argument about these more grey area borderline cases.
So does your view kind of help us figure out the answer to the validity of consent in those kinds of cases?
I mean, yes and no. I mean, some of these cases are just difficult cases. And a good theory of consent is not a theory.
That's like an algorithm that's going to give you the answer to all the moral questions.
A good theory is going to be one that helps you get a grip of how to articulate your judgements about about those cases.
Sometimes there are competing kind of considerations and they're really difficult ones.
And there's a spectrum of cases, as you rightly say.
Everyone's going to be accepting the kind of two party case where someone puts a gun to someone's head and say,
says, have sex with me, I'm going to shoot you. There's no valid consent.
Even if the person says yes, there's probably no consent.
If the person says yes because they're not actually consenting, they're just pretending to or something like that.
On the other end of the spectrum, you can think about really minor social pressure, which doesn't play much of a role in the person's decision.
So you can imagine a person making a decision partly because of a little bit of pressure,
but there's lots of other reasons why they choose to have sex.
And then to say the content is valid, I think, really undermines the fact that the persons exercise sufficient agency in making their choice.
And then there's lots and lots of cases which. Which are in the middle ground.
I tend to think that a lot more cases are invalid, though, than probably people think socially.
And I think that what happens in a lot of cases is that the person says yes, but the person who's applying the pressure,
even if it's not that significant, the pressure should still remove the pressure.
Right. And they shouldn't really have sex with the person until they've done that.
So it's still wrongful for the person applying the pressure to do that,
even if it's not an implication of that, that the consent would then be invalid.
Well, I think because it is invalid precisely because the person hasn't removed the pressure.
So the thing about the person who hectors someone intersex, which is a really increasingly familiar phenomena through the MeToo movement.
So we saw it in the Aziz Ansari case,
and then there was lots of other kind of instances which were like this where the person wasn't wasn't using threats, really.
They were just hectoring a person over and over again Into into saying yes.
And in those cases you might think, look, the person could just walk away. There's no real threat there.
But I don't think that's the right response to those cases, because the person who's applying the pressure to say, look,
no pressure and just take the pressure away and then the other person has a much freer choice and then the content is invalid.
Now things are much more difficult, I think,
in what we can call three party cases or multi-party cases where the pressure doesn't come from the person who's seeking consent,
it comes from all sorts of other people. So you think about the wider society that pressurise people into having sex.
And there's a lot, as I said earlier, of wider pressure, which is about sexual production.
So the wider pressure that says if you don't have enough sex, you've got a problem.
The wider pressure that that people say you've got to have sex within marriage.
Now, that pressure doesn't necessarily come from the person who's relying on consent.
It's coming from a much wider range of people.
Now, in those cases, I tend to think because the person who's seeking consent doesn't have much control over that much,
but over that kind of pressure, then consent is it's easier to make consent valid under those conditions.
So thinking about that kind of wider, more diffuse social pressure, which I guess also determines who is deemed sexually desirable,
which which is also in the background, kind of affecting what people do and don't consent to.
I wonder whether outside the law of consent or outside the law of rape and sexual offences, do you think,
you know the state or institutions should do anything about alleviating these kinds of influences?
I mean, it's a really interesting question. I mean, when the state gets involved in sex, um, to put it brutally, it always [INAUDIBLE] it up.
Yeah. And so, yeah, so that's kind of what tends to make the right calls.
Exactly, exactly. I put it more bluntly than you can.
So, um, you know, you worry about state engineering, sexual justice because state power is just the worst place to try and see.
Kind of social engineering around sex and social movements might do a much better job than the state in generating norms.
That's not to say the state doesn't have any role to play. It may well have more of a negative role to play than a positive one, though,
which is the role of trying to remove people from having influence who are really problematic.
So you think about the way in which, for example,
religious leaders or faith schools might create problems around around sex because they're insufficiently interested in sex education.
And so they don't promote the right kinds of norms and sexual education or promote all the wrong norms and sex education.
That's the kind of thing where the state has a role to say, yeah, we don't tolerate that.
And alongside religion, if we're thinking about forces,
ground forces that brainwash people about sex and sexual desirability and ideology, pornography kind of very obviously comes to mind.
And you do write a little bit about this. So I mean, are there any.
Are there any implications there for when we're talking about things the state should do to take away these forces,
you know, kind of mute their impact? Do you think pornography is a candidate?
It's definitely potentially a candidate. The question is whether the state can really do anything about it now.
I mean, in the days when people used to write about the regulation of pornography, it was under the assumption that this was really possible.
But now you just doubt that it's really possible. And even if they started to do it, you worry that they would do it badly.
So obviously there's a lot of extremely negative pornography out there,
which creates a lot of real problems around sex and kind of reinforces sexual injustice.
But there's also important positive influences of pornography.
So gay pornography, for example, is pretty important in helping people who are same sex oriented to realise their sexual ambitions in a way that was,
you know, a real problem when gay pornography wasn't so widely available.
And so it's much more complicated the pornography thing and just say, look, we just got to regulate.
Because if the government starts to regulate, you think, okay, are they going to also get rid of the potentially good effects of pornography?
There are obviously lots of very bad effects of pornography.
Would they really be able to challenge those effectively now, given the way in which pornography is distributed?
And the answer to that is probably no.
So in principle, I think this is all candidates for state power, because I think it's perfectly okay for the state to get involved.
And those people who think they're a kind of free speech kind of worries here.
I'm like a little bit unsympathetic to all of that.
I think, look, a lot of this stuff is about really serious harms and the fact the harms are a bit further on down the line.
The free speech worries, I think, sometimes get overridden or exaggerated,
and I think a bit of regulation might be okay, but in practice I have some doubts about that, that being effective.
Also in this domain, we have a debate that's got a bit of traction recently about this idea of a right to sex,
which very problematically has been taken up by the incel movement.
You know, these guys saying all these women are wronging us by not making sex available to us?
Um, but also linked to, I suppose, a true fact about the world, which is that social attitudes,
discrimination and social injustice feeds into sexual desirability,
and then the sexual desires that people actually have, uh, in ways that, you know,
causes distributive problems when it comes to who who has access to sex.
And you very interestingly argue in the book for, I guess, a version of a right to sex, which you do kind of heavily qualify and nuance and explain.
But I wonder if you could say a bit about that. Okay.
So, um, Amy Srinivasan, in her very well-known piece, The Right to Sex, raises the idea of the right to sex, but ultimately, I think, rejects it.
He doesn't really think there is a right to sex, but she kind of thinks the right to sex has a point,
which is that, um, although people aren't ever entitled to sex from some other person.
Nevertheless, there's a lot of distributive injustice about the way in which people have access to sex.
Those people who are considered sexually attractive have lots of opportunities for sex.
Those people who are considered sexually unattractive don't have much opportunities for sex.
And the way in which the, um,
being sexually attractive and sexually unattractive is distributed in a society reflects lots and lots of discriminatory norms,
racist norms, ableist norms. It's extremely problematic how, um, sexual attraction is distributed within a society.
This stuff is not just purely natural, it's stuff that is generated in us by social media, and the social media is racist, ableist and so on.
So it's deeply discriminatory how the opportunity for sex is distributed.
And then we might think, look, sex is a central value in the lives of many people.
The opportunity for sex is incredibly important to people not having any opportunity for a sex life is really bad,
and having a much better opportunity for a sex life. It's really good for a lot of people.
And so then we might think, look, justice is concerned with allocating and distributing goods which are central to people's lives.
And that at least gives us some pressure to think that there's a right to sex.
Okay. Now think okay, who is that right? Held against.
Is that right? Held against particular individuals. And this is where I think the incel movement.
This would be quite a problem. Well, this would be a real problem to say this person has a right to sex against the other person,
and the other person exactly is required to give it.
And that's what marriage was all about, that that wives were required to give sex to their husbands.
That kind of idea obviously is is deeply wrong.
And that's the thing I think that Amir Srinivasan is railing against when she thinks really ultimately there is no entitlement to sex.
But we don't need that idea to think there's an entitlement to sex,
because maybe the entitlement isn't held against particular individuals who have an obligation then to provide sex.
It's rather held against lots of other people who these people have a right that their opportunities for sex aren't undermined by social justice,
by social injustice. They're not undermined by racist pornography.
They're not undermined by ableist attitudes, they're not undermined by problematic sexual education.
And people have a right that those social influences which restrict their opportunities for sex are taken away.
Right. It's a right that all of this stuff doesn't happen. So as to downstream, you know, make it the case that their opportunities are restricted.
So I mean, think about that. What what would a violation then of the right to sex look like for you.
Okay. So one way to start is by thinking about the fact that people have a right to have sex.
And this is really uncontroversial. I think that people have a right to have sex.
So think about like gay couples who want to have sex and then society restricts them.
Their rights are being violated. Their rights to have sex with each other are being violated by the state.
And I think everyone is going to accept that, that those people have a right to have sex.
And you might think, look, what they have a right to is sex with a person who's willing to consent to sex with them or something like that.
Yeah. But then think, okay,
there's lots of other ways in which a person's opportunities to have sex could be undermined in a way that's prior to someone giving consent to them.
It could be undermined because that person is wrongly influenced not to consent.
So like in the book, I go through a bunch of more detailed cases which try and kind of show that this is
a pretty plausible idea that we don't just have a right to have sex with a person,
given that they consent. We also have a right that their decision to consent isn't undermined.
Really? Problematically so. For example,
if someone decides not to consent because someone's lied about the person they were going to consent with in a way that's really problematic,
that might then also undermine that person's right now that this person is given the opportunity to exercise sexual autonomy in a better way.
And if they had been given that kind of opportunity, they would then have consented.
And it really is. The sex is the thing that's being kind of taken away here.
That's the thing that the person had the right to and could say, you know,
racist and ableist social attitudes, which the state doesn't do enough to combat.
You know, count as that kind of wrongful undermining that shouldn't have happened.
That's right. So you think about like the kind of like, pervasive kind of impression that's created that some people are not sexually desirable
on racist grounds or because they're overweight or for all sorts of other reasons.
And they say, oh, those people who are targeted by that,
their rights are being undermined because other people are not able to exercise sexual autonomy in the right way,
because they're being influenced in a way that's really problematic.
Going back to the value of consent, kind of, you know, in the framework of the ethics of sex.
There's another view that you address in the book. I think it's a it's a particular scholarly view that emerged in recent years, um,
which says there's actually quite a problem thinking about consent as central to the value of good sex.
And this is because if we think about kind of the best case scenario sexual interaction,
we think about the kind of interactions that are kind of neutrally engaged,
symmetrical, you know, a joint activity where both parties are really enthusiastically involved.
And in those kind of scenarios, the idea is actually this whole idea of consent just drops out of the picture,
because consent actually has far more, you know, the hallmarks of a doer and a done to one person is doing something to another person.
It's inherently asymmetrical.
I mean, I think it's it also has roots in, in feminism, this idea, um, that when we're thinking about consenting, it's still presupposes, you know,
this inequality which is never going to be your best case scenario,
so that actually consent is only ever, you know, it's I think you even said this in a, in a seminar.
It's the second best way of putting it.
Um, hence that is not really what we should be striving to, but it's also not absolutely essential, uh, to good sex and ideal sex.
But you push against this view.
You you want to defend what you call the centrality of consent, even in these kind of ideal jointly, you know, symmetrical cases.
That's right.
So a lot of the bad press that consent gets, I think, is to do with assumptions that people make about concern, which I don't think are right.
And then an attitude about consent, which I think is actually something really valuable about consent, which is being denigrated.
So let me just kind of get into both of those sorts of things.
So the, the let me start with the assumption that, um, that people, um, uh, the people have about consent,
which is right, but which I think they're wrong to denigrate, which is the assumption that.
That consent is a unilateral thing. I agree that consent is a unilateral thing.
It's something that one person gives to another person unilaterally, and the other person might not do anything about it at all.
They might not be involved at all. And the consent could be still both given and valid.
Think about the non-sexual kinds of cases where this is obviously true. So if I say look, anyone can come into my room.
So now I've given consent to anyone coming into my room and no one might come into my room.
No one might be interested in coming into my room. Maybe no one wants to come into my room.
Maybe no one wanting me to give them permission to come into my room. Nevertheless, I've given everyone consent.
And in that sense, consent is unilateral. Now, I agree that consent is unilateral in that way, but I don't think that's problematic.
I think that's a real virtue of consent, that each person in a sexual encounter has control over what happened to them sexually.
In this intimate realm, I think it's quite right that each person has that kind of control and they have unilateral control over what happens to them.
This isn't something which some people think we should replace consent with something like agreement between two people.
And I say in response to that, look, if there's an absence of an agreement and you thought agreement with central,
it's like both people are wronged when the agreement is not there, but when one person forces sex or another.
The person who's having sex forced on them is the one that's being wronged because their unilateral control was being undermined.
So I think it's a, it's a it's a virtue of consent that it's unilateral.
But a lot of the other things that people say about consent, which is that it's not dynamic, it's should be given in advance.
It's something you do in response. Exactly. All of that, I think, is just stereotyping about consent.
And it's not really true. So people um, the one way I described is that it's like a piece of, like, machinery.
I think a lot of the people who think of consent in this way think of it as a piece of heavy machinery.
You kind of almost have to sign a contract in advance or something like that.
But in concert, in our ordinary, everyday lives, and again, outside of the central context, there's nothing like this.
So people learn to give consent when they're very young children.
Um, think about like the way in which kids play with toys and they say, you can use my truck or whatever.
You know, they pass things around to each other.
There's a huge amount of implicit consent that's going on in that, in those kinds of ordinary play interactions amongst children,
just in the sharing of toys, which shows just how lighter machinery consent really is.
Someone's consenting then withdrawing consent. They're doing that in a kind of context of a kind of dynamic interaction.
And I think a lot of sexual interaction has that kind of dynamic quality too.
And consent given and withdrawn in a very complex and dynamic way in the course of a person having sex.
And it's not always a response to a request in my case of the room shows that earlier too.
Some people say, look, it's it's really bad because it's something which people do in response to a request.
I say, no, that's not true, right? People sometimes just give consent without having a request in advance.
So if we take the case, which I guess is kind of the, uh, the antagonistic case for your view of someone who is strongly initiating sex,
you know, almost urging the other person to engage in sexual activity with them.
And then the idea is, well, it would be strange to think of that person, you know,
the instigator as consenting, because, you know, what do you mean, consenting?
They're the one instigating the whole thing. But according to your analysis, no consent is still doing a lot of work with them.
It's just that, I don't know, it's more implicit than often people take it to be.
That's right. So the person who's urging is urging and consenting.
Right. They can they can send urging. It's the consensus part of what's going all the way to get at this is to think, look,
you can urge people to do things and grant them a permission, or you can urge someone to do something without grant granting permission.
So here's again an example outside of the sexual context that I use.
So imagine, like I'm a martial arts instructor and I urge someone to punch me in the face.
And I do that because I want to show my class how to take a punch.
Well, I'm urging the person to do something, and I'm also, in the course of doing that, permitting the person to punch me in the face.
And we know that I'm doing that because if we compare other cases where I could urge someone to punch me in the face where I'm not permitting,
the wrong still is present. So suppose that, um, uh, Kate's out of prison.
I really want to get back into prison, and I can get her back into prison if she commits a criminal right against me.
So I urge her to punch me in the face. So come on, punch me, punch me.
And I want her to punch me so the cops will.
It's like an entrapment type case because I want her to be put back in prison, so I'm not granting a permission.
I'm not saying to Kate, look, you're permitted to punch me in the face.
I'm saying to you, I really want you to punch me in the face, even though I'm not permitting you to do it in order that you went back to prison.
Because if I was permitting you to do it, it wouldn't be a crime. A crime, and you When we came back to prison.
So I really want you not to be permitted. But I still really want you to do it.
So those two cases show you that you can urge and permit, or you can urge a not permit.
So urging is not sufficient. What you need to do is urgent permit in order to have permissible sex.
And so when it comes to urging, you better have implicit permission in there. And I think that's what's going on in a lot of urgent cases.
Okay. Um, you also suggest at some point in the book that there could be instances of sexual
activity that you describe as being beyond the scope of one person's consent in that,
uh, it does not equate to what they intended to allow and yet still amount to a validly consensual interaction that is not wrongful.
Um, so could you take me through how how that's the case and maybe an example of where that might be the case?
Okay. So a lot of the cases around the way to get to this is to think about deception and error.
So when people have sex with each other, there's obviously a lot of deception and a lot of error that goes on.
People make people give consent under conditions of non full information.
And if it was true that um, we required completely full information in order to give valid consent.
Forget valid consent because no one has completely full information.
And that's even true when the information really influences people's sexual choices.
So I think, you know, imagine that you could only have sex with a person where you knew all of the things that were relevant to your choice.
Right. You're never going to you're never going to know that.
And probably people would never give consent if they knew all the things that were relevant to their choices.
Because, you know, there's always something about a person that you're not going to like.
And so people would never really give consent, I think, if they knew everything about the person they were consenting to.
And a lot of consent to sex happens in,
in in contexts like people meet in a bar and then they really don't want to know everything about the other person either.
If they did know that stuff, they wouldn't consent though. Okay, so now notice that when people consent, they consent with a certain kind of scope.
So they consent to sex where they put certain kinds of conditions on or a certain kind of scope to their consent.
And that scope. There's different kind of theories out there about what determines that kind of scope.
My own view is that that's about intentions. So people the scope of the person's consent is what the person intends to consent to.
But that's a controversial view. I'm not relying on that really here.
But that's one way of understanding it that if I consent, then that's determined by what I intend.
Now, what I intend is often pretty vague, actually. So, you know, a lot of the the boundaries of consent anyway are quite vague.
And again, think about outside the sexual context and you can really see this. I invite someone into my house.
What am I really consenting to? And I can send it to them. Walking through the corridor, sitting on the sofa, Getting a glass of water.
Going to the toilet. You don't just address your mind. I'm not thinking about all of that stuff.
And then it's also really unclear whether I've consented to that.
Not just unclear because we don't know, but unclear because there is no determinate fact here.
About what? What's really going on? Okay, now, think sometimes I could consent with a certain scope,
but maybe what I've done is granted a permission to do something which is broader than that scope,
because maybe the conditions that I've put on are really problematic.
Right. And then I think sometimes the consent that I've given gives rise to a permission,
even though the thing that I got wasn't really the thing that I contend is an example in the book about virginity,
where one person puts a condition on having sex with another person who is a woman that she's a virgin for,
very problematic, you know, ideological reasons. Exactly. So again, go back to Egyptian society, where being a virgin is incredibly important in, um,
uh, in people's ability to secure marriage and sex within marriage, have children, and so on.
If a person's not a virgin, they've had sex outside marriage, then it's much more difficult for that person to get married.
And women in Egypt go through all sorts of, um, ridiculous kind of, uh, um, um, practices in order to try to prove virginity.
And many women who've had sex outside marriage lie about virginity and get married.
And the husbands that they get married to, that's a condition for them having sex.
And the question is, have these women wronged these men because these men haven't consented to sex with a non virgin?
And my view is that can't be right, that under these conditions,
particularly conditions where these particular men are also upholding these sexist norms, I don't think there's an obligation to inform.
But the sex that's being had then is outside of the scope of consent.
I think you want to hold that that clear that it's definitely outside of the scope of consent.
That's right. Because the men say I only have I only consent to sex with someone who's a virgin.
I suppose they put that condition on which they explicitly, explicitly. That's what they say.
Then they haven't consented to sex with these women because what they did was outside of the scope of consent.
But I think they consent to sex nevertheless gives rise to a permission to have sex.
Okay. Even though they haven't consented to exactly this. So that gets you to the, I guess, counterintuitive sounding conclusion,
but I can see why you get there that sex outside the scope of consent can sometimes be permissible.
You've consented to something not quite what you got, but you can send it to something and that's enough to ground the permission.
So it's important in this analysis that the person has has given their consent,
even in the the context of not knowing all the information, they have given some sort of consent.
It would be different, for instance, if for the same problematic reasons, a person said, well, I found out you're not a virgin, let's say.
Now, I don't want to have sex with you. Then the other person forces sex on them anyway because they don't accept the reason.
This is a different situation, right? Exactly. The fact that the person considered something really makes a difference in itself.
You couldn't force a sex on a person who said no, or for racist reasons or ableist reasons, or what happens exactly.
But once the person says yes to something, in this case, sex with a person who's a virgin,
then they, um, give rise to a permission to sex that a non virgin can have sex with them.
Right? Because it's close enough. Close enough. It's close enough to what actually happened.
Close enough so you didn't get quite what you wanted, but you got something which was close enough to what you wanted.
And the reasons why you didn't want it were really [INAUDIBLE] good.
So, um, I'm playing the world's smallest violin now and say, thinking you didn't get quite what you wanted.
It's super interesting. Um, okay. I mean, coming outside of, uh, the sexual context when it comes to consent.
Obviously, consent is an idea, is a notion that we have that is not just relevant to sexual activity, we employ it all the time in other situations.
And in your book, you use tons of analogues to do with consent to figure out what's going on with consent that are not in the sexual context.
And so I guess I wonder whether and when it matters to our analysis of consent and when we unearth valid consent,
invalid consent permissibility that we are thinking about sex in particular, is sex special?
In other words, in a way that changes our analysis of consent?
Or should our analysis of consent in the sexual context just follow,
you know neatly along how we would think about consent in all of these other contexts.
You know, contracts, you know, property exchanges, business transactions, um,
medical surgery, you know, is another good example where consent is really germane.
Should it look the same in all these cases? You know, do we work with the same principles?
Or does the fact that we're thinking about sexual activity change anything?
So I think it's both the same and different in some aspects.
It's the same. In some aspects it's different. So the very idea of consent I think is the same across all these different contexts.
I think it's the very same idea of granting people permissions to say, someone, you're allowed to do this.
That's really what consent is about, saying people you're allowed to do this.
And that basic idea, I think is prevalent across all sorts of different domains.
And that's why consent is really important in all sorts of different domains,
because people want to have control over whether they allow people to do things or not.
Not just in the sexual realm, but in all sorts of other realms as well.
So I think that in that way, when we think about the philosophy of consent to sex,
we should think about consent in a way that's uniform across these different contexts.
And sometimes we can learn a lot from other contexts by thinking about those and then drawing analogies from other contexts for consent to sex.
And I think there's nothing wrong with doing that,
as long as we're mindful of the fact that the conditions that make consent valid or that determine the significance of consent,
they might be quite different across these different realms.
And we've got to be careful about saying just because it's okay in this kind of context doesn't mean it's okay in the sexual context,
because sex has special kinds of value for people. It has a special kind of significance for people.
There's special kinds of power relations that are involved in sex.
Lots of other problematic features of sex which make it also different from these other things.
So we've got to be mindful when we're drawing analogies from other contexts.
I think it's okay to do it,
but you just need to be kind of careful about exactly how you do it and make sure that you're tracking these potential differences.
Right. And in this vein, I think you mentioned maybe in your introduction, this consent and t video that that went like viral a few years ago.
And then teacher friends of mine tell me that they use it in high school to train, uh, teenagers about consent to sex.
Um, I mean, I don't know if everybody knows about this video where the the they basically say, here's how to think about consent.
Imagine you're asking someone if they want a cup of tea. If they say no, you don't give them a cup of tea, do you?
You don't try to force it down their throats, scold them, this sort of thing. Um.
And you, you're unsure that in that case, that. That's a helpful analogy.
Of course it's helpful in some ways. You know, it's true that, like, it would be wrong if someone says to have a cup of tea before someone has sex,
or the analogy works there, don't you think? Other ways in which it doesn't really work?
So it would be okay, I think, if a student came into a professor's office for the professor to offer them a cup of tea,
not okay for them to offer them sex, it'd be okay for me to say to my grandmother at, um, a social occasion.
You're really good at making tea, right? Wouldn't be quite so okay for me to say you're really good at sex, right?
And urging someone to have a cup of tea. Maybe because you suspect that they do want the tea, but they're being polite.
It's quite unproblematic. Right? Whereas Less so in the case of sex.
We need to be much more careful in the sexual realm than we do in the T realm.
So the T video is kind of helpful in one way, but in another way it might actually generate some problems.
Cause people, if people start to think, look, I can do all the things that I would do with t with sex,
then we're going to get some serious problems, I think, as a result of that. And then going back to the introduction and the value of consent,
there's something you say there where you explain the thesis of the book and you say that the value of consent,
valid consent depends on the circumstances in which it's given and actually the value of consent.
This is separate from the question of is there consent is something that we can actually work to improve, you know, collectively or individually.
Can you say something about that? Like how would we improve the value of the consent that there already is being given?
I take you to be saying so one of the kind of like, um,
ways in which consent has figured in social discourse and in educational institutions, for example.
As I say, look, you've got to make sure that you've got consent. That's that's what we're trying to achieve.
Trying to achieve sexual justice is about making sure that people only have sex with consent.
And then people say, look, it can't just be consent. It has to be valid consent.
So the aim of kind of institutions is to make sure that people only have sex when they have valid consent,
texts, that consent that isn't induced by coercion or deception or, or lack of capacity or whatever.
And I say, look, that's not enough. You need to do better than that.
Because the thing that I pointed out earlier was people can give valid consent,
sometimes in deeply unjust conditions, and the value of the consent they give is less, even though it's valid.
So it gives rise to someone else being permitted to have sex with the person.
But it's just not as good as it could have been so valid because of the reasons we discussed earlier.
Because you still want people to be able to exercise agency in that situation, yet not as good as it could be.
Not as good as it could be, because the person's consent would have more value than the sex they had as a result,
would have more value if it had been given in a better social context.
And so our reasons for addressing, for example, ableist norms, um, misogynistic norms, racist norms,
our reasons for addressing those aren't just to ensure that people can have sex, which is consensual, and which people validly consent to.
It's to enhance the value of consent. When consent is given in more valuable circumstances,
then it improves the overall ethics of sex in a way that isn't just about making sure that it's all permissible.
It's about improving its significance for people, its value in people's lives.
So perhaps this is one way in which, according to you, we we de-emphasise slightly or to de-emphasise the importance of the binary of consent
and non consent as explaining everything that is going on in the ethics of sex.
That's right. So the challenge isn't just to make sure that people have sex when it's okay.
Yeah. It's to improve the circumstances in which people give consent to improve the value of sex in people's lives,
and the value of consent to sex in people's lives.
That's that's a central kind of aim of sexual justice, which I think has been kind of downplayed in the aim to ensure that people only have sex,
which is consented to they're not really thinking enough about this, but that's also about consent.
So some people might think, look, that's a way of decentralised consent, but it's not really.
It's a way of centring consent in a different way. So thinking about consent not just as something which determines permissibility,
but something which can have genuine value for people, more or less value for people.
And then we want to try and enhance its value as well. Victor Tadros, thanks very much for having this conversation with me.
Thank you so much. This was really enjoyable to talk to you.