Coerced Consent with an Unknown Future*

It is hard enough giving an account of how coercion undermines the consent of someone who knows full well the consequences of her choices. But in the wild, coerced consent is even more ethically complex because people are often unsure or misled about what will happen if they refuse to consent. In this essay, I discuss how coercion can invalidate consent under conditions of imperfect information. To explain how consent is invalidated in this way, I argue for the “Subjective Principle.” According to this principle, a sufficient condition for the invalidity of consent is that the consent-giver either believes or has a credence that they would suffer a penalty for refusing to consent, this penalty is illegitimate, and this belief or credence causes them to consent.     

Precedent Autonomy and Subsequent Consent

Honoring a living will typically involves treating an incompetent patient in accord with preferences she once had, but whose objects she can no longer understand. How do we respect her “precedent autonomy” by giving her what she used to want? There is a similar problem with “subsequent consent”: How can we justify interfering with someone's autonomy on the grounds that she will later consent to the interference, if she refuses now? Both problems arise on the assumption that, to respect someone's autonomy, any preferences we respect must be among that person's current preferences. I argue that this is not always true. Just as we can celebrate an event long after it happens, so can we respect someone's wishes long before or after she has that wish. In the contexts of precedent autonomy and subsequent consent, the wishes are often preferences about which of two other, conflicting preferences to satisfy. When someone has two conflicting preferences, and a third preference on how to resolve that conflict, to respect his autonomy we must respect that third preference. People with declining competence may have a resolution preference earlier, favoring the earlier conflicting preference (precedent autonomy), whereas those with rising competence may have it later, favoring the later conflicting preference (subsequent consent). To respect autonomy in such cases we must respect not a current, but a former or later preference.     

Respectful Lying

I argue that there are instances in which lying to an innocent and generally competent person respects her autonomy, contrary to arguments by Christine Korsgaard and Onora O’Neill. These authors say that respect for a person’s autonomy requires treating her in a way consistent with the possibility of consent, but I contend that the possibility of consent condition is unworkable. I maintain that lying can respect individual autonomy when being truthful to a person undermines her choices and lying gets her what she would reasonably see herself as having most reason to choose in the circumstances. I make my case by reflecting on lying invitations to a surprise party and on negotiation phenomena.     

Moral Character and the Significance of Action: Judging Dmitri Karamazov

The paper considers the problematic relation between a person and her action as it is expressed in the problem of blame and moral judgement. I argue that blaming someone for her action does affect our moral judgement of her, but does not imply condemnation of her moral character. I use the example of Dmitri Karamazov to show that a response to a particular situation, although shaped by the previous character of the person, does not follow from it and can in turn affect and change the person's character by changing the way in which she perceives what is valuable.     

A Lover’s Shame

Shame is one of the more painful consequences of loving someone; my beloved’s doing something immoral can cause me to be ashamed of her. The guiding thought behind this paper is that explaining this phenomenon can tell us something about what it means to love. The phenomenon of beloved-induced shame has been largely neglected by philosophers working on shame, most of whom conceive of shame as being a reflexive attitude. Bennett Helm has recently suggested that in order to account for beloved-induced shame, we should deny the reflexivity of shame. After arguing that Helm’s account is inadequate, I proceed to develop an account of beloved-induced shame that rightly preserves its reflexivity. A familiar feature of love is that it involves an evaluative dependence; when I love someone, my well-being depends upon her life’s going well. I argue that loving someone also involves a persistent tendency to believe that her life is going well, in the sense that she is a good person, that she is not prone to wickedness. Lovers are inclined, more strongly than they otherwise would be, to give their beloveds the moral benefit of the doubt. These two features of loving—an evaluative dependence and a persistent tendency to believe in the beloved’s moral goodness—provide the conditions for a lover to experience shame when he discovers that his beloved has morally transgressed.     

A Narrative Model of Recovery

Abstract

In this paper I defend the suggestion that narratively understanding her experience of rape can help a survivor in her recovery from the harm that she has suffered. Susan Brison defends a similar suggestion, but, I argue, does not get all of the possible mileage out of narrative understanding because she does not explore what she takes to be the necessary features of a successful narrative itself. I hope to supplement her, primarily relational, account with a richer understanding of narratives themselves, as it is only, I argue, through coming to understand the essential characteristics of a narrative that we are able to grasp the particular explanatory force of narratives and, thereby, all of the potential benefits of narratively understanding her experience for a rape survivor.     

Internalism about reasons: sad but true?

Internalists about reasons following Bernard Williams claim that an agent’s normative reasons for action are constrained in some interesting way by her desires or motivations. In this paper, I offer a new argument for such a position—although one that resonates, I believe, with certain key elements of Williams’ original view. I initially draw on P.F. Strawson’s famous distinction between the interpersonal and the objective stances that we can take to other people, from the second-person point of view. I suggest that we should accept Strawson’s contention that the activity of reasoning with someone about what she ought to do naturally belongs to the interpersonal mode of interaction. I also suggest that reasons for an agent to perform some action are considerations which would be apt to be cited in favor of that action, within an idealized version of this advisory social practice. I then go on to argue that one would take leave of the interpersonal stance towards someone—thus crossing the line, so to speak—in suggesting that she do something one knows she wouldn’t want to do, even following an exhaustive attempt to hash it out with her. An internalist necessity constraint on reasons is defended on this basis.     

Sex Under Pressure: Jerks,Boorish Behavior,and Gender Hierarchy

Pressuring someone into having sex would seem to differ in significant ways from pressuring someone into investing in one’s business or buying an expensive bauble. In affirming this claim, I take issue with a recent essay by Sarah Conly (‘Seduction, Rape, and Coercion’, Ethics, October 2004), who thinks that pressuring into sex can be helpfully evaluated by analogy to these other instances of using pressure. Drawing upon work by Alan Wertheimer, the leading theorist of coercion, she argues that so long as pressuring does not amount to coercing someone into having sex, her consent to sex answers the important ethical questions about it. In this essay, I argue that to understand the real significance of pressuring into sex, we need to appeal to background considerations, especially the male-dominant gender hierarchy, which renders sexual pressuring different from its non-sexual analogues. Treating pressure to have sex like any other sort of interpersonal pressure obscures the role such sexual pressure might play in supporting gender hierarchy, and fails to explain why pressure by men against women is more problematic than pressure by women against men. I suggest that men pressuring women to have sex differs from the reverse case because of at least two factors: (1) gendered social institutions which add to the pressures against women, and (2) the greater likelihood that men, not women, will use violence if denied, and the lesser ability of women compared to men to resist such violence without harm. I would like to thank Marcia Baron, Sylvia Berryman, Elizabeth Brake, Dominic McIver Lopes, Jennifer Warriner, Janet Wesselius, two anonymous reviewers for Res Publica and the audiences at the University of British Columbia Feminism and Philosophy Workshop and the Western Canadian Philosophical Association meetings in Winnipeg for helpful discussion and comments.     

Asymmetries in Benefiting, Harming and Creating

It is often said that while we have a strong reason not to create someone who will be badly off, we have no strong reason for creating someone who will be well off. In this paper I argue that this asymmetry is incompatible with a plausible principle of independence of irrelevant alternatives, and that a more general asymmetry between harming and benefiting is difficult to defend. I then argue that, contrary to what many have claimed, it is possible to harm or benefit someone by bringing her into existence.     

Acting and Believing Under the Guise of Normative Reasons

In this paper, I defend an account of the reasons for which we act, believe, and so on for any Ф such that there can be reasons for which we Ф. Such reasons are standardly called motivating reasons. I argue that three dominant views of motivating reasons (psychologism, factualism and disjunctivism) all fail to capture the ordinary concept of a motivating reason. I show this by drawing out three constraints on what motivating reasons must be, and demonstrating how each view fails to satisfy at least one of these constraints. I then propose and defend my own account of motivating reasons, which I call the Guise of Normative Reasons Account. On the account I defend, motivating reasons are propositions. A proposition is the reason for which someone Ф‐s when (a) she represents that proposition as a normative reason to Ф, and (b) her representation explains, in the right way, her Ф‐ing. As I argue, the Guise of Normative Reasons Account satisfies all three constraints on what motivating reasons must be, and weathers several objections that might be leveled against propositionalist views.     

Respect for other selves

Philosophers have mostly advocated that advance directives should bear the same authority, with regard to refusal of life-extending treatment, as a patient's contemporaneous consent or refusal. Such authors typically support this position through a theory of persistent personal identity. I agree that the loss of mental competence does not render someone a moral stranger to their prior goal but argue that equating advance direction with consent is to ignore the capacity of nonpersons to attribute and withhold moral value. A distinction should be drawn between advance directives that seek to pursue deeply held goals and those that express contempt for the mentally incompetent.     

Basic desert of reactive emotions

In this paper, I explore the idea that someone can deserve resentment or other reactive emotions for what she does by attention to three psychological functions of such emotions – appraisal, communication, and sanction – that I argue ground claims of their desert. I argue that attention to these functions helps to elucidate the moral aims of reactive emotions and to distinguish the distinct claims of desert, as opposed to other moral considerations.     

Autonomy and false beliefs

The majority of current attention on the question of autonomy has focused on the internal reflection of the agent. The quality of an agent’s reflection on her potential action (or motivating desire or value) is taken to determine whether or not that action is autonomous. In this paper, I argue that there is something missing in most of these contemporary accounts of autonomy. By focusing overwhelmingly on the way in which the agent reflects, such accounts overlook the importance of what the agent is reflecting upon. Whichever of these current formulations of autonomy we accept, reflection could be undertaken in full accordance with the conditions set, and yet the action fail to be autonomous. This will occur, I argue, if the agent is mistaken about the object of her reflection. More precisely, if she has a particular kind of false belief about the action she is contemplating undertaking, then no amount of reflection can render that action autonomous. This suggests the need for externalist conditions to be incorporated into an account of autonomy.     

The Descent of Shame1

Shame is a painful emotion concerned with failure to live up to certain standards, norms, or ideals. The subject feels that she falls in the regard of others; she feels watched and exposed. As a result, she feels bad about the person that she is. The most popular view of shame is that someone only feels ashamed if she fails to live up to standards, norms, or ideals that she, herself, accepts. In this paper, I provide support for a different view, according to which shame is about failure to live up to public expectations. Such a view of shame has difficulties explaining why an audience is central to shame, why shame concerns the self as a whole, and why the social rank of someone affects their ability to shame others. These features, I argue, are best explained by reference to the descent of shame in the emotion connected with submission in nonhuman animals. The function of submission—to appease relevant social others—also throws light on the sort of emotion that shame is. From the point of view of other people, a subject who experiences shame at her own failing is someone who is committed to living together with others in a socially sanctioned way. The argument is not that we must understand the nature of shame in terms of what it evolved for, but that its heritage is important to understanding the emotion that shame has become.     

Counterfactual discrimination

In counterfactual cases of discrimination, an agent would have treated someone worse had circumstances been different such that instead of being a member of her actual group, she was a member of some other group. The case for considering such cases to be genuine cases of discrimination is bolstered by the fact that we are inclined to say that cases where an agent would have treated someone better had she been a member of another group are discriminatory. But I argue that the cases are relevantly different: in one kind of case, but not the other, a person is harmed. I then consider and reject a number of objections to this suggestion.     

The Sexual Harassment Coercive Offer

There is disagreement in the coercion literature over whether an offer, which necessarily lacks a threat, could be coercive, which tends to imply at least some affinity with coercion, which, in paradigm cases, includes a threat. In one difficult sexual harassment case, someone is offered a promotion in exchange for sex, but there is, due to the arrangement of the case, no implied threat or repercussion for refusal. I argue this case counts as coercive since the offer‐making attempts to recast the agent's self‐image simply by making the offer: the harasser attempts to define his employee as a sexualized object in the workplace to whom it is acceptable to make this kind of offer. Yet, such an offer can only be acceptably made to a woman who would accept sexual intrusions in her career, and it can never be right to assume others are willing to have their business lives sexualized. Thus, the offer is coercive in its disrespect for the employee's autonomy, although it involves no threat.     

On the Existence of Duties to the Self (and Their Significance for Moral Philosophy)

Contemporary philosophers generally ignore the topic of duties to the self. I contend that they are mistaken to do so. The question of whether there are such duties, I argue, is of genuine significance when constructing theories of practical reasoning and moral psychology. In this essay, I show that much of the potential importance of duties to the self stems from what has been called the “second‐personal” character of moral duties—the fact that the performance of a duty is “owed to” someone. But this is problematic, as there is reason to doubt whether a person can genuinely owe to herself the performance of an action. Responding to this worry, I show that temporal divisions within an agent's life enable her to relate to herself second‐personally, in the way required by morality. The upshots, I argue, are that we need an intra‐personal theory of justice that specifies the extent of a person's authority over herself, and that we need to rethink our theories of moral emotions in order to specify how an individual ought to respond to attacks on her interests and autonomy that she herself perpetrates.     

The commitment in feeling absolutely safe

The experience of feeling safe even in the midst of trials and temptations seems to be a central feature of the Christian faith. In this article I will try to solve some possible difficulties in understanding this kind of absolute safety by discussing some problems noted by philosophers in connection with the related statements by Socrates that a good man cannot be harmed, and by Wittgenstein that he sometimes feels absolutely safe, that nothing can injure him whatever happens. First, I will investigate whether there is an invalid prediction implied in this feeling of absolute safety: how can someone know that nothing will hurt him or her? Second, I will examine whether this experience of complete safety is dependent upon impossible requirements, such as to be a good man or an impeccable Christian. Third, I will consider the character of the people who claim absolute safety as portrayed by different philosophers: do these people really need to be so cold and inhumanly detached from the world for them to be able to say that nothing can hurt them? I will argue that if, instead of asking how someone can claim absolute safety, we ask to what someone commits him- or her-self in making this claim, these difficulties disappear.