Contemporary analytic philosophy treats consent as the master concept of sexual ethics. This paper challenges that centrality on three fronts. First, consent-as-permission fails to capture the full range of sexual violations; the organising moral problem is domination, not autonomy-infringement. Second, rape law should be structured around perpetrator conduct and culpability, not the victim’s consent-status. Third, good sex is not merely permissible sex: its proper norm is consensus rather than permission. Finally, contemporary sexual culture sustains two competing regulative ideals—sex as shared agency and sex as dominance—and consent-talk obscures this conflict rather than resolving it.
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Manon Garcia is Professor of practical philosophy at Goethe University in Frankfurt (Germany). A former student of the École Normale Supérieure, she received a PhD from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She held positions at Chicago, at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and at Yale, before moving to Freie University in Berlin. She specializes in feminist philosophy, sexual ethics, and the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir. She is the author of several articles as well as three books: We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women’s Lives (2021), The Joy of Consent: A Philosophy of Good Sex (2023), and Living with Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial (2025).
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