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.
Abstract: Here I defend the consent model against Garcia’s competing analysis of domination as the organising moral problem of wrongful sex. I do not reject the centrality of dominance to the phenomenon of sexual wrongdoing, but argue that sexual consent, when correctly conceived as being the power that prevents an invasive wrongdoing in the domain of the body, is a concept that is tightly bound to nondomination. In making my defence, I distinguish the culture of dominance manifest in the actions of individuals from the interpersonal wrong of domination – and argue that truly consensual sex is, at least, incompatible with the latter.
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).
