Putting Consent Back in Its Place, or the Double Social Meaning of Sex

Contemporary analytic philosophy treats consent as the master concept of sexual ethics. This paper challenges that centrality on four fronts. First, consent-as-permission fails to capture the full range of sexual violations; the organizing 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.