Communications in Humanities Research
- The Open Access Proceedings Series for Conferences
Communications in Humanities Research
Vol. 6, 14 September 2023
Open
Access | Article
Dark Desires and Consent: A Response to Morgan
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
In the paper Dark Desires, Seiriol Morgan aims to argue against the claim that “universal participant consent is sufficient for the moral permissibility of a sexual act” which is largely accepted in contemporary western philosophy. This article examines Morgan's argument against such a claim and improves Morgan's two illustrative cases to better support his claim. It starts by clarifying the meanings of the terms "moral permissibility", "dark desires", and "consent" to make Morgan's argument easier to tackle with. Then, the strong and weak versions of Morgan's claim will be distinguished, and their plausibility will be examined. Finally, it concludes that (i) only the weak version succeeds, and (ii) Morgan succeeds in showing consent to be insufficient for the moral permissibility of any sexual act.
Keywords
moral impermissibility, consent, dark desires
References
1. Morgan, S. (2003). Dark desires. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 6(4), 377-410.
2. Lemieux, R. (1980). Valmont, libertin amoureux ou homme à projet?. Romance Notes, 20(3), 349-354.
3. De Laclos, P. C. (2012). Les liaisons dangereuses. Routledge.
4. Mill, J. S. (2016). Utilitarianism. In Seven masterpieces of philosophy (pp. 337-383). Routledge.
5. Moran, K. (2014). Delusions of virtue: Kant on self-conceit. Kantian Review, 19(3), 419-447.
6. Russell, F. (2020). Kantian Self-Conceit and the Two Guises of Authority. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 50(2), 268-283.
7. Wertheimer, A. (2003). Consent to sexual relations. Cambridge University Press.
8. Dougherty, T. (2013). Sex, lies, and consent. Ethics, 123(4), 717-744.
9. Miller, S.(2022). BDSM. Raja Halwani, Jacob M. Held, Natasha McKeever & Alan Soble (eds.), The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings, 8th edition. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.
10. Fifty Shades of Grey. (2015). [Film] Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson. United Kingdom: Universal Pictures.
11. Dunkley, C. R., & Brotto, L. A. (2020). The role of consent in the context of BDSM. Sexual Abuse, 32(6), 657-678.
Data Availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Authors who publish this series agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the series right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this series.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the series's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this series.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See Open Access Instruction).
- Volume Title
- Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Psychology and Humanity Studies
- ISBN (Print)
- 978-1-83558-005-9
- ISBN (Online)
- 978-1-83558-006-6
- Published Date
- 14 September 2023
- Series
- Communications in Humanities Research
- ISSN (Print)
- 2753-7064
- ISSN (Online)
- 2753-7072
- DOI
- 10.54254/2753-7064/6/20230029
- Copyright
- 14 September 2023
- Open Access
- This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited