How is the validity of our consent, and others’ moral permission to act on our consent affected by coercion? Everyone agrees that in cases of two-party coercion—when X coerces Y to do something with or for X—the consent of the coerced is invalid, and the coercer is not permitted to act upon the consent they receive. But coercers and the recipients of consent are not always identical. Sometimes a victim, Y, agrees to do something to, with, or for Z because (...) they are being coerced by X. Recently, several philosophers have argued that consent under third-party coercion can be fully valid. We argue that this view has troubling implications. We develop a novel view of consent in third-party coercion cases, which we call the partial validity account. The core idea is that, under severe coercion, Y’s consent is at most partially valid—it reduces the strength of, but does not completely dissolve, Z’s consent-sensitive duties. We argue that the partial validity account gets the right results in important cases and explains the moral factors at play better than alternative accounts. (shrink)

This paper focuses on consent and third-party coercion, viz. cases in which a person consents to another person performing a certain act because a third party coerced her into doing so. I argue that, in these cases, the validity of consent depends on the behavior of the recipient of consent rather than the third party’s coercion taken separately, and I will specify the conditions under which consent is invalid. My view, which is a novel version of what I call a (...) Recipient-Focus-View, holds that coercion invalidates consent only if consent was ‘obtained by’ coercion, but not if consent was ‘merely motivated by’ coercion. I explain and support my view on the basis that it best reconciles an unnoticed tension between two fundamental principles in the debate on consent and that it can deal with cases that undermine other Recipient-Focus-Views. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 103, Issue 2, Page 441-461, September 2021.

This paper argues for a theory of natural rights on which they are explained in terms of reasons supplied by rational consent. When B has a claim-right against A that A φ, A’s non-consent is not a reason for B not to simply make A φ. This theory solves a puzzle that defeats alternative views, including standard will and interest theories, the demand theory of rights, and the view that rights are irreducible or primitive.

Standard accounts of what makes exploitation wrong ground its wrong in distributive unfairness: when A exploits B he wrongs her by taking a greater share of the benefits from their interaction than he ought. I argue that this standard account does not succeed; distributive unfairness is neither the sole, nor the primary wrong of exploitation. I assume that distributive unfairness is pro tanto wrong. However, I argue that in situations where transactors’ consent to a transaction is morally valid, it is (...) also morally transformative and overrides distributive unfairness’s pro tanto wrong. Thus, wrongful exploitation requires morally invalid consent. (shrink)