Philosophy 290-2

This seminar is based on the topics of my manuscript Regulation of Intimacy: the Politics of Sex. There are three broad areas: consent, the justice of family and marriage, and sex-work. The first half of the semester will be focused on issues surrounding the first area: consent to sex; consent and justification; consent and rights; consent vs consensual; consent as a social institution. For the second area, we’ll revisit Rawls’s question, ‘Is the family to be abolished then?’, and we’ll relate Rawls’s original discussion to Scanlon’s more recent discussion of inequality of opportunity. We’ll explore arguments for and against marriage by the state. For the third area we’ll ask what, if anything, is wrong with sex-work, and scrutinize notions of objectification and commodification, as well as social shaming attitudes which attach to sex-work. We’ll also be joined in the first half of semester by David Enoch, Professor of the Philosophy of Law, University of Oxford, and the University of Jerusalem who’ll talk to us about consent and third-party coercion.