Sexual Consent and Having Sex Together

Some influential theorists have recently argued that if sex is in some sense ideal, then each partner’s consent is unnecessary: even absent each partner’s consent, neither partner infringes the other’s moral rights. I challenge a key premise in their argument for this alarming conclusion. I instead defend the Common-sense View: if you have sex with someone without their consent, you thereby infringe that person’s moral rights. In the course of defending the Common-sense View, I develop what I call the Hybrid Account of Consent. The Hybrid Account retains the benefits of two existing accounts of consent while avoiding their shortcomings. I close by suggesting some benefits of my alternative picture and some implications for law reform.

“Crusade for Justice”

Notebook 2 reframes Ida B Wells as a thinker of the multitude. In her unfinished autobiography Crusade for Justice, Wells sets aside her image as the maverick opposing lynching singlehandedly. Her autobiography grounds her intellectual and activist legacy in galvanizing collective opposition to racism, sexual violence, and class exploitation, with lynching serving as the microcosm of these horrors across the South and a newly imperial United States. This chapter reinterprets Wells’s canonical pamphlets from the 1890s and 1900s through her autobiography’s viewpoint. This notebook also challenges today’s common-sense view that racism is the by-product of “one bad apple” who can be converted to a less racist view by their victims. Lynching involves a collective reinforcing its superiority through informal and formal institutional channels. Only another collective force can counter it. Wells does not find that agency in “the people”—those who are already recognized as having rights—but in the multitude, that complicated mass at once empowering and destabilizing the State. Finally, this chapter challenges leftist romanticizations of the multitude by showing how it can express itself in mass acts of disinformation and terror and the collective pursuit of truth and justice, when guilt and fear are overcome.

What are these Familiar Words Doing Here?

This essay is concerned with six linguistic moves that we commonly make, each of which is considered in turn. These are: stating rules of representation; representing things categorically; mentioning expressions; saying truly or falsely how things are; saying vaguely how things are; and stating rules of rules of representation. A common-sense view is defended of what is involved in our doing each of these six things against a much more sceptical view emanating from the idea that linguistic behaviour is fundamentally messy. Both the fifth move and the sixth move involve vague concepts, and much of the essay is concerned with developing an approach to various problems and puzzles that attach to such concepts, most notably the sorites paradoxes.

Why Direct Realism?

As the common sense view of perception, Direct Realism rightly stands in a privileged position in relation to rival perceptual theories, Idealism and Indirect Realism. For most thinkers, rejecting Direct Realism would require extensive and unwelcome revisions to many other views. Furthermore, Indirect Realism and Idealism fall short of accomplishing their oft-assigned task of solving the Problem of Illusion.

What Moral Character is and is Not

Louise Mitchell discusses character in “Integrity and virtue: The forming of good character” ( The Linacre Quarterly 82, no. 2: 149–169). I argue that she is mistaken in identifying character as a potency and that it is rather the sum of one's moral habits and dispositions. I establish this by showing that if one correctly applies the division Aristotle presents in the text that Mitchell relies on, it follows that character belongs in the category of habit. I further support this conclusion by considering how people commonly speak of moral character. I then show that the text from the Summa Theologiae Mitchell relies on concerns sacramental character and not moral character; moreover, if we apply the reasoning contained there to moral character, we are again led to see that it should be categorized as a habit. Lastly, I explain that a human being's potency for character lies in the soul's rational powers. Summary I defend the common-sense view that moral character is the sum of one's moral habits and dispositions in response to Louise Mitchell who maintains that moral character is a potency. I do so by applying Aristotle's threefold division of things that exist in the soul—namely, potency, habit, and emotion—and also by examining how Aristotle speaks about character and how the average person speaks about character. In addition, I show why humans are the only animals that have the potential to develop character, and how this potential lies in the rational faculties of our soul.

Occam’s Razor, Dogmatism, Skepticism, and Skeptical Dogmatism

Underdetermination arguments for skepticism maintain that our common sense view of the external world is no better, evidentially speaking, than some skeptical competitors. An important and well-known response by dogmatists, those who believe our commonsense view is justified, appeals to abduction or inference to the best explanation. The predominant version of this strategy, going back at least to Locke, invokes Occam’s razor: dogmatists claim the common sense view is simpler than any of its skeptical alternatives and so has more to recommend it, evidentially speaking. This dispute has overshadowed another possible view: skeptical dogmatism. Skeptical dogmatists hold that we are justified in believing that the common sense view is probably false. I argue that skeptical dogmatism presents some interesting complications to the dialectic between the dogmatist and the skeptic. On the one hand, even if the dogmatist’s use of Occam’s razor is sufficient to rebut skepticism, in itself it is not sufficient to refute skeptical dogmatism. On the other hand, skeptics themselves, ironically, must, given the assumptions of the paper, appeal to something like Occam’s razor in order to avoid capitulating to skeptical dogmatism.