The Ethics of Communicating Consent

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Consent can mark a line to separate sex from rape, and medical surgery from battery. Yet this line risks becoming blurred. Can we communicate sexual consent through actions? If so, which actions can communicate consent? Which cultural beliefs must we share to manage this? What does this imply for the design of rape law or sexual education policy? How closely must a physician follow the letter of what a patient says, if the physician reasonably interprets the patient as failing to express herself with the words she uses? What does this imply for health policy regulating informed consent?These are examples of the practical questions that my research will address. Most researchers now agree that consent has to be communicated in one form or another. This means we now have to answer ethical questions about communicating consent. I will ask how literally we must interpret someone's consent, and how much we can read between the lines of what someone says. I will ask whether it is possible to implicitly communicate consent, and if so, how we do so. I will investigate the ethical importance for consent of the context in which a conversation takes place. I will ask how our understanding influences our ability to communicate consent. I will not just examine the linguistic side of these issues, but also explore the ethical considerations involved. I will use the results of my research to draw conclusions for policy.Research into these questions is important. In liberal democracies we need to understand the ethics of consent, because we agree that each of us should control what happens to his or her body. This makes my research important for framing healthcare policy governing medical consent, research policy governing human subjects, rape law and sexual education policy. This is also a good time to conduct this research. A recent government report found that English teenagers are often confused about sexual consent. Meanwhile, there is currently an international debate about how to define sexual consent in universities' rules. This challenge also faces the undergraduate consent workshops that are increasingly popular in the UK. On the medical side of things, informed consent procedures are in flux in light of a 2015 UK Supreme Court ruling.I will address these questions partly by making use of cutting-edge theories of communication. This will involve looking outside of moral philosophy and drawing new connections with the philosophy of language and linguistics. But it is not enough just to look at the linguistic side of communication. We also need to understand its ethical dimension. So I will also evaluate various ethical rules for consent. Other researchers have used an approach like this to understand the ethics of other forms of speech, like hate speech. But no one has fully explored this approach for consent. So my research will break new ground.By answering these questions, my research will lead to the very first detailed account of the ethics of communicating consent. It will mean we understand much better how we communicate consent to each other, and what the ethical significance of this communication is. This is knowledge that we can use in our everyday lives, and also knowledge that can help our society create the best policies.