Hi everyone,

UPDATE: Due to restoration work taking place in the Quadrangle, there may be 
some difficulty accessing the Philosophy Seminar Room. The room is still 
accessible. You may just need to persist to find a way in. You may need to ask 
someone in hi-viz for access. Also note the non-standard start time for the 
seminar: 3:00pm.

Today, Friday, the 11th of July, we have a special Anderson Seminar as part of 
the University of Sydney Philosophy Seminar Series. The speaker is Niko Kolodny 
(UC Berkeley). The title of Niko’s talk is “Two Concepts of Consent”. Here is 
the abstract for the talk:

When you consent, in the sense in which I’m interested, to my X-ing—say, my 
performing surgery on you—you make it the case that I no longer owe you a 
“negative” duty not to X.  And when you consent to my not X-ing—say, my not 
aiding you—you make it the case that I no longer owe you a “positive” duty to X.

This phenomenon raises three questions.  First, there is the question of “how 
consent works.” Why does your consenting to my X-ing, or to my not X-ing, make 
it the case that I no longer owe you a negative duty not to X, or a positive 
duty to X?  Second, there is the question of “what consent is.”  What must take 
place for you to have made it the case that I no longer owe you a negative duty 
not to X, or a positive duty to X, because of your consent?  Third, there is 
the question of “what the conditions are.”  What other conditions must be 
satisfied, and why must they be satisfied, in order for it to be the case that 
because you have consented, I do not wrong you by X-ing or by failing to X?  
This paper sketches answers to these three questions.

Negatively, my answers run counter to certain widely held views, which are 
often what is in mind when consent is said to be the exercise of what Joseph 
Raz called a “normative power”.

Positively, I suggest that consent works in two ways.  First, your “vacating” 
consent to my X-ing makes it the case that I no longer owe you a duty not to X 
by making it the case that my X-ing no longer sets back the interest that gave 
rise to the duty.  Second, your “non-vacating” consent to my X-ing makes it the 
case that I no longer owe you a duty to not to X without making it the case 
that my X-ing no longer sets back the interest that underlies the duty, while 
leaving that interest in place.  These two answers to the question of how 
consent works suggest two different accounts of what consent is.  And these two 
answers to the question of how consent works help to specify and explain what 
the conditions are.

The seminar will take place between 3:00pm and 4:30pm, Friday the 11th of July 
in the Philosophy Seminar Room N494 in the Quadrangle.

Any questions about the seminar can be directed to 
ryan....@sydney.edu.au<mailto:ryan....@sydney.edu.au>

Ryan Cox
Associate Lecturer in Philosophy
Discipline of Philosophy
School of Humanities
University of Sydney
ryan....@sydney.edu.au<mailto:ryan....@sydney.edu.au>


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