The Cambridge Forum for Legal & Political Philosophy will host a public lecture
tomorrow, Friday, April 29th, at 5:15pm, in Room B16 of the Law Faculty
Building. The lecture, on "Permissible Secrets: Reasonable Disclosure in
Sexual Relations," will be delivered by Dr Hugh Lazenby, who is a Lecturer in
Political Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. Everyone is welcome to
attend.
ABSTRACT OF LECTURE: How honest do we have to be with our sexual partners? Do
we have to tell them everything, including not only our sexual health, but also
our true feelings and the details of our past relationships? If we are allowed
to keep some things to ourselves, what are those things and what distinguishes
them from things that we must disclose? The gravity of these questions becomes
clear when they are connected with the issue of consent. For consent to be
valid, it must be properly informed. If we keep some things to ourselves in
sexual relations, we may be risking the validity of our partners’ consent. But,
then, sex without valid consent is non-consensual sex, and that is seriously
wrong. On many definitions it is rape.
In this article, we provide an account of informed consent that is
connected to what it is reasonable to expect our partners to disclose. This
connection is made through rights. Our rights to information about our partners
correspond to the duties they have to disclose that information to us. Whether
a person’s consent to sex is invalidated by non-disclosure turns upon whether
that person had a right to that information in the first place.
_________________________________
Matthew H. Kramer
Professor of Legal & Political Philosophy, Cambridge University
Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge
Director of Cambridge Forum for Legal & Political Philosophy
Fellow of the British Academy
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