Sex education
AND THE ETHICS OF CONSENT
b y D R . J O S E P H S H AW
This talk was given in Walsingham on 7 December 2019 at a pilgrimage in defence of primary educators.
O
nce upon a time, there was doctrine in the English law that while the legal character of some actions would be completely changed by the victim’s consent, this was not so with others. Thus, if Adam took away the property of Beatrice, this was theft if Beatrice did not consent, but not theft if Beatrice did consent. On the other hand, if Adam caused Beatrice actual bodily harm, or killed her, it made no difference if Beatrice consented. Adam could wave any kind of signed or sworn declaration by Beatrice, that she wanted him to do what he had done, in front of judge and jury, and they would find him guilty all the same. Many people will tell us that today we live in a more fortunate age. If Bea is tired of life, or wants to experience being harmed, we are well on our way to her consent being alone enough to make that legally, and indeed morally, permissible. The fast-moving world of bioethics has already gone beyond this rather simple idea. Now patients can be killed without their consent as well as with it, and doctors are increasingly obliged to harm their patients, if the patient should demand it: first in the case of abortion, but soon in that of gender dysphoria, with bodily-integrity disorder, when people want healthy limbs amputated, a little further down the road. Once you get rid of the traditional prohibition on killing in cases where the victim consents, why, after all, stop there? Why not move on to cases where the victim does not consent to be killed, but where duly authorised people think that it would be a good thing to kill him regardless? This is the direction in which the legal and medical establishment is inclined to go, under the influence of utilitarianism: the theory that we are obliged to bring about the best possible
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outcome. For them, the ultimate goal is bringing about good outcomes, not personal autonomy. The good outcomes are themselves measured in utilitarian terms, which means in terms of satisfying as many preferences as possible. The educational establishment, on the other hand, seems content to rest at the intermediate stage of conceptual development: that consent is the key, and consent must be mutual, be outcomes good, bad, or indifferent. This attitude is very much on display from social workers in the now numerous reports of public inquiries into child sex abuse rings. The pattern is that they acknowledge that child victims of abuse were making terrible choices, but this fact didn’t warrant intervention. On the contrary, they saw it as their job to prevent parents from intervening. Consent is everything, outcomes can go hang. In this presentation I want to explore the way consent is being used here: where it comes from, what it implies, and how it interacts with other aspects of morality, both traditional and progressive, and how it works in practice. CONSENT AND MORAL SCEPTICISM The first question is where the idea comes from. As I have already indicated, the appeal to consent is a substitute for the prohibitions of traditional morality and law: not to kill, for example, or to restrict sex to marriage. Such prohibitions have long been attacked for restricting our freedom. Before the end of the 18th century William Blake imagined the Garden of Love
CAL X M A R IA E
