You can find great problems with convinced that permission, of most things, is with the capacity of beating strong reasons that are moral sexual penetration, should those reasons occur. Think about the oddness for this trade: “Q: Why did you have intercourse with him? A: Because he consented!” As Wall rightly acknowledges, the work of permission is just permissive or empowering. Consent is a ‘cancelling permission’, not a beating reason, in so it doesn’t offer the reasons in preference of doing an action; it just releases someone to work on particular reasons in preference of that action, often regardless of the extant reasons against it. Footnote 38 ‘Just because an individual consents to penetrative sex’, Wall writes, ‘does perhaps maybe not imply that there was an explanation to take part in penetrative intercourse with that individual.’ Footnote 39 This is certainly quite right, and it also underscores a far more general point about the relevance of permission for justified wrongdoing. [Read more…]