Do We Have To Respect Discriminatory Sexual Preferences?

To engage in consensual sex seems to require mutual respect for one another’s capacity to make choices about our lives, including choices about the types of people we sleep with. That much seems intuitive. Unfortunately, that principle seems to imply that we also have to respect people’s discriminatory sexual preferences. And that can create moral dilemmas. Consider this case taken, with some modifications, from the philosophers Hugh Lazenby and Iason Gabriel:

Joseph is a mixed-race man living in the United States in 1900. He passes and presents himself as white. He starts dating Harriet. She mentions that she would never sleep with a black man, even one who passed. Joseph doesn’t want to tell Harriet about his racial background, out of fear of backlash from her and the community. Is Joseph obliged to tell Harriet the truth about his identity?

If mutual respect requires Joseph to respect all of Harriet’s preferences, no matter how backward they are, then the answer is clearly yes. But Lazenby and Gabriel think that Joseph’s racial identity is protected by his right to privacy. After all, divulging his secret would likely end his career and cause social isolation, which they think are considerations that trump Harriet’s right to know. Their paper argues that our duties to disclose information relevant to sex have to be balanced against our privacy rights.

I agree with their conclusion. Joseph can keep his identity a secret. But Lazenby and Gabriel’s arguments seem like an unprincipled way to get there. Privacy cannot be a matter of protecting what is merely inconvenient to disclose. Instead, I want to offer a different way of getting to that conclusion, one that puts constrains on what counts as a valid deal breaker.

The philosopher Kate Manne observes that the appropriate way to deal with other people can vary greatly depending on their rational capabilities at the time. Normally, it’s wrong to trick people to do what we want. Instead, we should offer them reasons. But if your friend is drunk and trying to drive home, then it’s okay to hide their keys or lock them in the bathroom. We don’t have to respect our drunk friend’s poorly formed preferences.

But alcohol isn’t the only thing that can degrade one’s rationality. Growing up in a racist society can to. Systematic oppression interferes with people’s ability to see what would otherwise be obviously true – like that fact that black people deserve to be treated with humanity. If racism hadn’t interfered with Harriet’s reasoning, she wouldn’t be opposed to sleeping with black people. Moreover, oppressors in that society may be immune to persuasion in many circumstances. If Joseph tried to explain why Harriet’s preferences were irrational, Harriet may dismiss them outright. After all, she thinks black people are deceptive and immoral. So, reasoning with Harriet may be off the table.

If we don’t have to respect the irrational preferences of our drunk friends, then I don’t think we have to respect irrational preferences molded by systematic oppression either. It’s not, as Lazenby and Gabriel think, that Joseph’s privacy interest outweighs Harriet’s disclosure interest. It’s that Harriet doesn’t have a genuine preference in the first place, at least not one that should constrain Joseph’s behavior.

Of course, this doesn’t mean people have a broad right to sexually manipulate racists for any reason. But it does mean that deception is sometimes permissible to hide information relevant to malformed, discriminatory sexual preferences.

This is a more useful analysis because it means there can be substantive constrains on what counts as a sexual deal breaker. At a minimal, our preferences must respect the other person status as a rational agent. Otherwise, we risk undermining the mutual respect for decision making that anchors sexual consent in the first place.

-Daniel Saunders