Is It Love Or Does He Just Pay The Rent? Consent and the Problem of Adaptive Preferences

Sometimes people consent to sex, but we still don’t think it’s entirely ethical. For example, when economic pressures induce someone to consent, they can find themselves trapped in undesirable situations. This raises a problem for sexual ethics. In cases like these, it’s not clear whether everyone is really consenting and, if we think they are, it’s also not clear if that is enough for ethical sex. Imagine this case:

Sophia and Lewis are dating and live together in a San Francisco apartment. Sophia works at a non-profit where the pay is measly, but she finds the work fulfilling. Lewis works for a tech firm and provides the vast majority of their money. Sophia doesn’t particularly like Lewis and finds sex with him unpleasant, but she consents to it because she can’t afford to break up with him. If Sophia wasn’t dating Lewis, she couldn’t afford to live in San Francisco at all and would have to leave her non-profit.

This case is interesting for a few reasons. It seems like there is something ethically problematic going on, despite the fact that Sophia is uncoerced, informed and voluntarily consenting. She isn’t forced to have sex but if she didn’t, she would have to sacrifice things values deeply. She might even genuinely believe that everything is okay but, if she had better options available, she would likely view the situation differently. In light of cases of consent produced by structural economic dependency, Linda Martin Alcoff argues we need to move beyond consent as a framework for thinking about sexual ethics, instead focus on how to expand the range of people’s capacities to build the sort of sexual identities they want.

                I think her critique of consent is too quick. There’s two ways of explaining what’s wrong in Sophia’s case. You could say the problem is the sex. It’s ethically problematic and consent just isn’t helping us determine what’s good sex and what’s bad. I don’t think it’s helpful to read the case in this way. Introducing a category of morally-problematic-but-still-consensual-sex doesn’t help us determine responsibility, blame or devise solutions. My intuition says Lewis hasn’t done anything wrong* and shouldn’t be punished, legally or socially. After all, Sophia is telling him that she consents. A useful notion of consent should help people navigate interpersonal situations such that Lewis could conceivably use it to figure out if he is doing anything wrong.

The second approach is to say the problem is the fact that Sophia has a limited range of options in the first place. The sex isn’t problematic because it is consensual**, but the situation is problematic. The advantage of this reading is that it puts the emphasis, not what Lewis does to Sophia, but on the economic situation. Consent induced by economic dependency is a justice question, not an ethics question. The solution is to change the institutional arrangement such that Sophia has a healthy range of options and it should involve government policy to address wages and housing prices.

                There’s a parallel in political theory known as the problem of adaptive preferences. Feminists and Marxists have long argued that oppression can cause oppressed people to adjust their preferences to accept their situation. Martha Nussbaum points to this problem to argue that, even when people say they are fine with some unfortunate situation, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do anything to fix it. If people were provided the economic and social institutions that expanded the range of their options, then their true preference would be revealed. That’s the kind of analysis I prefer because it helps us keep the political and interpersonal question separate. While Alcoff also defends the view that we should expand the range of capacities for people to pursue the sexual lives they desire, her critical remarks about consent make it unclear how we should navigate interpersonal situations.

 Daniel Saunders

*We can easily imagine a slightly different case in which Lewis is doing wrong, by adding that he is working behind the scenes to make Monica financially dependent on him. That’s morally problematic but for different reasons then sexual ethics.

**there are cases of consent induced by economic dependency involving abusive partnerships where the sex is problematic. But the consent model still works because the abuse creates coercion and consensual sex must be uncoerced.