Many believe that the only actions we can consent or not consent to are actions of other people. Particularly, they believe it doesn’t make sense to talk about consenting or not consenting to one’s own actions. I think this view is wrong. It does make sense to talk about a person consenting or not consenting to their own actions and this cannot be reduced purely to the notion of whether the agent voluntarily or involuntarily did the action. I believe that the applicability of consent to one's own actions is deeply interconnected with notion of labor rights.

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Catharine MacKinnon, Tanya Palmer, John Gardner, Jonathan Ichikawa, and others have argued that in ideal cases of sex, the concept of consent is inapplicable and, so, consent is not involved. They think that the concept of consent is applicable only in situations involving some negative feature, and so, in the best of cases, consent isn't applicable because the involved parties are "beyond a state of consent". I believe that these arguments are mistaken. The concept of consent is applicable even in ideal cases; it would just be odd for a speaker to describe the situation as involving consent because such a description is an understatement (but, importantly, the description is applicable and true). Largely, the problem with their arguments stems from a confusion between presuppositions and implicatures. They misidentify situations where the concept of consent is inapliccable and situations where it is pragmatically odd for a speaker to say that the situation involves consent.

The Moral Necessity of Consent

Philosophers such as David Chalmers, Cian Dorr, John Hawthorne, David Lewis, Gideon Rosen, Robert Stalnaker, Peter van Inwagen, Timothy Williamson, and Juhani Yli-Vakkuri, all have endorsed the thesis — call it 'Metaphysicalism' — that metaphysical possibility is the widest “genuine” type of possibility. Metaphysicalism entails that if a situation is not metaphysically possible, it cannot be genuinely possible in any other sense. Perhaps the most important aspect of this thesis is that virtually all defenses of S5 modal logic rely on it. Dorr and Hawthorne's new book, 'The Bounds of Possibility,' includes some of the most compelling arguments for Metaphysicalism and how Metaphysicalism (along with some uncontroversial premises) entails that S5 modal logic is correct. I summarize, clarify, and strengthen Dorr and Hawthorne’s arguments, but I also show that their view requires a controversial premise about which properties are one and the same. I argue against this premise but acknowledge that, if one were to endorse Metaphysicalism, this is the best way to do it. Implications about arguments for S5 modal logic are discussed.

On Absolute Possibility

Identifying propositions with the set of possible worlds at which the proposition is true has the infamously implausible entailment that all necessary true sentences share the same meaning. Several different extensions to this theory have been suggested to avoid this problematic entailment. One of which says that propositions are identical to the set of possible and impossible worlds at which it is true. I am working on a paper that argues that this extension (often called "Impossible World Semantics") still implausibly entails that seemingly non-synonymous sentences express the same proposition. I have presented varying versions of this project at a few conferences, most recently at the Eastern APA in January 2019. This project is low on my current research priorities but I stand by the arguments made in it and I plan to eventually finish this project.

A Granularity Problem for Impossible World Semantics