Dr. Hallie Liberto Presents on Coercion and Consent

On Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2018, Professor Hallie Liberto, visiting from the University of Maryland College Park, gave a lecture regarding Coercion and Consent. Professor Liberto has a Ph.D. from the University of Madison Wisconsin, and her main research topics are sexual ethics and promises.  Dr Liberto presented her audience with quite stimulating information about permissive consent and how it is rendered, and that it must be “morally transformative” to actually count as consent.

First, Dr. Liberto discussed exactly what permissive consent is. Permissive consent is the actual, real definition of consent, while not having been coerced, threatened, or pressured in any way to do something that you might not want to do. Dr. Liberto also spent a great time speaking about what many situations in which consent might be necessary. One example she used was being mugged or robbed. When getting mugged and threatened, if you give the thief your wallet, you aren’t really consenting to them having your wallet and all its belongings; you’re doing it because they are presenting you with a major harm.

After that, Dr. Liberto discussed even more types of consent-based situations, including two types of third-party coercers, morally impermissible harms, and mechanism substitutions. She also talked about something called deliberative significance, which is how much a threat has to matter in order to give consent to the requested act. For example, if someone told you to have sex with them or else they would pinch you, you would suffer the pinch because it’s not that big of a threat. However, if someone threatens to beat you up or have sec with them, you might be more inclined to have sex with them because being beat up is a more harmful threat.

After the lecture was finished, there was a five-minute break, followed by a discussion between the audience and Dr. Liberto, during which she asked questions that the audience wanted to ask about rape, consent, and the contexts in which consent should and should not be, could and could not be necessary. In short, the lecture put forth by Dr Liberto was both intellectually stimulating and morally enlightening.