How can anybody say it's informed consent when the spouse doesn't know?
I'm curious about this moral dilemma. A married person is having an affair. Their spouse doesn't know, and they continue having sex with their spouse. In this situation, is their spouse's consent (to the sexual act) informed consent?
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I've been wondering the same thing myself. It is a slightly complex issue because "informed" doesn't mean informed about everything. But hard to think that anybody in this situation would suppose their spouse wouldn't consider the information relevant to their consent!
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The presumption is that if the spouse knew of the affair they would withdraw their consent.
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Exactly. And that's something the person having the affair can reasonably to be supposed to know. (As opposed to say knowing that their spouse doesn't want to have sex with anybody who once war purple socks.)
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I would say 'not informed consent' but I'm not sure whether it is or is not rape, so went with the last option. I don't think the cheating spouse could claim that they honestly believed their spouse consented if they knew they were not in possession of relevant facts.
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It’s arguable whether informed consent in the total capacity used here can ever be achieved. I’m willing to be most people aren’t going to tell their SO about that nasty person they banged at the bar one night.
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I agree. But if they don't tell their SO, & it's something they know their SO would consider relevant in terms of their consent to sex - in other words, given the information, they'd probably say no - then at the very least it leaves further sex on a dodgy moral ground.
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Agreed but I can guarantee most people have engaged in something that their SO would consider significant historically and not told them. Taking randoms home from a bar, that one real nasty girl you had sex with while drunk, etc.
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I don't understand the questiin tbh. Informed consent is usually a term for medical procedures. To use it in a sexual context I would stretch it to mean a duty to inform regarding any physical consequences eg stds, not lying about birth control.
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I'd like to have seen an option saying "Whatever the case, it is definitely not rape."
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The question is problematic: by definition it's not "informed"; is "being informed" a requirement to avoid a technical definition of rape? The common sense response is, I suppose, option 2. But in, say, the HIV epidemic of the 1980s, I think the answer might be different.
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Well, 25% of people seem to think it is informed - though that is a bit baffling! I'm inclined towards the fourth option.
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Well, if (as our degrees suggest) we are philosophers, that's one approach. In fact, that's an interesting question about philosophy and what it does. In my view, it's a process of searching, ever more nit-pickingly, for the answer to the question: what do we mean by?
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It can't be *informed* consent, since they're not informed that their spouse is sleeping with someone else (unless they have an agreement to allow their spouse to have secret affairs).
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