by Claude Opus 5.5
Can someone be wronged by a sexual encounter they consented to, for example through exploitation of vulnerability? Is “sexual exploitation” a distinct wrong from assault?
Much of the ethics of sex is organised around a single line: consent. On one side, permissible activity; on the other, assault. This framework has great strengths. It is clear, it centres the person whose body is involved, and it identifies the most serious wrong. But it can suggest that anything on the permitted side of the line is morally unproblematic. That is plainly false. People can be treated badly in sexual encounters they validly agreed to, and campus codes, including the one under which one respondent in the case behind these seminars was found responsible for “attempted sexual exploitation”, recognise wrongs that are not assault.
Wrongs within consent
Consider some familiar cases. A person consents to sex with someone who has lied about being single. A person consents because she is lonely and grieving, and the other person knows this and takes advantage of it. A person consents to sex but not to being filmed, and is filmed. A person consents to sex with one person, not knowing that others are watching.
These cases differ. In the first, consent may be vitiated by deception, depending on how central the deception is; philosophers disagree about which lies defeat consent. In the second, consent is probably valid, but the other person has taken unfair advantage of a vulnerability. In the third and fourth, consent to sex is valid but there is no consent to something else that happens alongside it: recording, sharing, observation.
What these cases show is that consent to sexual activity does not settle every moral question about the encounter. Valid consent removes one specific wrong, the wrong of using someone’s body without permission. It does not remove the wrongs of deceiving, manipulating, exploiting, humiliating or exposing someone.
What is exploitation?
Alan Wertheimer, in his work on exploitation, defines it roughly as taking unfair advantage of another person. Crucially, he argues that exploitation can be consensual and even mutually beneficial. A business that pays desperate workers a pittance exploits them, even though they agree to the terms and are better off than they would be without the job. The wrong lies not in the absence of consent but in the unfairness of the terms and the use of the other person’s vulnerability to secure them.
Applied to sex, this suggests that someone can be exploited when another person uses her vulnerability, whether intoxication, emotional distress, dependency or inexperience, to obtain sexual access on terms she would not accept if she were not vulnerable. Her consent may be valid in the sense that she had capacity and was not coerced. But the encounter can still wrong her, because she was used.
How campus codes define sexual exploitation
University codes usually use “sexual exploitation” in a narrower and more concrete sense. Typical definitions include recording someone in a state of undress or during sexual activity without consent, sharing such images, allowing others to watch without consent, voyeurism, and taking non-consensual sexual advantage of another person for one’s own benefit or the benefit of others. These provisions recognise that some of the most damaging conduct in sexual situations concerns not the act itself but what is done with it: exposure, distribution, spectatorship.
This matters in the setting behind these seminars, where a group chat with dozens of members reportedly received messages and a photo during the night. Whatever the facts, the kind of conduct that exploitation provisions cover is exactly the kind that group chats make easy. A photo shared with fifty people can wrong someone independently of anything else that happened, and can continue to wrong her as long as it circulates.
Is exploitation a distinct wrong from assault?
There are good reasons to treat it as distinct. First, it can occur without assault: recording a consensual encounter without permission exploits without assaulting. Second, it can occur alongside assault and add to it: sharing images of an assault compounds the original wrong with a further one. Third, its wrongness has a different structure. Assault wrongs by violating bodily autonomy. Exploitation wrongs by using someone, by treating her as a means to another’s ends, whether profit, status, entertainment or the approval of a group.
That last point connects to a Kantian idea. Kant’s formula of humanity forbids treating persons merely as means. Consent normally ensures that people are not treated merely as means, because they share in the end being pursued. But consent does not guarantee this. Someone who agrees to sex while another person is privately treating the encounter as material for an audience is being used in a way she has not agreed to and would not agree to.
Should exploitation be punished as severely?
Not necessarily. Some forms of exploitation, like distributing intimate images, can be extraordinarily harmful and are now criminal offences in many places. Others, like taking advantage of someone’s loneliness, are serious moral wrongs but not plausible candidates for legal or disciplinary sanction. The point of recognising exploitation as a distinct wrong is not to equate it with assault but to make visible a range of conduct that the consent framework, taken alone, leaves out.
Questions for discussion
Two questions are worth pressing in a seminar. First, what makes exploitation of a vulnerability wrong if the person still benefits or would choose the same thing again? Second, how much of the harm of sexual exploitation in the age of group chats is new, and how much is an old wrong, being made a spectacle of, given new reach? The answers say a good deal about what we think sex is for and what we owe one another within it.