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The Deliberative Duty and Other Individual Antidiscrimination Duties in the Dating Sphere

  • Simone Sommer Degn ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: September 22, 2023

Abstract

What does morality require of individuals in their dating and sex life? In this article I challenge recent outlines of antidiscrimination duties in the dating sphere and present a plausible alternative: the deliberative duty. This duty avoids the risks and limitations of earlier outlines: it is time-sensitive regarding the malleability of intimate preferences, it avoids being too demanding on the duty-bearer and minimizes the risk of generating mere dutiful attraction behavior towards right-holders. In addition, it is better suited for universal action guidance in the dating sphere than earlier outlines of individual antidiscrimination duties.


Corresponding author: Simone Sommer Degn, Centre for the Experimental-Philosophical Study of Discrimination (CEPDISC), Department of Political Science, Aarhus BSS Aarhus University, Bartholins Allé 7, Building 1340, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Aarhus, Denmark, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to my colleagues at the Centre for the Experimental-Philosophical Study of Discrimination (CEPDISC), Department of Political Science, Aarhus BSS, Aarhus University, DK, and for my colleagues at the Political Theory section for discussing this idea with me at several stages. I am indebted to Søren Flinch Midtgaard, my supervisor Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen and Michael Brownstein for providing very useful comments and suggestions. Special gratitude is also owed to Jonas Franzen whose input was very insightful. Not least, I want to thank the two anonymous reviewers who carefully engaged with the paper’s arguments and challenged me on several points, which helped improve the paper. Last, I presented this idea at the international CEPDISC conference, and I am appreciative of the many useful comments I received.

  1. Research funding: This work was funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF144).

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Received: 2023-02-11
Accepted: 2023-08-08
Published Online: 2023-09-22
Published in Print: 2024-10-28

© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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