It is kind of funny and sad in that it took millions of years for humankind to realize that a man should not have sex with a woman unless she consents to it.1 To be honest, most people certainly had some vague notion that it’s preferable when all2 the participants are happy about what’s happening. Still, it was clearly not obvious to everyone: the concept of marital duty, which includes sex as moral duty that spouses owe each other, was definitely a serious hindrance to people’s (but in this case mostly women’s) free sex will.3
Consent is the kind of concept which can feel natural and intuitive nowadays, even though it results from a very modern understanding of our relationship to each other. Until recently it was fairly normal that people would forcefully impose things on each other: rape, war, slavery, colonization, language, religion… And let’s be honest, it still happens a lot, but now it’s more and more often frowned upon. But nothing forces anybody to honestly care about consent. For example tech companies frequently offer a choice whether one accepts or rejects their terms of service, so in theory they respect your choice; in reality their terms of service are clearly not meant to be read by their users, and naturally most users don’t read them. This is fake consent: people agree but they don’t know what they agree to; it’s just a legal manipulation, it’s meaningless since the concept of consent requires that the person who consents understands what they’re consenting to.
Even in a society which values free will and therefore consent, it’s hard to make it work. We can see it when some people reject mandatory health measures intended to protect society as a whole. The tension between contradicting individual preferences and collective inclinations are not easily solved… and likely not solvable in general. To my knowledge, nobody gave their consent to being bombarded with advertisement everywhere in the streets, for instance. Society forces things on us constantly: some people object to pollution levels, others object to immigration levels. And it becomes even harder if one thinks about the future victims of our current choices: for example, it’s established that pollution levels increases the risk of infertility; but the victims will discover the issue way too late for having any say in whether or not they agree to sacrificing their choice to have children.4
We routinely ignore consent when it’s too complex to link individual choices with global consequences. Obviously nobody consents to being a victim of the environment crisis, yet we all contribute to it. Imagine if there was a direct link: every individual would choose for themselves the level of risk that they personally want to take. For example, not using a lot of polluting transportation would reduce your risk to personally find yourself in the middle of a dangerous heatwave. If it the link was so direct, it’s likely that a lot of of people would make different choices. This means that we are limited by our inability to comprehend complex causes and consequences, this is why we see consider consent almost only at the most basic and individual level.
Even then, things are not so simple. Our modern societies rely massively on contracts between individuals and/or organizations. A contract is a sacred document in the mythology of our free societies: this is the ultimate form of formal consent between parties. But consent is always a matter of context: sure, a contract signed under duress is not legally valid, but “duress” is thought only as the most obvious kind of constraint, like signing with a gun to your head. What about signing a work contract because otherwise your family will go hungry? What about signing for a loan because you would be ashamed not to have nice clothes or a nice car? If one of the parties doesn’t feel that they have a choice, is it really consent? And if not, does this mean that the contract is not meaningful, not ethically valid? If we tried to be really honest about the meaning of a contractual agreement, we would discover a lot of ethical issues everywhere. Of course, in the real world we simply pretend that people are rational and have their own free will, so that we can ignore all the nasty complications involved in real, actual consent.
All of this doesn’t mean that consent is too complicated or impossible.5 Quite the opposite: it’s because it’s complex and always imperfect that we can and should strive to make it work as well as possible, and keep on improving the way we think about it individually and collectively. The greatest achievements of humankind are precisely like this, they are fragile pieces of collective understanding that need to be constantly nurtured and grown further: knowledge, democracy, peace, respect for other beings… consent. There is a beautiful and troubling incompleteness in our pursuit of consent, because despite the high risk of sufferring that being alive involves, none of us consented to being born and experience our life.
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The converse is true too, but the problem does not occur as often. ↩︎
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I was going to say “both participants”, but let’s not impose any stereotypical norm on how people should have sex or not. ↩︎
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Marital duty is still a very real thing for a lot of people, with legal and potentially harmful consequences. ↩︎
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And I’m not even talking about the unborn children themselves. By the way, another moral issue for conservative pseudo-Christians (pseudo because they’re not real Christians obviously): shouldn’t unborn children who don’t exist due to infertility be protected as well? If so, shouldn’t Conservative defend the environment against all kinds of pollution which put unborn babies at risk? ↩︎
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An argument that Conservatives are tempted to make very often and actually make regularly. They would rather avoid the headache of thinking how to solve a problem by pretending that the problem doesn’t exist. ↩︎