The Problem Of Consent
I think that the fact that we cannot consent to be brought into existence creates a real and serious problem.
At the least we have consent hypocrisy. Rape is considered bad because the person being assaulted did not consent to sex and is being imposed upon. But no one chose to be born so life is an imposition.
I don't see how we can claim that person X was not imposed upon if they had no choice or if they were forced to make a choice.
The wider problem is of social contracts and accountability.
I think parents can be held accountable for the life they created but I don't think anyone can be held accountable for their own existence. I think creating another existence is special responsibility and an endorsement of life but simply existing isn't.
This thread is not about antinatalism however but about how we can have a rational or just society that honestly analyses consent and responsibility.
At the least we have consent hypocrisy. Rape is considered bad because the person being assaulted did not consent to sex and is being imposed upon. But no one chose to be born so life is an imposition.
I don't see how we can claim that person X was not imposed upon if they had no choice or if they were forced to make a choice.
The wider problem is of social contracts and accountability.
I think parents can be held accountable for the life they created but I don't think anyone can be held accountable for their own existence. I think creating another existence is special responsibility and an endorsement of life but simply existing isn't.
This thread is not about antinatalism however but about how we can have a rational or just society that honestly analyses consent and responsibility.
Comments (36)
I agree, but what particular duties are entailed by this special responsibility?
P. S. I'm talking in atheist terms, so your idea of an after life and of what we were (or where we were) before being born could be different from mine.
I think a simple acknowledgement is vital. A change in mindset. A proper apportioning of responsibility.
Your English is great.
I know consent to be born is impossible. I think that makes creating someone else very problematic because you cannot claim they exist through their own wishes and desires. It creates a kind of imposition.
However here I am talking about how you can be considered to have consented to anything after you start to exist just because you started to exist.
For example being born in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia does not mean you agreed to be a communist or Nazi.
Wherever you are born does not mean you agree with or consent to societal or family norms in that place.
Yet people are treated as if they have somehow signed a social contract and agree with their societies or families norms.
You say you're not arguing anti-natalism, but it seems like you are. Or maybe I've misunderstood what you're trying to say.
As for your point about consenting to be born - Until they reach an age where they can make decisions for themselves, a child's consent is vested in it's parents, which is as it should be. With babies, the mother and father decide what it eats, where it lives, who it knows, what it does. That's the way it works. How could it be otherwise. I don't see any reason why the parents don't have the right to make the decision that a child will be born.
I find it hard to take the anti-natalist position seriously, at least as it has usually been presented on the forum. It's not fair! Stomps feet. No one gave me a choice about being born!!! Stomps feet again. As my football couch used to say - Suck it up.
As a parent, I think we are held responsible for establishing a life that is sufficiently aware/prepared to take responsibility for its own existence. This is true of any species - but there is much more that we must learn from each other in order to exist as human beings. I also think that parents (particularly in societies where daycare and school systems assume much of this responsibility) are often unaware of or misinformed about their responsibility, and so they often fail to achieve this. The child then grows up unprepared or unwilling to assume responsibility for their existence when they finally realise that no-one ever gets a choice initially.
I think perhaps there has been a separation of our rights from our responsibilities that confuses this issue of consent. When children are given rights, there are responsibilities attached to them. The idea that we should ‘let kids be kids’ pressures parents to give consent for their children to have certain rights without the accompanying responsibilities. A 15 year old girl, for instance, has every right to get herself into a position where she is no longer legally responsible for what happens to her body. In these situations, is a parent supported in with-holding the rights of their child until she is sufficiently aware/prepared to take this responsibility?
If consent is ‘permission for something to happen or agreement to do something’, then in my opinion it’s insufficient to describe the mutual agreement entered into for any sexual activity, and isn’t going to solve the issue of rape or sexual assault. Sex is not uni-directional, despite how it’s commonly portrayed. So it shouldn’t be a case of my giving consent to an activity, but of two people entering into a social agreement.
To put it very mildly, rape and other sexual assault occurs when there is a disagreement between parties on their rights and responsibilities in relation to each other. That ‘no means no’ is insufficient suggests that we’re not dealing with mere consent, but with a more complex social agreement. Not just what am I saying yes to, but also what does he think I’m saying yes to? Am I agreeing to just this action, or to everything he might assume is a ‘natural’ follow-on? Can I change my mind if I don’t like it? Can I stop if I’m in pain?
Sexual acts could be seen as a social agreement where all rights have accompanying reponsibilities. If she is no longer taking responsibility for her actions, she has relinquished her right to act. But if he accepts (or takes away) the right to act or speak on her behalf, he is then responsible for her situation as well as his own actions towards her. If she takes back that right, it is no longer his right to act on. If he accepts the right (freely given or not) to act in a way that may potentially cause her pain, he is responsible for the pain that he causes.
What should be very clear is that both parties have the capacity to accept or refuse the right and accompanying responsibility - this is what is often overlooked. What they should not be allowed to do is accept the right without the responsibility - or refuse responsibility without relinquishing the right.
But I don’t think this is how society currently views consent and responsibility.
It can't be an issue for things that are not capable of granting or withholding consent.
I am not talking about that. I am talking about the fact that after we start to exist we have not consented to the social or political order etc.
We know that once a human is born and grows they will be capable of withholding consent. You do not need to wait until someone is born to assess a capacity for consent because we know they will value consent based on the current members of our species experiences.
The welfare of the unborn can be and clearly is an issue this his been exploited in eugenics programs and climate change arguments etc..
However here I am discussing the lack of consent that arises once someone is born until they explicitly give consent at some stage.
This is impossible because no one is responsible for their existence because their parents are.
I am not discussing that.I am discussing the fact that none can automatically be considered to have consented any aspect of life and society.
The issue is a lack of a social contract that has been signed by anyone accepting any social norms or common moralities and philosophies.
Yeah, and since they can't form coherent sentences, or let alone consent to anything.
What I'm saying is that it's not a "good" decision bestowed by a parent, rather a projection of insecurities and concerns about the world onto a fictional entity that is this unborn child.
Well, typically we don't consider kids to be capable of consent until they're older--until they've gone through puberty, or until they've reached adulthood, etc. Hence why we don't allow kids to choose whether they want to bother with school, with doctors, why we don't allow them to choose to drink and smoke and drive and have jobs and get tattoos and have sex etc.
We could argue that consent should be an issue earlier than it is, but then we need to be prepared for allowing kids to make their own decisions about all of that sort of stuff and then some. A lot of people aren't prepared to allow that.
Re political situations and so on. some people (like me) only consider consent an issue for things that are actions you're directly involved with--actions that are done to you, where you're "physically" involved in direct forces applied to you, but sure, to some extent political situations factor into that. But (a) that's the whole theory of allowing people to vote, to have a say in what laws we have, etc., once we consider them old enough to consent, and (b) it's difficult to figure how we could have societies that only consist of things that you opt into, although that's part of the gist of minarchist libertarianism, for example.
There are lots of things that should or could deter a parent from having a child. Are you seriously claiming anyone anywhere in any circumstances is somehow entitled to have a child.
No one has natural rights. The only reason people can have children is because no one prevents them and nature allows it.
Someone could easily kill someone else and nature won't intervene (see genocides) the fact that you can do something naturally does not invest it with any legitimacy.
In civilized countries parents have limited rights over their children unless they agree to treat them a certain way. Thousands of children are taken of there parents each year. A man addicted to drugs and his two partners in my city had all 8 of their children taken away at birth.
However I am not talking about this but the lack of consent after birth to the circumstances of life and social politics etc.
Your position seems very arrogant assuming parent are adequately bringing their children into a just and rational political situation.
At some stage a person will be able to exhibit rational consent.
A very young child already withdraws its consent for a lot of things.
They often say no and can experience harm and desire boundaries. Also there is no reason to believes that the parents are capable of being a reasonable parent and the grounds to judge this problematic. It isn't children that voted for the Nazi's etc.
I think peoples analysis of childhood here is very unrealistic.
Sure. My opinions on this are fairly controversial, but as I said, the vast majority of people aren't ready to let kids decide whether they want to drink and get tattoos and have sex (with whoever they might choose to have sex with), etc.
If you're not ready for those things, then you think that kids aren't capable of consenting to some things, either.
I am talking about a complete lack of consent until someones explicitly gives consent there is no aspect of life someone has consented to until they give consent.
I have to use the kidnap analogy here. Someone who is kidnapped has clearly not consented to anything and they are no considered to have any obligation their kidnapper.
The kidnap scenario undermines consent although it does not completely prevent it. But I see no justification to turn around to someone and tell them how they should feel about life or their existence. It is for them to decide.
These are not the consent issues that concern me they are about endorsement of wider society and politics.
Anyhow I would strongly disputes that parents are making rational decisions for their offspring.
However I mentioned the Nazi/Communist example that you can't assume a child is Nazi, a communist, Christian. Hindu or atheist just because they were born into this environment.
I think consent is an existential problem when you realise people did not consent to most of their circumstances.
Okay, but you can't really be selective about it. If you're going to argue that kids need to consent to their situation, you're opening up the door to consent about everything.
I think the only species capable of reflecting on the ramifications of having children (and we have consistently failed to do this) is humans.
There are many different models of reproduction with varying proposed levels of sentience.
Before we might have children we have a huge amount of information to refer to before we make that decision. People act like having children is inevitable when it certainly isn't.
If you bring children into a negative situation (most people do) then you have already failed in my opinion to prove some kind of parental authority/responsibility regardless of the lack of capacities of children.
Despite the limits of children it is adults that are causing the most violence, mayhem and prejudice etc.
My position is that none consented to being born and after coming to exist they did not consent to anything unless they explicitly consent to it.
To me that withholds legitimacy from any social, familial or political structure that someone withholds their consent from.
My older brother has had MS in its severe form for 20 years that has left him helpless and paralyzed. I can't imagine anyone consenting to that.
I think the case of what people might consent to is highly speculative a deeply problematic.
But that's nonsensical, because consent can't be an issue in that regard.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I don't really buy that consent has to be explicit for everything, although I think that's important for some things . . . to the point of requiring contracts for some things.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I don't see that as something that requires consent, because it's not an action directly performed on someone by some other agent. Consent is only an issue for that in my opinion. Talking about consenting to physical "laws," mosquito bites, and so on seems kind of ridiculous.
I find your position unbelievable and implausible.
I don't to need to stick my hand in a fire to know i would not consent to having my hand stuck in a fire. the future is speculation and doesn't exist but it is easy to assess what we might desire in the future.
If people have a genetically transmittable illness they can assess whether or not future offspring might want to inherit that disease and this happens and people use contraceptives or have abortions.
There is a lot of evidence against your position such as contraception and any other means of birth prevention. People successfully try and prevent births due to future connotations.
If you have a fire in your house and get trapped so that you're burned, it's not a consent issue.
The circumstance where you're consenting or not to sticking your hand in a fire is where you have an option to stick your hand in a fire and choose to, or where someone is offering a fire to you to stick your hand in. When it's not something being performed as an action on you by another moral agent and you have no choice in the matter, it's not a consent issue.
This is a bizarre notion of consent issues.
A unconscious person can not express their consent on whether they would like their hand stuck in a fire. Unconscious people can never express an opinion so this period of inability to voice consent does not entail any rights or justifications for someone else to do something to them
Your positions entails that as soon as someone is unconscious or asleep then their inability to consent justifies whatever you do to them.
Their are facts such as facts about the pain of burns that can be conceptually generalized to future humans
So, if your house catches on fire and you can't escape being burned, is that a consent issue?
You are misstating my position. What I wrote was specifically in relation to your claim that an unborn child can't consent to being born. I said that her prospective parents provide that consent, just as they will after the child is born and until she is old enough to decide things for herself.
Now, as to whether or not "anyone anywhere in any circumstances" is entitled to have a child - I don't know anything about entitlement, but in the United States at least, consenting, competent adult men and women wanting to have children are able to.
I think your notion of consent issues is arbitrary.
The point is that most humans can withhold consent at some stage in their lives.
Your position seems almost evil in exploiting the fact that at some stage people can't give informed consent.
In the issue of child sexual abuse. The adult is prosecuted not vindicated because the child can't give informed consent.
But the overall issue is that at some stage most humans can withhold their consent from anything. Your position apparently relies on a complete failure of your imagination so that you cannot imagine that anyone other than yourself could have differing desires and values.
If I ever did hypothetical have a child I would have no problem understanding that they are not me and will have separate and individual desires. I would not expect them to endorse any of my values or consider me an expert in anything simply because I had a reproductive capacity.
you cannot consent on behalf of someone else. That is not their consent, wishes or desires.
The child comes to exist what ever crazy desires those might be. unfortunately most people, try and make their child agree with their beliefs and values rather than finding out the child's perspective.
Ha ha - this is not as easy as it sounds, and it’s not because you have reproductive capacity, but because you are responsible for their actions as well as yours (despite your ability to influence such actions) until such time as they are aware of and prepared to take responsibility for their own. Until such time as you are in this position, you are not qualified to pass judgement on the expectations of parents with regards to the desires and values of their child.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Refusing to accept a situation up to this point is not withholding consent. You cannot withold consent for something that has already happened - whether or not you were capable of consenting to it at the time. But you are within your rights to personally withhold or withdraw consent to the continuation of a particular situation - you do that by resisting with your words and your actions. What continues beyond that resistance is where you take responsibility for your words and actions, and anyone who denies your active/vocal resistance is held responsible for their words/actions within the social/political structure. But you have to take into account that refusing social responsibilities is accompanied by a loss of accompanying rights within that social structure. Rights and responsibilities go hand in hand.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
No - as soon as someone is unconscious or asleep then their inability to consent shifts the entire responsibility for the situation to whoever consciously exercises their right to act. If you are asleep in a fire and someone pulls you out but in the process allows your hand to be burned, then who is responsible for the injury? This is where the law makes money, and the rescuer often regrets his decision to act. But in my opinion you cannot then withhold your consent to being pulled from the fire, nor to having your hand stuck in a fire, because (being unconscious at the time) that consent was not yours to give. Like it or not, that ship has sailed. If you consent to life after the fire, then you consent to living with a burnt hand, and you regain responsibility for your situation. If not, you can explore your options to resist the future, but you cannot change the past.
Consent is about the future, not the past. It doesn’t justify actions - it determines who’s responsible for a situation going forward. Whoever exercises their right to act must take responsibility for their action. If the law says you have no responsibility, then whoever acts towards you or on your behalf at that point assumes responsibility for your actions as well as their own.
I asked the question I asked you because I was curious about your answer.
There is no consent implied by simply existing so that social institutions and norms are problematic until you ascertain that someone does consent to them.
But if they don't consent to them there are not grounds to justify imposing them on someone.
It is false to assume people have some kind of human responsibilities due to just existing.
The point that I'm making is that things that are however they are, things that we can't do anything about--such as physical laws (or brute physical facts, at least)--are a category error for talking about consent.
The realm (relative to conceptual conventions) for talking about consent (a) requires agents who are capable of granting or withholding consent (in general, including about possible future states they might be in, even if they're not conscious at the moment in question), and (b) at least for saying that something was done to them nonconsensually, requires that what was acting upon them was another moral agent, where we're not simply talking about things like observational approval, but something with direct (so, physical violence or manhandling for example) or indirect-but-causally-linked effects (so, for an example, effects from poisons or toxins that someone put in an environment) on the agent in question.
Thus, consent isn't an issue for whether you'll get hurt if you decide to jump off of a building. But consent is required for whether you'll allow someone else to push or propel you off of a building. And consent isn't required when a snake bites you, say, since we don't consider snakes to be moral agents.
And personal responsibility is just a social construct, it's not really innate. Some artists these days don't even claim to be responsible for the stuff they make because they believe it was subconscious or whatever.
I think that social constructs need to reflect reality more.
Personally I think we do have free will and I don't understand people who say we don't have free will but then act like they have free will and can't come up with a coherent societal system that reflects that we allegedly don't have free will.
For example they will say Judges should be more lenient because criminals don't have free will. But if judges don't have free will either how can they choose to be more lenient?
But If we can somehow change society and create better social constructs then they should reflect the essential primary lack of consent. So for example in the criminal case we have mitigating circumstances. I think not having consented to anything is a mitigating circumstance.