• Possibility
    2.8k
    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.Andrew4Handel

    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.

    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.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.

    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.
    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.
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k
    I think your notion of consent issues is arbitrary . . .Andrew4Handel

    I asked the question I asked you because I was curious about your answer.
  • Andrew4Handel
    2.5k
    The point I am trying to make is that we do not did not consent to anything.

    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.
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k


    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.
  • Forgottenticket
    215
    This just goes into the free will argument. I didn't consent to my mind you're correct. Though it was pre-existing as potential genetic code and the cultural archetypes that formed it. I also (and still do) consciously make decisions knowing it would become something like it is now.
    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.
  • Andrew4Handel
    2.5k
    And personal responsibility is just a social constructForgottenticket

    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.
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