This is my first post here, so I apologize if it doesn’t fit the standards or norms of typical posts on this forum. This idea has just been lingering in my head recently.
Imagine this hypothetical scenario:
You consent to walking in a building and knowing you are going to be killed unless you give someone your wallet.
Someone threatens to kill you, unless you give them your wallet.
You don’t give them your wallet.
You get killed.
Are you consenting to be killed? Why or why not?
I woudl not say you are giving consent to be killed. Consent has to be given in some manner.
You would be purposefully looking to be killed though. Consent plays no part here that I can see?
If you frame it as someone has said to you that they will kil you if you do X and you say ‘That is okay. You have my consent to kill me.’ then you have clearly given consent. Then problem is the significance of consent and whether or not the law is involved here or not. This is clearly not a situation where the killer would be viewed as not committing any crime, they woudl be charged with murder and would not give consent to being charged so I imagine.
Consent only has meaning within certain legal and ethical contexts. In terms of logic it is a muddy concept.
A locus classicus for this sort of puzzle is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics:
That is generally held to be involuntary which is done under compulsion or through ignorance.
“Done under compulsion” means that the cause is external, the agent or patient contributing nothing towards it; as, for instance, if he were carried somewhere by a whirlwind or by men whom he could not resist.
But there is some question about acts done in order to avoid a greater evil, or to obtain some noble end; e.g. if a tyrant were to order you to do something disgraceful, having your parents or children in his power, who were to live if you did it, but to die if you did not—it is a matter of dispute whether such acts are involuntary or voluntary.
Throwing a cargo overboard in a storm is a somewhat analogous case. No one voluntarily throws away his property if nothing is to come of it, but any sensible person would do so to save the life of himself and the crew.
Acts of this kind, then, are of a mixed nature, but they more nearly resemble voluntary acts. For they are desired or chosen at the time when they are done, and the end or motive of an act is that which is in view at the time. In applying the terms voluntary and involuntary, therefore, we must consider the state of the agent’s mind at the time. Now, he wills the act at the time; for the cause which sets the limbs going lies in the agent in such cases, and where the cause lies in the agent, it rests with him to do or not to do.
Such acts, then, are voluntary, though in themselves [or apart from these qualifying circumstances] we may allow them to be involuntary; for no one would choose anything of this kind on its own account.
The basic idea here is that some acts are voluntary, some acts are involuntary, and some acts are mixed. In the case of jettisoning cargo from a ship during a storm, the act is voluntary in the sense that it is something that you yourself choose to do, for no one besides you is moving your limbs and jettisoning the cargo. Nevertheless, it is involuntary insofar as you did not ultimately want to jettison the cargo, and would not have done so absent the storm.
The same thing applies to your scenario. The act is voluntary insofar as you yourself are the one who hands over the wallet, but it is involuntary insofar as you do not ultimately want to be deprived of your wallet, and you would not hand it over except for the undesirable circumstances.
A difference between Aristotle’s scenario and your scenario is that in your scenario the undesirable circumstance is being intentionally created by another human being. This does introduce some important differences.
Supposing you refuse to hand over the wallet and are then killed, should we say that you have consented to be killed? That you have died willingly? If you thought the thief was telling the truth then there is a real sense in which you die willingly (just as someone who defies a tyrant would be said to willingly undergo the punishment threatened by the tyrant). If you thought the thief was bluffing, then the case is different.
In our modern world we seem to think of death as a kind of infinite reality, such that nothing could balance the cost of death (i.e. we would say that it is irrational to choose death in a barter). Where the consequence is conceived as finite there would be little reason to say that the consequence was not undergone willingly. For example, if the government tells you that you will be fined if you park on Central Ave without paying the meter, then by knowingly doing so you accept the fine voluntarily (and one might well do this in circumstances where the fine is deemed worthwhile). Still, even in this more clear-cut scenario “consent” is an odd word. Has he consented to be fined? I’m not sure. We would have to suss out what is meant by “consent.”
Taken from the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Let’s define consent as:
The free, voluntary, and informed agreement to engage in an activity, relinquish authority, or permit something to be done. It requires an active, affirmative “yes” rather than the absence of a “no”. Consent must also be provided without pressure, coercion, threats, or manipulation.
Interesting example. What if you replaced the “fine” with a simple fee. It’s practically the same scenario, but it removes the hostility/negativity of the word “fine”, and turns it into a regular financial transaction. Does it become definitionally accurate to say it is consensual?
A similar example would be taxation. The same thing applies to my original scenario. The act is voluntary insofar as you yourself are having a job, but it is involuntary insofar as you do not ultimately want to give the government a portion of your income, and you would not do so except for the undesirable circumstances (imprisonment or a fine).
Could this possibly not fit the definition of consent? Pressure is technically involved, since if you weren’t earning income (to avoid taxation), you would be under pressure, as you aren’t easily able to provide basic needs (food, shelter, etc) for yourself.
Also, there was a mistake in my original scenario. I was meant to say:
If you give them your wallet, is it consensual?
What if I slightly changed the scenario, and it became this instead:
You consent to walking in a building and knowing you are going to be killed unless you give someone your wallet.
Someone threatens to kill you, unless you give them your wallet.
You give them your wallet.
Are you consenting to give them your wallet?
The titillating gedanken experiment may not apply to those who don’t wallet.
It’s too complicated a puzzle for me to solve. The poor man may need the wallet, there maybe something valuable in it. Other people want the wallet or else … Too many variables. A wicked problem for our genius, Einstein.
I missread hence edit!
Giving someone your wallet under duress is not equivalent to consent.
This is a distinction you seem to be ignoring perhaps?
Forcing someone to do something does not mean they are consenting to do it. If someone simply asked ‘May I have your wallet?’ and the gave it to them without any threat coming from them, or fear of any reprisal for not doing so, I would calling that ‘consent’.
Okay, good. Given that last sentence in your definition I would say that none of these cases constitute consent.
Right: so just the simple act of paying the parking meter. I think it depends on the person’s state of mind. The threat does hang over their head, so if they pay the meter based on that threat then it is not consensual (on the definition you gave). But another person might pay the meter simply on account of services rendered, and that would seem to be consensual.
An example of an uncontroversially consensual monetary transaction would be a free will offering, made anonymously.
A common libertarian claim is that taxation is theft, and therefore there is an argument to be made for that position. Similarly, I think everyone would agree that there are unjust levels of taxation which are therefore more strongly coercive and non-consensual.
Yes, good point.
Right. I tried to address that in the first part of my first post. That question is very closely related to the question of whether one consents to the consequence of withholding the wallet.
You probably don’t remember the comedian Jack Benny, whose comic persona was very stingy. In this clip from his radio show, Jack is being held up at gun point. “Your money or your life” was first broadcast in 1948.
I think you may (obviously, I don’t know because you’re positing questions, not statements) be confusing consent with acceptance.
In both of your scenarios i suggest I am accepting that X is highly likely to occur, but I have no given consent to it. This is a really tricky argument to maintain, because surely knowing entering a situation in which X is likely points to consent? But I think it poitns to acceptance of risk. If it were 100% certain that might be different, but I think what would change things is… actually giving consent to the person who kills you. Tacitly accepting something “from the world” isn’t the same as consenting to Jimothy Tangrimes killing me over my wallet.
Could be done as an act of defiance so no consent does not logically follow
The OP is persistent in his desire to talk about consent, and this does make sense given the central importance of consent in contemporary ethics. To give but one example, consent-driven ethics has shifted the way that society views prostitution. So the focus on consent makes sense.
The intellectual tension for consent-driven ethics is the fact that we presuppose certain pressures which are placed upon us without our consent, and many of these pressures have a significant influence on our decision-making. The case of handing over your wallet while under duress is a good example of this. In more simple terms we would say that we do not choose to have our life threatened, but given the precondition of a threat to our life, we do choose to hand over our wallet. Still, choice is a bit different than consent.
The other side of the coin is the thief who leverages coercion in order to achieve his theft. Contemporary ethics is extremely wary of coercion, and would therefore deduce that something has gone amiss given the presence of coercion. We might even say that consent is not present where there is coercion.
While I would agree that consent to the risk does not necessarily mean consent to the outcome, I would wonder if the coercion is really the key factor involved here as one is not coerced if they don’t enter the building in the first place and so doing so would be knowingly exposing themselves to said coercion. Yet we would not say they consent to being coerced nor would we say they’ve been coerced into putting themselves in a coercive situation that they could’ve otherwise chosen not to be a part of.
Instead I think the key for why consent does not follow is due to the existence of logical alternatives that do not imply or explicitly provide consent.
For instance if someone enters the building knowing there’s an armed robber in the bank that will shoot anyone who doesn’t comply with their demands it’s quite possible someone might enter the building with the intention of stopping the robber and resisting the coercive pressure. Here we have someone willingly choosing to enter the building while consenting to the risks of doing so and denying consent to be harmed or to give up their money.
Yes, I agree that no coercion occurs if one decides against entering the building.
Okay, but I think you are changing the premises of the question.
First let’s clear up an ongoing misunderstanding. On my view consent occurs between two or more persons. So the various usages within this thread which do not involve at least two persons are incorrect. For example, when the OP says, “You consent to walking into a building,” I’m not sure what that means. If it’s just me and the building, with no other person, then there can be no consent. To enter a building freely and to enter a building consensually are two different things.
Now let’s take your example:
“Knowing there’s an armed robber in the bank that will shoot anyone who doesn’t comply with their demands.” If I know that there is an armed robber in the bank who will shoot anyone who does not comply with their demands, and I enter the bank without complying with their demands, then I know I will be shot. The claim is then made that I have consented to being shot. The argument here is that if I freely choose X, and I know that X will lead to Y, then I have freely chosen Y. Similarly, if other persons are involved then what is done freely may also be done consensually.
I think you probably meant, “…who will shoot at anyone who doesn’t comply.” In this case we have the same analysis, except instead of knowing that I will be shot, I know that I will be shot at.
This distinction is relevant because the OP’s premise that, “you know you are going to be killed unless…,” is in some sense artificial. Given the kinds of situations being described in this thread, we simply do not know that we are going to be killed, and that makes all the difference. We do not know that we will be shot, and usually if we enter the bank we believe there is a chance that we can manage without being shot (or else we wear a bulletproof vest). The claim, “He entered the building knowing that he was going to be killed,” is implausible from the start. It happens occasionally with martyrs and whatnot, but “in our modern world we seem to think of death as an infinite reality;” hence the implausibility of choosing to die or consenting to be killed by another.
In reality what happens is that the bank robber believes that the police have no choice but to meet his demands, and the SWAT team disagrees with that proposition. So in reality the conditional premise is nearly always contested.
In the case of the martyr assuming that knowledge of death is guaranteed and they’re resolved to choose that over the other option though neither is preferred, yes I could see where coercion and force then becomes the dominant factor here. Though I still think there could be other outlying possibilities such as someone who is not mentally sound enough to provide consent, seeking out a dangerous situation specifically for such ends. Or even someone along the similar line of the original martyr who stubbornly refuses to give into coercion and refuses to accept the certainty of death regardless of their preexisting knowledge of the outcome not granting power to the coercive actions yet unable to overcome the force applied thereafter.
In the second example with the individual who is mentally unwell they could be said to be attempting to provide consent to be harmed regardless of any coercive force that others may be attempting to apply. Their will is already aligned with one particular outcome of the ultimatum that is meant to be coercive yet the coercive intent loses all its power because the individual’s desired outcome is only achieved through the consequence of the ultimatum not the narrow path left to circumvent it. But because they are not in a sound enough state of mind they’re not able to provide said consent meaningfully.
Likewise in the last example a martyr who knows they’re going to die yet stubbornly refuses to accept that certainty regardless, while stubbornly refusing to give into the ultimatum as well, is another possibility. Sure it is one of great cognitive dissonance but haven’t we humans demonstrated time and again a great propensity towards such unfounded stubbornness? In such a case of a martyr who refuses to accept that fate lying down its neither coercion nor unsoundness of mind which remove their consent but the brute force of the act itself when they’re clearly trying to resist it.
I don’t want to get drawn into a tangent about martyrdom because that seems a different topic than the OP. Simplifying things a bit, how would you see the relation between consent and coercion in general?
I would say its complicated because we would need to account for not only the presence of attempted coercion but also the effectiveness of said coercion and the desire a person would have to choose otherwise even without the coercive pressure.
For example say that a guy fully intends to ask a girl on a date prior to any coercive attempt unbeknownst to this girl’s group of friends. Her friends know she also likes this boy and so they take it upon themselves to try and force the guy to ask her out. One of the friends threatens him if he doesn’t ask the girl out and the other friend bribes him with money if he does ask the girl out and the third is just really really persistent about pushing him to ask the girl out.
Now the guy in question certainly wants to avoid the consequences of the threat regardless of if it’s one of blackmail, violence, or something else, so much so that if he had not already intended to ask the girl out he would’ve felt forced to do so. He also could use the extra cash and so the bribe too would be sufficient to make him feel like he should ask the girl out if he hadn’t already intended on doing so. Lastly the third friend being very persistent about pressuring him to ask the girl out would’ve uncomfortable enough to make him feel like he needed to ask the girl out to make her friend stop pestering him.
However in spite of all of this his original decision and motivation of how he simply wants to ask the girl out because he genuinely likes her remains unaltered despite the extra external pressure that was added.
We can both agree that the three friends are in the wrong to apply coercive pressure to the situation because it certainly would have the significant potential to violate the guy’s ability to consent in this situation however if it has not done anything to change his actual intent or decision and the primary reason he’s asking the girl out remains pure and unaltered while everything else is just excess would you say the guy did not consent to asking the girl out?
This is somewhat adapted from a personal experience I had gone through myself in highschool so I can attest that while it’s certainly a strange and uncomfortable situation to be in I would in no way have said I didn’t consent to asking the girl out. But what do you think?
Okay, interesting. You are trying to draw up a situation in which consent and coercion both coexist, and if that situation holds then they would not be contrary to one another.
Let’s just consider her first girlfriend to make things simpler. Bill plans to ask Susie out. Susie’s friend Barb does not know about his plan and threatens him, “Bill, if you don’t ask Susie out on a date I will make your life a living hell.” Bill asks Susie out. Did Bill consent to asking Susie out? Was Bill coerced to ask Susie out? Let’s continue to use the definition of consent that Chad gave us.
This is tricky, but I would say that it depends on the reason why Bill asked Susie out. If he asked her out because he was threatened then his asking her out was a matter of coercion. If he asked her out because he freely chose to do so, then he did so freely. Note again that because there are not two persons “involved,” this is not a matter of consent. If I go up to a woman and ask her on a date, nothing consensual has yet occurred, because only one person has exercised agency. To consent one must at least accede to another person who is exercising their agency.
The difficulty here is that it may be hard for even Bill to know whether he asked Susie out freely or out of coercion. In your scenario both his initial plan and Barb’s threat are sufficient conditions, and therefore the outcome is overdetermined. So it will come down to the manner in which we define “freely” and “coerced.”
Still, we should recognize that what would usually happen in reality is that Bill would say, “Barb, I was already planning to ask Susie on a date!” Barb would generally reply, “Oh, well never mind then.” I suppose if Barb doubled-down and said, “You’d better, because if you don’t you’ll regret it!,” then your scenario would still obtain, but I imagine this sort of overdetermination would be rare.
What are your thoughts?
Yes that’s exactly what I am getting at. And to preserve the interaction between more than one person part of the scenario we can say that Barb informed Bill prior to her threat that he should ask Susie out and he had taken time to consider that possibility on his own and had decided to do so, but Barb being impatient issues the threat during their next meeting and we can say she does indeed double down after he voices he already intended to ask Susie out.
If Bill still asks Susie out because he genuinely likes Susie in spite of her toxic friend then I would say he has full consent in that situation because it is happening in spite of the coercive pressure and not because of it.
That’s what I’m trying to get at, the coercion is indeed a relevant factor to pay attention to but it’s also important to understand weather or not the coercion succeeded in swaying or limiting the person’s decision.
Another example which I imagine should seem obvious is a somewhat opposite situation where Bill wants to ask Susie out after his friend Frank mentions he should, but Frank also happens to be Susie’s ex and is the jealous type so he later changes his mind and tells Bill he shouldn’t ask Susie out or Frank will fight Bill if he goes through with it.
So there still exists coercive pressure around if Bill asks out Susie or not but if Bill asks Susie anyways he does so in spite of the coercive threats Frank has issued and so he’s still maintained the consensual nature of him asking Susie.
I think thats the key point, was the act sufficiently influenced or restricted into an act that otherwise might not have occurred were the coercion not applied.
This would then include if Bill himself ever considered changing his mind did he feel pressured to stick with his original decision? If that were to occur which there is high potential in these scenarios then this would count as a violation of consent via coercion as well but if the thought of changing his mind never occurred then there was never anything that the coercion would be able to change or restrict.
I don’t disagree with any of your comments - but I think Banno got it right: OP is confusing acceptance with consent and so some various answers are generating similar responses, despite being about different things. Where you accept the “choice” aspect I call that “acceptance”. you’ve understand your circumstances and accepted some outcome will obtain. That doesn’t then mean consent. No contest legal pleas are similar.