Normative consent and authority 1

Abstract

Among our moral requirements, there might be requirements to consent to authority in certain cases. In those cases, what happens if we don’t consent? Can we escape the authority in that way, by abusing our power to refuse consent? Why not say, instead, that, just as consent is sometimes null if it fails to meet certain standards, likewise, non-consent can be defective too and null as a result? The nullity of non-consent means, roughly, that the authority situation is as it would have been if the non-consent had not occurred—that is, just as if consent had occurred. The view that authority could be grounded in what would have been a requirement to consent could be formulated as a novel form of a hypothetical consent theory of authority, based on what I have called “normative consent”. 2 If this view can be sustained, authority can simply befall us, whether we have consented to it or not, though the conditions under which this occurs are a separate question. In this short piece, I do not attempt to explain or defend the normative consent approach in a general way. But after a brief sketch of the approach, I go more deeply than before into the questions I refer to as “bypass objections” (which are aimed at all hypothetical consent theories) and the question of what I shall call quasi-voluntarism . My main thesis is that, while normative consent theory, in certain versions, might indeed be quasi-voluntarist, even if it were not it would yet have moral force on other, utterly non-voluntarist grounds. A warning: in that part of the argument we will have occasion to distinguish voluntarism, quasi-voluntarism, proto-voluntarism, pseudo-voluntarism, and anti-voluntarism. I will explain each as it arises.