Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa “Deception and Valid Consent”

Friday, 6 December; 2pm to 4pm; Edgecliffe G03.

“When all goes well, one’s agreement to φ constitutes valid consent to φ. If I agree to your doing X to me, for instance, and all goes well, then I waive any right I had against your doing X to me, and other things being equal, you are morally permitted to do X to me. This paper concerns what it takes for all to be going, in the relevant sense, well. In particular, under what circumstances does ignorance on my part, or deception on yours, prevent my agreement from constituting valid consent? Commonsense liberal ethics says it does so only when I am ignorant about central elements of the situation: if I am deceived about who it is I am agreeing to have sex with, for example, because of a partner’s disguise, I do not give valid consent. But if I am seduced by someone who exaggerates their influence in my industry, it is widely thought, whatever wrong done to me is not a violation of my consent. Tom Dougherty has argued against this commonsense stance, suggesting that any time one is deceived about a “dealbreaker”, one’s consent is invalidated.
I will argue three things. First, Dougherty’s view cannot be right; it is subject to clear counterexamples. Second, attempts to rehabilitate the dealbreaker framework by invoking subtler distinctions in the same spirit are unlikely to succeed; a parallel to the “defeaters” literature in post-Gettier epistemology is instructive. Third, this motivates an altogether different way of thinking about the motivating questions: instead of focusing on whether deception can prevent one’s agreement to φ from constituting valid consent to φ, we should focus instead on questions of just what contents one consenting to, given the conventional ways in which consent is communicated.”