Thank you, Orsolya Kárpáti, for raising a really important question. Let’s start by thinking about the role consent plays in our moral thinking.
The first thing we might notice is the difference between consent as an utterance – saying, ‘I agree’ or ‘yeah, sure’ – and morally valid consent. We can say that we consent without successfully giving our consent. We probably don’t think an employer could expect a child to work for them even if the child agreed. In medicine we have to give informed consent to procedures, because if we don’t have proper information then our consent isn’t taken to be morally valid.
Giving (morally valid) consent is important in a lot of our moral thinking. By agreeing to show up to work, I make it reasonable for the university and my students to expect me to be there; I create an obligation for myself. By consenting to take an experimental drug, I remove a researchers’ obligation not to expose me to (potentially dangerous) drugs. Changing my obligations, and other people’s obligations to me, gives me a lot of control over my life. Giving (or withholding) morally valid consent is how I exercise my autonomy: it lets me govern, to some extent, how my life goes.
So, the question becomes: What effect does the offer of payment have on our autonomy? Let’s think about some cases where it looks like consent is bought. When I agree to work for the university, they ask me to teach students and I consent; in exchange, I am paid. If I wanted a different career, I could have refused that offer, or tried to work at another university. It looks like I had a reasonable degree of choice, and agreeing to work as a teacher is part of the academic career I chose. This looks like I am exercising a fair amount of autonomy.
However, if the offer of money is given to someone who is in dire need – someone who has dependents and is struggling to pay their rent, say – it starts to look like there are pressures on their will that might interfere with their autonomy. If the alternative to getting this money is a constant struggle to make ends meet, then they don’t really have a choice. As long as the alternative is sufficiently bad, then it doesn’t matter what they think of the offer; they have to take it. Though this might be rational for us, it doesn’t look like we are properly governing our lives, so our consent isn’t expressing our autonomy. On the flip side, if an offer was ‘too attractive’, we might jump at it without thinking about how it sits with our values. This, again, doesn’t look like self-governance. (That said, some philosophers might think that our actions reveal our values, and can therefore constitute morally valid consent).
I think the validity of our consent turns on whether it expresses our autonomy in the right way. What do you think? What does valid consent cost?
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Image: Arbitrary Consent I, by June Erica Vess
I started studying philosophy at the University of Glasgow back in 2011. I was officially a psychology student back then, but I jumped ship almost immediately, and now I'm working on my PhD at the University of Kent. My interests sit mostly in moral and political philosophy, but I have that magpie-like tendency to dip into all the areas of philosophy I know less about as soon as I see a shiny idea. My research focuses on autonomy in mood disorders, pulling together moral psychology, some phenomenology, and moral philosophy. I've also been getting more and more interested in Epistemic Injustices recently (which ties in nicely with my core research), so for now that might be my new favourite area in philosophy.