Agency, desire, and the conceptual representation of consent

Abstract

Advances in the protection of human rights have placed the notion of autonomous consent in the spotlight of ethical and legal thought. Nowadays, the moral demand for consent governs a range of everyday interactions, from medical care and third-party use of personal data to sexual relationships. Recently, however, scholars have called into question the suitability of consent as a moral ideal in the sexual domain. To contribute to this debate, we ask what a speaker's expression of consent ordinarily conveys. Probing participants' linguistic acceptability judgments and inferences in response to contextualized expressions of consent (total N = 1232) and leveraging the tools of natural language processing, we documented two attributes of people's conceptual representation of consent. First, expressions of consent were connected to the speaker's patient role in dyadic interactions. Second, consent was indicative of a person's instrumental desire toward the target action. These results help to construe prototypical acts of consent as conveying a speaker's instrumental acceptance of an agent's behavior (e.g., a medical intervention) for some ulterior end (e.g., to restore health). Finally, we confirmed that people selectively reject instrumental desire as an adequate standard in the sexual domain. Our findings may therefore help to explain recurring skepticism about the transformative power of sexual consent as stemming from a mismatch between what consent communicates and prevailing moral norms surrounding sex.