Change my mind: consent should not factor into moral evaluations
Posted: Sun Jun 25, 2023 7:17 pm
For the sake of the argument I'd like to define any given hypothetical act as falling into one of three categories: morally wrong, morally neutral or morally good.
Consent is defined in terms of a communication between two parties.
If one party gives consent but the other did not perceive or acknowledge the consent, then no consent was communicated.
If one party perceives there to have been consent when in fact the other person did not intend to communicate consent, then consent was communicated.
To say that morality of an action depends (even only partially) on consent is to say that in order to correctly place the action into one of the categories you must know whether or not the party performing the act believed that the receiving party gave them permission.
This framework for what should constitute right and wrong can be shown to conflict with most peoples' intuitions; in general, a morally wrong action is wrong regardless of whether you believe you had permission to engage in it.
Oftentimes with animals it seems like no one really ever bases their actions toward animals on what they're consenting to at any given time. As a rule of thumb I find it practical to just circumvent the matter of consent with them altogether and base my intuitions of what's good or bad for them on what's likely to be in their best interest.
I personally have an extreme repulsion to the idea that you can justify doing something to an animal just because the animal did not express disapproval.
Even if we take consent to be in terms of what the animal hypothetically wants (as opposed to what they outwardly express), this doesn't seem to fix the problem for me:
In order to have any kind of preference about whether or not someone should do something bad to you, you have to first perceive the fact that you're being prompted to make a decision on whether or not to give permission. A chicken can't even comprehend the fact that you're about to snap its neck and kill it instantly, so they can't just think to themselves, "yeah, I like this. I hope this human continues what they're doing". You can't say the chicken wants it. By the time the chicken even realizes what's going on it's already too late for the chicken's brain to form an opinion on whether or not the snapping of its neck should continue.
Consent is defined in terms of a communication between two parties.
If one party gives consent but the other did not perceive or acknowledge the consent, then no consent was communicated.
If one party perceives there to have been consent when in fact the other person did not intend to communicate consent, then consent was communicated.
To say that morality of an action depends (even only partially) on consent is to say that in order to correctly place the action into one of the categories you must know whether or not the party performing the act believed that the receiving party gave them permission.
This framework for what should constitute right and wrong can be shown to conflict with most peoples' intuitions; in general, a morally wrong action is wrong regardless of whether you believe you had permission to engage in it.
Oftentimes with animals it seems like no one really ever bases their actions toward animals on what they're consenting to at any given time. As a rule of thumb I find it practical to just circumvent the matter of consent with them altogether and base my intuitions of what's good or bad for them on what's likely to be in their best interest.
I personally have an extreme repulsion to the idea that you can justify doing something to an animal just because the animal did not express disapproval.
Even if we take consent to be in terms of what the animal hypothetically wants (as opposed to what they outwardly express), this doesn't seem to fix the problem for me:
In order to have any kind of preference about whether or not someone should do something bad to you, you have to first perceive the fact that you're being prompted to make a decision on whether or not to give permission. A chicken can't even comprehend the fact that you're about to snap its neck and kill it instantly, so they can't just think to themselves, "yeah, I like this. I hope this human continues what they're doing". You can't say the chicken wants it. By the time the chicken even realizes what's going on it's already too late for the chicken's brain to form an opinion on whether or not the snapping of its neck should continue.