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The problem with “mutual consent” as the standard of sexual behavior
The problem Jim Kalb is touching on in his recent article could be restated as follows. The Sexual Revolution said all standards of sexual behavior are defunct, except for one: that the behavior involve consenting adults (or “consenting” older teens, or “consenting” adolescents, or—who knows?—even “consenting” children, but let’s leave the question of age aside for the moment). For liberals, “consent” is the all-purpose formula that answers all moral questions. But the consent standard only leads to the question of how to define such consent. Which leads to the further question of how, in the absence of any substantive morality, can it be defined? To put it another way, if the human being is an agent of radically free choice lacking any natural, social, or divine good toward which he is directed, it becomes impossible to define any objective limits on his choices, other than violations of other persons’ choices, i.e., of other persons’ consent. But without commonly recognized standards of the good, there can also be no commonly recognized standards of consent. In these circumstances, “mutually consensual” behavior becomes behavior between increasingly selfish, predatory, and self-destructive entities. Since it is urgently necessary that consent be defined, and since there are no inherent or recognized standards by which to define it, new definitions of consent become necessary, based not on nature or common sense or traditional morality but on an artificial calculus derived from contemporary, and often highly arbitrary, notions of radical freedom and equality. These politically correct standards are not only more artificial than the traditional standards they are replacing, but far more complex and intrusive. The final result is that, instead of being guided in their choices by an orientation toward the good as embodied in a few simple substantive rules which everyone can understand and which are informally enforced by society, people are guided in their choices by an ideology of radical personal freedom as embodied in an all-encompassing set of artificial procedural rules which no one can understand and which are formally enforced by a cadre of specialists.
Comments
Agreed that if there is radical freedom and no publicly recognized goods a workable definition of “consent” becomes impossible. To expand slightly: the problem is that consent to sexual relations, like other human actions, is not a self-contained act. It’s an instance of communication within a setting, and such things are carried on by means of signs that must be interpreted. Correct interpretation requires that both parties inhabit a world of common meanings that depend on shared habits, understandings and goods. In the New Order, of course, common meanings cannot be presumed because doing so would violate our radical freedom and autonomy. Hence the attempts to define “consent” in ever more explicit, demanding and artificial ways that ordinary people find increasingly difficult to understand. Posted by: Jim Kalb on March 28, 2003 1:31 PMThus the problem is not just a lack of common standards of consent but a lack of a common language with agreed upon meanings. This relates to Mr. Kalb’s idea that once you deny transcendence, language itself becomes impossible, because the meaning of words is transcendent, i.e., the meaning of words is not an object of direct experience. So, in a world without acknowledgement of moral truth, it will become impossible for people to agree on what they’re saying or signifying to each other in, say, sexual encounters. The ultimate symbol of this is the phenomenon of people meeting on the Internet and arranging a date, and then one of them rapes and kills the other. There would seem to be a failure of communication here. Posted by: Lawrence Auster on March 28, 2003 1:52 PM |