Editor of the Journal of Political Philosophy and General Editor of the eleven-volume Oxford Handbooks of Political Science. A Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, he has been awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science and the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research.
Goodin applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Consent Matters, and reported the following:
Ninety-nine is an odd number and it is an odd page in my book Consent Matters. It comes at the end of a long chapter introducing various different 'modes of consent' – explicit consent, tacit consent, presumed consent and implicit consent. All of those can, in suitable circumstances, be valid ways of giving consent. What I discuss on page 99 – David Estlund's 'ought-to consent' – is not. Just because you ought to give someone your consent to do something does not mean that that person actually has (or may properly proceed as if they had) your consent to doing it. As I had argued in chapter 1, to consent is to do something, internally (mentally) in the first instance and externally (performatively, typically communicatively) in the second. Until and unless you have actually done those things, you have not consented. It may have been wrong not to have done so, but that does not make it all right for others to treat you as if you had done when you haven't.Learn more about Consent Matters at the Oxford University Press website.
Most of my book is devoted to operational questions about consent: evoking it, invoking it, revoking it. There are some things we should ask consent for before doing, but even asking for consent to do them would be offensive. Revoking consent would be wrong after someone else has already performed the consented-to action. And if you revoke it before that, you must at least compensate others for the costs that they reasonably incurred in preparation for acting on your now-revoked consent. And so on.
Mistakes about consent loom large in the book. Jack says or does something that has led Jill to think – reasonably but, as it happens, wrongly – that she has Jack's consent to her doing something. Those are not genuine cases of consent because Jack lacked the requisite internal mental attitude (he did not intend to consent). But externally he has said or done something that has led Jill to reasonably conclude that he had consented. If Jack knew, or could and should have known, that Jill would understand his words or deeds that way, then Jack should be treated 'as if' he had consented. Jack should permit Jill to do what he seemingly consented to permitting her to do, or at least Jack should compensate Jill for her reasonable costs in acting in reliance on his seeming consent. That is not because he genuinely consented but, instead, because he led her on (in ways he could and should have realized) in thinking that he consented. If Jack misled Jill 'deliberately fraudulently', he should be regarded as having literally forfeited the rights that his deliberately false consent purported to waive. Where consent was falsely signalled through 'innocent error' or 'culpable negligence', then Jack should be allowed to 'correct the error' and 'take back' his apparent consent – but not without compensating (to a greater or lesser extent) Jill for costs she bore in reasonable reliance on Jack's misleading indications of consent.
Consent Matters finishes with a discussion of three 'special cases'. One concerns political consent conferred through voting. Two others involve 'consent of the uncommunicative', one concerning 'simulated necrophilia' and the other a hunger striker who internally wishes for assisted feeding but cannot externally say that they consent for fear of betraying the other hunger strikers.
The Page 99 Test: On Complicity and Compromise by Chiara Lepora and Robert E. Goodin.
--Marshal Zeringue
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