I visit your house and admire an ornament on your bookshelf. You say you’d like me to have it as a gift. If I thank you and take it with me when I leave, it seems I’ve done nothing wrong. It was yours, but you gave it to me.
You have a serious illness. Untreated, it will leave you physically incapacitated and often cognitively exhausted to the extent that you won’t be able to work. There’s an experimental surgery available, but it’s very risky: It might cure you completely, but it might kill you. You decide to have the surgery. You book it, show up on the day, and sign the consent form. If the surgeon then starts to operate, it seems they do nothing wrong. It’s your body, but you’ve requested they operate on it.
Of course, if I had forced you to give me the ornament as a gift by threatening you with violence if you hadn’t, I would do wrong by taking it. And similarly, if the surgeon knows your family threatened to cut you off completely if you didn’t sign the consent form, they do wrong by starting to operate. Coerced consent is not effective; it doesn’t release others from the duties they have not to take your property or interfere with your body.
But there is another way in which consent can seem ineffective that is more mysterious. Suppose you offer me the ornament as a gift because you have extremely altruistic preferences—you always wish others to have what they want to have. And suppose you have those preferences because of strong pressure from the unjust society in which you live or from the bullying family in which you were raised. Perhaps you belong to a social grouping whose members are severely sanctioned if they seek anything for themselves, or your family punished you whenever you sought something for your own enjoyment. Then, even if the resulting preferences are genuinely your own—you attest to having them, your other behavior supports that, and you reflectively endorse them—it seems that when you offer me the ornament on the basis of these self-denying preferences, it is still wrong for me to take it. Perhaps not as wrong as it would have been had you not offered it to me at all; and surely not as wrong as it would have been had I threatened you with physical violence should you not offer me it. But wrong, nonetheless.
Or suppose you consent to the risky surgery because you were raised in a society in which the dominant ideology teaches you that only productive lives are valuable and that you can only be productive by doing the sort of work you will be unable to do if your illness progresses unchecked. Suppose this view is everywhere around you from novels and films and television to political discussions and school lessons and your parents’ teachings. Then again, we might feel that the consent you have given is not completely effective and, should the surgeon proceed with the surgery, they will not have acted well.
Such cases, which in different areas of study go by the names of false consciousness or adaptive preferences or deformed desires, are mysterious because the consent is based on your genuine preferences, and the content of those preferences is not in itself troubling: After all, formed in another way, altruistic preferences can be deeply admirable. And you are surely permitted to almost exclusively value productivity in your own life, even if that’s absolutely not how you should value the lives of others.
If the preferences are genuine and their content untroubling, it must be the history of these preferences that renders any consent based on them less than fully effective. But of course, it cannot be just that they were formed in part under the influence of something outside of you—that’s true of nearly all your preferences! Instead, it must be the nature of the external influences. It’s natural to think that what is crucial here is that the external source applies strong pressure, that it is a social source of pressure, and that it arises from injustice. Why it must be all of these is an interesting and difficult question—what of nonsocial sources of pressure? What of pressure imposed by a just society? But these aren’t my questions. I’m interested in why some preferences formed as a result of unjust social pressure can ground effective consent while others can’t. My contention is that it is the precise mechanism by which the preferences are formed under this unjust social pressure that holds the key.
Now, there are a great many mechanisms by which we form our preferences. Some come from rather thoughtlessly mimicking others—we are often mimetic creatures. Some come from a post hoc rationalization of decisions between options we take to be on a par—what social psychologists call choice-induced preferences. Sometimes we come to prefer that which we think we might be able to get, and we disprefer that which we know is impossible—Nietzsche’s amor fati. In the case of the ornament from above, it might be that the altruistic preferences were formed as a self-preservation mechanism: If you genuinely have the preferences your society demands of you, rather than simply pretending you do, you won’t slip up and act in ways that will attract punishment or sanction. In the example of the surgery, the impoverished information environment your society has created leads you to form the belief that an unproductive life is objectively without value, and you then transfer that belief about objective value into a subjective preference. When preferences are formed via these latter two mechanisms, we tend to think that consent based on them is less than fully effective.
And yet there are mechanisms by which preferences might be formed under unjust social pressures that can ground effective consent. Consider, for example, the following case: Holt has never wanted children. Nonetheless, the society in which they live sanctions and punishes childless people in a hundred different ways from social stigma to material consequences, and Holt’s partner has piled on further pressures to make Holt have a child with them. Despite all these pressures, Holt still doesn’t want a child but nonetheless agrees to have one to avoid these various sanctions and punishments. It proves to be a transformative experience for them. Raising their child makes them value aspects of being a parent in ways that they didn’t value before. Their time with the child leads them to conceive of the activities of raising a child differently from how they conceived of them before: Where once they conceived of certain imaginative play as dull and repetitive, they come to see it as part of forming shared bonds; where once they conceived of checking the child’s behavior as authoritarian and confrontational, they come to see it as the process of helping the child discover who they are and how they want to be. Compare this with Iris Murdoch’s famous example of M. and her attitude towards her daughter-in-law D. When she first meets her, M. finds D. to be “a good-hearted girl, but while not exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement”; but later, after she reflects more carefully upon D.’s nature, “D. is discovered not to be vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay.” In Holt’s case and in M.’s, the key is attention: By becoming a parent, Holt’s attention is by necessity focused on the business of raising a child, and their attention leads them to conceive of certain aspects of that activity differently and that, in turn, changes their preferences. In M.’s case, Murdoch is keen to emphasize that it is extended attention to the memory of D. that effects the change.
Holt’s preferences are formed under pressure that is exerted by an unjust society and within a relationship in which they are treated unjustly. Nonetheless, the preferences so formed may ground consent because they were formed via a specific mechanism, namely, the mechanism of attending to the object of the preference.
Why the difference? If Holt later consents to have another child, their consent will be fully effective. Why is this different from the case of the ornament above, where you formed your altruistic preferences because having self-directed ones risked punishment, or the case of the surgery above, where you came to disvalue a life without work because the information your society fed you made you think such a life is objectively not valuable? The answer, I think, lies in the room these mechanisms leave you for the free exercise of agency. If I unjustly threaten severe sanctions should you not behave in line with certain preferences, I leave little room for you to determine for yourself whether or not to have those preferences. And if I unjustly create an information environment that gives you very strong evidence in favor of some claim about objective value, I might leave you space to freely exercise your agency, but I don’t leave you the resources you need to do so, such as access to alternative ways of thinking. Of course, I don’t thwart your free agency entirely, as I would if I were to install these preferences in you via involuntary hypnosis. But I leave much less space for it and many fewer resources to support it than if I were unjustly to force you into extended contact with the object of preference and leave you to make up your own mind. It is this, I think, that distinguishes the cases.
Richard Pettigrew
Richard Pettigrew is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol. He has worked on the interpretation of mathematical language, the justification of norms for reasoning under uncertainty, the rationality of choice in the face of transformative experiences, and he has recently started thinking about questions at the intersection of rational choice theory and ethics. His books include Accuracy and the Laws of Credence (2016), Choosing for Changing Selves (2019), and Epistemic Risk and the Demands of Rationality (2022).
