Alex McQuibban
King’s College London
The idea of a just state and the concept of consent seem inextricably linked: for a state to govern justly it must secure the consent of its subjects. Although not universally accepted, this line of thinking has become so popular in modern liberal democracies as to be taken for granted. However, it has also been accompanied by conceptions of consent which advocate much higher standards for how consent can legitimately be achieved. This paper assesses three types of political consent used in common justifications of the state – hypothetical, tacit, and democratic – according to its own framework around consent. The framework, which can be grounded in either values of autonomy and agency, or rights-based ethics, justifies a number of prerequisites for consent to be morally transformative – namely, that consent be explicit, informed, continuous, and uncoerced. In especially urgent edge-cases where these prerequisites cannot apply but where consent must nevertheless be determined, the framework allows for waiving these prerequisites in favour of a suitable proxy, like hypothetical consent, being used to approximate what would be a person’s consent under normal conditions. Ultimately, its assessment provides a damning – if unsurprising – condemnation of the state. All the assessed forms of political consent fall woefully short of the expectations we should have of morally transformative consent, failing to rely on any form of explicit consent at all and/or requiring unacceptable compromises on its continuous, informed, and uncoerced character. Furthermore, states, in general, are found to violate consent’s uncoerced character, given their inherently coercive and monopolistic nature. Judging that the context surrounding political consent does not constitute a proxy-justifying edge-case, the paper argues we should lean towards resolving this dilemma by retiring or reforming the state and preserving consent given its greater importance to ethics as a whole.
Chair: Ryan McLaughlin
Time: September 13th, 14:40 – 15:10
Location: SR 1.007
SOPhiA 2026 