Consent covers certain actions but not others. If I lend you my new car, you are now free to use it to run errands but not to compete in a demolition derby. This is obvious enough, but determining exactly what I have permitted is much harder. Since you cannot read my mind, you cannot know for sure which uses of the car fall within the contours of my consent. But if you get this wrong, you use my car without my permission, and that is a rights violation. There is a lot riding on determining which actions are permitted by my consent. Fortunately, Tom Dougherty offers us a novel way to determine this in their excellent book The Scope of Consent.It is natural to think that the scope of consent is fixed by what the consent-giver intended to permit. This captures the intuition that the scope of consent is controlled by the person giving consent. This used to be Dougherty’s view. However, this Permissive Intentions View is implausible. Suppose I had no intention of lending you my car—I only said you could borrow it because I falsely believed it would not start. Despite saying you could use it, this view implies that your use would not fall under the scope of my consent since I did not, in fact, intend you to use it. Cases like these lead Dougherty to reject the Permissive Intentions View in parts 1 and 2 of the book. And, since this view is implied by the Mental View of Consent—the view that we consent only if we have a certain mental attitude—they reject that too.Another plausible idea is that the scope of consent is fixed by what the consent-giver successfully communicates to the consent-receiver. This is intuitive in two respects. First, while most people agree that the consent-giver should determine what has been permitted, they also think that the consent-receiver should have epistemic access to whatever falls within the scope of consent. Second, this view implies that consent is a public phenomenon. Dougherty agrees with the second implication, and this provides them with another reason to reject the Mental View in favor of a Behavioral View of Consent. However, they are not persuaded by the Successful Communication Principle itself. Since successful communication requires uptake, the view implies that the consent-giver has not waived their rights until the consent-receiver finds out. So, even if I leave you a note saying that you can borrow my car, I have not succeeded in consenting until you have read the note. Dougherty finds this counterintuitive, and they therefore reject the view.Dougherty agrees that consent requires public behavior, and so the Successful Communication Account is the closest rival to the view they end up defending. And yet, despite engaging with arguments offered in favor of a view that makes consent and its scope a matter of private intention in part 1 of the book, there is no discussion of arguments offered in favor of a view that makes consent and its scope a matter of public performance in part 2. As a result, Dougherty fails to consider why uptake might be a feature—rather than a bug—of any view that attempts to do justice to the bilateral nature of consent. To see what is attractive about uptake, consider the function consent plays in interpersonal morality. If you have read my note, you can appeal to it to justify your use of my car. However, if the note falls behind the back of the shelf before you could read it or if my partner grabs it, intends to give it to you, and promptly forgets, you have no good reason to think you are now permitted to borrow my car. To justify an action that would be impermissible without my consent, it is not enough that others have good reason to believe you have my permission; you need to have good reason to believe you have it, and that requires uptake. The lack of engagement with actual defenses of the Successful Communication Account is a little unfortunate here given the virtues of that view and the limitations of Dougherty’s own (which to their credit, they discuss at length at the end of the book.)With the goal of reconciling the intuitions that pulled us toward each rejected view—namely, that the consent-giver should determine the scope of consent and yet the consent-receiver must have epistemic access to what is permitted— Dougherty offers us their Evidential Account in part 3 of the book. The account comprises (1) a view about what constitutes consent (the Expression of Will View), (2) a principle that determines the scope of consent (the Due Diligence Principle), and (3) an argument that supports both (the Interpersonal Justification Argument). The Expression of Will View preserves the intuition that the consent-giver plays a role in determining the scope of consent since consent just is a deliberate expression of will. However, the Due Diligence Principle ensures that the scope of consent is fixed by certain evidence that is available to parties to the consent transaction, so the consent-receiver has epistemic access to what is permitted. In turn, each is supported by the Interpersonal Justification Argument, which tells us that “consent is morally significant as a consideration that the consent-receiver could appeal to in order to justify their behaviour to the consent-giver” (149). Now, since the Interpersonal Justification Argument also supports the Successful Communication Account, the reason to favor the Evidential Account over its rival is because it has “the explanatory power to predict intuitive results about the various cases … encountered” (149).While the originality of this complex and intuitive account is impressive, its explanatory power is doubtful. To see this, consider the Due Diligence Principle. To fall within the scope of consent, Dougherty claims that an action must meet three necessary and jointly sufficient conditions, and these constitute the Due Diligence Principle. First, consent must be given at a specific time and not retracted. Second, at that time, the available and reliable evidence must sufficiently support the interpretation that consent is given to that act. This evidence not only refers to “what the consent-giver intends to cover” (140), but both parties “must reasonably accept that this evidence bears on how the consent ought to be interpreted” (140). The evidence might include (just) conventions, the conversational context, and knowledge of the consent-giver, and while the evidence must be available to the consent-receiver, they might not be aware of it yet. And so, third, at the time consent is given, the enhanced reliable evidence must also sufficiently support the interpretation that consent has been given to that act. This evidence is obtained when the consent-receiver discharges certain duties of due diligence to investigate what the consent-giver intended to permit.What is supposed to set the Evidential Account apart is its explanatory power, and yet we would be hard pushed to derive anything from the Due Diligence Principle alone. It is silent on a range of normative issues that need settling before we could determine whether an action falls within the scope of consent. For instance, an action only falls within the contours of consent if parties reasonably accept that the reliable and available evidence supports how the consent ought to be interpreted. However, the principle itself tells us nothing about whether and why certain facts ought to be accepted by parties to the consent transaction. Dougherty admits that “a lot of heavy lifting is done by the notion of what evidence someone must reasonably accept” here, and the reliance on normative intuitions about reasonableness renders “the principle … less explanatory” (150). But this is far from the only place we find intuitions shouldering the explanatory load. The principle is also silent on what constitutes adequate investigation of what the consent-giver intended to permit or what constitutes a low- or high-stakes consent decision, and so we need to rely on normative intuitions when applying the principle here too. The upshot is this: when taken alone, the principle cannot explain intuitive verdicts about consent cases, and it offers no guidance about whether actions fall within the scope of consent when intuitions about reasonableness, adequateness of investigation, or stakes of the consent decision are contested.However, these criticisms should not be read as minimizing the importance of this highly original account. The value of the book does not lie in Dougherty’s solution to the problem but in the cases and arguments they provide to deepen our understanding of consent. The Expression of Will View is a case in point. On this view, consent is not a matter of intending to release someone from a duty, it is a matter of doing so with a deliberate expression of will. We can do this by expressing permission, of course, but Dougherty thinks that we can also consent by issuing a directive that is not an expression of permission. This challenges the prevailing view: most scholars agree that to give consent the consent-giver must understand that they are giving consent. However, Dougherty provides a range of fascinating cases in which the consent-giver could not be read as intentionally waiving their rights, and yet they seem to give consent all the same. One such case is Patriarchal Marriage: Wife believes that she has waived her rights against Husband’s sexual trespass by getting married, but now she says to him, “I know that you do not need my permission for sex, but would you like to have sex?” (91) Dougherty thinks that she consents to sex with this proposal, and yet it could not be an expression of permission since she does not believe Husband needs her permission to have sex with her. Even though she does not take herself to be waiving a right against sexual trespass (because she thinks that that right has already been waived), by proposing this joint action she succeeds in giving Husband a good reason to think he is now permitted to have sex with her. The implication is surprising: a consent-giver may be able to give consent without understanding that that is what they are doing.The Scope of Consent is full of similarly novel arguments, stimulating cases, and creative proposals. And, in many ways, Dougherty achieves something remarkable in this book: they envisage a way of determining the scope of consent that perfectly balances the control we think the consent-giver ought to have over what they have consented to without denying the consent-receiver epistemic access to what falls within the contours of that consent. Although there are problems with the account, none is insurmountable, and an account that promises to balance these considerations has high value. Those working in the field—and those outside who want a clear insight into a major debate in the area—will profit from reading this beautifully written, imaginative, and ambitious book.

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同意范围

同意涵盖某些行为，但不涵盖其他行为。如果我把我的新车借给你，你现在可以自由地用它去办事，但不能参加拆除德比。这很明显，但确切地确定我所允许的内容要困难得多。由于您无法读懂我的想法，因此您无法确定汽车的哪些用途属于我同意的范围。但如果你弄错了，你未经我的许可就使用我的车，那就侵犯了权利。确定哪些行为经过我的同意是允许的，这涉及很多因素。幸运的是，汤姆·多尔蒂（Tom Dougherty）在他们的优秀著作《同意的范围》中为我们提供了一种新颖的方法来确定这一点。 人们很自然地认为同意的范围是由同意者打算允许的内容决定的。这体现了同意范围由给予同意的人控制的直觉。这曾经是多尔蒂的观点。然而，这种宽容意图观点是难以置信的。假设我无意把我的车借给你——我只是说你可以借用它，因为我错误地认为它无法启动。尽管说你可以使用它，但这种观点意味着你的使用不属于我同意的范围，因为事实上我并不想让你使用它。诸如此类的案例导致多尔蒂拒绝了本书第一部分和第二部分中的许可意图观点。而且，由于这种观点是由“同意的心理观”所暗示的——即只有当我们有某种心理态度时我们才同意——他们也拒绝这一点。另一个看似合理的想法是，同意的范围是由同意者所决定的。成功与同意接收者沟通。这在两个方面是直观的。首先，虽然大多数人同意同意给予者应该决定什么是被允许的，但他们也认为同意接受者应该对属于同意范围内的任何内容有认知访问权。其次，这种观点意味着同意是一种公共现象。多尔蒂同意第二个含义，这为他们提供了另一个拒绝心理观点而支持同意的行为观点的理由。然而，他们并没有被成功沟通原则本身所说服。由于成功的沟通需要被接受，这种观点意味着在同意接受者发现之前，同意者并没有放弃他们的权利。所以，即使我给你留了一张纸条，说你可以借我的车，在你读完纸条之前，我也没有成功同意。多尔蒂认为这违反直觉，因此他们拒绝这种观点。多尔蒂同意同意需要公共行为，因此成功沟通帐户是与他们最终捍卫的观点最接近的竞争对手。然而，尽管在本书的第一部分中讨论了支持将同意及其范围视为私人意图的观点的论点，但没有讨论支持将同意及其范围视为私人意图的观点的论点。第 2 部分中的公开表现问题。因此，多尔蒂没有考虑为什么任何试图公正对待同意的双边性质的观点都可能被接受，而不是一个缺陷。要了解接受的吸引力，请考虑同意在人际道德中发挥的作用。如果您阅读了我的说明，您可以诉诸它来证明您使用我的汽车的合理性。然而，如果在你读之前这张纸条就落到了架子后面，或者如果我的伴侣抓住了它，打算把它给你，但很快就忘记了，你就没有充分的理由认为你现在可以借用我的车了。为了证明未经我同意而不允许的行为的合理性，仅仅其他人有充分的理由相信你得到了我的许可是不够的；你需要有充分的理由相信你拥有它，而这需要接受。考虑到这种观点的优点和多尔蒂自己的局限性（值得赞扬的是，他们在书的末尾详细讨论了这一点），缺乏对成功沟通帐户的实际辩护有点不幸。调和将我们拉向每个被拒绝的观点的直觉，即同意给予者应该确定同意的范围，但同意接受者必须能够在认知上获得允许的内容——多尔蒂在第三部分中向我们提供了他们的证据说明这本书。该叙述包括 (1) 关于什么构成同意的观点（意愿表达观点），(2) 确定同意范围的原则（尽职调查原则），以及 (3) 支持这两者的论点（人际交往原则）论证论证）。意愿表达观点保留了这样的直觉：同意者在确定同意范围方面发挥着作用，因为同意只是有意表达的意愿。然而，尽职调查原则确保同意的范围是由同意交易各方可获得的某些证据确定的，因此同意接收者可以在认知上获得允许的内容。反过来，每个人都得到人际正当性论证的支持，该论证告诉我们“同意在道德上具有重要意义，作为同意接受者可以诉诸的考虑因素，以便向同意给予者证明他们的行为是正当的”（149）。现在，由于人际正当性论证也支持成功沟通账户，因此支持证据账户而不是其竞争对手的原因是因为它具有“预测关于……遇到的各种案例的直观结果的解释力”（149）。这种复杂而直观的描述令人印象深刻，但其解释力却令人怀疑。要了解这一点，请考虑尽职调查原则。多尔蒂声称，要落入同意的范围，一项行动必须满足三个必要且共同充分的条件，这些条件构成了尽职调查原则。首先，必须在特定时间给予同意且不得撤回。其次，当时，现有的可靠证据必须充分支持对该行为表示同意的解释。该证据不仅指“同意者打算涵盖的内容”（140），而且双方“必须合理地接受该证据与应如何解释同意有关”（140）。证据可能包括（仅）惯例、对话背景和同意者的知识，虽然同意接受者必须可以获得这些证据，但他们可能还没有意识到。因此，第三，在给予同意时，增强的可靠证据也必须充分支持对该行为已给予同意的解释。当同意接收者履行某些尽职调查义务以调查同意给予者打算允许的内容时，就会获得此证据。证据账户的独特之处在于它的解释力，但我们很难得出任何结论仅从尽职调查原则来看。它对一系列需要解决的规范问题保持沉默，然后我们才能确定某项行为是否属于同意的范围。例如，只有当各方合理地接受可靠且可用的证据支持应如何解释同意时，一项行动才属于同意的范围。然而，该原则本身并没有告诉我们某些事实是否以及为什么应该被同意交易的各方接受。多尔蒂承认，“很多繁重的工作是由人们必须合理接受哪些证据的概念完成的”，而对合理性规范直觉的依赖使得“原则……缺乏解释性”（150）。但这远不是我们发现直觉承担解释负担的唯一地方。该原则也没有提及什么构成对同意者打算允许的内容进行充分调查，或者什么构成低风险或高风险的同意决定，因此我们在这里应用该原则时也需要依赖规范直觉。结果是：当单独考虑时，该原则无法解释有关同意案件的直觉判决，并且当有关合理性、调查的充分性或同意决定的利害关系的直觉受到质疑时，它无法提供关于行动是否属于同意范围的指导然而，这些批评不应被解读为低估了这一高度原创性叙述的重要性。这本书的价值不在于多尔蒂对问题的解决方案，而在于它们提供的案例和论据加深了我们对同意的理解。《意志观点的表达》就是一个很好的例子。根据这种观点，同意并不是打算免除某人的义务，而是有意表达意愿的问题。当然，我们可以通过表达许可来做到这一点，但多尔蒂认为，我们也可以通过发布不表示许可的指令来表示同意。这挑战了普遍的观点：大多数学者都同意，要给予同意，同意者必须明白他们正在给予同意。然而，多尔蒂提供了一系列令人着迷的案例，在这些案例中，同意者不能被理解为故意放弃他们的权利，但他们似乎仍然给予同意。重男轻女婚姻就是这样一个案例：妻子认为自己通过结婚就放弃了针对丈夫性侵犯的权利，但现在她对他说：“我知道你的性行为不需要我的许可，但你想发生性行为吗？” ？” (91) 多尔蒂认为她同意这个提议发生性关系，但这不可能是许可的表达，因为她不相信丈夫需要她的许可才能与她发生性关系。尽管她并不认为自己放弃了反对性侵犯的权利（因为她认为该权利已经被放弃），但通过提出这项联合行动，她成功地给丈夫一个充分的理由认为他现在被允许发生性行为和她在一起。其含义令人惊讶：同意者可能在不了解自己正在做的事情的情况下就表示同意。《同意范围》充满了类似的新颖论点、刺激性案例和创造性建议。而且，在很多方面，多尔蒂在本书中取得了一些非凡的成就：他们设想了一种确定同意范围的方法，完美平衡了我们认为同意给予者应该对他们所同意的内容拥有的控制权，而不否认同意接收者对同意范围内的内容进行认知访问。尽管账户存在问题，但都不是不可克服的，承诺平衡这些考虑因素的账户具有很高的价值。那些在该领域工作的人——以及那些想要清楚地了解该领域重大辩论的外部人士——将从阅读这本文笔优美、富有想象力和雄心勃勃的书中受益。通过提出这一联合行动，她成功地让丈夫有充分的理由认为他现在可以与她发生性关系。其含义令人惊讶：同意者可能在不了解自己正在做的事情的情况下就表示同意。《同意范围》充满了类似的新颖论点、刺激性案例和创造性建议。而且，在很多方面，多尔蒂在本书中取得了一些非凡的成就：他们设想了一种确定同意范围的方法，完美平衡了我们认为同意给予者应该对他们所同意的内容拥有的控制权，而不否认同意接收者对同意范围内的内容进行认知访问。尽管账户存在问题，但都不是不可克服的，承诺平衡这些考虑因素的账户具有很高的价值。那些在该领域工作的人——以及那些想要清楚地了解该领域重大辩论的外部人士——将从阅读这本文笔优美、富有想象力和雄心勃勃的书中受益。通过提出这一联合行动，她成功地让丈夫有充分的理由认为他现在可以与她发生性关系。其含义令人惊讶：同意者可能在不了解自己正在做的事情的情况下就表示同意。《同意范围》充满了类似的新颖论点、刺激性案例和创造性建议。而且，在很多方面，多尔蒂在本书中取得了一些非凡的成就：他们设想了一种确定同意范围的方法，完美平衡了我们认为同意给予者应该对他们所同意的内容拥有的控制权，而不否认同意接收者对同意范围内的内容进行认知访问。尽管账户存在问题，但都不是不可克服的，承诺平衡这些考虑因素的账户具有很高的价值。那些在该领域工作的人——以及那些想要清楚地了解该领域重大辩论的外部人士——将从阅读这本文笔优美、富有想象力和雄心勃勃的书中受益。