The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Consent is a collection essays on the philosophical issues surrounding consent. Like other Routledge Handbooks, it is written as a series of essays by different authors, each covering a different topic related to consent, all written by appropriate specialists. It is divided into five parts: general questions, normative ethics, legal theory, medical ethics, and political philosophy. Mostly, the essays do not focus on defending a specific position but rather on summarizing the relevant questions and debates.

The first part, General Questions, starts out by looking at consent in broad, abstract terms, and it explores the most fundamental issues concerning consent, such as whether consent is simply a mental act or whether it require some performative act that communicates consent to another person, whether consent expands liberty (by granting others the freedom to do something they would not have otherwise been allowed to do) or contracts liberty (by limiting the consenters’ ability to assert certain rights they previously could’ve exercised), and, why it is morally important to respect consent (whether to promote the consenter’s well-being or because we need to respect the consenter’s autonomy in actions and choices). The essays in this section mostly take a neutral view of these debates, explaining the arguments and objections of the two sides in a fair-minded way.

The second part is on normative ethics and looks at how consent relates to moral questions; the third part is on consent and legal theory, and the fourth part is on medical ethics. These are written in a broadly exploratory way, covering many topics within the broader issue. Part two includes essays on the relation between consent and paternalism, exploitation, and deception, and about sexual consent, (such as who can consent, when is a mistaken belief about consent unreasonable and thus blameworthy, and why is rape so much more wrong than other non-consensual acts). Part three covers legal questions such as consenting to pain, coercion, contracts, and privacy, as well as laws around sexual consent. And part four covers topics in medical ethics such as informed consent; the role of consent in medical treatment, medical research, and donation; and on consent given on behalf of people who cannot give consent for various reasons.

Lastly, Part five is on political philosophy, covering topics such as whether consent is necessary for political obligation (our obligations to follow laws, obey political authorities, and generally be a good citizen) and different explanations for how we can be said to consent to our government, such as theories of implicit consent, hypothetical consent, and normative consent

As can be seen, the book covers a wide range of topics, and each essay also has an extensive bibliography with lots of useful references. And helpfully, parts one, three, four, and five each start with a historical overview of ideas about consent in the relevant areas: chapter 1 covers the history of the role of consent in ethics; chapter 17 is on the history of the volenti maxim, (volenti non fit injuria – “to a willing person no injury is done”) in legal theory; chapter 23 is about the role of consent in medical ethics, and chapter 29 is about the history of consent’s role in political philosophy.

The book also covers many topics that are important and interesting but probably not familiar to most scholars. For example, chapter 32 is on consent and moral education. The issue is that moral education involves inculcating society’s values onto an unwilling child. This can’t really be done with a child’s consent, and government and society need to inculcate their values to continue to exist. This creates problems because, even if people, once adults, consent to the rules and values of their society, that consent was in a sense coerced by their early-childhood education. This raises challenging questions and thus has become an area of recent debate and discussion.

Nonetheless, the book does have some shortcomings. It would be helpful if it covered more empirical work that relates to consent, such as questions related to the psychology of consent and decision-making. There are only two brief discussions of behavioral economics in sections covering paternalism and informed consent.

The structure of the book, a set of separate essays of defined length by different authors, can also create problems. For one, there can be significant overlap and repetition, such as frequent references to the moral magic of consent and repetitive discussions of what criteria make consent valid (such as it being informed, voluntary, and competent). Admittedly, though, this repetition can be helpful if you pick up the book only to read some select essays, since it means you will get some brief discussion of these very essential questions. Another issue is that essays are uneven in coverage, in that some topics need much more space to fully explain (with some authors simply referring the reader to a fuller discussion elsewhere instead of explaining it in this volume). For example, in the section on consent and organ donation, due to space limitations, the chapter only briefly discusses the debate on organ sales (that is, financially compensating organ donors), despite that this is a fairly large area of debate in ethics, even on the narrow question of how compensation might affect consent. And in the section on group consent, the chapter intentionally avoids the question of whether it’s possible for a group to consent, which is certainly a very relevant debate for this volume.

Despite these limitations, the breadth of coverage is vast and the discussions of these topics are high quality. Because of the variety of topics in the book, most readers will probably be able to find a few sections relevant to their interests. And the book is mostly written at a level so that the someone who is a non-expert on consent can learn about the various topics with minimal background knowledge. This book is a good introduction to the topics of consent, both for scholars interested in learning more and as an introduction for students.

© 2018 Joseph Kranak

Joseph Kranak, Wilbur Wright College