Due to its normative transformative power, consent is often regarded as marking the boundary between legitimate actions and illegitimate restrictions on freedom. Yet, the validity of consent depends on procedural and substantive conditions whose specification and satisfaction remain highly contestable. Rather than providing a guarantee of freedom, consent can in fact reinforce existing relations of domination. This workshop asks: under what procedural and substantive conditions can consent genuinely transform the normative status of an action, and when does it instead reproduce domination? Bringing together political, Kantian, and feminist perspectives, it aims to critically reassess the scope and limits of consent.
The notion of ‘consent’ is routinely invoked to legitimise or question certain types of interaction. This reflects its widely assumed normative-transformative function: to consent is to grant someone permission they would not otherwise have (Bergelson 2018; Chambers 2008; Hurd 2018) and sometimes to assume new obligations (Koch 2018; Simmons 2009). Yet this standard of legitimacy faces important challenges. Its procedural conditions are less straightforward than they appear: under what conditions can consent be considered voluntary and adequately informed, and can these conditions ever be fully met? There also seem to be substantive limits to what may legitimately be consented to: enslavement or humiliation are morally problematic, even when consented to (Schaber 2020; Tadros 2016: ch. 14) These questions have broad disciplinary significance, consent operating as a standard of legitimacy across several areas of political science, including political theory (Simmons 2001; Brennan 2023), international political theory (Buchanan & Keohane 2006; Kritsiotis, D. et al. 2023), Kantian political thought (Kleingeld 2020; Fahmy 2023; Pascoe 2023) or feminist theory (Garcia 2023; Pateman 1980; Phillips 2008). Debates often leave the normative force of consent insufficiently connected to consent’s social conditions. The workshop brings these literatures into dialogue to develop a socially embedded account of consent, examining how relations of power and domination shape both the capacity to, and the normative effects of, consent. The workshop is designed to attract a high number and broad range of participants (at the recent Annual Meeting of the Kantian Standing Group, all participants expressed interest in participating)
1: • What role could and should consent play in politics, international relations, and intimate life?
2: • Under what conditions does imperfect consent retain normative transformative power?
3: • Are there limits to what may be morally and legally consented to?
4: • What conditions are necessary for consent to protect, rather than undermine, freedom?
1: • Kantian and non-Kantian approaches to the normative value of consent
2: • The legitimacy of consent in democratic theory and practice
3: • The populist appropriation and transformation of consent rhetoric
4: • Consent, legitimacy and power in international relations
5: • Consent, subordination and authoritarian social movements
6: • Rethinking sexual consent in a digital age
7: • Socially embedded approaches to the limits and conditions of consent
