Understanding, Communication, and Consent

Abstract

By giving consent competent adults can permit acts that would otherwise be rights violations. In order to give valid consent a person must be capable of autonomous decision-making and her consent must be proffered voluntarily. However competence and voluntariness are insufficient. The person who gives consent must also understand what she is authorizing. In this paper we develop an account of the understanding requirement for valid consent. We argue contra existing accounts that the content of the understanding requirement is minimal. Valid consent requires that the person proffering it understand just three things: (1) that she is giving consent; (2) how to exercise her right to give or refuse consent; and (3) to what she is being asked to consent. To meet the third condition the profferer of consent must share an understanding with the recipient of consent of how the normative boundaries between them will be redrawn. This mutual understanding is achieved through successful communication. The content of what is successfully communicated can be analyzed in terms of implicatures: the overlap in utterer- and audience-implicature contains what both parties have communicated to each other and hence mutually understand.