Consent Matters. R.E.Goodin, 2024. Oxford, Oxford University Press. xiv + 255 pp, $110.00 (hb)

In the philosophical literature, plenty of ink has been spilled regarding what consent is and how it works. Impressively, Robert E. Goodin, in Consent Matters, not only considers the claims of the major consent scholars, but also makes a novel contribution in elaborating on the important distinction between the moral and social roles of consent. The book sets itself apart from much of the contemporary work on consent through the attention it pays to mapping how consent works in practice. Goodin uses examples grounded in real-world social practice, eschewing more abstract thought experiments. As such, philosophers will not be the only ones to find value in Goodin's work. Legal scholars, sociologists, bioethicists, and political theorists will find Consent Matters approachable and informative as well. In Chapter 1, Goodin overviews existing accounts of consent, before offering his own – the Social Functionalist account – on which consent is a tool for both transforming the moral landscape and guiding others' actions. This account is expanded upon in the book's second chapter as Goodin compares consenting to a related activity: promising. Following this discussion of what consent is, Goodin spends the next five chapters clarifying how it works in practice. Chapter 3 examines the ways consent can be given (explicitly, tacitly, presumedly, and implicitly). Chapter 4 looks at who should bear the burden when mistakes happen in the communication of consent. Chapter 5 considers situations where one could consent to something without knowing that one is consenting. Chapter 6 discusses the moral consequences of evoking, or asking for, consent and invoking, or using, another's consent. Chapter 7 covers when consent can be revoked and what the consequences of revocation ought to be. Goodin follows that section up with an application of his theory to some trickier cases: consent of the unconscious and incompetent (Chapter 8), consent of the mute (Chapter 9), and consent by extension (Chapter 10). He uses kinky sex, medical interventions in hunger strikers, and consent to a political authority via voting as case studies for each chapter respectively. Goodin concludes in Chapter 11 with a discussion of the moral importance of consent and the limits of that importance. Perhaps the book's most important contribution is Goodin's Social Functionalist account on which consent plays two roles. One is its familiar moral role: consent is used to change the moral landscape, making the impermissible permissible. Goodin explains that there are two requirements for consent to perform this role. First, the consent-giver must perform a mental act of committing to waiving a right of theirs. Second, the consent-giver must make external that internal commitment through a performance signaling consent. Fulfilling this moral role is enough for an act to count as consent. But consent can play a social role too. As Goodin cogently argues, consent is often action-guiding for consent-receivers, in that it ‘is supposed to help delineate the set of options from among which agents choose their actions’ (p. 19). To fulfill this role, an additional requirement (beyond the mental and performative ones) must be met: consent must be successfully communicated to the consent-receiver. These distinctions are important. They cut against the current literature. As Goodin outlines, consent theorists generally fall into one of three camps. Attitudinalists claim consent merely requires that the consent-giver be in a consenting state of mind. Communicationists claim only external communication signaling consent is necessary. Hybrid Theorists say both aspects are required. Of these theories, all focus solely on what it takes for consent to exist, failing to properly disentangle what is required for consent to serve its moral role versus its social one. Goodin's acknowledgement of the dual roles of consent also allows him to nicely explain cases of ‘false consent’, where X takes Y to be consenting when Y does not actually consent. For an example Goodin uses throughout the book, consider someone at an auction house who accidentally communicates to the auctioneer that they are bidding on an item through a signal they did not know to mean ‘I bid’. Since both Attitudinalists and Hybrid Theorists require that the consent-giver be in a consenting state of mind, they must say that such a case of false consent is simply not consent. This is unintuitive because, at the very least, there is something quite consent-like going on. Communicationists, on the other hand, are forced to say that all cases of false consent are genuine consent, since false consent cases involve external communication of consent. As a consequence, ‘Communicationists are blind … to gradations of blameworthiness that can be involved in falsely consenting’ (p. 30). If all false consent is genuine consent, the false consent-giver has waived their right no matter what. This is particularly an issue when consent is signaled in innocent error, like with the accidental bidder. After all, forfeiting one's right seems an overly harsh punishment for accidentally signaling the waiving of that right – the innocent accidental bidder ought not to be made to pay what they bid if they did not know they were consenting to the exchange of their money for the item. Goodin's Social Functionalist account inherits the same problem as the Attitudinalists and Hybrid Theorists – false consent lacks the necessary internal commitment and thus cannot be consent. But, by acknowledging consent as action-guiding, Goodin can offer a more intuitive explanation. The false consent-giver may be treated in some sense as if they consented and held responsible to varying degrees depending on how at fault they were for guiding others' actions through their consent signals. If the bidder was truly innocent, Goodin argues they ought to merely bear the costs of others' assuming they consented; whereas if the bidder intentionally misled the auctioneer, we ought to treat them as if they had waived their right to what they falsely consented. Although, given others' mental lives are obscure to us and their consent signals sometimes faulty, I was left wondering whether Goodin's response risks turning too much of the practice of consent into this ‘as-if’ consent. Goodin's focus on the social and conventional dimensions of consent colors many of the book's other insights as well. When it is appropriate to ask for consent will depend on the ‘reasonable expectations’ generated by the ‘on-going practices and continuing relationships’ of the parties to the consent (p. 145). And what signals count as evidence of consent is often dependent on the relevant social context and norms. Silence, for example, may be taken to signal consent in one context but not another, depending on the agreed-upon conventions of the parties to the consent. Consent Matters also opens the door for further questions about the distinction between what is morally and socially necessary for consent to play its roles. Recall that Goodin bundles together an internal commitment and external performance as required for consent to do its moral work of making the impermissible permissible. On the other hand, successful communication is not required for consent to do this work. As a reader, I was curious why Goodin takes an external performance as necessary for consent to do its moral work, given he maintains that successful communication is irrelevant to consent doing that work; an external performance seems purely in service of communication to others. All told, Consent Matters is a remarkably thorough philosophical treatment of consent, written with great detail and clarity. The book is a ‘must-read’ for any scholar interested in consent, regardless of their field. This research was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The contributions of the NIH author were made as part of their official duties as an NIH federal employee, are in compliance with agency policy requirements, and are considered Works of the United States Government. However, the findings and conclusions presented in this book review are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NIH or the US Department of Health and Human Services.