On Consent

When Mahatma Gandhi was asked “What do you think of Western civilization?” he supposedly replied “I think it would be a good idea.” It’s a great line, but it misses a crucial point about civilization. Civilization is not primarily an ethical achievement, though in practice our ethics have improved remarkably, even just since the 18th century, when the breaking wheel was still a common method of execution and slavery was still a routine fact of life. But any ethical progress we've made is a side-effect of our technical progress, not the other way around. Ethical rules are useless without the power to apply them, and that power comes from technical progress.

It all boils down to consent. Can sex with an animal be acceptable if it causes the animal no suffering? Many vegans would say no, because the animal can't give consent. The deeper problem is that consent doesn't actually exist for animals; it's a legal conception that you need an education to appreciate. On the other hand if you say yes, now you're on a slippery slope. What about raping someone who is completely anesthetized so that they don't even realize it happened? Obviously most people wouldn’t accept this, and here the issue is clearly consent.

This is relevant because in order to succeed, civilization has to do many things without obtaining or even considering consent. For example, you didn't consent to be made literate. If author William Golding ("Lord of the Flies") was even half right, you would have preferred to be a savage, and would have remained one if civilization hadn't intervened. Civilization obliges people to do “unnatural” things, in fact that’s its mission in a nutshell. Freud explored this fundamental tension in his classic “Civilization and Its Discontents.”

Science starts from the premise that our senses are unreliable, which they in fact are. As recently as the 16th century, it was still reasonable to believe that the sun orbits the earth, because that’s how it appeared to the naked eye. The heliocentric model ultimately prevailed because technical progress (in the design and manufacture of lenses) made it impossible to deny that it was a better explanation of observed phenomena. This leads to the essential point, which is that science has necessarily co-evolved with technology. You simply can't have one without the other.

Of course this spoils the utopian daydream that science can somehow exist without power plants and copper mines and chemical refineries and microchip factories. Nope! We need all that stuff to do science, and science of course made all that stuff possible. So it's a vicious circle, a positive feedback, and that co-evolution is what brought us social progress. Monarchy gradually replaced aristocracy because monarchy was less hostile to progress. But eventually monarchy also became a limiting factor. The notion that all individuals have inalienable rights only dates back to the American and French revolutions. These revolutions (or something like them) were inevitable, because the resulting ethical and legal advances were prerequisites for further progress.

Social progress is both a result of, and a necessary condition for civilization, and also co-evolved with science and technology. The institution of slavery ultimately failed not only because it was unethical but also because it was too inefficient to be compatible with progress. Soviet communism failed for similar reasons. To function properly, technological society requires well-educated and reasonably independent citizens capable of assimilating information, thinking critically, and disseminating new information in response. That's why you were taught to read and do arithmetic even if you hated it, and why this absence of consent isn’t considered a crime. On the contrary, inhibiting a child’s education is illegal in civilized countries.

Similarly, you’re not asked to consent to laws against drunk driving, because society’s desire to prevent you from murdering random strangers on the highway outweighs your personal desire to drive drunk. The more antisocial a behavior is, the less likely that consent will apply to it. In an ideal world, consent would always be required, but we don’t live in an ideal world, and never will. Progress is nothing if not pragmatic.