Autonomy and the folk concept of valid consent.

Area of Science:

• Social Psychology
• Moral Psychology
• Legal Psychology

Background:

• Consent is fundamental to social interactions like sex, medical procedures, and property use.
• Understanding laypeople's reasoning about consent validity is crucial but underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how ordinary people assess the validity of consent.
• To examine the roles of autonomous capacities and decision-making in consent judgments.
• To explore the downstream moral consequences of consent validity.

Main Methods:

• Three studies examined consent judgments across domains including sex, medical exams, and police entry.
• Participants evaluated consent validity based on varying levels of autonomous capacities and decision-making.
• The impact of consent validity on moral reasoning regarding third-party rights was assessed.

Main Results:

• Possession of autonomous capacities, not their exercise, significantly influences consent validity judgments.
• Specific incapacities reduce consent validity, but failing to exercise capacities does not.
• Consent validity, particularly concerning autonomy, affects moral reasoning about rights and obligations, even for morally wrong acts.

Conclusions:

• Laypeople hold a domain-general concept of valid consent tied to the possession of autonomy, not its active use.
• Autonomous capacities are key to determining consent's authority and its power to alter moral rights.
• Autonomous capacities and autonomous decisions play distinct roles in evaluating consent and consented-to actions.