The modern commandment “thou shalt not coerce” makes coercion the threshold for an immoral action—an action that involves two or more people. This provides us with a modern moral principle: an act that involves more than one person is moral so long as all involved consent to it.
But the appeal to consent as that which makes human behavior morally appropriate is tantamount to saying that the behavior participated in by both parties is morally right because they both deem it so. If one or both didn’t deem it morally appropriate, then one or both wouldn’t consent to the act. So, according to this view, there is no moral truth independent of what the group of individuals participating in the behavior consent to, regardless of the number of people participating. A consent-based ethic, therefore, is nothing more than a cultural moral relativism.
A good place to begin our refutation of this moral absolute is with an appeal to intuition. Our common sensibilities signal that there must be something more than consent that goes into evaluating the morality of human behavior.
Take self-injury, for example. Some “transabled” persons feel as though they should be disabled, and so they desire to have a doctor render them paraplegic or to amputate a healthy limb. But just because these persons, and the doctors whom they ask to help them, consent to such acts (even with full knowledge of the effects), it doesn’t mean they are morally justified.
We also don’t apply this principle when it comes to absurd examples like Armin Meiwes, who butchered and ate a willing victim who responded to his internet ad. That someone says “yes” doesn’t make murder and cannibalism morally permissible.
A critic might say that someone who consents to being killed and eaten must be mentally ill. But why must we draw that conclusion? We can judge that someone has a mental illness only if we first believe that his desired behaviors are grossly disordered. But disordered or bad behaviors can be evaluated based only on a presupposed moral standard that determines what ordered and good human behavior is. This undermines the idea that choice, or consent, by itself is the sole moral criterion.
In one last attempt to avoid the problems of the consent-based ethic, someone might just bite the bullet and acknowledge that the self-destructive behaviors mentioned above are morally permissible. In his mind, each person has a moral right to determine how he lives his life, even if the lifestyle is counterintuitive to modern moral sensibilities.
This reply successfully dodges the above critique because the critique appeals to moral intuitions. But for many, giving up moral intuitions might be too high of a price to pay. They realize that our moral intuition can be a source of wisdom. It keeps most people (and their limbs) intact. Moral intuition may not be the best foundation upon which to build a moral system, but it should not be discarded so lightly, either.
A critique of the consent-based ethic doesn’t have to rely on intuition alone. There is another moral fundamental problem: it fails to understand the nature of consent and how it works.
When I consent to you performing an activity, I basically confer a stamp of approval, or authorize you to act. But my consent has no legitimizing power unless the activity that I authorize is subject to my authorization. Suppose, for example, that I tell you that you have my permission to steal your neighbor’s car. My consent would not thereby give justification to the act because I don’t have the right to authorize it in the first place. Valid consent, therefore, is valid not by the mere fact of consent. It requires a pre-existing right to authorize a course of action.
So, for consent to have any moral legitimizing power, it requires a pre-existing moral standard that determines which behaviors we are morally allowed to consent to. You might think of our consent’s moral power as being on loan. Its currency is derived from a deeper moral standard.
To say that consent by itself makes a behavior morally permissible is like saying a police officer’s commands have normative force just because they’re commands. But we know that a police officer’s commands are meaningful only in light of his position of authority. Similarly, our consent has moral significance only inasmuch as the behaviors that we authorize are already morally permissible given some moral framework.
Of course, what that moral framework is would need to be worked out. (I claim it’s the natural moral law.) But we must admit that there must be a moral framework in the first place that gives consent the power to make something morally permissible.
If consent has moral significance only on account of a more fundamental moral framework, then it’s futile to appeal to consent alone in establishing the moral permissibility of sexual acts, or any act, for that matter. It’s seeking moral power where no moral power can be found.
This leads us to the true understanding of “thou shalt not coerce”—a version of it that doesn’t have cultural moral relativism lurking in the background. We affirm that people should not be unjustly coerced, regardless of what type of human behavior it might be. But this brings up an important question: why is consent even necessary for establishing the moral permissibility of a human act—especially the sexual act? Or, to put it negatively, why is unjust coercion wrong? Since people normally don’t articulate the moral theory that underlies their condemnation of unjust coercion, it needs to be teased out.
Unlike an arrow that is moved to its target by an archer, and unlike an animal that is directed entirely by instincts, we have a power by which we’re able to freely move ourselves to an end (see Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II:1:2). As Scott Sullivan puts it in An Introduction to Catholic Sexual Morality, we are “natural born end-choosers.”
This power, called free will, follows upon our power of reason. When we act, we act based on a judgment that something should be pursued or avoided. And, as Thomas Aquinas points out, “because this judgment . . . is not from a natural instinct, but from some act of comparison in the reason,” we act from “free judgment and retain the power of being inclined to various things” (ST I:83:1).
Our self-determining power, therefore, is due to our nature as rational beings. And it’s this rational part of our nature that separates human beings from all other creatures in the material world.
Herein lies the reason why unjust coercion is immoral: to unjustly impede someone from self-determination is to violate his human dignity. It sees a person’s humanity as an evil to be avoided and thus reduces a person to something lower than a human: a tool, an object for use.
Following upon Aquinas’s teaching (see Scriptum Super Sententiis II dist. 44, qu. 1, art. 3, ad 1), Pope St. John Paul II, as Karol Wojtyla, in Love and Responsibility unequivocally asserted the immorality of using a person as a mere means: “Anyone who treats a person as the means to an end does violence to the very essence of the other, to what constitutes its natural right” (26-27).
Since the subject of human morals is a human being, and since a human being by essence has both rationality and animality, it follows that the shape of human morals ought to be determined not only by the patterns that belong to the form of our rational life, but also by the specific form of our animal life. And this is where our sexuality comes into play. Our sexed bodies flow from the animal side of our nature. And if our animality participates in determining moral norms for human action, then our sexed bodies, along with what they’re designed for, ought to participate in determining moral norms as well.
There is hope after all for our sex-crazed culture. The appeal to our human nature, and in particular its rational part, to condemn sexual coercion opens wide the doors for the animal part of our nature, and in particular our sexed bodies, to also play a role in the moral evaluation of sexual behavior.