There is no shortage of instructions on how to be a good person.
Religious teachings. The tutelage of parents. Aphorisms, allegories, and archetypes.
Gurus give guidance. Cult leaders promise the perfect system. Friends and neighbors offer suggestions, set a good example, or serve as cautionary tales.
Much of this advice is quite valuable. Some, needless to say, is rather questionable.
The Moral Rope
Most cultures present morality as a single package, proffering a holistic vision for how to conduct oneself in the world. A deeper look, however, reveals that morality isn’t a single phenomenon. It is more like a rope woven together of several strands:
First, and most importantly, are the things one must not do. These are the most likely to be shared among many cultures.
Second are ideas of fairness and justice. These vary somewhat more, but still include many common threads.
Next are the things one probably should do, but cannot rightly be forced to do: be polite, helpful, kind, and all the other things that make social life more harmonious.
Finally, there are customs: the proprieties and traditions unique to each culture.
Overall, these threads can be separated into two main types: that which is rightly enforceable and that which is not.
The Rightful Domain
This distinction matters a great deal.
The use of force is only justified when its purpose is protective. A culture may concern itself with manners, and it is certainly important to be a decent and honorable person. But the first concern of a just society must be to limit force as much as possible. We must be able to determine which transgressions are actionable and which are merely impolite.
Fortunately, we have a lodestar to guide us: consent.
You, and you alone, have authority to control your own life. No one else has rightful license to attempt to usurp that control. In order to exercise your self-authority and continue your existence, you must be secure in that which belongs to you and to no other: your person, property, and liberty. That is your rightful domain.
Within that domain, your consent is supreme. You may not rightly be made party to any exchange, agreement, authority, or other action within your rightful domain unless you give your valid consent. Acts that are perfectly fine with your consent become impermissible crimes without it.
Consent is the touchstone by which actionable harms are distinguished from mere improprieties.
The world outside your rightful domain is not yours to control, however. Someone else’s words may be rude … you may not approve of how they use their own person, property, or liberty … but such things are not rightly actionable.
Self-defense, and other forms of protective action, are thus jurisdictional. Coercive force, and other forms of trespass, are invasions upon your personal jurisdiction—your rightful domain.
Imagine an invisible bubble around each individual—completely permeable with consent, rightfully rigid without it. This is what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said, “Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.” Stated formally,
Your freedom to act, and to interact with the things of this world, is unlimited, save for that which encroaches upon the person, property, or liberty of an unwilling other.
Picking Our Battles
We will never be able to achieve unanimity on the more subjective strands of morality, and it is a fool’s errand to try. If we want to create a just world, our focus ought to be on these far more universal principles—on what is, and is not, an actionable violation of consent.
Some hold these principles to be the moral emanation of natural facts—universal because they are natural and thus apply everywhere. Others view them in a consequentialist light—as universally desirable because they produce superior results. And almost everyone lives by them, even if they refuse to acknowledge it for fear of seeming morally chauvinistic.
Of course, here too, we won’t achieve complete agreement—humans are too fractious. You will always find someone to disagree with even the most self-evident of truths. Nonetheless, these principles are quite broadly accepted, and they form the foundation of most moral systems.
And that is more than good enough.
Consent is the correct foundation upon which to build a just world.
The Elephant in the Room
Some may read all this and respond that it is obvious: Of course consent is the basis of morality. (Then again, everything becomes commonplace through explanation, doesn’t it?)
But if it’s so obvious, why don’t we apply it to the one thing that trespasses our rightful domain every single day?
People debate issues of consent all the time. Assisted suicide. Vaccines. Intimate encounters. Yet they ignore the biggest consent violator of them all: government.
Most consent violations are one-and-done—single instances from which you can defend yourself or seek redress. Government violates your consent every minute of your life—from birth to death and beyond.
And you cannot refuse. You cannot opt out. Even in its mildest forms, it is still a permanent condition of subjugation to which you never agreed. Government does not merely violate your consent; it demands that you relinquish your very self-authority.
If there is ever to be true peace in this world, that is the first question of consent that we must address, not the last. Or, put another way:
There will never be true peace in this world so long as one class of humans—government officials—is granted license to violate the consent of everyone else.
Never not ever. Not even if the excuse is that government is securing “the rest” of our rights. (That was a good move in the 17th and 18th centuries, but we can do better now.)
It is time to question the consent violator that never gets questioned.
But this immediately raises new consent problems. How do we deal with the world’s biggest consent violator … without becoming consent violators ourselves?
We began the discussion in our series on consent and building a just world. We will continue that discussion, drawing from both, to explore what a world of consent would really look like.
Part 2: The Fallacy of the Single System
Why do people believe that the only way human beings can possibly coexist is if everyone is forced to live under the same system?
Part 3: Panarchy, Not Anarchy
A world of consent is not a single anarchic condition. It is many different polities and people choosing their own way.
Part 4: Secession, Not Revolution
Fight-the-power or exit-and-build? Overthrow or underthrow? Do revolutions violate the consent of those who did not choose them?
