The Cornell 7 Case Has People Asking: Is Consent Enough?

The case of the so-called Cornell 7, in which a young woman voluntarily engaged in group sex before later feeling ashamed and accusing her various partners of sexual assault, has many calling into question the nature of consent. Can consent be withdrawn after the fact? Is it possible to give consent after consuming alcohol? And is consent even the metric we should use to differentiate right from wrong?

Some of these questions have easy answers. No, you can’t give consent to something and then change your mind days, months, or years later. If you could, it would render useless all contracts of any nature, and no two people would ever be able to agree on anything, functionally ending the very concept of cooperation.

As far as alcohol goes, it’s clear that young people are simply not experienced with the substance. I’ve long decried the decline in drinking culture among Gen Z as a concerning blow to civilization, but one side effect of this which I hadn’t anticipated is that we are now seeing an entire class of people who genuinely have no idea what alcohol does to the mind and body. Based on the comments I am seeing, young people (as well as some stuffy politicians) apparently believe that beer, wine, and spirits are essentially a Jekyll-and-Hyde potion that transforms the drinker into a completely different person, with different values, desires, and boundaries than their sober counterpart.

As someone who has experienced being drunk, let’s say “several” times, I can assure you that this is not how alcohol works. While drinking will lower your inhibitions and make you less concerned with future consequences, it does not change who you are or what you want. In fact, it would be more accurate to say it does the opposite, revealing your true self buried under all those layers of social affectation that we use to fit in with polite society. An angry drunk is just an angry person who is able to conceal his negative emotions while sober. A horny drunk is merely expressing the desires that already existed, but were formerly suppressed for the sake of propriety. In Vino, Veritas, a Latin proverb used to express this truth thousands of years ago, demonstrates how universal our species’ understanding of alcohol used to be. The idea that you can’t consent while drunk exists to protect women who are literally unconscious from being used against their will, not to excuse the deliberate and rational behavior of inebriated partygoers.

But what about this third idea, the question of whether consent alone is a good enough measure to judge the difference between right and wrong? Matt Walsh, of the Daily Wire, doesn’t think so. In a recent video he posted responding to the Cornell 7 case, he described the whole situation as “the failure of the left’s consent-based morality.” He then elaborates on what he means by this, saying: “The fact of the matter is that a lot of people in this country today, especially those on the left politically, truly believe that the only moral rule that obtains in any situation, not just sexual, is consent, the only thing that matters morally, they think, ever, is whether everybody involved in a particular act chose to be involved.” According to Walsh, the logic of leftist morality dictates that only nonconsensual acts are bad, and since the Jane Doe of the Cornell 7 case experienced negative consequences, both internal and external, from her sexual adventures, therefore whatever happened to her must have been nonconsensual irrespective of any evidence to the contrary.

I don’t have enough insight into the leftist mind to know whether Walsh’s characterization is a correct assessment of how people like Jane Doe think. But as someone who has used the concept of consent extensively to describe the libertarian view of ethics, I think it is worth responding to Walsh on behalf of my political brethren.

Libertarians emphasize the importance of consent, not just in sexual matters, but in all aspects of life. “My body, my choice” extends to the products of our labor, the medical care we choose to accept or decline, and the various substances we put into our bodies. While the left understands consent when it pertains to sex and drugs, they struggle with the concept when it applies to things like money or medical freedom. A man cannot ethically use a woman’s body for his own ends without her consent, but neither can he legitimately use her money to fund his personal priorities, even if he works for the IRS. As individuals, we have the right to inject ourselves with pleasure-inducing chemicals, but we have an equally strong right to refuse to be injected with chemicals the government wishes to force on us without our consent. In this way, the concept of consent can be useful in explaining what libertarians believe to those unfamiliar with our ideas.

At its core, however, Walsh’s argument is basically correct. Consent itself is insufficient as a basis on which to ground all morality. We can easily conceive of consensual acts which we would nevertheless regard as “wrong” in some sense of the word. If I agree to let you hit me in the face, it would be clearly wrong for you to viciously seize that opportunity to inflict as much damage as possible, even though you were given permission. Dueling was outlawed because the act of two men consenting to try to kill one another was deemed too barbaric to be permitted, and while some libertarians might argue that dueling should not be illegal, few would approve of the practice morally. It is also obviously immoral to take advantage of a financially desperate person by exploiting their desperation to the maximum degree possible, such as by goading them to engage in humiliating and degrading acts in exchange for trivial sums of money.

I don’t know about the leftists Walsh was addressing, but no libertarian I know would disagree that some consensual acts can nevertheless be cruel and disgusting, and therefore subject to moral judgment. But here we have to draw a distinction between morality, ethics, and the law. The libertarian position is not “no consensual acts can ever be bad”, but rather, “consent or the lack thereof is what we use to justify third-party intervention.” In other words, your right to interfere with another person’s behavior is limited to those occasions when your consent, or the consent of someone else, is being violated.

To take the example above, if a man consents to being physically hurt by another man (or perhaps by a woman who makes a living catering to specific appetites), we can judge that behavior as immoral, degrading, unpleasant, and repugnant, but we cannot arrest the aggressor and charge them with a crime. If you hit someone without their consent, however, bystanders are justified in stepping in to forcibly restrain you. And while a libertarian might find it distasteful for an employer to pay desperate workers a pittance for performing difficult and dangerous work, we do not think such contracts should be forbidden by law. Adults should be allowed to make their own decisions, even if those decisions may lead to negative consequences such as shame, regret, or unhappiness. Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand, and it is impossible to advocate for one without the other. If human beings are to be free to act as they choose, they must also live with the consequences of their choices.

Firebrand feminist Camille Paglia sums up this duality neatly, arguing that the new feminism is infantilizing to women and pursuing the opposite of the strong and independent womanhood she originally fought for: “We’ve reverted to the 1950s with this, for heaven’s sake. Again, my code of Amazonism says every woman is responsible for her own self for her own sexuality. You are responsible. Stop thinking there’s going to be parent figures to get you out of jams afterwards. You decide what you want, something happens to you, you learn from it, and you move on.”

The major difference between libertarians and conservatives like Walsh is that conservatives generally believe that it is in society’s interest to aggressively police immorality, whereas libertarians object to the government inserting itself between consenting adults, even if we disapprove of what those adults are doing. Granting governments that level of authority over their citizens invariably leads to tyranny, in which peaceful individuals are jailed for victimless crimes and Big Brother is constantly on the lookout for opportunities to punish “immoral” behavior.

Returning to the Cornell 7 case, we can see an example of horseshoe theory in which the two sides of the political spectrum appear to reach the same conclusion from different premises. If the far left holds that consensual sex can be rape in spite of the woman’s enthusiastic participation, then it follows that women must be protected from their own choices. Meanwhile, the far right believes that women’s behavior must be regulated for the good of society, as well as for their own sake. Both approaches point to a new puritanism that disempowers individuals and entrusts the relations between the sexes to government authority figures. It is only a libertarian approach to ethics that can acknowledge the negative consequences of total sexual liberation while also upholding the autonomy of women to run their own lives, assuming the risks as well as the rewards.

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Republished from Free the People.