On the Limits of Consent
If agreement is what makes an obligation binding, what happens at the edges — where consent is assumed, inherited, or manufactured?
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Consent does a great deal of work in political argument. It is asked to explain why a person is bound by rules they never wrote, to institutions they never chose, in a place they happened to be born. That is a heavy load for one idea to carry.
Where the difficulty begins
The difficulty is not that people never agree to anything. They plainly do. The difficulty is that the agreements which matter most to political obligation are the ones hardest to point to.
An obligation that cannot be refused is not obviously an obligation at all.
This is the point at which most accounts reach for a substitute: tacit consent, hypothetical consent, or benefit received. Each substitute buys generality at the cost of the very thing that made consent attractive.[1]
A narrower claim
A narrower claim may survive. Consent might explain the bindingness of some obligations without explaining all of them, and a theory that admits this is in better shape than one that does not.
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