It seems that negative consent is all over the place. We constantly talk about this topic and most of the time it seems that people are giving permission to others to do it. In theory, this means it is fine to have negative consent. However, negative consent is the permission to do something without being aware or having the ability to stop it. In my experience, it doesn’t always work that way.
Negative consent is a term that has a very specific meaning in the context of consent. It usually comes from a book by the philosopher Peter Singer, but a more accurate description is the concept of negative consent.
Negative consent is a concept that deals with the ability to consent to things without fully being aware of what you’re consenting to. For example, when I go to the grocery store, I am consenting to receive food from the grocery store. When you leave the store without buying anything and then arrive at your grocery store with the groceries, you aren’t consenting to receiving the groceries in the store.
Our first few conversations with Singer revealed that he was only referring to the more rare situation where we don’t know what we’re consenting to. For example, if we go to the grocery store and we don’t consent to receiving food from the grocery store (although we are aware we can receive food there), then we wouldnt be consenting to the groceries being in the store.
But yes we all agree, we never want to be in the situation where we dont know what are we consenting to.
In a nutshell, consent is the process by which you agree to do something. Your consent is the agreement you have to enter into when you agree to something. So if you are consenting to receiving groceries from the grocery store, you are consenting to the groceries being in the store. And if you are consenting to the groceries not being in the store, you are consenting to the groceries not being in the grocery store.
In a way, you are not agreeing to a good deal. You are merely agreeing to a bad deal. You are agreeing to a good deal, even if you wouldnt agree to having your head chopped off and your face torn down all the time.
While agreeing to something is an act of consent, agreeing to something that you dont agree with is an attempt at consent. What you are consenting to, or agreeing to, is a false deal that is really a bad deal. But you dont have to like it if you dont like it. This is what consent is.
If you think the way you do your consent is, you really do. Because if you like it, you don’t have to like it. And if you don’t like it, you have to do it anyway, unless you like it. And in the case of some people, even if you don’t like it, that doesn’t mean that you don’t like it. It just means that you don’t want to like it.
I agree. So if you think you’ve done consent to avoid a specific act, you have really done consent. If you think you’ve done consent because you dont want to do or allow something, then you’ve really done consent.
