Consent: its nature and normative relevance

By consenting to an agent’s action, we often seem to change its moral status and turn an action that is morally wrong into a permissible one. Consent can make the difference between visiting someone’s home and trespassing, between battery and surgery, and between rape and sex. Because of its relevance in cases like the ones just mentioned, consent plays an important role in, e.g., medical ethics and the philosophy of (criminal) law. 

While it is uncontroversial that consent often does make a difference to the moral status of an action, this phenomenon also gives rise to a number of questions. The aim of this conference is to provide an occasion for discussing some of the fundamental questions about consent, such as: 

• How does consent affect the moral status of an action and the normative situation of the agent who considers performing it? 
• Why is consent morally relevant at all? What justifies the central role that consent plays in medical ethics and elsewhere? 
• What exactly are the criteria for a person’s consent to be valid? For example, which aspects of the action does she have to be informed about and which can be ignored without invalidating consent? 
• How should we understand the notion proxy consent, which plays an important role in medical practice? Can someone really consent on another person’s behalf?