Abstract

Suppose you come to my house and I invite you in. ‘I’m just heading out’, I say, ‘but make yourself at home’. I have consented to you remaining in my house, but what else? In your home, you put your feet up on the coffee table, so may you now do that in mine? If I complain that you’ve left crumbs from eating biscuits in my bed, can you defend yourself on the grounds that I told you to make yourself at home? These questions concern the scope of my consent. How we should ascertain the scope of someone's consent is the topic of Tom Dougherty's book.The book is divided into three main parts, each corresponding to a view about what fixes the scope of consent: the mental account, the successful communication account, and the evidential account, which Dougherty favours.Versions of the mental account have in common that they think consent can be granted without any behavioural signal. Provided that the person granting consent has the appropriate mental state, they can grant permission to the recipient of consent, even if they do nothing to communicate the consent. Proponents of these views, Dougherty argues, should adopt a principle according to which the scope of consent is fixed by what the consent-giver intends to permit. However, Dougherty rejects the mental account on the grounds that consent requires some sort of publicity so that we can hold each other accountable: ‘what you do in the privacy of your own mind is not enough to waive your rights in the public sphere’ (p. 60).