Consent in a Deeper Sense

Suppose that a person is asked for consent. However--either due to cognitive disability, or because she is intoxicated, or because she is a child--she is not able to think through this question in the way most of us would. When this person says ‘yes,’ does she thereby consent? We suggest intuitions about such cases can reflect two different senses of consent--one more superficial sense of consent, and one deeper sense. We provide empirical evidence that apparent disagreement or ambivalence about such cases in fact reflects complex reactions of simultaneously thinking that there is a sense in which the agent consents (superficial sense), but also thinking that there is an important sense in which she did not consent at all (deeper sense). We argue that these findings carry important implications for researching and discussing consent in philosophy and public discourse.