Consent and the Formation of Preferences

Under ideal conditions, explicit consent and related actions usually change the moral facts in a distinctive way: they make something permissible that was previously impermissible. But they don’t do this if the consent is coerced. And it seems they also don’t do it if the preferences on which the consent is based were formed in particular ways: if they were formed via certain mechanisms under pressure from unjust social forces, for instance. In this paper, I describe a range of mechanisms by which our preferences might be formed, determine which of those can give rise to preferences that ground effective consent and which cannot, and explain why each mechanism falls on its side of the division.