Consent as the Modern Leftist Moral Compass

[Black Man Underwear]

I've had a theory going for a while: consent is the moral basis for ideological leftism. It's their way to find a moral anchor from an entirely relativist worldview.

If you want a peek into what I'm thinking of, browsing r/antinatalism is a good start. Consent is their biggest issue: because nobody consented to being birthed, birth is a form of abuse.

I'll explain the two parts of my theory here:

• No matter how good or necessary the act, it is automatically abusive if consent can't be involved, like with having a dog. Even if you do it in the most moral possible way, you never got explicit consent and therefore it's abuse.
• No matter how evil or selfish the act, it is automatically good if consent is given, even if traditionally that consent would be considered invalid. A leftist would argue that a dog can't verbally consent, but if it didn't rebel then fucking it is okay.

I'll give some other examples to illustrate my point:

• Abortion isn't murder because the mother consented to it.
• Harvesting eggs is murder because the hen didn't consent.
• Because chickens can't consent, raising them is a form of slavery to begin with.
• Bestiality is fine if the dog "consents" by not resisting.
• Owning a dog is a form of slavery.
• Objectifying and catcalling women is wrong, unless it's consentual with compensation.
• Divorce is always justified because marriage is voluntary and a child's well being is never an excuse.
• Gay marriage, even with increased STDs, domestic abuse and sex crime risks, is acceptable because both parties consent.
• Transgenderism at any age is acceptable because consent was given, even uninformed consent.

Notice how most of these rely on dubious theories about what the first party is thinking.

• Dogs not reacting violently to sexual advances is a form of consent.
• Hens not reacting violently to eggs being taken is not a form of consent.
• Childrens' opinions are irrelavent in gay marriage or divorce, but not with transgenderism or sexual advances.

This is because this perversion of a moral compass exists for justification of stupidity at best, at worst justification of total immorality.

They believe consent is always valid no matter who gives it, as long as it is given in some way. If it is or isn't given is in the eye of the beholder because this is all nonsense, but this is how I think they think.

Not all of these points will be shared by all leftists, but the premise stands.

 

[Blindeye]

I think you're onto something, when you have no other bedrock for morality this mindset is sort of a natural permutation of the Golden Rule, "I am ok with this being done to me, therefore it is good." It makes perfect sense if you believe everything is meaningless and it's always justified to pursue your own interests

 

[Hulkster]

I find it funny how the same people who justify their beliefs based solely on consent take offense to bestiality and incest. I remember seeing some dumb lefty video essayist make a video about zoophiles that included a trigger warning for bestiality. While having a trans flag hanging in the background, how do they not see the irony of their beliefs?

 

[Disastrously Dumb]

Liberal Arts College Graduate working as a Paramedic: "Oh My God. You've been shot. Do I have your Consent to treat you?"
Man: "What the fu-- Yes! I need fucking treatment"
Liberal Arts College Graduate working as a Paramedic: "Alright then. Wait. No. Are you giving me consent under duress? thats not really consenting"
Man: "FUCKING HELL IM DYING HERE"
Liberal Arts College Graduate working as a Paramedic: "I CANT DO ANYTHING UNLESS YOU GIVE ME YOUR CONSENT"
Man: "AAAHHH FUCK.. YES! YES YES! YES! HURRY UP"
Liberal Arts College Graduate working as a Paramedic: "YES TO WHAT? THE CONSENT? OR GIVING ME CONSENT UNDER DURESS? ITS TWO DIFFERENT THINGS"
Man: -dies from bloodloss and cringe-


And there you have it, the modern day leftist utopia that they want the entire world to conform to.

 

[Tremolo]

They believe consent is always valid no matter who gives it, as long as it is given in some way. If it is or isn't given is in the eye of the beholder because this is all nonsense, but this is how I think they think.

Except if a woman decides to have sex (or even worse, flirt) with a man, and then five years later realizes "oh I didn't actually like him that much", then this becomes a moot point and the man in question is an evil rapist because "well of course consent can be revoked at any time you stupid fucking chud" or "Well sure she said yes but when she said yes you didn't even consider that social context and gender factors obviously made that yes no hmm??", and that's not even a fringe liberal opinion, everyone left of centre thinks this.

Sounds like a nice postulation on paper and I agree for a lot of the median of them "muh consent" is never far from the forefront of their mind, but contrarianism for the sake of it to the prior western standard of the 20th century is what defines leftism and its ideologies, what they then see as the unwritten rules of consent in these standards were flipped on their head somewhere along the road and that's what led to the examples in OP.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

The leftist view of consent is incredibly limited, I was having a discussion with one about whether drugs or prostitution should be legal and all he would say is "as long as it's between two consenting adults it's fine.". I can see where they're coming from but leftists never seem to consider that things people consent to will have a broader impact on society.

 

[VF-1J Armored Valkyrie]

You're gently tapping on the split between utilitarian and deontological ethics.

Leftist and progressive ideology, especially contemporary versions, is generally a pure utilitarian standpoint; rules don't matter, agreements don't matter, authority doesn't matter, all that matters is harm and outcomes. The issue of children's consent is moot to them compared to avoiding harmful outcomes from not enabling the social contagion. The rules of due process in sex crimes are made moot by the harmful outcomes of not treating all allegations as true. The authority of a nation to police it's borders is made moot by the harmful outcomes of turning people away and/or deporting them when they slip through. The agreements between workers and their bosses or rentors and their landlords are moot compared to the desired outcomes of leftist economics.

The issue is that 'harm', at least in the way it is used by pure utilitarians, is a meaningless subjectivity, so in practice this becomes a rationalization machine that can manufacture pseudoethical justifications for practically anything. All thats needed is for the subjective sense of harm to be lesser within the desired outcome. The mob believes that the harm caused to you by your brutal dekulakization and the exploitation of your dependent family is outweighed by the positive outcomes for the mob that are available if they take all your shit, beat you to death, rape your wife, and enslave your children.

This is ultimately the reason why everything progs and leftists do is completely demonic; they have constructed an ideological worldview that has no principles except 'do whatever you want to whoever you want and then cast it as ethical harm reduction'.

Now to round back to your original line of inquiry, consent is ultimately a deontological concept that a utilitarian prog leftist has no philosophical conception of. Consent operates on the human agreement that violating consent is wrong; without that, you can make a flimsy harm analysis to say that it's bad, but this can never rise above that issue of the subjective sense of harm. Progressive leftists actually have no argument against the violation of consent, and actually violate consent all the time, because it relies on ethical principles that they categorically reject.

 

[Whatevermancer]

• Dogs not reacting violently to sexual advances is a form of consent.
• Hens not reacting violently to eggs being taken is not a form of consent.

Who even thinks that?
In fact, if you wanted to destroy the immoral leftists, you should've said the opposite, that keeping chickens is a-okay, but raping the dog is bad cause dogs can't consent, as if chickens consent to being kept in cramped cages and have their eggs taken away. Cause that's how a typical leftist/atheist thinks, and that way of thinking is quite hypocritical.
Not me, though, cause I'm aware that all morality is based upon ｖｉｂｅｓ and the reason raping animals is bad is cause it ｆｅｅｌｓ wrong.

 

[VF-1J Armored Valkyrie]

Not me, though, cause I'm aware that all morality is based upon ｖｉｂｅｓ and the reason raping animals is bad is cause it ｆｅｅｌｓ wrong.

Unironically accurate, there's a threshhold of self-awareness in animals that seems to be the determining factor in moralistic behavior. Animals below a certain level of cognitive ability are incapable of producing the f e e l z that run human ethics and morality. Obviously this doesn't mean that you become more ethical just by being more intelligent (chimps and dolphins say hi), but a level of self-awareness that doing 'bad' things makes you feel 'bad' is clearly required.

This is also why pure ethical outlooks never work. Humans are inherently self-deceptive and will naturally gravitate to shit like subjective sense of harm or a self-serving basis of rules as a way to rationalize what they already want to do. This is why if you're going to study ethics, you need to study all of it so that different perspectives can be checked against each other. Anyone going into ethics with the idea of ignoring everything but the 'good stuff' is just looking for a word game they can use to fool their critics.

 

[MadStan]

This is really weird thinking from the author. I suspect they haven't left their home or state for some time and spends too much time on the internet. This worked he describes, does not exist anywhere I have ever seen.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

@OP
The problem isn't that "consent" is being treated as a moral compass, the problem is that consent gets utilized as a moral placeholder in a worldview that doesn't have a stable compass whatsoever. Once it's detached from ownership, "consent" is floating in space, invoking it is a signal of "legitimacy", but it has no fixed meaning anymore. That's why the same dipshits who say "the chicken didn't consent" also say "the child did consent". It's not a contradiction in their framework, because there is no framework. That kind of discourse is not grounded in ethics, it's just a performance, a pretense of principle

Consent only has normative weight when it corresponds to rightful control (property). You can only consent to the use of what you own. Without that anchor, "consent" is like a cargo cult virtue, something that's gestured at to bless whatever needs a retroactive moral cover. It no longer is a constraint of behavior, it becomes a rationalization for it
Like, the examples you gave don't show that there's a warped principle, they show that there is no principle at all, and all we have is a smokescreen of improvised rationalizations to hide the fact that there's a black void where ethics would have been

 

[FunPosting101]

Honestly, I just think it's a retarded extension of the reasonable idea that what mentally sound adults do in the privacy of their own home is their own business and nobody else's.

 

[Atton Risk]

Honestly, I just think it's a retarded extension of the reasonable idea that what mentally sound adults do in the privacy of their own home is their own business and nobody else's.

That makes sense until you have a public health crisis

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

I've had a theory going for a while: consent is the moral basis for ideological leftism. It's their way to find a moral anchor from an entirely relativist worldview.

Correct. They can't explain why consent even matters, of course, because under their own worldview it wouldn't.

Abortion isn't murder because the mother consented to it.

Typically they'd say the other lifeform involved requires its consent too, like with the dog, and they'd bemoan the destruction of eagle eggs, or a rare non-sentient alien lifeform brought back from Mars, but when it comes to murdering babies it's okay because what REALLY underpins their worldview is selfishness even when it's inconsistent or hypocritical.

They believe consent is always valid no matter who gives it, as long as it is given in some way.

In theory and as they state it, yes, but as indicated above, they play fast and loose with the rules. They're really more just like Satanists usually.

Not me, though, cause I'm aware that all morality is based upon ｖｉｂｅｓ and the reason raping animals is bad is cause it ｆｅｅｌｓ wrong.

This is common too, if they're not Satanists they're just emotional, their current feelings dictate everything.

This is really weird thinking from the author.

It's an observation of fact you can't dispute, so you rely on ad hominem.

 

[Squanto Airi]

• Bestiality is fine if the dog "consents" by not resisting.
• Owning a dog is a form of slavery.

Oh hey YMS

 

[HOMO FOR LIFE RETURNS]

It really is a biazzaro world. And there are those who seek to supplement the lack of morality with subhuman religion like Islam because that's how the left sees humanity: subhumans.

 

[wholetthegodsout]

I think your onto something. But there are layers of complexity.

Just off the top of my head. How does mass immigration into the west fit into this? Opinion polls show that is highly unpopular. I assume though they can always go back to what you were saying in that a person didnt choose where they were born and should be free to move about, but at the same time shouldn't I be able to exclude people from a community if enough people dont consent. They seem to assume that the native people are going to consent to them being there. That it is all propaganda making people not consent.

 

[Black Man Underwear]

I think your onto something. But there are layers of complexity.

Just off the top of my head. How does mass immigration into the west fit into this? Opinion polls show that is highly unpopular. I assume though they can always go back to what you were saying in that a person didnt choose where they were born and should be free to move about, but at the same time shouldn't I be able to exclude people from a community if enough people dont consent. They seem to assume that the native people are going to consent to them being there. That it is all propaganda making people not consent.

>The immigrant consented. How does this affect you?

The complexity only goes so deep as to support their agenda.

 

[FunPosting101]

That makes sense until you have a public health crisis

If you're referring to HIV, that wouldn't be an issue at all if homosexuals were willing to use condoms. Seems a bit silly to discard a perfectly reasonable idea due to a small number of bad actors (bug chasers, basically).

 

[Atton Risk]

If you're referring to HIV, that wouldn't be an issue at all if homosexuals were willing to use condoms. Seems a bit silly to discard a perfectly reasonable idea due to a small number of bad actors (bug chasers, basically).

There is an element of truth to that however promiscuity culture is not limited purely to homosexuals. It is also deeply suspect if we can successfully control the spread of other diseases because of the natural selection factions associated with them. That being said the advent of nexplanon condom has fallen off a cliff more or less globally, which I am fine with except the cost of all of this is returned to the tax payers in the end.