The Permissive Intention Principle
This chapter exploits the Autonomy Argument to motivate the Permissive Intention Principle for the scope of consent. According to this principle, the scope of consent is determined by the mental content of a consent-giver’s ‘permissive intentions’. These are intentions to release another person from duties that they owe to the consent-giver. The Autonomy Argument supports the Permissive Intention Principle because there is little value to the consent-giver controlling whether they consent unless they also control what they consent to. Since permissive intentions are propositional attitudes, we can think of these intentions’ contents in contrastive terms. These intentions distinguish two sets of possible interactions, according to whether someone intends to permit these interactions. That gives us a clear way of thinking about the contents of permissive intentions without adopting the idea that someone consents ‘under a description’.