Consent is not the test of morality. . .

All over the place it seems that people are in trouble.  Even President Trump has had his share of women who complained about his unwanted advances.  From politics to religion to education to the military, sexual activity without consent is being identified, exposed, and decried as immoral.  While never wishing to presume that non-consensual sexual activity is okay, neither should we fall into the trap of saying that consent is what makes something moral.  This is certainly true of sex but it is also true of a myriad of things.  Approval, even the mass approval of a whole society, does not constitute morality anymore than permission.  This is the dilemma we are in.  Absent any real and certain boundaries of good or evil, right or wrong, we are left with the flimsy foundation of mere consent.  Even in law the issue can often boil down to consent -- not simply whether the victim gave their consent but also if they were able to give their consent.

On the sex side of things, we are approaching the new terrain of allowing minors to give their sexual consent.  It is as if we are writing pedophilia out of the diagnostic book of disorders and reducing the whole thing to the same playing field we have long used for adult sexual relations.  Consent is everything.  When it comes to children, the last remaining hurdle to removing all legal and moral barriers will be the question of the ability of a minor to give consent.  It will certainly be interesting to see how this one works itself out in the court of public opinion but that is already the direction being pursued in our neighbor to the North as well as in other so-called enlightened nations of the West.  Without the ability to say that certain things are always right or wrong, acceptable or intolerable, consent is the only remaining question to be resolved.

That is the flaw in this premise -- namely, that consent is what makes something moral.  Already we have gotten to that point with premarital sex and that was a longtime in the making.  Now we are seeing extramarital sex being judged by the same standard.  If it is not always wrong, then the standard applying is left up to the participants to judge and that is largely consent.  Believe it or not, that is the base of the issue of transgenderism.  It is not simply that people are saying they have a gender which does not relate to their reproductive organs or chromosomes but also that society has given consent that to this being the only legitimate standard to judge the truth and morality of the thing.  Again, when it comes to minors the issue is largely consent.  It is moral and may even be compelling to use puberty blockers or surgical intervention when the child has decided that their supposed gender is at odds with their body.  The question moves away from the morality of such treatment to whether or not the child is able to consent to such treatment and at what age or by what standard this ability resides in that child.  So no longer are we arguing about the morality of the treatment but simply if the child, freed to judge for themselves, is able to make that judgment.  

We have also used consent to decide if, for example, suicide itself is moral.  We seem perfectly willing to walk back several millennium of prohibitions simply on this basis of consent.  In the same way, my body, my choice is really an appeal to consent as well.  If I decide it is needed or good (for me), then abortion should be allowed without restriction and left to the woman alone to decide (not even in conversation with her physician).  Consent becomes the only thing that matters. 

Even conservatives can appeal to consent.  When some object to the abject inequities of capitalism, billionaires whose wealth increases seemingly endlessly while workers earn proportionately smaller pieces of the success pie, consent is the justification.  It is not, so they say, inequitable if the workers agree to work for their wage and if the system judges it fair.  Consent is then the litmus test of the fairness of employers to employees.  As appealing as this might seem, it applies the same relative standard to morality in his instance as it does to the other instances.

This is a neat way to judge everything and particularly sin.  It leaves most of us off the hook if we have obtained consent from others (and therefore their approval) and it allows us the freedom to decide what is sin and what it not.  This is, in effect, what most liberal Christian churches have done.  Sin is not about God's will and purpose or even about commandments and prohibitions in Scripture.  It is only about harming others (unless they consent to it).  That does a very fine job of removing most of what used to pass for sin from any test of morality beyond consent -- yours or the consent of those affected by your words or actions.  In such a situation, the confessor can skip over sins that were done consensually and the father confessor need not jump to conclusions about something being wrong but merely inquires about whether or not it was done by agreement and with permission.  In this way, it not only narrows sin but also narrows the Gospel.  Forgiveness becomes something small and occasional instead of being something profound and essential to everyday life.  Worse, it puts the person giving consent in the driver's seat of God, deciding by that consent if something was wrong or not.