ABSTRACT
Among our moral requirements, there might be requirements to consent to authority in certain cases. In those cases, what happens if we don’t consent? Why not say that, just as consent is sometimes null if it fails to meet certain standards, likewise, non-consent can be defective too and null as a result? The nullity of non-consent means, roughly, that the authority situation is as it would have been if the non-consent had not occurred—that is, just as if consent had occurred. The view that authority could be grounded in what would have been a requirement to consent could be formulated as a novel form of a hypothetical consent theory of authority, based on what I have called “normative consent”. If this view can be sustained, authority can simply befall us, whether we have consented to it or not. After a brief sketch of the approach, previously developed elsewhere, I go more deeply than before into the questions I refer to as bypass objections (which are aimed at all hypothetical consent theories) and the question of what I shall call quasi-voluntarism. My main thesis is that, while normative consent theory, in certain versions, might indeed be quasi-voluntarist, even if it were not it would yet have moral force on other, non-voluntarist grounds.
