Topics Ethics

Question Imagine some activity in which all affected parties have given their free and informed consent to the activity. Is this activity now ethically neutral/permitted, no matter what it is, insofar as it only affects those who consented to it in the first place? Suppose a person joins a fraternity that advertises itself as being organized around (for instance) learning from older peers, sharing and helping one's fellow students, making friends and participating in extracurricular sports. After being initiated, though, the person finds that there is an informal tendency of older fraternity members to bully new initiates, to make constant unreasonable demands of them and ostracize them if they refuse, to take their things without returning them and to use the new initiates as a less experienced opposing team for easy victories in sports competitions. Does the person who joined the fraternity have any right to complain about how he is being treated? Or can he, since the behavior engaged in is all nominally part of the fraternity's "mission," do nothing besides either accept the abuse or quit?

Accepted:
January 3, 2012

Comments

It sounds to me as if the notion of "informed consent" is being stretched past reasonable limits in your case. If it is well-known among members of the fraternity that new initiates are bullied, etc., it does not seem to me as if consent can be informed adequately if this is not made known to the prospective initiates before they pledge. At most colleges and universities, moreover, there are clear rules about what is and is not appropriate in these affairs, and anything that goes outside these rules is clearly not made exempt of sanction simply because the initiate "gave consent."

More broadly, society has a reasonable interest in ensuring that somethings don't happen to its citizens--even if those citizens were to give consent. Slavery is a good example. Maybe someone might actually think it was a great idea to become the chattel slave of another, and might give his or her consent to such an arrangement. Even so, the arrangement would still be illegal, and I think the same goes for whether the arrangement could ever be moral, consent or no. Several other examples from law (where most would have similar moral responses) are readily available, including polygamy and various forms of economic practices. We do not function under "buyer beware" not should a scam be accepted simply because the victim consented to it.