What’s the Difference Between Decision and Consent?
Jul 10th, 2009 by Micah Tillman | 3 Comments |
In a comment the other day, Jeff asked what sense it made to talk about decisions that someone hadn’t actually made.
I had claimed, you see, that “a culture is a set of fundamental decisions about how to look at a broad range of things in life (food, friends, family, country, religion, government, the arts, clothing, careers, entertainment, living quarters, transportation, etc)” that “[i]n large part, no one ever makes,” but rather “consents to.”
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In response to Jeff’s question, I tried to provide a couple examples of decisions that he, as a member of the culture to which I also belong, makes without actually making them.
What I was trying to do is to get at the difference between decision and consent.
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At its root, the difference between deciding and consenting, is that when you consent, you’re going along with a decision someone else has made.
However, the more I think about it, the more I see how many different types of phenomena fit that description.
For example, to go along with another person’s decision could mean:
- to decide to make the same decision she had made,
- to follow her in making the same decision (without consciously deciding to),
- to “accept” a decision as having been “made for you,”
- to follow a decision without even realizing a decision has been made,
- to make a “typical” or “normal” or “usual” or “expected” choice amongst several options (with or without explicitly considering the other options, or with or without even realizing there are other options),
- etc.
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Therefore, I’m going to take a post or three in the future to work out, for myself, a good, thorough description of all the possible situations in which one could say that someone has somehow made a decision without actually making it (whether by consenting to it, or by making a decision about it, or by imitating it, etc.).
In other words, I’m going to be trying to work out what precisely is the difference between decision and consent.
Thanks. You’ve spelled out some things that were scurrying around in the damp recesses of my brain when you broached this topic the other day.
It seems like the phenemonology of decisions is really important here. (Am I using that word corectly?) What I mean is, there are frequent disagreements around whether X actually counts as a choice.
There are numerous reasons why we might say “I had no choice but to do such-and-such.” The only functional such a statement really seems to have is to dispute some one else’s belief that X actually made a choice.
I guess I’m saying that I don’t see #3 (To accept a decision as having been made for you) as a distinct member of the list you provide. Instead, I’d suggest it’s a justification for #’s 1,2, 4, 5, and 6.
Sometimes, it’ll be a valid justification; other times not so much. I think that some of this dependence will be on a case-by-case basis.
You indeed used the terms “phenomenology” correctly there. Well done! :-)
And good point about disputes over whether someone has actually made a choice. I . . . well, I’ll just have to deal with that in future posts.
[...] As I said before, I need to work out for myself exactly what the difference is between decision and consent. [...]