Social choice theory deals with mutual compatibilities of various choice criteria or desiderata. It thus provides a natural angle to look at methods for finding consensus. We distinguish between three types of settings of consensus-reaching. Firstly, we may be looking for the correct decision. This is typically the setting where the participants have different degrees of expertise on an issue t...

The objective of this work is to try to define and calculate the optimal growth path, in the presence of exogenous technical change, without resorting to the discounted-sum criterion. The solution suggested is to consider an optimality criterion expressing an Allais-anonymous intergenerational consensus. The partial characterization of consensual optimality was made possible thanks to the decom...

In order to test the proposition that imagining carrying out an unacceptable non-consensual act can evoke contamination-related feelings in the perpetrator, 4 connected experiments were carried out involving male students. The effects of the experimental procedure were enhanced by the introduction of a theme of betrayal which boosted the feelings of contamination and urges to wash. The non-cons...

The current practice of non-consensual medical treatment of hunger-striking asylum seekers in detention needs closer inquiry. An Australian Government regulation empowers the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA) to authorise non-consensual medical treatment for a person in immigration detention if they are at risk of physical harm, but there are doubts abou...

Sex is often conceptualized either as wanted and consensual or as unwanted and nonconsensual, reflecting an implicit model of wanting that is unidimensional and dichotomous and that conflates wanting and consenting. This study had three objectives: developing a multidimensional model for conceptualizing the wantedness of a sexual act, using this model to compare women's experiences with rape an...

Consistency is the hallmark of a coherent ethical philosophy. When considering the morality of particular behaviour, one should look to identify comparable situations and test one's approach to the former against one's approach to the latter. The obvious comparator for animal experiments is non-consensual experiments on people. In both cases, suffering and perhaps death is knowingly caused to t...

A common notion of vision, consistent with this excerpt from the first paragraph of David Marr’s seminal book [1], is gained by considering the predicament of a person with a searchlight placed in a pitch-dark room full of unfamiliar furniture. One would hope that, by swinging the beam around, the observer will be able to recognize the objects present in the room (a cat here, an aquarium there,...

A central tenet of medical ethics holds that it is permissible to perform a medical intervention on a competent individual only if that individual has given informed consent to the intervention. Yet it occasionally seems morally permissible to carry out non-consensual medical interventions on competent individuals for the purpose of infectious disease control (IDC). We describe two different mo...

Six patients with intraocular hypertension received 0.5% timolol or saline uniocularly with saline to the other eye, and the intraocular pressure was measured by applanation tonometry at 0, 30, 60, 120, and 240 minutes. Falls in pressure were seen in both the timolol treated and consensual eyes. The same experiments were conducted after pretreatment of the consensual eyes with guanethidine 5%. ...