"Nobody can touch you without your consent"
Some exceptions and why they matter
“Nobody can touch you without your consent” seems right. When I entered the phrase into Google, the AI stated that it was
fundamentally correct and a core principle of bodily autonomy, personal boundaries, and law.
Critically, it’s current consent that matters. Someone can agree ahead of time (even enthusiastically agree) to sex or surgery, but if they change their mind the moment the contact is about to happen, their choice must be respected.
This principle does not always apply, though. Exploring those cases where it doesn’t hold can tell us some interesting things about how we think about autonomy and morality.
For starters, this principle doesn’t apply to everyone. Parents manhandle their children all the time—sometimes for their own good, as when the kid is trying to stick his fingers into an electrical socket, but sometimes for the parents’ convenience, like when forcing a screaming toddler into a car seat because you have to take her home from the supermarket. Children do not have the autonomy rights that the principle assumes.
You can override this principle in emergencies. If you yank someone onto the sidewalk if they’re about to be creamed by an oncoming truck, that’s totally fine.
You can use force to keep your drug-tripping friend from jumping out a window or your drunk neighbor from getting into his car. (Maybe in some relevant sense, these individuals become like children.)
You’re allowed limited contact with strangers. You can gently tap someone on the elbow (but not the butt) to get them to move aside on the moving walkway.
The principle doesn’t apply to those who commit certain immoral/illegal acts. If someone is attacking you or another person, you are permitted to touch them. And law enforcement officers—and sometimes regular people—can touch someone against their will to keep them from committing a crime or escaping from the scene of a crime. In old movies, a man grabs a woman’s purse and runs away; there is a scream, someone shouts, “Stop, thief!”, and the man is chased and tackled to the ground, very much without his consent—but while the thief doesn’t like it, I bet he doesn’t feel morally wronged.
There are many questions that these exceptions and related ones raise. (When does a child get old enough to acquire autonomy rights? What sorts of crimes are tackle-worthy?) But I’m more interested in cases like this:
Someone is trying to touch me, and I really don’t want them to. I move away and try to hit the person to make them stop. They touch me anyway.
Have they done something wrong? Not necessarily. Have you ever boxed? In boxing, someone tries to punch you—often right in the kisser! When boxing, you don’t want to be punched, not even a little bit, and you try very hard to avoid it. It’s unwanted physical contact if anything is.
This isn’t a true counterexample to the principle, though. The main difference between a boxing match and a violent assault (other than the gloves) is that, for boxing, you agreed to enter a situation in which this unwanted touching happens. You don’t want to be hit, but you have consented to being hit. A less violent example of unwanted touching is tag, where the whole goal is not to be touched, and yet you agree to letting people try.
Boxing and tag fall within a broader category of sports and games in which participants consent to the possibility of experiencing unwanted events. I’ll be unhappy if you take my queen, sink my battleship, or call my bluff—and I’ll work hard to keep these events from happening—but such activities are only fun if these negative outcomes are possible, and so I consent to them.
Then there’s sex.
