ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 lays the foundation for the inquiry of this book. It explains the philosophical sources of an investigation into voluntary consent and provides a definition of its main terms. The former is critical because questions about voluntary consent are not part of an ahistorical episode of practical ethics but have grown from twentieth-century philosophy of action. The chapter explains the two major approaches to voluntary action in twentieth-century philosophy of action, which the author calls Ethical Models and Anscombian Models, and shows how the current debate on voluntary consent inherits key assumptions from these approaches. The chapter then turns to the latter and defines the key terms of the debate. This is important because the multidisciplinary literature on consent has produced several diverging definitions and thereby removed a common terminological basis. The chapter thereby provides working definitions of consent, voluntariness, and validity.
