The Fallacy of Consent

Excerpt

Central to some theories of liberal states is a commitment to two major ideas. The first idea is that the fundamental rights of individuals to their persons and property which a legitimate state protects are pre-existing rights. The pre-existing rights are usually taken to include some form of enforcement rights, the function of which is to allow individuals to repel and rectify aggressions by others to their most basic rights. The second idea is that the fundamental rights of individuals may be infringed neither on paternalistic nor on consequentialist grounds. The rights of an individual are thus taken to establish an area of moral freedom or sovereignty that has normative preeminence over considerations having to do with the social or even personal good. Thus, according to this perspective, a state is merely in charge of assuring its residents that their pre-existing moral claims to individual sovereignty are respected. Yet if we hold such a particular liberal doctrine, it is not initially clear how the existence of a state could be morally permissible in the first place. …