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Comment by regularfry | Hacker News Reader

Oh, I understand the concept. It's broken. If I am "consenting", but not to the action that's actually happening, I am not, in fact, consenting. If I believe that I am consenting to sex with someone that's not my husband, in that moment I am not consenting to sex with my husband. If they then have sex with me, knowing that that is my state of mind, that is non-consensual.

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You do not understand the concept:

I decide I want to try a bit of "something new", and I pay someone to induce a Capgras delusion in me. At which point, my wife seems like an imposter. I wish to have sex with this new person, and I am also sure my real wife has given me permission to, prior to this. You can tell me as much as you like that it's "really" my wife, but, in my delusion, I am quite sure it's just someone who looks like her, and delightfully and consentfully have sex with the imposter new person -- who is giving their consent the whole time -- with all the thrill that entails. Afterwards, the delusion wears off, and I realise it was just sex with my wife. Everyone has consented at every point to this.

I do understand the concept. You have not changed my understanding with this description.

If I am suffering a delusion, and you know that, then you know that I am not mentally competent. You know that, if I agree to something, I do not correctly understand what I am agreeing to. Any expression of consent you extract from me is invalid.

This seems extreme. You are consenting to be deluded, knowing everything that will come afterwards. And the consenting during as well

But you don't know everything that will come afterwards. You know what's planned.

The consent during cannot be valid. It's not informed: in fact it's specifically misled, and that is known to the other participant.

So you are saying there is no way for two willing, informed adults to consent to this happening?

Yes. That is what I'm saying. If consent needs to both informed and continuous, it's not possible. It's fundamentally broken.

Yes, that’s why you’d get consent before hand

Consent beforehand doesn't bind or imply consent during the act. If you're saying consent beforehand counts, you're saying that it's not possible for anything to happen that would cause me to change my mind if I was in a mentally competent state.

This discussion boils down to if consent must be continually given or if you can give it ahead of time. And I'm not up to date, but I believe it's not a settled discussion even in academia. The problem of continual consent is that if it must be continually given then you can never give your partner permission to initiate sex with you before you wake up, or agree that it's fine to have sex while drunk, and these are things a nontrivial amount of couples want and are not harmed by, which means such a rule is inadequate.

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