You never signed anything. No contract, no agreement, no handshake with the state. Yet every day, the government claims authority over you—taxing your income, restricting your movements, punishing your transgressions. On what grounds?

This is the consent problem, and it's been haunting political philosophy for centuries. Every modern government claims legitimacy, but almost none can point to actual consent from their citizens. We're all governed by rules we never explicitly agreed to follow. So how can any political authority be justified?

The classic response to the consent problem is tacit consent—the idea that by living in a country, using its roads, and accepting its protections, you've implicitly agreed to its authority. John Locke famously argued that remaining within a territory signals acceptance of its government.

But this argument crumbles under scrutiny. You didn't choose where you were born. Emigration requires resources, skills, and receiving countries willing to accept you. Telling someone they consent to governance because they haven't left is like telling a medieval serf they consent to feudalism because they haven't crossed the ocean.

The birth lottery problem is stark: your political obligations are determined entirely by circumstances beyond your control. A child born in a democracy and one born under authoritarianism face radically different constraints on their freedom—neither chose their situation. If consent must be voluntary to be meaningful, geographical accident cannot serve as its foundation.

Takeaway

Genuine consent requires real alternatives. When your only options are obey or leave everything you've ever known, calling that a choice stretches the word beyond recognition.

Facing the weakness of tacit consent, philosophers developed a more sophisticated approach: hypothetical consent. The question shifts from 'Did you agree?' to 'Would a rational person agree?'

John Rawls's famous thought experiment asks what principles people would choose behind a 'veil of ignorance'—not knowing their future position in society. The idea is that rational agents, uncertain whether they'd be rich or poor, would choose fair institutions protecting everyone. This hypothetical agreement supposedly justifies real political authority.

It's an elegant solution with an uncomfortable gap. Hypothetical consent isn't actual consent. Saying 'you would have agreed if you were rational' doesn't bind the real, flesh-and-blood person who never actually agreed to anything. Critics argue this approach smuggles in philosophers' preferred conclusions under the guise of rationality. The veil of ignorance doesn't discover what people would choose—it constructs conditions that produce predetermined outcomes.

Takeaway

Hypothetical consent reveals what we think political institutions should look like, but it cannot generate the same moral force as genuine agreement. Imagined contracts don't bind real people.

Contemporary democratic theory largely abandons the search for actual consent. Instead, it grounds legitimacy in something different: the right to participate in collective decisions. You may not have consented to every law, but you had a voice in the process that created them.

This shift matters because it changes what justifies authority. The question isn't whether you agreed to specific outcomes, but whether you were treated as an equal participant in determining them. Democratic procedures—voting, representation, constitutional protections—create legitimacy not through consent but through inclusion.

The participation model has its own problems. What about permanent minorities who consistently lose votes? What about those excluded from meaningful participation by poverty, discrimination, or systematic disadvantage? Democratic legitimacy requires more than formal voting rights—it demands genuine political equality. When participation becomes mere ritual, the legitimacy it supposedly creates rings hollow.

Takeaway

Democratic legitimacy rests not on everyone agreeing with outcomes, but on everyone having genuine standing to shape them. Procedure matters as much as results.

No political theory has fully solved the consent problem. Every attempt—tacit consent, hypothetical agreement, democratic participation—faces serious objections. This doesn't mean all governments are equally illegitimate, but it should make us humble about claims to authority.

Perhaps the honest answer is that political legitimacy is always imperfect and always contested. The best we can do is build institutions that come closest to treating people as genuine participants in their own governance—and remain perpetually open to challenge.