The slide comes from the Interwebs, and is delightful in its reflexivity.  Radical misunderstanding of the nature of the human person, the ontology of property, and the meaning of “rights,” however, has consequences that are by no means so clever and amusing.  Autonomy is by no means a first-order good (though moral freedom, rightly understood, is something like one).  Setting it up as a first-order good, a “fundamental human right,” is sure to destabilize both understanding and law:

But when does a person actually possess this autonomy to which he is said to have a right? We are constantly influenced by the people around us and the circumstances in which we find ourselves. I may feel emotionally down on a dreary day in November when the daylight hours are diminishing, yet I am likely to feel cheerful on a freezing day three months later when the days are lengthening, the sun is shining, and the snow is diffusing its light everywhere. My mood on each of these days will inevitably affect the decisions I make. If I am wise, I will postpone making important decisions until I am feeling better. But what if my capacity to access this wisdom is hindered by my dark mood, which for me often leads to a loss of appetite? What if it takes only a good meal to improve my emotional state, thus leading me to decide differently than I might have an hour earlier? When does my autonomy kick in?

(source: The Courts and the Impossibility of Autonomy | David T. Koyzis | First Things)

Obvious and less obvious evidence that we are beginning to come to grips with this misconception of autonomy (I took a potshot at it recently) weaves its way through a great many important conversations about the problem of pornography, a problem intimately tied to almost every other social problem in our culture:

• Carl Trueman, Greg Forster, and Carl Trueman again engage in a tremendously useful conversation here;
• Greg’s comments on the culture-making role of businesses should also be weighed into this conversation;
• This column linking pornography to the vice acedia is first-rate;
• Here are a couple parallel pieces, tending to underscore the confusion of our understanding;
• The problem has led to a call for a specific, fresh teaching on the matter from American bishops;
• And has led to the publishing of at least one such authoritative teaching work.

For many, this is a light thing….

Realize, however, that whatever the perspective we begin from, we are talking about something that has become utterly commonplace in our culture:

As a U.S. Justice Department memo warned, “Never before in the history of telecommunications media in the United States has so much indecent (and obscene) material been so easily accessible by so many minors in so many American homes with so few restrictions.” If that sounds about right, it will be sobering to consider that it was written in 1996—before wireless broadband, before iPads, before selfies and sexting. Before pornography took over twelve percent of the Internet, with more than 25 million sites today raking in over $5 billion a year. Before it was considered common practice, as it is today, for porn consumption to begin with a first encounter around age 11 and go on to radically shape the ideas that teens and young adults have about sexual intimacy.

(source: Bought With A Price — PDF)

And, as anyone not born since the default of reason in our culture could have told you, this acceptance leaves its mark in the body and the mind, the animal and the rational.  We cannot fail to be shaped by our participation in this world:

Pornography is not simply changing our tastes through its representation of sex as a self-directed and recreational activity; it is literally changing the way our brains think. That makes the task of defending traditional morality in the public square much more difficult.

It also exposes the specious nature of moral arguments built on the principle of consent. These assume that the nature of consent is constant, absolute, and easily established. As Kheriaty points out, it is none of these. Consent is always complicated by specific context. Furthermore, the principle of consent assumes at a minimum that individuals have sovereign rights over the range of purposes and uses to which their own bodies can be put. Yet the evidence of the impact of pornography on the brain indicates that the individual is not consciously in control of determining the nature of that range. Pornography alters the sexual desires and transforms the understanding of the body’s purpose not by ethical or even aesthetic persuasion. Rather it does so by altering the physiology of the brain itself, a process beyond the conscious control of the consumer of pornography, and which thus subverts the assumptions of the principle of consent.

One would not allow alcoholics to have the last word on liquor licensing laws or crack addicts on drug policy. Yet when it comes to sexual morality, that is the kind of world in which we now live. The availability of pornography and the near universality of its consumption are today facts of human existence, at least in the West, and are likely to remain so. That means that moral thinking is thus at the mercy of an industry whose interests do not lie in promoting the common good unless that common good is understood in terms of unfettered sexual license.

(source: In Bondage to Pornography | Carl R. Trueman | First Things)

Which leads us back to where we started.  The notion that the “consent” given by an “autonomous” individual can form either a moral or a legal standard all by itself, without a surrounding cultural context that conforms such “consent” to what can actually be intended by humans, is at best insufficient to the good it purports to uphold.  If our aim is autonomy, and our standard is momentary consent, then what is it that we need anyone else for?  Are there any relationships that are not merely “using” others in moments when their autonomy is impaired by “need” or “want”?  We are left alone, trying to define the minimum of exploitation in a reality conceived as intrinsically exploitative.

The weight of what is denied in “liberated” sexuality–that is, that a conjugal union is in every case potentially life-altering in ways that go beyond any possible reckoning beforehand, and that the proportion of the consequences to the desire is itself descriptive of the act’s proper intelligibility and discipline–reappears in the judicial, legislative, and social machinery ordered to accounting for and enforcing the meaning of “consent.”  The explicit “consent” required to justify the act makes truly “consensual” sex–even sex “between consenting adults”–increasingly unlikely to occur at all.

[…]Rule of law suffers as legislators and judges are turned into diviners of increasingly minute definitions of “consent” which can never be mutually well-informed and proportionate to the consequences (surely at some point we will realize that ad hoc sexual encounters are, pretty much by definition, an unconscionable bargain). The problem is that “consent” can never properly be understood while we attempt to deny the reality that we consent to in honest conjugal union.

(source: The Deconstruction of Consent; Or, Re-Inventing the Wheel | Hang Together)

The predictable result:  regret and recrimination.

Q.E.D.