Consent covers certain actions but not others. If I lend you my new car, you are now free to use it to run errands but not to compete in a demolition derby. This is obvious enough, but determining exactly what I have permitted is much harder. Since you cannot read my mind, you cannot know for sure which uses of the car fall within the contours of my consent. But if you get this wrong, you use my car without my permission, and that is a rights violation. There is a lot riding on determining which actions are permitted by my consent. Fortunately, Tom Dougherty offers us a novel way to determine this in their excellent book The Scope of Consent.
It is natural to think that the scope of consent is fixed by what the consent-giver intended to permit. This captures the intuition that the scope of consent...
