 But whose consent, and to what? Not the consent of our ancestors, for such an “original” contract, as it was called in the seventeenth century, can have no authority over those who did not agree to it. A voluntarist theory requires the actual consent of each subject. But this cannot mean consent to every law or application thereof. The evident absurdity of that idea leads some to declare consent “intrinsically implausible”: As Finnis puts it,