Consent as a Biopolitical Device: Contractualism and Sex Magic

Luigi Corvaglia

In 2001, in Germany, Armin Meiwes placed an advertisement seeking a person willing to be killed and eaten. Bernd Brandes responded to the ad. The two then carried out the pact, which had been preliminarily approved and signed by both in a kind of contract.

The so-called “Meiwes case” is a testing ground for law and moral philosophy, because it forces us to question the limits of consent. Is it possible that consent can legitimize any act, including one’s own elimination? Or are there intrinsic limits to self-disposal that consent cannot override?

This question becomes relevant whenever we are faced with the ethical dilemma confronting those who observe cases of consensual self-alienation. A clear example of such situations is that of adherents to spiritual movements that require their complete physical and psychological subordination. Consider the case of schools of sexual magic and “sacred eroticism” discussed by Massimo Introvigne in a recent interview. He expresses reservations about the fact that women who initially participated in practices of sex magic—having even signed informed consent forms—later reassess their experiences and accuse the gurus of abuse. According to this view, such claims would be improper, given the original consent, and also belated (video below).

https://vimeo.com/1182194860

This position fits within what is known as rational choice theory, a framework developed in economics, later extended to the social sciences, and eventually abandoned by the scientific discourse after proving to be false. This theory interprets human behavior as the result of individual decisions aimed at maximizing personal utility. According to this paradigm, even the most extreme or incomprehensible choices can be traced back to coherent subjective preferences, strategically formed and pursued by individuals.

Applied to the religious domain—a transfer most clearly expressed in the “religious economy theory”—this conception has been used to argue that adherence to “high-demand” groups, including those imposing severe constraints or radical practices, is the result of rational choices based on perceived costs and benefits. However, extreme cases raise profound questions about the ability of this model to account for the real dynamics of consent, especially when it seems to lead not to the fulfillment of the individual, but to their negation.

Rational choice theory also constitutes the epistemological foundation of one of the most radical political doctrines based on contractualism: anarcho-capitalism. In this perspective, associated with figures such as Murray Rothbard, David Friedman, Walter Block, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, the entire social order is conceived as the result of voluntary interactions among sovereign individuals, without the need for state authority. The market thus becomes not only an economic mechanism but a universal organizing principle, capable of regulating even domains traditionally excluded from exchange, such as law, security, and even personal relationships.

In a manner fully consistent with this view (without implying complete overlap), the aforementioned theory of religious economy—developed, among others, by Rodney Stark—applies the same interpretive framework to religion, describing churches and movements as “firms” competing to attract adherents, and believers as rational actors making decisions based on a calculation of spiritual costs and benefits. What remains in the shadows is the crucial issue of how such preferences are formed, transformed, or manipulated. This is because the very concept of mind control tends to lose theoretical consistency in a framework where every decision is interpreted as a coherent expression of individual preferences. Everything is absorbed into the paradigm of choice.

The argument that fully consenting adults should not be entitled to retrospectively reinterpret experiences of extreme submission—including forms of “contractualized sexual slavery”—finds one of its clearest formulations precisely in the positions of Massimo Introvigne, who is not coincidentally both a critic of mind control and a proponent of religious economy theory. He presents a reading that appears strongly contractualist and rooted in the rational choice paradigm. In this perspective, initial consent, if expressed under formally free conditions, would suffice to legitimize even radical practices, and subsequent claims of abuse would be interpreted as subjective revisions lacking normative relevance. However, this position has been at the center of a debate between two proponents of extreme contractualism: Walter Block and Murray Rothbard.

Walter Block starts from the idea of self-ownership: “if something is mine, I can sell it; if I cannot sell it, it is not mine.” If this logic is applied consistently, ownership of one’s body and the will that emanates from it becomes fully alienable, and consent legitimizes even voluntary slavery. In such a case, there would be no theoretical reason to exclude the validity of contracts that provide for total control over the body, up to its destruction. The Meiwes case represents precisely this outcome: an individual consents not only to their own subordination but to their physical elimination. If initial consent is a sufficient criterion, then even an act of consensual cannibalism should be considered legally and morally admissible.

It is precisely this extreme implication that reveals a breaking point in the paradigm: under such conditions, the contract does not regulate an exchange between subjects but annihilates one of the contracting parties, retroactively destroying the very possibility of consent.

It is here that Rothbard’s natural law position introduces a decisive limit: the will is not an alienable property, but the very condition of property. A contract that attempts to irrevocably bind future will—such as in the case of slavery or total submission—is intrinsically null, because it eliminates the possibility of revocation, which is the constitutive element of free action. In other words, the subject would annul the very holder of their own subjectivity. The tension between these positions, later revisited by Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, had already been raised by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract, revealing the paradox of a freedom that, if absolute, must include the possibility of its own negation.

Yet it is not only philosophical considerations that challenge the legitimacy of self-alienation and the surrender of one’s future will. For example, another extreme contractualist, Richard Epstein, notes that contracts of slavery or sexual servitude, while theoretically conceivable, are impossible to enforce coherently: the legal system cannot guarantee the enforcement of a total and permanent renunciation of personal freedom without contradicting its own foundational principles concerning coercion and responsibility.

For his part, Alan Wertheimer distinguishes between formal consent (the condition in which an agreement is expressed voluntarily) and substantive consent, which depends on the real conditions under which the choice is made. A contract may be formally voluntary yet still problematic if it arises under extreme pressure, power asymmetries (including charismatic ones), or alternatives so disadvantageous that the choice is only apparently free. Within this framework, so-called “voluntary slavery” is not so much impossible for logical or legal reasons, but because it is unlikely to meet the requirements of genuinely non-coercive consent.

Applied to the context of pseudo-spiritual groups or “tantric sex,” this distinction becomes crucial: initial consent cannot be considered definitive, especially because the rhetoric of free choice shifts attention from the conditions of choice to the choice itself. This may instead be the result of processes of influence or progressive redefinition of preferences—phenomena widely documented in the literature on high-demand movements.

The error in Massimo Introvigne’s approach, in the view of the present author, therefore lies in a double reduction: on the one hand, it reduces consent to a punctual and formally verifiable act, ignoring its processual and dynamic dimension; on the other, it implicitly assumes a conception of the will as a transferable object, in line with the most radical contractualism. Yet the Meiwes case, used here as a “stress test,” demonstrates that such a conception leads to paradoxical outcomes. It is not insignificant that the German court convicted Meiwes despite the victim’s consent. Nor is it accidental that “informed consent” in healthcare must be constantly updated in the case of patients undergoing prolonged treatments.

It follows that testimonies from women who, years later, reinterpret previously accepted experiences as forms of manipulation or abuse cannot be dismissed as mere second thoughts induced by the cultural climate of liberal democracies allegedly “hostile to gurus” (it is curious that influence is considered undue and effective only when exercised by secular and democratic culture, but never in the opposite direction). On the contrary, they often represent the recovery of a critical capacity previously compromised. In Rothbardian terms, we might say that it is not consent that grounds freedom, but freedom—understood as the permanent capacity for revocation and reconsideration—that grounds the validity of consent. When this capacity is eroded, the contract loses its normative meaning and becomes an instrument of domination.

In this sense, the extreme case of Armin Meiwes is not an irrelevant anomaly, but a thought experiment that reveals the aporias of a purely contractualist approach. It shows that not everything that is consensual is thereby legitimate, and that rational choice theory—already devoid of scientific plausibility—when applied to the sphere of human relationships, risks becoming a theoretical justification for coercion.

In other words, in a perfect market, characterized by complete information and freedom of entry and exit, the consent of actors reflects an authentically free choice. Conversely, under conditions of power asymmetry and incomplete information, consent itself becomes an expression of power, as it legitimizes it and renders it invisible. A good indicator for distinguishing between these two conditions is whether it is possible to revise and reinterpret the consent initially given. Otherwise, one risks transforming initially “free” adherents into counterparts of Meiwes’s cannibalized victim—unable to withdraw, despite remaining alive.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Block, W. (2001). Toward a libertarian theory of inalienability: A critique of Rothbard, Barnett, Gordon, and Smith. Journal of Libertarian Studies, 17(2), 39–85.

Epstein, R. A. (1995). Simple rules for a complex world. Harvard University Press.

Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, state, and utopia. Basic Books.

Rothbard, M. N. (1982). The ethics of liberty. Humanities Press

Stark, R., & Bainbridge, W. S. (1985). The future of religion: Secularization, revival and cult formation. University of California Press.

Wertheimer, A. (2003). Consent to sexual relations. Cambridge University Press.