A disturbing case at Cornell University has reopened an old question in a new form: what happens to consent when somebody voluntarily becomes seriously intoxicated?
There is no need to rehearse the allegations in detail. They are unpleasant, contested and now the subject of renewed investigation. What matters for present purposes is the legal issue that the case has exposed. New York law has drawn an important distinction between incapacity resulting from intoxicants voluntarily consumed and incapacity caused by substances administered without consent. The local prosecutor initially cited constraints in New York law when explaining why criminal charges had not been pursued. The controversy has now become sufficiently serious that New York's governor has appointed the state attorney-general as special prosecutor, while legislators are again discussing changing the law.
There is an important philosophical question buried beneath the political controversy. If an adult voluntarily consumes alcohol or recreational drugs until his or her judgment is severely impaired, surely that person bears some responsibility for becoming intoxicated? But does accepting that proposition mean accepting that anything subsequently done to the intoxicated person has therefore been consented to?
Australian law, and South Australian law in particular, provides an interesting answer.
Section 46 of South Australia's Criminal Law Consolidation Act 1935 begins with the basic principle that consent means freely and voluntarily agreeing to sexual activity. It then expressly deals with intoxication. A person is taken not to have freely and voluntarily agreed where the person is intoxicated by alcohol, another substance, or a combination of substances "to the point of being incapable of freely and voluntarily agreeing to the activity."
Notice what the legislation does not say. It does not say that the alcohol must have been secretly administered. It does not say that the drug must have been taken involuntarily. It asks about the person's capacity at the relevant time.
This is an important distinction because intoxication does not automatically eliminate consent. An adult who has consumed several glasses of wine does not thereby become legally incapable of making decisions. People can be intoxicated to varying degrees while remaining capable of understanding what they are doing and freely choosing to do it. The South Australian threshold is incapacity: intoxication must have reached the point at which free and voluntary agreement is no longer possible.
That immediately disposes of one simplistic slogan sometimes heard in these debates: "Drunk people cannot consent." As a universal proposition, that is not the South Australian law. The relevant question is not whether somebody had been drinking, but whether the person's intoxication had become sufficiently severe to destroy the capacity for free and voluntary agreement.
But there is an equally simplistic proposition on the other side: "If you voluntarily got drunk, you are responsible for whatever happens afterwards." That does not follow either.
Suppose a man gets thoroughly drunk and leaves his wallet containing $500 on a hotel table. He has behaved foolishly. Perhaps he has behaved morally irresponsibly. He has certainly increased the probability that something bad will happen to him. None of that converts another person's deliberate taking of the wallet into morally or legally innocent conduct. There can be two wrongs in the same story.
That elementary proposition seems strangely difficult to preserve in modern discussions of sexual conduct. One side fears that acknowledging imprudence by a complainant amounts to "victim blaming." The other fears that denying the significance of voluntary intoxication abolishes personal responsibility altogether. Neither conclusion is necessary.
A traditional Christian morality has no difficulty holding two propositions simultaneously. Deliberately becoming grossly intoxicated is wrong and dangerous. Exploiting someone who has rendered himself or herself incapable of rational choice is also wrong and dangerous. The second proposition does not cancel the first, and the first does not excuse the second.
Indeed, the older moral tradition is in some respects more demanding than contemporary arguments because it places obligations upon everyone involved. Christianity did not invent temperance because drunkenness was considered harmless. The warnings against drunkenness found throughout Christian moral teaching recognise precisely what intoxication does: it impairs judgment, weakens self-command and places the individual in situations in which both sin and victimisation become more likely.
That is an argument for sobriety. It is not an argument for open season on the drunk.
The criminal law then introduces another necessary distinction. It is not enough simply to ask whether one person consented. In a prosecution the law must also address the accused person's state of mind. South Australian law deals with this through the concepts of knowledge and reckless indifference. A person can be recklessly indifferent to another person's lack of consent where, for example, he recognises the possibility that the other person may not be consenting but proceeds regardless, or is aware of that possibility and fails to take reasonable steps to ascertain consent.
This becomes particularly important in intoxication cases because real life does not provide a convenient meter reading "CAPABLE OF CONSENT" or "INCAPABLE OF CONSENT."
There is a spectrum. At one end is somebody who has consumed alcohol but is talking coherently, making decisions and plainly capable of exercising choice. At the other is somebody unconscious or so profoundly impaired as to be incapable of meaningful decision-making. Between those extremes lie the difficult cases that criminal courts actually have to resolve.
How was the person speaking? Could the person understand questions? Was the person making deliberate choices? Could the person walk normally? Was consciousness intermittent? What did witnesses observe? What did the accused observe? What was said at the time? These factual questions matter enormously because neither intoxication nor subsequent regret establishes the absence of consent.
Nor does an inability to remember everything afterwards necessarily establish that the person lacked capacity at the time. Alcohol-related memory impairment and contemporaneous incapacity are not identical concepts. Criminal guilt cannot safely be determined merely by working backwards from somebody's later inability to reconstruct an evening.
But the converse is equally important. A person need not be literally unconscious before incapacity becomes possible. South Australian legislation deliberately distinguishes unconsciousness from intoxication to the point of incapacity. The law therefore recognises that there can be a state in which somebody remains physically awake while no longer possessing the capacity required for free and voluntary agreement.
This is where personal responsibility must be analysed carefully rather than used as a slogan.
If I voluntarily become intoxicated, I am responsible for the decision to become intoxicated and for the reasonably foreseeable risks I thereby impose upon myself and others. That proposition should not be controversial. Modern culture often treats extreme intoxication as though it were something that merely happens to people rather than something they sometimes deliberately do. But responsibility for creating vulnerability is not identical to responsibility for another person's decision to exploit that vulnerability.
We understand this perfectly well elsewhere. A motorist who foolishly leaves an expensive laptop visible on the passenger seat has increased the risk of theft. The thief nevertheless remains a thief. A person who walks through a dangerous district displaying a wallet may be reckless about personal safety. That does not transfer moral ownership of the wallet to the first person prepared to take it.
Prudence and justice answer different questions. Prudence asks, "What should I have done to avoid placing myself in danger?" Justice asks, "What was another person entitled to do to me once I was there?" Confusing those questions produces bad moral reasoning.
There is also a broader cultural issue here. Much contemporary entertainment and advertising has spent decades presenting intoxication as an almost compulsory component of sexual and social liberation. Young adults are simultaneously told to regard drunkenness as normal recreation and expected to navigate extraordinarily consequential questions of consent while their judgment is chemically impaired.
Perhaps the older morality had a point. Sobriety is not merely a puritanical prohibition imposed to prevent people enjoying themselves. Self-command protects human freedom. The more seriously a society takes consent, the more peculiar it becomes to celebrate practices specifically designed to diminish the mental capacities through which meaningful consent is given.
That does not mean returning to a world in which someone who drank too much was considered to have forfeited legal protection. It means recognising why temperance and responsibility belong in the same conversation as consent.
The Cornell controversy is useful precisely because it exposes the inadequacy of the two ideological extremes. We need not decide the truth of the particular allegations, which are now again under investigation. Nor should a criminal accusation be treated as proof merely because the alleged conduct sounds appalling. The jurisprudential question stands independently of the case.
Voluntary intoxication matters. Adults possess agency and bear responsibility for choices that foreseeably impair their judgment. But voluntary intoxication cannot logically constitute advance consent to everything another person might subsequently do. Australian law sensibly separates these questions by asking whether intoxication actually reached the point of incapacity and, in a criminal prosecution, examining what the accused knew or recklessly disregarded.
Christian morality can make the same distinction without embarrassment. Do not deliberately surrender your reason to alcohol or drugs. Do not place yourself unnecessarily in situations where judgment disappears and vulnerability increases. Parents should tell their sons and daughters that plainly, however unfashionable the message has become.
But there is a corresponding command: do not exploit another person's weakness. If somebody has become incapable of rational choice, his or her foolishness does not become your permission.
There can be personal responsibility on both sides of an encounter without equal responsibility for the same thing. One person may bear responsibility for becoming dangerously intoxicated. Another may bear responsibility for deliberately exploiting the resulting incapacity. Recognising the first does not excuse the second. Condemning the second does not require pretending that the first was wise.
Perhaps that is the larger lesson. A culture obsessed with consent but embarrassed by self-restraint has started the moral argument halfway through. Consent matters because human agency matters. And if human agency matters, then preserving the capacity to exercise it matters too.
Temperance and consent are therefore not enemies. Properly understood, they begin from the same proposition: human beings should remain capable of making responsible choices, and other human beings should respect those choices, and never exploit the moment when that capacity has been lost.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2026/10/02/concerning-a-rape-allegation-scandal-at-cornell/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQWoQzhHFC4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPE7pRNGNfc