The society that surrounds a person has an influence on the sorts of decisions they are likely to make. People bandy about the phrase "consenting adult" as though each adult is sitting there in a vacuum making uninfluenced personal decisions, when that couldn't be further from the truth.

There are many examples to show how ridiculous it is to place consent über alles but the easy one is women who take part in "consensual" sexual intercourse but then later claim that they were raped. It's so easy to attribute bad motive to the woman, but what has really happened is that they've been hoodwinked by a toxic society to go along with something that they don't actually feel right about and then later deeply regret it as what's left of their conscience rebels against whatever messed up societal norms have propagated in the absence of common sense.

The victim in a toxic society, generally speaking, are agreeable people, because they will "consent" to being taken advantage of in all sorts of ways to avoid conflict. See recent allegations against Neil Gaiman for just a recent example.

You claim that there's a difference between these examples and actions done to oneself, saying, "Many on the Right failed to differentiate between defending someone's choice to engage in a victimless activity and condemning actions with actual victims, such as coercing others into sex", but the only difference I see is how easy it is to peg a single person in the situation as the "victimizer". Is there any reason to believe that a victim/victimizer dynamic only exists if the victimizer is one person? Further, you claim that in one case it's a victimless activity. Based on?

As for who decides, the important thing to understand is that no matter how liberal the society, you're never going to get even close to 100% of individuals making truly free decisions. Rather, their decisions will be influenced by various others (including tradition, local norms, and people) within that society. If that is a functional, productive society, then the influence will be positive. If it's a dysfunctional society, then the influence will be negative. In neither society will this unrealistic, idealistic notion of "consent" be the only impetus behind a given decision.

Peter: As a paying subscriber it should be obvious that I think your takes on various matters are interesting, but it often seems like you have simple answers to issues by the expedient of ignoring complexity. This is one example, but there are others. In the past I thought you were perhaps doing it unknowingly, but here you state explicitly that "These are not particularly complicated issues, and we already have well-established moral frameworks to navigate them. Still, that does not stop people from complicating what is otherwise straightforward." In this case you've simplified the situation by taking it as a foregone conclusion that these activities are victimless. Whether the activities are victimless is at the heart of this discussion, so saying that "Many on the Right failed to differentiate between defending someone's choice to engage in a victimless activity and condemning actions with actual victims" is just textbook begging the question. Any issue can become simple by oversimplifying it, but I'm not sure what the goal is by claiming without evidence that an issue is simpler than your opposition says it is, nor framing them as emotional. It goes from bad to worse when the very next topic in the article is all about nuance.