If there is consent, a rape is no longer a rape, but lovemaking; a theft is no longer a theft, but a gift; a battery is no longer a battery, but surgery, or sports, or massage. A wrong, it seems, is no longer a wrong if the victim consents to it. That at least is the generally accepted view.

Coercive interrogation is now a live subject, thanks to 9/11. At one time, coercive interrogation played a role only in philosophical disputes about consequentialism, in which scholars asserted or denied that the police could interrogate an individual in order to extract the location of a ticking nuclear bomb. None of the participants in those debates seriously considered the possibility that coercive interrogation could be justified except in extreme circumstances never likely to be met.

In response to a report of an argument on a public sidewalk, a police officer approaches two people standing in the vicinity of the reported dispute. The officer requests that each person provide her name so the officer can run the names through databases to which the police department subscribes. After searching each name through various databases, the officer might discover that one of the individuals made several purchases of cold medicine containing pseudoephedrine and that the other just received a license from the State to procure certain hazardous chemicals. These two people might be in the early stages of setting up a methamphetamine ring, or they might respectively be a person getting over a cold and an entrepreneur. In either case, merely by giving her name, each person provided the police officer with information that she could have reasonably believed might lead the officer to incriminating evidence.