I listened to a radio programme last week! That’s the real news, because I never listen to radio. It was this Radio 4 programme about “repugnant markets”. I unfortunately missed the end, but the first half was good. They made an excellent point that what transactions we find repugnant have varied wildly over time: it was once considered repugnant to charge interest on loans, but perfectly alright to sell slaves.

In modern times, dwarf tossing is banned in France, which rendered a professionally-tossed dwarf unemployed. He argued before the UN Commission on Human Rights that his right to employment was being infringed:

He says you know France says that this is a violation of human dignity, but there aren’t any jobs for dwarves in France and the essence of human dignity is having a job and this is my job. And I remember when I read that, I thought you know the little guy wins. You know this is a great argument. But in fact he didn’t win. The UN found in favour of France and basically they argued that it’s such a repugnant thing for him to sell the right to throw him that human dignity is compromised; that you and I become less human every time he makes this transaction.

I wouldn’t have felt compelled to write anything on this, but I read this morning that cage fighting is being condemned by “politicians, religious leaders, and senior police officers”. Never mind that the fans happily paid up to see the event, that the organisers willingly hosted it, that the fighters are handsomely paid professional athletes, and that everyone involved not only consented to the cage fight, but actually got entertainment, profit, and glory out of it. Can we step back from the brink of nannydom and remember that those are good things?

Consent is the foundation of civilisation. Without it, we are merely barbarous animals plundering each other for whatever we can get. The busybodies who would seek to ban the activities of consenting adults, and thus undermine the power of consent itself, pose a greater threat to human dignity than any harmless sport.