Glossary entry

Consent Depth

Glossary entry in Governance & power. Definitions, checks, and evidence for Consent Depth.

Quick takeaways

The distinction between consenting to enter a dependency and consenting to every degree of dependency its operation produces.

Definition
Minimum evidence
Operational tests

Definition

The distinction between consenting to enter a dependency and consenting to every degree of dependency its operation produces. Adoption is one choice, made once, under one set of alternatives; depth is what accumulates afterwards without any further choice being offered.

The choice at adoption helps manufacture the constrained choice set later. Data accumulates, collaborators organise around the system, alternatives disappear, and the adopter's own competence atrophies, so “you chose this” stops describing the present relationship. Enumerating affected parties at adoption does not close the set either, because people become exposed later without ever having been asked. Bound by STD-02 §10.1 and §10.2.

It matters because standing is usually rationed by original consent. Depth is why corrective standing has to reach anyone who became an error-bearing party after adoption, and why a deepened dependency is where exit coercion operates with nobody applying pressure, leaving a right of exit that is formally intact and practically spent.

TemporalAgency

Scale: Organizational · Phases: Deployment, Audit · Measurability: Semi-quantitative · Maturity: Active research

Scope: H. Governance & power. Structures that decide who holds authority, on what grant and for how long, and who can intervene.
Genealogy: Separates the Law VII question of who holds standing from the moment of adoption, so consent cannot be used to price a relationship it no longer describes.

Adjacent terms

Corrective Standing Error-Bearing Party Exit Coercion Right of Exit

References

STD-02 contestability and recourse · Standard
Standing eval · Eval

Glossary territory

Structures that decide who holds authority, on what grant and for how long, and who can intervene.

Explore Governance & power in the glossary index.

Entry details

Last updated: 2026-09-22
Term version: v1.13.0
Changelog: View updates

Tests and evidence

Operational tests (3)

The affected-party set is re-opened at each review rather than fixed at adoption.
Adverse movement in exposure score, substitution cost, or reversibility level since consent is disclosed to the consenting party.
The operator can name the last material deepening of the dependency and show what was disclosed at the time.

Minimum evidence checklist

Artifact: A consent record paired with a dated dependency trend showing exposure score, substitution cost, and reversibility level at consent and now.
Behavior: A disclosure sent to consenting parties when the dependency deepened materially, ahead of the next renewal.
Metric: Share of material deepenings disclosed within a stated interval, and share of parties who became affected after adoption who hold standing.

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Version

v1.13.0

Last updated

Sep 22, 2026

Permalink

https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/consent-depth

DOI

Pending Zenodo deposit

APA

Ethotechnics Institute Research Team. (2026). Consent Depth. Ethotechnics glossary. https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/consent-depth

MLA

Ethotechnics Institute Research Team. "Consent Depth." Ethotechnics glossary, 2026, https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/consent-depth.

Chicago

Ethotechnics Institute Research Team. "Consent Depth." Ethotechnics glossary. Sep 22, 2026. https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/consent-depth.

BibTeX

@misc{glossary_consent-depth,
  title={Consent Depth},
  author={Ethotechnics Institute Research Team},
  year={2026},
  howpublished={Ethotechnics glossary},
  url={https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/consent-depth},
  version={v1.13.0}
}

RIS

TY  - WEB
TI  - Consent Depth
AU  - Ethotechnics Institute Research Team
PY  - 2026
UR  - https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/consent-depth
ER  -

Scholarly metadata

Authorship

Ethotechnics Institute Research Team · Ethotechnics Institute · research@ethotechnics.org

Contact: research@ethotechnics.org

Publication details

Published: Dec 3, 2025
Last updated: Sep 22, 2026
Version: v1.13.0
DOI: Pending Zenodo deposit

License: CC BY-SA 4.0

Credit Ethotechnics Institute, include the term title + version, and link to the glossary permalink.

Archive: Wayback Machine history

Changelog

v1.13.0 · 2026-09-22 — Rewrote category descriptions and scope notes to the current framing, replaced vague or promotional definitions in 89 entries and 109 short definitions, removed unsourced adoption and effect claims, and cut filler words and redundant sentences from 38 entries and 20 short definitions. No term was added, removed, or renamed.
v1.12.0 · 2026-09-22 — Added Typed Decision Model and Confidence-Gated Execution, cross-linked to the worked example of a decision-model gate on refunds.
v1.11.0 · 2026-09-22 — Added Decision Threshold, Shaping Hop, and Reason Substitution: the places typed decision models locate authority, shape decisions without making them, and separate the reason from the decision.
v1.10.0 · 2026-09-19 — Promoted 64 orphaned short definitions to full canonical entries across core concepts, governance, decision states, and anti-patterns, and removed three redundant short definitions (procedural-realism, intake-cinema, legibility-illegibility).
v1.9.0 · 2026-09-19 — Added Feedback Proximity, Asymmetric-Capacity Restraint, Adaptive Capacity, Compensatory Adaptation, and Corrective Power, aligned the short definition of Ethotechnics with its canonical authority-and-correction framing, and refreshed the glossary's category scaffolding off the earlier moral-system vocabulary.
v1.8.0 · 2026-09-19 — Added Insulation, the unifying failure mode of the framework: whatever stops the consequences of institutional decisions from traveling back to those who can revise the generating rules, with its channels, its good and bad forms, and its self-ratifying loop.
v1.7.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Non-Finality, Consequential Contradiction, and The Excluded Case, and generalized the falsified denominator into the falsified ledger — completing the five concerns and the fallibilist ground they stand on.
v1.6.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Human Non-Substitutability, Safe Incompleteness, Anti-Conversion Rights, Abstention, Constitutional Debt, Discretion Migration, and Corrigibility Rent — the person-side principles, the three abstentions, and the rent concept.
v1.5.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Exception Absorption, Exception Learning, Case Corrigibility, Structural Corrigibility, Institutional Learning, Corrective Debt, and the Workaround Presumption, formalizing the historical turn: reading institutions through their failure trajectories rather than their stated controls.
v1.4.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Residual Complexity, Complexity Displacement, Falsified Denominator, Closure Without Remainder, Constitutional Governance, and Post-Optimization Rigor, embedding the foundational contention of burden redistribution.
v1.3.0 · 2026-09-11 — Added Attestation, Liability Record, Carve-Out, Delegation Chain, Composed Latency, and Silent-Harm Discovery, each bound to the standard clause that requires it.
v1.2.0 · 2026-09-08 — Added The Non-Conversion Principle, Exit Cost, and Jurisdictional Path Dependence, each linked to the theory essay that argues for it.
v1.1.0 · 2026-01-09 — Expanded scholarly metadata, operational tests, and provenance notes.
v1.0.0 · 2025-12-03 — Initial glossary release with stable permalinks.

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