Hannah Arendt on failure-to-dissent as consent:

Every man is born as a member of a particular community and can survive only if he is welcomed and made at home within it. Some kind of consent is implied in every newly born’s factual situation, namely, some kind of conformity to the rules under which the great game of the world is played in the particular group into which he belongs by birth.  We all live and survive by a kind of tacit consent, which however it would be difficult to call voluntary.  How can we will what is there anyhow?  We might call it voluntary, though, when the child happens to be born into a community in which dissent is also a legal and de facto possibility once it has grown into a man.  Dissent implies consent and is the hallmark of free government; who knows that he may dissent knows also that he somehow consents when he does not dissent.…

…Seen in this perspective, tacit consent is not a fiction; it is inherent in the human condition.  This consensus universalis, however, does not cover consent to specific laws or specific policies, even if they are the result of majority decisions.  It is often argued that the consent to the Constitution, the consensus universalis, implies also consent to statutory laws because in representative government the people helped to make them.  This consent, I think, is indeed entirely fictitious; under present circumstances, at any rate, it has lost all plausibility.…

http://sniggle.net/Experiment/index.php?entry=20Jun06

Hannah Arendt on temptation vs. compulsion:

...in the words of Mary McCarthy, who first spotted this fallacy: “If somebody points a gun at you and says, ‘Kill your friend or I will kill you,’ he is tempting you, that is all.”  And while a temptation where one’s life is at stake may be a legal excuse for a crime, it certainly is not a moral justification.

http://sniggle.net/Experiment/index.php?entry=22Dec04

See also: http://sniggle.net/Experiment/index.php?entry=07Apr03 where I said much the same thing: "even a gun to your head doesn’t eliminate your freedom of choice — it just adds to the set of consequences your choices may produce.  It becomes a factor that you add up along with all of the other factors before making your decision.  In the case of a gun to the head, it’s a pretty big consequence and a pretty overwhelming factor, but it doesn’t change the basic rules of the game."