People in public cannot consent in advance, so the baseline has to be set for them

The argument

Opponents of legalisation argue that public space is defined by the feature that makes consent impossible. A person going to work, taking a child to school, waiting for a bus or walking to the shops has not chosen what they will meet on the way, cannot be asked beforehand, and often cannot leave without abandoning what they were doing. Whatever happens in that space happens to everyone in it. This is why opponents distinguish sharply between the street and places people opt into. A naturist beach, a private club, a designated stretch of park or a specified event are all entered by choice, by people who know what they are choosing. Opponents of legalisation frequently support such provision, and regard that support as showing what their objection is and is not: not that the unclothed body is shameful, but that an encounter with it should not be imposed on people who have no say in the matter. From there the argument is about how shared spaces are made usable at all. Because the street is used by everyone, including small children and people with particular reason to find the encounter distressing, some baseline has to be set in advance rather than negotiated case by case, and clothing is the baseline nearly every society has settled on. Setting it, opponents insist, is not a verdict on the body. It is the ordinary work of making a space workable for people who did not choose one another's company and cannot withdraw from it.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Proponents reply that the inability to consent in advance is true of everything met with in public, including distressing speech, advertising, preaching and the sight of serious injury, none of which is criminalised on that ground. They add that the argument establishes only that a default is needed, not that the default must be clothing enforced by police, since signage, designated areas and custom set defaults in many other contexts without anyone being arrested.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Nothing encountered in public is consented to in advance, including speech, advertising and the sight of injury, so inability to consent cannot by itself justify prohibition. [Rejecting P2] That opt-in spaces work supports permitting nakedness rather than confining it. The premise concedes the conduct is harmless where expected, which locates the problem in expectation rather than in the act. [Rejecting P3] A baseline is needed, but the premise moves without argument from a baseline to a criminal one, when signage, custom and designated areas set baselines elsewhere without arrest. [Rejecting C] The conclusion keeps the prohibition while granting that the conduct is acceptable where it is expected, which is an argument for changing expectations rather than for policing them.