distinction between consent-based and benefit-based obligations. Somehow I don’t think it would have helped. But the contretemps with Sam the repairman highlights a common confusion about consent. Sam believed that if he had fixed my car while he was poking around, I would have owed him the fifty dollars. I agree. But the reason I would have owed him the money is that he would have performed a benefit—namely, fixing my car. He inferred that, because I would have owed him, I must (implicitly) have agreed to hire him. But this inference is a mistake. It wrongly assumes that wherever there is an
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