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Who or what is urging us to seek the consent of our respondents? To what ends should we seek consent? Who should consent and how? Which fields, objects, issues, and results are more, less or not at all welcoming to consent? By revisiting our participation in a British-French research project, this article understands consent as revealing the enterprise of regulating research conducted in the name of ethics. Its objective is to provide information on its consistency and its effects on our work. To do this, it combines an analysis of its regulatory equipment (from the funding conditions and “ethical guides” formalized by the funder to the “consent form” submitted to respondents) and our experience of this framework in several research situations (namely interviews and observations) and at different stages of the research process (from the translation of the consent form to the analysis of the first results). This paper shows that by aggregating various areas of ethics violation prevention/promotion of virtue, this codification retains a maximalist conception of free consent (formal, informed, protective, revisable at any time) deemed to guarantee ethical research. Moreover, this article seeks to show how these heterogeneous strata come into tension with each other, with the field survey but also –more essentially– with all or part of sociological reasoning itself. Finally, the paper tries to capture, within the multiplicity of roles expected from the researcher, the portrait of this new spirit of ethics. Thus this article shows how this regulation tends to encourage fragile research, at both an ethical and scientific levels, and fuels collective reflexivity over such issues.