Coercion and Choice

Coercive interactions are generally thought to be morally problematic.[1] Despite, however, the apparent significance of the term ‘coercion’ in our moral vocabulary, it is difficult to specify precisely the problem with interactions that might be described as coercive. Indeed, it has been difficult even to characterize the category of coercive actions. This latter difficulty has been the subject of the bulk of the recent literature on coercion.[2] I believe, however, that exclusive focus on this difficulty is misguided. The discussion of this difficulty has involved using linguistic intuitions to settle how to use the word ‘coercion’. These intuitions are muddled and controversial in precisely the cases that tell in favor of one account or another. The discussion has thus degenerated into a definitional quagmire.

I think that a more promising strategy involves examining the normative dimensions of paradigmatic cases of coercion. Exploring the morally problematic features of paradigmatic cases of coercion enables us to begin addressing the first difficulty I mentioned above and the results of this normative inquiry may give us insight into the nature of coercion, insight that cannot be gained simply by plumbing linguistic intuitions. Normative analysis of paradigmatic cases of coercion thus has the potential to further discussion of both the philosophical difficulties surrounding coercion.

Consider, then, the mugger who approaches his victim at the ATM and says, “Your money or your life.” Intuitively, it seems as though the problem with the mugger’s action lies in the effect this action has on the recipient’s choice. In this paper, I explore one general category of views on what exactly this effect amounts to. Views in this category take seriously the implications of one common way of talking about the actions we typically call coercive. Consider the following commonplace locutions: ‘he didn’t leave me any choice’ or ‘she forced me to do it’. These statements might be understood as claiming that in problematic cases the recipient, in some sense, does not really choose what to do in response. One way of understanding what this means is that the recipient’s response shouldn’t be understood as a full-fledged action. Call accounts that understand the problem with coercion in this way ‘impaired action accounts’.

Impaired action accounts are usually motivated in one of two ways. First, there is the thought that the victim’s responsibility for her response is, in some sense, mitigated. Second, there is the thought the victim does what she does, in some sense, unwillingly. I’ll examine both these motivations and argue that neither can adequately support the impaired action account and thus that the impaired action account does not offer a promising analysis of the problem with coercion.

1. Responsibility

As I mentioned above, being subject to a coercive proposal is often thought to mitigate the responsibility of the victim for her response. This in turn is sometimes taken to imply that these actions are not fully attributable to the victim.[3] This move, however, involves a failure to distinguish between different senses of responsibility.

I want to distinguish between four questions we might be asking regarding the responsibility of a particular agent in a given situation.[4] First, one might ask whether the behavior in question may be attributed to the agent so as to be the proper subject of moral evaluation and appraisal. Second, one might ask whether the action is permissible or impermissible (and perhaps whether it is obligatory or supererogatory). Third, one might ask whether the action is praiseworthy, blameworthy, or morally neutral. Fourth, one might ask whether we should let the benefits and burdens resulting from the behavior fall to the agent who engaged in it.

Now, one might think that answers to some of these questions imply answers to others. So, for example, one might have a view on which an answer to the first two questions implies an answer to the second two. On this view, if an action is attributable to an agent and is wrong it is blameworthy and the agent should bear the burdens that follow. There are many other ways to work out the relationship between the answers to the four questions. Here I just want to make it clear that the presence of what we typically call coercion in a situation can affect the answer to some or all of the latter three questions without affecting the answer to the first question. The bare claim that an action is attributable to an agent as the proper subject of moral evaluation and appraisal does not itself settle what the appropriate evaluation and appraisal are. So, we can perfectly well make sense of the idea that coercion, in some sense, mitigates the victim’s responsibility without needing to deny that the victim really chooses what to do in response.

One might accept this and yet still object that the particular way we conceive of the mitigated responsibility of the victim involves denying that the response is attributable to the victim as the proper subject of moral evaluation and appraisal. Subjection to coercion, this objection claims, is an excuse for the resulting behavior rather than a justification for it. The category of excuses involves things like accidents, mistakes and insanity. These seem to be cases in which the agent doesn’t perform an action or doesn’t perform the action in question. Since coercion is often thought of as an excuse, the objection concludes that coercion also makes it the case that the recipient doesn’t really perform the action in question. In fact, both premises of the objection are mistaken: not all instances of coercion are best understood as excused rather than justified and we need not think that all excuses require denying the attribution of an action to the agent.

There are three possible ways some bit of behavior might turn out to be not blameworthy. First, the action might be permissible. Second, on certain views regarding the relationship between wrongdoing and blame, the action might be impermissible but still not blameworthy.[5] Third, the behavior might not be the proper subject of moral evaluation and appraisal at all. To justify an action is to claim that the first description is applicable. To excuse an action is to claim that one of the latter two descriptions is applicable.

Some instances of coercion are best understood as instances of the first kind of case. When the bank robber points his gun at the teller and demands money, the act of handing it over is permissible. Indeed, we might even praise the teller for keeping a cool head and not panicking. So, it’s simply not true that we need to think of subjection to coercion as an excuse rather than a justification.

That alone is enough to defeat the above objection. But it’s worth spelling out why the second premise in the objection, i.e. that excuses involve the denial that the behavior constitutes an action, might also be rejected. Suppose we are confronted with a case in which it seems appropriate to be looking for an excuse rather than a justification because if the behavior were an action it would impermissible. Consider someone faced with the threat of the murder of her family if she does not kill some political figure. It seems plausible to think that killing the political figure would still be wrong even under these circumstances. But, if we think that blame isn’t the appropriate attitude to take with respect to the recipient’s response, we need not think that this is because the recipient’s response isn’t the proper subject of moral evaluation and appraisal. There is, as I pointed out above, another possibility. Perhaps, the action, although wrong, is not blameworthy. This is only a live option on certain views of the relationship between wrongdoing and blame. But, this observation is enough to show that the claim that subjection to coercion in this case is an excuse does not automatically commit us to claiming that the recipient’s response is not an action.

My main aim in this section has been to argue that our interest in claiming that the victim is in some sense not responsible for her response does not automatically commit us to the impaired action account. In claiming that subjection to coercion sometimes provides a justification rather than an excuse, I’ve also suggested that the impaired action account is incorrect. Sometimes the victim’s response is attributable to her. In the next section, I explore the more direct reasons one might have for denying this and argue that they are misguided, thus confirming my claim about coercion’s relationship to justification and undermining the remaining motivation for the impaired action account.

2. Attributability

The impulse to say that the recipient’s response is not attributable to her seems to flow principally from the thought that there is some sense in which she is not doing what she does ‘willingly’. She is in some way alienated from what she does. There are four distinct senses of unwillingness that the victim may experience.[6] We will see, however, that only the third and fourth kind affect attributability and that these kinds of unwillingness are limited in a way that prevents them from grounding a general explanation of the problem with the actions we typically call coercive.

First, consider the relationship between the agent and the circumstances in which he finds himself. It is nearly always possible for an agent to imagine circumstances that he would prefer to those he finds himself in – circumstances that would be more conducive to his aims. But sometimes, as Harry Frankfurt puts it, an agent “regrets or resents the state of affairs with which he must in fact contend.”[7] This sense that one’s circumstances are hostile to one’s aims, i.e. that one has to choose the lesser evil, seems to capture one familiar reason an agent may not identify himself wholly with what he does – why he may want to put some distance between himself and his action.

But, although one may regret or resent having to choose in certain circumstances, one chooses nonetheless. Consider a mother who must decide whether to turn in her adult child for a committing a serious, violent crime. Suppose also that she has reason to be confident that he will not commit this kind of crime again. Here she is torn between loyalty to her son and her apparent obligations to the victim and society in general. This is a terrible choice to have to make. Her resulting behavior is, however, attributable to her. It is the proper subject of moral evaluation. There may be grounds for debating what she ought to do. But it makes sense to ask what she ought to do and we can even imagine her asking herself that very question before deciding. Moreover, it is the proper subject of moral appraisal. Once we settle whether failing to turn him in is permissible it is appropriate to ask what attitude we should take to that action (blame or something else).[8]

This first type of unwillingness seems to be characteristic of the experience of the recipient of a coercive proposal. The mugger makes his victim face hostile alternatives. The next type of unwillingness is closely related. This is the kind of alienation involved in feeling trapped and as a result disengaged in the deliberative process. In addition to making the victim face hostile alternatives, the aggressor often shapes the alternatives such that the balance of reasons points strongly in one direction. This can make it seem as though there is no decision left to be made and hence that the ensuing behavior isn’t ‘up to me’.

This appearance involves a slide between two thoughts: (1) that the recipient does not choose to act as she does and (2) that the recipient has no other meaningful options. It is important to see that these really are two distinct claims and that (2) does not imply (1). This is clear when we look at a more pleasant example. Suppose you are offered your dream job at an ideal moment in your life. Everything counts in favor of accepting and nothing counts against accepting. Even though it wouldn’t make sense for you to do anything else, it would be a mistake to say that you don’t really accept the position when you respond to the offer, i.e. that you’re just going through the motions.

Why, then, might one think that the unpleasant case is different – that one isn’t really acting when both the alternatives are hostile and the considerations to which they give rise are decisive? The, answer, I think, has to do with how we experience the force of reason. When the deliverance of the process of reasoning is virtually instantaneous and the verdict is not one the agent is pleased by, there is a tendency to see the verdict as imposed from the outside. There is a sense, of course, in which this is true. The circumstances have dictated the appropriate response and the tendency to see the verdict as imposed from the outside is heightened when there is a specific agent who is responsible for bringing those circumstances about. But, although this explains why the pleasant case and the unpleasant one feel differently to the agent, it doesn’t show that these cases are actually different. In fact, it shows that they are the same in the respect that matters. In both cases, the considerations to which the circumstances give rise are assessed by the agent and it is this assessment that leads to action. So, it doesn’t make sense in either case to claim that it’s not really you controlling your behavior.

We’ve seen so far that two generally applicable explanations of the unwillingness involved in responding to a coercive proposal are consistent with maintaining that the response is attributable to the victim. The third kind of unwillingness may affect attributability. We will see, however, that this effect does not seem to be intimately connected enough with the aggressor’s action to really get at the heart of the problem.