Some Thoughts on Coercion

Abstract

This short and rough 8-page draft attempts an original reflection on the normative concept of coercion, and compares and contrasts two philosophical methodologies for approaching the task of philosophically illuminating the concept of coercion (or for that matter, any normative concept). Especially, the is identified, explained, and rejected; this is the attempt, in fact common throughout philosophy, to understand a concept by distilling a (pre-concept) essence from its instances. Through counterexample, the paper argues that the usual results of the extractive approach in the case of coercion can all be shown as inessential to the category; the paper argues against understanding coercion as having to do necessarily with threats, contingency announcements, bad intentions, successfully restricting options, causing any kind of belief in the victim, or the notion of seeing reasons to act otherwise than one is coerced to act. Instead, the thesis is advanced that coercion is essentially about wrongly determining a person in some way, an admittedly abstract, general notion that does not already contain a theory of just precisely when a person is wrongly determined. This thin, minimal account is defended--despite its thinness and minimality - as having several theoretical virtues: especially, it makes fruitful sense of disagreement between people who may disagree as to the coerciveness of particular cases, and it gives us an appropriate sense for the natural stakes of coercion. In the end, even if my particular fomulation is unconvincing, these are the sorts of things that should be demanded of any philosophical illumination of a concept.