Choice and coercion

[eirias]

It's ethics time!

It's a familiar story: You're a teller at a bank and a guy comes in with a loaded gun and says, "Give me all your money or else I'll shoot." Ostensibly, he's offering you a choice between cooperation and death. However, ethically, most people do not consider this to be a real choice. Because the alternative is so noxious, it's said, it is not actually an alternative; this situation counts as forcing a person to do something against his will.

What I'm wondering is, how noxious does the "or else" have to be for the above to hold? Does it have to be lethal, or even physical? What is the line between choice and coercion?

Comments

[kirin]

I haven't read others' comments yet, but one criteria that strikes me is this: if the "other" choice violates the target's rights, then so does the holdup. If you want to put things on some sort of ethical "scale", I guess I'd say the holdup will be less "bad" than just carrying out the threat, but linearly proportional to the "badness" of the threat. Does that make any sense? As for where you put various dividing lines of ethical badness, that seems fairly arbitrary. I suppose I'll go read comments now...