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

[cognative.livejournal.com]

Well the intention issue is more fuzzy than I initialy thought. So the bank robber is clearly trying to present one option as unviable. It's the old "make him an offer he can't refuse". The bank robber is also in control of what the options are.
Lets say a sales person tells me I can pay with cash or credit and I have no cash on me. That option is unviable to me and I pretty much have to go with credit. The sales person didn't manipulate the options in order to make me do one thing over the other. The sales person probably doesn't care either way and may not know that one option is not reasonable for me. I wouldn't call that coercion though. Maybe I'm just arguing semantics. I'm not sure.

(The Icon is from Scary-Go-Round. A webcomic.)

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's a semantic issue, I think it's a real issue, though I think the addition of the salesperson adds a new complexity in that the salesperson isn't making the rules, just enacting them. If the owner of some radical Madison establishment decided to give its customers two payment options - lire, or Madison Hours - I think that would count as "coercion" or at least social manipulation of some variety. Because they don't even print lire anymore. (Yeah, ok, not really coercion because there's the third unstated option of "buy your freakin sandwich somewhere else," which most people would probably take.)