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

[eirias.livejournal.com]

This is an interesting response and one I haven't really dealt with. I'd argue that guilting a person into doing something can be coercive, yes, and I hadn't thought about that aspect. I would argue that some confessions received by priests represent just this kind of coercion.

You and several other people have said that coercion requires the use of force. My problem with that is, how do you define force? - if I had a good definition of force, the original question would be answered. :) Some people, I think, mean only the threat of physical force applied to the recipient's body, but that rules out blackmail and hostage-taking from consideration and I think everyone would agree that those are coercive. But once you include emotional factors, you open the door for guilt trips and the like to be considered coercive, and that's just a big moral grey area full of, like, everyone you know, because seriously, whose mom has NOT done this at some point?

I think one thing this discussion strikes home for me is a more general point, that the morality of an interpersonal action is highly dependent on the characteristics of the recipient of that action. Which is not particularly new (leora wrote a nice screed against the Golden Rule many months ago) but I think it really complicates any attempt to form a coherent moral framework in a way no one ever mentioned when I was growing up. (But hey, why poison children's minds with moral complexity when it's so much easier to give them a full Disney library and a copy of the Ten Commandments?)