## 1. History



Historically, the use of coercion by powerful actors has been of great
concern to philosophers and legal theorists. Detailed attention to
understanding the concept *coercion*, however, is a relatively
recent phenomenon. One effect of this discrepant attention is that it
is sometimes difficult to determine what precise meaning earlier
writers intended in their discussions of "coercion," as
well as to decide whether "coercion" captures something
different from or related to other frequently used terms, such as
*violence*, *compulsion*, *punishment*,
*force*, or *interference*. A brief survey of a few
notable thinkers suggests that coercion has commonly been understood
as a use of a certain kind of power for the purpose of gaining
advantages over others (including self-protection), punishing
non-compliance with demands, and imposing one's will on the will
of other agents. The kind of power needed for these functions is the
sort that states and other forceful or violent agents possess. One of
the clearest, most important uses of coercion has been understood to
be the state's enforcement of law, either through direct uses of
force or through punishments meted out to lawbreakers. The
state's use of coercion is thought to be licensed in particular
for the sake of preventing private acts of violence or coercion, as
well as for punishing the failure to keep agreements. These public
uses of coercion are thought justified because they make possible
private cooperation and peaceable coexistence among people not linked
by ties of affection or blood.


### 1.2 Aquinas



Although one could start earlier, Aquinas offers a picture of what
might be regarded as the traditional, canonical understanding of
coercion, its importance, and consequences. Discussion of coercion
(sometimes also described as "compulsion") recurs in the
*Summa Theologica* under several headings. In a discussion of
necessity and the will, he notes that when we speak of necessity, we
mean "that which must be" (Aquinas, *ST*, I.II Q6
A6). There are various ways something may be necessary. Coercion, he
says, is a kind of necessity in which the activities of one agent
-- the coercer -- make something necessary for another
agent. The "necessity of coercion" is that in which
"a thing must be, when someone is forced by some agent, so that
he is not able to do the contrary" (*ibid*.). Such
necessity is "altogether repugnant to the will,"
(*ibid.*) meaning that what is done because of coercion is not
done voluntarily. To say that something is voluntary, for Aquinas,
implies that it follows from or is in accord with one's
inclinations; in contrast, coercion is linked with the notions of
violence and the involuntary.



> 
> For we call that violent which is against the inclination of a thing.
> ... [A] thing is called voluntary because it is according to the
> inclination of the will. Therefore, just as it is impossible for a
> thing to be at the same time violent and natural, so it is impossible
> for a thing to be absolutely coerced or violent, and voluntary
> (Aquinas, *ST*, I Q82 A1).
> 



For Aquinas, the law and the government bear a special relationship to
the use of coercion/compulsion. In a discussion of the nature of
(human) law, Aquinas claims that "the notion of law contains two
things: first, that it is a rule of human acts; secondly, that it has
coercive power" (Aquinas, *ST*, I.II Q96 A5). This power
is identified with the ability of rulers to use force and violence
against their subjects: "the governor of a city has perfect
coercive power: wherefore he can inflict irreparable punishments such
as death and mutilation" (Aquinas *ST*, II.II Q65 A2).
The law, Aquinas suggests, must use "force and fear" in
order to restrain those who are "found to be depraved, and prone
to vice, and not easily amenable to words," so that they will
"desist from evil-doing, and leave others in peace," as
well as become "habituated in this way," and
"virtuous" (Aquinas, *ST*, I.II Q95 A1). This power
is not available for anyone to use: Aquinas argues that the coercive
function should be "vested in the whole people or in some public
personage," and not allowed to private parties (Aquinas,
*ST*, I.II Q90 A3). He does allow, however, that some parties,
such as the head of a household ("an imperfect
community"), must be able to use an "imperfect coercive
power, which is exercised by inflicting lesser punishments, for
instance by blows, which do not inflict irreparable harm"
(*ibid*.).



Aquinas also supports the common view that at least some coercion
affects the coercee's responsibility or blameworthiness for what
he does as a result of coercion. He holds that one is not to be blamed
for things done non-voluntarily. Insofar as violence undercuts the
voluntariness of one's doings, as suggested above, one is not to
be blamed for them. Violence appears able to coerce in two ways: when
used directly against one's body ("a man may be dragged by
force: but it is contrary to the very notion of violence, that he be
dragged of his own will" (Aquinas, *ST*, I.II Q6 A4));
and when used in a way that disables one's will ("the will
can suffer violence, in so far as violence can prevent the exterior
members from executing the will's command" (Aquinas,
*ST*, I.II Q6 A4)). Interestingly, however, the
 *threat*[1]
 of violence that causes one to act from fear, or to avoid that
violence, does not make an act involuntary, on Aquinas'
understanding. So only some uses of violence to hinder another's
actions have the effect of exempting the person targeted from blame
for things done as a result of
 violence.[2]


### 1.2 Hobbes, Locke, Kant



These three modern-era thinkers, though they differ in many ways, hold
surprisingly similar views of the nature of coercion and its role in
the function of justice and the state. Hobbes's fame as a
political theorist derives at least in part from the central role he
gives to coercion as a necessary part of a state's function.
Noticing that many contracts require one party to perform one's
obligations before the other party acts, Hobbes suggests that such
first performance would be irrational if one had no means to secure
the subsequent performance of one's bargaining partner.



> 
> For he that performs first has no assurance the other will perform
> after; because the bonds of words are too weak to bridle men's
> ambition, avarice, anger, and other Passions, without the fear of some
> coercive Power. ... But in a civil estate, where there is a Power
> set up to constrain those that would otherwise violate their faith,
> that fear is no more reasonable; and for that cause, he which by the
> Covenant is to perform first, is obliged so to do (Hobbes 1651,
> Ch.14).
> 



Interestingly, Hobbes seems to share Aquinas' view that acting
from fear does not undercut the voluntariness of one's acts, as
he famously asserts that "covenants extorted by fear are
valid" (Hobbes 1651, Ch. 14).



More generally, the very possibility of establishing justice and
injustice depends on the possibility of coercing subjects to abide by
their covenants.



> 
> [W]here there is no coercive Power erected, that is, where there is no
> Commonwealth, there is no Propriety; all men having Right to all
> things: Therefore where there is no Commonwealth, there nothing is
> Unjust. So that the nature of Justice, consists in keeping of valid
> Covenants: but the Validity of Covenants begins not but with the
> Constitution of a Civil Power, sufficient to compel men to keep them:
> And then it is also that Propriety begins (Hobbes 1651, Ch. 15).
> 



Hobbes thus holds that coercion is essential to both the justification
of and function of the state or commonwealth. In fact, it is a law of
nature that we seek the protection of the Leviathan's coercive
powers in order to exit the perilous conditions of the state of
nature.



Locke very rarely uses the term "coercion" or its
 variants,[3]
 but he believes like Hobbes that the function of the state is
intimately tied to its role in securing individuals against those who
would kill, injure or rob them.



> 
> Political power, then, I take to be a right of making laws, with
> penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties for the
> regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of
> the community in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the
> commonwealth from foreign injury, and all this only for the public
> good (Locke 1823 [1689], Sec. 3).
> 



Locke, more so than Hobbes, is wary of the power of the sovereign, but
is less anxious about conditions in the state of nature. One reason
for this reversal of concern, he suggests, is that sovereigns are more
potent oppressors than ordinary inhabitants of the state of nature,
due to the ability of sovereigns to organize force and violence (Locke
1823 [1689], Sec. 137).



Because individuals cannot reasonably give up power to an unchecked
sovereign, Locke also holds that an agent's ability to possess
and use that power effectively depends in many ways on the rightness
of that agent's use of power. In particular, Locke seems to
suggest that a system of property rights cannot be enforced by the
state if it renders others unable to secure their own economic
survival. One is entitled to the protection of what one has labored to
create so long as, with respect to land and other natural resources,
"there is enough, and as good, left in common for others"
(Locke 1823 [1689], Sec. 27). This "Lockean proviso," as
Nozick called it (Nozick 1974, p. 175 *ff*), creates a sort of
baseline condition against which the acceptability of any set of
coercive arrangements can be judged. So for Locke, more than for
Hobbes, the power of the sovereign rests on the consent of those
governed -- not only for its justification, but also for its
stability against revolution, about which Locke was clearly more
sanguine than Hobbes.



Kant also gives considerable attention to the importance of coercion
for guaranteeing rights of citizens, though he says little that would
explain what he means by his use of the term. Kant's only
prominent discussion of coercion occurs in his *Doctrine of
 Right*,[4]
 a treatise on the nature of law. Kant thinks there are two sorts of
"incentives" to follow the law: *ethical* and
*juridical*. The ethical (i.e., rational) incentive to follow
the law is the motive of duty. But since the wills of some people are
determined pathologically -- that is, by inclinations and
aversions, rather than by duty -- there needs also to be a way to
get such persons to follow the law as well, through such means as
aversion to punishment (Kant 1996 [1797], 20 [AK 6, 219]). Coercion is
then a tool the law uses to get the lawless to respect the rights of
others whether they want to or not. He associates it with the
executive authority of the state's ruler, and the ruler's
use of punishment in conformity with the law. Kant makes clear that
coercion counts as a hindrance to freedom, in which respect it is
similar to all violations of a person's rights. But coercion can
be used to prevent other rights violations, and thus may be justified
on the grounds that it counts as a hindrance to a hindrance to
freedom. "Right and authorization to use coercion therefore mean
one and the same thing" (Kant 1996 [1797], 26 [AK 6, 232]).



Kant's views on the necessity of coercion for the existence of
right differ from those of Hobbes and Locke, but he is in general
sympathetic to the idea that states require the ability to use
coercion in defense of the equal freedom of their subjects. Without
such coercive abilities, one can have "private right," but
that is no more than the rights one has in the state of nature, which
are by no means secure.



> 
> It is true that the state of nature need not, just because it is
> natural, be a state of *injustice*, of dealing with one another
> only in terms of the degree of force each has. But it would still be a
> state *devoid of justice ...* in which when rights are
> *in dispute* there would be no judge competent to render a
> verdict having rightful force. Hence each may impel the other by force
> to leave this state and enter into a rightful condition; ...
> [the] acquisition [of right] is still only *provisional* as
> long as it does not yet have the sanction of public law, since it is
> not determined by public (distributive) justice and secured by an
> authority putting this right into effect (Kant 1996 [1797], 90 [AK 6,
> 312]).
> 



So Kant, like Hobbes and Locke, sees it as a necessity for people to
establish a state with coercive powers in order to achieve
justice.


### 1.3 John Stuart Mill



With respect to his thinking about coercion, Mill is most famous for
his views, in *On Liberty*, about what coercion is not fit to
do: namely, be used to regulate people's behavior for their own
good. Like his predecessors and mentor Jeremy Bentham, Mill associates
coercion with the state's powers to punish lawbreakers. But Mill
seems in general to take a more expansive view of what coercion
amounts to than did those surveyed above, appearing to treat the terms
"coercion" and "interference" as much the same
thing in *On Liberty*. In stating the thesis of that work, Mill
writes,



> 
> The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as
> entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the
> individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means
> used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral
> coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for
> which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in
> interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is
> self-protection. ... [An individual] cannot rightfully be
> compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so,
> because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others,
> to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for
> remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or
> entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any
> evil in case he do otherwise (Mill 1909-14 [1859], Ch.1).
> 



In treating coercion expansively, Mill apparently intended to capture
a number of different ways in which powerful agents could exercise
constraining power on others besides the use of force, violence, and
threats thereof. So, for instance, Mill suggests that the potency of
legal penalties often resides more in the stigma they attach than the
actual punishments they apply. Concerning laws against unpopular
views, Mill writes,



> 
> [T]he chief mischief of the legal penalties is that they strengthen
> the social stigma. It is that stigma which is really effective...
> [Except for people who are] independent of the good will of other
> people, opinion, on this subject, is as efficacious as law; men might
> as well be imprisoned, as excluded from the means of earning their
> bread.... Our merely social intolerance kills no one, roots out
> no opinions, but induces men to disguise them, or to abstain from any
> active effort for their diffusion (Mill 1909-14 [1859], Ch. 2).
> 



Thus Mill decries "the despotism of custom," as a force
seemingly more potent than that of governments, in that it is able to
hold back whole civilizations for centuries (Mill 1909-14
[1859], Ch. 2).



By contrast with Hobbes, Locke, or Kant, Mill recognizes that the
power of civil institutions is frequently on a par with the power of
the state, and treats the potential for coercion by these other
institutions as similarly a matter of concern. For instance, in
thinking about the institution of marriage, Mill writes,



> 
> When the law makes everything which the wife acquires, the property of
> the husband, while by compelling her to live with him it forces her to
> submit to almost any amount of moral and even physical tyranny which
> he may choose to inflict, there is some ground for regarding every act
> done by her as done under coercion (Mill 1909 [1848], Bk.V, ch. XI).
> 



And in looking at the circumstances of child labor in his day, he
noted,



> 
> Labouring for too many hours in the day, or on work beyond their
> strength, should not be permitted to [children], for if permitted it
> may always be compelled. Freedom of contract, in the case of children,
> is but another word for freedom of coercion (Mill 1909 [1848], Bk. V.
> ch. XI).
> 



Thus Mill's understanding of coercion appears to treat a wider
array of powers as potential means of coercion than did earlier
thinkers.


### 1.4 20th Century views to 1969



With the advent of analytic approaches to philosophy and law in the
20th Century, philosophers and legal theorists began to give more
explicit elaboration to what "coercion" means, and how it
relates to other concepts. In the period prior to 1969, there were of
course some differences among theorists, but there seems to be a
mainstream view of coercion that is more or less continuous with the
view found in Aquinas and Hobbes/Locke/Kant (and some of the views of
Bentham and Mill). This view identifies coercion with the use of force
or violence, as well as to threats of the same. For instance, Hans
Kelsen explains the nature of law by saying,



> 
> As a coercive order, the law is distinguished from other social
> orders. The decisive criterion is the element of force -- that
> means that the act prescribed by the order as a consequence of
> socially detrimental facts ought to be executed even against the will
> of the individual and, if he resists, by physical force (Kelsen 1967
> [1934], 34).
> 



Kelsen goes on to count as coercive acts such things as detaining
those suspected of crimes, detaining for protective custody, detaining
of the insane, detaining in internment camps potential enemies of the
state, and the confiscation or destruction of property (Kelsen 1967
[1934], 40-41).



J. R. Lucas puts a slightly different cast on a similar thought,
emphasizing the importance of a technique by which one agent (e.g.,
the state) can assure that its decisions are implemented.



> 
> [W]e are concerned with the *enforcement* of decisions: we are
> considering the conditions under which decisions will be carried out
> regardless of the recalcitrance of the bloody minded. We therefore
> define *force* in terms of bloody-mindedness, of what happens
> irrespective of how recalcitrant a man is, of what happens to him
> willy-nilly. Force, then, we say, is being used against a man, if in
> his private experience or in his environment either something is being
> done which he does not want to be done but which he is unable to
> prevent in spite of all his efforts, or he is being prevented, in
> spite of all his efforts, from doing something which he wants to do,
> and which he otherwise could have done by himself alone. A man is
> being *coerced* when either force is being used against him or
> his behaviour is being determined by the threat of force (Lucas 1966,
> 57; emphasis in the original).
> 
> 
> [I]mprisonment is the paradigm form of coercion.... Even if it
> were not regarded as a penalty, it would still be effective in
> frustrating the efforts of the recalcitrant to prevent a judicial
> decision being implemented (Lucas 1966, 60).
> 
> 
> 



If there is a single, continuous thread that runs through the various
thoughts about coercion surveyed above, I believe it could be
identified as Lucas suggests with a concern for the ability of some
agents to implement and enforce decisions about the activities of
others. With the possible exception of Mill, who allows for a greater
range of coercive methods than the others surveyed, this general idea
seems to capture what one might have said was essential in the concept
of coercion as pre-modern and modern political theorists employed it,
by name or (in the case of Locke) by function.



## 2. Contemporary philosophical accounts of coercion


### 2.1 Nozick and a new approach to coercion



Beginning in 1969, a spate of short articles was published on
coercion. The earliest of significance was Robert Nozick's
"Coercion." It was followed shortly by a collection of
essays by political philosophers published in a volume of the
*Nomos* series, focused on coercion (Pennock and Chapman 1972).
These articles were in turn followed by an outpouring of responses and
original discussions of coercion that continued throughout the 1970s
and 80s. The influence of these early discussions of coercion remains
strong. So it is useful to begin thinking about contemporary
treatments of coercion by looking at how these early articles framed
the topic.



Nozick's essay was by far the most influential of these early
works. Besides being first, his essay established a framework for
thinking about coercion which provided an intuitively compelling
picture of how coercion works. Nozick analyzed coercion by offering a
list of necessary and sufficient conditions for judging the truth of
the claim that *P* coerces *Q*. Somewhat simplified, he
argued that *P* coerces *Q* if and only if:


1. *P* aims to keep *Q* from choosing to perform action
*A*;
2. *P* communicates a claim to *Q*;
3. *P*'s claim indicates that if *Q* performs
*A*, then *P* will bring about some consequence that
would make *Q*'s *A*-ing less desirable to
*Q* than *Q*'s not *A*-ing;
4. *P*'s claim is credible to *Q*;
5. *Q* does not do *A*;
6. Part of *Q*'s reason for not doing *A* is to
lessen the likelihood that *P* will bring about the consequence
announced in (3) (Nozick 1969,
 441-445).[5]



Many theorists adopted this framework explicitly or implicitly, and it
has influenced almost all subsequent analytic philosophical
discussions of the topic. Subsequent sections will address the aspects
of Nozick's analysis which have received the most attention and
debate. The remainder of this section sketches some of the less
remarked ways in which Nozick's analysis differs from the more
traditional understanding of coercion, exhibited in the historical
survey above. Specifically, (1) it associates coercion only with
proposals (e.g., conditional
 threats[6]),
 and excludes direct uses of force or
 violence[7];
 (2) it insists that coercion takes place only when the coercee
acquiesces to it; and (3) it makes coercion explicitly dependent on
the coercee's choice to take or not take a specific action
*A*, and mandates that a judgment about coercion must refer to
facts about the coercee's psychology, such as her assessment of
the consequences *A-*ing in light of the coercer's
proposal. The overall effect of these differences is to focus the
analysis of coercion on how the coercee is affected by it, rather than
on what the coercer does, and what is required for him to do it
successfully. (See Anderson 2008b.)


#### 2.1.1 Coercion via threats, and (not) via force



One significant departure from the traditional approach is that Nozick
limits his discussion of coercion to techniques that influence or
alter the will of the coercee, by altering the intentions or
dispositions of the coercee. Such coercion usually takes the form of a
conditional threat (or sometimes a conditional offer). Though a few
subsequent writers, like Michael Bayles (Bayles 1972; and Gunderson
1979, following Bayles) and Grant Lamond (Lamond 1996 and 2000), have
accepted direct force as equally a means of
 coercion,[8]
 Nozick's restriction of the topic to the use of threats --
that is, coercion that operates through the will of the coercee
-- has been the much more frequently accepted view, whether
explicitly or implicitly.



However, some theorists argue that there are good reasons to treat
coercion via the will and direct force or constraint applied to the
body as two methods of a single kind of activity. First, though direct
force is usually unsuited to get an agent to perform a specific
action, both are well suited to preventing an agent from taking a
variety of actions, with direct force or constraint often being more
decisive. Second, the two techniques are often used hand-in-hand. For
instance, police officers will shackle and manhandle someone in
custody who refuses to cooperate when given instructions to move or
stay still. Also, prison inmates are coerced into remaining there by a
combination of penalties for attempting escape along with physical
obstacles that limit the feasibility of doing so. So using both
techniques is often part of one and the same activity aimed at
affecting or constraining what an agent will do (sometimes by
affecting what she *can* do) (Anderson 2008a and 2010). Of
course, under direct force, it will usually be true that the coercee
does not act, but rather is acted upon, as H. J. McCloskey puts it
(McCloskey 1980). However, from the coercer's perspective, it
may be just as well, in enforcing his decisions, to prevent the
coercee from acting at all as it would be to induce her to choose not
to act.


#### 2.1.2 (No) unsuccessful coercion



Nozick's framing indicates that coercion is necessarily
successful: if the coercee does not act as demanded, then there is no
instance of coercion. At most, it seems, there is an instance of
attempted coercion. One might say that Nozick builds a "success
condition" into his analysis of coercion. Others have disagreed
with the success condition, though Nozick's is apparently a
majority view. (Those who agree include McCloskey 1980; Gorr 1986;
Murray and Dudrick 1995; Berman 2002; Garnett 2018; one who disagrees
is Carr 1988). The disagreement seems to be over whether to identify
instances of coercion with one or the other of the two faces mentioned
at the outset: that is, to identify it with a kind of behavior by the
coercer (which may or may not be successful), or to identify it with
specific events in the life of the coercee (namely, those that alter
or constrain her activities). Several authors, picking up on the
disagreement, have suggested that we might distinguish coercion from
coerciveness, associating the former with completed, successful
attempts, and the latter with qualities of the attempt itself (Lamond,
2000).



Of course, if the coercee defies the coercer, there is no coerced
action to investigate, nor any question to answer about responsibility
for such an action. There is also reason to doubt that what the
coercer did in such cases rises to meet the bar at which we should
consider it coercive. (If a threat is trivial, we would likely resist
saying that an agent was coerced by it even if she acts to prevent its
execution.) On the other hand, it may be unwise to make a categorical
distinction between cases in which coercion succeeds and cases where
it fails: the difference between them on some occasions may be nothing
more than what mood the coercee happened to be in at the time. Since
the coercer has the final and definitive say over whether he will
engage in coercive activity (and who will be engaged by it), it may
make more sense to identify our phenomenon of interest with a certain
form of activity by the coercer, admitting that such activity may or
may not result in any further noticeable consequences. (The would-be
coercer may of course be bluffing, and the prospective coercee may
call the bluff; this would not, by itself, give reason to deny that we
have here an instance of the technique under study.)


#### 2.1.3 Is coercion conceptually limited to specific coerced acts?



Finally, Nozick frames his analysis with respect to some particular
action *A* taken or not taken by the coercee. The connection of
coercion to a specific action taken or foregone has seemed natural to
almost all subsequent commentators, even though it raises some
problems of which at least Nozick himself seems to have been aware. In
the short detour that is the second section of his essay, Nozick poses
questions of the following sort: If *P* coerces *Q* into
doing *A*, and *B* and *C* are the only ways to
do *A*, does *P* coerce *Q* into doing *B*
(assuming that is the means *Q* chose)? Similarly, if
*P* coerces *Q* into not doing *A*, and
*A* is a necessary precursor to *B*, does *P*
coerce *Q* into not doing *B*? Does it matter whether
*Q* was already aiming/hoping/expecting to do *B*? More
generally, if as a result of prior acts of coercion by *P*, an
act *A* is no longer possible for *Q* (perhaps
*Q* doesn't think about it at all), has *P*
coerced *Q* into not *A*-ing? Nozick broaches questions
of these sorts, but leaves them aside without much mention of their
significance (See Nozick 1969, 445-47). Taken seriously,
however, they would force some significant revisions to the way
theorists have analyzed coercion. They show that there may be
difficulties in identifying coercion strictly with actions taken or
foregone, since it may be impossible to determine just what actions
this description includes.



More generally, Nozick's analysis emphasizes the alteration in
the coercee's choice of actions which results from the way the
coercer's proposal affects her reasons for acting. While this is
certainly a plausible approach for distinguishing coerced from
uncoerced acts, it puts the focus on how the coercee perceives her
situation; it is only via this reflection that it takes into account
how the coercer is able to create this perception. That is, it leaves
the standard sorts of means (force, violence, perhaps even economic
deprivation) that coercers use out of the account, and instead treats
all kinds of alterations to the coercee's costs and benefits to
acting as possible indications of coercion. While this more ecumenical
approach to coercion may succeed in encompassing ways of coercing that
the traditional theories would leave out, it creates a difficult
challenge for the theory to distinguish coercive from non-coercive
proposals. It is not surprising, therefore, that these are the issues
that have been the focus of most subsequent theorizing on the
subject.


### 2.2 Threats and Baselines



Since Nozick's essay, theorists have frequently treated the
making of a conditional threat as an essential factor in coercion. The
largest single effort expended in analyzing coercion has been devoted
to making sense of such threats, and determining their relationship to
coercion. Some, however, have questioned the linking of coercion with
threats, and suggested that conditional offers too can be coercive.
Both conditional threats and conditional offers can be said to be
proposals, where the distinction between them is their relationship to
some baseline representing the coercee's situation prior to the
proposal: compared to the baseline, threats worsen the coercee's
situation, while offers do not. In this and the next two sections,
we'll examine some of the issues involved here. In Section 2.5
we'll consider some approaches to coercion that attempt to
escape from a "baseline" analysis of threats and
offers.



Most will recognize the connection of coercion with threats as a
matter of common sense: armed robbers, mafias, the parents of young
children, and the state all make conditional threats with the
intention of reducing the eligibility of some actions, making other
actions more attractive by comparison. Note, however, that offers may
also be made with the same general intention as coercive threats: that
is, to make some actions more attractive, others less so. Consider the
basic structure of a conditional threat by *P* that attaches
undesirable consequences *C* to some action *A* by
*Q*:



> 
> *P* claims that (*P* will bring about consequences
> *C* if and only if *Q* does *A*).
> 



This proposition has the same structure as an ordinary offer by
*P* to do something *Q* desires if *Q* agrees to
pay for it, but not otherwise. Conversely, any ordinary offer has the
same structure as a threat. This suggests that any proposal whatever
may be read as a threat or an offer, depending on the relationship
between the proposal and some specifiable external factors.
("Your money or your life" might equally be proposed by a
back-alley robber or a pharmaceutical company; in one case it's
a robbery, in the other case it may be a life-saving offer.) The idea
that threats coerce while offers don't is frequently thought to
be connected to the fact that threats propose to make their recipient
worse off than she would have been otherwise. If so, we are required
to specify how we should pick out and assess the relata in this
comparison, which is trickier than it may at first appear. Consider
first the question of what aspect of the proposal is relevant for this
comparison; and then second what relevant comparison case (usually
called the "baseline") should be used.



Any bi-conditional proposal can be analyzed into a conjunction of two
component simple conditionals, both of which must be true if the
bi-conditional itself is true. However, only one of the two
conditionals will have its antecedent satisfied (depending on what
*Q* chooses to do), and will thus govern what comes about as a
consequence. If the proposal is to have a motivational effect on its
recipient, it will be because the recipient prefers that one of the
two possible consequents be realized -- either that *P*
brings about *C*, or that *P* does not bring about
*C* -- so we may suppose that it is the difference in
*Q*'s valuation of these consequents that motivates (if
anything does) *Q* to act in response to *P*'s
proposal. (If the agent is indifferent between the two states, we may
consider the proposal to be an offer, but too unattractive an offer to
tempt one to accept it.) So we look to the conditional containing the
less-preferred consequent, and compare it to the baseline in order to
see whether *P*'s proposal makes *Q* worse off
than she would be in the relevant alternative state of affairs. (The
following analysis slightly modifies the analysis in Gorr 1986,
391-397; and Berman 2002,
 55-59.[9])



So, for instance, an armed robber issues a proposal to a passerby that
amounts to the following conditionals:



> 
> (a) If she keeps her valuables, he will harm her;
> 
> 
> (b) if she hands them over, he will not.
> 
> 
> 



The passerby prefers the consequent in (b), so we compare the
conditional (a) to the baseline. Normally, one faces no harm if one
keeps one's valuables. So the first conditional makes the
passerby worse off than she would normally be, thus turning the
robber's proposal into a threat.



By contrast, consider the offer of a salesman who proposes to a
customer the following:



> 
> (c) If the customer pays *X*, he will provide her a vacation
> package;
> 
> 
> (d) if she does not pay *X*, he provides no vacation
> package.
> 
> 
> 



Assuming the customer would prefer having the vacation package to not
having the vacation package, the second conditional contains the less
preferred consequent. But receiving no free vacation is quite normal,
so one is no worse off when the second conditional is operative than
under normal circumstances. Hence the salesman is making only an
offer, not a threat.



(Some have discussed "throffers," which are proposals that
make one better off than normal under one conditional, worse off than
normal under the alternative conditional. On the above analysis,
throffers will be included among the threats because the conditional
containing the less-preferred consequent makes one worse off than one
normally would be.)



This analysis works well enough for most purposes. Since we quite
often know what's normal and what's not, threats and
offers are usually easily distinguished. Difficulties arise, however,
when this is not the case.


### 2.3 Moralized vs. non-moralized baselines



Nozick explains the idea of the baseline by calling it the
"normal or natural or expected course of events" (Nozick
1969, 447). But all of these terms are ambiguous, in that they have
normative (or "moral") and non-normative (e.g.,
"predictive") uses. Frequently, the normative and
predictive uses will point to the same state of affairs as the course
of events that is indicated. However, the extensions of the normative
and non-normative uses will sometimes differ, thus requiring a
theorist to choose one or the other in order to determine whether a
particular communication counts as a threat or an offer, and is
therefore coercive or not.



Nozick offers two of the best known cases in which the normative and
non-normative baselines would appear to diverge. Here's one of
them (Nozick 1969,
 450-51):[10]



> 
> **The slave case:**
>   
> 
> *P* is a slave owner who regularly beats his slave *Q*.
> One day *P* proposes to spare *Q* his regular beating if
> and only if *Q* now does *A*.
> 



*Q* prefers not to be beaten, so we look to the conditional



> 
> (e) If *Q* does not do *A*, *P* will beat
> *Q*.
> 



Since *P* beats *Q* regularly, this conditional's
becoming operative makes *Q* no worse off than what *Q*
finds normal or expected (statistically speaking). So
*P*'s proposal amounts to an offer, not a threat, on this
way of understanding of what's normal. Yet we would reasonably
hold that if *Q* elects to escape a beating by doing
*A*, *Q*'s choice is made in response to a threat
of a beating, and is thus coerced.



The slave case demonstrates an ambiguity in our thought about
"what is normal" (or "what is expected").
Although the slave is typically beaten and predicts he'll be
beaten based on past history, we expect on moral grounds that people
are not beaten for no reason. Given the moral sense of what is normal,
the slave owner's proposition amounts to a threat, thus
validating our sense that the slave is coerced into doing *A*.
Especially in contexts of entrenched injustice, the
"moral" and "predictive" baselines may
diverge, forcing us to choose between them.



Actually, any number of different possible baselines might be
constructed for judging whether a proposal makes one better or worse
off than the baseline. There are different ways of making a
prediction; there are different "moral" standards; there
are also ways of taking into consideration what the recipient of the
proposal would want. So divergences among the many possible baselines
may be more common than we might at first suspect. This requires us to
find a way to choose among the possibly diverging baselines. Nozick,
for instance, proposes that when the "predictive" and the
"moral" baselines diverge, we turn to the preferences of
the recipient of the proposal, and use the baseline he prefers. In the
slave case above, Nozick reasonably supposes that the slave would
prefer that "normal" meant "moral"; in which
case the slave would not be beaten even if he did not do *A*.
By comparison to this baseline, the slave-owner's proposal is a
threat, not an offer.



Some theorists have noticed that what the proposal recipient wants to
happen may differ from both the moral and predictive baselines.
Michael Gorr, for instance, argues that if preferences are important
when the baselines diverge, "it is unclear why they should be
less so in cases where the two baselines coincide." Hence he
favors an account that "makes the subject's preferences a
controlling factor in *all* cases" (Gorr 1986,
398-399; see also Rhodes 2000). The difficulty with this
suggestion, however, is that it's very difficult to craft
constraints on what preferences will count for how things go; people
can want others to do or omit doing almost anything. Suppose we agree
it is normal in both the moral and predictive senses for workers who
shirk to be fired, and for customers who refuse to pay utility bills
to have their electricity cut off. Of course, workers and customers
would likely prefer to get paid for nothing, and to get their
electricity for free. Compared to these baselines, proposing to fire
or to cut off electricity to someone amounts to going out of
one's way to attach undesirable consequences to some
(non-)action *A*. On Gorr's criteria, it would
appear, both of these threats count as coercive threats, yet both seem
to be parts of ordinary, non-coercive commerce based on offers and
 acceptances.[11]
 At any rate, it is difficult to see how a fully preference-based
baseline account can avoid seeing coercion in a vast array of
situations where our pre-theoretic views would deny it.



Those who opt for a moralized baseline approach seem to offer a more
plausible approach. The most prominent of these theorists has been
Alan Wertheimer, whose book *Coercion* sets the current
standard and starting point for continued scholarship in this
 area.[12]
 Since only threats coerce, but not all threats do, he provides a
two-pronged test for whether a proposal constitutes a coercive threat
(Wertheimer 1987, especially chs. 2, 12, and 14). The proposal
constitutes a *threat* if the proposer indicates that, if his
demand is denied, he will make the recipient worse off than the
recipient ought to be. (In particular, Wertheimer believes that this
is frequently best understood as a question of whether the proposer
proposes to violate the recipient's *rights* (Wertheimer
1987,
 217).)[13]
 Yet the mere fact that something threatens one is not sufficient to
ground a claim that it coerces anyone; the threat may be wrongful but
also trivial. So Wertheimer requires that the choice forced upon the
coercee be such that she has no reasonable choice but to succumb. This
too requires a contextually specific, moralized judgment, Wertheimer
thinks. One might, for instance, be supported in a claim that a
threatened beating left one "no choice" but to sign a
contract; the same might not be said about a choice to commit
murder.



Wertheimer's approach is developed and defended by surveying
legal reasoning in the U.S. and its common-law tradition with respect
to such matters as contracts, criminal responsibility, plea bargains,
blackmail, and consent to searches and medical procedures. His work
has been influential among many who have tried to determine what the
law should say about various coercive phenomena, and Wertheimer
himself has offered further applications of his theories in subsequent
work, including a book on consent to sexual relations (Wertheimer
2004). Wertheimer's moralized account and moralized theories of
coercion more generally raise some difficulties for understanding how
there could be "justified coercion," such as law
enforcement, in that they tend to associate uses of coercion with
immoral action. Some of these difficulties are considered in Section
3.4 below.


### 2.4 Coercive Offers?



While the dominant strand in recent theory has associated coercion
with threats, and denied that offers can be used to coerce, this sharp
differentiation of these two sorts of proposals has come in for some
criticism. The parallel structure of conditional threats and
conditional offers has led some to deny that there is a deep
distinction to be made between them. Others have focused on the role
of both in the broader political and economic context, and found that
these broader conditions make coercive offers a live possibility.
Dealings in capitalist markets are often highly exploitative;
governments often condition the provision of ordinary benefits on the
satisfaction of unrelated demands (such as making highway funding
conditional on states' passing particular laws). Given the
potency such offers possess, one might suspect that there are many
offers that one cannot reasonably refuse, possibly reflecting great
imbalances in power or prior historical injustices between the
bargaining parties. (See, for instance, O'Neill 1991; and Berman
2001.)



Of those who have argued that threats and offers can both be used
coercively, David Zimmerman has been most prominent (Zimmerman 1981;
others who have argued offers can coerce include Frankfurt 1988
[1973]; Held 1972; Lyons 1975; Van De Veer 1979; Benditt 1979;
Feinberg 1986; Stevens 1988; Rocha 2011; for criticism of Zimmerman,
Held, and Stevens, see Alexander 1981; Bayles 1974; and Swanton 1989,
respectively). Retaining the baseline-approach to coercion found in
Nozick, Zimmerman urges that in setting a baseline for judging a
proposal, we should take into account the possibility that the
proposal maker is actively hindering the coercee from obtaining a
situation for herself that would be better than the situation the
coercer proposes. So, for instance, if a person is destitute on an
island, and someone proposes to employ this person for a
life-sustaining pittance, this proposal may count as an offer, since
it is an improvement over the "pre-proposal" situation.
But if the person is destitute and unable to obtain better conditions
only because the employer actively prevents the person from leaving
the island (say, by preventing the building of boats), Zimmerman
suggests the offer should be regarded as coercive. That's
because the appropriate baseline for evaluating the proposal is the
state of affairs that the recipient would face in the absence of
special interference by the proposal maker. (In the present case, this
might be the situation the island inhabitant would face were she able
to build a boat and return to the mainland.) If relative to this
baseline the offer is less favored, then it should count as coercive,
Zimmerman thinks.



Do such offers coerce? The dispute between those who say offers can
coerce, such as Zimmerman, and those who insist only threats coerce
may be more verbal than substantive. While Zimmerman, for instance,
would label the offer itself coercive, what appears to do the coercing
here is whatever means were or are being used to keep the recipient of
the offer from reaching a better bargaining state. If the offering
party here has created the conditions that make even very unattractive
offers still the best available, then the coercion, if there is any,
seems to be vested in the offerer's actions that prevent the
recipient from improving her situation or finding better offers
elsewhere.



Zimmerman grants that even if the offering party does not cause the
recipient to be in the position she's in, we may still want to
criticize such offers. In these cases, the offer-maker may be guilty
of engaging in *exploitation*, though not coercion. When one
party is in a much stronger bargaining position than another, the
stronger party sometimes uses its advantage to keep for itself most or
all of the gains to be had from cooperative interaction between the
parties. So employers who are in a stronger bargaining position than
their employees may exploit them by paying them a small fraction of
the value their labor contributes to the production of goods for the
employer. This is especially feasible when one party has a relative
monopoly position with respect to some valuable good (say, employment
opportunities). So, reconfiguring Zimmerman's results somewhat,
we might retain the exclusive connection between threats and coercion
by saying that offers made from a position of superior bargaining
strength are very likely to be exploitative; and that sometimes
coercion is used to create or maintain one's bargaining
advantages.



Not all, however, would accept that the coerciveness of a large
differential in bargaining power depends upon its causal origins. Joan
McGregor, for example, gives an analysis of such offers in an account
that eschews the baseline approach. She argues, "the
'better off'/'worse off' distinction ignores
the power relationships that occur when there are radically disparate
bargaining strengths" (McGregor 1988-89, 24). To assess
the coerciveness of something like an economic transaction, one must
instead attend to the relative strengths of the bargaining positions
between parties involved. "[C]oercion involves exercising power
over another; in the market, it involves exercising superior
bargaining power" (McGregor 1988-89, 25). At least two of
the conditions for having bargaining power sufficient to coerce
another are that the weaker party is *dependent* in some way on
the stronger party (e.g., there are no other options or potential
exchange partners), and the stronger party has influence over whether
some significant *evil* occurs to the weaker party (such as
loss of life, health, security) (McGregor 1988-89, 34). If in
addition the stronger party decides to take advantage of these
conditions, then this is not just exploitation but coercion. While the
details of her account of bargaining strength may raise difficulties,
her attempt to incorporate a measure of the coercer's power into
the account of coercion seems a useful if relatively under-explored
approach. Arguably, a consideration such as this motivates Serena
Olsaretti in her argument that markets might preserve freedom while
also undermining voluntariness in a fashion similar to that of
coercive threats (Olsaretti 2004, ch. 6).


### 2.5 Non-baseline approaches



The need to establish a baseline is generated by a need to distinguish
threats from offers as a central criterion of coercion. Threats and
offers are both proposals put to the coercee, aiming to influence her
behavior, and distinguished with respect to how they affect what is
normal for the coercee. There are two main ways in which some
theorists have diverged from the baseline-style account that Nozick
proposed, each of these ways admitting of both moralized and
non-moralized versions. Instead of distinguishing threats and offers
from what's normal for the agent, we might instead see threats
as applying a special sort or degree of pressure on the
coercee's will. Or, we might move away from focusing on the
coercee's will as the locus of coercion, and instead look at the
powers, intentions, and activities of coercers. A
"coercer-focused" account seeks to determine what is
special about coercive actions, rather than trying to distinguish
coerced from non-coerced actions.



One way to identify coercive threats is by looking for a distinctive
way that pressure can affect a coercee's will. Sometimes, a use
of threats conditioned on the agent's activities may affect not
just the coercee's choice but also her ability to choose at all.
Under severe psychological pressure, faced with grave dangers or
significant evils, people sometimes react in ways that diverge from
(or at least do not follow from) their more rational, considered
desires. Harry Frankfurt seems to make this effect a requirement for
something to count as coercive, saying "A coercive threat
arouses in its victim a desire -- i.e. to avoid the penalty
-- so powerful that it will move him to perform the required
action whether he wants to perform it or considers that it would be
reasonable for him to do so" (Frankfurt 1988 [1973], 78).
Frankfurt has several reasons for insisting on this strong
requirement, but perhaps most central is his view that coercion must
have such an overbearing effect if it is to override the
coercee's moral responsibility for acting (Frankfurt 1988
[1973], 75-76). However, if one treats such overburdening as a
sufficient condition for coercion, then this again lends support to
the view that some offers -- irresistible ones -- will also
turn out to be coercive. Though the fact that Q's will was
overborne would seem compatible with the claim that Q has been
coerced, few besides Frankfurt have taken such overburdening to be a
necessary condition for coercion to take
 place.[14]



Short of generating psychological compulsion, one might hold that
coercion involves the imposition of an option which no one could
reasonably refuse to take. Several have tried to characterize such
situations in a way that neither reduces to a form of psychological
determinism, nor implicitly invokes baseline comparisons. For
instance, Mark Fowler argues that "coercion generally involves
the prima facie immoral imposition of practical imperatives by use of
threats" (Fowler 1982, 330). While this approach must be
supplemented with further details (including, perhaps, a resort to a
baseline to distinguish threats from offers), its principal
contribution is its reliance on "practical imperatives."
Fowler suggests that we need to see coercion in relation to our
understanding of how practical reason works. When we say that the
coercer leaves the coercee "no choice," we don't
necessarily mean that the coercee is literally unable to choose, but
that for the coercee to choose otherwise than the coercer demands
would be contrary to practical reason (Fowler 1982, 331).



The normative approach Fowler favors links this criterion to a Kantian
account of autonomy, and suggests that the test of a coercive threat
is that it violates the coercee's autonomy. This would appear to
produce a mismatch between our pre-theoretic understanding of coercion
and the cases that will satisfy Fowler's conditions -- for
instance, giving someone a false "warning" arguably
violates her autonomy, but this seems different than coercion. Yet if
there is a way to make sense of the notion of imposing a practical
imperative, this seems a useful element of an account of coercion.



Joel Feinberg identifies coercion with a special degree or kind of
pressure imposed on the coercee's will, but avoids connecting
pressure to a normative judgment. His account is tailored to cases
where the coercer seeks to obtain a token of "consent" to
some harmful or dangerous activity from the coercee, but it could
easily be generalized to cover other sorts of coerced activities. His
account starts by offering a helpful description of the role of the
coercer, stipulating that the coercer:



> 
> threatens to "cause or fail to prevent some consequences that
> [the coercee] finds unwelcome"; and
> 
> 
> "gives some evidence of the credibility of the threat";
> and
> 
> 
> 
> "has actively intervened in [the coercee's]
> option-network, to acquire control of the relevant option-switches; in
> particular he can close tight the conjunctive option that consists of
> [the coercee's] noncompliance with the demand *and* [the
> coercee's] avoidance of the threatened unwelcome
> consequences" (Feinberg 1986, 198).
>  [15]
> 
> 
> 



These stipulations are useful supplements to the Nozickian-style
account, in that they require the coercer to demonstrate his power,
and to actively use it to create the situation facing the coercee, in
particular by preventing the coercee from finding ways to avoid the
forced
 choice.[16]



The bulk of Feinberg's account focuses instead, however, on how
coercive proposals can generate pressure on the coercee's will
that, if not irresistible, is sufficiently strong to make the
coercee's choice unfree. This account avoids a reliance on
baselines because it makes the coercee's judgment of the
frightfulness, unwelcomeness and pressure involved in the threat the
key criterion for determining whether it coerces. Feinberg goes on to
give a detailed discussion of how one might compare the pressures
involved when coercers issue various sorts of demands coupled with
various sorts of threats, suggesting ways of calculating the
"total coercive burden" a threat creates for a
coercee.



Feinberg's account generates a number of apparently troubling
results. For one thing, it will allow that extremely tempting offers
are coercive if they create pressure similar to that associated with
coercive threats; the only thing that seems to count is how much
pressure one feels to act. It will also treat people with non-standard
preferences or fears (say, a dire fear of being patted on the back) as
having been "coerced" by threats to do what are,
objectively speaking, trivial things (Feinberg 1986, 212).



A different way of understanding coercion moves away from focusing on
its impact on the coercee. Some approaches, like McGregor's
noted above, look for coercion in the coercer's taking advantage
of certain sorts of power differentials between coercer and coercee.
Others identify coercion with the making of threats, but seek to
distinguish threats from offers in ways that avoid reference to a
baseline, and instead look at the qualities of the coercer and his
activities. Mitchell Berman, following Vinit Haksar, has argued for an
approach the crux of which holds that immoral coercive threats propose
to do something that would be immoral to do if carried out. (See
Berman 2002; Haksar 1976.) (Berman does not, it appears, offer a
definition of coercion *per se*, but only of *wrongful*
coercion.) Grant Lamond focuses instead on the coercer's
intentional attempt to use pressure to alter the activities of the
coercee, where that pressure comes from an intention to deliberately
set back the interests of the coercee. (See Lamond 1996 and 2000.)
Because McGregor's, Berman's and Lamond's ways of
capturing coercion attend to the coercer's actions and
intentions, they avoid the need to distinguish coercive from other
proposals based on specific effects on the coercee. (For that reason,
they could also reject the "success" condition on coercion
found in Nozick's and most subsequent accounts of coercion.)



Scott Anderson, drawing upon some remarks of J. R. Lucas (1966), takes
a different tack, and associates coercion with the use of an ability
some agents have to enforce their decisions about what another will or
will not do, "where the sense of enforceability here is
exemplified by the use of force, violence and the threats thereof to
constrain, disable, harm or undermine an agent's ability to
act" (Anderson 2010, 6). Anderson thus rejects Nozick's
innovations in this area (see above Section 2.1) by refocusing the
analysis on the powers and acts of the coercer (rather than on the
will or actions of the coercee), by allowing that direct force (and
not just threats) can be used to coerce, and denying that coercion is
coextensive with particular acts taken or avoided by the coercee.
Anderson requires that the coercer engage in activity either to create
a power differential between himself and the coercee (say, by taking
up arms), or else draw upon some existing differential between agents
of the sorts to which coercer and coercee belong (say, policeman and
citizen, respectively). This "enforcement approach"
suggests that uses of these sorts of powers are distinctive, and thus
can be used to pick out long-standing threats (such as the criminal
law) as coercive, even if it is difficult to identify specific actions
that they alter.


## 3. Uses for thought about coercion



Although some writings on coercion might appear to aim principally for
conceptual clarification, theorists of coercion more often aim to
answer questions that have practical import for ethics, judicial
decisions, political or legal theory, and social policy. Some of the
most common implications of claims about coercion are explored below.
The four subsections here (on the ethics of coercion, responsibility
under coercion, its effect on freedom, and its legal and political
implications) overlap in various ways, so while these subsections have
distinct foci, the discussions should not be taken to be fully
independent of one another.


### 3.1 The ethics of coercion



In section 3.3, we'll consider how coercion is thought to
impinge upon freedom, something that raises obvious ethical
implications in its own right. So consideration of these sorts of
ethical issues will be postponed until there. The present section
looks at certain more basic questions about whether and why employing
coercion is necessarily or contingently wrongful, as well as whether
its wrongfulness is intrinsic to it or derivative, and what else might
be wrong with it besides its effect on freedom or autonomy.



There has been considerable debate over the question of whether
employing coercion is necessarily or contingently wrongful. There seem
to be three categories in which answers to this question might fall:
coercion is necessarily wrongful; it is *prima facie* or
*pro tanto* wrongful, though it may be justified by further
facts; and it is intrinsically morally neutral, though some uses of it
may be wrongful because of specific facts about them. Differences in
understanding what is wrongful about it may account for these
different positions. Further, in cases where coercion is wrongful, we
might distinguish two different ways of explaining the nature of its
wrongfulness. It might be a basic wrong, in that being coercive is
sufficient to justify the judgment that it is wrongful; or, otherwise,
we can explain its wrongfulness as deriving from some component
activity that is wrongful, so that coercion's wrongfulness is
derivative, rather than
 basic.[17]



One route to finding coercion is necessarily wrongful is to define
coercion as constitutively involving a violation or threatened
violation of the coercee's rights, or a proposal to violate
one's normative obligations. For instance, Cheyney Ryan argues
for such a normative conception of coercion. (See Ryan 1980.) Tying
coercion closely to immoral action captures a number of intuitions we
have about coercion, reflecting also a lot of ordinary language.
People often associate uses of coercion with injustices done to
themselves or others. This tie also provides a sharper division
between coercive and non-coercive activity than might otherwise be
found: if an activity is morally unobjectionable, then it is *ipso
facto* not coercive.



If coercion is not necessarily wrongful, it might still involve moral
judgment by being defined as requiring some *prima facie* or
*pro tanto* immoral element; this is probably the most commonly
held view. There have been a variety of different attempts, especially
in the 21st century, to find and describe the immoral
factor in coercion that will then suffice to explain its wrongfulness
when not rebutted, while avoiding the miscategorization of cases.



One suggestion holds that what is distinctive about coercion and gives
it its moral character is that it involves an instrumental making of a
threat to do something wrongful. Following Niko Kolodny we might call
this the "inheritance" view (Kolodny 2017). For instance,
Mitchell Berman has argued that when a coercer threatens to do
something, the rightness or wrongness of the use of such a threat to
coerce depends on whether it would be rightful or wrongful for that
agent to carry through with that threat (Berman 2002; see also Haksar
1976; Wertheimer 1987, ch. 12). Berman's account of wrongful
coercion thus apparently relies on a principle of inference that holds
that if it is wrong to do *A*, then it is wrong to
*threaten* to do *A*, and vice versa. Japa
Pallikkathayil sketches a similar view, holding that if the
coercer's proposal has motivational force only because it
proposes to do something that the recipient should have a right to
veto, then such a proposal (in at least paradigmatic cases of
coercion) wrongfully constrains the recipient, and wrongfully impinges
on their normative powers. Here too, the wrongfulness of the proposal
depends on the wrongfulness of the thing the coercer proposes to do
(Pallikkathayil 2011). Benjamin Sachs suggests a claim that might
bolster Berman's position, namely, that the very making of the
threat has the tendency to increase the likelihood that the threatener
will carry out the wrongful act threatened, which he describes as
"self-incitement" (Sachs 2013). The
"inheritance" view is similarly defended by James Shaw
(2012), in his account of the immorality of blackmail.



The inheritance view does not seem to correctly categorize or explain
the morality of all cases that are intuitively regarded as coercive.
At least sometimes it appears appropriate to threaten to do something
which would be wrong to carry out (nuclear deterrence is sometimes
thought to be like this; see Section 4.1 below). And sometimes it may
be wrongful to threaten what it would be right to carry out (some
instances of blackmail and extortion seem to fit this description).
The inheritance view also does not explain why making a conditional
threat may be more ethically problematic than a plain,
*unconditional*
 threat.[18]
 Unfortunately, the complexities due particularly to the
conditionality of coercive threats have been little explored to date
by those more centrally interested in
 coercion.[19]



A second suggestion holds that there's something special about
the coercer's intention vis-a-vis the coercee that makes
coercion frequently problematic. Grant Lamond suggests that the
wrongness of wrongful coercion derives from the fact that it involves
a "proposal deliberately to impose a disadvantage on
another" (Lamond 2000, 49). "The distinctive wrong
involved in [coercive conditional] threats is to propose to take an
action *because* it is unwelcome to the recipient, i.e.,
because he does not want it done" (Lamond 1996, 228). It is thus
the coercer's intention to harm or disadvantage the coercee (or
to propose to do so) that creates coercion's special burden of
justification (though Lamond does not suppose such justifications are
particularly difficult to find). But it isn't clear either that
when one proposes to harm another that one thereby *intends* to
bring about any harm (one could be
 bluffing).[20]
 More importantly, it's also unclear that all intentions to
impose disadvantages are even *prima facie* in need of
justification. Unless we accept that all activities are *prima
facie* unjustified absent specific justifications, it requires an
argument to show that disadvantaging another person is itself
something that always must clear a hurdle to count as justified.
Certainly some kinds of disadvantage require special justification,
but some may not. One might, for instance, intend to disadvantage
one's social rival by arranging to have him seated between two
dreary bores at a dinner party. While perhaps not nice, it seems to
require no special moral justification for this action (or the threat
of this action) to be ethically permissible. We might say that so long
as one respects the rights of others (a set as rich as one likes), one
needs no special justification to act towards them as one likes. And
surely no one has the right that no one else will ever act for the
sake of disadvantaging one. If this is the case, then the mere
intention to disadvantage someone, perhaps conditionally, does not
suffice to violate her rights.



Stephen White takes notice of the fact that sometimes we find coercion
problematic even if the coercer's threat involves something that
it would not be wrongful for the coercer to do (White 2017). Cases of
blackmail, both conventional and "emotional blackmail,"
often have this form: the threatener threatens to do something they
may well have legal and moral right to do considered by itself, but
something that would not otherwise be tied to the actions of the
threat's recipient. White argues that what coercers do in making
conditional threats is to make the coercee responsible for the
coercer's execution of their threat, a responsibility that in
many cases they should not have to bear. This seems most clear in
cases where the coercer threatens to do something independently
wrongful, since they are obligated not to carry out such a threat, so
transferring that responsibility to the coercee is clearly wrongful.
But even if the act threatened, such as self-harm, is not
independently wrongful, forcing another to regard this outcome as
their responsibility to prevent generates an unfair burden. This
analysis is argued to help explain some other intuitions we have
regarding the threat of wrongful coercion to autonomy and its
deforming of the coercee's choice situation.



Beyond wronging the target of coercion, there are arguably other
ethical implications of coercion. While acknowledging that the concept
of coercion is often invoked to play a role in "deontic"
judgments, identifying interpersonal wrongs, Michael Garnett aims to
expand the scope of our ethical concern with coercion by
distinguishing this deontic role from a principally
*eudaimonistic* role for a concept of coercion. Garnett argues
that coercion is bad for the individual insofar as it amounts to
one's will being subjected to a foreign will--that of the
coercer--independently of whether the coercion is wrongful
(Garnett 2018; similar concerns with coercion are raised in Julius
2013 and Kolodny 2017). Similarly, Elinor Mason holds that coercion is
a kind of violation of agent integrity, by virtue of being subjected
to the domination of the coercer. She claims, "The coercer makes
a proposal to the coercee, and provides substantial reasons for the
coercee to do what the coercer desires. The coercer is attempting to
dominate the coercee: the coercer is not treating the coercee as an
agent, but as an object to be manipulated. The coercee finds the
proposal credible, and accepts the reasons provided as substantial. As
a result of the proposal, the coercee is dominated: she is alienated
from her action" (Mason 2012, 201). In a similar vein, Ambrose
Y. K. Lee argues that legal coercion used to incentivize people to do
what they have otherwise good reason to do already fails to respect
people as "reasons-responsive agents" (Lee 2014, 853). And
Jan-Willem van der Rijt suggests that it is a criterion of coercion
that the coercee feels subjectively wronged by it, thus making such
felt wrongness part of its essential meaning (van der Rijt 2011).



There are some situations in which the coerciveness of an action
appears obvious even though it may be difficult or impossible to
ascertain its rightfulness or wrongfulness. Thus some (e.g., Zimmerman
2002; Anderson 2010) have argued against making judgments of coercion
depend on prior moral judgments. For accounts of coercion that do not
invoke moral judgments to define it, the ethical implications of
coercion may be more contextual and determined by the particular uses
to which it is put. If one holds the common view that coercion is
rightly employed for purposes such as self-defense, defense of
innocent others, and the enforcement of just laws, such views may
encourage one to evaluate its use based on factors such as why and how
it is used, who uses it, against whom, in what circumstances, and what
other means were possible instead. Coercion is no ordinary means, but
if it can be defined in non-moralized terms, it's unclear why we
should suppose that it is intrinsically (even *prima facie* or
*pro tanto*) immoral, instead of simply noting that it is a
very potent means, prone to abuse, and something that deserves ethical
scrutiny whenever it is used.


### 3.2 The effect of coercion on coercee responsibility



There is no single, widely agreed upon theory that explains when an
agent is or is not responsible for something that happens in the
world. Judgments of responsibility are normative, and may depend on
other normative facts specific to the particular sort of action or
practice in question. For instance, facts that might limit one's
responsibility for signing or violating a contract might fail to limit
one's responsibility for killing someone. So the effect of
coercion or its kin (duress, extortion) may differ depending upon the
sort of action for which one seeks to limit one's
responsibility, or upon the moral context in which one acted.
Nonetheless, a few central cases and some general tendencies can be
given with some confidence.



There are two traditional sorts of grounds on which an agent's
responsibility might be truncated or attenuated because he was
coerced. The first is by virtue of being excused for his action; the
second is by virtue of his action's being justified. The exact
understanding of this distinction is under continuing dispute, but
here is one way of understanding its most salient points. One may be
*excused*, in whole or in part, for an action performed under
coercion if that action (or its consequences) was beyond one's
control or willpower to prevent, or if that action (or its
consequences) was unintentional. This latter condition might obtain
if, for instance, one acquiesces under coercion to do something
intentionally (like driving a car), but in so doing one does something
else unintentionally (like helping a murderer escape). One is
*justified* in acquiescing to coercion if one's action
(or its consequences) is morally required, or is morally permissible
under the circumstances even if the action will foreseeably result in
harm to others. (One obvious category of actions that carry such
justifications are those taken to disable an attacker in self-defense
or the defense of others.) However, the predominant recent accounts of
coercion seem to need additional filling in when queried for guidance
to determine whether the target of coercion may be excused or
justified for actions taken or forgone due to coercion.



Most questions about coercion's effect on responsibility arise
in cases of coercion via conditional threats. When an agent is
confronted by a threat, one ground on which her acquiescence may be
excused is if the threat causes a total breakdown in her will. Like
other incapacities, this can affect her responsibility for actions
taken because she was truly unable to do otherwise. (This excuse may
lead to questions about how the agent became vulnerable to suffering
such a breakdown in agency; but in such cases she may be responsible
for her weakness of character, though perhaps not for her action.)
Excuse may also be invoked when the coerced person acts in ignorance
or if the harm she causes is unintentional (excuses which are
available regardless of whether one is coerced). But many people are
able to react deliberately and rationally in response to coercive
threats. So it seems that most cases of diminished responsibility
under coercion will appeal to justification rather than excuse.



Some accounts of coercion apply a moralized test to the
coercee's situation, holding that one may avoid responsibility
for an act taken under coercion if the coercer's proposal is
such that one "is entitled to yield to [the coercer's]
proposal and then be released from the normal moral and legal
consequences of [one's] act" (Wertheimer 1987, 267).
Similarly, Pallikkathayil argues that individuals have a right to a
"moral veto" over proposals that impermissibly restrain
their options for action. When someone makes a coercive proposal that
violates this moral right of veto, this undermines the normative power
of the coercee's will to consent to the terms of the proposal,
and thus renders supposed consent ineffective, and thus undercuts
their responsibility (Pallikkathayil 2011). Such moralized theories
thus shift the explanatory burden from a theory of coercion to the
background moral or normative theory they call upon to explain the
effect of coercion on moral responsibility. Although there are some
specific moralized or normative tests one might use to decide
responsibility for action under coercion, it is unclear that any of
them is robust enough to handle more than a fraction of the
 cases.[21]



One test of responsibility that might be proposed would limit the
responsibility of someone acting under coercion if she acts in a way
that minimizes the total amount of harm (invoking the
"lesser-evil principle"). So, for instance, we might deny
that a person is responsible for choosing to injure another to avoid
being killed, but hold her responsible if she chooses to kill someone
to avoid being injured herself. Though this principle is intuitively
plausible, we clearly do not accept it in other, non-coercive
contexts. For instance, we do not permit one to snatch a spare kidney
from one individual to save the life of another. Although we might add
conditions to this test to make the limitation of one's
responsibility harder to obtain, and therefore more in line with our
intuitions, it remains unclear that there is any widely-accepted moral
principle of this sort that would cover all cases equally well.



Instead of a moral test, one might propose a psychological test, on
which acquiescing to a coercer's demands in a way that harms
others is justified if the net value of doing so is sufficiently great
to the coercee. Roughly speaking, this is Feinberg's approach,
taken up by Murray and Dudrick as well. (See Feinberg 1986; and Murray
and Dudrick 1995.) The point of such a standard is to recognize that
some pressures on the will are too much to bear, without implying that
in such cases it is literally impossible for the coercee to make
choices because of an overborne will. The difficulty with this
approach is that it lets the degree of inducement alone justify
one's yielding to it. A number of causes other than coercion can
create extreme inducements to do harm to others; consider what some
have done for fame, wealth, or love. Because most would be reluctant
to accept that even extraordinarily tempting offers limit one's
responsibility for yielding to them, the magnitude of the inducement
by itself seems not to suffice to explain our judgments of
responsibility. Although we might add other conditions to restrict the
limiting effect on responsibility exclusively to threats and not
offers, if the justification lies in the pressure on the will, then it
would seem one might have the same justification for yielding to
temptation that one has for acquiescing to a mortal threat. (Note that
some tempting offers have life or death riding on them.)



Law is sometimes required to make judgments about actions performed
under necessity due to exigent circumstances. Sometimes persons harm
the interests of others in order to save themselves or others from
death or serious injury from causes beyond their
 control.[22]
 Coercion, however, presents a more complicated set of issues for
making judgments of responsibility than do cases of natural necessity.
Coercion involves a strategic and dynamic interaction between two
agents -- coercer and coercee -- and the standard used to
judge the coercee's responsibility for acting under coercion can
affect that strategic situation. The principles by which we judge a
coercee's responsibility for acquiescing to coercion may affect
whether it is rational or productive for a would-be coercer to attempt
coercion in the first place. (By comparison, in cases of bad luck and
natural disaster, the situation is simpler because the behavior of the
weather, unlike the behavior of coercers, is unaffected by the
incentives facing those who might be pressured into acting under its
power.) If we are permissive in limiting the responsibility of
coercees, this will make acquiescing to coercion a more reasonable
option; if instead we are stingy in limiting responsibility for harms
caused under coercion, coercees may be much less likely to acquiesce
to a coercer's threats. But if a (would-be) coercer knows that a
potential victim will be unyielding to his threats, then coercion
becomes a less productive or reasonable means to use. So in choosing a
principle that justifies coercees in acquiescing under coercion, we
need to take into account that this principle may alter the dynamic
between coercer and coercee in ways that may in turn affect the
rationality and fruitfulness of using coercion.



There are, however, some cases in which coercion may alter an
agent's responsibility for what happens as a result of coercion
that don't raise the difficulties with justifications noted
above. If, like some older ideas about coercion, we count uses of
direct physical interference among the means of coercion --
through restraint, incapacitation, or denial of essential means to
achieve a purpose -- then in some cases it is comparatively easy
to see how coercion can provide an individual an excuse for things
done or not done because of coercion (See Anderson 2010). Relying on
the principle of "ought implies can," when one cannot do
something, this provides a good excuse for why one is not responsible
for failing to do it. Related questions may arise about how one came
to be incapacitated; for instance, if one fails to care for
one's children, and seeks to be excused for this neglect because
one was incarcerated, we may want to know why one was incarcerated
before crediting the excuse. Nonetheless, there will be some cases
where the answers to these questions will show that the coercee played
no role in his own incapacitation, and is therefore not to be held
responsible for things the coercer caused him to do or not do.



Similarly, it is worth noting that there are some cases in which
coercees may be justified, and not just excused, for acquiescing to
threats, even if they do so calmly and deliberately. This sort of
justification can be granted when the coercer has structured a
coercee's situation in such a way that the coercee's will
becomes essentially redundant to the outcome. If, for instance, a
bouncer is able to remove a patron from the bar whether she likes it
or not, then if the bouncer threatens to do so, her walking out of the
bar in response to such a threat may be regarded as no more voluntary
than her being carried out by force. When a coercer has the power to
enforce his decision regardless of what the coercee chooses to do,
this may provide the coercee a justification for failing to engage in
an exercise in
 futility.[23]
 Generalizing this situation somewhat, Stephen Galoob and Erin Sheley
argue that in contexts where a coercer has "coercive
control" over a someone, such as in a long-term violent and
abusive relationship, if such a coercer directs the coercee to act
unlawfully, the criminal law should allow a legal defense for actions
under the influence of such control. "A defendant should be
entitled to a coercion-based defense when the coercer has usurped the
target's decisional authority--that is, when the coercer
has usurped control over the target's decision about what to
do" (Galoob and Sheley 2021, 314).



An additional wrinkle with respect to responsibility under coercion
arises in cases sometimes referred to as involving "third-party
coercion": where X coerces Y to consent to something that Z does
to Y. For instance, a patient might consent to a medical procedure
under pressure from family members (assuming such pressure rises to a
level that qualifies as coercion), or a person might consent to have
sex with someone due to threats of harm from an third party
unconnected to the person who receives her consent. While it is
generally agreed that a coercer's threats invalidate any consent
that the coercee might give to subsequent actions by the coercer, in
third-party cases the consent is given to action by a bystander with
respect to the coercion. Issues here may involve the extent to which
the third-party is aware (or should be aware) of the coercee's
situation, the question of what action by the third-party would most
benefit the coercee, and whether the third party seeks to take
advantage of the coercee's situation. Such cases have only
recently received focused attention by philosophers, such as Joseph
Millum and Mollie Gerver, though issues of this sort have been
identified in applied ethics and in the context of international and
humanitarian aid for some time (Millum 2014, Gerver 2021).


### 3.3 Coercion, freedom, and voluntariness



Some choices are said to be made freely, others unfreely, or
involuntarily. More generally, people may be said to live more freely
or less freely, depending on facts such as the range and quality of
choices open to them, the extent to which they are immune to
interference from outside powerful parties, or the extent to which
they can pursue options of deep significance to them.
*Autonomy* seems to be a special type of freedom which, insofar
as it differs from the above types, is used to refer to an inner state
of orderly self-directedness. Coercion has been thought to be inimical
to at least some of these types of freedom, perhaps all, and also to
have deleterious impacts on the special type we call autonomy.



If coercion includes uses of direct force against a person's
body, it is clear enough how it can constrain most kinds of freedom
(though not necessarily how it can affect autonomy). But as Aquinas
long ago noted, it's unclear why coercion in the form of threats
should be thought to be in tension with freedom. As Craig Carr puts
the worry, "if at least some instances of coercion involve
making choices, and if being able to make one's own choices is
part of what it means to be free, in what sense (if any) is coercion
antithetical to freedom?" (Carr 1988, 59). Certainly many
instances of coercion make one's choices less appealing than
they would be otherwise, or reduce the quality of the compossible
options one has available. But it does sound somewhat odd to say that
one is less free just because one's choices have become less
appealing, or some options for action have fallen off the menu of
choices. Is there a sense we can give to the claim that one is less
free because of coercion?



Let us consider first a type of freedom associated with the range and
quality of actions open to a person. One gets an intuitive idea of
this sort of freedom in comparing the situation of a prison inmate to
that of someone outside prison. Someone confined to a cell around the
clock has less freedom than does someone who is able to move about as
she wills, interact with others in a variety of ways, and choose from
a broad variety of activities (at least if she has available
sufficient means to pursue them). We might be tempted to say that the
unincarcerated person has *more* and *better* choices of
actions. But several difficulties get in the way of making such a
comparison precise. We lack a precise way to enumerate actions, which
seems necessary if we are to count them or compare their number. The
incarcerated and unincarcerated both have indeterminately many
different things they can do, each can do only perform some small
range of those actions at any one time. (It's even likely that
the incarcerated person can do some things the unincarcerated person
 can't.[24])
 So it is probably more helpful to focus on the greater quality and
desirability of the actions open to the unincarcerated person. Being
confined to a jail cell takes away one's freedom at least in
part because it denies one the necessary means to pursue many other
activities that would ordinarily be desirable. But we also have no
good means for reckoning the value of different actions
interpersonally. So even this comparison is hard to make in a robust,
defensible
 fashion.[25]



With some threats, it seems an interpersonal comparison is
unnecessary. When the gunman demands one's money or one's
life, one goes from being able to have both to being unable to have
both. What were compossible goods have now become incompossible, and a
valuable option (e.g., keeping one's money) has become
essentially foreclosed. So freedom is decreased (Day 1977, 259).



Focusing locally on the coercee's situation, such analysis seems
reasonable enough. However, it is possible that some general threats,
made against a group of people, may make the individuals in the group
more rather than less free. Consider the threats that are part of laws
against stealing. The state may threaten to jail those who steal,
which (let us assume) makes it incompossible both to steal and to
retain one's freedom. The possibility of a stable system of
private property, however, would seem to depend on the existence of
such laws which prohibit the wanton expropriation of the goods of
others. If such a regime is in fact valuable, then the threat to
incarcerate thieves may both reduce people's freedom with
respect to one sort of action (by making stealing incompossible with
remaining unincarcerated), while enhancing it with respect to others
(by making it possible to accumulate, use, and trade private
property). For another example, notice that the ability to make
enforceable contracts with others greatly enhances one's
abilities to gain through cooperation, but that it relies precisely on
the fact that contracting parties give up certain seemingly
compossible benefits (say, gaining the goods of another while failing
to fulfill one's half of the bargain).



Craig Carr suggests that we can grapple with the complexities here by
noticing that many social interactions are regulated by conventions
that arise from particular sorts of interpersonal relationships. So,
for instance, a sports team is managed by a coach, who may
"threaten" to pull a player out of the game unless he
sticks to the game plan. But this threat does not, we may agree,
lessen the player's freedom in any interesting sense (Carr 1988,
62). Given the nature of sports, the roles of players and coaches, and
the necessity of organization in making the team and sport possible,
Carr suggests that when such threats are licensed by the appropriate
conventions, then there is no reason to suppose that they impinge on
freedom. It may be difficult in many cases to decide just what
conventions are appropriate and controlling in a situation, but it
seems reasonable to suppose that something like Carr's analysis
is helpful in understanding the relationship between threats and
freedom in conventional contexts.



Serena Olsaretti argues for the importance of a distinction between
acting freely and acting voluntarily, and holds that while
(successful) coercion may not in fact affect a coercee's freedom
(if, say, a coercer is bluffing), it always affects their potential to
act voluntarily. On her analysis, the extent of a person's
*freedom* is determined by their actual possibilities for
action, while whether they act *voluntarily* depends on whether
the agent's actual action is acceptable to the agent. "A
choice is voluntary if and only if it is not made because there is no
acceptable alternative to it. Conversely, a claim that a person was
forced to do x (she did x non-voluntarily) means that she did x
because she had no acceptable alternative to it" (Olsaretti
2004, 139). Because credible threats make alternatives to the
coercer's desired activity unacceptable to the coercee, they
vitiate the voluntariness of the coercee's acquiescence, and
amount to "forcing" the coercee to act as they do. Seeing
such choices as forced whether or not unfree, Olsaretti argues, shows
important similarities between coerced choices and other situations in
which people's choices are forced, such as in certain market
conditions.



There's a different way of thinking about freedom that is
political in nature. This is the way of thinking that some (e.g.,
Pettit 1996) have associated with civic republicanism, in which
freedom amounts to being undominated by another agent. One is
dominated by another if it is continually possible for another party
to step in and impose his will on one's choices (even if the
dominant party rarely finds it useful to do so). Freedom from
domination differs from the previous sort in that one who is subject
to the domination of another may in fact have a wide variety of
valuable choices open to her. The sense in which she is unfree is that
her choices must always be made with an eye towards retaining the
favor of those in a position to interfere with her choices.
Conversely, one may be undominated by anyone else, yet lack (for
various reasons) many of the different valuable options that might be
available to some who are highly subject to the power of others (e.g.,
adolescent children of wealthy parents, or prisoners in
minimum-security facilities).



Garnett's "eudaimonistic" understanding of coercion
follows this line, holding that "what matters fundamentally for
coercion is whether, in acting, one's will is subject to,
determined by, or under the control of the will of another, and not
whether one's prospective actions are blocked by the actions of
another" (Garnett 2018, 554). He contrasts this understanding of
"freedom-as-nonsubjection" to
"freedom-as-nonprevention," holding that there is a
distinct good that involves not being subjected to interference by
others, independently of whether this amounts to domination. Notably,
Garnett holds that such subjection can be found in some cases of
offers, where the offeror takes advantage of the offeree's lack
of an acceptable alternative.



Coercion is one method by which a powerful agent can exercise and
maintain his dominance over another. When one has the power needed to
credibly threaten another, one can use that power to impose
one's will on her regarding many choices (Anderson 2010). This
power may give one the ability to dominate another in Pettit's
sense, since it can be used arbitrarily to alter or constrain
another's activities, even if it is in fact used only rarely. If
one's threats are sufficiently credible, and if meeting
one's demands is not devastating in itself, one may be able to
leverage one's powers to influence many of the activities of
others, while only rarely being required to expend one's powers
in enforcement. Malignant governments and mafias are frequently able
to maintain control over sizeable populations through threats and
intimidation, though they may only infrequently interfere directly in
the activities of others. If one's powers and wishes are well
enough known through past demonstrations, one may even be able to
avoid making many overt threats while still getting one's
way.



This raises a question about whether the use of coercion requires or
implies that the coercer is in a position of dominance over the
coercee. While most would likely accept that one can coerce without
having such dominance, this may be a rarer and more curious scenario
than it at first appears. It is true that virtually anyone can state a
claim that has the form of a threat against another, and it is also
true that many agents can issue credible threats that are nonetheless
bluffs -- that is, can threaten without possessing the power that
is advertised. Nonetheless, the possibility and usefulness of issuing
threats depends in general on the likelihood that such threats can be
executed successfully, without the coercer suffering a cost comparable
to that of the coercee. Also, it would seem that for coercion to be
possible, one must be in a position to do more than trivial damage to
the coercee's interests; otherwise, one might be said to use
coercion when one threatens, e.g., to quit one's minimum-wage
fast-food job if one's employer doesn't raise one's
wage to match what one could make at the restaurant across the street.
Moreover, coercers frequently need to craft and adapt their threats to
the specific vulnerabilities of the coercee. Gideon Yaffe has nicely
expressed this aspect of the relationship between the coercer's
power and their ability to affect one's freedom:



> 
> The key to the explanation for the freedom-undermining force of
> coercion is that, as a general rule, coercers don't merely
> produce, but also track, the compliance of their victims. ...
> [T]he coercer is rarely attached to the particular nasty consequence
> that he threatens; with some limits, he is ready to bring about
> whatever consequences would serve to bring the victim around to
> compliance (Yaffe 2003).
> 



If a coercer lacks the power needed to do these things, it may be
irrational for the coercer to execute his threat if defied, and hence
frequently irrational for the coercee to accede to it. So unless the
coercer or coercee is irrational (and the other perceives him as
such), or unless one is deceived about the other's relative
power (or rationality), coercion requires some significant
differential in power between coercer and coercee for it, in general,
to be a rational, useful technique. So even if a just state does not
dominate its citizens in Pettit's sense of exercising its power
over them arbitrarily, it still must be capable of such dominance if
it is to be able to keep order against those who would otherwise defy
its commands. (For related arguments and an analysis of domination as
the "impositional power" to impose one's will
arbitrarily on another, see McCammon 2015.)


### 3.4 Political/legal theory and coercion



As the historical section of this entry suggests, the relationship
between states, law, and coercion has been a subject of vast
discussion throughout Western philosophical history. Many of the most
pressing issues belong to a discussion of states and law rather than
to a discussion of
 coercion.[26]
 However, some theorists have attempted to draw some fairly
revisionist lessons about politics and law from their theoretical
discussions of coercion. This work is worth consideration here, since
their conclusions may impact how we understand the nature of coercion,
and its place in law and politics.


#### 3.4.1 The coerciveness of law



As noted above, there are a number of accounts of coercion that insist
that coercion is a violation of right, or otherwise normatively
defective, of which Alan Wertheimer's *Coercion* is the
most prominent. But if coercion is necessarily immoral action, then it
is hard to explain how an act of coercion could count as
 justified.[27]
 Among other implications, this view is in apparent contradiction with
the traditional approach to coercion which treats states as
paradigmatically, even necessarily users of coercion. As William
Edmundson has pointed out (and as Nozick 1969, had noticed), if the
state is justified in punishing wrongdoers, then when it threatens to
do so, it does not threaten to make them worse off than they ought to
be (Edmundson 1995 and 1998, chs. 4-6). Hence on an approach to
coercion that insists it is immoral activity, the state's use of
police powers to enforce the law is not coercive.



Could this be right? It hinges, first, on whether one accepts a
moralized analysis of coercion; if one can give a non-moralized
account of coercion, then the grounds for the claim are much more
tenuous. It would also seem to depend on whether the moral evaluation
of the coercer's action is an "all things
considered" judgment, or merely a *pro tanto* one. While
the government's use of coercion may be all-things-considered
morally benign, the threat of jailing someone may count as *pro
tanto* wrong in a way that, say, paying a reward is not. If so,
then even on a moralized account we may suppose that government
coercion requires special justification before it can be accepted.
Wertheimer, Haksar, Lamond, and Oberdiek, for instance, seem to find
no problem accepting that there is "justified coercion"
-- that is, acts which are coercive on a moralized theory of
coercion (baseline or otherwise), yet which are ultimately justified
by other considerations (Oberdiek 1976; Haksar 1976; Wertheimer 1987;
and Lamond 2000 and 2001). Edmundson, however, argues that such a view
is unmotivated and not required by a moralized theory, properly
understood. If he is right, then the uses of what are normally thought
of as coercive techniques do not call for special scrutiny if they are
constrained to the support of just, procedurally sound law.



Edmundson's criticism of the canonical view of the state as
coercive reveals a deeper root to some disagreements over coercion. In
effect, Edmundson provides a reason to question how special or
important coercion really is. Coercion may make some actions
necessary, but human beings in any natural world will be constrained
by necessities of many sorts: the physical limits of our bodies in our
environments, and our needs for things such as nourishment, shelter,
protection, and even perhaps community, recognition, and love. To be
coerced adds to or alters in some ways what it is necessary for one to
do. But being subject to a coercive set of laws might also provide one
greater opportunities or freedom from necessity, as arguably the
criminal law does, at least if well-drafted and
 enforced.[28]
 If just laws provide us protection from wrong-doers while leaving us
at liberty to take any morally justifiable act (assuming here that the
criminal law prohibits only unjust acts), then the law's
threatened use of force against lawbreakers may not merit any special
scrutiny. We might instead regard it as a shifting, regularization,
and rationalization of the necessities to which human beings are
anyways subject. Edmundson and those he disputes with can all agree
that coercion used for illicit ends is a matter of moral significance
and a cause for special scrutiny and opposition. What Edmundson shows
is that moralized approaches to coercion make it hard to see why the
technique itself and the agents who can use it are especially worthy
of our attention.



One might thus object to moralized accounts on the grounds that we
have reason to track and scrutinize uses of this technique whether
performed well or badly, justly or unjustly. This is because when an
agent has the power to coerce willy nilly, as the state does, it is up
to such an agent to decide what purposes it will use its powers for.
Natural necessities are typically predictable, stable requirements on
our actions, persisting without regard to us as individuals. By
contrast, powerful agents are not necessarily predictable, stable, or
indifferent to us as individuals. Rather, they can target and direct
their powers to suit their purposes. Of course we hope that they are
constrained by justice, but even mostly just governments are likely to
enact bad laws or have rogue elements within them. Hence there is
value in having a concept to pick out the sort of technique used in
law enforcement, forced migrations, mafia protection rackets,
back-alley robbery, and the training of some recalcitrant children,
since one and the same state might use the same tools and techniques
to engage any or all of these sorts of activities, with only the whim
of the leader or parliament to decide which it shall be.



A slightly less radical, though still revisionist claim about the
coerciveness of law, holds that the coerciveness of law resides in its
claim to a right to use (or authorize the use of) enforcement power.
Drawing a distinction between the state and its apparatuses on the one
hand, and the law on the other, Grant Lamond argues that the
coerciveness of law should not be thought to depend on the fact that
the state has such things as police departments and prisons as its
enforcement mechanisms. Rather, he argues that the coerciveness of law
resides in its claim to a "right to authorize the
*enforcement* of [its subjects duties, responsibilities,
etc.]... It is not that legal duties are sanction-based, nor that
every law must ultimately be linked to coercive measures, but that law
claims the *right* to back up its directives with force"
(Lamond 2001, 55). He later clarifies this view to point out that the
law claims *indeterminate* authority to enforce its
dictates.



Lamond's aim in making this distinction is to clarify what he
sees to be several possible confusions. First, he argues that the
law's coerciveness need not depend directly on the state's
own enforcement apparatus; the state might use vigilantes, private
contractors, or other private means for this
 function.[29]
 Moreover, he aims to limit law's responsibility for coercive
acts to just those that it in fact authorizes: extra-legal uses of
coercion by the state should not be chalked up to law's
coerciveness. He also argues that some of the coercive enforcements
that law uses are not themselves uses of force; instead, one might
confiscate bank accounts or take away rights in non-tangible property
(such as intellectual property protections) as means to pressure
subjects to comply with the law. Lamond holds that if such
interventions exert sufficient pressure on the will of those
considering a particular option, such that they change course, then
they may be counted as coercive, even if they do not involve the
threat or imposition of sanctions conditioned on the activities of the
people governed (Lamond 2000, 56-57). Lastly, like Edmundson, he
aims to downplay the supposed role that coercion plays in our
appreciation of the law, holding that many of law's functions do
not depend specifically on its function of authorizing (or not
authorizing) enforcements on the subjects. "It is easy to
exaggerate the role of coercion in maintaining the efficacy of the
legal system, and to overestimate its capacity to sustain
efficacy" (Lamond 2001, 57).



Lamond's claim about law's coerciveness stems from a
number of considerations, but undoubtedly one is his understanding of
the nature of coercion itself, which was discussed in Section 2.5
above. Whether or not his account of coercion is tenable, what Lamond
says about why law is coercive generates independent difficulties.
Even if the law claims to authorize the enforcement of its
subjects' duties, it is not clear why the mere *claiming*
of such authorization would suffice to make the claiming coercive. The
laws of a state may well provide for and instruct agencies or
mechanisms to serve as its enforcers (e.g., police, vigilantes, or
robots); but if these enforcers quit, or are bought/killed/shut off,
the coerciveness of the law will quickly evaporate. If, for instance,
the army decides to side with the protestors rather than the
government, the law loses its force in a hurry, no matter how
legitimate. Moreover, were a private association or other institution
to "lay claim" to use such indeterminately bounded
enforcement powers, what would determine whether in fact they ended up
being coercive is *whether in fact* they managed to engage in
enforcement activities through agencies or mechanisms similar to those
that states regularly use, or so Lucas points out. (Lucas 1966,
61-2) A church, for instance, might even leverage its threats
with claims about the final disposition of one's mortal soul.
But this sort of claim to reward and punish does not give the church
the ability to coerce, at least as this concept is usually understood
in political contexts.



Some have argued directly that law does not require coercive backing
in order to count as law (e.g., Raz 1975), holding that what is
instead important is that law is made by the appropriate authority
(see also Oberdiek 1976). Going further than this, Robert Hughes
argues that there can be laws a state is entitled to make but not
entitled to enforce. "Whether a government is entitled to
enforce any given legal restriction coercively depends on concrete
empirical facts, not only on abstract truisms about human nature, and
on moral features of the restriction in question" (Hughes 2013,
184). Such empirical factors on Hughes' account include whether
compliance can be obtained through non-coercive means, and what the
costs of using coercion to secure compliance would be. Responding to
Joseph Raz, Edmundson, and Lamonde, *inter alia*, Ekow Yankah
defends the traditional view connecting law and coercion, contending
that "Legal norms must be ultimately enforceable by coercion to
be included in the core concept of the law" (Yankah 2008, 1198).
After developing his own non-moralized conception of coercion, Yankah
argues that law requires not only authority but the ability to compel
obedience. There are, after all, many different possible normative
systems, for example religious ones, that claim to have moral
authority to command obedience, but law is distinctive among them
because it has the possibility to compel compliance with the edicts of
justified authorities. Countering Raz's view that coercion might
be merely instrumentally needed, Yankah asserts, "the inability
of any structure to even theoretically compel [a lawbreaker] to obey
would cast serious doubt on the system's claim to be the
law" (Yankah, 2008, 1236; for others on this side of the dispute
see Himma 2016 and Woodbury-Smith 2020).


#### 3.4.2 The coerciveness of states



Moving from the question of how law relates to coercion to the broader
question of how states and politics more generally relate to coercion,
there are a number of ways that political theory addresses the role of
coercion as a tool of statecraft, and offers arguments about how
coercion conditions the scope and legitimacy of political action. Max
Weber famously defined the state in terms of its legitimate
monopolization of physical coercive force within a territory:



> 
> 
> A political organisation will be called a "ruling
> organisation" to the extent that its existence and the validity
> of its orders can be continually guaranteed within a given
> geographical area by the application and threat of physical coercion
> by an administrative staff. An institutionally organised political
> enterprise (*Anstaltsbetrieb*) will be called a state if, and
> to the extent that, its administrative staff can lay claim to a
> monopoly of legitimate physical force in the execution of its orders
> (Weber 2019 [1921], SS17, 135-136; See also Weber 1946
> [1921]).
> 
> 
> 



Liberals, broadly construed, have been impressed with the power of the
state and its potential both for misuse as well as partisan domination
over and sectarian interference with dissenters, and thus have
identified its employment of coercion as generating a distinctive set
of political concerns. For instance, G. E. M. Anscombe argues that if
states are to be distinguished from mafias, it is only because they
may, if well ordered, earn authority over their subjects, which she
understands as "a right to be obeyed" (Anscombe 1981,
132). Judith Shklar, in her "Liberalism of Fear," draws
attention to the distinctiveness and historical rarity of the modern
liberal state as one in which the power of the government is
constrained by foreswearing the use of cruelty and fear as tools of
statecraft (Shklar 1989). Others, such as Charles Larmore and Gerald
Gaus, take coercion to be a distinctively problematic interpersonal
imposition. Hence, because states are understood to be the
preeminently coercive agents, the justification of the state depends
in significant part on whether there is sufficient justification for
its use of coercion to secure compliance with its decisions (see
Larmore 1996, ch. 6; Gaus 2003).



Echoing Weber, in *A Theory of Justice*, Rawls distinguishes
the "legal system" of a state by "its comprehensive
scope and its regulative powers with respect to other associations.
The constitutional agencies that it defines generally have the
exclusive legal right to at least the more extreme forms of coercion.
The kinds of duress that private associations can employ are strictly
limited" (Rawls 1999 [1971], 207), and "By enforcing a
public system of penalties government removes the grounds for thinking
that others are not complying with the rules. For this reason alone, a
coercive sovereign is presumably always necessary, even though in a
well-ordered society sanctions are not severe and may never need to be
imposed" (Rawls 1999 [1971], 211). In his later *Justice as
Fairness: A Restatement*, he regards coercion as an intrinsic
feature of state political activity: "Political power is always
coercive power applied by the state and its apparatus of
enforcement" (Rawls 2001, 40). He goes so far as to suggest that
if people in a society could attain their goods harmoniously, without
resorting to private coercion or relying on public coercion to resolve
conflicts, it would be "a society in a certain sense beyond
justice. It has eliminated the occasions when the appeal to the
principles of right and justice is necessary" (Rawls 1999
[1971], 249). Rawls goes on to argue for the importance of justice as
the primary regulative virtue of the basic structure and institutions
that determine the distribution of benefits and burdens to members of
society (Rawls 1999 [1971], 4).



Although Rawls does not offer a detailed explication or defense of his
understanding of coercion, due to the outsized influence of his
political theory, his thinking about the place of coercion in politics
has set the terms for several debates in this area. One issue that
bears the distinctive mark of his thinking is whether and why the
principal object of justice is the basic structure of a society, and
how that structure should be delimited. Expressed in terms somewhat
less specific to Rawls, we may query whether the state is distinctly a
user of coercion, and what difference this might make to the question
of its activities should be regulated. Another area for inquiry
considers whether there are special limits to a state's use of
coercion, and/or whether it needs to meet some special condition for
its justification (for this way of structuring the concerns here, see
Kolodny 2017 and 2018). Some, following Rawls, argue that some form of
public justification that speaks to all reasonable members of society
is required to justify the state's use of coercion; others
reject this requirement, while supporting other grounds of
justification instead. And still others hold that the state's
use of coercion does not require distinctive justification or need to
be limited to only a specific range of purposes. A third line of
inquiry asks whether there are implications from the state's use
of coercive power for determining the scope of the obligations of
justice. Some, again following Rawls, hold that because members of a
single polity are mutually subject to the power of coercion that they
materially facilitate, they have distinctive obligations of
distributive justice to one another that do not apply to those not
similarly part of the same polity. Others object to this argument on a
number of grounds.


#### 3.4.3 Are states distinctively coercive?



The first set of inquiries here concerns whether the state's
coercive activities are distinctively coercive, compared to other
social institutions and practices. One reason Rawls offers for
applying his principles of justice to the "basic
structure" of society (which includes such things as the
political constitution, the major social institutions and practices
that structure human relationships, such as the family) is
"because its effects are so profound and present from the
start" (Rawls 1999 [1971], 7). While it appears clear that the
state, via its coercive determination of law and institutions like the
economic system, constitutes much of the "basic
structure," it is hardly the only source of profound
constraining effects on the lives of its subjects. This point is
pressed by G. A. Cohen, who argues regarding Rawls's principles
of justice that their application should not be limited to just those
parts of the "basic structure" of society that are the
outgrowth of the state's coercive institutions. Cohen then
argues that a social institution such as the structure of the family
is something that is largely determined by conventional social
practices rather than by the coercively-backed laws of the state. Yet
few aspects of a society's structure will have more profound
effects on the life prospects and possibilities for action than the
way family structures are organized. Since these are not defined by
the state's coercive apparatus (or so Cohen suggests),
there's no reason why the principles of justice should be
limited to regulating just the parts of the social structure that owes
its existence to the state's coercive impetus (Cohen 1997).
Whether or not one holds that the social structures one is born into,
such as a particular set of family arrangements, count as coercive,
their structure is largely outside the bounds of the state coercive
enforcement, even though they constrain choice and possibility in a
way little different from state coercive decisions.



While accepting that the family, in some of its aspects, should be
counted within the "basic structure" and thus is
accountable to principles of justice, Blain Neufeld argues that there
is good reason to restrict concern with social justice to just those
social institutions that are "organized and maintained through
the collective exercise of coercive power" (Neufeld 2009, p.
37). The state's use of power is distinctive in two ways: it is
an activity of the whole collective body, so requires justification to
all of those who are part of that body. And the whole of that society
is subject to it; it is normally very difficult or impossible for
individuals to exempt themselves from a state's coercive
jurisdiction. The use of coercion here is not arbitrary, since the
functioning of these public institutions depends on their being able
to provide assurance to society's members that everyone will be
subject to the same terms and obligations, and that their
contributions and cooperation will be reciprocated by others (Neufeld
2009, 43). While other social institutions in a well-ordered society,
such as religions or cultural institutions, may have profound effects
of many members of a society, it remains possible for individual to
reject their authority and jurisdiction. Hence they are
"voluntary" associations in a way that the state is not
(Neufeld 2009, 42).



Neufeld, following Susan Moller Okin (See Okin 1994 and 2005), argues
that in Rawls' later writings he treats the structure of the
family in particular as more like one of these voluntary associations,
rather than properly part of the basic structure, and so does not fall
within the scope of principles of justice. However, Neufeld points out
that in contemporary liberal states there are a wide range of coercive
laws and state-organized facilities that regulate family structure and
the possibilities for association there, thus making it much more an
effect of state coercive power than are religions, cultural
associations, and many other forms of private association. Thus the
state is more directly implicated in the structure of the family than
Rawls or Cohen seem to register. (See here also Brake 2012 for the
ways in which state power constitutes legal marriage.)


#### 3.4.4 Does state coercion need special justification?



A different aspect of Rawls' approach holds that coercion is
itself a distinctive political activity, and distinctively in need of
justification to the members of a polity. Rawls here accepts what
seems to be a broadly held view that coercion is an especially
problematic way for one party or entity to treat another party, which,
if right, makes the issue of how to justify its use by the state
pressing. One might ground this view in the concern Kant expresses in
the "formula of humanity": "So act that you use
humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other,
always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means"
(Kant 1997 [1787], AK 4:429). To coerce someone appears to be a
paradigmatic way of overriding their own decision about what they
should do, and directing their will to serve one's own purposes,
rather than purposes of their own, thus treating them solely as a
means rather than as an end themselves. As Charles Larmore puts the
point, "the distinctive feature of persons is that they are
beings capable of thinking and acting on the basis of reasons. If we
try to bring about conformity to a political principle simply by
threat, we will be treating people solely as means, as objects of
coercion. We will not also be treating them as ends, engaging directly
their distinctive capacity as persons" (Larmore 1996, 137; see
also Pallikkathayil 2016, 174).



For this reason, many liberals hold that state coercion must be
subjected to some further constraint or justification that that
explains how at least some exercises of coercion are consistent with
treating those who are coerced as ends in themselves, and not merely
means. Perhaps the dominant approach is one Gerald Gaus and
Christopher J. Eberle have called "justificatory
liberalism" (which Eberle associates also with the work of
liberals such as Rawls, Larmore, and Robert Audi) which makes the
justification of coercion its central mission. "The claim that
respect requires public justification provides a basis for the central
component of the justificatory liberal's ethic of citizenship:
the norm of respect imposes an obligation on each citizen to
discipline herself in such a way that she resolutely refrains from
supporting any coercive law for which she cannot provide the requisite
public justification" (Eberle 2002, 12, emphasis omitted; see
also Gaus 2010).



There is now a very large literature, arising out of
Rawls-interpretive scholarship, attempting and criticizing this
justificatory task, which extends well beyond the issues raised by
state coercion; this entry is not suited to address it in any detail.
(See instead the *Stanford Encyclopedia* entries on
"Public Reason," "Public Justification,"
"Liberalism" and "Political Legitimacy.") But
relevant here are some rebuttal arguments that reject or qualify the
claim that the state's use of coercion is especially in need of
such justification. Several authors have argued that state uses of
coercion are not necessarily problematic in a way that encumbers them
with a special justificatory burden, or at least not a burden that is
owed to those subjected to state coercion.



In response to the presumption against state coercion that motivates
the liberal justificatory projects, Andrew Lister raises a number of
objections to such a presumption (Lister 2010). While Lister
acknowledges that paternalistic uses of coercion--aimed at the
well-being of those coerced--would be hard to justify against
those whose choices are overridden for their own good, he argues that
other exercises of state coercion may be more defensible than the
"reasonable rejectability" test would seem to allow. He
argues that although there may be disagreements based in publicly
acceptable reasons about whether a particular use of coercion may be
warranted or desirable, a polity's citizens might reasonably
agree to accept, say, authorizing a government to enact a set of
coercive policies (which may include some that some individuals would
reject), rather than requiring that each individual policy be tested
for reasonable rejectability, which might result in all of them being
rejected by someone or another. That is, it may be reasonably
unrejectable to adopt as a compromise a process that enacts some
coercive state policies that are, as a package, preferred by everyone
in comparison to a situation in which nearly all uses of coercion are
disabled by one or another party's specific reasonable objection
to it. This solution is one Joseph Chan, developing the idea from
Thomas Nagel, calls the "principle of higher-order
unanimity": if people can and should unanimously agree that a
state must use coercion out of practical necessity, then this
principle can be adopted as reasonably unrejectable, and then used to
justify specific coercive policies even if some citizens might
subsequently have reasonable objections to those particular policies
(Chan 2000, Nagel 1995).



Lister defends this proposal against objections from Gaus's
liberal neutrality (Gaus 2003) that hold state coercion to be
distinctively problematic, and so demand that every coercive state
action be individually vetted for reasonable rejectability. For one
thing, Lister points out that policies that invoke state coercion may
differ in their acceptability depending on what other policies are in
place. He offers as an illustration that it may be reasonable to favor
stronger property rights against the state in a society with broadly
egalitarian distribution of wealth, whereas it may be more justifiable
to allow eminent domain to override property owners' rights
where there is broad inequality of ownership and little redistributive
taxation (Lister 2010, 158). Moreover, state coercion is often used to
combat private coercion, or other harms of a similarly disruptive
character; it is not obvious that we should prefer a state that allows
private coercion to one that uses coercion itself against private
coercion. Furthermore, Lister argues, it is also unclear how to
measure the extent of coercion as an output of a state's policy
choices, which is another obstacle to a presumption against state
coercion for the sake of avoiding coercion more generally.



Colin Bird also argues against the view that being coerced by the
state is a distinctive ground necessitating that coercers justify
their actions to the coercees. He argues that other ways in which a
majority might exclude equal protection to minorities not involving
coercion would be similarly problematic, suggesting that the problem
with state coercion is not specifically due to the effect of coercion
on those coerced. For instance, if a state organized a voluntary cash
lottery to fund some sectarian mission, making it independent of the
use of taxation, he argues that this would raise similar problems of
reasonable rejectability by those whose interests are ignored by this
program. Moreover, he notes that objections to coercion need not be
due to its effect on those coerced: people might even reasonably
object to a coercive policies even if they are immune to that
coercion, as a male might reasonably object to laws forbidding
abortion even if he is not liable to suffer its enforcement (Bird
2014, 198). Bird instead thinks that because the state acts on behalf
of all of its citizens, the requirement of public justification
attaches to its decision because they speak on behalf of everyone, and
so should be justifiable to all as co-authors of those decisions. But
this then severs the need for public justification from the coercive
quality of some of those decisions.



In a similar vein, Niko Kolodny and Christopher Morris contest the
significance of the state's use of coercion to the question of
whether state power can be legitimate by liberalism's lights.
Kolodny registers the concerns of civic republicans that it's
the state's superior power to coerce that makes it suspect.
However, he thinks that this is based in a misdiagnosis of the concern
about the state; our worry about the state would be justified even if
the state maintained its supremacy without the use of coercion, but
rather just had widespread public assent to its decisions. Ultimately,
he holds that concern with coercion stems more from how the power of
the state seems to impugn the equality and self-sovereignty of the
members of society, and not from any special threat it poses to the
freedom of its subjects (Kolodny 2016, 2017 and 2018). Morris argues
coercion is just one tool that states use to gain compliance with
their decisions. Possessing "authority" is sufficient to
gain compliance in many decisions from at least many people, and so is
similarly in need of justification if coercion is. "One does not
understand law and, more generally, states if one does not see
coercion and force as *supplementary* to authority. Coercion
and force are needed when the state's claimed authority is
unappreciated, defective, or absent. Unjust states, recognized widely
as such, will need to rely heavily on force; just states presumably
need much less force" (Morris 2012, 40 (Morris'
emphasis)). On these views, then, even if state coercion requires
justification, it isn't a distinctively important factor in need
of special justification.



Lastly, Pallikkathayil argues that the question of how state coercion
can be justified to those coerced is wrongly posed. Developing a
Kantian approach (similar to that elaborated at greater length by
Arthur Ripstein in Ripstein 2009), Pallikkathayil argues that states
are instituted to allow people to live their lives in association with
others in a way that allows all to be mutually independent through a
system of rights that prevent unjust interference in one
another's choices. States are required in order to specify those
rights, adjudicate claims in the breach, and enforce those judgments
so people may rely on them. With this story as background,
Pallikkathayil asks:



> 
> 
> [W]hat I am doing when I coerce someone by subjecting her to liberal
> political institutions and laws. I am actually trying to treat her as
> independent by putting her in the only circumstances in which she can
> be free to live her life as she sees fit consistently with everyone
> else doing so as well. And this remains the case even if she
> reasonably disagrees with me about the justification for the state
> just given. So, on this view, what is distinctive about permissible
> coercion is that it is consistent with--and in the case of the
> state's use of coercion, needed for--mutual independence,
> rather than that it makes contact with the viewpoints of others in a
> particular way. (Pallikkathayil 2016, 177)
> 
> 
> 



Pallikkathayil then argues that this account of the function of a
state, with coercion being an essential tool for it to carry out this
function, has the advantage of restricting uses of state power to
those that facilitate or at least are compatible with this aim of
mutual independence, while providing a justification for necessary
coercion that doesn't depend on the particular values of the
society's members. "[A]n advantage of the Kantian's
account of permissible coercion is that it looks to capture what is
intuitively most problematic about impermissible coercion.
Impermissible coercion involves trying to make a decision for another
that one is not entitled to make. The possibility that we might
disagree about what decision to make is orthogonal to this
concern" (Pallikkathayil 2016, 183). Hence, similar to the way
the Nagel/Lister appeal to a principle of higher-order unanimity
short-cuts the need to justify specific policies involving coercion,
Pallikkathayil's Kantian approach justifies the coerciveness of
the state more generally, with justification of specific coercive
policies coming in at a subsidiary step where the use of coercion is
already pre-cleared, in a sense.


#### 3.4.5 Does state coercion generate special obligations for its citizens?



The third topic arising from Rawls' framework is the issue of
whether participation in a society governed by a coercive state
generates distinctive obligations to co-nationals, because of that
mutual susceptibility to coercion, or whether political obligations
are unaffected by this mutual susceptibility. Rawls famously limited
the applicability of the principles of justice to the boundaries of a
single polity, "a closed system isolated from other
societies" (Rawls 1999 [1971], 7; see also Rawls 1993);
relations between different polities and people across borders were
taken to be governed according to other principles. For Rawls, the
subject of justice is "the major social institutions [that]
distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of
advantages from social cooperation," (Rawls 1999 [1971], 6), the
principles of justice apply only to those united in a society that
forms the basis of such social cooperation.



While this limitation has been contested, Michael Blake and Mathias
Risse argue that it can be supported by consideration of the coercive
nature of the state. The necessity of state coercion puts citizens of
a single state in a kind of relationship to one another that differs
from their relationship to those outside their state. Blake holds that
a duty to promote economic equality as a matter of justice "is a
plausible interpretation of liberal principles only when those
principles are applied to individuals who share liability to the
coercive network of state governance" (Blake, 2002, 258). Risse
similarly accepts that states (though not just states) may bear
special obligations to those they govern due to their use of coercion
over those under their authority (Risse 2006). Risse however stresses
that it is the immediacy of the sort of legal and political coercion
states exercise over their subjects that gives those subjects special
claim to just treatment from their states and fellow citizens.



Thomas Nagel reasons likewise to a similar conclusion, and extends it
to justify the exclusion of immigrants from a state.
"Immigration policies are simply enforced against the nationals
of other states; the laws are not imposed in their name, nor are they
asked to accept and uphold those laws. Since no acceptance is demanded
of them, no justification is required that explains why they should
accept such discriminatory policies, or why their interests have been
given equal consideration. It is sufficient justification to claim
that the policies do not violate their prepolitical human
rights" (Nagel 2005, 129-30). Against this view, the use
of coercion to exclude non-citizens from a state has been argued to
violate basic rights (Huemer 2010) and principles of democratic theory
(Abizadeh 2008; for objections and replies, see Miller 2009 and 2010;
and Abizadeh 2010). As the next section will further explore, coercion
across state borders is also a contentious issue.



In response to positions like that of Blake, Risse, and Nagel, Andrea
Sangiovanni argues that people do not accrue special obligations to
their fellow citizens just because they are mutually and
non-voluntarily liable to being coerced for the sake of their common
well-being (Sangiovanni 2012). While justice may constrain what sort
or extent of coercive "will-bending" can be justified,
Sangiovanni argues that being mutually subjected to coercion does not
change what obligations one has to others similarly situated. While
not ruling out that there may be obligations arising from being
members of the same society, if such members have more demanding
obligations to share the wealth with fellow members than with
outsiders, this can't be explained just by their common
subjection to coercion. (For a reply to Sangiovanni friendly to
Blake's position, see MacKay 2016.)



For a discussion of the sub-legal and super-legal uses of coercion in
domestic and international settings, see the supplementary
document:



> 
> Applications for Theories of Coercion
>