COMMENTS ON CHAPTER FIVE: COERCION IN GENERAL:

[ABSTRACT of Ch.6: 'Liberty' is a sacred word which interferes with clear analysis. The strategy here is to accept the 'right-wing', narrow definition of liberty as non-coercion, and thus move the discussion from the definition and value of LIBERTY to the definition and analysis of the disvalue of various forms of coercion. Coercion is 'located' in a general taxonomy of 'forms of influence'. Various preposterous (but 'respectable') attitudes towards coercion are refuted: e.g., "Coercion is legitimate only to minimize coercion", or "Coercion is a uniquely evil form of influence." Then the real, general drawback of coercion is analyzed: that coercion is presumably more humiliating to the one coerced than are other forms of influence. This gives a general but limited force to a presumption against using coercion in society.

The real, but limited, advantages of guaranteeing 'free expression' are contrasted with the real and serious drawbacks of always granting this guarantee.]

We sometimes need to influence some people's mental states, not just their external conduct. For instance, a baby must influence its mother to love it; a young man must influence the woman he loves to love him back. But social philosophy studies mainly the way we influence others' conduct.

To TRY TO influence someone is to TRY TO make it more likely that he will act in a desired way.

On the other hand, one can influence someone without trying to. A person could involuntarily influence someone to act AGAINST the influencer's wishes. Many clumsy parents manage this.

Social influences need not be intended. For instance, many Colorado men are eager to kill the women who jilted them,for revenge. No person or agency deliberately planned to make them see failure at such revenge as humiliating-- this awful, powerful form of social influence just happened.

FORMS OF INFLUENCE:

If the other is already likely to act the way I want him to, then I want to influence him to KEEP him able and willling to comply with my desires. So in the chart of 'forms of influence' (in text and below, whenever we speak of 'making him more able/willing to..', the reader should add -- 'or keep him able/willing to...' This point is very important: for instance, the criminal law must not only make would-be criminals less able/willing to commit crimes; the society must also PRESERVE the law-abiding tendencies of the great majority of people.

To INCREASE the subject's CAPACITY FOR COMPLIANCE,

--I could train a worker to work with computers;

--if the person already has a vague desire to 'do something great',I could educate him to understand better the criteria for true achievement--(high pay for a certain line of work seems to mark that line as admirable).

--I could train people who want to control their births in effective birth-control methods;

--I could remove internal obstacles to compliance (say by curing his alcoholism);

--To DECREASE a subject's capacity TO REFUSE compliance,

--I could cripple the deft hands of a pick-pocket. (Here, it goes without saying, we are considering possible methods without assessing their morality!)

--I could execute a criminal.

--I could close a school that trained pick-pockets.

--I could sterilize people who are not to reproduce.

To INCREASE a subject's (external) OPPORTUNITIES to comply:

--I could provide a worker with access to new machines;

--I could provide information-libraries;

--I could lend him money to start a new business;

--To encourage birth-control, I could set up an effective pension program so parents wouldn't have to have lots of children to support them in old age.

--I could remove obstacles that now stop him from complying.

--natural obstacles;

--human obstacles: I could stop someone else from interfering.

To decrease a subject's opportunity to avoid complying:

--I could permanently imprison a criminal;

--I could permanently mark the hands of a forger.

--I could set up electronic security to minimize shoplifting.

--I could block his getting information that might increase his ability to avoid compliance effectively.

Some forms of influence may fall under one heading from one perspective and under another heading from another perspective.

The sailors in ODYSSEY interfered with Odysseus' attempts to escape (by tieing him up) but they didn't actually coerce him. However,he'd have been grateful later if they had coerced him, assuming that was a necessary and sufficient way to constrain him.

Interference could be evaluated differently from coercion in some situations. We'll discuss mainly coercion here.

Coercive Offers:

Examples:

"I have the right to repossess your humble cabin and turn your family into the street--but I'll generously refrain from repossessing (at least for now), IF I can have my way with your lovely daughter."

OR: "I'll throw you a rope so you won't drown--IF you'll promise, in front of these witnesses, to give me all your money."

OR: " I'll continue to offer you day-by-day employment IF you turn Lutheran."

OR: "I wouldn't be wrong to tell the police what you've done-- but I'll keep silent IF you pay me."

OR: "We could charge you with ten different crimes; but we'll drop 9 charges IF you plead guilty to this one charge."

Some right-wing theorists say that an employer offers workers a new chance to work each day. If the boss fires a worker for any reason, he is just withdrawing a free offer of more work--he is not imposing a harm. So 'threatening' to fire someone unless he turns Lutheran isn't really a threat at all; it's just a free offer to go on offering him daily chances to work IF he'll turn Lutheran.

But most people would say the boss 'made' the worker turn Lutheran--that is, most people see the threat to fire as a threat.

Elsewhere we saw that the courts 'protected' academic freedom by blocking a Communist professor's being fired, then OK'd her being refused tenure (and thus dismissed). But surely "Comply or be refused tenure" is, for a professor, equivalent ly coercive as "Comply or be fired."

MY CRITERIA FOR COERCIVE OFFERS:

Whenever Joe offers Sam some benefit (or non-penalty) X, in return for Sam's doing Y, then I say that 'offer' really counts as a form of coercion if (& only if):

I. Sam would be reluctant--independent of this offer-- to exchange his Y for Sam's X;

AND II. Either (A) Joe should have offered Y to Sam on easier terms; ( e.g.,Joe asks Sam for $5 to get back the shoes Joe stole from Sam);

OR (B) Joe would have offered Y to Sam on easier terms if this 'Y for X' exchange were not available: (E.g.,Joe offers to 'sell' drowning Sam an old life preserver for $1 million.)

Notice that under II/B , when a rich corporation offers dangerous work to a desperate pauper for $1 a day (when he adds far more than $1 per day to their income), they are coercing him; they use their extra bargaining power to exploit him, they are making him do that dangerous work for that low pay. ["Joe made Sam do that" is the ordinary-language equivalent of 'Joe coerced Sam to do that', a form which is rare in ordinary-language.

These complex criteria for coercive offers are defended in my articles:

--"Welcome Threats & Coercive Offers", in PHILOSOPHY 1985;

--"The Last Word on Coercive Offers...?" in PHILOSOPHY RESEARCH ARCHIVES, 1982

(I submit that no simpler criteria will cover all cases in ordinary language of "Joe made Fred do X, by 'offering' him a benefit for complying."

Right-wing theorists often talk about 'FREEDOM of contract'--but the advantage of enforced contracts is conferring POWER--I am now ABLE to get money in advance, if my creditor is sure the contract will be enforced; and I lose a power if the courts refuse to enforce, say, my gambling chits.. If anything, my liberty is restricted by my contracts, but I think the trade-off is OK between less liberty and more power.

Contemporary farmers complain that they face real competition, say,in the world wheat market--but the machinery they buy is artifically expensive because the manufacturers manage to collude in oligopolistic ways.

The OPEC oil cartel is coming unglued because there is no way to enforce their mutual agreements to cut production. The different nations tend to agree, then to cheat. What would save the cartel is finding a Bully who could detect all violations and ENFORCE the rules of collusion. (Perhaps Saddam Hussein thought he was volunteering to be theENFORCER--punishing Kuwait for cheating on the cartel; so he may have thought Saudi Arabia would not turn against him.) / The rest of the world is not apt to help OPEC find this ENFORCER, since oil-consumers suffer from any success OPEC has in collusion.

COERCION TO PREVENT HARMFUL COMPETITION:

--AMONG WORKERS:

--Employer-corporations will typically have more bargaining power than workers because they can move their operations more easily. Workers are tied to one place by family commitments,etc.

A corporation can move overseas; the worker usually can't follow, because of immigration-restrictions by other countries.

To realize how dehumanizing full competition among workers can be, consider this story from the Great Depression: a brick-layer would have an unemployed rival standing right behind him, calling any mistakes or slowness to the boss's attention, hoping to get the worker fired so he could take his place.

--AMONG COLLEGES COMPETING FOR STUDENTS:

--How explain the incredible grade-inflation on the college level?

Colleges get more income with more students; hence they compete for students, tending to offer easier grades. (One junior college advertised HIGHER GRADES in big print!) Profs compete for popularity (and raises) by offering easy grades.

All this could be prevented;states could mandate a certain rigorous grade-curve (over several years, to allow for varying circumstances). Individual colleges could ask each prof to give number-grades as well as letter-grades; then college computers could compute each student's rank in each class. Then, on the transcript, the student's average class-rank could be printed as well as his grade-point average. But there is no real pressure for any such reforms.

COERCION AS AN ALLEGEDLY-UNIQUE MORAL EVIL:

"NO COERCION, EXCEPT TO PREVENT WORSE COERCION":

To see the moral absurdity of this slogan, imagine crazy Eddy, who likes to give people electric shocks just to watch them jump.He's not coercing them to jump; it's a pure reflex reaction to the shock. Obviously we may legitimately coerce Eddy to stop this hurting of people, even though we are not then using coercion to prevent coercion!

IT'S NOT ALWAYS BETTER TO SUBSTITUTE REWARDS FOR PUNISHMENTS:

If you're trying to get son Joe to quit hitting his little brother, you would NOT want to pay him for each day he abstains! You would not want to convey the idea that just refraining from wickedness entitles him to a reward! You want him to see that doing bad things deserves punishment; you'll want to use threats--coercion accompanied by moralistic scolding--to get him to stop hitting his brother..Here threats are morally better than offers, to mark for the child the difference between our insisting that they do their minimal duty, and being asked to go 'beyond the call of duty'.

COERCION AS ALLEGEDLY DESTROYING AUTONOMOUS ACHIEVEMENT:

It's said that Michelangelo was forced by the Pope to paint the Sistine Chapel.But the Pope was smart enough not to interfere in the details of the painting. So Michelangelo's artistic integrity was not threatened;nor can we say that his achievement was diminished: we can't say the ceiling was the Pope's achievement, not his--even though the Pope decided that it would be done. (After all, if the Pope had used only the free offer of pay to get the ceiling done, it would still be true that the ceiling came in some sense from the Pope's will.)

THREATS TYPICALLY MORE HUMILIATING THAN FREE OFFERS:

However, a person who accepts a free-offer bribe to do wrong, a bribe he can't resist because of his runaway greed--such a person should perhaps feel more humiliated than one who was forced to do wrong.

Rape is a vivid example of humiliation from coercion.But consider a merciless seduction, where the man flatters the woman and woos her, then sneers at her to his friends, in her presence, after he has her. This might be even more humiliating, because the woman displayed foolish weakness in believing his soft, cynical wooing.

One of the nastiest lines in Shakespeare is when the crass soldier Bertrand (In ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL) is trying to seduce an honorable maid, from sheer perversity: "I will flesh my Will in the spoil of her honor!"

If the girl submitted, and then realized his real attitude, she might be more humiliated than if she had been raped.

None of this mitigates the horror of rape; it only shows the possibly-worse horror of ruthless seduction. On the other hand, there is a general presumption that rape involves coercive humilitation; there is no such general presumption about seduction. More generally, there is a presumption that coercion is humiliating, while there is no such presumption about persuading or using free offers.

SELF-DEFEATING COERCION?

Could we argue against legitimate coercion the way we argued in APPENDIX vs. legitimate violence? (We said there that violence is presumed wrong, needs justification by showing that it is (a)necessary and (b) workable to prevent some worse disaster than the violence itself constitutes. Then we noted that violence often enrages the victim so he won't comply, even if he prudently should; so intimidating violence can't be presumed workable--so, in practice, it can never be justified.)

Perhaps coercion itself should be presumed 'unworkable' also; it also often enrages its subject so as to prevent compliance; however--in many situations, many kinds of coercion DO work to get compliance; for instance, my employer is effectively coerced by the State (using quiet,steady pressure) to withhold my income tax and social security. So we can't presume that coercion is unworkable, hence always wrong.

COMMENTS FOR AFTERWORD OF CH5( FREE MEDIA)::

I speak of `free expression of viewpoint' instead of opinions, because I don't want to exclude expression through art and music; I don't want to discuss only information and editorials. However, in practice I think that expressing opinions in words should be specially privileged.

THE PARADOX OF CHEAP PUBLISHING BEING POSSIBLE, YET ONLY EXPENSIVE PUBLISHING HAS INFLUENCE:

On the campus of Colorado .State U., a man named Joe Stern has for years offered on campus a continuous barrage of cartoons and writings presenting his unusual point of view. These are usually discarded by the students without being read. The skill of attracting jaded readers' attention is worth money; that means that only Big Money will succeed in getting the attention of millions of readers.

GOOD AND BAD REASONS FOR PAYING ATTENTION:

It's fascinating to see how even jaded business leaders, who should beware of misleading glamour in presentations to them, automatically heed the most polished presentations from their underlings.

A huge amount of new computing power goes to add `bells and whistles' (e.g., childish color, animation and music) to commercial presentations.

A sensible `consumer' of offered information should translate all claims out of clever slogans into plain speech; he should insist that information be also presented to him plain, without bells and whistles--to see how much intrinsic plausibility and cogent evidence remain.

MURDERERS HOPING FOR PUBLICITY:

Statistics show that starting or dropping capital punishment makes almost no difference in the murder rate. Since some sensible villains might be deterred by the threat of execution, these statistics suggest that an equal number of sick people are inspired to murder by the hope of the dramatic publicity they'll get in being executed. That's why dull 'lethal injection' is probably less bad policy than dramatic hangings or electrocutions.

CRIME-RATES:

The raw numbers of major crimes have gone down; but all experts agree that violent crimes are a function above all of the ratio of young males to other groups in society. That ratio has sunk considerably in the last decade..yet the number of violent crimes has not gone down proportionately..in other words, the number of violent crimes from each 1000 young males has increased--and the ratio of teen-age males to general population is rising again.

'RAISING THE COST OF AGGRESSION":

It's dangerous to have a miltary threat-system administered by civilians who are, of course, secular and sensible enough themselves to yield readily to credible threats--and who therefore assume that everyone is similarly responsive to threats--even adolescents and fanatics.

The worst situation is to have 'deterrent'weapons administered by bureaucrats trained in Economics, trained under the rigid, though counter-intuitive, assumption that human behavior is by and large rational. They will be especially tempted to conceal their arbitrary desire to 'thump' an enemy by telling themselves that they are rationally applying (negative) incentives to gain compliance.

When the economist Walt Rostow was influential in directing the bombing of Vietnam, he used to refer to his policy as 'raising the cost of aggression."

One could imagine his picture of the the North-Vietnamese hierarchs saying to Ho Chi Minh, "Sire, the cost of our aggression has clearly exceeded its benefits; Return to contents

Return to contents we must cancel the enterprise." But they didn't.