October 2008

I’m grateful for the opportunity to participate in this forum, and thank Simon May and Public Reason for the work in organizing this symposium.

My paper provides a positive account of coercion that responds to difficulties I have found in many recent writings about coercion.  It enters these debates through what seems a bit of an off-hand distinction that some have made, between coercion via threat, and uses of direct force or violence for similar purposes (such as to constrain an agent from being able to act).  Some philosophers have made a big deal of the claim that coercion has to go “through the will” of the coercee, and thus direct force is not coercive.  By and large, though, most recent writers have simply assumed this to be so, as though it were obvious. This seems to me quite at variance with older notions of coercion, so this change is worth remarking upon.

I argue in this talk, the dispute over whether there are two sorts of coercion here or one points up a problem with accounts that identify coercion with the way threats put “pressure on the will,” giving little or no attention to the kinds of powers and activities that make it possible for coercers to issue credible threats.  I claim that in order to reasonably regard a particular communication (say, a “threat”) as coercive, the threat maker must be drawing upon the sorts of powers that explain why the coercee should take such threats as credible.  These would include relational facts that explain why the coercee does not in turn threaten the coercer back, disarm or disable him, evade the threatened consequence, ignore the threat, or otherwise proceed contrary to the way the threat-maker demands.  When one agent demonstrates a willingness and ability to use powers such as force and violence, unchecked, against another, this powerful agent is in a position to greatly restrict the possibilities for action of his target.  The powerful agent can thereby make demands of the target, the fulfillment of which become necessary means to virtually anything the target of the demand might wish to do.  Without such powers over the target, it becomes somewhat mysterious why the target should accede to the demands of the would-be coercer.

In this podcast, I am only able to outline the two different ways of thinking about coercion (what I call the “enforcement approach”, contrasted with what I call the “pressure-on-the-will approach”), and give some reasons to think that the enforcement approach is more fundamental.  In a longer version of this paper, I consider a variety of objections that might be raised to the central account presented here. If you are interested in the longer version of this paper, you can find it at this link

I am grateful also to William Edmundson for taking time to respond to this paper, and look forward to a lively discussion in the comments. [Bill's comments are available here -- SCM]

It seems that governments sometimes act in ways that are good, but not required by any plausible conception of justice.  Think of the lovely flowers on the highway median, or the block party thrown in your town each year, or the grant you received last summer.  Or, more controversially, consider the victim compensation fund set up by the U.S. Congress after the September 11th attacks, or maybe even the $700 billion bailout of the U.S. financial industry going on right now.

When the government provides for these things, it may be engaging in what we can call government supererogation.  Which acts we’d label as examples of government supererogation will depend on which theories of justice and goodness we accept.  While there is disagreement over these theories, and thus disagreement over which specific acts are supererogatory, I believe most people would identify some acts as fitting into the category.  Taken together, these acts may consume a substantial amount of public resources and attention.

In my contribution to the Political Philosophy Podcast Symposium, I argue that the kinds of acts that seem to be examples of government supererogation are only apparently supererogatory.  Because of the kind of agent government is, the category of supererogation is unavailable to it.  Acts of apparent government supererogation, I argue, are instead either wrong or required by justice, and for most such acts the latter option is implausible.

This paper is related to a larger project of mine on questions about the agency of justice.  Some of these questions have to do with the agency of the state, since the state is typically thought of as the prime agent of justice.  Other questions concern other possible agents of justice, such as private citizens and voluntary associations.

I look forward to getting your thoughts on the paper.  Thanks for listening / reading.  Thanks also to Simon for setting up the Symposium, and to Helena de Bres for her very helpful comments.

Click here to read the paper.

Click here to read Helena de Bres’s comments on the paper.