The line between forcing to act and merely getting to act is drawn somewhere in the manipulation or persuasion part of the scale. Feinberg More recently, Marcia Baron and Allen Wood have also discussed forms of manipulation that seem best characterized as forms of pressure Baron ; Wood Although we can treat the idea that manipulation consists of a form of pressure as a full-fledged theory of manipulation, most of the authors just cited hold only that some forms of manipulation consist of pressure.
In particular, most agree with Faden, Beauchamp, and King, that other forms of manipulation are more akin to deception. Thus, it is somewhat artificial to speak of the pressure model as a theory meant to cover all forms of manipulation. It is more accurate to regard the pressure model as claiming that exerting non-coercive pressure is sufficient but perhaps not necessary for an influence to count as manipulative.
Our discussion of the trickery and pressure accounts highlights a rather striking fact: If we survey the tactics that seem intuitively to be examples of manipulation, we find tactics that seem best described as forms of trickery as well as tactics that seem best described as forms of pressure. This is puzzling, since, on the face of it, trickery and pressure seem rather dissimilar. What should we make of the fact that we use the same concept—manipulation—to refer to methods of influence that seem to operate by such dissimilar mechanisms?
Several responses are possible. Second, we might hold that the concept of manipulation is not vague but rather disjunctive, so that manipulation consists of either trickery or pressure. Indeed, in one of the earliest philosophical analyses of manipulation, Joel Rudinow takes this approach. Rudinow begins with the following thesis:. Rudinow We might then define manipulation in terms of a two-dimensional space bounded by rational persuasion, outright lying, and coercion.
Disjunctive strategies that combine the trickery and pressure accounts are appealing because they seem to do a better job than either the trickery or pressure account alone in accounting for the wide variety of tactics that seem intuitively to count as manipulation.
However, this wider coverage comes a price. Of course, it is possible that this question cannot be answered because, as a matter of fact, there are two irreducibly different forms of manipulation.
But this seems like a conclusion that we should accept only reluctantly, after having made a good faith effort to determine whether there really is anything in common between pressure-based manipulation and trickery-based manipulation.
On her view, manipulativeness is at the opposite extreme from the vice of. Baron Perhaps, then, we can understand the underlying similarity between trickery- and pressure-based manipulation as manifestations of a common vice, as different ways of going wrong with regard to how and how much we should try to influence those around us. Finally, it is worth noting two other approaches to defining manipulation. Patricia Greenspan suggests that manipulation is a sort of hybrid between coercion and deception.
She writes that. Greenspan It certainly seems true that manipulators often use both pressure and deception. However, we can also point to relatively pure cases of manipulative pressure or manipulative trickery: Indeed, all of the items on the list above can be imagined as involving either pure pressure or pure trickery. This distinction in hand, Cave defines motive manipulation as any form of influence that operates by engaging non-concern motives.
This is because the distinction between a concern and a non-concern motive—which is a crucial part of the theory—seems under-described. Are such things as my fear of failure or my desire to retain your friendship concerns? A complete answer to the evaluation question should tell us about the sort of wrongfulness that manipulation possesses: Is it absolutely immoral, pro tanto immoral, prima facie immoral, etc.?
It should also tell us when manipulation is immoral if it is not always immoral. Finally, a satisfactory answer to the evaluation question should tell us what makes manipulation immoral in cases where it is immoral. Suppose that Tonya is a captured terrorist who has hidden a bomb in the city and that her preferred course of action is to keep its location secret until it to explodes. How would this way filling in the details of the case change our moral assessment of the various ways that Irving might induce Tonya to change her mind?
This hardline view would hold that manipulation is always morally wrong, no matter what the consequences. A less extreme position would be that while manipulation is always pro tanto wrong, other moral considerations can sometimes outweigh the pro tanto wrongness of manipulation.
Thus, we might think that manipulation is always wrong to some extent, but that countervailing moral factors might sometimes suffice to make manipulation justified on balance. What might such factors include? It is important to note that, on this view, the fact that an action involves manipulation is always a moral reason to avoid it, even if stronger countervailing considerations render it not wrong on balance.
By contrast, we might hold that manipulation is merely prima facie immoral. On this view, there is a presumption that manipulation is immoral, but this presumption can be defeated in some situations. When the presumption is defeated, manipulation is not wrong at all i.
On this view, we might say that while manipulation is usually wrong, it is not wrong at all in the terrorist scenario. A more complex—but, perhaps, ultimately more plausible—view would combine the prima facie and pro tanto approaches.
Such a view would hold that manipulation is prima facie immoral, but that when it is wrong, the wrongness is pro tanto rather than absolute. On this view, there are situations in which the presumption against manipulation is defeated and manipulation is not even pro tanto wrong.
Perhaps bluffing in poker is like this. But where the presumption is not defeated, the wrongness of manipulation is only pro tanto , and thus able to be outweighed by sufficiently weighty countervailing moral considerations. In such cases, even if it is not wrong on balance to manipulate, it would still be morally preferable to avoid manipulation in favor of some other, morally legitimate, form of influence. Manipulating a friend into refraining from sending a text to rekindle an abusive relationship might be an example where the pro tanto wrongness of manipulation is outweighed by other considerations.
A view along these lines has been defended by Marcia Baron — Although this view is far less absolute than the hardline view, it retains the claim that manipulation is prima facie wrong, so that there is always a presumption that it is immoral, though this presumption is sometimes defeated.
However, the claim that manipulation is presumptively wrong might be challenged. On this view, whether a given instance of manipulation is immoral will always depend on the facts of the situation, and the term itself includes or should include no presumption one way or the other.
Clearly there are non-moralized notions of manipulation. For example, several papers by the evolutionary psychologist David M.
Buss ; D. Buss et al. An argument for preferring a non-moralized notion of manipulation is provided by Allen Wood, who writes that. Wood 19— No matter how we answer the question of whether manipulation in general is absolutely immoral, prima facie immoral, pro tanto immoral, or not even presumptively immoral, there are clearly situations in which manipulation is immoral.
Any complete answer to the evaluation question must explain why manipulation is immoral in those cases where it is immoral. Several accounts have been offered to identify the source of the moral wrongfulness of manipulation when it is wrong. Perhaps the most straightforward way to explain the wrongfulness of manipulation when it is wrong points to the harm done to its targets.
The harmfulness of manipulation seems especially salient in manipulative relationships, where manipulation may lead to subordination and even abuse. The more minor economic harm of the extraction of money from consumers is often pointed to as a wrong-making feature of manipulative advertising, and there has been some discussion of how manipulation might lead targets to enter into exploitative contracts.
Systematic political manipulation may weaken democratic institutions and perhaps even lead to tyranny. It is commonly held that harmfulness is always a wrong-making feature—though perhaps one that is only prima facie or pro tanto.
Thus, it seems reasonable to think that instances of manipulation that harm their victims are, for that reason, at least pro tanto or prima facie immoral.
But not all instances of manipulation harm their victims. In fact, manipulation sometimes benefits its target. If the harm to the victim is the only wrong-making feature of manipulation, then paternalistic or beneficent manipulation could never be even pro tanto wrong. But this claim strikes most people as implausible. To see this, consider that the debate about whether paternalistic nudges are wrongfully manipulative is not settled simply by pointing out that they benefit their targets.
The fact that it seems possible for an act to be wrongfully manipulative, even though it benefits and is intended to benefit the target, presumably explains why there are few, if any, defenses of the claim that manipulation is wrong only when and because it harms the target. Nevertheless, it seems plausible to hold that when manipulation does harm its target, this harm adds to the wrongness of the manipulative behavior. The reason for this is easy to see: Manipulation, by definition, influences decision-making by means that—unlike rational persuasion—are not clearly autonomy-preserving.
Thus, it is natural to regard it as interfering with autonomous decision-making. The idea that manipulation is wrong because it undermines autonomous choice is implicit in discussions of manipulation as a potential invalidator of consent. Indeed, the assumption that manipulation undermines autonomy is so common in discussions of manipulation and consent that it would be difficult to cite a paper on that topic that does not at least implicitly treat manipulation as undermining autonomous choice.
But even outside of discussions of autonomous consent, the claim that manipulation is immoral because it undermines autonomy commonly made and perhaps even more commonly assumed. However, there are reasons for caution about tying the moral status of manipulation too tightly to its effects on autonomy.
One can imagine cases where it is not obvious that manipulation undermines autonomy. For example, a teacher might manipulate a student into taking a course of study which ultimately enhances her autonomy by opening new career options, improving her skills of critical self-reflection, etc.
Suppose that Tonya has autonomously decided to leave an abusive partner, but that she is now tempted to go back. One might respond that these examples do not undermine the claim that manipulation is wrong when and because it undermines autonomy because these autonomy-enhancing instances of manipulation are not wrong. However, this response faces a complication: Consider the case where Irving manipulates Tonya into resisting the temptation to backslide on her resolution to leave her abusive partner.
But it also seems plausible to say that it was nevertheless pro tanto wrong since it seems plausible to think that it would have been morally preferable for Irving to find some other way to help Tonya avoid backsliding.
Of course, it is open to defenders of the autonomy account of the wrongness of manipulation to bite the bullet here and deny that autonomy-enhancing manipulation is even pro tanto immoral. A more significant threat to the link between manipulation and autonomy appears in an influential paper by Sarah Buss. Buss First, she claims that manipulation does not, in fact, deprive its victim of the ability to make choices; indeed, it typically presupposes that the target will make her own choice.
For a similar argument, see Long Second, Buss argues that it is false to claim that an autonomous agent would rationally reject being subjected to manipulative influences.
Her most notable example is the cultivation of romantic love, which often involves—and may even require—significant amounts of behavior that is aptly described as manipulation. Moreover, the defender of the link between autonomy and the wrongness of manipulation might simply deny that the forms of manipulation to which an autonomous agent would consent for example, those required by romantic love are wrongful cases of manipulation.
Several accounts of manipulation tie its moral status to the fact that it influences behavior by methods that seem analogous to how one might operate a tool or a device. On this view, manipulation involves treating the target as a device to be operated rather than an agent to be reasoned with.
As Claudia Mills puts it,. For the manipulator, reasons are tools, and bad reasons can work as well as, or better than, a good one. Mills — The point here is that a manipulator treats his target not as a fellow rational agent, for that would require giving good reasons for doing as the manipulator proposes.
Thus, it would be natural to appeal to Kantian ideas to help elaborate the idea that manipulation is wrong because of the way that it treats its target. Thus, for example, Thomas E. Hill writes,. Hill Hence, if it is unethical to fail to treat someone as that kind of rational agent, we might be pushed toward the conclusion that the only acceptable basis for human interaction is the kind of coldly intellectual rational persuasion that excludes any appeal to emotions.
But as we saw earlier, there are good reasons for regarding such a conclusion as implausible. These considerations certainly do not entail that it is hopeless to look to some notion of treating persons as things for an account of the wrongfulness of manipulation.
But they do suggest that more work must be done before the claim that manipulation is wrong because it treats a person as a mere thing can be regarded as much more than a platitude. Although harm, autonomy, and treating persons as things are the most prominent suggestions about what makes manipulation wrong when it is wrong, one can find other suggestions in the literature.
Patricia Greenspan suggests that when manipulation is immoral, it is because it violates the terms of the relationship between the manipulator and his target—terms that will vary according to the nature of the relationship between them Greenspan Such a view suggests—plausibly—that the moral status of a given instance of manipulation will depend at least in part on the nature of the relationship between the influencer and the target of the influence.
In addition to answering the identification and evaluation questions, a complete theory of manipulation should address several further issues. He does this by fooling a police officer into thinking he is about to commit suicide. The police officer brings him to the ward, reports that he is suicidal, and requests that he be admitted. It seems clear that the malingerer has manipulated the police officer by tricking him into adopting a faulty belief. But the psychiatrist, while not falling for the feigned suicide attempt and thus not adopting any faulty beliefs, is nevertheless induced to do what she did not want to do.
Although it seems correct to say that the psychiatrist was manipulated, this form of manipulation seems different from what was done to the police officer. Drawing a similar distinction, Claudia Mills writes. If A wants to get B to do act x, there are two general strategies that A might undertake. While some writers might call both strategies manipulative, at least in certain circumstances, I prefer to reserve the label manipulation for a subset of morally problematic actions falling in the second category.
Mills Consider tactic 9 above, where Irving threatens to withdraw his friendship if Tonya does not do as Irving wishes. Is this direct psychological manipulation, or situational manipulation? Why would it be more like what the malingerer does to the police officer than what he does to the psychiatrist? This is not to deny that there is a difference between psychological and situational manipulation. Instead, it is to ask what that difference is, and why it might matter.
Yet criteria like those proposed by Mills and Barnhill seem to imply that these two forms of manipulation are on opposite sides of that distinction. But much work remains to be done to provide a well-motivated account of that difference. Some views of manipulation seem to suggest, if not require, that manipulators have fairly complex intentions—such as the intention to lead the target astray—for manipulation to occur.
Marcia Baron and Kate Manne offer compelling reasons to think that such requirements are too strong. Baron argues that manipulation can occur even if the manipulator only has. She goes on to argue that the manipulator need not be aware that she has that intention Baron , Manne agrees; to support this claim, she offers the example of Joan, who gives extravagant gifts to relatives who pay her less attention than she thinks they should Manne , Nevertheless, the arguments offered by Baron and Manne raise important questions about the level of conscious intentionality required for an action to be manipulative.
The question of what sort of intention is required for an act to count as manipulative has practical implications for assessing the behavior of children, who sometimes behave in ways that seem aptly described as manipulative even when they are too young to have the complicated intentions that some theories of manipulation might require.
Similar worries arise for assessing the behavior of people for whom manipulativeness has become a habit, or a part of their personalities. As professor of psychiatric nursing Len Bowers writes,. It is an integral part of their interpersonal style, a part of the very disorder itself. Bowers ; see also Potter In such cases, one wonders what level of intentionality lies behind behavior that we would otherwise think of as manipulative.
Even if we are inclined to regard childhood or certain personality disorders as factors that mitigate the blameworthiness of manipulative behavior, it would seem counterintuitive for a theory of manipulation to say that children and persons with personality disorders are incapable of acting manipulatively. Marxian notions of ideology and false consciousness as mechanisms that facilitate the exploitation of workers by capital clearly resemble the concept of manipulation as it is being used here.
Allen Wood explores some of these connections in Wood On a smaller scale, a bevy of self-help books focus on how manipulative tactics can be used to create and maintain subordination within relationships Braiker ; Simon ; Kole A relative lack of socio-political power is almost certainly one source of vulnerability to manipulation.
But there are likely others as well. The trickery model of manipulation suggests—plausibly—that people who are less intellectually sophisticated are especially vulnerable to trickery and therefore to manipulation. The pressure model suggests that financial, social, and emotional desperation may make one especially vulnerable to pressures created by threats to worsen an already tenuous situation.
However, it may also be true that manipulation is a tempting tool for use by the vulnerable against the powerful. As Patricia Greenspan notes,. A further argument for manipulation in these cases appeal to the limits on what is possible in a position of subordination.
Bowers Finally, it seems likely that one reason why children often resort to manipulative tactics is that they often lack any other or any other equally effective way to get what they want. It is also worth noting that the idea that the idea that manipulation undermines autonomous choice might be used, somewhat paradoxically, to undermine autonomous choice, especially among the non-elite. Akerlof and Shiller discuss a number of advertising, sales, and marketing practices that they deem manipulative.
The problem that Skwire notes is that the reason for calling these practices manipulative is that consumers make choices that Akerlof and Shiller think are sufficiently irrational that they would only be made under the influence of manipulation. In short, she suggests that Akerlof and Shiller are too quick to suspect manipulation in cases where people make different decisions from the ones they think best.
It would be ironic—and unjust—to use the idea that manipulation is a wrongful interference with autonomy as a weapon to delegitimize the autonomous choices of people with whom we disagree or whose situations, needs, and values we do not understand.
The SEP editors would like to thank Rasmus Kasurinen for pointing out some passages in prior versions of this entry in Section 4. Make Tonya feel guilty for preferring to do Y. Induce Tonya into an emotional state that makes doing X seem more appropriate than it really is. Point out that doing Y will make Tonya seem less worthy and appealing to her friends. Do a small favor for Tonya before asking her to do X , so that she feels obligated to comply.
Make it clear to Tonya that if she does Y rather than X , Irving will withdraw his friendship, sulk, or become irritable and generally unpleasant. Preliminaries 1. Answering the Identification Question 2. Answering the Evaluation Question 3. Further Issues 4. Galbraith Several philosophers have made similar criticisms of advertising. Answering the Identification Question Currently, there are three main characterizations of manipulation on offer in the literature: One treats manipulation as an influence that undermines or bypasses rational deliberation.
An early example of this more expansive trickery-based approach to manipulation can be found in a paper by Vance Kasten, who writes that manipulation occurs when there is a difference in kind between what one intends to do and what one actually does, when that difference is traceable to another in such a way that the victim may be said to have been misled.
More recently, Robert Noggle has defended a version of this more expansive approach, writing that There are certain norms or ideals that govern beliefs, desires, and emotions. Barnhill 73, emphasis original; for a similar view, see Hanna Claudia Mills offers a theory that can be considered as either a version of, or a close relative to, the trickery account: We might say, then, that manipulation in some way purports to be offering good reasons, when in fact it does not.
Then they observe that There are many in-between cases: For example, suppose the physician has made clear that he or she will be upset with the patient if the patient does not take the drug, and the patient is intimidated. However, they do not claim that all forms of manipulation fall into the middle region of this continuum; they also count forms of deception, indoctrination, and seduction as manipulative, and claim that some manipulative strategies can be as controlling as coercion or as noncontrolling as persuasion; other manipulations fall somewhere between these endpoints.
He writes that many techniques for getting someone to act in a certain way can be placed on a spectrum of force running from compulsion proper, at one extreme, through compulsive pressure, coercion proper, and coercive pressure, to manipulation, persuasion, enticement, and simple requests at the other extreme.
Baron 48 Perhaps, then, we can understand the underlying similarity between trickery- and pressure-based manipulation as manifestations of a common vice, as different ways of going wrong with regard to how and how much we should try to influence those around us.
Answering the Evaluation Question A complete answer to the evaluation question should tell us about the sort of wrongfulness that manipulation possesses: Is it absolutely immoral, pro tanto immoral, prima facie immoral, etc.? You might feel scared to do it, obligated to do it, or guilty about not doing it. The victim engenders a feeling of guilt in their target.
But while manipulators often play the victim, the reality is that they are the ones who have caused the problem, she adds. A person who is targeted by manipulators who play the victim often try to help the manipulator in order to stop feeling guilty, Stines says. Targets of this kind of manipulation often feel responsible for helping the victim by doing whatever they can to stop their suffering.
Nice Guy. In fact, exploiting the norms and expectations of reciprocity is one of the most common forms of manipulation, says Jay Olson, a doctoral researcher studying manipulation at McGill University. A salesperson, for example, might make it seem like because he or she gave you a deal, you should buy the product. In a relationship, a partner might buy you flowers then request something in return. Often, manipulators try one of two tactics, says Olson.
The first is the foot-in-the-door technique, in which someone starts with a small and reasonable request—like, do you have the time? The door-in-the-face technique is the opposite—it involves someone making a big request, having it rejected, then making a smaller one, Olson explains. Someone doing contract work, for example, may ask you for a large sum of money up front, and then after you decline, will ask for a smaller amount, he says.
This works because, following the larger request, the smaller appeal seems reasonable comparatively, Olson says. A good support group can help, too, says Stines.
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