On The Concept Of Coercion And Its Moral Effect

This thesis consists of two articles. Chapter one is a concept study about coercion, meaning to find the underlying concept of different of conceptions of coercion. Chapter two is a normative study about coercion, meaning to explain the effect of coercion on coercee's responsibility, i.e. why an agent might be exculpated for coerced. Logically , the conclusion of chapter one define the topics of chapter two; secondly and more importantly, the concept of coercion refers to a morally meaningful phenomenon, i.e. an agent can't be able to do otherwise, which can explain the effect of coercion itself.Chapter one maps inter-and inner arguments in two conception of coercion, named threatenism coercion and violentism coercion here. The former regard coercion as a sub-concept of threat, e.g. successful threat, which means threat is an exclusive form of coercion. Others like offer or warm, though similar to threat in form, can not be coercive; while interactions in different forms, such as, use violence directly, hypnogenesis or other similar volitional control,can not be coercive either. The latter regards coercion as a kind of physical behavior control, all threat can not be coercive, except for which will destroy the coercee's volition. The formulations of the two conceptions are "make it worse off for sb.to do otherwise"and "make sb. can't able to do otherwise". We advance a modified formulation of "make sb. can't able to do otherwise" which identifies the two previous formulation.The core issues of threatenism are to define conditions for threat and coercive threat. Like offer, threat is a by-conditional proposal, i.e."if Q do A, then P ; if Q do not do A,then P don't bring about or have brought about some consequence C". We could distinguish threat from offer by C, if C makes Q's situation worse off , then the proposal is threat; if C makes Q's situation better off , then the proposal is offer. "Worse/better off " is short for "worse/better off certain baseline". While baseline is divided into moral and non-moral, threat can be a normative concept or descriptive concept. On the conditions for coercive threat, some writers consider successful threat as coercion; others argue that there must be another condition satisfied,i.e. the threat make the victim have no choice but do. These two views hold that threat is the only form of coercion. The third view identifies threat as a particular kind of coercion,meanwhile, hypnogenesis and direct use of violence satisfied this (no choice )condition are coercion, too.The violentism argues that the nature of coercion is "make sb. cannot be able to do otherwise". Because of their narrow definition of "cannot", i.e. Physically or objectively impossible, they exclude general threat out of coercion mistakenly. In fact, "cannot" refer to both objectively impossible and motivationally impossible. The completely understanding of "cannot" indicates the common nature of conceptions of coercion. Some threats are coercive, since they make threatees cannot bring about the motive to do otherwise. All offers are refusable normatively, so offer can not be coercive.In chapter two, focusing on the criminal defense of duress, we summarize its traditional approaches and give a new approach based on the concept of coercion. There are two main traditional approaches, named excuse and justification. The former means Q is not culpable because of duress, though his harmful action is wrong; the latter means Q is justified to do the harmful action under duress, and he is not subject to punish for right action. There are three explanations of excuse: firstly, duress disables the victim's volition, making him no longer a genuine agent, so out of punish; secondly, the agent under duress makes the mistake that any ordinarily people will do in the same situation, which is not an expression of bad characteristic,so out of punish; thirdly, our expectation of Q should be based on fairly respect to him and the victim, and the fairly expected action is the action resulting to less evil, if Q's action conforms with our expectation, then he is out of punish. The explanation of justification: less evil is a general principle of justification, if Q's action accords with the principle , then his action is right, therefore he is out of punish. To be concluded, duress brings Q into a Hobbesian state, in which there is no other emotive but self-protect. According to "ought imply can", Q is out of punish.