Abstract

This work is concerned with the moral status of coercion--with why it is presumptively wrong and with when it is, on balance, permissible. In the first chapters, coercion is distinguished from other means of influencing behavior, especially physical compulsion and noncoercive duress, and the effect of coercion on the moral responsibility of agents and the scope of their freedom is assessed. It is argued that coercion does not affect an agent's "freedom to act" but does restrict his "freedom to choose." An account of the presumptive wrongness of coercion is developed within the framework of a theory of rights, and coercion is judged morally wrong in that abridgement of freedom to choose violates the right of self-determination. ;The concept of a right also provides the basis in the succeeding chapters for a theory of the justifiability of coercion. Moral rights, it is argued, carry with them "second-order rights" of enforcement which may include coercion of potential violators of rights. It is argued further that these second-order rights can be alienated and that this provides a justification for the state's role in using coercion to defend the rights of individuals--since the citizens of a state can be regarded as having transferred to the state their second-order rights. The concluding chapter defends a modified retributive theory of punishment--according to which the social costs of crime should be fairly distributed between criminals and potential victims--on the ground that only if punishment is governed by such a theory will the rights of citizens be defended in a manner which manifests the same respect for persons which grounds these rights in the first place