The second view, that coercion is immoral prima facie or pro tanto, is probably the most common view. However, it is difficult to find and describe the immoral factor of coercion, which is sufficient to explain its illegitimacy if not refuted, while avoiding the miscategorization of cases. Here are two recent attempts at such a description. If the law must indeed be supported by coercion in order to be a law, and if, as follows, States necessarily and legitimately use coercion against their citizens, then this may constitute a particular burden of justification for the State and its citizens. Christopher J. Eberle sees that “justifying liberalism” (which he associates with the work of liberals such as Rawls, Charles Larmore, Robert Audi, and Gerald Gaus) rightly makes justification of coercion its central task. “The assertion that respect requires public justification provides a basis for the central element of justification of the liberal ethic of citizenship: the standard of respect obliges every citizen to discipline himself so that he resolutely refrains from supporting coercive legislation for which he cannot provide the necessary public justification” (Eberle 2002, 12, emphasis omitted; see also Gaus 2010). But alongside this obligation, the necessity of state coercion is argued in order to bring citizens of a single state into a kind of relationship with each other that is different from their relationship with those outside their state. Michael Blake argues in this sense to conclude that the duty to promote economic equality as a matter of justice “is a plausible interpretation of liberal principles only when these principles are applied to the individuals responsible for the coercive network of state government” (Blake, 2002, 258). Fowler`s normative approach combines this criterion with a Kantian representation of autonomy and suggests that the test of a coercive threat is that it violates the autonomy of coercion. This seems to create a disconnect between our pretheoretical understanding of coercion and cases that satisfy Fowler`s conditions – for example, a false “warning” may well violate his autonomy, but it seems different from coercion. However, if there is any way to understand the notion of imposing a practical imperative, it seems to be a useful element of a representation of coercion. If coercion involves the use of direct force against a person`s body, it`s pretty clear how it can limit most types of freedom (though not necessarily, how it can interfere with autonomy).

But as Thomas Aquinas noted long ago, it is not clear why coercion in the form of threats should be in tension with freedom. As Craig Carr puts it, “If at least some cases of coercion involve making decisions, and if the ability to make one`s own choices is part of what it means to be free, in what sense (if any) does coercion conflict with freedom?” (Carr, 1988, p. 59). To be sure, many instances of coercion make a person`s decisions less attractive than they would otherwise be, or reduce the quality of the options available. But it seems a little strange to say that you are less free simply because your choices have become less attractive or certain options for action have fallen off the decision menu. Is there any meaning we can give to the claim that we are less free because of coercion? Although the law is not inherently coercive, legal systems generally use threats and violence to enforce their standards. Our question is how such practices can be justified. Some coercive relations apply a moralized test to the situation of coercion, asserting that one can evade responsibility for an act performed under duress if the proposition of necessity is such that one has “the right to yield to [coercive] suggestion and then to be freed from the normal moral and legal consequences of [one`s] action” (Wertheimer 1987, 267).

Such a moralized test may be the best that theorists can do, but it requires a different theory than that which explains the compulsive character of the proposition. (For example, Wertheimer`s theory has two “teeth”: the first cone decides whether a particular proposition is coercion; it is the second point that then determines whether a coercive proposition, once made, actually constrains someone in the sense that it influences their responsibility for tolerance.) While there are some specific moralized or normative criteria that could be used to decide responsibility for actions under duress, it is not clear whether any of them are robust enough to deal with more than a fraction of cases. [17] The ethics of coercion, when understood as a morally neutral means to the ends of coercion, has been little studied in contemporary literature, at least as a separate subject. It is true, of course, that many ways of coercing someone are dangerous, harmful, and (when used by private parties) illegal. But the fact that coercion is a necessary tool, even for just governments in well-ordered societies, gives reason to believe that the ethics of coercion depend primarily on a number of distinct factors in its application, rather than on its intrinsic qualities. These factors include why and how it is used, who uses it, against whom, under what circumstances and what other means were possible instead. Coercion is no ordinary means. But it`s not clear why we should say it is immoral per se (even prima facie or pro tanto), rather than simply stating that it is a very effective, abuse-prone tool, and something that deserves ethical scrutiny every time it is used. Nozick`s essay was by far the most influential of these early works. In addition to being the first, his essay established a framework for thinking about coercion that provided an intuitively compelling picture of how coercion works.