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What’s Wrong with Motive Manipulation?

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Abstract

Consider manipulation in which one agent, avoiding force, threat, or fraud mobilizes some non-concern motive of another so as to induce this other to behave or move differently than she would otherwise have behaved or moved, given her circumstances and her initial ranking of concerns. As an instance, imagine that I get us to miss the opening of a play that I have grudgingly agreed to attend by engaging your sublimated compulsive tendency to check the stove when we are halfway to the theatre. Such motive manipulation is, I take it, widely regarded as morally worrisome. If it really is morally worrisome, then we should be able to explain adequately why it is so. But existing condemnations of manipulation come up short in this regard. In this paper, I develop and defend a more plausible account of the moral status of this phenomenon.

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Notes

  1. On the issue of resistible and irresistible motives, see Fischer (2004). On the issue of motives which can and cannot be shed, see Mele (2001), pp. 144–73.

  2. I might have expressed this coherence condition more formally, but given our purposes, there is nothing to be gained by so doing.

  3. One might mobilize a target’s non-concern motives not to induce her to act against her concerns, but rather to bring her to pursue her concerns differently than she otherwise would have. This would be manipulative, and perhaps morally worrisome. But it would not be morally worrisome for precisely the same reasons as motive manipulation, for it leaves an agent’s concerns fully intact. Hence, I shall exclude it from the discussion to follow.

  4. Whether it is possible to motive manipulate oneself, and what the moral status of such motive manipulation might be, are interesting questions. The answers to these questions are tied intimately to the vexed question of how to best analyze personal identity, and this is a question that I do not wish to engage here. Hence, in what follows, I shall restrict my inquiry to cases in which one agent motive manipulates another agent or agents.

  5. See Kane (1996), pp. 64–65.

  6. See Mele (2001), pp. 166–67.

  7. I am indebted to an anonymous referee for this journal for this concise expression of Mele’s view. For the longer version, see Mele (2001), pp. 166–67.

  8. For a nice, compact discussion of this criterion, which has its genesis in the political philosophy of John Rawls, see Timmons (2003), pp. 11–12.

  9. I thank Anthony Landreth for this point about motive manipulation and second-order ends.

  10. See Feinberg (1988), pp. 201–02.

  11. Something like this standard of appropriate consent has been a focus of consensus in medical ethics at least since the adoption of the Nuremburg Code. For a detailed discussion of the various aspects of appropriate consent in medical contexts, see Beauchamp and Childress (2001), pp. 69–98.

  12. This is a version of what is frequently called “consequentialism” in the literature on rationality. And consequentialism, understood broadly as the claim that agents should evaluate acts solely by their consequences, is widely acknowledged as a normative constraint on means/ends reasoning. For an accessible discussion of consequentialism as a postulate of contemporary rational choice theory, see Levi (1991).

  13. See Kant (1964), pp. 114–16.

  14. For details on each of these formulations beyond the brief summaries offered in the next sentence, see Kant (1964), pp. 89–104.

  15. To get a sense for how interpretations of the three formulations of the Categorical Imperative can diverge, even among prominent contemporary Kantians, compare Pogge (1998) and Guyer (1998).

  16. I do not know of any interpretations of the Formula of Universal Law that condemn motive manipulation. For an interpretation of the Formula of Humanity that does so, see Hill (1980). And for an interpretation of the Formula of the Kingdom of Ends that condemns motive manipulation, see Korsgaard (1996), pp. 188–221. This list is not exhaustive.

  17. See, for instance, Dworkin (1988), pp. 3–6. Or see Watson (1987).

  18. There are a number of different ways of parsing this body of work. For a detailed discussion of this issue, see Zimmerman (2003). For the division that I sketch here, I am indebted to Christman (1991).

  19. For the locus classicus of this view, see Frankfurt (1971). But see also Dworkin (1988), pp. 3–20, Ekstrom (1993), and Friedman (2003), pp. 1–29, among many others.

  20. See, for instance, Christman (1991), pp. 6–10. Or see Fischer and Ravizza (1988), pp. 194–201.

  21. See Christman (1991), pp. 10–18. See also Mele (2001), pp. 144–73.

  22. See, for instance, Christman (1991), pp. 10–18.

  23. See, for instance, Mele (2001), pp. 144–73.

  24. This principle is not as restrictive as it might seem. By opening a hot dog stand across from B’s successful stand, A interferes with B’s realizing a maximal profit, a highly ranked concern of B’s. But by so doing, A does not render B any less capable of supplementing, winnowing, reordering, revising, or striving towards her concerns. Modest Autonomy prohibits threatening the capacity of an agent to manage her concerns, not threatening the realization of her concerns.

  25. For a contractarian version of this principle, see Gauthier (1986), pp. 330–55. For a neo-Kantian version, see Korsgaard (1996), pp. 106–32. And for a broadly utilitarian version, see Mill (1947), pp. 15–74. This list is not exhaustive.

  26. For deployment of Modest Autonomy against manipulation in medical contexts, see Beauchamp and Childress (2001), pp. 57–104. For deployment of a close relative of Modest Autonomy against manipulation in a variety of contexts, medical and non-medical, see Dworkin (1988), pp. 100–60.

  27. One might wonder whether the first and second of these cases are really distinct. They are. In the first case, you behave counter to your initial ranking of concerns, and also to your ranking at the time of your behavior. In the second case, you behave counter to your initial ranking of concerns, but not to your ranking at the time of your behavior.

  28. I owe this point to Mary MacLeod, who commented on an ancestor of this paper at the April 24, 2003, meeting of the Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love in Cleveland, Ohio.

  29. For an involved discussion of the linkage between the moral status of intentions and the moral status of intended actions, see Kavka (1987), pp. 19–56.

  30. This objection is inspired by Michael Walzer’s treatment of pluralism and values, although Walzer does not explicitly discuss the sort of autonomy with which we are concerned here. See Walzer (1983), pp. 3–30.

  31. I thank Jeanine Weekes Schroer for this point.

  32. Thanks to Jeanine Weekes Schroer for suggesting this objection to me.

  33. This case is a modification of a case offered by Robert Kane, although Kane deploys it to make the somewhat different point that indeterminacy does not necessarily undermine control and responsibility. See Kane (2002), p. 504.

  34. I thank Charles Carr for this example.

  35. Beauchamp and Childress distinguish similarly between rational and non-rational means of influencing others, although they reserve the term “persuasion” for the former. See Beauchamp and Childress (2001), pp. 94–98.

  36. One might think that this analysis of the difference between motive manipulation and rational persuasion implies that while motive manipulation is prima facie immoral, there is nothing worrisome about manipulating someone by appeal to concerns tangential to whatever choice she may be making. But our analysis implies only that if such manipulation is worrisome, it is so by virtue of violating some principle other than Modest Autonomy. And this is plausible, since such manipulation does not threaten targets with the same sorts of potentially crippling motivational conflicts as motive manipulation.

  37. Transitivity requires that if an agent prefers x to y and y to z, then she must also prefer x to z.

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Acknowledgements

For helpful comments on this paper, I am grateful to Charles Carr, Stephen Kershnar, Anthony Landreth, Jeanine Schroer, Robert Schroer, an anonymous referee for this journal, and audiences at the 33rd Conference on Value Inquiry (Rockville Center, New York, April 17, 2006), and the 97th meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology (Durham, North Carolina, March 24, 2005).

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  1. Department of English and Philosophy, Arkansas State University, P.O. Box 1890, Jonesboro, AR, 72467, USA

    Eric M. Cave

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Cave, E.M. What’s Wrong with Motive Manipulation?. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 10, 129–144 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-006-9052-4

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