Roughly, that we often respond to others’ ability to cause us harm (whether by modifying our behavior or our bank accounts or our internal organs or whatever other mechanism) as a threat, independent of their likelihood of causing us harm.
So if you demonstrate, or even just tell me about, your ability to do these things, then while depending on the specific context, my specific reaction will be somewhat different… my reaction to you knowing my bank PIN number will be different from my reaction to you knowing how to modify my behavior or how to modify the beating of my heart or how to break into my home… they will all have a common emotional component: I will feel threatened, frightened, suspicious, attacked, violated.
That all is perfectly natural and reasonable. And a common and entirely understandable response to that might be for me to declare that, OK, maybe you are able do those things, but a decent or ethical person never will do those things. (That sort of declaration is one relatively common way that I can attempt to modify your likelihood of performing those actions. I realize that you would only consider that a form of manipulation if I realize that such declarations will modify your likelihood of performing those actions. Regardless, the declaration modifies your behavior just the same whether I realize it or not, and whether it’s manipulation or not.)
But it doesn’t follow from any of that that it’s actually unethical for you to log into my bank account, modify my heartbeat, break into my home, or modify my behavior. To my mind, as I said before, the determiner of whether such behavior is ethical or not is whether the result leaves me better or worse off.
Breaking into my home to turn off the main watervalve to keep my house from flooding while I’m at work is perfectly ethical, indeed praiseworthy, and I absolutely endorse you doing so. Nevertheless, I suspect that if you told me that you spent a lot of time thinking about how to break into my home, I would become very suspicious of you.
Again, my emotional reaction to your demonstrated or claimed threat capacity is independent of my beliefs about your likely behaviors, let alone my beliefs about your likely intentions.
Roughly, that we often respond to others’ ability to cause us harm (whether by modifying our behavior or our bank accounts or our internal organs or whatever other mechanism) as a threat, independent of their likelihood of causing us harm.
This seems very implausible to me. I often encounter people with the ability to do me great harm (a police officer with a gun, say), and this rarely if ever causes me to be angry, or feel as if my dignity has been infringed upon, or anything like that. Yet these are the reactions typically associated with finding out you’ve been intentionally manipulated. Do you have some independent reason to believe this is true?
Roughly, that we often respond to others’ ability to cause us harm (whether by modifying our behavior or our bank accounts or our internal organs or whatever other mechanism) as a threat, independent of their likelihood of causing us harm.
So if you demonstrate, or even just tell me about, your ability to do these things, then while depending on the specific context, my specific reaction will be somewhat different… my reaction to you knowing my bank PIN number will be different from my reaction to you knowing how to modify my behavior or how to modify the beating of my heart or how to break into my home… they will all have a common emotional component: I will feel threatened, frightened, suspicious, attacked, violated.
That all is perfectly natural and reasonable. And a common and entirely understandable response to that might be for me to declare that, OK, maybe you are able do those things, but a decent or ethical person never will do those things. (That sort of declaration is one relatively common way that I can attempt to modify your likelihood of performing those actions. I realize that you would only consider that a form of manipulation if I realize that such declarations will modify your likelihood of performing those actions. Regardless, the declaration modifies your behavior just the same whether I realize it or not, and whether it’s manipulation or not.)
But it doesn’t follow from any of that that it’s actually unethical for you to log into my bank account, modify my heartbeat, break into my home, or modify my behavior. To my mind, as I said before, the determiner of whether such behavior is ethical or not is whether the result leaves me better or worse off.
Breaking into my home to turn off the main watervalve to keep my house from flooding while I’m at work is perfectly ethical, indeed praiseworthy, and I absolutely endorse you doing so. Nevertheless, I suspect that if you told me that you spent a lot of time thinking about how to break into my home, I would become very suspicious of you.
Again, my emotional reaction to your demonstrated or claimed threat capacity is independent of my beliefs about your likely behaviors, let alone my beliefs about your likely intentions.
This seems very implausible to me. I often encounter people with the ability to do me great harm (a police officer with a gun, say), and this rarely if ever causes me to be angry, or feel as if my dignity has been infringed upon, or anything like that. Yet these are the reactions typically associated with finding out you’ve been intentionally manipulated. Do you have some independent reason to believe this is true?
Yes, but no reasons I can readily share. And, sure, I might be wrong.