This is a followup to the thread you linked, but I’ll mention it here because it may be relevant to the current conversation.
I spent a little while with TheValliant (offsite) trying to pin down a definition of “manipulation”—specifically, to divide it from acceptable forms of nonverbal communication. The facets which came to mind immediately were “trying to get someone to do something they otherwise wouldn’t have,” which is clearly too broad, and “displaying exaggerated emotion,” which is sometimes valid (when you’re trying to communicate an emotion and your natural expression is too subtle). We got from there to “trying to make someone feel an emotion they otherwise wouldn’t have,” which still isn’t right, because it covers gestures of affection.
What we eventually settled on was this: “Using emotion to bypass someone’s normal decision-making process.” That is, creating emotions in someone else for the purpose of getting them to do something. This phrasing also makes it pretty clear why we find it abhorrent: it’s opening a back door into someone else’s brain, and about as invasive as that makes it sound.
The reason I felt a need to pin it down is that TheValliant, like you, has a policy of not tolerating it under any circumstances, and it seemed to me that that required understanding what it was. So now I’m curious—does the above definition match the thing you hate?
Physical coercion forces you to do something that you don’t want to do, don’t enjoy while you’re doing it, and regret doing afterwards.
Emotional manipulation causes you to do something that you didn’t want to do before, and regret afterwards—but you may like it in the meantime.
For example: violent rape causes you to have sex against your will. You don’t want to have sex ahead of time, you don’t want to have sex while you’re being raped, and you aren’t glad you were raped afterwards.
Manipulating someone into sex means that she didn’t want to have sex before, and she regretted it afterwards, but you got her to want to have sex while she was doing it. It’s not strictly speaking coercion, but you did get her to do something that’s out of character and not in keeping with her usual desires.
The third option is “try it, you’ll like it.” The person didn’t intend to take the action before, but she wanted to do it at the moment she acted, and she was glad she did it afterwards. I don’t see a moral problem with this. It’s influence, but it’s not harmful.
To continue the sex example, if the woman’s initial impression is negative, but the man gets her to want to have sex and afterwards she’s glad she did then he’s just good at attracting women, not a harmful manipulator.
Influencing someone to take an action that you know she will regret afterwards is manipulative.
To illustrate another example where the “avoid buyer’s remorse” principle is overbroad (which may or may not be the principle you are advocating), let’s talk about cookies.
You’re having a dinner party, and everyone is stuffed. You bring out some freshly baked cookies for dessert. Guest: “Oh no, I’m stuffed.” You: “They are warm and soft!” Guest: “Well, that does sound good, I’ll have just one.” Guest eats a cookie. Later, Guest looks a bit queasy and is obviously regretting eating so much.
This is another case that falls afoul of the “avoid creating buyer’s remorse” principle, but doesn’t deserve such a negative term as “manipulation.”
The fact is that a lot of people enjoy taking actions that they may later regret. It’s not a moral requirement to protect people from themselves. As long as they are making the decision with free will (or the closest thing to it that humans have), and informed consent exists, then it’s valid for people to take responsibility for the risks of their behavior. We should assume that people can assess their best interests, unless we have reasons to believe otherwise (for instance, if you know that Guest is on a strict diet that they committed to, offering them a cookie would be unethical). But in the absence of such information, you should assume that Guest knows what’s best for them.
There isn’t a perfect duty to protect Guest from himself, but of course empathy is a different subject. You might decide as a matter of empathy that you don’t want to risk Guest being queasy from dessert, even if Guest would be willing to take that risk.
To continue the sex example, if the woman’s initial impression is negative, but the man gets her to want to have sex and afterwards she’s glad she did then he’s just good at attracting women, not a harmful manipulator.
The problem with this principle is it judges the ethics of taking an action in the present, based on the consequences in the future. That’s a similar temporal error to Roissy who said it was OK to slap his girlfriend because she turned out to be massively turned on by it and hump him. You can’t know whether someone will regret sex with you, just as Roissy couldn’t have known that his girlfriend would like being slapped without any prior discussion of consent.
The intuition I would like to extract from your quote is that whether someone regrets sex is potential evidence that the person who initiated the sex did so unethically. This is true, but it’s weak evidence: there are all sorts of other things that cause people to regret sex other than miscreancy by their partner, such as conservative parents, physical discomfort during sex, judgmental/jealous friends, or reflecting on STD/pregnancy risk.
On the other hand, the fact that someone gives consent to something is evidence that they believe that they won’t regret it (or that it is worth a try even if they might). As long as that consent is sufficiently informed, given with a sound mind, not forced, and not coerced by some unethical threat of punishment, that’s good enough… right? To create stricter perfect duties gets into infantilization territory. However, there are a lot of extra measures that are good for people to take, even though we can’t actually require them all the time:
If someone gives enthusiastic consent, that’s extra strong evidence that they have shouldered the risk of buyer’s remorse. Attaining a standard of enthusiastic consent is what I personally aspire to in seduction; I don’t want to just be the tasty cookie that someone regrets eating later. It’s probably not a perfect duty that people absolutely must go for (if someone who is lukewarm about sex with you decides to go for it with you, you don’t have an absolute obligation to stop it), but it’s an imperfect duty that’s a good thing to attain if you can manage it.
The primary responsibility of avoiding buyer’s remorse must fall on the buyer in typical situations that involve informed consent; this is still true in situations where someone’s mind has changed during a relatively short period of time, because people do change their minds.
If the moral principle of protecting others from buyer’s remorse were followed as a perfect duty, it would destroy a lot of the types of spontaneous purchases and sex that many people enjoy (including, but not limited to guilty pleasures); this fact needs to be weighed against the need to protect people from the types of purchases and sex that they might regret.
Making people scrutinize their decisions more to avoid the possibility of buyer’s remorse is not necessarily more ethical; you can probably psych someone out of taking any action with you that they might enjoy, if you try hard enough. At some point we need to step back and let adults make decisions for themselves. And yes, adults can still make valid decisions under the influence of sales hype or sexual arousal; I think the folk concept of “free will” is good enough here. Badgering people with “are you sure you don’t want to?” is the other side of the same coin of badgering people with “are you sure you actually want to?”; both of them fail to accept an adult’s stated preference.
If someone knows that they are vulnerable to influence leading them to do things they will regret, then perhaps they should take measures to avoid situations where they will encounter such influence, instead of walking into them, getting tempted, and then blaming the other person. For instance, if you are trying to diet and find cookies hard to resist, the burden shouldn’t be on cookie-offerering friends to prove that you aren’t on a diet before they can ethically offer you cookies; such a principle would simply destroy the practice for offering cookies to friends for everyone who gives a crap about the ethics. The solution is to tell people that you’re on a diet and that they shouldn’t offer you anything; you have a comparative advantage at making this information known. They should respect your wishes until you give them reason to believe that you’ve changed your stance.
Overbroad moral standards are actually very dangerous, because they will cause the scrupulous people who follow them to fail and get selected out for no good reasons. Furthermore, shifting all the moral calculations to one party in social transactions is both infantilizing and unfair (exception: certain transactions with massive informational asymmetry, like financial services). Even worse, the results are corrupt, because when the moral calculations and burden of proof become impractical (e.g. having to prove that friends aren’t on diets before offering them cookies), people have an incentive to cut corners on their moral calculations and be biased, otherwise they will get outcompeted by people who ignore the morals.
In my next reply, I will propose an alternative demarcation criterion between ethical and unethical social influence in the area of sex.
Influencing someone to take an action that you know she will regret afterwards is manipulative.
What if you also “manipulate” so that it will also not be regretted afterwards?
In marketing at least, there is the concept of customer retention through anticipating and countering buyers’ remorse… which mostly, AFAICT, consists of providing a customer with arguments to use to explain to co-workers, friends, relatives, spouses, or whomever why their purchase decision was a good one. This strongly implies that at least in the purchasing arena, the main reason people come to have buyers’ remorse (besides crappy products) is that the purchase makes them look bad in the eyes of others.
Hence the marketing adage that the primary function of facts and logic in a sales pitch is to provide the customer with a rationale that lets them prove to themselves and others that they made the right decision… but only after they’ve been convinced to make that decision based on emotion.
I believe there’s some discussion in the PUA field of similar “buyer’s remorse” issues and providing the same sort of supporting rationale, except that such rationales are more to allow those women who are uncomfortable with casual sex to rationalize that it e.g. “just happened” (i.e., neither she nor the PUA truly intended it, so she is neither a slut nor a victim) or that it falls into the category of “once-in-a-lifetime encounter”, or something else that can be reconciled with her belief system or social image in a non-harmful way.
In either case, a wise “salesperson” takes care to find a way to allow a person to reconcile their actions with their self-perception of “character” or their “usual self”.
Incidentally, my personal model of an “ethical PUA” is Founding Father Gouverneur Morris, who told his lover, “I never lost respect for those who consented to make me happy on the principles of affection.”
Isn’t that kind of a low standard? I’m glad he doesn’t do slut-shaming, but I’m curious about what the women involved think about his effect on their lives.
I expect he’s said other things you’ve liked, but what you quoted is actually that unusual, it might enough by itself to explain why women are apt to be nervous around men.
Still, how common do you think it is for men to see women as lowering their own status by consenting to sex?
Depending on the social group somewhat less common than women lowering the status of others via judgement on that criteria—for most part it is women who are the more direct rivals with other women.
I’m still inclined to think that I don’t have a problem with it, if, in the clear light of day with plenty of time and space to think it over, the rationale still holds water. If my best reasoning can accept it, then fine. If I know that I was influenced by the “salesman” but I still don’t really have much to regret, it’s okay. He just swayed me to try something that turned out to be good for me (or, at least, within my range of acceptable outcomes.)
Example: suppose you try to convince someone that sex before marriage is okay and give them reasons that they shouldn’t feel guilty afterwards. I’d say you’ve still helped that person rather than hurt them.
I’m still inclined to think that I don’t have a problem with it, if, in the clear light of day with plenty of time and space to think it over, the rationale still holds water.
Or, to put it in more objective terms: If you get someone to do something by improving their decision-making process, or if you cause someone to do something that is instrumentally rational relative to their values, then it’s not manipulation. If you believe that premarital sex is okay and you think you can persuade someone to feel the same way, then that’s okay.
Aurini’s hypothetical example with Mary doesn’t pass this criterion. Aurini didn’t really believe that donating to the charity would be a good decision for Mary to make.
Yay, ethics of influence and seduction, one of my favorite subjects. I’m still figuring out my thoughts, so I would appreciate it if people tell me if I’m making incorrect assumptions.
First, I’ll state that I prefer the terms “unethical influence” and “unethical influence” to “manipulation” and “non-manipulation,” because people use “manipulation” to mean too many different things.
Second, in ethical discussions, we should distinguish between things that would be a good things to do that aren’t morally required, and things that are morally required (Kant called these “imperfect duties” vs “perfect duties”). Also, we should distinguish between ethical courses of action, and empathetic courses of action. There are lots of cases where there’s an action that’s a good and empathetic thing to do, but actually requiring it as a perfect duty would screw everything up.
Physical coercion forces you to do something that you don’t want to do, don’t enjoy while you’re doing it, and regret doing afterwards.
There is clearly a perfect duty against physical coercion, and that duty applies even if someone happens to enjoy what you are doing. An example of that case up when Roissy (a pickup blogger who built up a large following, but isn’t actually typical of the seduction community) condoned slapping women in arguments because it could “turn them on.” I argued that even if a certain percentage of women are turned on in that case, slapping without consent is unethical on both deontological and consequentialist terms. That thread has since been deleted, or I would link to it.
Hitting someone nonconsensually violates their rights from a deontological perspective. From a consequentialist perspective, the expected value of a positive reaction occurring is negative.
Emotional manipulation causes you to do something that you didn’t want to do before, and regret afterwards—but you may like it in the meantime.
Is it empathetic to avoid people regretting your forms of influence? Yes. Is it an imperfect duty to avoid buyer’s remorse? Probably yes. Is it a perfect duty to avoid influence that could create buyer’s remorse? Probably not.
This moral principle (as I understand it) is a bit too broad. It catches many things that we would actually consider ethical. A bit part of the problem is that it doesn’t account for uncertainty about whether buyer’s remorse will occur; I’m not sure what levels of uncertainty you are imagining, so the following analysis may reflect my interpretation of what you wrote better than it reflects your actual views.
Let’s say you want a friend to come to a movie with you. Your friend initially protests, but then you hype up the movie. Your friend decides that it sounds cool, and comes with you. Afterward, the friend enjoys the movie, but afterwards decides that it wasn’t worth the cost of admission.
By your criteria, this was “manipulation,” but I don’t think anything untoward has occurred here. Agree/disagree? We are, of course, assuming that your friend comes out of interest, not merely to make you happy. You don’t know in advance that your friend will decide that the movie wasn’t worth it.
The third option is “try it, you’ll like it.” The person didn’t intend to take the action before, but she wanted to do it at the moment she acted, and she was glad she did it afterwards. I don’t see a moral problem with this. It’s influence, but it’s not harmful.
But this sort of influence can sometimes result in people doing things that they regret; I’m having trouble reconciling it with the other principle you articulated.
Now, what if you knew that your friend probably wouldn’t find the movie worth it, and you dragged them along anyway? That’s falling into the category of unethical social influence, and perhaps that’s the scenario you are proscribing. But if you believed that they would enjoy it, and you turn out to be wrong, then arguably you’ve done a good thing by taking your friend to a movie that they might plausibly like, and that they believed that they would like based on information that you provided them… even though you were both wrong.
When influencing people, we must assume by default that people know their preferences better than we do. You must give primacy to the version of your friend that wants to see the movie now after you’ve told them why you think it will be great, rather than to the version 5 minutes ago that didn’t want to go out of the house.
People usually know more about what they will or won’t regret, and what risks they are willing to take, than we do. So if someone is willing to engage in a certain activity with you, that’s pretty strong evidence that it’s a good risk for them to take from their perspective. The fact they initially didn’t want to in the past is evidence that they might have buyer’s remorse, but that evidence is much weaker than the evidence of their preferences in the present.
Of course, if you have some information that someone might end up getting buyer’s remorse that they might not be aware of (like the product you are selling is defective), and it’s information that you believe the other person doesn’t have access to, and shouldn’t be expected to figure out for themselves, then influencing them starts becoming unethical. Perhaps that’s what you mean when you say:
Influencing someone to take an action that you know she will regret afterwards is manipulative.
Yet it’s actually rare that you “know” in advance whether or not someone will regret sex; in most cases, you really only have a guess, and so do they. By default, the informational asymmetry about whether the other person will experience buyer’s remorse favors the other person; their guess is probably better than yours about how they’ll feel later, and you shouldn’t try to do their thinking for them unless you know something big that they don’t.
I think you have a much better handle on this than I did; by comparison my comment was pretty flip.
What I was trying to get at was that it isn’t nice to tempt people to do things that are bad for them. (In my opinion it’s outright wrong to use physical force to coerce people except in self-defense; not nice is a weaker statement than wrong.) I don’t think it’s nice to influence people by selling a product you know is defective, or trying to get them to buy something you know they can’t afford. I don’t think it’s nice to talk your friend into going out to a party the night before his big test.
Yes, in some of these cases, the “victim” should have known better, but strong influence can bypass willpower. The better you are at tempting people, the more responsible you are for the results of the temptation. It may even be fair to say that it’s mostly because of you that your friend flunked or your client went broke.
On the contrary, I don’t think I’d mind being influenced to do something that turned out to be good for me, except in a few cases where I have a strong commitment against it and a second-order desire to retain that commitment.
What I was trying to get at was that it isn’t nice to tempt people to do things that are bad for them.
I think we’re saying something similar here. It’s a failure of empathy to tempt people to do things that might be bad for them, but I’m not convinced it’s always a failure of ethics in the sense of perfect duty. There are plenty of forms of influence where I would be comfortable saying that the influencer is being a jerk, but where I wouldn’t be comfortable saying that they are doing something unethical.
I don’t think it’s nice to influence people by selling a product you know is defective,
This is unethical under my analysis, also. It falls into the category of where you know something big that the other person doesn’t which destroys informed consent.
or trying to get them to buy something you know they can’t afford.
If you know this for sure, that would also be unethical under my analysis. My analysis only applies to situations where people are capable of watching out for their own interests. This is the default situation, but if someone gives you strong evidence that they can’t watch out for themselves (e.g. they are trying to buy things you know they can’t afford), then you should scale down the influence. Unfortunately, most real-life situations of influence are less clear-cut.
I don’t think it’s nice to talk your friend into going out to a party the night before his big test.
This one seems a bit less clear-cut. If you get your friend to miss out on sufficient sleep, or get hung over, then yeah, that’s unethical. But if the problem is that he might skimp on his studying? That’s less clear. Your friend knows better than you do whether they’ve done enough studying for their test. If you invite your friend, you know that he can refuse if he needs to study. On the other hand, maybe he’s done enough studying, and would benefit from relaxing. Unless you have some evidence either way, you’re not doing anything wrong by inviting him and letting him decide.
Yes, in some of these cases, the “victim” should have known better, but strong influence can bypass willpower.
Could you give an example of such a scenario? I’m not seeing it in either of the three in your post. Can you give an example of influence that is morally suspect, and (a) involves adequate informed consent, unlike the defective product scenario, (b) involves someone capable of watching out for themselves, unlike the scenario of buyers trying to buy things you know they can’t afford, and (c) is actually strong, unlike talking your friend into going to a party?
I tried to come up with an example, and the first thing I thought of was running an unhealthy fast food business and influencing people to eat your food. Then I realized that this example fails the test I proposed, because it would be known that many people don’t watch out for their health. While eating at your restaurant every once in a while might not be a health risk, your advertising will pull people in on a regular basis (in contrast, if you are running an ice cream shop, you aren’t trying to get people to eat there every day, and they won’t be eating ice cream instead of healthier food). There is something inherently wrong with supplying tasting food that is unhealthy, but if you do it in a way that influences people to substitute healthier food for what you are providing, and eat your food regularly enough that it’s a health risk, that’s unethical.
The better you are at tempting people, the more responsible you are for the results of the temptation.
The best way to tempt people is to offer them what they want (in a way that they identify it as satisfying one of their wants). I think your claim implies that people who can offer things that other people want more should have higher responsibility for the results of influencing people. That principle may be a little to broad, and lead the people who actually have good things to offer (which is influential) to have a moral panic and become too shy.
In terms of sales and products, there are four simplified categories:
Bad products with bad salesmen
Bad products with good salesmen
Good products with bad salesmen
Good products with good salesmen
The principle you suggest would make good salesmen with bad products more inhibited… but it will also make good salesmen with good products more inhibited! Actually, many of the most influential products may be good products with good salesmen… should these salesmen with the good products really be fretting the most about responsibility just because they are good at sales?
I think we need to articulate a principle that makes good salesmen with bad products scrutinize themselves more than good salesmen with good products.
The degree that people want what you offer isn’t quite the right index for the degree of responsibility you should shoulder for the result. People who want something really badly might be more likely to throw caution to the winds and make mistakes, so degree of want is weakly related to the responsibility you should take to protect them. But there are other variables that are much better indexes for the level of responsibility you should take:
Your estimate of the expected value to them of accepting your offer
Your estimate of how well they are watching out for themselves
Your confidence that they have enough information to be giving informed consent
The reasons that someone is consenting to whatever you are influencing them towards, and whether those are the type of reasons that are well-known to be correlated with buyer’s remorse
How do these criteria sound to you?
On the contrary, I don’t think I’d mind being influenced to do something that turned out to be good for me
Unfortunately, people who influence you can’t predict the future and know whether the results will turn out good or bad for you. Of course, they should make guesses, and refrain from influencing you if they think the expected value of the result will be negative for you, and you haven’t given informed consent to that risk. But when there is uncertainty about the result, the ability of people to make those sort of guesses varies depending on the domain.
In financial services, your broker really does know better than you about whether their product will be good for you, and the criteria for satisfying your preferences is objective and easily understood by them. As a result, a lot of responsibility falls on their shoulders.
In social interaction and dating, it’s a lot harder to know whether you are a good match with someone better than they do. You don’t know exactly what their preferences are and how you fit into them. Responsibility for protecting them from buyer’s remorse falls primarily (but of course, not completely) on them. Since they have the higher quality information about how you fit into their preferences, it’s their responsibility to communicate their preferences to you to help protect them from being unhappy later.
“Second, in ethical discussions, we should distinguish between things that would be a good things to do that aren’t morally required, and things that are morally required (Kant called these “imperfect duties” vs “perfect duties”). ”
That’s a good distinction, but it’s not Kant’s. For Kant, a perfect duty is prohibitive (“don’t lie”) while an imperfect duty is one which demands the pursuit of some end, like “develop your talents”. The ‘perfect’ and ‘imperfect’ refer to a grammatical distinction: perfect duties are complete when you’re not murdering people, etc. while imperfect duties are never complete and always ongoing.
The distinction you’re drawing is between the supererogatory and the obligatory, where the latter is what you have to do just to be decent, and the former is some extra good stuff you can do. Kant not only never makes this distinction, by his lights it’s impossible to make it.
That’s a good distinction, but it’s not Kant’s. For Kant, a perfect duty is prohibitive (“don’t lie”) while an imperfect duty is one which demands the pursuit of some end, like “develop your talents”. The ‘perfect’ and ‘imperfect’ refer to a grammatical distinction: perfect duties are complete when you’re not murdering people, etc. while imperfect duties are never complete and always ongoing.
I don’t know (or care much) about what Kant said but wikipedia seems to be closer to Hugh’s usage than yours.
Well, in case a fit of curiosity about Kant strikes you, the relevant discussion is in Metaphysics of Morals (not the Groundwork) 6:390ff. Neither Hugh’s interpretation nor mine is obviously correct and I think the matter is up for discussion. Hugh is right that a failure to pursue imperfect duties isn’t vicious or a transgression by Kant’s lights, but I think it’s neverless wrong to attribute to Kant the possibility of supererogatory action. imperfect duties are flexable because they can be trumped by other dutoes, not because they can be passed over. Failure to pursue imperfect duties is still moral failure, just not a failure of the same species as moral transgression.
You should give Kant a glance though. Perhaps his work is not strictly relevant to the question of machine morality (I think he might argue against the possibility of a moral machine), but it’s still very interesting stuff, even to argue against.
In the case of sex, I propose a different demarcation criterion between ethical and unethical social influence than yours. The dimension I’m most concerned with is not remorse or lack thereof after the fact, but rather the reasons for consent at the moment of consent. In the past, I proposed the following definition for ethical seduction on a pickup blog:
Taking intentional action to create a context that raises someone’s chances of wanting to be sexual with you of their own free will out of anticipation of intrinsic enjoyment of the experience.
The “anticipation of intrinsic enjoyment of the experience” criterion is important, because it gets rid of cases where people consent to sex out of feelings of obligation, pity, merely because the other person wants it, or because they had trouble putting on the brakes. This notion is similar to the notion of “enthusiastic consent,” but without the confusing connotations that “enthusiastic” may hold.
I’m not sure whether this is a perfect or merely an imperfect duty. The argument for this principle being a perfect duty is that if someone has sex with you for reasons other than anticipating inherent enjoyment of the experience (which includes emotional enjoyment, not just physical), there is too high a chance that they won’t enjoy it and feel buyer’s remorse later. As a result, the argument would be that you should refrain from having sex with people in such circumstances, unless you know that they are aware of the potential negative consequences and are willing to risk them.
I’m not convinced either way about this argument, but it’s plausible. It’s actually really hard to think about ethical principles around influence that aren’t or overly broad, and that don’t contradict our existing moral intuitions. If someone thinks they have one, they should try as hard as they can to poke holes in it.
Interesting—so part of the definition would be the regret afterwards? If they don’t regret it, you convinced them, but if they do, it was manipulation? In that case, can you manipulate someone accidentally (if you didn’t expect them to regret it but they did)?
To continue the sex example, if the woman’s initial impression is negative, but the man gets her to want to have sex and afterwards she’s glad she did then he’s just good at attracting women, not a harmful manipulator.
My definition of manipulation: an attempt to bypass or bias a person’s normal decision-making process. Attempting to counter an already present bias doesn’t count. In the case where the sum of the facts clearly favor a specific decision, presenting all the facts doesn’t count as bias.
Manipulation says little about ethics, since people can be manipulated into doing things that are good for them, though it reflects poorly on the decision-making abilities of the one being manipulated and the honesty of the person doing the manipulating. It could both be argued that manipulation is always wrong, or that the intent of the manipulation matters more. My ethics say the destination is more important than the path, but that a path must be composed of a series of temporary destinations.
an attempt to bypass or bias a person’s normal decision-making process. Attempting to counter an already present bias doesn’t count.
I’m not quite sure what you mean by “normal decision-making process,” if countering an existing bias doesn’t count as bypassing that process. What you seem to be referring to is some kind of idealized decision-making process that we hypothesize is what the person’s decision-making process would be if they were somehow not subject to any cognitive biases… is that right?
By “bypassing” someone’s normal decision-making process, I mean something such as massive misdirection and emotional tinkering, or verbal threats of some kind (I’ll never talk to you again, I’ll tell your secrets, etc), or something else such that it is ambiguous whether the victim can be credited with making the decision.
By “biasing” someone’s normal decision-making process, I mean minor emotional appeals or simply providing biased data, focused on all the good points of one option and/or the bad points of the other, or activating other biases such as by privileging a hypothesis. It’s still clear that the subject made their own decision, by thinking about and weighing the facts, although due to your manipulation their decision is more suspect than it would otherwise.
The reason I’m saying that it isn’t manipulation to counter biases or provide facts even when the facts clearly favor a decision is that these don’t feel like manipulation. Do these sound manipulative? “Don’t use your lighter, this place is full of fumes” “When you’re in jail for killing your cheating girlfriend, don’t drop the soap” “You’re so drunk you can barely stand. I’m not going to let you leave with that guy, because I know you will regret it later.”
The reason I’m saying that it isn’t manipulation to counter biases or provide facts even when the facts clearly favor a decision is that these don’t feel like manipulation.
I grow more uncertain, rather than less, as I read your explanation. It sounds like you’re simply working backwards from your intuitions about what feels like manipulation: if I direct your attention in ways that feel manipulative, for example, you class it as “massive misdirection,” otherwise you don’t.
Human definitions aren’t nice, simple, logical, syntactically correct meanings for words—often they’re defined more as “I’ll know it when I see it”. When I want to figure out my own definition for a word, I have to carefully analyze different scenarios where the word applies and doesn’t apply, and try to figure out a definition that fits. Even this is incomplete as it doesn’t account for connotations and subtext. (Once I saw a TV show where they made a reference to sex using the words “play parcheesi”. The meaning was entirely clear despite that I’ve never heard of such a connotation before. Similarly, in the sentence “It’s cold outside, let me go grab my goat”, the word “goat” usually means “a misspelling of ‘coat’” even if that is not what the dictionary says.)
So, my intuition tells me that it is not manipulation to bias someone’s decision-making process towards their normal state if their current state is highly unbalanced due to drugs or emotion. The connotation of manipulation as being negative tells me that helping people make an obviously good decision shouldn’t have a negative connotation, and so shouldn’t be categorized as manipulation.
Ah, I see. So, sure, you’re welcome to your lexical intuitions, and you’re welcome to talk about “manipulation” while referring to the fuzzy concept your lexical intuitions point to. That’s what most people do in casual conversation. And when talking to someone whose intuitions differ from ours we either get derailed into discussing what “manipulation” really means, or we find some other way to talk about the concepts in question, or we fail to communicate at all, and that works more or less OK for our purposes much of the time.
Your original comment made it sound like you were trying to be more rigorous than that… sorry to confuse the issue.
The connotation of manipulation as being negative tells me that helping people make an obviously good decision shouldn’t have a negative connotation, and so shouldn’t be categorized as manipulation.
Oh,boy.
Let me suggest that the set of “obviously good decisions” is much narrower than you seem to think. And that is even ignoring the elephant of an observation that other people’s ideas of “good decisions” are likely to be significantly different from yours.
Your definition is too broad—for example, it applies to women using makeup. Maybe amend it to “creating negative emotions in someone else for the purpose of getting them to do something”.
Specifying negative emotions is too narrow; that wouldn’t apply to any strategy that leaves its target marginally happier but at a resource cost considerably greater than the marginal increase in happiness could’ve been obtained with elsewhere. Of Cialdini’s 6 “weapons of influence,” all of which I’d classify as manipulative, only “authority” seems to cause negative emotions with any consistency. PErhaps the metric is orthogonal to the quality of emotion?
“Negative emotions” certainly isn’t right—the example in the post was about making the woman feel better.
I’m not sure I agree with your exception (I don’t equate “making a good impression” or “living up to a social expectation” with “creating emotion”), but perhaps we could make it clearer by adding “for a specific decision” to the end? i.e. the manipulation must have a specific goal.
The example in the post is not okay because it’s piggybacking on an existing negative emotion, and if the woman refused, that emotion would’ve been reinforced. Like a guilt trip.
So do you not think it’s possible to manipulate through positive emotion? What about flattering and pampering someone ’til they fall for you, then robbing them blind?
Hmm. To me it’s kinda “bad in theory”, like killing kittens. The strong hate is reserved for the things I actually did a lot and then decided to cut out.
I’m assuming this is a definition for a specific kind of manipulation.
You can, of course, use things other than emotion to manipulate people. It is the bread and butter of board game strategy, for example.
EDIT: Come to think of it does this definition cover people whose ‘normal decision-making process’ is essentially emotion? The more I look at it the more it seems like what I consider manipulation is an extremely messy concept.
This is a followup to the thread you linked, but I’ll mention it here because it may be relevant to the current conversation.
I spent a little while with TheValliant (offsite) trying to pin down a definition of “manipulation”—specifically, to divide it from acceptable forms of nonverbal communication. The facets which came to mind immediately were “trying to get someone to do something they otherwise wouldn’t have,” which is clearly too broad, and “displaying exaggerated emotion,” which is sometimes valid (when you’re trying to communicate an emotion and your natural expression is too subtle). We got from there to “trying to make someone feel an emotion they otherwise wouldn’t have,” which still isn’t right, because it covers gestures of affection.
What we eventually settled on was this: “Using emotion to bypass someone’s normal decision-making process.” That is, creating emotions in someone else for the purpose of getting them to do something. This phrasing also makes it pretty clear why we find it abhorrent: it’s opening a back door into someone else’s brain, and about as invasive as that makes it sound.
The reason I felt a need to pin it down is that TheValliant, like you, has a policy of not tolerating it under any circumstances, and it seemed to me that that required understanding what it was. So now I’m curious—does the above definition match the thing you hate?
Here’s my understanding of manipulation.
Physical coercion forces you to do something that you don’t want to do, don’t enjoy while you’re doing it, and regret doing afterwards.
Emotional manipulation causes you to do something that you didn’t want to do before, and regret afterwards—but you may like it in the meantime.
For example: violent rape causes you to have sex against your will. You don’t want to have sex ahead of time, you don’t want to have sex while you’re being raped, and you aren’t glad you were raped afterwards.
Manipulating someone into sex means that she didn’t want to have sex before, and she regretted it afterwards, but you got her to want to have sex while she was doing it. It’s not strictly speaking coercion, but you did get her to do something that’s out of character and not in keeping with her usual desires.
The third option is “try it, you’ll like it.” The person didn’t intend to take the action before, but she wanted to do it at the moment she acted, and she was glad she did it afterwards. I don’t see a moral problem with this. It’s influence, but it’s not harmful. To continue the sex example, if the woman’s initial impression is negative, but the man gets her to want to have sex and afterwards she’s glad she did then he’s just good at attracting women, not a harmful manipulator.
Influencing someone to take an action that you know she will regret afterwards is manipulative.
To illustrate another example where the “avoid buyer’s remorse” principle is overbroad (which may or may not be the principle you are advocating), let’s talk about cookies.
You’re having a dinner party, and everyone is stuffed. You bring out some freshly baked cookies for dessert. Guest: “Oh no, I’m stuffed.” You: “They are warm and soft!” Guest: “Well, that does sound good, I’ll have just one.” Guest eats a cookie. Later, Guest looks a bit queasy and is obviously regretting eating so much.
This is another case that falls afoul of the “avoid creating buyer’s remorse” principle, but doesn’t deserve such a negative term as “manipulation.”
The fact is that a lot of people enjoy taking actions that they may later regret. It’s not a moral requirement to protect people from themselves. As long as they are making the decision with free will (or the closest thing to it that humans have), and informed consent exists, then it’s valid for people to take responsibility for the risks of their behavior. We should assume that people can assess their best interests, unless we have reasons to believe otherwise (for instance, if you know that Guest is on a strict diet that they committed to, offering them a cookie would be unethical). But in the absence of such information, you should assume that Guest knows what’s best for them.
There isn’t a perfect duty to protect Guest from himself, but of course empathy is a different subject. You might decide as a matter of empathy that you don’t want to risk Guest being queasy from dessert, even if Guest would be willing to take that risk.
The problem with this principle is it judges the ethics of taking an action in the present, based on the consequences in the future. That’s a similar temporal error to Roissy who said it was OK to slap his girlfriend because she turned out to be massively turned on by it and hump him. You can’t know whether someone will regret sex with you, just as Roissy couldn’t have known that his girlfriend would like being slapped without any prior discussion of consent.
The intuition I would like to extract from your quote is that whether someone regrets sex is potential evidence that the person who initiated the sex did so unethically. This is true, but it’s weak evidence: there are all sorts of other things that cause people to regret sex other than miscreancy by their partner, such as conservative parents, physical discomfort during sex, judgmental/jealous friends, or reflecting on STD/pregnancy risk.
On the other hand, the fact that someone gives consent to something is evidence that they believe that they won’t regret it (or that it is worth a try even if they might). As long as that consent is sufficiently informed, given with a sound mind, not forced, and not coerced by some unethical threat of punishment, that’s good enough… right? To create stricter perfect duties gets into infantilization territory. However, there are a lot of extra measures that are good for people to take, even though we can’t actually require them all the time:
If someone gives enthusiastic consent, that’s extra strong evidence that they have shouldered the risk of buyer’s remorse. Attaining a standard of enthusiastic consent is what I personally aspire to in seduction; I don’t want to just be the tasty cookie that someone regrets eating later. It’s probably not a perfect duty that people absolutely must go for (if someone who is lukewarm about sex with you decides to go for it with you, you don’t have an absolute obligation to stop it), but it’s an imperfect duty that’s a good thing to attain if you can manage it.
The primary responsibility of avoiding buyer’s remorse must fall on the buyer in typical situations that involve informed consent; this is still true in situations where someone’s mind has changed during a relatively short period of time, because people do change their minds.
If the moral principle of protecting others from buyer’s remorse were followed as a perfect duty, it would destroy a lot of the types of spontaneous purchases and sex that many people enjoy (including, but not limited to guilty pleasures); this fact needs to be weighed against the need to protect people from the types of purchases and sex that they might regret.
Making people scrutinize their decisions more to avoid the possibility of buyer’s remorse is not necessarily more ethical; you can probably psych someone out of taking any action with you that they might enjoy, if you try hard enough. At some point we need to step back and let adults make decisions for themselves. And yes, adults can still make valid decisions under the influence of sales hype or sexual arousal; I think the folk concept of “free will” is good enough here. Badgering people with “are you sure you don’t want to?” is the other side of the same coin of badgering people with “are you sure you actually want to?”; both of them fail to accept an adult’s stated preference.
If someone knows that they are vulnerable to influence leading them to do things they will regret, then perhaps they should take measures to avoid situations where they will encounter such influence, instead of walking into them, getting tempted, and then blaming the other person. For instance, if you are trying to diet and find cookies hard to resist, the burden shouldn’t be on cookie-offerering friends to prove that you aren’t on a diet before they can ethically offer you cookies; such a principle would simply destroy the practice for offering cookies to friends for everyone who gives a crap about the ethics. The solution is to tell people that you’re on a diet and that they shouldn’t offer you anything; you have a comparative advantage at making this information known. They should respect your wishes until you give them reason to believe that you’ve changed your stance.
Overbroad moral standards are actually very dangerous, because they will cause the scrupulous people who follow them to fail and get selected out for no good reasons. Furthermore, shifting all the moral calculations to one party in social transactions is both infantilizing and unfair (exception: certain transactions with massive informational asymmetry, like financial services). Even worse, the results are corrupt, because when the moral calculations and burden of proof become impractical (e.g. having to prove that friends aren’t on diets before offering them cookies), people have an incentive to cut corners on their moral calculations and be biased, otherwise they will get outcompeted by people who ignore the morals.
In my next reply, I will propose an alternative demarcation criterion between ethical and unethical social influence in the area of sex.
What if you also “manipulate” so that it will also not be regretted afterwards?
In marketing at least, there is the concept of customer retention through anticipating and countering buyers’ remorse… which mostly, AFAICT, consists of providing a customer with arguments to use to explain to co-workers, friends, relatives, spouses, or whomever why their purchase decision was a good one. This strongly implies that at least in the purchasing arena, the main reason people come to have buyers’ remorse (besides crappy products) is that the purchase makes them look bad in the eyes of others.
Hence the marketing adage that the primary function of facts and logic in a sales pitch is to provide the customer with a rationale that lets them prove to themselves and others that they made the right decision… but only after they’ve been convinced to make that decision based on emotion.
I believe there’s some discussion in the PUA field of similar “buyer’s remorse” issues and providing the same sort of supporting rationale, except that such rationales are more to allow those women who are uncomfortable with casual sex to rationalize that it e.g. “just happened” (i.e., neither she nor the PUA truly intended it, so she is neither a slut nor a victim) or that it falls into the category of “once-in-a-lifetime encounter”, or something else that can be reconciled with her belief system or social image in a non-harmful way.
In either case, a wise “salesperson” takes care to find a way to allow a person to reconcile their actions with their self-perception of “character” or their “usual self”.
Incidentally, my personal model of an “ethical PUA” is Founding Father Gouverneur Morris, who told his lover, “I never lost respect for those who consented to make me happy on the principles of affection.”
Isn’t that kind of a low standard? I’m glad he doesn’t do slut-shaming, but I’m curious about what the women involved think about his effect on their lives.
I expect he’s said other things you’ve liked, but what you quoted is actually that unusual, it might enough by itself to explain why women are apt to be nervous around men.
If it helps, he lived in the 18th century—he was one of the framers of the U.S. Constitution.
Thanks—I didn’t bother to google, and your phrasing left it unclear about whether he was a Founding Father of the US or PUA.
Still, how common do you think it is for men to see women as lowering their own status by consenting to sex?
Still pretty common, unfortunately.
But I wouldn’t single out a contemporary man for praise just because he didn’t slut-shame. It’s more remarkable 250 years ago.
Depending on the social group somewhat less common than women lowering the status of others via judgement on that criteria—for most part it is women who are the more direct rivals with other women.
I wasn’t clear—I meant the specific case of a man lowering the status of a woman for consenting to sex with him.
Hamlet, Act IV, Scene V:
(Ophelia is singing bawdy songs)
hmm, that’s interesting.
I’m still inclined to think that I don’t have a problem with it, if, in the clear light of day with plenty of time and space to think it over, the rationale still holds water. If my best reasoning can accept it, then fine. If I know that I was influenced by the “salesman” but I still don’t really have much to regret, it’s okay. He just swayed me to try something that turned out to be good for me (or, at least, within my range of acceptable outcomes.)
Example: suppose you try to convince someone that sex before marriage is okay and give them reasons that they shouldn’t feel guilty afterwards. I’d say you’ve still helped that person rather than hurt them.
It’s a borderline issue for me, though.
Or, to put it in more objective terms: If you get someone to do something by improving their decision-making process, or if you cause someone to do something that is instrumentally rational relative to their values, then it’s not manipulation. If you believe that premarital sex is okay and you think you can persuade someone to feel the same way, then that’s okay.
Aurini’s hypothetical example with Mary doesn’t pass this criterion. Aurini didn’t really believe that donating to the charity would be a good decision for Mary to make.
Yay, ethics of influence and seduction, one of my favorite subjects. I’m still figuring out my thoughts, so I would appreciate it if people tell me if I’m making incorrect assumptions.
First, I’ll state that I prefer the terms “unethical influence” and “unethical influence” to “manipulation” and “non-manipulation,” because people use “manipulation” to mean too many different things.
Second, in ethical discussions, we should distinguish between things that would be a good things to do that aren’t morally required, and things that are morally required (Kant called these “imperfect duties” vs “perfect duties”). Also, we should distinguish between ethical courses of action, and empathetic courses of action. There are lots of cases where there’s an action that’s a good and empathetic thing to do, but actually requiring it as a perfect duty would screw everything up.
There is clearly a perfect duty against physical coercion, and that duty applies even if someone happens to enjoy what you are doing. An example of that case up when Roissy (a pickup blogger who built up a large following, but isn’t actually typical of the seduction community) condoned slapping women in arguments because it could “turn them on.” I argued that even if a certain percentage of women are turned on in that case, slapping without consent is unethical on both deontological and consequentialist terms. That thread has since been deleted, or I would link to it.
Hitting someone nonconsensually violates their rights from a deontological perspective. From a consequentialist perspective, the expected value of a positive reaction occurring is negative.
Is it empathetic to avoid people regretting your forms of influence? Yes. Is it an imperfect duty to avoid buyer’s remorse? Probably yes. Is it a perfect duty to avoid influence that could create buyer’s remorse? Probably not.
This moral principle (as I understand it) is a bit too broad. It catches many things that we would actually consider ethical. A bit part of the problem is that it doesn’t account for uncertainty about whether buyer’s remorse will occur; I’m not sure what levels of uncertainty you are imagining, so the following analysis may reflect my interpretation of what you wrote better than it reflects your actual views.
Let’s say you want a friend to come to a movie with you. Your friend initially protests, but then you hype up the movie. Your friend decides that it sounds cool, and comes with you. Afterward, the friend enjoys the movie, but afterwards decides that it wasn’t worth the cost of admission.
By your criteria, this was “manipulation,” but I don’t think anything untoward has occurred here. Agree/disagree? We are, of course, assuming that your friend comes out of interest, not merely to make you happy. You don’t know in advance that your friend will decide that the movie wasn’t worth it.
But this sort of influence can sometimes result in people doing things that they regret; I’m having trouble reconciling it with the other principle you articulated.
Now, what if you knew that your friend probably wouldn’t find the movie worth it, and you dragged them along anyway? That’s falling into the category of unethical social influence, and perhaps that’s the scenario you are proscribing. But if you believed that they would enjoy it, and you turn out to be wrong, then arguably you’ve done a good thing by taking your friend to a movie that they might plausibly like, and that they believed that they would like based on information that you provided them… even though you were both wrong.
When influencing people, we must assume by default that people know their preferences better than we do. You must give primacy to the version of your friend that wants to see the movie now after you’ve told them why you think it will be great, rather than to the version 5 minutes ago that didn’t want to go out of the house.
People usually know more about what they will or won’t regret, and what risks they are willing to take, than we do. So if someone is willing to engage in a certain activity with you, that’s pretty strong evidence that it’s a good risk for them to take from their perspective. The fact they initially didn’t want to in the past is evidence that they might have buyer’s remorse, but that evidence is much weaker than the evidence of their preferences in the present.
Of course, if you have some information that someone might end up getting buyer’s remorse that they might not be aware of (like the product you are selling is defective), and it’s information that you believe the other person doesn’t have access to, and shouldn’t be expected to figure out for themselves, then influencing them starts becoming unethical. Perhaps that’s what you mean when you say:
Yet it’s actually rare that you “know” in advance whether or not someone will regret sex; in most cases, you really only have a guess, and so do they. By default, the informational asymmetry about whether the other person will experience buyer’s remorse favors the other person; their guess is probably better than yours about how they’ll feel later, and you shouldn’t try to do their thinking for them unless you know something big that they don’t.
I think you have a much better handle on this than I did; by comparison my comment was pretty flip.
What I was trying to get at was that it isn’t nice to tempt people to do things that are bad for them. (In my opinion it’s outright wrong to use physical force to coerce people except in self-defense; not nice is a weaker statement than wrong.) I don’t think it’s nice to influence people by selling a product you know is defective, or trying to get them to buy something you know they can’t afford. I don’t think it’s nice to talk your friend into going out to a party the night before his big test.
Yes, in some of these cases, the “victim” should have known better, but strong influence can bypass willpower. The better you are at tempting people, the more responsible you are for the results of the temptation. It may even be fair to say that it’s mostly because of you that your friend flunked or your client went broke.
On the contrary, I don’t think I’d mind being influenced to do something that turned out to be good for me, except in a few cases where I have a strong commitment against it and a second-order desire to retain that commitment.
I think we’re saying something similar here. It’s a failure of empathy to tempt people to do things that might be bad for them, but I’m not convinced it’s always a failure of ethics in the sense of perfect duty. There are plenty of forms of influence where I would be comfortable saying that the influencer is being a jerk, but where I wouldn’t be comfortable saying that they are doing something unethical.
This is unethical under my analysis, also. It falls into the category of where you know something big that the other person doesn’t which destroys informed consent.
If you know this for sure, that would also be unethical under my analysis. My analysis only applies to situations where people are capable of watching out for their own interests. This is the default situation, but if someone gives you strong evidence that they can’t watch out for themselves (e.g. they are trying to buy things you know they can’t afford), then you should scale down the influence. Unfortunately, most real-life situations of influence are less clear-cut.
This one seems a bit less clear-cut. If you get your friend to miss out on sufficient sleep, or get hung over, then yeah, that’s unethical. But if the problem is that he might skimp on his studying? That’s less clear. Your friend knows better than you do whether they’ve done enough studying for their test. If you invite your friend, you know that he can refuse if he needs to study. On the other hand, maybe he’s done enough studying, and would benefit from relaxing. Unless you have some evidence either way, you’re not doing anything wrong by inviting him and letting him decide.
Could you give an example of such a scenario? I’m not seeing it in either of the three in your post. Can you give an example of influence that is morally suspect, and (a) involves adequate informed consent, unlike the defective product scenario, (b) involves someone capable of watching out for themselves, unlike the scenario of buyers trying to buy things you know they can’t afford, and (c) is actually strong, unlike talking your friend into going to a party?
I tried to come up with an example, and the first thing I thought of was running an unhealthy fast food business and influencing people to eat your food. Then I realized that this example fails the test I proposed, because it would be known that many people don’t watch out for their health. While eating at your restaurant every once in a while might not be a health risk, your advertising will pull people in on a regular basis (in contrast, if you are running an ice cream shop, you aren’t trying to get people to eat there every day, and they won’t be eating ice cream instead of healthier food). There is something inherently wrong with supplying tasting food that is unhealthy, but if you do it in a way that influences people to substitute healthier food for what you are providing, and eat your food regularly enough that it’s a health risk, that’s unethical.
The best way to tempt people is to offer them what they want (in a way that they identify it as satisfying one of their wants). I think your claim implies that people who can offer things that other people want more should have higher responsibility for the results of influencing people. That principle may be a little to broad, and lead the people who actually have good things to offer (which is influential) to have a moral panic and become too shy.
In terms of sales and products, there are four simplified categories:
Bad products with bad salesmen
Bad products with good salesmen
Good products with bad salesmen
Good products with good salesmen
The principle you suggest would make good salesmen with bad products more inhibited… but it will also make good salesmen with good products more inhibited! Actually, many of the most influential products may be good products with good salesmen… should these salesmen with the good products really be fretting the most about responsibility just because they are good at sales?
I think we need to articulate a principle that makes good salesmen with bad products scrutinize themselves more than good salesmen with good products.
The degree that people want what you offer isn’t quite the right index for the degree of responsibility you should shoulder for the result. People who want something really badly might be more likely to throw caution to the winds and make mistakes, so degree of want is weakly related to the responsibility you should take to protect them. But there are other variables that are much better indexes for the level of responsibility you should take:
Your estimate of the expected value to them of accepting your offer
Your estimate of how well they are watching out for themselves
Your confidence that they have enough information to be giving informed consent
The reasons that someone is consenting to whatever you are influencing them towards, and whether those are the type of reasons that are well-known to be correlated with buyer’s remorse
How do these criteria sound to you?
Unfortunately, people who influence you can’t predict the future and know whether the results will turn out good or bad for you. Of course, they should make guesses, and refrain from influencing you if they think the expected value of the result will be negative for you, and you haven’t given informed consent to that risk. But when there is uncertainty about the result, the ability of people to make those sort of guesses varies depending on the domain.
In financial services, your broker really does know better than you about whether their product will be good for you, and the criteria for satisfying your preferences is objective and easily understood by them. As a result, a lot of responsibility falls on their shoulders.
In social interaction and dating, it’s a lot harder to know whether you are a good match with someone better than they do. You don’t know exactly what their preferences are and how you fit into them. Responsibility for protecting them from buyer’s remorse falls primarily (but of course, not completely) on them. Since they have the higher quality information about how you fit into their preferences, it’s their responsibility to communicate their preferences to you to help protect them from being unhappy later.
“Second, in ethical discussions, we should distinguish between things that would be a good things to do that aren’t morally required, and things that are morally required (Kant called these “imperfect duties” vs “perfect duties”). ”
That’s a good distinction, but it’s not Kant’s. For Kant, a perfect duty is prohibitive (“don’t lie”) while an imperfect duty is one which demands the pursuit of some end, like “develop your talents”. The ‘perfect’ and ‘imperfect’ refer to a grammatical distinction: perfect duties are complete when you’re not murdering people, etc. while imperfect duties are never complete and always ongoing.
The distinction you’re drawing is between the supererogatory and the obligatory, where the latter is what you have to do just to be decent, and the former is some extra good stuff you can do. Kant not only never makes this distinction, by his lights it’s impossible to make it.
I don’t know (or care much) about what Kant said but wikipedia seems to be closer to Hugh’s usage than yours.
Well, in case a fit of curiosity about Kant strikes you, the relevant discussion is in Metaphysics of Morals (not the Groundwork) 6:390ff. Neither Hugh’s interpretation nor mine is obviously correct and I think the matter is up for discussion. Hugh is right that a failure to pursue imperfect duties isn’t vicious or a transgression by Kant’s lights, but I think it’s neverless wrong to attribute to Kant the possibility of supererogatory action. imperfect duties are flexable because they can be trumped by other dutoes, not because they can be passed over. Failure to pursue imperfect duties is still moral failure, just not a failure of the same species as moral transgression.
You should give Kant a glance though. Perhaps his work is not strictly relevant to the question of machine morality (I think he might argue against the possibility of a moral machine), but it’s still very interesting stuff, even to argue against.
Where would you place trying to influence people out of feeling buyer’s remorse when they’re feeling it?
I place it at “closing the stable door after the horse has bolted”. ;)
The part of the game that involves reducing buyer’s remorse is for most part before the sex, not after.
I’d consider that an imperfect duty.
An imperfect duty to do it, or to not do it?
To do it.
Wouldn’t it be better to influence them not to buy similar products again?
In the case of sex, I propose a different demarcation criterion between ethical and unethical social influence than yours. The dimension I’m most concerned with is not remorse or lack thereof after the fact, but rather the reasons for consent at the moment of consent. In the past, I proposed the following definition for ethical seduction on a pickup blog:
The “anticipation of intrinsic enjoyment of the experience” criterion is important, because it gets rid of cases where people consent to sex out of feelings of obligation, pity, merely because the other person wants it, or because they had trouble putting on the brakes. This notion is similar to the notion of “enthusiastic consent,” but without the confusing connotations that “enthusiastic” may hold.
I’m not sure whether this is a perfect or merely an imperfect duty. The argument for this principle being a perfect duty is that if someone has sex with you for reasons other than anticipating inherent enjoyment of the experience (which includes emotional enjoyment, not just physical), there is too high a chance that they won’t enjoy it and feel buyer’s remorse later. As a result, the argument would be that you should refrain from having sex with people in such circumstances, unless you know that they are aware of the potential negative consequences and are willing to risk them.
I’m not convinced either way about this argument, but it’s plausible. It’s actually really hard to think about ethical principles around influence that aren’t or overly broad, and that don’t contradict our existing moral intuitions. If someone thinks they have one, they should try as hard as they can to poke holes in it.
P.S. Sorry about the triple-post brain dump.
Interesting—so part of the definition would be the regret afterwards? If they don’t regret it, you convinced them, but if they do, it was manipulation? In that case, can you manipulate someone accidentally (if you didn’t expect them to regret it but they did)?
Or, he’s a very good manipulator.
Or he’s very good in bed!
Or both of these are the same thing in his case!
Third option would include drug addiction.
Are addicts generally glad to be addicts?
My definition of manipulation: an attempt to bypass or bias a person’s normal decision-making process. Attempting to counter an already present bias doesn’t count. In the case where the sum of the facts clearly favor a specific decision, presenting all the facts doesn’t count as bias.
Manipulation says little about ethics, since people can be manipulated into doing things that are good for them, though it reflects poorly on the decision-making abilities of the one being manipulated and the honesty of the person doing the manipulating. It could both be argued that manipulation is always wrong, or that the intent of the manipulation matters more. My ethics say the destination is more important than the path, but that a path must be composed of a series of temporary destinations.
I’m not quite sure what you mean by “normal decision-making process,” if countering an existing bias doesn’t count as bypassing that process. What you seem to be referring to is some kind of idealized decision-making process that we hypothesize is what the person’s decision-making process would be if they were somehow not subject to any cognitive biases… is that right?
By “bypassing” someone’s normal decision-making process, I mean something such as massive misdirection and emotional tinkering, or verbal threats of some kind (I’ll never talk to you again, I’ll tell your secrets, etc), or something else such that it is ambiguous whether the victim can be credited with making the decision.
By “biasing” someone’s normal decision-making process, I mean minor emotional appeals or simply providing biased data, focused on all the good points of one option and/or the bad points of the other, or activating other biases such as by privileging a hypothesis. It’s still clear that the subject made their own decision, by thinking about and weighing the facts, although due to your manipulation their decision is more suspect than it would otherwise.
The reason I’m saying that it isn’t manipulation to counter biases or provide facts even when the facts clearly favor a decision is that these don’t feel like manipulation. Do these sound manipulative? “Don’t use your lighter, this place is full of fumes” “When you’re in jail for killing your cheating girlfriend, don’t drop the soap” “You’re so drunk you can barely stand. I’m not going to let you leave with that guy, because I know you will regret it later.”
I grow more uncertain, rather than less, as I read your explanation. It sounds like you’re simply working backwards from your intuitions about what feels like manipulation: if I direct your attention in ways that feel manipulative, for example, you class it as “massive misdirection,” otherwise you don’t.
Human definitions aren’t nice, simple, logical, syntactically correct meanings for words—often they’re defined more as “I’ll know it when I see it”. When I want to figure out my own definition for a word, I have to carefully analyze different scenarios where the word applies and doesn’t apply, and try to figure out a definition that fits. Even this is incomplete as it doesn’t account for connotations and subtext. (Once I saw a TV show where they made a reference to sex using the words “play parcheesi”. The meaning was entirely clear despite that I’ve never heard of such a connotation before. Similarly, in the sentence “It’s cold outside, let me go grab my goat”, the word “goat” usually means “a misspelling of ‘coat’” even if that is not what the dictionary says.)
So, my intuition tells me that it is not manipulation to bias someone’s decision-making process towards their normal state if their current state is highly unbalanced due to drugs or emotion. The connotation of manipulation as being negative tells me that helping people make an obviously good decision shouldn’t have a negative connotation, and so shouldn’t be categorized as manipulation.
Ah, I see. So, sure, you’re welcome to your lexical intuitions, and you’re welcome to talk about “manipulation” while referring to the fuzzy concept your lexical intuitions point to. That’s what most people do in casual conversation. And when talking to someone whose intuitions differ from ours we either get derailed into discussing what “manipulation” really means, or we find some other way to talk about the concepts in question, or we fail to communicate at all, and that works more or less OK for our purposes much of the time.
Your original comment made it sound like you were trying to be more rigorous than that… sorry to confuse the issue.
Oh,boy.
Let me suggest that the set of “obviously good decisions” is much narrower than you seem to think. And that is even ignoring the elephant of an observation that other people’s ideas of “good decisions” are likely to be significantly different from yours.
Your definition is too broad—for example, it applies to women using makeup. Maybe amend it to “creating negative emotions in someone else for the purpose of getting them to do something”.
Specifying negative emotions is too narrow; that wouldn’t apply to any strategy that leaves its target marginally happier but at a resource cost considerably greater than the marginal increase in happiness could’ve been obtained with elsewhere. Of Cialdini’s 6 “weapons of influence,” all of which I’d classify as manipulative, only “authority” seems to cause negative emotions with any consistency. PErhaps the metric is orthogonal to the quality of emotion?
“Negative emotions” certainly isn’t right—the example in the post was about making the woman feel better.
I’m not sure I agree with your exception (I don’t equate “making a good impression” or “living up to a social expectation” with “creating emotion”), but perhaps we could make it clearer by adding “for a specific decision” to the end? i.e. the manipulation must have a specific goal.
The example in the post is not okay because it’s piggybacking on an existing negative emotion, and if the woman refused, that emotion would’ve been reinforced. Like a guilt trip.
So do you not think it’s possible to manipulate through positive emotion? What about flattering and pampering someone ’til they fall for you, then robbing them blind?
It’s possible, but I don’t have the same aversion to it.
Wait, what? Really? You don’t find that example scenario objectionable?
Hmm. To me it’s kinda “bad in theory”, like killing kittens. The strong hate is reserved for the things I actually did a lot and then decided to cut out.
Heh. Okay, we think about those things very differently, but that’s fine. :P
I’m assuming this is a definition for a specific kind of manipulation.
You can, of course, use things other than emotion to manipulate people. It is the bread and butter of board game strategy, for example.
EDIT: Come to think of it does this definition cover people whose ‘normal decision-making process’ is essentially emotion? The more I look at it the more it seems like what I consider manipulation is an extremely messy concept.
That is a very good definition.
Heh, I thought so, but apparently several other people have problems with it. Any thoughts about the objections that’ve been raised in this thread?
They’re giving me ideas for articles I hadn’t planned on writing; which is awesome.
Still letting things percolate—I want to do the pieces on the basic tools first.