(Edit) During this entire thread I was misusing the word “coerce.” I meant something more like “entice.” Thanks Alicorn.
If as it turns out, kids enjoy consensual sex and take no harm by it, on what basis can society consider it wrong? There has to be a reason. Societies can’t just create moral crimes by their say-so.
I always assumed that part of the problem is that it is easier to coerce children. If I kidnap a child and do nothing but feed them ice-cream and take them on a tour of the zoo it is still wrong, even if they liked it and no harm was done.
If I seduce a child and do nothing but feed them ice-cream and have sex with them… is it still wrong? Even if they liked it and no harm was done? There are certainly risks involved and assuming things will be okay is naive. But is assuming things will be bad/evil/gross just as naive?
Suppressing the moral gag reflex is hard to do. I do not know if I can answer the question objectively. I know if I had kids I do not want anyone coercing them into having sex.
Well yes, because kidnapping involves taking a child from their parents unannounced, possibly against the child’s will too, possibly also asking for ransom, etc. Those are separate harms that happen even if the child enjoyed the ice-cream and the trip to the zoo.
But what are the separate harms of sex? There are health risks, but they don’t hugely exceed the risks in other common childhood activities such as tree climbing.
I always assumed that part of the problem is that it is easier to coerce children. If I kidnap a child and do nothing but feed them ice-cream and take them on a tour of the zoo it is still wrong, even if they liked it and no harm was done.
No ransom and not against the child’s will. If the reason kidnapping is wrong deals with parental consent, does the same thing apply to sex?
But what are the separate harms of sex?
This is actually irrelevant for the point I was trying to make. Kidnapping, with no harm done, is still very much illegal. Should it be?
Removing a child from a parent is a harm (as witness the panicked parent). It’s not so much a matter of consent, as of making people worry and separating them from their family. The parents have a protective interest in the child, which is harmed by their non-consent to the zoo trip. This is the very thing that makes it “kidnapping” and not “visiting with friends”. It is a separate harm, which is why the distinction I drew is relevant.
BTW, this line of argument doesn’t get you to “no sex”, it gets you to “no sex without parental consent”. Fair enough, now what if they say “yes”?
Removing a child from a parent is a harm (as witness the panicked parent). It’s not so much a matter of consent, as of making people worry and separating them from their family.
If the child is returned before the parent knows they are missing? I am not understanding why the correlation is so hard to see. It is an analogy, not a mirrored situation. Kidnapping is not seducing. There are differences. The original point was that seduction involves coercing children. Kidnapping can do the same thing. So can brainwashing. All three of these (kidnapping, brainwashing, seducing) can produce harm but may not and arguing about exactly when “harm” happens is not really useful. The relevant question is exactly this:
BTW, this line of argument doesn’t get you to “no sex”, it gets you to “no sex without parental consent”. Fair enough, now what if they say “yes”?
I am not arguing for any particular stance. I just saw an interesting correlation between seduction and kidnapping that involved coercion. If I remember correctly, the laws in some states get remarkably relaxed when minors have their parents’ consent. I could not tell you specifics, however. If you find this sort of thing interesting I am sure it is relatively easy to find information about sex with parental consent.
The bottom line: A child will do an awful lot to please someone. Is it okay to coerce them into doing something? Does it matter if they enjoy it? Does it matter if there is harm? Does it matter if they want to do it?
All of this also assumes “seduction” instead of a real, true romance. I would assume that a real, true romance has less coercion. (Or, at the very least, thinks it has less coercion.)
Perhaps we’re being confused by your use of the verb “seduce”, since to me that doesn’t include non-consensual means—it usually implies cunning trickery at worst and goal-directed charm at best. Can you restate without using it?
You can replace the word “seduce” with “get them to have consensual sex with you.” “Get” in the context I am using basically implies “coerce.” The point does rely on the possibility of convincing someone they want the same thing you want. The catch is that such a sexual encounter satisfies the term “consensual sex.” They completely, and of their own volition, consented to having sex.
The original point asks if there is validity in condemning sex with children because they are easy to coerce. In other words, is the criterion of “consensual” too easy to manipulate?
I don’t think the word “coerce” has the right implications here. It sounds like what you’re going for is more along the lines of “entice”. Coercion arguably invalidates consent even with adults.
Enticing would usually mean suggesting the activity is intrinsically desirable, offering a trade, asking pretty please, making a dare, or etc. We’ll assume the child’s mind is changed by the enticement.
I keep coming back to kidnapping because the I think the example fits. I have been trying to avoid getting into super picky details because I consider the details to be obvious. I apologize for being obtuse.
If I stop by the local pool and convince a kid to take a trip with me and feed it ice-cream, take it to the zoo, and then return the kid to the pool before anyone else notices, was the kidnapping wrong? Would you even call it kidnapping?
If someone found out after the fact and charged me with kidnapping, could I use the defense, “But the kid liked it! It was fun and no harm was done!”?
This is from an above comment you made:
Removing a child from a parent is a harm (as witness the panicked parent). It’s not so much a matter of consent, as of making people worry and separating them from their family. The parents have a protective interest in the child, which is harmed by their non-consent to the zoo trip. This is the very thing that makes it “kidnapping” and not “visiting with friends”. It is a separate harm, which is why the distinction I drew is relevant.
You say that the reason kidnapping is wrong is because the parents will worry. Parents worry about all sorts of things and most of them were not made illegal. Many parents would worry if their child was having sex with an adult.
If you really don’t like the example we can just skip to the abstract view. If I consciously manipulate someone into wanting a particular something, can I use their desire as a justification for my actions? Or, if I brainwash them into having sex with me, is it considered consent?
What are the current laws about consent under the influence of alcohol? That also seems relevant. What about people with mental handicaps? The basic point is that “consent” is not a cut and dry excuse. Consent can be manipulated and it is much easier to manipulate consent out of a child than an adult.
This is not an argument one way or the other, but merely asking if consent from children should mean the same thing as consent from adults.
The American Psychiatric Association explicitly states that children cannot give consent. The problem is that children are completely dependent upon adults, and they see any friendly adult as a caretaker, especially if the parent gives permission to be with that adult or there is any physical affection. Individual kids vary in their sophistication, and it depends on the age of the child, but most kids cannot tell the difference between “do this please so I will be happy” and “do this please so I will take care of you / love you / keep you safe”. It just activates the same “I-need-to-listen-for-survival” pathway either way. It is a relevant observation that when a child feels less safe with an adult, they will usually be more agreeable. A first sign of abuse is often lack of agreeability or hostility in response to requests noticed in school.
Is there a special reason the American Psychiatric Association should be considered an authority on ethics? They can inform us of the empirical facts, of which “children who feel unsafe are agreeable” is one, but “children cannot give morally relevant consent to sexual activity” does not follow instantly and obviously from that statement.
But knowledge about the psychology of a creature does not instantly and obviously lead to knowledge about the ethical boundaries around treatment of the creature. I could have encyclopedic knowledge of the empirically observable facts about, say, pigs, without being able to derive from that whether it’s okay to kill them for food. Similarly, the APA is undoubtedly an authority on child psychology. It is not at all clear that they are an authority on the implications that child psychology has for ethics, so while most of your comment was quite interesting, the first sentence was noise.
My entire comment was about whether children can consent or not. I didn’t say anything about ethical implications.
While simply giving the appearance of consent is a plain empirical fact which might or might not have ethical features, it’s obvious that children can utter consent-like words, so I assumed you were talking about consent in an ethically relevant sense. Should I not have assumed that? If you’re not talking about consent as a thing that changes what it is ethically okay to do to somebody, then I don’t know what you’re talking about at all.
Whether children can consent or not to sex is a psychological fact. Just as whether a pig can consent or not to being eaten is a biological fact.
Facts may have ethical implications (and thus ethical relevance which is why your question above is confused). The ability to give consent is not obviously and immediately connected with an specific ethical conclusion, because you can argue that it is ethical to eat a pig even though they cannot give consent. To argue that sex with children is wrong, because they cannot give consent, you need to add the ethical argument that sex without consent is unethical.
Whether children can consent or not to sex is a psychological fact.
I’m really surprised you’d claim that. Even if you could propose an experiment that you think would settle this question of fact, it’s far from clear that everyone would agree that your experiment settled it. To me it’s obvious that whether or not we consider that a given act from a given person counts as consent to something is in large part a question of values, not of fact.
Yes, we do seem to disagree. I think that “ability to do X” is factual. However, I suspect there is ambiguity in what “consent” means, and there is room for inserting values there. But I hold my position, because I think that if you define consent in a meaningful way, kids cannot do that. (For example, if you say consent means to just articulate a set of words, I will gladly abandon the word “consent” for what I do mean.)
I would define consent as (a) understanding what you are agreeing to and (b) freely agreeing.
Psychology is a soft science, surely. Which is why I felt more comfortable quoting an authority in psychology than asserting my own beliefs: I hardly know what counts as evidence or good epistemology in psychology. However, I could think of some experiments to demonstrate that children don’t understand and are not freely agreeing. For example, for the latter experiment, first ascertain what the children’s real preferences are, say, for a specific type of cookie. Then demonstrate that if an adult indicates which cookie choice will make them happy, the kid will choose the adult’s choice at a rate proportional to the perceived power imbalance and inversely proportional to their perceived environmental safety.
To be clear, I think that adult-child sex is extremely unethical.
I am motivated to contribute to this discussion, because I hope I may be able to encourage rational people to adopt a similar view on adult-child sex. However, I am not sure it is emotionally safe or that it would be effective to participate. Certain attitudes and comments on this thread make me wonder if any argument for a position that is not counter conventional wisdom will be summarily dismissed. In other words, there seems to be evidence that “you guys” are not unbiased about this.
Empathy is the source of ethics and is beyond facts and rhetoric. Do you agree?
I don’t agree. I think empathy is to ethics as tastiness is to nutritional content—it’s a reaction that makes us feel good under circumstances conducive to a valuable end and feel aversion to circumstances conducive to deplorable ends, but it’s easily fooled (just as our tastebuds can be fooled by cinnamon buns). We need intuitions and empathy to have a starting point when we talk ethics, but a purely intuitionist morality is inevitably going to be inconsistent and have poor motivations in extreme cases.
It’s obvious that you feel very strongly that adults having sex with children is unethical; you’ve made that abundantly clear. It doesn’t have to follow from that that you are correct, and it definitely doesn’t follow that we can’t consider the question, and I’m sorry to say that you seem to be under the impression that you can’t civilly discuss it with people who don’t share your opinion.
I don’t think anyone is going to read this thread and then find that, because a few people gave some thought to the issue, their qualms about raping children have evaporated. Deep-seated ethical misgivings, legal repercussions, practical concerns, and the simple fact that most people aren’t pedophiles would see to that; anyone who’d be convinced by this thread in favor of actually having sex with children was just looking for an excuse and would have found NAMBLA’s website eventually.
If you cannot stick to solid argumentation in favor of your view (which I suspect is the dominant one—it’s just fashionable in this thread to signal open-mindedness by being cryptic and oblique about the matter) and instead resort to what amounts to shrill, repetitive whining about how unethical we all are, you aren’t “contributing to the discussion” and you certainly are unlikely to make any progress in convincing this particular audience.
All of that having been said, the experiment you describe wouldn’t prove that the children aren’t “freely” agreeing to take the cookie that the adult wants them to take. You can prove that people are likely to incorrectly judge the length of lines when others state incorrect judgments aloud; that doesn’t mean they’re being coerced or that they aren’t free, it just means that humans are social animals. The opinions and wishes of the people around us are important factors in our choices, and it is deeply murky territory when those opinions and wishes turn into coercive power dynamics.
It may be even more surprising to you that I don’t think inability to give consent is a strong argument for why adult-child sex is unethical. However, to be clear, I think that adult-child sex is extremely unethical.
My personal pet peeve in this discussion is that nobody is defining precisely what “adult” and “child” mean.
Teenagers these days are getting thrown in jail (and given lifetime “sex offender” labels) for having consensual sex on the wrong side of arbitrary age lines that vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
So, my empathy on this subject is much more solidly with them, and that’s the ethics I’m personally concerned with in this discussion. We may not be able to prevent all the harm that takes place from manipulation and abuse, but I’d like to see some improvement for the innocents who get caught in the crossfire.
agreed. A consequentialist, however, would not necessarily buy this—weighing the harm to innocents on the border versus harm to children nowhere near the border might well favor keeping things as they are. Not that I buy that justification.
Whether children can consent or not to sex is a psychological fact.
Just as whether a pig can consent or not to being eaten or not is a biological fact.
Facts may have ethical implications (and thus ethical relevance which is why your question above is confused). The ability to give consent is not obviously and immediately connected with an specific ethical conclusion, because you can argue that it is ethical to eat a pig even though they cannot give consent. To argue that sex with children is wrong, because they cannot give consent, you need to add the ethical argument that sex without consent is unethical.
I don’t think it this type of quibbling on semantics (for example, a perfectly good meaning of coerce is to compel) is useful to the discourse. When words have variable meanings, you need to use the context to determine the meaning, and request clarification if it isn’t clear.
(Edit) During this entire thread I was misusing the word “coerce.” I meant something more like “entice.” Thanks Alicorn.
I always assumed that part of the problem is that it is easier to coerce children. If I kidnap a child and do nothing but feed them ice-cream and take them on a tour of the zoo it is still wrong, even if they liked it and no harm was done.
If I seduce a child and do nothing but feed them ice-cream and have sex with them… is it still wrong? Even if they liked it and no harm was done? There are certainly risks involved and assuming things will be okay is naive. But is assuming things will be bad/evil/gross just as naive?
Suppressing the moral gag reflex is hard to do. I do not know if I can answer the question objectively. I know if I had kids I do not want anyone coercing them into having sex.
Well yes, because kidnapping involves taking a child from their parents unannounced, possibly against the child’s will too, possibly also asking for ransom, etc. Those are separate harms that happen even if the child enjoyed the ice-cream and the trip to the zoo.
But what are the separate harms of sex? There are health risks, but they don’t hugely exceed the risks in other common childhood activities such as tree climbing.
No ransom and not against the child’s will. If the reason kidnapping is wrong deals with parental consent, does the same thing apply to sex?
This is actually irrelevant for the point I was trying to make. Kidnapping, with no harm done, is still very much illegal. Should it be?
Removing a child from a parent is a harm (as witness the panicked parent). It’s not so much a matter of consent, as of making people worry and separating them from their family. The parents have a protective interest in the child, which is harmed by their non-consent to the zoo trip. This is the very thing that makes it “kidnapping” and not “visiting with friends”. It is a separate harm, which is why the distinction I drew is relevant.
BTW, this line of argument doesn’t get you to “no sex”, it gets you to “no sex without parental consent”. Fair enough, now what if they say “yes”?
If the child is returned before the parent knows they are missing? I am not understanding why the correlation is so hard to see. It is an analogy, not a mirrored situation. Kidnapping is not seducing. There are differences. The original point was that seduction involves coercing children. Kidnapping can do the same thing. So can brainwashing. All three of these (kidnapping, brainwashing, seducing) can produce harm but may not and arguing about exactly when “harm” happens is not really useful. The relevant question is exactly this:
I am not arguing for any particular stance. I just saw an interesting correlation between seduction and kidnapping that involved coercion. If I remember correctly, the laws in some states get remarkably relaxed when minors have their parents’ consent. I could not tell you specifics, however. If you find this sort of thing interesting I am sure it is relatively easy to find information about sex with parental consent.
The bottom line: A child will do an awful lot to please someone. Is it okay to coerce them into doing something? Does it matter if they enjoy it? Does it matter if there is harm? Does it matter if they want to do it?
All of this also assumes “seduction” instead of a real, true romance. I would assume that a real, true romance has less coercion. (Or, at the very least, thinks it has less coercion.)
Perhaps we’re being confused by your use of the verb “seduce”, since to me that doesn’t include non-consensual means—it usually implies cunning trickery at worst and goal-directed charm at best. Can you restate without using it?
You can replace the word “seduce” with “get them to have consensual sex with you.” “Get” in the context I am using basically implies “coerce.” The point does rely on the possibility of convincing someone they want the same thing you want. The catch is that such a sexual encounter satisfies the term “consensual sex.” They completely, and of their own volition, consented to having sex.
The original point asks if there is validity in condemning sex with children because they are easy to coerce. In other words, is the criterion of “consensual” too easy to manipulate?
I don’t think the word “coerce” has the right implications here. It sounds like what you’re going for is more along the lines of “entice”. Coercion arguably invalidates consent even with adults.
Ooh, yes, you are very right. Apologies.
OK, so, we’ll go with entice.
Enticing would usually mean suggesting the activity is intrinsically desirable, offering a trade, asking pretty please, making a dare, or etc. We’ll assume the child’s mind is changed by the enticement.
Why would that change not simply be valid?
Is it valid when considering kidnapping?
Didn’t we already beat that one to death? The child’s volition isn’t all that’s involved with kidnapping. It isn’t directly comparable.
I keep coming back to kidnapping because the I think the example fits. I have been trying to avoid getting into super picky details because I consider the details to be obvious. I apologize for being obtuse.
If I stop by the local pool and convince a kid to take a trip with me and feed it ice-cream, take it to the zoo, and then return the kid to the pool before anyone else notices, was the kidnapping wrong? Would you even call it kidnapping?
If someone found out after the fact and charged me with kidnapping, could I use the defense, “But the kid liked it! It was fun and no harm was done!”?
This is from an above comment you made:
You say that the reason kidnapping is wrong is because the parents will worry. Parents worry about all sorts of things and most of them were not made illegal. Many parents would worry if their child was having sex with an adult.
If you really don’t like the example we can just skip to the abstract view. If I consciously manipulate someone into wanting a particular something, can I use their desire as a justification for my actions? Or, if I brainwash them into having sex with me, is it considered consent?
What are the current laws about consent under the influence of alcohol? That also seems relevant. What about people with mental handicaps? The basic point is that “consent” is not a cut and dry excuse. Consent can be manipulated and it is much easier to manipulate consent out of a child than an adult.
This is not an argument one way or the other, but merely asking if consent from children should mean the same thing as consent from adults.
The American Psychiatric Association explicitly states that children cannot give consent. The problem is that children are completely dependent upon adults, and they see any friendly adult as a caretaker, especially if the parent gives permission to be with that adult or there is any physical affection. Individual kids vary in their sophistication, and it depends on the age of the child, but most kids cannot tell the difference between “do this please so I will be happy” and “do this please so I will take care of you / love you / keep you safe”. It just activates the same “I-need-to-listen-for-survival” pathway either way. It is a relevant observation that when a child feels less safe with an adult, they will usually be more agreeable. A first sign of abuse is often lack of agreeability or hostility in response to requests noticed in school.
Is there a special reason the American Psychiatric Association should be considered an authority on ethics? They can inform us of the empirical facts, of which “children who feel unsafe are agreeable” is one, but “children cannot give morally relevant consent to sexual activity” does not follow instantly and obviously from that statement.
I was citing them as an authority on child psychology.
But knowledge about the psychology of a creature does not instantly and obviously lead to knowledge about the ethical boundaries around treatment of the creature. I could have encyclopedic knowledge of the empirically observable facts about, say, pigs, without being able to derive from that whether it’s okay to kill them for food. Similarly, the APA is undoubtedly an authority on child psychology. It is not at all clear that they are an authority on the implications that child psychology has for ethics, so while most of your comment was quite interesting, the first sentence was noise.
My entire comment was about whether children can consent or not. I didn’t say anything about ethical implications.
However, this paper makes the connection:
http://www.itp-arcados.net/wissen/Finkelhor1979_EN.pdf
While simply giving the appearance of consent is a plain empirical fact which might or might not have ethical features, it’s obvious that children can utter consent-like words, so I assumed you were talking about consent in an ethically relevant sense. Should I not have assumed that? If you’re not talking about consent as a thing that changes what it is ethically okay to do to somebody, then I don’t know what you’re talking about at all.
Whether children can consent or not to sex is a psychological fact. Just as whether a pig can consent or not to being eaten is a biological fact.
Facts may have ethical implications (and thus ethical relevance which is why your question above is confused). The ability to give consent is not obviously and immediately connected with an specific ethical conclusion, because you can argue that it is ethical to eat a pig even though they cannot give consent. To argue that sex with children is wrong, because they cannot give consent, you need to add the ethical argument that sex without consent is unethical.
I’m really surprised you’d claim that. Even if you could propose an experiment that you think would settle this question of fact, it’s far from clear that everyone would agree that your experiment settled it. To me it’s obvious that whether or not we consider that a given act from a given person counts as consent to something is in large part a question of values, not of fact.
Yes, we do seem to disagree. I think that “ability to do X” is factual. However, I suspect there is ambiguity in what “consent” means, and there is room for inserting values there. But I hold my position, because I think that if you define consent in a meaningful way, kids cannot do that. (For example, if you say consent means to just articulate a set of words, I will gladly abandon the word “consent” for what I do mean.)
I would define consent as (a) understanding what you are agreeing to and (b) freely agreeing.
Psychology is a soft science, surely. Which is why I felt more comfortable quoting an authority in psychology than asserting my own beliefs: I hardly know what counts as evidence or good epistemology in psychology. However, I could think of some experiments to demonstrate that children don’t understand and are not freely agreeing. For example, for the latter experiment, first ascertain what the children’s real preferences are, say, for a specific type of cookie. Then demonstrate that if an adult indicates which cookie choice will make them happy, the kid will choose the adult’s choice at a rate proportional to the perceived power imbalance and inversely proportional to their perceived environmental safety.
To be clear, I think that adult-child sex is extremely unethical.
I am motivated to contribute to this discussion, because I hope I may be able to encourage rational people to adopt a similar view on adult-child sex. However, I am not sure it is emotionally safe or that it would be effective to participate. Certain attitudes and comments on this thread make me wonder if any argument for a position that is not counter conventional wisdom will be summarily dismissed. In other words, there seems to be evidence that “you guys” are not unbiased about this.
I don’t agree. I think empathy is to ethics as tastiness is to nutritional content—it’s a reaction that makes us feel good under circumstances conducive to a valuable end and feel aversion to circumstances conducive to deplorable ends, but it’s easily fooled (just as our tastebuds can be fooled by cinnamon buns). We need intuitions and empathy to have a starting point when we talk ethics, but a purely intuitionist morality is inevitably going to be inconsistent and have poor motivations in extreme cases.
It’s obvious that you feel very strongly that adults having sex with children is unethical; you’ve made that abundantly clear. It doesn’t have to follow from that that you are correct, and it definitely doesn’t follow that we can’t consider the question, and I’m sorry to say that you seem to be under the impression that you can’t civilly discuss it with people who don’t share your opinion.
I don’t think anyone is going to read this thread and then find that, because a few people gave some thought to the issue, their qualms about raping children have evaporated. Deep-seated ethical misgivings, legal repercussions, practical concerns, and the simple fact that most people aren’t pedophiles would see to that; anyone who’d be convinced by this thread in favor of actually having sex with children was just looking for an excuse and would have found NAMBLA’s website eventually.
If you cannot stick to solid argumentation in favor of your view (which I suspect is the dominant one—it’s just fashionable in this thread to signal open-mindedness by being cryptic and oblique about the matter) and instead resort to what amounts to shrill, repetitive whining about how unethical we all are, you aren’t “contributing to the discussion” and you certainly are unlikely to make any progress in convincing this particular audience.
All of that having been said, the experiment you describe wouldn’t prove that the children aren’t “freely” agreeing to take the cookie that the adult wants them to take. You can prove that people are likely to incorrectly judge the length of lines when others state incorrect judgments aloud; that doesn’t mean they’re being coerced or that they aren’t free, it just means that humans are social animals. The opinions and wishes of the people around us are important factors in our choices, and it is deeply murky territory when those opinions and wishes turn into coercive power dynamics.
My personal pet peeve in this discussion is that nobody is defining precisely what “adult” and “child” mean.
Teenagers these days are getting thrown in jail (and given lifetime “sex offender” labels) for having consensual sex on the wrong side of arbitrary age lines that vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
So, my empathy on this subject is much more solidly with them, and that’s the ethics I’m personally concerned with in this discussion. We may not be able to prevent all the harm that takes place from manipulation and abuse, but I’d like to see some improvement for the innocents who get caught in the crossfire.
agreed. A consequentialist, however, would not necessarily buy this—weighing the harm to innocents on the border versus harm to children nowhere near the border might well favor keeping things as they are. Not that I buy that justification.
Whether children can consent or not to sex is a psychological fact. Just as whether a pig can consent or not to being eaten or not is a biological fact.
Facts may have ethical implications (and thus ethical relevance which is why your question above is confused). The ability to give consent is not obviously and immediately connected with an specific ethical conclusion, because you can argue that it is ethical to eat a pig even though they cannot give consent. To argue that sex with children is wrong, because they cannot give consent, you need to add the ethical argument that sex without consent is unethical.
I don’t think it this type of quibbling on semantics (for example, a perfectly good meaning of coerce is to compel) is useful to the discourse. When words have variable meanings, you need to use the context to determine the meaning, and request clarification if it isn’t clear.