Philosophy & Public Affairs 51 (2023), 4

Why is it wrong to engage in manipulation, when it is wrong to do so? Manipulating someone can be wrong not (or not only) because it's manipulative, but because it has other bad effects. I am interested in the first sort of wrong. What is it about wrongful instances of manipulation that makes them wrong, other things being equal?

Most philosophers think this question can be answered in non-moral terms: the features of wrongful manipulation that make it wrong can be defined non-morally, without reference to any other wrong that's involved. In this sense, they think the wrong of wrongful manipulation is basic. The standard version of this view appeals to practical reasoning—it says wrongful manipulation is wrong because it impairs, non-rationally influences, or circumvents the practical reasoning of the person it affects (henceforth “the target”). Let us call this the Reasoning View. In this paper, I argue that the Reasoning View is false. Not only does it provide the wrong formula for generating examples of wrongful manipulation, but it is rooted in a mistaken idea about the relationship between manipulation and autonomy—namely, that manipulating people is wrong when and because it prevents them from acting autonomously. Although some proponents of the Reasoning View resist this idea, they do not resist it radically enough.

In place of the Reasoning View, I defend an alternative account of why it is wrong to manipulate people, when it is. On my view, the answer has to do with autonomy only in the sense that it invokes our rights against other people's interference, which we sometimes call “autonomy rights.” Non-interference rights may or may not be grounded in the capacity for autonomous action, but they are not themselves rights against being prevented from acting autonomously. I call my position the Reductive View.