I argue that if the notion of coercion is given a non-normative interpretation, then it can do no work for us. Of its normative interpretations – any precisification of the term and condemnation of coercion arising from natural law is ineliminably question-begging; and neither will any positivist precisification deliver the objectionability of coercion. So what and all that remains for coercion to be is a con word, useful, apparently, to rhetoricians, but of no use whatever to political philosophers.

Categories: Papers My Wife Said I Should Have Published Long Ago, Social and Political Philosophy

Tags: Alston, coercion, Contractarian, Gauthier, Hart, Hobbes, intentional, language, Locke, Narveson, natural law, non-normative, normative, philosophy, positivist, Rawls, rhetoric, Rhodes, rights, vacuity