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A great deal of scholarly attention has been paid to coercion. Less attention has been paid to what might be a more pervasive form of influence: manipulation. The essays in this volume address this relative imbalance by focusing on manipulation, examining its nature, moral status, and its significance in personal and social life.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Michael Weber and Christian Coons
- 1. Coercion, Manipulation, Exploitation
- Allen Wood
- 2. What is Manipulation?
- Anne Barnhill
- 3. Towards a Theory of Interpersonal Manipulation
- Moti Gorin
- 4. The Mens Rea and Moral Status of Manipulation
- Marcia Baron
- 5. A Framework for Assessing the Moral Status of "Manipulation"
- J.S. Blumenthal-Barby
- 6. Manipulation as an Aesthetic Flaw
- Claudia Mills
- 7. Information Manipulation and Moral Responsibility
- Todd Long
- 8. Unsavory Seduction and Manipulation
- Eric Cave
- 9. The Implications of Ego Depletion for the Ethics and Politics of Manipulation
- Michael Cholbi
- 10. Non-Machiavellian Manipulation and the Opacity of Motive
- Kate Manne
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Christian Coons is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University. His research focuses on theory selection in normative ethics, the nature of value, and the structural relationship between normative concepts. He has published work in each of the major sub-fields of moral philosophy: applied ethics, normative ethics, axiology, metaethics, and political and legal theory.
Michael Weber is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University. He has published widely in ethics and political philosophy, with emphasis on contemporary egalitarianism, rational choice theory, and ethics and the emotions. His papers have appeared in journals including in Ethics, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, The Canadian Philosophical Review, Philosophical Studies, The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, The Journal of Ethics and Social Policy, The Journal of Ethics, and Public Affairs Quarterly.
Summary
A great deal of scholarly attention has been paid to coercion. Less attention has been paid to what might be a more pervasive form of influence: manipulation. The essays in this volume address this relative imbalance by focusing on manipulation, examining its nature, moral status, and its significance in personal and social life.
Additional text
All of the essays make interesting, thoughtful contributions to answering these questions. They also acknowledge each other. This gives a nice sense of a collaborative effort, despite the differences in the details. Coons and Weber's introduction is masterful Overall, this is a very worthwhile book. It is rammed to the rafters with interesting examples, and all of the contributions have something interesting to say. It is an important topic, and I hope -- and expect -- this collection will inspire more to examine it.
