CEPPA Talk (in-person) – Bel Colburn (University of Glasgow)

Title: Moral Blackmail

Abstract: Suppose I want you to do something. How can I make you do it? Depending on me, you, our context, and the nature of the thing I want you to do, I have various options: rational or emotional persuasion; manipulation; coercion; physical compulsion; maybe more. Different mechanisms will be more or less effective, depending on the features of the interactions that I listed above, and they will also attract different moral evaluations, not settled wholly by their effectiveness. In this talk, I explore a (generally effective and usually problematic) mechanism which has mostly been ignored, namely moral blackmail. Someone is morally blackmailed when they act as they do because all the alternatives have been made morally unacceptable. Moral blackmail is in this sense analogous to coercion, on a plausible understanding of the latter. I defend this way of thinking from some objections, and show that moral blackmail is a real and problematic phenomenon in global challenges of the largest scale, including how we deal with global poverty and climate change.

Location: Edgecliffe G03