Coercion, Consent, and the Mechanistic Question*

In this article I examine the most prevalent explanation for why coercion ever undermines consent, an explanation that I call "moral debilitation." On this view, the manipulative strategy of coercion can disempower an agent from making the relevant change to the moral world-one necessary to grant another person a permission. I argue that coercion rarely debilitates and that there is an alternate method for explaining why coercion ever undermines consent. In the face of certain types of coercive threats, an agent's compliance fails to have the implicit content that is usually responsible for doing the transformative work of consent.