The difference between being coerced and coercing

[pvn]

From another thread:

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What is the difference between your child tripping outside and being impaled on a knife and dying... and me charging at your child with a knife and stabbing her to death?

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I see none.

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The reason this person sees none is that he is only looking at one narrow aspect:

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In both instances my child would be dead, I would be sad, and I would remove the hazard after the fact (too late for my child, but hopefully in time to save others from the same fate).

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In other words, he is only observing that someone died.

He is totally ignoring that in one case someone *acted* and the other one didn't.

There is a difference between looking at cases where one is forced to do something and looking at cases where one forces others to do something. There is not a one-to-on mapping.

People are forced to "work or die" every day. People are "forced" to eat to survive. But there is no moral agent at the other end making a *decision* to force people into these situations. There is nobody to blame. Yet those who only see someone being coerced think that *someone* must be "made responsible". Yet there is nobody who can justly be saddled with the obligation to remedy these conditions.

This is the critical fallacy that has struck a long line of distinguished politics posters, including moorobot, propertarian, and most recently jogger.