Source
Noggle, “The Ethics of Manipulation”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2018; substantive revision 31 March 2026), LIT-1007, read in full in NOTE-744: §2.1 (bypassing reason), §2.2 (trickery), §2.3 (pressure), §2.4 (disjunctive, hybrid and non-definitional views).
What was actually shown
A survey’s counterexamples, one or more per family of analyses.
- Covert influence (Ware, Strudler, Susser et al., LIT-1002): fits priming, framing and gaslighting, but “Many manipulative influences, such as peer pressure, nagging, and guilt trips, do not seem covert.”
- Covert intent (Belohrad; Whitfield, who needs only “plausible deniability”): the teenager nagging for a phone has a “quite transparent” intent.
- Non-rational influence (Raz): graphic portrayals of the dangers of smoking, the Golden Rule and dressing up for an interview are non-rational and not obviously manipulative. Literal bypassing (subliminal advertising, hypnosis) sets the bar too high to count the entry’s ordinary examples.
- Trickery (Noggle 1996, Barnhill, Mills): charm offensives, peer pressure, nagging and emotional blackmail “do not seem to involve trickery”.
- Pressure (Faden, Beauchamp and King; Kligman and Culver): misses pure misdirection; most of its proponents claim only sufficiency.
- The conjunctive hybrid (Greenspan) fails on pure pressure and on pure misdirection.
What is left (§2.4): a disjunction (Rudinow: “deception or pressure or by playing on a supposed weakness”), whose cost is leaving unanswered “what makes all forms of manipulation manifestations of the same phenomenon”; common-factor accounts (Noggle’s 2025 Mistake Account, whose akrasia claim the entry flags as unproven; Klenk’s disregard for whether a method reveals reasons; Baron’s vice); and non-definitional accounts (Ackerman; Cohen’s cluster concept, “no single subset of which is necessary and sufficient”).
What this does not say
- It does not say manipulation has no unifying account. Common-factor accounts locate the unity in a mistake induced or a manipulator’s carelessness, not in one mechanism of influence, and the survey leaves them open. The claim is only that the five mechanisms each fail alone.
- The cases are intuitions. Each counterexample rests on finding a tactic clearly manipulative, or clearly not. A defender can bite the bullet, as Susser et al. do in calling open nagging a failed attempt at manipulation (LIT-1002, p. 5). The survey does not show such moves fail; it reports that they are costly.
- It says nothing about global manipulation. The entry is about ordinary tactics, and says that their relation to the “radical programming or reprogramming” of the free-will literature has hardly been explored (§1.1).
- It does not settle whether manipulation needs intent. §4.2 lists five answers and endorses none. That is a report of an open question, not a finding, and is not filed as one.
- It does not settle why manipulation is wrong. §3 leans, with a “perhaps”, to prima facie and pro tanto wrongness and sets objections against harm and autonomy accounts. That is not filed either.
Connections
No relations are declared.
- THEORY-235 (covert influence and autonomy). This account is why that one is filed of covert influence and not of manipulation as such. The two are compatible: one bounds the scope of the other.
- QUESTION-070. Any answer must say what manipulation is before asking whether a whole with no intending member can do it. This account says that taking one mechanism as the definition will misclassify clear cases. Cohen’s cluster concept, on which intent is one feature among several and none is necessary, is the option nearest a view on which a system without intent can manipulate.
- QUESTION-071. The analyses here are of ordinary manipulation of single decisions. They do not by themselves supply what the four-case argument assumes.