Description

Manipulation has been dominating the news in recent years. Hotly debated issues, such as how we should regulate social media or whether governments are allowed to adopt nudging policies, have made the questions of what counts as a manipulative behaviour, and of what is wrong with such behaviour (when something is wrong with it), increasingly pressing.

Surprisingly, however, the notion of manipulation has received little attention in the philosophical debate. Philosophers have written extensively about coercion, lies and deception, but remarkably little about manipulation. This might be, at least in part, because manipulation is hard to pin down as an independent moral phenomenon. Some instances of manipulation do, after all, involve using deception or coercive techniques. Still, manipulation is importantly different both from deception and from coercion. Thus, the challenge for an account of manipulation is to identify the central features of a complex phenomenon that incorporates elements of deception and coercion, but that cannot be reduced to either of these notions.

To meet this challenge, the speaker first develops an account of how well-functioning autonomous agents should ideally exercise their practical agency. He will then argue that manipulation involves a distinctive kind of interference with this process.

About The Speaker

Massimo Renzo is Professor of Politics, Philosophy & Law at King’s College London. He has held visiting appointments at the Australian National University, the Universities of  Virginia and Arizona, the Murphy Institute, the National University of Singapore and the Nathanson Centre for Transnational Human Rights, Crime & Security. He is an affiliated researcher at the Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War & Peace, the Honorary Secretary of the Society for Applied Philosophy, and one of the editors of Criminal Law and Philosophy. He has written on political authority, just war, human rights, and philosophy of the criminal law. He is currently working on moral agency, with a focus on the notions of autonomy, responsibility and meaning.