Is it wrong to manipulate people?
People often say it is, that it’s wrong to use or manipulate people for what are ultimately your own purposes. But in truth, we do just that every day. If you convince a friend to go to dinner with you instead of heading straight home, you have, if transparently, manipulated him into doing so. When an advertisement results in your buying a product, millions of dollars have often gone into that manipulation. If you tell a man about to leap to his death from a bridge that “You have so much left to live for!” and he believes you and steps down, you’ve manipulated him. So when does normal, everyday manipulation become bad?
I contend that never really does. The measure of the evil of manipulation lies in its method and intended result, not the degree of manipulation employed. To kill someone because it will make someone love you, the methodology is evil even though the result would be positive. And conversely, to court someone with gifts and compassion to make them kill someone is positive methods but a wrongful result. If methods are right and the result is good, the amount of manipulation is inconsequential, assuming the requisite degree of skill.
Even so, where manipulation gets its reputation is that no one likes to be deceived. If you convince your friend to dine with you because you simply don’t want to be alone, he might balk at the deception that you aren’t also interested in his personal company. If an advertiser told you from the start that their goal isn’t to highlight the good of their product, but just to get you to pay money for it, I suspect you might be less likely to make an impulse buy. And if the man on the bridge knew that you really didn’t feel he had much going for him, but just that you’d hate to see him end his life, the manipulation might not work out so well. At the heart of manipulation is that it restricts what the target (and indeed anyone else whose involvement requires them to behave in ways they might not absent the deception) knows of the truth of the matter. Some might call that wrong, but then they likely just aren’t aware of the times they actually do it.
Truly excelling at the art of manipulation requires the instigator to accept the above principles. The greater the stakes are, the further from the target’s natural reaction is from the intended result, the more careful and deliberate the deception must be. Your friend may not need much convincing to go to dinner, since he’s hungry as well, so not much is required. But a true paradigm shift in a person’s way of thinking may require much planning and difficulty.
This can be especially complicated for even one skilled in the art when the subject matter is subjective (such as matters of the heart) rather than objective (such as buying a Coke). A manipulator may have to not only deceive the target, but himself as well. Extreme planning is required and he must be crystal clear in his own mind the positive intended result, as otherwise he risks losing sight of the intended result and getting caught up in his own web, entering the realm of the pathological liar. A final and necessary part of the planning is resolving the manipulation at the endgame, lest he end up living a lie, forever doomed to maintain the loose threads of a manipulation that will never die.
To those that would still decry the amorality (or immorality) of this practice, keep a few things in mind. Every person, without exception, is basically selfish at heart; they want to be happy, they want to achieve their goals in life, they want to be free from pain. To vary degrees, every person employs manipulation for their own intended results. The line between right and wrong lies in what the outcome is and how it is achieved, not in how far one will go to get it. No one ever likes to be deceived, and they’ll always tell you as much. Then they’ll go convince their friend to go to dinner.
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There are substantial puzzles when we ask what matters other than how people’s experiences feel “from the inside.”
Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life’s experiences? If you are worried about missing out on desirable experiences, we can suppose that business enterprises have researched thoroughly the lives of many others. You can pick and choose from their large library or smorgasbord of such experiences, selecting your life’s experiences for, say, the next two years. After two years have passed, you will have ten minutes or ten hours out of the tank, to select the experiences of your next two years. Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think it’s all actually happening. Others can also plug in to have the experiences they want, so there’s no need to stay unplugged to serve them. (Ignore problems such as who will service the machines if everyone plugs in.) Would you plug in? What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside? Nor should you refrain because of the few moments of distress between the moment you’ve decided and the moment you’re plugged. What’s a few moments of distress compared to a lifetime of bliss (if that’s what you choose), and why feel any distress at all if your decision is the best one?
What does matter to us in addition to our experiences? First, we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them. In the case of certain experiences, it is only because first we want to do the actions that we want the experiences of doing them or thinking we’ve done them. (But why do we want to do the activities rather than merely to experience them?) A second reason for not plugging in is that we want to be a certain way, to be a certain sort of person. Someone floating in a tank is an indeterminate blob. There is no answer to the question of what a person is like who has long been in the tank. Is he couragous, kind, intelligent, witty, loving? It’s not merely that it’s difficult to tell; there’s no way he is. Plugging into the machine is a kind of suicide. It will seem to some, trapped by a picture, that nothing about what we are like can matter except as it gets reflected in our experiences. But why should we be concerned only with how our time is filled, but not with what we are?
Thirdly, plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality, to a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct. This clarifies the intensity of the conflict over psychoactive drugs, which some view as mere local experience machines, and others view as avenues to a deeper reality; what some view as equivalent to surrender to the experience machine, others view as following on of the reasons not to surrender!
We learn that something matters to us in addition to experience by imagining an experience machine and then realizing that we would not use it. We can continue to imagine a sequence of machines each designed to fill lacks suggested for the earlier machines. For example, since the experience machine doesn’t meet our desire to be a certain way, imagine a transformation machine which transforms us into whatever sort of person we’d like to be (compatible with our staying us). Surely one would not use the transformation machine to become as one would wish, and thereupon plug into the experience machine!*** So something matters in addition to one’s experiences and what one is like. Nor is the reason merely that one’s experiences are unconnected with what one is like. For the experience machine might be limited to provide only experiences possible to the sort of person plugged in. Is it that we want to make a difference in the world? Consider then the result machine, which produces in the world any result you would produce and injects your vector input into any joint activity. I won’t pursue here the fascinating details of these or other machines. What is most disturbing about them is their living of our lives for us. Is it misguided to search for particular additional functions beyond the competence of machines to do for us? Perhaps what we desire is to live (an active verb) ourselves, in contact with reality. (And this, machines cannot do for us.) Without elaborating on the implications of this, which I believe connect surprisingly with issues about free will and causal accounts of knowledge, it’s merely worth noting the intricacy of the question of what matters for people other than their experiences.
*** Some wouldn’t use the transformation machine at all; it seems like cheating. But the one-time use of the transformation machine would not remove all challenges; there woudl still be obstacles for the new us to overcome, a new plateau from which to strive even higher. And is this plateau any the less earned or deserved than that provided by genetic endowment and early childhood environment? But if the transformation machine could be used indefinitely often, so that we could accomplish anything by pushing a button to transform ourselves into someone who could do it easily, there would remain no limits we need to strain against or try to transcend. Would there be anything left to do? Do some theological views place God outside of time because an omniscient omnipotent being could fill up his days?
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