ABSTRACT
Coercion may be virtuous or wicked, prescribed, permitted, or prohibited by religion, law, society, and the actor’s own conscience. Coercing a child to submit to a painful but necessary medical intervention is virtuous, but coercing it to submit to a sexual act is wicked. These are judgments, not facts. Judgments issue from and refl ect the values of the judge and, more generally, the values of his culture. In the judgment of our contemporary American culture, psychiatric coercion is virtuous provided its purpose is to protect the subject-defi ned as a “dangerous mentally ill patient”—from harming himself or society. This is a distinctly modern, post-Enlightenment secular view.
