Should We Admit That We Manipulate People to Be Good?

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It's a loaded question, sure—but I don't think I'm wrong. I recently encountered a fictional story about a mom whose 11-year-old nephew got sucked into the world of drug dealing. He becomes so engrossed in working as a dealer that, despite everyone’s desperate pleas to stop him from being a distributor for these dangerous cartels, he doesn’t listen to them. He thinks it’s cool. He has absorbed it into his core identity, and nothing can stop him now. His mom is nothing but a nuisance to him. His school counselors are nothing but lame, lifeless robots with boring 9-to-5 jobs. Nothing anyone says can change his mind that drug dealing is the coolest thing ever.

Which begs the question: If your nine-year-old kid got sucked into the world of drug dealing, do you let that slide? Obviously not—right? You never stop encouraging him to come back to you. But all of this doesn’t sound… optional. All of this doesn’t sound freeing. You’re not really giving the kid any choice but to toe the line and behave accordingly. And if he doesn’t toe the line, you will keep on plotting strategies until he finally does give up the world of drug dealing and come back to being a normal child.

Now does that sound voluntary to you? Not really… right? It's the same thing as your kid misbehaving at the dinner table. He doesn't wanna eat. He refuses to put anything into his mouth. Do you let that slide? Or do you make sure that he eats no matter what? Well, for one thing, if he doesn’t eat, he’ll starve to death. But more importantly, he will never become a functioning member of society if he continues to disregard proper etiquette and act like a total Scrooge at the dining table. So no—you don’t let that slide. You manipulate him until he behaves accordingly no matter what.

Now you might not phrase it quite that way—and you might argue that I’m dysphemizing the whole scenario. But if you really think about it, we don’t actually give our children the option to opt out. We don’t actually give them a choice in whether they want to behave. They have to behave no matter what; and if they don’t? Well, you keep trying—forever and ever—until they finally become good, law-abiding citizens that respect the social order and agree to toe the line. Hell, it’s not enough that they be law-abiding—they also have to want to be law-abiding. And that’s literally one step above manipulation: making someone not only do something, but want to do something that they otherwise wouldn’t wanna do.

And most of us never have to think about it because our children are mostly well-behaving: Sure, they might misbehave every once in a while—but eventually, after some time, they conform to the social norm. They don’t scream and rebel and act reckless. All of which makes you happy. But you don’t consider the thousands of other parents out there with children who were never able to conform. And in those cases, what do you do? Do you respect their free will? Obviously not, right? When your kid decides to become a drug dealer, why would you respect that? You have to change them no matter what. You will not tolerate a world where your child goes into the darkness like that.

So help me out here—I can't really see the difference between disciplining your kid, and manipulating them to be good. We don't give people a choice over whether they want to be good. The bottom line is, if you want to be a functioning member of our society, and if you want to live a life that is peaceful, cooperative, and mature, you rely on society’s early institutions to manipulate you into wanting to be good. Where would we be if we didn't have these institutions that instilled within us the moral systems that manipulate us into valuing moral behavior? I can't imagine how chaotic society would be if we didn't condition people into believing that goodness is good. But it also raises a lot of interesting questions, one of which being the ethics of it all: Is it really okay to force people into certain belief systems that encourage prosocial behavior—without their consent?

And if we’re okay with the ethics of manipulating people into social harmony, then who’s to say that we can’t take it even further and improve the system to the point where no one can even want to commit a crime no matter what?