Recent Work on Manipulation

Philosophical work on manipulation has expanded rapidly in recent years. Earlier discussions often treated manipulation as a secondary topic in debates about autonomy or consent. More recent work has made manipulation a topic of inquiry in its own right. This article reviews this recent literature. We first examine debates about the nature of manipulation, focusing on deliberation-centred accounts, covert-influence accounts, and anti-definitional approaches. We then turn to manipulation’s moral status, focusing on recent attempts to explain manipulation’s apparent pro tanto wrongness. Finally, we review the expansion of recent applied work from nudging toward new topics in technology, politics, and neuro-ethics, amongst others. We argue that recent work has both deepened and broadened the debate: it has clarified the ideals of agency, transparency, and interpersonal interaction that structure accounts of manipulation, while challenging the familiar model of manipulation as a dyadic interpersonal relation.