Undue Influence as Coercive Offers in Clinical Trials

Abstract

Coercion has been conceptually connected with threats. Under the standard account of coercion, threats propose to make the victim “worse off” than his or her baseline, or where he or she was before the proposer intervened in the victim’s causal nexus. This model of coercion that focuses only on the notion of threats does not go far enough to capture cases where the victim’s vulnerability is taken advantage of to accomplish the coercion. In the kinds of cases I have in mind, no threats are used or needed. Clinical trials conducted in developing nations, for example, are at risk of taking advantage of the vulnerabilities of the subjects that can rise to the level of coercion. In this paper, I will consider the question whether in some instances clinical trials with vulnerable populations involve coercion that is accomplished not with threats but rather through offers.