Ian Hunt concurs that offers may be considered coercive, and claims that, whatever form the interventions take, they may be considered coercive "when they are socially corrigible influences over action that diminish an agent's freedom overall".
Although relations between those with unequal economic power are often said to be coercive, this claim is more accurate in some cases than in others.
The case also involved allegations of coercive land appropriation and claims of air and water pollution.
If the Sept. 11 defendants do face death penalty proceedings, their lawyers will almost certainly cite as a mitigating argument against capital punishment their clients' treatment in detention, including the claims of coercive interrogation and in the case of Mr. Mohammed, the 183 instances of waterboarding.
It has been well documented that intelligence gathered at the base asserting that some detainees had ties to al Qaeda was obtained through coercive interrogations, but these claims continue to be cited.
Rather, he argues that the coerciveness of law resides in its claim to a "right to authorize the enforcement of [its subjects duties, responsibilities, etc.]… It is not that legal duties are sanction-based, nor that every law must ultimately be linked to coercive measures, but that law claims the right to back up its directives with force" (Lamond 2001, 55).
More extreme right institutionalists, most vividly represented by Thomas Nagel in his article 'The Problem of Global Justice,' (2005) argue that the lack of an international legal system with sovereign coercive authority does not simply undermine claims of egalitarian distributive justice; it undermines all claims of justice outside the state.
Some liberal critics of the standard view, such as Nicholas Wolterstorff, maintain that at the heart of liberal democracy is the claim that some coercive laws function to protect inherent human rights.
He said that in his four trips to Asia since becoming defense secretary 18 months ago, several countries had expressed concern about "the security implications of rising demand for resources" (translation: China's voracious quest for new sources of energy) and about "coercive diplomacy" (translation: China's contested claims of resource-rich territorial waters).
These commitments, they add, are not in tension with the claim that citizens may support coercive laws that they believe to lack a plausible secular rationale.
