Introduction

In contemporary debates about free speech, rights, and political authority, the terms violence and coercion are often blurred together. Some treat coercion as merely another form of violence; others conflate both with speech acts themselves. To defend free speech rigorously and preserve conceptual clarity, we must separate these categories. Within the Agency framework, violence and coercion are distinct modes of agency violation, operating at different levels of the choice landscape.

Violence: The Actualized Attack

• Definition: The direct application of physical force that causes bodily harm, damage, or destruction.

• Examples: Punching, stabbing, shooting, arson, smashing property.

• Agency Effect: Violence collapses an agent’s choice space outright. It removes or cripples agency in the most literal sense—by injuring, destroying, or eliminating the agent’s capacity to act.

• QBU Framing: Violence deletes branches from the quantum branching tree. Death, injury, or destroyed resources mean entire sets of possible futures are permanently pruned.

Coercion: The Conditional Attack

• Definition: The credible threat of actual harm to gain compliance.

• Examples: “Hand over your wallet or I’ll stab you.” / “Testify against me and I’ll kill your family.”

• Agency Effect: Coercion does not immediately collapse the agent’s branches. Instead, it reshapes their value landscape. The coerced agent still has multiple possible branches (comply, resist, escape), but the threat revalues those branches so that only compliance appears rationally accessible.

• QBU Framing: Coercion changes the value of branches. They are not removed, but most are poisoned with extreme negative utility. Practically, this funnels the agent toward one distorted path.

Speech, Violence, and Coercion

• Speech is not violence: Words, even harsh or inflammatory, do not themselves collapse agency. Violence requires physical force or its direct equivalent.

• But sometimes speech is coercion: When words constitute a credible threat of harm to gain compliance, they are no longer protected expression—they are the coercive act itself.

  • Protected: “We should rise up against the government.”

  • Unprotected: “Do what I say or I’ll burn your house down.”

• Key Distinction: Incitement is not coercion. Calls to action are permissible; threats are not. This preserves free speech while marking the precise boundary at which speech becomes an agency-violating act.

Why the Distinction Matters

1. Analytic Clarity: Violence and coercion are not the same. Violence is brute force in action; coercion is violence-in-potential harnessed strategically, sometimes delivered through speech.

2. Normative Clarity: Defensive violence can be justified (self-defense). Coercion is harder to justify, since it instrumentalizes another’s agency rather than merely countering force.

3. Speech Principle:

   • Speech ≠ violence.

   • Speech sometimes = coercion.

   • Coercion operates by changing the value of branches, not removing them.

   • Violence operates by removing branches outright.

Placement in Rights and Justice

• Rights as Preferences: Rights are those preferences we collectively enforce by coercion. Recognizing coercion as distinct from violence allows rights enforcement to be seen as conditional coercion justified by consent, not violence per se.

• Justice: Universal Compensatory Justice requires distinguishing between legitimate uses of coercion (contract enforcement, voluntary governance) and illegitimate coercion (threats, extortion, domination).

• Free Speech Absolutism: Protecting all speech except coercion preserves a strong liberal principle: speech is never violence, but sometimes speech itself is coercion.

Conclusion

• Violence = Actualized harm, collapsing agency outright (branch deletion).

• Coercion = Conditional harm, constraining agency through threats (branch revaluation).

• Speech = Free, unless it is coercive.

By maintaining this distinction, we safeguard clarity in law, ethics, and political philosophy. We protect speech without dilution, condemn coercion without confusion, and preserve violence as a term for real, not metaphorical, harm.