Rational Persuasion, Effort and ‘Easy Resistibility’

Abstract It is standardly assumed that for it to be morally permissible to use an influence to change someone’s mental state or behaviour, that influence must be fully or substantially non-controlling. Or, as it has also been put, if an influence is not ‘easily resistible’, then we have a pro tanto reason against employing the said influence. Currently, the most dominant account of easily resistibility is effort-based, i.e. for an influence to qualify as easily resistible it must not require too much effort to resist. This paper argues that the effort-based account faces considerable challenges in that it implies that paradigmatic cases of rational persuasion are not easily resistible. Two objections to this contention are considered and ultimately rejected, and three directions for future research are suggested.