  One is most likely to accept the first view, that coercion is intrinsically wrongful if one defines coercion as some sort of violation or threatened violation of the coercee's rights. Wertheimer's account seems to accept such a view, as does Cheyney Ryan's arguments for a normative conception of coercion. (See Wertheimer 1987; Ryan 1980.) This close tie between coercion and immoral action captures a number of intuitions we have about coercion, reflecting also a lot of ordinary language. People often associate uses of coercion with injustices done to themselves or others. This tie also provides a sharper division between coercive and non-coercive activity than might otherwise be found: if an activity is morally unobjectionable, then it is ipso facto not coercive. Of course, if identifying coercion requires a prior moral judgment, then one will need to be able to make such judgments reliably in order to be able to identify coercion reliably. But this suggests an objection to this view of coercion's wrongfulness: there are some situations in which the coerciveness of an action appears obvious even though it may be difficult or impossible to ascertain its rightfulness or wrongfulness (this objection goes doubly for the next proposal, viz., that coercion is prima facie or pro tanto wrongful). Thus some (e.g., Zimmerman 2002) have resisted making judgments of coercion depend on prior moral judgments. The Wertheimer/Ryan view also generates a categorical distinction between different possible uses (and users) of the same technique: if the mafia threatens to destroy your property if you fail to pay protection money, this threat will count as coercive; but if the just, well-regulated state threatens to confiscate your property unless you pay taxes, this threat is arguably not coercive, on this view. Some difficulties stemming from this implication will be noted in the next section.