  Of course, if the coercee defies the coercer, there is no coerced action to investigate, nor any question to answer about responsibility for such an action. There is also reason to doubt that what the coercer did in such cases rises to meet the bar at which we should consider it coercive. (If a threat is trivial, we would likely resist saying that an agent was coerced by it even if she acts to prevent its execution.) On the other hand, it may be unwise to make a categorical distinction between cases in which coercion succeeds and cases where it fails: the difference between them on some occasions may be nothing more than what mood the coercee happened to be in at the time. Since the coercer has the final and definitive say over whether he will engage in coercive activity (and who will be engaged by it), it may make more sense to identify our phenomenon of interest with a certain form of activity by the coercer, admitting that such activity may or may not result in any further noticeable consequences. (The would-be coercer may of course be bluffing, and the prospective coercee may call the bluff; this would not, by itself, give reason to deny that we have here an instance of the technique under study.)