  Nozick explains the idea of the baseline by calling it the “normal or natural or expected course of events” (Nozick 1969, 447). But all of these terms are ambiguous, in that they have normative (or “moral”) and non-normative (e.g., “predictive”) uses. Frequently, the normative and predictive uses will point to the same state of affairs as the course of events that is indicated. However, the extensions of the normative and non-normative uses will sometimes differ, thus requiring a theorist to choose one or the other in order to determine whether a particular communication counts as a threat or an offer, and is therefore coercive or not.