Moral suasion

Moral suasion is an appeal to morality in order to influence or change behavior. A famous example is the attempt by William Lloyd Garrison and his American Anti-Slavery Society to end slavery in the United States by using moral suasion. In economics, moral suasion is more specifically defined as "the attempt to coerce private economic activity via governmental exhortation in directions not already defined or dictated by existing statute law." The 'moral' aspect comes from the pressure for 'moral responsibility' to operate in a way that is consistent with furthering the good of the economy. Moral suasion in this narrower sense is also sometimes known as jawboning.

There are two types of moral suasion:

Moral suasion has been applied in many different fields. In early educational thought, it was often paired against corporal punishment as a means of achieving school discipline. Similarly, in parenting, writers from the 19th century through Benjamin Spock have advocated the use of moral suasion with children as an alternative to physical violence. In politics, moral suasion has frequently been employed by movements for social change, but its effectiveness has varied widely.

In the temperance movement of the 18th and early 19th centuries in Britain and North America, moral suasion was initially a key part of the strategy for reducing the prevalence of alcohol in society. As the movement began to face the limitations of this strategy in the late 19th century, its members turned to legal coercion, leading to the rise of prohibitionism.

In the American Civil Rights Movement of the twentieth century, moral suasion was one of three major prongs of the movement, the others being legal action and collective nonviolent protest. After initial victories, this nonviolent strategy began to struggle in the 1960s, and largely ended with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr..

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