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atucker comments on The Dark Arts - Preamble - Less Wrong
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Here's my understanding of manipulation.
Physical coercion forces you to do something that you don't want to do, don't enjoy while you're doing it, and regret doing afterwards.
Emotional manipulation causes you to do something that you didn't want to do before, and regret afterwards -- but you may like it in the meantime.
For example: violent rape causes you to have sex against your will. You don't want to have sex ahead of time, you don't want to have sex while you're being raped, and you aren't glad you were raped afterwards.
Manipulating someone into sex means that she didn't want to have sex before, and she regretted it afterwards, but you got her to want to have sex while she was doing it. It's not strictly speaking coercion, but you did get her to do something that's out of character and not in keeping with her usual desires.
The third option is "try it, you'll like it." The person didn't intend to take the action before, but she wanted to do it at the moment she acted, and she was glad she did it afterwards. I don't see a moral problem with this. It's influence, but it's not harmful. To continue the sex example, if the woman's initial impression is negative, but the man gets her to want to have sex and afterwards she's glad she did then he's just good at attracting women, not a harmful manipulator.
Influencing someone to take an action that you know she will regret afterwards is manipulative.
In the case of sex, I propose a different demarcation criterion between ethical and unethical social influence than yours. The dimension I'm most concerned with is not remorse or lack thereof after the fact, but rather the reasons for consent at the moment of consent. In the past, I proposed the following definition for ethical seduction on a pickup blog:
The "anticipation of intrinsic enjoyment of the experience" criterion is important, because it gets rid of cases where people consent to sex out of feelings of obligation, pity, merely because the other person wants it, or because they had trouble putting on the brakes. This notion is similar to the notion of "enthusiastic consent," but without the confusing connotations that "enthusiastic" may hold.
I'm not sure whether this is a perfect or merely an imperfect duty. The argument for this principle being a perfect duty is that if someone has sex with you for reasons other than anticipating inherent enjoyment of the experience (which includes emotional enjoyment, not just physical), there is too high a chance that they won't enjoy it and feel buyer's remorse later. As a result, the argument would be that you should refrain from having sex with people in such circumstances, unless you know that they are aware of the potential negative consequences and are willing to risk them.
I'm not convinced either way about this argument, but it's plausible. It's actually really hard to think about ethical principles around influence that aren't or overly broad, and that don't contradict our existing moral intuitions. If someone thinks they have one, they should try as hard as they can to poke holes in it.
P.S. Sorry about the triple-post brain dump.