Manipulation

[Lucifer98]

is subtly changing someone always bad? or can you manipulate people for the greater good?

[watche]

First, I'll define manipulation for myself so that any following discussion is clear:

In this post, manipulation is an optimal (though not necessarily completely optimal) use of leverage to influence others.

Is using leverage wrong? Well that's situational, and one can manipulate others in a mutually beneficial manner, such as making a trade. (Your item serves as your leverage, and you trade it in order to attain another item, which is more useful to you. Thus, you have used your leverage in a more optimal manner than keeping it, and your item is what influenced the other person to give you theirs.) Of course, we all know of more malevolent forms of manipulation, but I think that with a definition made as such, it is a neutral thing.

That said, the de facto (colloquial) definition may vary to make it necessarily more negative or (rarely if ever) more positive.

TL;DR
depends on one's definition thereof

[Vis-spei]

Well I feel the need to ask whether we can agree on a definition of ''manipulation''. If we cannot find a definition accepted by everyone engaged in the conversation then we cannot proceed any further with the question. The word manipulation kinda has a negative color, don't you think...and I mean that we do not use it for good. That aside it includes the volition of the subject to affect, aka bring about change to the other, the object of the manipulation in order to achieve a goal. Now there are good and bad objectives and that depends entirely on the subject. But reguardles of the objective, to bring about change intentionally is infringment of one of the most essential aspects of human life, I talk about freedom.

[Keeps]

Definition as agreed upon by the western world:

1:  to treat or operate with or as if with the hands or by mechanical means especially in a skillful manner
2 a :  to manage or utilize skillfully
   b :  to control or play upon by artful, unfair, or insidious means especially to one's own advantage
3 :  to change by artful or unfair means so as to serve one's purpose.


So 1 doesn't apply to the topic.  2b is by definition 'bad.  3. has a bad connotation, but may not be 'bad'  and 2a is 'neutral' by definition.

What is philosophically interesting is how these definitions developed, why outside of management (in which it is not really used anymore), is manipulation considered bad.  This is something that a couple thousand years ago actually was considered good.  To be tricky or manipulative was considered an asset where today it is not.  If you want to explore this topic.  I would suggest exploring in from the philosophy of sociology and paleontology to understand this change.

[Vis-spei]

Your suggestion is indeed interesting however not been akin to those scientific fields I could only make speculations which may or may not be right. If you are right about people concidering being manipulative an asset in the past one could assume that it wasn't considered ''bad'' thoso days, or that it was within the socialy accepted norms (in term of sociology). It is a fact that the meaning of words may change with the passage of time and this is a natural occurance in linguistic progression. Maybe then having the ability to utilise skillfully people  and circumstances in order to achieve something (have in mind that the human mind operates based on goals and therefore our actions are means of fulfilling those goals) was an ability that not many people had and those people used the ability to gain power over others (I cite many great leaders of history)...so it was a feared asset and what people fear tend to name it ''bad''.
However the purpose of the post's author was to gather opinions whether manipulation was bad or not. And I asked for a definition only to make sure that we are talking about the exact same thing (according to the analytic philosophy of Russel and Wittgenstein). Normaly we would be interested in the nature of modern application of manipulative technics. But I agree that we need to take the history of the word into account.

[Keeps]

Well,
I prompted that, simply because it will lead to the correct answer.
Manipulation as used today, is by definition bad.  We use other words, such a negotiation, leadership, and management to indicate that positive forms of it.  The dividing line, is one is selfish and the other is team or society oriented.  As we developed larger and larger societies, we found that selfish actions were inherently destructive against the collective.  It comes for two competing biological drives naturally within us.  If our societies broke down, if we were reduced to a million people spread across the world...  individual selfishness or intellect would be appreciated again. 

So to answer the prompt...  Manipulation is bad when there is a large collective of social creatures, individually of course it is good.

[Vis-spei]

All agreed!
But I doupt that manipulation might be a feat even if the human population was diminished to a mere thousand people. The way I look at it, manipulation is moraly anacceptable not only catastrophic for common goals of society as it is driven by opportunism and insencere motives. As long as there are humans it will be concidered bad, one the other hand with no people, manipulation isn't plausible and therefore it is generaly wrong as there cannot be a situation where it has a positive impact (excluding the person being manipulative).