Question

With God’s help,
The question is about coercing the giving of a get when the alternative is disproportionate.
Defining the framework of the discussion: the discussion will deal with the question from the moral angle, and not necessarily according to any particular legal system, while taking into account a person’s relationship to the commandments of his religion or to the dictates of his conscience.
 A friend raised the question whether it is moral to threaten a get refuser with any punishment if he does not give a get. The argument in favor is that in practice we are not doing anything to him, since he had the choice to give a get. The argument against is that in the end, if he refused and you punished him, you are responsible for the punishment—for example, death. Against the argument against, I proposed the following thought experiment: if we put a person into a machine that asks him whether he is willing to give a get, and if he refuses it kills him, and if he agrees he goes free, here it would seem that he really is responsible for his own death if he refused, since he had a choice and we did nothing to him (other than putting him into the machine). If so, what is the difference, apparently, between that and telling him: if you refuse, we will kill you? (One could distinguish between direct physical killing and indirect causation, but we will not deal with that here.)

But then the question arises: when throughout history Jews were given the choice between violating one of their commandments and death, then apparently, as in this case, one could place the responsibility for the death on the Jew, since he could have committed the transgression and escaped death at the hands of the gentile. So it was argued that the gentile’s crime lies in what he placed before the Jew in the face of death. For example, if in the machine the choice is between eating pork and death, and the Jew chose to die, the gentile is guilty of coercing the Jew to eat pork and not of murder. Here we would accuse him under the heading of religious coercion of a severe degree. (Note that we would not judge the gentile by Jewish criteria but by general moral ones.)

And so we return to the question of the get refuser: if so, in this case we would be accused of coercing the refuser to give a get, and since there is no moral problem with such coercion, it is permissible to place before him, opposite giving the get, whatever option we choose.