Often in chess, at least among novices, one player doesn’t know that they’ve been checkmated. When the other player declares “checkmate”, this first player is surprised; that claim contradicts their intuitive impression of the board. So they have to check each of their possible moves, one by one, to see that none allow an escape.
There is a difference between being an intelligence officer and and being an agent. An agent can have many different motives, from idealism through mercenary and being a blackmail victim.
Ordinarily, we would use a market test to determine relative value. In an auction, we generally presume that the winner valued the item more than either the seller or other bidders. But when the auction is between newspapers and the blackmailed, the newspapers cannot capture the full value of the information to everyone who eventually learned the information directly or indirectly. The presumption when it comes to such information is that the benefits to the public outweigh the cost to the individual.
So we have a different test from cost/benefit: Is the information printed by the newspapers true or libelous?
When it comes to providing information about building atomic bombs, the opposite presumption is held. The cost of disseminating the information to the public (or enemy) is presumed greater than the benefit.
It does because it is PUBLIC. Fact is necessary because we have FREE SPEECH. No, we did not use to have free speech, but if you have free speech it also needs bounds and definitions. You have to ask yourself why we have legal traditions against hearsay. Trying to force everything into one size fits all is DOOMED to FAILURE. There are MANY objectives we want to pursue, no one trumps everything else. Instead we must judge and weigh what is most important in any situation. Public disclosure of what one might blackmail over is not prohibited. Opinion is not prohibited. A more interesting case is the legalized blackmail we have over confidentiality which I do expect to eventually fall, but the law changes slowly.
To attack the check-mate on blackmail: I consider blackmail a bad strategy to play in all of the situations mentioned. Every one of the ones I saw could be much better resolved than by directly withdrawing from the shared social capital. So why not legalize it to maximize the freedom of people to do stupid things?
I think the general distaste for blackmail comes from the switch from the cooperative games with surplus of normal human interaction to competitive games with zero-sum or negative payout.
In my mind the purpose of states and laws is providing the enforceable contracts that are necessary to stabilize better payout situations than the equilibria - change the games to some with a higher payout. And blackmail is just a game with no win-win situation.
So should blackmail be an enforceable contract? I think that would actually allow bad strategies/games to flourish. Similar to, but of much weaker degree, than legalizing the use of force in common negotiations.
I'm happy to join you in supporting that limited change, though I'll also support a wider change. Society is already making big changes in sex/drugs norms. Not clear that what remains isn't worth enforcing.
Robin, Again, I would differentiate between all of society's norms (which I agree are mostly correct) and norms in areas where blackmail tends to occur (drugs, sex, etc.) Norms that I believe are mostly destructive.
What about allowing blackmail in areas where both of the following hold:
1. The person being blackmailed has committed a crime.
2. There is an identifiable person who was the victim of the crime.
This rules out blackmail over nude pictures, gay outing, drug use, sexual activity among consenting adults, etc.
So the downsides of your proposed policy change could be mitigated by additional policy changes. But those additional policy changes weren't part of your original proposal, and if they had been, people would have objected to those other changes on other grounds.
In the context of a claim of checkmate on a policy proposal, I don't think you get to expand the scope like that; the policy proposal has to be self-contained. Otherwise you could use incompatible companion policies as counter-arguments to different downsides.
Do the right to silence and the presumption of innocence make it inefficient to enforce norms? Is the required outcome (1) the maximum number of accusations and people in jail, or is it (2) maximising the number of succesful accusations about guilty people, while protecting the innocent.
It's easy to make changes to a legal system that optimise (1). People tend not to do it, not because of widrespread stupidity, but because they are trying to optimise (2).
You could make libel/slander into crimes, if you think tort status isn't punishing them enough. You could also just ban all negative gossip, as Rome did. Surely that makes the evidence issue even easier.
While we do have libel/slander rules against spreading false info, in order to correctly calculate the effects of different policies, you have to incorporate evidentiary standards and burden of legal expense (which are themselves parts of the policy) into your model.
US libel/slander laws put the expense of investigation on the slandered party, and require them to prove by a preponderance of evidence that the slanderer knew the info was false. In practice, this makes slander easy to get away with.
US blackmail laws put the expense of investigation on the government, require proof beyond reasonable doubt that blackmail occurred, but don't require anything be proven about the truth of the blackmail info or the blackmailer's beliefs. In practice, this makes blackmail difficult to get away with.
If blackmail laws were removed and nothing else changed, then blackmail-based-on-slander would be under the same evidentiary rules as blackmail-based-on-truth, which are tilted towards the blackmailer, and blackmail-based-on-slander would become easy to get away with.
Outsiders may disagree, but the typical person who supports a society's norms sees an advantage from more cost-effective enforcement of them. If the typical person didn't support them, they couldn't be the society's norms.
I think that in pre modern societies it was more a Lese Majeste law.. you weren't supposed to decry your social superiors, but your inferiors were fair game.
A condition that makes it somewhat easier to pursue and prove. Still not easy, but that is what pragmatism is all about, pragmatism. It is the pursuit of ideas to absurdity that is itself absurd.
There is a difference between being an intelligence officer and and being an agent. An agent can have many different motives, from idealism through mercenary and being a blackmail victim.
Ordinarily, we would use a market test to determine relative value. In an auction, we generally presume that the winner valued the item more than either the seller or other bidders. But when the auction is between newspapers and the blackmailed, the newspapers cannot capture the full value of the information to everyone who eventually learned the information directly or indirectly. The presumption when it comes to such information is that the benefits to the public outweigh the cost to the individual.
So we have a different test from cost/benefit: Is the information printed by the newspapers true or libelous?
When it comes to providing information about building atomic bombs, the opposite presumption is held. The cost of disseminating the information to the public (or enemy) is presumed greater than the benefit.
It does because it is PUBLIC. Fact is necessary because we have FREE SPEECH. No, we did not use to have free speech, but if you have free speech it also needs bounds and definitions. You have to ask yourself why we have legal traditions against hearsay. Trying to force everything into one size fits all is DOOMED to FAILURE. There are MANY objectives we want to pursue, no one trumps everything else. Instead we must judge and weigh what is most important in any situation. Public disclosure of what one might blackmail over is not prohibited. Opinion is not prohibited. A more interesting case is the legalized blackmail we have over confidentiality which I do expect to eventually fall, but the law changes slowly.
To attack the check-mate on blackmail: I consider blackmail a bad strategy to play in all of the situations mentioned. Every one of the ones I saw could be much better resolved than by directly withdrawing from the shared social capital. So why not legalize it to maximize the freedom of people to do stupid things?
I think the general distaste for blackmail comes from the switch from the cooperative games with surplus of normal human interaction to competitive games with zero-sum or negative payout.
In my mind the purpose of states and laws is providing the enforceable contracts that are necessary to stabilize better payout situations than the equilibria - change the games to some with a higher payout. And blackmail is just a game with no win-win situation.
So should blackmail be an enforceable contract? I think that would actually allow bad strategies/games to flourish. Similar to, but of much weaker degree, than legalizing the use of force in common negotiations.
I'm happy to join you in supporting that limited change, though I'll also support a wider change. Society is already making big changes in sex/drugs norms. Not clear that what remains isn't worth enforcing.
Peter, I wish I had thought of that.
Robin, Again, I would differentiate between all of society's norms (which I agree are mostly correct) and norms in areas where blackmail tends to occur (drugs, sex, etc.) Norms that I believe are mostly destructive.
What about allowing blackmail in areas where both of the following hold:
1. The person being blackmailed has committed a crime.
2. There is an identifiable person who was the victim of the crime.
This rules out blackmail over nude pictures, gay outing, drug use, sexual activity among consenting adults, etc.
So the downsides of your proposed policy change could be mitigated by additional policy changes. But those additional policy changes weren't part of your original proposal, and if they had been, people would have objected to those other changes on other grounds.
In the context of a claim of checkmate on a policy proposal, I don't think you get to expand the scope like that; the policy proposal has to be self-contained. Otherwise you could use incompatible companion policies as counter-arguments to different downsides.
Do the right to silence and the presumption of innocence make it inefficient to enforce norms? Is the required outcome (1) the maximum number of accusations and people in jail, or is it (2) maximising the number of succesful accusations about guilty people, while protecting the innocent.
It's easy to make changes to a legal system that optimise (1). People tend not to do it, not because of widrespread stupidity, but because they are trying to optimise (2).
You could make libel/slander into crimes, if you think tort status isn't punishing them enough. You could also just ban all negative gossip, as Rome did. Surely that makes the evidence issue even easier.
While we do have libel/slander rules against spreading false info, in order to correctly calculate the effects of different policies, you have to incorporate evidentiary standards and burden of legal expense (which are themselves parts of the policy) into your model.
US libel/slander laws put the expense of investigation on the slandered party, and require them to prove by a preponderance of evidence that the slanderer knew the info was false. In practice, this makes slander easy to get away with.
US blackmail laws put the expense of investigation on the government, require proof beyond reasonable doubt that blackmail occurred, but don't require anything be proven about the truth of the blackmail info or the blackmailer's beliefs. In practice, this makes blackmail difficult to get away with.
If blackmail laws were removed and nothing else changed, then blackmail-based-on-slander would be under the same evidentiary rules as blackmail-based-on-truth, which are tilted towards the blackmailer, and blackmail-based-on-slander would become easy to get away with.
Outsiders may disagree, but the typical person who supports a society's norms sees an advantage from more cost-effective enforcement of them. If the typical person didn't support them, they couldn't be the society's norms.
"blackmail is wrong" is a norm.
I think that in pre modern societies it was more a Lese Majeste law.. you weren't supposed to decry your social superiors, but your inferiors were fair game.
Unless you can have too much norm adherence.
To make the point a bit more vivid, in a left-liberal hegomony Alice could blackmail Bob over having made a racist or sexist comment.
Or too put it abstractly: if you wind norm adherence up to infinity, you wind personal freedom down to zero.
I strongly disagree that adding that condition makes it easier to pursue and prove.
A condition that makes it somewhat easier to pursue and prove. Still not easy, but that is what pragmatism is all about, pragmatism. It is the pursuit of ideas to absurdity that is itself absurd.