In legal jargon, blackmail is threatening to reveal information, usually information that would damage the reputation of the person being threatened, unless that person yields to the threatening party’s demands. Extortion and coercion refer to the more general act of levying threats and ultimatums to change someone’s behavior. The only common exception I know of to this terminology is nuclear blackmail.
The conceptual analysis edge-case you give is called price gouging. Lawful commercial threats (withdrawing business) can come from customers as well. Threatening to deny a seller your purchase unless offered a better deal is a threat made credible by the existence of alternative sellers and substitute goods.
Just from memory, it seem to me that unlawful, morally reprehensible coercive threats, as made by people rather than software agents, are not often very costly to the person making them, and not anywhere near as costly to the threatener as to the threatenee. For that reason, I don’t think “costly to the threatening party if the victim doesn’t yield” quite cuts at the joints of “the bad kind of extortion”, when talking about human interactions. Some of the reasons why we don’t make threats that are costly to ourselves:
We have value uncertainty. If Mr. Extortion Black kidnaps and ransoms the child of Eccentric Richman, the harmful action he threatens won’t be “release a plague that eats everyone’s feet”, because maybe Richman hates his child and his feet.. Or he doesn’t hate his feet, but he doesn’t disvalue losing them because he can just buy prosthetic ones for himself (or for everyone except Mr. Black).
If I threaten to prove a contradiction and destroy reality should my friend Internet Troll fail to make a sandwich for me, there’s a non-negligible chance that he’ll tell me to “do it, friend”. In this case I’d avoid the threat both because of my uncertainty of his values and because he doubts my commitment or my ability to act.
Blackmail in particular, among kinds of extortion, has been subjected to a long history of legal conceptual analysis. Many legal theorists take the position, contrary to popular opinion across most cultures, that while blackmail is morally wrong, it should not be unlawful, given that we don’t police threats or the revealing of secrets separately. “How could threatening to do something legal be a crime?”
Conceptual analysis is difficult. Sometimes it’s an incorrect to approach to solving mysterious questions. The best way I know to work with it is to keep a goal in mind that will help determine boundaries of relevant categories, like remembering that you’re gathering vanadium when you sort bleggs and rubes and edge cases. So what’s your goal?
In legal jargon, blackmail is threatening to reveal information, usually information that would damage the reputation of the person being threatened, unless that person yields to the threatening party’s demands. Extortion and coercion refer to the more general act of levying threats and ultimatums to change someone’s behavior. The only common exception I know of to this terminology is nuclear blackmail.
The conceptual analysis edge-case you give is called price gouging. Lawful commercial threats (withdrawing business) can come from customers as well. Threatening to deny a seller your purchase unless offered a better deal is a threat made credible by the existence of alternative sellers and substitute goods.
Just from memory, it seem to me that unlawful, morally reprehensible coercive threats, as made by people rather than software agents, are not often very costly to the person making them, and not anywhere near as costly to the threatener as to the threatenee. For that reason, I don’t think “costly to the threatening party if the victim doesn’t yield” quite cuts at the joints of “the bad kind of extortion”, when talking about human interactions. Some of the reasons why we don’t make threats that are costly to ourselves:
We have value uncertainty. If Mr. Extortion Black kidnaps and ransoms the child of Eccentric Richman, the harmful action he threatens won’t be “release a plague that eats everyone’s feet”, because maybe Richman hates his child and his feet.. Or he doesn’t hate his feet, but he doesn’t disvalue losing them because he can just buy prosthetic ones for himself (or for everyone except Mr. Black).
If I threaten to prove a contradiction and destroy reality should my friend Internet Troll fail to make a sandwich for me, there’s a non-negligible chance that he’ll tell me to “do it, friend”. In this case I’d avoid the threat both because of my uncertainty of his values and because he doubts my commitment or my ability to act.
Blackmail in particular, among kinds of extortion, has been subjected to a long history of legal conceptual analysis. Many legal theorists take the position, contrary to popular opinion across most cultures, that while blackmail is morally wrong, it should not be unlawful, given that we don’t police threats or the revealing of secrets separately. “How could threatening to do something legal be a crime?”
Conceptual analysis is difficult. Sometimes it’s an incorrect to approach to solving mysterious questions. The best way I know to work with it is to keep a goal in mind that will help determine boundaries of relevant categories, like remembering that you’re gathering vanadium when you sort bleggs and rubes and edge cases. So what’s your goal?