I’m a little confused about how the burden of proof ended up as it is in this discussion. I think most people intuitively understand that blackmail is a bad thing. That they are not able to articulate a rigorous, general argument for why seems like a much higher bar than we expect for other things.
Consider murder. Murder should be illegal, obviously (I hope?! Not sure there is much to discuss if we disagree on that). But it’s not trivial to construct a rigorous, general argument for why. Any demonstrated harm can be countered with another hypothetical in which some convoluted chain of events following the murder creates a net benefit.
“Oh, it’s always bad to shoot a stranger in the street? What if you have an uncanny ability to identify serial killers and recognize some stranger as one who’s about to kill again and you can prevent even more deaths by shooting them on sight?”
“You think killing your unfaithful spouse should be illegal? What about if the knowledge that they’re continuing to see other people causes you such great psychological harm that killing the spouse is actually less bad, huh?”
And you don’t really have to go to silly extremes like that to generate counter examples; most claims that “murder should be illegal” implicitly except killing for self defense, during wartime or for national security reasons, euthanasia, late term abortion for medical reasons, and the death penalty itself. I’m not saying everyone has the same list of exceptions, but I’ve never met anyone who rejects all of those simultaneously and claims that literally all murder, no matter the context or consequences, should be illegal. That’s not what people mean when they say murder should be illegal.
How is the blackmail situation any different? It’s trivial to come up with endless exceptions in which the blackmail is more like whistleblowing and provides a net benefit. I have two responses to that. First off, even if blackmail were legalized, the government would never allow routine whistleblowing. There are always a million exceptions when it comes to how three letter organizations and their information are treated legally. But more importantly, why does the possibility of black swan whistleblowing scenarios make the law worse to have than not? There are plenty of exceptions to the general rule that murder is bad and yet we still have laws against murder, right?
I’m a little confused about how the burden of proof ended up as it is in this discussion.
Among people generally, the burden of proof is the opposite of what you perceived it to be in this discussion. But this post was responding to a blog post claiming the arguments for legally prohibiting blackmail aren’t persuasive.
But in any case, the point of the discussion is to sharpen our intuitions, or even discard then if warranted.
I’m a little confused about how the burden of proof ended up as it is in this discussion. I think most people intuitively understand that blackmail is a bad thing. That they are not able to articulate a rigorous, general argument for why seems like a much higher bar than we expect for other things.
Consider murder. Murder should be illegal, obviously (I hope?! Not sure there is much to discuss if we disagree on that). But it’s not trivial to construct a rigorous, general argument for why. Any demonstrated harm can be countered with another hypothetical in which some convoluted chain of events following the murder creates a net benefit.
“Oh, it’s always bad to shoot a stranger in the street? What if you have an uncanny ability to identify serial killers and recognize some stranger as one who’s about to kill again and you can prevent even more deaths by shooting them on sight?”
“You think killing your unfaithful spouse should be illegal? What about if the knowledge that they’re continuing to see other people causes you such great psychological harm that killing the spouse is actually less bad, huh?”
And you don’t really have to go to silly extremes like that to generate counter examples; most claims that “murder should be illegal” implicitly except killing for self defense, during wartime or for national security reasons, euthanasia, late term abortion for medical reasons, and the death penalty itself. I’m not saying everyone has the same list of exceptions, but I’ve never met anyone who rejects all of those simultaneously and claims that literally all murder, no matter the context or consequences, should be illegal. That’s not what people mean when they say murder should be illegal.
How is the blackmail situation any different? It’s trivial to come up with endless exceptions in which the blackmail is more like whistleblowing and provides a net benefit. I have two responses to that. First off, even if blackmail were legalized, the government would never allow routine whistleblowing. There are always a million exceptions when it comes to how three letter organizations and their information are treated legally. But more importantly, why does the possibility of black swan whistleblowing scenarios make the law worse to have than not? There are plenty of exceptions to the general rule that murder is bad and yet we still have laws against murder, right?
Have you read the Hanson post that this post is replying to?
Among people generally, the burden of proof is the opposite of what you perceived it to be in this discussion. But this post was responding to a blog post claiming the arguments for legally prohibiting blackmail aren’t persuasive.
But in any case, the point of the discussion is to sharpen our intuitions, or even discard then if warranted.