You and me live in the open desert, and our dear mother is trapped there (assume some mythology).
No mythology necessary, actually. Two daughters and an aging mother. Which of the two gets to marry and move away from home, and which is left behind? My mother, her sister, and their mother. All dead now, so I can’t ask any of them if there was any conflict over it.
This is not something I would call blackmail, any more than I would call theft blackmail. Fait accompli: one of the two simply does something to the disadvantage of the other. It may of course be morally wrong, but there are many varieties of wrong, only some of which are blackmail.
But this is just a terminological question. The real question here is presumably: how can a rational agent be designed not to be exploitable by fait accompli?
No mythology necessary, actually. Two daughters and an aging mother. Which of the two gets to marry and move away from home, and which is left behind? My mother, her sister, and their mother. All dead now, so I can’t ask any of them if there was any conflict over it.
This is not something I would call blackmail, any more than I would call theft blackmail. Fait accompli: one of the two simply does something to the disadvantage of the other. It may of course be morally wrong, but there are many varieties of wrong, only some of which are blackmail.
But this is just a terminological question. The real question here is presumably: how can a rational agent be designed not to be exploitable by fait accompli?
I did the mythology simply so I could make one of them into a literal rock at the end :-)
It still has some similarities—in that they would only move away because of the expected behaviour of the other...