I started without very strong beliefs about blackmail, and over the course of the discussion I think mostly just gained more fleshed-out models of blackmail. I still lean towards “Blackmail is bad, should probably be illegal” and think most of the arguments to the contrary seemed optimistic or naive.
But the arguments to the contrary did also deepen my understanding of what things you might want to accomplish with blackmail, such as:
encourage punishment of actual bad behavior
counterbalancing punishment of elites (who have more power and so are generally harder to punish)
reach a new equilibrium where everyone knows that certain things are more common than we pretend they are, such that they maybe becomes less shameful, with weird distortionary effects.
I don’t think blackmail is a very useful way to go about that, but the underlying goals there seem important and I can think about them more clearly.
I started out with weak beliefs that blackmail is acceptable, and that weakened further, but didn’t change sign. It did highlight for me that the context that makes blackmail viable is often unpleasant, and examples are far too available which categorize blackmail as “monetary incentive to do the wrong thing (in either direction, by being paid in some cases and by not being paid in others)”, rather than “monetary incentive to choose between two permissible actions”.
It did make it clear (to me, maybe everyone else knew it) that it’s a pretty wide range of behaviors and situations under one label, and that if there is a right answer to the question, it’s to break it into multiple different topics and evaluate them separately.
Along with this, I understood that it can make sense for a group to outlaw something based not on intrinsics of the action, but based on association with other things that we’d like to ban, but can’t find a way to. Outlawing the complements to a hard-to-prosecute crime is understandable. But it requires more nuance than I think can be had in most online fora.
I started without very strong beliefs about blackmail, and over the course of the discussion I think mostly just gained more fleshed-out models of blackmail. I still lean towards “Blackmail is bad, should probably be illegal” and think most of the arguments to the contrary seemed optimistic or naive.
But the arguments to the contrary did also deepen my understanding of what things you might want to accomplish with blackmail, such as:
encourage punishment of actual bad behavior
counterbalancing punishment of elites (who have more power and so are generally harder to punish)
reach a new equilibrium where everyone knows that certain things are more common than we pretend they are, such that they maybe becomes less shameful, with weird distortionary effects.
I don’t think blackmail is a very useful way to go about that, but the underlying goals there seem important and I can think about them more clearly.
I started out with weak beliefs that blackmail is acceptable, and that weakened further, but didn’t change sign. It did highlight for me that the context that makes blackmail viable is often unpleasant, and examples are far too available which categorize blackmail as “monetary incentive to do the wrong thing (in either direction, by being paid in some cases and by not being paid in others)”, rather than “monetary incentive to choose between two permissible actions”.
It did make it clear (to me, maybe everyone else knew it) that it’s a pretty wide range of behaviors and situations under one label, and that if there is a right answer to the question, it’s to break it into multiple different topics and evaluate them separately.
Along with this, I understood that it can make sense for a group to outlaw something based not on intrinsics of the action, but based on association with other things that we’d like to ban, but can’t find a way to. Outlawing the complements to a hard-to-prosecute crime is understandable. But it requires more nuance than I think can be had in most online fora.