For non-crime blackmail, there’s a broader question about whether we should give people incentives to share information about norm-violation. I think an important question is: whose norms?
Perhaps most of society believes in ritually torturing themselves for an hour every day with electric shocks, to ward off demonic possession. Perhaps I don’t believe in that. If you find out that my ritual-electric-shock chair has been mostly disabled and is running at 1% of standard power, should you have an incentive to blackmail me about that?
Perhaps I think X is a bad religion, and I spend a lot of time warning people away from it and trying to deconvert people who have joined it. Members of X are notoriously aggressive about attacking people who do this, in ways both legal and illegal. If you find out that I’m really active on the X-Is-Bad forum, should you have an incentive to blackmail me about that?
Perhaps I’m gay, or I’m in an open relationship, or I have lots of unusual sex. (The stories of Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan come to mind here.) Perhaps there are lots of socially-conservative people who would want to cancel me if they found that out. Should you have an incentive to blackmail me about that?
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I’m only aware of one non-crime activity which I think we should try to discourage, and that’s cheating-on-your-spouse. But I can think of lots of examples of non-crime activities which I think we should be free to do without fear of getting blackmailed. To me, that suggests that we should have a special case for the cheating thing, and we should have the general case be that blackmail continues to be illegal.
You are very much in the minority if you want to abolish norms in general.
There’s a parallel here with the fifth amendment’s protection from self incrimination making it harder to enforce laws and laws being good on average. This isn’t paradoxical because the fifth amendment doesn’t make it equally difficult to enforce all laws. Actions that harm other people tend to have other ways of leaving evidence that can be used to convict. If you murder someone, the body is proof that someone has been harmed and the DNA in your van points towards you being the culprit. If you steal someone’s bike, you don’t have to confess in order to be caught with the stolen bike. On the other hand, things that stay in the privacy of your own home with consenting adults are *much* harder to acquire evidence for if you aren’t allowed to force people to testify against themselves. They’re also much less likely to be things that actually need to be sought out and punished.
If it were the case that one coherent agent were picking all the rules with good intent, then it wouldn’t make sense to create rules that make enforcement of other rules harder. There isn’t one coherent agent picking all the rules and intent isn’t always good, so it’s important to fight for meta rules that make it selectively hard to enforce any bad rules that get through.
You can try to argue that preventing blackmail isn’t selective *enough* (or that it selects in the wrong direction), but you can’t just equate blackmail with “norm enforcement [applied evenly across the board]”.
I’m not arguing for abolishing norms. You are arguing for dramatically increasing the rate of norm enforcement, and I’m arguing for keeping norm enforcement at the current level.
Above, I’ve provided several examples of ways that I think that increasing the rate of norm enforcement could have bad effects. Do you have some examples of ways that you think that increasing the rate of norm enforcement could have good effects?
Note that, for this purpose, we are only counting norm enforcements that are so severe that people would be willing to pay a blackmail fee to escape them. You can’t say “there’s a norm against littering, so increasing the rate of enforcing that norm would decrease littering” unless you have a plausible scenario in which people would get blackmailed for littering.
For non-crime blackmail, there’s a broader question about whether we should give people incentives to share information about norm-violation. I think an important question is: whose norms?
Perhaps most of society believes in ritually torturing themselves for an hour every day with electric shocks, to ward off demonic possession. Perhaps I don’t believe in that. If you find out that my ritual-electric-shock chair has been mostly disabled and is running at 1% of standard power, should you have an incentive to blackmail me about that?
Perhaps I think X is a bad religion, and I spend a lot of time warning people away from it and trying to deconvert people who have joined it. Members of X are notoriously aggressive about attacking people who do this, in ways both legal and illegal. If you find out that I’m really active on the X-Is-Bad forum, should you have an incentive to blackmail me about that?
Perhaps I’m gay, or I’m in an open relationship, or I have lots of unusual sex. (The stories of Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan come to mind here.) Perhaps there are lots of socially-conservative people who would want to cancel me if they found that out. Should you have an incentive to blackmail me about that?
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I’m only aware of one non-crime activity which I think we should try to discourage, and that’s cheating-on-your-spouse. But I can think of lots of examples of non-crime activities which I think we should be free to do without fear of getting blackmailed. To me, that suggests that we should have a special case for the cheating thing, and we should have the general case be that blackmail continues to be illegal.
You are very much in the minority if you want to abolish norms in general.
There’s a parallel here with the fifth amendment’s protection from self incrimination making it harder to enforce laws and laws being good on average. This isn’t paradoxical because the fifth amendment doesn’t make it equally difficult to enforce all laws. Actions that harm other people tend to have other ways of leaving evidence that can be used to convict. If you murder someone, the body is proof that someone has been harmed and the DNA in your van points towards you being the culprit. If you steal someone’s bike, you don’t have to confess in order to be caught with the stolen bike. On the other hand, things that stay in the privacy of your own home with consenting adults are *much* harder to acquire evidence for if you aren’t allowed to force people to testify against themselves. They’re also much less likely to be things that actually need to be sought out and punished.
If it were the case that one coherent agent were picking all the rules with good intent, then it wouldn’t make sense to create rules that make enforcement of other rules harder. There isn’t one coherent agent picking all the rules and intent isn’t always good, so it’s important to fight for meta rules that make it selectively hard to enforce any bad rules that get through.
You can try to argue that preventing blackmail isn’t selective *enough* (or that it selects in the wrong direction), but you can’t just equate blackmail with “norm enforcement [applied evenly across the board]”.
I’m not arguing for abolishing norms. You are arguing for dramatically increasing the rate of norm enforcement, and I’m arguing for keeping norm enforcement at the current level.
Above, I’ve provided several examples of ways that I think that increasing the rate of norm enforcement could have bad effects. Do you have some examples of ways that you think that increasing the rate of norm enforcement could have good effects?
Note that, for this purpose, we are only counting norm enforcements that are so severe that people would be willing to pay a blackmail fee to escape them. You can’t say “there’s a norm against littering, so increasing the rate of enforcing that norm would decrease littering” unless you have a plausible scenario in which people would get blackmailed for littering.