I sort of went the other way from most people, in that while I came in thinking blackmail should be illegal (which I think is true of almost everyone who hasn’t really considered it in depth), I immediately was sympathetic to Robin’s argument.
But actually, by the end, I was more firmly convinced of the desirability of illegality. Zwi’s point about incentives is the most important consideration, I think: the prohibition of the most powerful material incentive to obtain and release information will make the average information release much likelier to be morally motivated, which in turns makes it more likely to be the kind of information release we want. Robin’s main contention, that it it’s a strange, arbitrarily one-sided sort of a rule, seems comparatively unimportant if it produces better outcomes.
I sort of went the other way from most people, in that while I came in thinking blackmail should be illegal (which I think is true of almost everyone who hasn’t really considered it in depth), I immediately was sympathetic to Robin’s argument.
But actually, by the end, I was more firmly convinced of the desirability of illegality. Zwi’s point about incentives is the most important consideration, I think: the prohibition of the most powerful material incentive to obtain and release information will make the average information release much likelier to be morally motivated, which in turns makes it more likely to be the kind of information release we want. Robin’s main contention, that it it’s a strange, arbitrarily one-sided sort of a rule, seems comparatively unimportant if it produces better outcomes.