Should Blackmail Be Legal?

> Robin Hanson: My claim was not so much that blackmail is good but that no one had offered concrete, clear, consequentialist arguments for why blackmail should be banned, especially relative to allowing NDAs in terms of who makes the offer.

It's about power imbalance. In the case of blackmail, it's extortion. Someone forces you to pay money and threatens you with unpleasant consequences.

With an NDA, not the person signing the NDA has more power, the other party has. Yes, they pay you, but they can sue you if you leak the secret.

Which, thinking about it, also likely happens if a blackmailer leaks their secret when you don't pay up... So I think the assymetry is not as big as they say. Also a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a small mind.

Robin misses the point that blackmail harms people as it is an ongoing threat. How would you write a contract that says what you are being blackmailed for without the lawyers involved that wrote the contract also blackmailing you? How do you prevent someone from leaking something anonymously and reneging on the contract to blackmail you repeatedly for the same thing? I feel the con side was really weak and didn't dive into the actual implementation problems at all.

this reminds me of the letterman case. The guy got nailed for blackmail, he would have been so much better off just selling the info to a tabloid.