The Morality of Blackmail

Lizzie Widdicombe, of The New Yorker (doesn't that just sound like the name of someone who would write for The New Yorker?), has an interesting piece about the moral-reasoning behind the idea that blackmail is wrong.

Consider the following example:

"There’s a film coming out—a thinly disguised portrayal of a media mogul—and word is that if it’s released it will hurt the mogul’s reputation. Powerful people intervene: they call a meeting and offer the movie studio money—eight hundred and forty-two thousand dollars—to scrap the movie and destroy the negatives. Would it be wrong for the studio to take the money?...

...The mogul in question was William Randolph Hearst, and the movie was Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane.” The studio turned down the offer, but, (Northwestern law professor James) Lindgren asked, “had they given in and taken the money, could the studio have been prosecuted for extortion?”"

Widdicombe goes on to ask if the same reasoning can be applied to the current situation with David Letterman, or, more specifically, with Robert Halderman (the CBS executive who is being prosecuted for attempting to get Letterman to pay him money to keep Letterman's affairs with female staffers a secret).

As Widdicombe puts it:

"The thinking goes like this: It’s perfectly legal for Halderman to write, or threaten to write, a screenplay (or an e-mail to TMZ) exposing the fact that David Letterman had flings with “Late Show” employees. It’s also legal for Halderman to ask Letterman for money as part of a business transaction. So why are the two things illegal when you put them together? In other words,...Why is it illegal to threaten to do what you can do legally anyway?"

The only way you can really defend blackmail as being wrong is to judge the motives of the individual (or individuals) who are engaging in it. If you're asking someone for money to provide a service for them in terms of a business deal, its okay, but if you ask them for money for more nefarious reasons, that's wrong.

The problem is that our justice system is not set up to judge guilt and innocence on the basis of motives alone (although motivation can have an impact on the degree to which a convicted criminal is punished), so there has to be a more objective standard. It's just very difficult to find, apparently.

Maybe the only real reason to make blackmail illegal is as a deterrent against doing something that is legal, but not very nice, says Erin Smith of Business Insider. But that doesn't sound like a very good foundation for making something against the law. After all, there are plenty of mean/annoying/irritating things that are perfectly legal. It seems that Libertarian economist Walter Block, quoted in the New Yorker article, would agree. He says that blackmail, "like smoking, is "yucky", but should be legal."

Your Thoughts?