Blackmail

Blackmail can be defined as a demand for money (or other benefits, e.g., sexual services) combined with a threat to reveal something about the “victim” of this enterprise; it is illegal everywhere. Quotation marks have been placed around the word “victim” to indicate that there is indeed much controversy with regard to this act. Libertarians claim that it is a victimless crime. Most ordinary folk view it with abhorrence and distaste. Mainstream legal analysts all agree that blackmail should be illegal, but they disagree as to precisely why this should be the case.

In the libertarian view of blackmail, the only acts that should be against the law are physical invasions of the persons of innocent people or their rightfully owned property, or threats thereto. Murder, rape, and theft are paradigm cases and are thus considered illicit, but nothing else. So, on this view, does a blackmail threat rise (fall) to this level? No. Why? What exactly is the threat? Physical violence? No, not at [Page 69]all. If the target (not victim) of the blackmail menace does not comply with the demand for money, what will befall him? Simply this: The blackmailer will engage in his rights of free speech. He will become a gossip. He will reveal that the target has done something illegal, immoral, or embarrassing. Gossip, however, is legal. No one maintains that those who tell others' secrets should be considered criminals. If gossip is legal, and the blackmailer threatens to do no more than engage in that legal practice unless he is paid off to refrain, then blackmail, too, must be considered a lawful enterprise, according to this argument. This does not mean that libertarians favor engaging in blackmail, any more than they support partaking in other victimless crimes such as pornography, prostitution, gambling, drug taking; it means only that those who do so should not be punished by law.

Most people have never heard of this argument. Probably, most would be appalled if they did. In their view, blackmail simply does not pass the “smell” test. Perhaps the best spokesman for this perspective is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, in his 1905 story “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” has his hero Sherlock Holmes state the following about a “mere” blackmailer: “I've had to do with fifty murderers in my career, but the worst of them never gave me the repulsion which I have for this fellow.” Another commentator characterizes blackmail as “Attempted Murder of the Soul.”

It is crucially important to distinguish blackmail from extortion. In both, there is a demand coupled with a threat. But in the former case, the threat is to do something legal: gossip to all and sundry, as in “If you don't give me money, I'll blab all over the place.” In the latter, it is to initiate violence, as in “If you don't give me money, I'll shoot you, or kill your children,” or some such. All too often, commentators conflate these two very different acts. Indeed, many dictionaries offer blackmail and extortion as synonyms for each other.

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