I don’t have a ton of time right now, so just initial reaction:

It seems like in the case of the boycott, I’m making an individual choice, and as an individual, I don’t deal a great deal of harm against a corporation. It is a legitimate choice to choose not to buy a product. If I decide to organize a boycott, its a collection of individual choices. but in that case, my complaint is aired, regardless of the effectiveness of the boycott.

In the blackmail situation, you’re forcing a choice upon the blackmailed party. The complaint is contingent upon personal gain.

I don’t really see the similarity between the cases. In one case, boycotters of a product (say unfairly traded coffee), are trying to make a point, and workers who are striking want to be fairly paid. The person who is threatening to reveal something otherwise private, and perhaps of no particular business of anyone else, is doing so for her own private gain, even if, say, she wants money for her daughter’s medical care. The boycott and the strike are commensurate with and related to the actions of the boycotters or strikers, the blackmailer’s are not. If she really thought it a matter of public record, something that people should know, and scandalous enough to cause problems for (in this case) a political candidate, I’m sure she could have easily sold her story to the news media. Then, she would not only be informing the public of something it was their business to know, but helping her daughter at the same time, as well as doing nothing illegal. Demanding money with menaces is not without its shady side, and often deals in information that no one really has a right to know, no matter how scandalous if known.

Usually blackmailers blackmail for personal gain. In my case, Jane is aiming for EITHER exposure of the politician OR cure of her child. She is not aiming for personal gain. In fact, she’s aiming for something good (a disjunctive good–this OR that). What’s curious is that the intuition persists that she does wrong, despite her good intentions and the good results the blackmailing will have.

I don’t think people can sell news to reputable newspapers, fyi. So there isn’t that happy alternative.

Jane has other options besides blackmail in order to help her sick child. She’s blackmailing someone because she’s morally and ethically inferior.

Workers going on strike do so as a last resort. A striking worker is not always (if ever) looking to ruin the company they work for. That would be counter-productive. They are striking because they believe they are being treated unfairly by their employer. A corporation is not a person. It does not have to worry about personal embarassment, or divorce, or any of the other issues a person being blackmailed may be concerned with.

I also fail to see the similarities. Granted that the woman who blackmails has good intentions: to help her sick child, but people who blackmail generally do so for personal gain, playing on the weakness of others (the blackmailed person). We could just as well say that Jane robs a bank to get money for her child’s operation. Would that be justified? Perhaps it would be justified in a system which denies free medical care to sick children. That is, in an unjust society, one which denies medical care to sick children, one is justified in committing crimes: blackmailing or robbing a bank. On the other hand, people who boycott almost always do so for a good cause. Strikes are a legitimate pressure tactic used by workers to demand higher wages. The fact that strikes and boycotts are compared to blackmail, a sleazy crime, perhaps lower than bank robbery on my ethical scale at least, indicates a conscious or unconscious intention to discredit legitimate tactics of political struggle. Sorry to be so harsh.

Jean wrote:

Smilanksy inventories the various solutions in the literature, and finds some merit here and there, but says on the whole we can’t really explain what’s so bad about blackmail in terms of something intrinsic to it. ’Paradoxically, what singles it out is that little or no good derives from it.”

What do you say to someone that doesn’t find x wrong? One might try to establish that x was an example of an action which most people would say was wrong. How about blackmail as an example of demanding money with menaces or extortion. In this case one is threatening to wreck their carreer, marriage or political future by means of a secret which came into ones possesion by some underhand means. The instrument of coercion is psychological rather than a weapon but the principle remains the same. Not to report a serious unsolved offence to the police is in itself a crime.

There is much more that could be said about blackmail but if at the end of it all if the person remains puzzled about the wrongness of it we might be disposed to say that in their search for the killer scenario moral philosophers are apt to affect uncertainty about actions which folk ethicists would condemn. Is this such a case?

Wait, wait, wait…I think the point of my Jane example is being missed (to be honest).

OK, we have a puzzle–and it’s just a puzzle, not an attempt to defend blackmailers or smear boycotters and strikers (that was for Amos). The puzzle is (basically) how blackmail, boycotts, and strikes can be so similar, yet so different. Why is the first immoral and illegal, if the others are neither? I do see the initial similarity, so the puzzle grabs me.

The first blackmailer that comes to mind is a very shady character. He’s just trying to enrich himself. He doesn’t care about the impact of publicizing someone’s dirty secret. He’s doing this willfully, and not as a last resort. This person certainly differs from the first boycotter or striker who comes to mind. But here’s the intriguing thing. The intuition that blackmail is very wrong is extremely persistent.

Enter Jane. Jane is not the first blackmailer who comes to mind. She’s altruistic. She cares about the public’s right to know and cares about her child’s health. You can even imagine she blackmails as a last resort. And yet (how odd!) she’s a blackmailer and it still seems like she does something wrong! If you can explain what Jane does wrong, then you’ve gotten at the essence of what’s wrong with blackmail. If you can only explain what’s wrong with the first blackmailer who comes to mind, then you haven’t.

So I’ve tried to explain what’s intrinsically wrong with what Jane does. Of course, I have to avoid talking about traits of the typical blackmailer. I have to talk about Jane. (Which I do in my next to last paragraph.)

Michael–If SS thinks no such explanation is forthcoming, it’s not because he doesn’t find blackmail wrong. Presumably he does, and that’s why his inability to accept any deep explanation is intellectually discomforting (to him) and he considers his “deflationary” story paradoxical.

Blackmail is wrong like torture is wrong. What if Jane were an altruistic torturer? Would you defend her? What if she were torturing a terrorist suspected of having placed a ticking bomb in a hospital for children? Would that make torture right?
I think that there are sliding slope arguments which make it very difficult to defend either altruistic blackmail or altruistic torture.

While I should probably credit Jane for her intricate inner life, blackmailers and strikers share no similarities.

Sorry Jane, I don’t give a flip about you. How about we just look at the act of blackmail rather than try to decorate it with altruistic ribbons?

Amos, I’m not defending Jane. In fact, as I’ve said, I’m explaining what’s wrong with what she does. The point, again, is that the intuition that blackmail is wrong persists across all sorts of cases. It won’t do to just focus on the “easy” cases, where there are all sorts of things wrong with blackmailers. You want to be able to explain what’s wrong in the “hard” case where the blackmailer is not completely nefarious. The point is to achieve a deeper explanation.

Tree, Sounds like this puzzle is not your cup of tea. Some people like puzzles and paradoxes (I do), some don’t.

To remind you of what I said about Jane–and that I did try to explain what she did wrong, I will be bold and quote myself–

The fun thing about paradoxes is that they spur feverish figuring out. Reason doesn’t like the paradoxical, so tries to fix it and avoid it. My own “fixing” over the last couple of days leads me to say this on behalf of the striker and boycotter: if the business owner doesn’t comply with their demands, then he deserves what he gets. The punishment (no workers, no business) has a connection with the crime.

But in blackmail it’s a different story. If the sleazy politician doesn’t pay Jane, he doesn’t deserve to have his misdeeds exposed for that. Maybe it’s proper for his misdeeds to be exposed. Maybe he would have no reason to complain if a journalist reported the story. But Jane is setting things up so that the exposure is due to the non-payment. Jane has set a trap for him that can only make him feel that life is wretchedly unfair. And since none of us want to be in the politician’s position, it’s a good thing blackmail is illegal.

What I like about this explanation is that it appears to be one you could use to explain the wrongness of any act of blackmailing. It’s not limited to especially nefarious or especially benign cases. It applies to Jane, but also to the run of the mill creepy blackmailer.

Of course, it could be a bad explanation even if it aspires to generality in an admirable way. I’ll be happy to hear what’s bad about it, if someone would care to comment (on what I really said, and not on my alleged defense of Jane).

So, as far as I can see, we all agree: blackmailing (even if one’s child is ill) is bad and should be illegal;
strikes and boycotts are legal methods of protest.

Yes, but the puzzle is “why”? Considering the similarities, what is the basis for placing blackmail in such a distinctive moral and legal category? Is it deeply and intrinsically different, or (paradoxically) just less likely to lead to good results?.

I just don’t see the similarities. Life is full of forms of pressure. Your boss can pressure you into selling more this month by threatening to fire you. Workers can pressure the boss into raising wages by threatening to stop work. My mother can pressure me into answering her myriad emails by making me feel guilty. None of those forms are pressure are either illegal or wrong. Let’s look at blackmail. Almost all of us have done things which we would not like to appear as the headlines of all the tabloids in the world. Happily, the tabloids are not very interested in my past sins: my past sins don’t sell newspapers. The past or present sins of public figures do sell newspapers. What’s more, the revelation of the past or present sins of a public figure can ruin his or her career, often without any consideration of his or her merits as a public figure.
That is, there is no evidence that adulterers or homosexuals or heavy drinkers (Winston Churchill) are necessarily bad leaders. So blackmail plays on the vulnerability of a public figure, a vulnerability that 99% of humanity potentially shares. No one would want blackmail to be universally practiced, because almost everyone has some sins to hide. When I speak of sins, I exclude legal crimes, which should be denounced. The blackmailer is a like a robber who points a pistol at your head. However, instead of saying “your money or your life”, the blackmailer says “your money or your career”.

Jean:
It may be a matter of scale and the assimilation of different scales to each other. You can move from the level of the atlas to the level of the room plan as circumstances require. Further out boycott, strike and blackmail may blend into coercion but when you go closer their individual features stand out. Keeping contrary attributes going at the same time is the mark of the paradox, we oscillate between them unable to decide.

It’s also the case that the level of moral judgement is at a different scale to that of the individual event which is unique. As we go out we blend and assimilate, as we go in we individualise.

That’s the original Platonic paradox: we encounter the particular only but we judge by the general. I seem to recollect scalar puzzles in the Dialogues about the good, courage and foolhardiness etc.

Jean- Just throwing this out there… I’m not ready to say I actually believe this idea…. but maybe this is a trolley case. Kill one person save five, everyone is for it. Push a person on the tracks to save five lots have reservations. On requires a different kind of intention than the other (so I believe anyways) and that might be the key difference between the two acts.

similarly, this difference in intention might be at work here between the strikers and the blackmailer.

There are no similarities. To compare striking workers to blackmail is just offensive.

“To compare striking workers to blackmail is just offensive.”

Is offensive to whom? I find the comparison thoughtful, insightful really. But then, I’ve come to expect that from W.Y.

Jean, I loved the story of your suffering family (mine would sympathize), and of how you gradually got your children to see the attractions of blackmail.

Just a note before I start. This paradox isn’t mine: it has been known to philosophers and legal theorists for some time, and there is an impressive literature on it. (The phenomena of Fortunate Misfortune is of course also familiar before I wrote about it, but as far as I know mine is the first analysis of it as a philosophical paradox. The other 8 paradoxes in the book are original.) My claim for originality on blackmail is the solution, which (as Jean said), because of it’s deflationary nature, seems paradoxical.

It’s important to clear the way for our thought experiment from various other matters that will just cloud our thinking. So, we want to put aside extortion, where one threatenes to do an illegal action (if one is not permitted to beat someone up, it’s no wonder one isn’t permitted to threaten to do so). Similarly, we are not talking about using (e.g.) information that was acquired in an unacceptable manner (such as through wire-tapping), or saying false things (as in defamation). We also don’t want to think about cases where we ask the person we are blackmailing to do immoral or illegal things. Even without all those things, it is easy to think of cases of what we can call “ordinary blackmail”, e.g, you know that your neighbor is having an affair, and you ask her for money in return for not telling her husband. It’s legal to tell the husband, as it is to ask for money (in itself). The moral aspects are less clear, but still the particular moral outrage and disgust that blackmail elicits seems special. Why do we view blackmail in this extreme way, morally, and outlaw it morally? Why, indeed, is it so horrible and such a grave crime to open up a company that will engage in blackmail (find out open information about people, and then offer them not to make use of it)? Why is this not just sharp capitalist practice? We need, after all, good reason to outlaw things, and to view them as morally odious as we view blackmailers. But what are those reasons?

It seems like it would be easy to give a reply, but it hasn’t proven to be that way. Blackmailers make money by making coercive offers and by taking advantage of people and their weaknesses. But then so do employers lowering the salaries of their workers, or the gutter press when it prints unpleasant stories and pictures and ruins the lives of people (people who would often be glad to be able to pay blackmail instead of suffering the bad publicity!). And so on. The features of “ordinary blackmail” (threats, taking advantage, “being a parasite”, etc.) are eerily present in much of our social life. So what is special about blackmail? So far, none of the solutions that have been offered seem persuasive. My reply is that there isn’t in fact anything DEEP going on here: blackmail is detestable and harmful, like many other paractices. But the difference is that unlike the other social practices, there isn’t anything comparable that is good about it (as there is about worker-employer negotiation, or a free press), to redeem it. So we shouldn’t legalize blackmail, nor look at it favorably, morally, but that’s NOT because there is anything particularly bad about it. And that seems to me pretty paradoxical.

Saul has just made his view quite persuasive, but I will say–I think it would show philosophical bad manners to just allow yourself to be persuaded, without putting up a fight. You ought to resist, making every effort to find something deeply bad about blackmail. After some period of resistance, only then should you give in. I’m not quite done resisting, though I do find him persuasive fairly persuasive.

It occurs to me that blackmail, striking, and boycotting all have something to do with punishment. They all (could) issue in sentences like:

If you don’t raise our wages, we wil punish you by not working.

If you don’t improve conditions for migrant workers, we will punish you by not buying your grapes.

If you don’t pay me off, I will punish you by publicizing your dirty secrets.

OK, it’s a little forced, but there’s something to the “punishment” construal. The advantage of that construal is that it allows you to see a difference. In the other cases, the punishment might be perfectly fair. In the blackmail case, it isn’t fair at all. The sleazy politician doesn’t deserve to have his secrets publicized as punishment for failure to pay off the blackmailer, though he might deserve for other reasons.

Another point: workers and consumers are entitled to punish business owners because of a certain contractual relationship that exists between them. But blackmailers are total strangers, relative to their victims. There’s nothing that entitles them to punish these people for their sins.

The fun of the book is that it puts you in this sort of resistance mode, making you struggle to figure out ways to avoid paradox.

Again, I think it boils down to intention here…

Strikers are intending to get something that is morally just or fair. They have an entitlement to something that they are not receiving, and aim to get it, from the legitimate person who can provide it to them.

If we think of it that way, we can have immoral strikes, striking for something that you’re not really entitled to, or striking against your employer when they can’t provide you what you’re demanding (because of gov’t regulations or something).

Blackmail on the other hand is a kind of striking against someone for something that you are not particularly entitled to, or that they are not the legitimate person to be asking. The blackmailer’s intent is to exploit a circumstance, not to get what they are entitled to.

Blackmailing to help your child for instance is an example of something that you’re not particularly entitled to, and the person being blackmailed is not the legitimate person to be asking for the money anyways.

Is blackmail wrong because, like theft, or other wrong things, it is an offence against property (and privacy)? What makes Jane’s act wrong is that she has become privy to information that is none of her business (that she is not entitled to, as Wayne says), and that could be damaging to someone. A person’s privacy is a possession, sometimes a very valuable one. Threatening a person’s privacy by asking for money makes this clear. Who steals my purse steals nothing, but he who steals my good name steals something of real worth (to paraphrase the bard a bit roughly).

Wayne, I don’t see how all your points add up to the idea that “it boils down to intention.” It sounds, rather, like it boils down to justice, fairness, who’s entitled to ask for what from whom, and that sort of stuff. It seems like you can know an act of blackmail is wrong without knowing much about what was going on in the blackmailer’s mind.

Wayne and Eric - I want to give you a hard time (that’s what philosophy is for, after all). So let’s make the intention similar, and not think about cases where the entitlement differs, as far as we can. I can set up a business searching for information. My intention is to make money, and the information is out in the open. If I sell the information I find to newspapers (e.g. pictures of some celebrity kissing her neighbor behind the bushes), that’s fine. It’s maybe not the nost morally attractive business, but it would not be considered vile and despicable, nor would it be outlawed. But if the SAME business (same intention, same knowledge, same everything) begins to offer the information to the clients thmeselves (e.g. “I won’t sell this to the Sun if you pay me 5000 Pounds”) then it becomes moraly terrible and a very serious crime. So the challenge as I see it is to find anything in the second practice (i.e. the blackmail) that makes such a huge difference.

I find a person who earns a living selling scandalous photos of celebrities in private moments to be ethically despicable. However, the difference between her and a blackmailer is that there is no extortion: the blackmailer holds a metaphorical gun to his victim’s head and says “your money or your career.” Perhaps there should be more laws protecting the privacy of public people from photographers in any case.

Saul Smilansky
I read this earlier today:
“Associate professor of history at Pepperdine University, Stewart Davenport tackles the paradox of America’s exuberant spirituality and what he sees as its “gross materialism.” That such a paradox should exist in the Christian is easy to understand once one considers that the Christian ethic itself emerged in the first instance within a pre-industrial, pre-capitalist age.”

This use of ‘paradox’ is immediately intelligible to me and though I can understand the need for a hook to engage hormone addled youth, false paradox is not a bright shiny object but just an agent of confusion.

So you expected to find that blackmail would have a particular cofiguration of badness or be an evil with a distinct shape that would set it off from other forms of extortion and coercion. This was your ‘doxa’ so to speak but what you claim to have discovered is ‘para’ that ‘doxa’. Perhaps you ought not to have had this expectation. There is no good argument for it which is one of the marks of the paradox. It ignores the well known and accepted fact that words do not have rigid boundaries and that there is speaker’s meaning.

-That’s blackmail, said the Chairman of the Board.
-No it’s not said the Union Rep, you signed up for that , no changes to working practices without consultation.

We know what he means though even though it is not real blackmail. Real blackmail is much more specific even though it can and does have shifting boundaries where disputes can occur. Lawyers have to make a living too. No one should expect a particular precise form of badness but that it is bad is understood by all.

Wikipedia Defn:
<blockquote.Blackmail is the crime of threatening to reveal substantially true information about a person to the public, a family member, or associates unless a demand made upon the victim is met. This information is usually of an embarrassing and/or socially damaging nature. As the information is substantially true, the act of revealing the information may not be criminal in its own right nor amount to a civil law defamation; the crime is making demands to withhold it.

Blackmail is similar to extortion. The difference is that extortion involves an underlying, independent criminal act, while blackmail does not.

JK- mm… Yeah, it does seem like I’m moving away from intent here. Not sure what I was thinking when I wrote that.

Saul- I think I have to agree with Amos here… I’m not sure being a paparazzi is a terribly moral thing, to the point that it might be morally wrong to engage in.

Okay so lets change the case so that it isn’t a paparazzi, but just a journalist or an author that isn’t doing something plainly exploitive…. maybe something like a expose piece, with only the intention of making money, not necessarily for informing the public, but thats how they make money, by informing the public.

I think what I said before about entitlement to the information could help us decide between the two. In the blackmailing buisness, I’m not entitled to the information. If the public is genuinely not entitled to the information either, then the journalist is doing something wrong, no matter how juicy and how much the public would be willing to pay for that information (thus the wrongness of the paparazzi).

Now what determines the entitlement in these cases could depend upon all sorts of things, but the basic issues of making informed decisions, impact on personal lives etc. e.g. I would think that a spouse hiring a private investigator to determine if their partner is havign an affair is legitimate, since a spouse really is entitled to that information. But not to just what they were doing on a day to day basis, because their partner has a right to a reasonable air of privacy.

A distinction between the two forms of “blackmail” is that one is public and the other one is not. The striker and the boy-cotter’s threats are there for all to see, while Jane’s are not. I’m not sure what it means in terms of resolving the paradox except that perhaps our revulsion at, and instinct to criminalize, the sub rosa form, lies in the degree to which we value our own personal privacy and, by extension, that of others?

MR–If I understand you, you’re asking why it’s a paradox that blackmail isn’t morally singular. We never had any reason to think it was, to begin with (you say). But I think many paradoxes are like this–like the voter’s paradox. It is extremely obvious we should vote. It just is, apart from having any initial good reasons to think so. It’s paradoxical if you can’t support that conclusion with a sound argument.

Wayne–Isn’t Saul’s point about the paparazzi just that they are morally different from blackmailers, even if they have the same intentions and they do as much to violate privacy? Thus, it can’t be that the special badness of blackmailers is due to their intentions and the way they violate privacy. With that out of the way, we can continue our hunt for an explanation… Of course, Saul thinks we’re never going to find a “deep” one, but the only way to decide if he’s right is to give it a try. (As we are doing.)

Peter, Your point fits with the image at the top–the shadowy blackmailers in the movie. If you must do something secretly, can it be entirely innocent? Sadly, my inner counterexample generator is starting up….but I will suppress it. I do think there’s something to what you say, at least as an explanation of our reactions.

Jean-But you see I’d equate some of the paparazzi’s activities with blackmail. Not all, because sometimes the celebrity wants the paparazzi as much as the the paparazzi wants the celebrity… But in cases in which privacy is wanted and the paparazzi invade it, I’d say that that would be about as bad as blackmail.

I’m thinking of big celebrity weddings that want to be kept private like Brangelina’s wedding and the birth of their children. That surely must be as bad as if a student were to demand twenty bucks from me or s/he would give compromising photos of me to my wife or to the dean or something (twenty bucks because, hey I’m a philosophy instructor and not a a famous one).

Jean:
If you take the 7 Deadly Sins as the basic palette of turpitude then the mixing of them together will give you the complete ‘my bad’ chart.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins
Hindus incidentally have 6. They leave out sloth. I draw no Catholic work ethic conclusions. We can imagine ,I think, the mixing of different hues at different levels of saturation to give us the complete range of bad behaviour. In some the ‘red’ of anger will predominate, the passive aggressive might be light red with ice blue. In the way that we can discriminate quite precisely between different tones and hues our moral perception is trained from early childhood. We have no difficulty distinguishing anger from revenge but wherein does it lie precisely. They are on the same end of the spectrum. Perhaps revenge is anger that is lustfully pored over. Put anger together with gluttony and you might have ‘green crime’, destruction of habitats, strip mining etc. There will be tinctures of the other deadlies in all evil acts.

Just as we can distinguish between different colours without knowing the precise saturation of each colour of the spectrum in them we can say ‘this is sort of blackmail with a tincture of aggression and a soupcon of envy’ as in the paps assaults on the privacy of celebrities. The celebrities may well be asked
- Would you care to comment before we publish the story?

Michael wrote:
“No one should expect a particular precise form of badness but that it is bad is understood by all.”

If it is obviously bad and this is understood by all then it shouldn’t be too hard to explain why it is bad. I think the attitude you demonstrate here can be dangerous. Many people justify dodgy views, such as prejudice against gays or a stance against gay marriage, on the idea that “it’s just wrong”.

Eric:
“What makes Jane’s act wrong is that she has become privy to information that is none of her business”

Not at all. The actions of politicians are the public’s business *IF* they have a bearing on the politician’s public comments, his campaign, his policies etc. If a politician goes out of his way to portray himself as a traditional, good old loving family man because he believes that will help get our votes, then any actions he takes that show that to be a lie is fair game.

… further to that last post, what jane has done wrong here is not the obtaining of the information, but that she has used it in the ‘trap setting’ fashion. Jean K has basically got this one pegged.

Jean wrote:
“OK, it’s a little forced, but there’s something to the “punishment” construal. The advantage of that construal is that it allows you to see a difference. In the other cases, the punishment might be perfectly fair. In the blackmail case, it isn’t fair at all. The sleazy politician doesn’t deserve to have his secrets publicized as punishment for failure to pay off the blackmailer, though he might deserve for other reasons.”

That’s basically it Jean. I think you have solved this one. Saul seems to believe there’s nothing ‘deep’ about the wrongness of blackmail. I don’t know about ‘deep’, but I do think there is something intrinsically wrong with blackmail, that doesn’t apply to those other situations (strikes etc).

In the case of the other situations, such as strikes, sometimes the strikers can be unreasonable, but that’s contingent. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a strike - it may be completely valid “punishment” (as Jean puts it) for poor behavior by the management. The converse can be equally true: a lockout or similar action by an employer may be reasonable in some circumstances. The coercive aspect is related to and (arguably, depending on circumstances) justified by the situation.

As Jean as pointed out, there is no such relationship in the blackmail case. Jane isn’t justified in coercing money out of the politician just because he’s dodgy. IF he has done something dodgy, hypocritical etc, he should be exposed, but she should not contrive that into a trap whereby she gets something out of his avoiding the justified exposure. Jane should have made the information public. The fact that she resorted to blackmail for the reason that she did will elicit a lot of sympathy, and is a mitigating factor, but it doesn’t make it okay.

However, as far as blackmail goes, Jane’s is more understandable. Saul’s original attempted paradox and Jean’s response have brought an interesting idea to light. Namely, that blackmail is wrong, but not really *all that* wrong. That is, I disagree with whoever said earlier that blackmail was up there in terms of bad conduct. A lot of the ‘badness’ of blackmail comes from what Jean calls the nefarious aspects in most actual blackmail cases. These are aggravating factors. If you strip away the contingent nefariousness typical in blackmail, as Jean has in her example, you are left with something that, while wrong, is not quite so blatantly wrong as many once probably assumed.

Blackmail,boycott, and strike are different words with different meanings.
Blackmail is wrong and it is wrong not to stand up to it.
Boycotts or strikes can be good or bad. To strike because the boss wears a pink shirt would be wrong.
To strike or boycott for a livable wage would be proper.