Ok, I had nothing better to do tonight so I was watching Bill O’Reilly. On the show they were discussing a case of blackmail and as a libertarian it got me thinking and I found it a bit hard for me to digest.
For starters, lets use Walter Blocks arguement that blackmail is not a crime. You have some information, make a threat to disclose the information unless someone else performs a voluntary action. No crime involved. Ok.
But here’s the case. Some pervert goes on facebook and poses as a girl and asks teenage girls to send him naked pictures. They do. He then reveals that he is a man and demands the girls have sex with him or else he will publish the pictures on facebook. Aparently like 30 girls ended up having sex with him over this.
Now, I feel like I’m completely missing something. To me, this has to be a crime. But using Block’s arugument of blackmail (which I agree with), there doesn’t seem to be anything illegal.
Maybe you could say that he committed fruad when posing as another girl. But there wasn’t any contract offer. He just asked (or that’s how it was told) for naked pictures and they voluntarily gave them to him.
Could this be rape? Granted, sex with a minor girl even if it was voluntary, maybe would be in a libertarian society. But what if they were 18 or were a mature enough 16 or 17 year old to be considered an adult? Is it still rape?
What am I missing? If we all had our grand libertarian utopia, would perverts get away with this?
Didn’t read the OP yet, but Block’s argument is that blackmail is perfectly legitimate.
His argument is that how can something be a crime when you’re threatening to do something, but what you’re threatening to do is not actually a crime itself.
Like: “give me 100 dollars or I’ll wear a blue vest tomorrow”.
In the same way telling someone some piece of information you have is also not a crime. So how can threatening doing it be?
I would think fruad too except there wasn’t any contract offer. He just asked for pictures, didn’t offer anything in return and they voluntarily gave them to him. Can you have fruad in absence of a contract?
It appears to me that the only fraud in this case was that he wasn’t a girl (assuming the OP description is correct and all there is to it); which to me appears to be a very minor offense.
Did any of the girls complain or just Bill? Because who knew sending naked pictures to strangers on facebook was going to backfire; right???
It appears to me that all of the people involved have severe psychological issues (that were caused years before all this), and taking people to court or to jail isn’t going to solve any of that.
That’s complicated, but the fact that the girls shared their pictures with who they thought was a girl, hints at fraud. I mean, wouldn’t a panhandler asking for money to buy food, who then went and bought booze be technically defrauding people? If not, then I really gotta brush up on my rights theory here.
I think the case would be somewhat more clear-cut if the subsequently blackmailed girls were sharing their pictures in exchange for the impostor’s pictures. If he then shared, e.g., his sister’s pictures, claiming them to be his own, then that would be fraud, right?
This. It’s not fraud if a person tells lies about him/herself in social situations like that. It’s not as if he’s selling a product or puttng inaccurate personal info on a contract. And who the hell doesn’t say whatever they can to get laid? What’s the difference between him doing that and some guy telling a girl at a bar that he’s personal friends with Jay Z in order to up his chances of getting with her? He didn’t force the girls to give him their pics. The girls simply made an unwise decision of sending nude pics to a guy they’ve never met. And unless they went into a contract that laid out the terms of arranging sex for his never releasing of the pics, he could still just release the pics after they have sex with him. The girls’ best bet is just to live with the fact that they screwed up and just deal with the fact that their nude pics might be floating around. And if his identity is exposed, then he’ll pay they social ramifications of looking like a lying pervert.
Of course there is such a thing as a “minor”. By definition it is any child that does not have the capacity to understand the consequences of his or her actions. Thus a legal guardian is needed until the child becomes mature enough. That would not change in a libertarian society. The only difference would be the age of majority would be more subjective and on a case by case senario rather than just an artificial age number (18) that the state imposes.
Are you going to say that if a 5 year old voluntarily had sex with a 30 year old man that it would not be rape? Common of course it would. I think this case could very well be rape if the girls were young enough. Certainly not however if they were adults.
Even if none of this were legally fraud - and I sort of agree with you that it isn’t, but I’m not entirely sure yet - that would not say anything about its morality. Duping or blackmailing people into sex is not “having game”, it’s being a manipulative asshole.