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Abstract: Many of us easily agree that blackmail is clearly immoral, and thus are quite content with its criminalization. Justifying this belief is more difficult than it might initially seem. It is difficult if not impossible to distinguish cases of blackmail, which we prohibit, from other hard economic transactions, which we do not criminalize although we may dislike them. It might be tempting to suggest that we ought to criminalize blackmail because it is coercion of one citizen by another, but this is too quick because it is more accurate to say that some blackmail is one individual coercing another to do something, the failure of which will induce the blackmailer to do something which he has no right to do. Other blackmail situations possess no such inherent coercion and thus the paradox of blackmail. This article attempts to make a start toward sorting out the problems involved in answering this difficult question. These problems have a profundity not immediately obvious when the topic of blackmail is first raised, for they force us to look at the morality of a whole range of economic transactions.
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