04-08-2025, 02:04 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-08-2025, 02:07 AM by DownToBrassTacks.)
(02-05-2024, 12:17 AM)Eagle Wrote: Illegal but morally acceptableThe ethical conundrum is more like: if you have information about someone being a certified pedophile, is it morally acceptable to make a profit out of it in the form of a hefty "non-disclosure fee", knowing that they could cause real harm to a real child?
In the case of mere "fantasizers", who get off on highly messed up digital material but wouldn't actually act on their deviant impulses, it may be okay-ish, but you never know for sure which one is going to snap eventually. The sheer humiliation of the blackmail could be enough of a repellent to keep those deviant impulses at bay... for a while... but again, you can't know for sure how they will act in the future.
Performing the blackmail then reporting them anyway could be a solution, from a strict moral standpoint, but it makes the whole thing very risky: once they're being investigated, and their reputation is ruined anyway, they will have no qualms about reporting the blackmail (whether or not they believe that the blackmailer reported them even though they complied and paid -- or if they refused to pay), and if it happens repeatedly with a similar pattern, it might get noticed by LEA and taken very seriously. As crazy as it might sound, it may even be taken more seriously than "small fish", passive """consumers""" of child pornography (who in some jurisdictions, in so-called "civilized" countries, get actual sentences of no more than a few years of probation jail time, which means no jail at all).
