I've only skimmed the paper, but I didn't find anything that would clearly distinguish between things that harm someone's reputation in a justifiable way, and things that harm it in an unjustifiable way. For example, if the CEO of a startup has previously been convicted multiple times for financial fraud, it would both hurt their reputation and be beneficial to potential investors to know this. But what if it's only one conviction? And a long time ago? It seems like the whole argument comes down to drawing this line, but I didn't see any real attempt to do so.
A lot of the impulse for this paper seems to be based around "the [claimed] right to a fresh start":
Moreover, if reputational interest is understood as a presumption of good
standing, then there is another reason to prohibit true defamation, one that depends upon the presumption, namely what might be called the right to a fresh start. By “a fresh start,” I mean the right to have a misdeed from long ago eventually cease to be part of one’s current reputation, so that it ceases to have any impact on one’s life. ... The interest in a fresh start stands against this veritable life sentence—an interest, instead, in being treated as a new person, no longer associated with a misdeed from long ago.
Yes, if you grant that such a right exists, it might make sense to make it illegal to point out true facts about someone's past. And I can easily see why many individuals would want a "fresh start". But does society as a whole benefit from having such a right? I'm far from convinced that it should be any sort of universal right, and don't see any good way to define when it's applicable and when it's not. Are there good solutions for this problem somewhere?
"Are there good solutions for this problem somewhere?"
There are no simple solutions to a problem this complex as human trust.
But I really do not see, how I can I trust humans more, if it would be illegal to say true things about the past.
Truth may never be hidden, if you want real trust.
And there need to be more consequences of lying.
And people should accept, that people change. If someone was stupid in their teenage years 10 years ago, then most can actually assume, that they changed a bit.
But if someone was lying and stealing 20 years ago and is caught doing it again yesterday, I will probably also not trust this guy in 2 years, unless he can convincingly explain why and how he changed.
I think you have identified the crux of my objection to this piece. The OP is mostly talking about cases where a truth about someone is so much more widely known than other truths about them that it becomes overwhelming in perception of that person.
The problem to be solved here is not the liability owed by the reporter of the truth, but rather the way in which our reptilian brains fail to balance that truth against an undoubtedly bigger picture.
"I will probably also not trust this guy in 2 years, unless he can convincingly explain why and how he changed."
As you correctly say, 'there are no simple solutions to a problem this complex as human trust' but your last point is telling. Let's assume your villain provides proof well beyond reasonable doubt that he has actually changed for the better the fact remains that most people will always remember the fact—even many, many decades later. Moreover, I'd suggest that incident forever changes one's perception of the person even if it's almost imperceptibly small.
I claim no great expertise in human nature but from my observations of others and of myself I'd suggest that it is human nature to retain these negative images even if one has no logical reason whatsoever to do so.
It seems to me this is one of the basic underpinnings that drives defamation and why so many have such strong opinions about it.
For instance, to my knowledge I've never been defamed in public nor do I know of any reason why anyone would bother defaming me. I'm hardly controversial, and although I'm certainly no saint, I can't think of anything I've done that's bad enough to warrant someone pursuing defamation against me. (No doubt, there have been many occasions where I've been called an idiot or perhaps even a ratbag in private but I don't consider these amount to defamation.)
Nevertheless, I remain mindful that I could be wrongfully defamed in public for the very reason that others will remember the fact well into the future even though the claim was without merit.
Perhaps this is an evolutionary trait developed out of self-protection or similar, but whatever the underlying reason many remain mindful of the potential damage defamation can cause whether a claim is factual or not.
Incidentally, I know someone who committed a misdemeanor as a youth many decades ago and has been well behaved and kept out of trouble since. That said, on rare occasions someone will still mention the fact.
No doubt the right to have certain facts about oneself forgotten is a complicated matter, and if opinions were scaled just about everyone would have a different view—and, no doubt, those views would again vary according to one's perception of the claimed or actual wrongdoing (if plotted, I'd venture to suggest everyone's opinions would be a 3D graph and no two graphs would the same).
As the old parable goes 'try to please all and you'll please none'.
Seems like the best way for somebody to get over a bad thing that they did in their past is to be forthright in acknowledging that they did the bad thing, and show through their actions how they've become a better person.
In other words, accept responsibility and earn back your reputation.
Hiding the truth seems like the exact opposite of that.
> Hiding the truth seems like the exact opposite of that.
It seems like “true defamation” could be a lie of omission. If someone harps on about a past misdeed but omits N years of atonement, that’s misleading, even if true.
That sounds like the most totalitarian thing in the world.
Imagine I’m considering marrying someone. Do I really not have an interest in knowing their past misdeeds?
A better way is to have strict rules on what you can take into account for certain types of decisions: renting a house, hiring an employee, offering an insurance policy.
But there is no right have the world forget your misdeeds.
If, say, a fraud conviction 20 years ago should morally not preclude running a business[0], then the simple solution is to require statements of long past crimes to include the date range. That handles the concern about misleading people not thinking it was recent. If you believe in fresh starts, "Bob was convicted of fraud in 2003" is not defamatory. It's redemptive.
If the motivation for banning facts is to prevent people from making non-PC judgments based on those facts, then what to do about making true statements like "Bob is Jewish", or "Vic's legal name is Vikram", which might cause discrimination? Is that True Defamation?
In general, making laws to prevent people from doing reasonable things that cause other people to misbehave, is dangerous ground. Usually better to intervene at the stage of the actual misbehavior.
Leadership is the most sacred responsibility, you literally have people’s lives in your hands. You get ZERO slack from me and you better be operating at your absolute best.
Why? It’s possible to do and to teach. I’ve had many such leaders and I’m consistently told I meet these standards so its imminently possible and achievable
There are so many amazing people and leaders in this world that there’s ZERO reason to give someone who has acted badly any additional opportunities to hurt or retard the progress of even one person
I expect to be held to the highest possible standard as a leader and hold leaders to standards of perfection
There are way too many amazing people have not been given enough opportunities for us to give second and third chances to people who have demonstrated that they cannot take care of their people as primary priorities
This stands as an example of the opposite of a universal right. Denying me to true knowledge that someone is awful is abuse. I think we can infer the author knows some real jerks.
Generally speaking, it should always be legal to say things which are true. This is vital to democracy.
(The only exceptions to this should be when you contractually sign away this right, such as a lawyer who enters into a contract with a client and cannot give all their private correspondence to the opposition. Or a soldier who signs away his right to speak freely about troop movements, etc.)
The book excerpt is very interesting because it focuses on private individuals defamed by groups. It argues that bringing up true statements about these private individuals that occurred a long time ago is also defamation.
We see the opposite in public discourse. Mobbing private individuals is perfectly fine, criticizing organizations or their leaders (public figures) is punished harshly.
Organizations destroying the reputation of private individuals is also perfectly fine. Everyone believes the leaders and corrections or hints that the leaders are doubtful characters themselves are suppressed.
Who are you seeing being punished for criticising organisations? In general it’s extremely difficult for an organisation to sue an individual for defamation.
I had the same question. The closest I'm aware of isn't organizations, but protected classes who can sue individuals for hate speech e.g. inciting violence against them.
> This is unfortunately how it works here in Sweden, and it's terrible.
I’d say it has its ups and downs.
One upside is that the court does not have to delve into the question of truth as a part of legal proceedings.
It’s also worth noting that “true defamation” is only legal when you can prove it’s true. So it’s not really a freedom to speak truth, just a freedom to speak what is provably true.
I think the main problem with the Swedish law is that it places too little emphasis on the intent behind the “true definition”. For example I think it’s wrong to “defame” someone in order to gain control over a company, in some cases even if the statements are true. But I think it’s a very different thing to indite someone for telling their life story in a book, because a central part of their life is that they were the victim of a crime (see e.g. the chancellor of justice’s prosecution of Cissi Wallin for her autobiography).
>One upside is that the court does not have to delve into the question of truth as a part of legal proceedings.
That's only an upside for lazy jurists. For the people who say true things and punished for them, it is only repression.
I think should follow the basic view that we have always had: that the courts may consider anything they have knowledge of, the free evidence evaluation.
The primacy of freedom of speech must central, and I think we should think as if though everyone were psychologically very strongly compelled to speak about what he does and that we should have the presumption that he speaks honestly.
Truth is also special, and rightly holds a special place in people's psychology and in religion.
There aren't five cases in the Swedish court system where this has been relevant.
There's only really been two cases. One is a case where a Swedish Christian Democrat politician brought up what the opposing council in a certain dispute had done previously and was convicted of defamation for this. Another is a case where a Swedish journalist was convicted of defamation for that he brought up that a guy who was suing people for all sorts of rubbish was himself criminal-adjacent in that he had been prosecuted for animal cruelty, but had remained outside the country until the state of limitations came into effect.
> In this way, one’s reputation, like one’s hand or one’s home, is an aspect or extension of oneself, at least insofar as damage to it suffices as a harm to oneself, quite
apart from any further impact it might have. It is, in other words, inapt to ask,
“Your reputation may have suffered, but how exactly did that hurt you?” There is
also another important way reputation is an aspect of oneself: It is not primarily
constituted by the voluntary acts of other people, like a store owner’s share of the
consumer market or a school board candidate’s share of the electorate. Unlike purchases or votes, the appraisals of others that constitute their reputation do not reflect the appraisers’ choices—some decision to begin viewing the person this way
or that—but are instead generally formed as natural, passive consequences of
learning the relevant information.
If a tree falls and no one hears it, does it make a sound? I can only know about my reputation from the voluntary acts of other people. These actions may be more or less conscious, just like the choice to buy from a store or to vote for a candidate, but they are not "a passive consequence of learning the relevant information".
One point not covered but clearly understood tacitly by the author is that the representativeness of a fact degrades over time. While it may be true that someone did something 10 years ago, that fact may not be a true reflection of their character today. Thus a statement may be technically true, but practically false, and thus should be considered defamatory (under the modern American definition).
I think what this paper attempts to argue, distilled to its simplest form, is that revenge is not justified.
The act of tearing someone down purposefully, either with facts or non-truths, is almost always an act of revenge. Someone felt wronged by someone's current or previous actions, and they move to "take revenge." This paper essentially argues that no one is entitled to revenge.
Revenge or not, it should never be illegal to speak the truth of a matter, on any subject. Facts are facts. Truth is truth. Withholding true facts only worsens our models of reality.
TFA is difficult to read; because the author, having argued that "defamation" should include true but harmful remarks, proceeds to use the word "defame" as if that term included truthful utterances.
E.g., concerning Tilley: "Yet he was indisputably defamed by it". Yes, his reputation was harmed, so arguably he was defamed by 17thC standards; but "indisputably" is simply wrong on the present definition of "defame". If he was indeed a bad manager, then having that information in the public domain seems to be a social good; bad managers harm all of us, and this guy was trading on his reputation as a good one.
It would be even harder to read if the author didn't do that.
We are being invited to consider a premise (i.e. presume that it is true) and explore the consequences. At any point, we can choose to disagree with this premise, but at least we understand it.
Imagine instead if the author, after inviting us to accept the premise, proceeded to write as if we were to assume the premise were false. It would be much harder to understand what they were proposing or why they even wrote the piece in the first place. At best it would be a maze of obligatory qualifiers and nested hypotheticals.
Instead of reviving defamation, we should introduce the right of rebuttal.
The right of rebuttal should replace defamation and libel lawsuits.
It's compatible with the freedom of speech and the first amendment.
Thoroughly wordy; this could have been 3 pages. Deeply unconvincing, to boot. (am I defaming the author by saying their writing sucks?) I'm more convinced "true defamation" is not defamation at all.
> as long as we understand the “opinions” involved in people’s reputation
to be something formed more or less involuntarily as a consequence of receiving
information being circulated about them.
What? Involuntarily? My opinions are certainly not formed involuntarily as a consequence of information. That's not something I can "understand".
One's reputation is not their property. How can my opinion be your property? Step off.
> It is wrong, all else equal, to knowingly damage an aspect of other people—like their face or their farm—in which they have strong interests.
No, it is not. If James Taylor has a strong interest in singing, it is not wrong to say he sings flat. It can be mean to criticize people for things they cannot change, but it's hardly wrong.
1. Opinions are involuntary. You see rain, you don't decide to think it's raining. You just think it.
2. The piece doesn't say rep is property, just like property in 2 ways (no others).
3. Not wrong to damage stuff you have a strong interest in, only stuff that's also an "aspect of yourself," how the paper defines this. Doesn't apply to Taylor case.
Agree, too long and wordy. But still worth getting right what it says before hating on/disagreeing because of what it doesn't.
I don't think that defamation is the right lens to view the arguably legitimate cases here through, a better one may be harassment or privacy violation.
Whatever one's views on defamation before coming Helmreich's well-researched and well-argued paper it's highly doubtful that afterwards their views will remain unaltered.
Let's assume that if beforehand one agreed wholeheartedly with Helmreich's position—which I'd suggest would be unlikely—then I'd posit this paper would further nuance their views. This is an excellent and authoritative paper, and I have learned much about a subject of which I thought I already had reasonable knowledge.
This article, and I suspect much of "journal" it is published in, is an attempt to recast right-wing complaints about cancel culture into respectable legal language. Make it appear (in true right wing fashion) as if they are defending some time honored truth that has recently been corrupted.
I don't have the knowledge or scholarship to go point by point verifying or refuting the actual article, and it does bring up up a lot of interesting points.
But I beg you not to be suckered by academic phrasing, calls to the past or the mere length of the article. How we treat defamation should be based on what has the best outcomes for society today, and you should be able to come to you own conclusions about what a world where "true defamation" is prohibited would look like.
I've only skimmed the paper, but I didn't find anything that would clearly distinguish between things that harm someone's reputation in a justifiable way, and things that harm it in an unjustifiable way. For example, if the CEO of a startup has previously been convicted multiple times for financial fraud, it would both hurt their reputation and be beneficial to potential investors to know this. But what if it's only one conviction? And a long time ago? It seems like the whole argument comes down to drawing this line, but I didn't see any real attempt to do so.
A lot of the impulse for this paper seems to be based around "the [claimed] right to a fresh start":
Moreover, if reputational interest is understood as a presumption of good standing, then there is another reason to prohibit true defamation, one that depends upon the presumption, namely what might be called the right to a fresh start. By “a fresh start,” I mean the right to have a misdeed from long ago eventually cease to be part of one’s current reputation, so that it ceases to have any impact on one’s life. ... The interest in a fresh start stands against this veritable life sentence—an interest, instead, in being treated as a new person, no longer associated with a misdeed from long ago.
Yes, if you grant that such a right exists, it might make sense to make it illegal to point out true facts about someone's past. And I can easily see why many individuals would want a "fresh start". But does society as a whole benefit from having such a right? I'm far from convinced that it should be any sort of universal right, and don't see any good way to define when it's applicable and when it's not. Are there good solutions for this problem somewhere?
"Are there good solutions for this problem somewhere?"
There are no simple solutions to a problem this complex as human trust.
But I really do not see, how I can I trust humans more, if it would be illegal to say true things about the past.
Truth may never be hidden, if you want real trust. And there need to be more consequences of lying.
And people should accept, that people change. If someone was stupid in their teenage years 10 years ago, then most can actually assume, that they changed a bit.
But if someone was lying and stealing 20 years ago and is caught doing it again yesterday, I will probably also not trust this guy in 2 years, unless he can convincingly explain why and how he changed.
I think you have identified the crux of my objection to this piece. The OP is mostly talking about cases where a truth about someone is so much more widely known than other truths about them that it becomes overwhelming in perception of that person.
The problem to be solved here is not the liability owed by the reporter of the truth, but rather the way in which our reptilian brains fail to balance that truth against an undoubtedly bigger picture.
"I will probably also not trust this guy in 2 years, unless he can convincingly explain why and how he changed."
As you correctly say, 'there are no simple solutions to a problem this complex as human trust' but your last point is telling. Let's assume your villain provides proof well beyond reasonable doubt that he has actually changed for the better the fact remains that most people will always remember the fact—even many, many decades later. Moreover, I'd suggest that incident forever changes one's perception of the person even if it's almost imperceptibly small.
I claim no great expertise in human nature but from my observations of others and of myself I'd suggest that it is human nature to retain these negative images even if one has no logical reason whatsoever to do so.
It seems to me this is one of the basic underpinnings that drives defamation and why so many have such strong opinions about it.
For instance, to my knowledge I've never been defamed in public nor do I know of any reason why anyone would bother defaming me. I'm hardly controversial, and although I'm certainly no saint, I can't think of anything I've done that's bad enough to warrant someone pursuing defamation against me. (No doubt, there have been many occasions where I've been called an idiot or perhaps even a ratbag in private but I don't consider these amount to defamation.)
Nevertheless, I remain mindful that I could be wrongfully defamed in public for the very reason that others will remember the fact well into the future even though the claim was without merit.
Perhaps this is an evolutionary trait developed out of self-protection or similar, but whatever the underlying reason many remain mindful of the potential damage defamation can cause whether a claim is factual or not.
Incidentally, I know someone who committed a misdemeanor as a youth many decades ago and has been well behaved and kept out of trouble since. That said, on rare occasions someone will still mention the fact.
No doubt the right to have certain facts about oneself forgotten is a complicated matter, and if opinions were scaled just about everyone would have a different view—and, no doubt, those views would again vary according to one's perception of the claimed or actual wrongdoing (if plotted, I'd venture to suggest everyone's opinions would be a 3D graph and no two graphs would the same).
As the old parable goes 'try to please all and you'll please none'.
2 replies →
Seems like the best way for somebody to get over a bad thing that they did in their past is to be forthright in acknowledging that they did the bad thing, and show through their actions how they've become a better person.
In other words, accept responsibility and earn back your reputation.
Hiding the truth seems like the exact opposite of that.
> Hiding the truth seems like the exact opposite of that.
It seems like “true defamation” could be a lie of omission. If someone harps on about a past misdeed but omits N years of atonement, that’s misleading, even if true.
4 replies →
That sounds like the most totalitarian thing in the world.
Imagine I’m considering marrying someone. Do I really not have an interest in knowing their past misdeeds?
A better way is to have strict rules on what you can take into account for certain types of decisions: renting a house, hiring an employee, offering an insurance policy.
But there is no right have the world forget your misdeeds.
If, say, a fraud conviction 20 years ago should morally not preclude running a business[0], then the simple solution is to require statements of long past crimes to include the date range. That handles the concern about misleading people not thinking it was recent. If you believe in fresh starts, "Bob was convicted of fraud in 2003" is not defamatory. It's redemptive.
If the motivation for banning facts is to prevent people from making non-PC judgments based on those facts, then what to do about making true statements like "Bob is Jewish", or "Vic's legal name is Vikram", which might cause discrimination? Is that True Defamation?
BTW, True Defamation is illegal even in the modern day, in UK, if the the defendant can prove truth sufficiently, with some recent protection since 2013. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_defamation_law
In general, making laws to prevent people from doing reasonable things that cause other people to misbehave, is dangerous ground. Usually better to intervene at the stage of the actual misbehavior.
Leadership is the most sacred responsibility, you literally have people’s lives in your hands. You get ZERO slack from me and you better be operating at your absolute best.
Why? It’s possible to do and to teach. I’ve had many such leaders and I’m consistently told I meet these standards so its imminently possible and achievable
There are so many amazing people and leaders in this world that there’s ZERO reason to give someone who has acted badly any additional opportunities to hurt or retard the progress of even one person
I expect to be held to the highest possible standard as a leader and hold leaders to standards of perfection
There are way too many amazing people have not been given enough opportunities for us to give second and third chances to people who have demonstrated that they cannot take care of their people as primary priorities
This stands as an example of the opposite of a universal right. Denying me to true knowledge that someone is awful is abuse. I think we can infer the author knows some real jerks.
Generally speaking, it should always be legal to say things which are true. This is vital to democracy.
(The only exceptions to this should be when you contractually sign away this right, such as a lawyer who enters into a contract with a client and cannot give all their private correspondence to the opposition. Or a soldier who signs away his right to speak freely about troop movements, etc.)
The book excerpt is very interesting because it focuses on private individuals defamed by groups. It argues that bringing up true statements about these private individuals that occurred a long time ago is also defamation.
We see the opposite in public discourse. Mobbing private individuals is perfectly fine, criticizing organizations or their leaders (public figures) is punished harshly.
Organizations destroying the reputation of private individuals is also perfectly fine. Everyone believes the leaders and corrections or hints that the leaders are doubtful characters themselves are suppressed.
Who are you seeing being punished for criticising organisations? In general it’s extremely difficult for an organisation to sue an individual for defamation.
I had the same question. The closest I'm aware of isn't organizations, but protected classes who can sue individuals for hate speech e.g. inciting violence against them.
1 reply →
This is unfortunately how it works here in Sweden, and it's terrible.
Truth is really incredibly important and not having the freedom to speak truth one knows and which one feels are important is a tremendous imposition.
Ones reputation isn't like ones body parts-- but the truthful speech of the person who would speak against you, that's the true body part.
> This is unfortunately how it works here in Sweden, and it's terrible.
I’d say it has its ups and downs.
One upside is that the court does not have to delve into the question of truth as a part of legal proceedings.
It’s also worth noting that “true defamation” is only legal when you can prove it’s true. So it’s not really a freedom to speak truth, just a freedom to speak what is provably true.
I think the main problem with the Swedish law is that it places too little emphasis on the intent behind the “true definition”. For example I think it’s wrong to “defame” someone in order to gain control over a company, in some cases even if the statements are true. But I think it’s a very different thing to indite someone for telling their life story in a book, because a central part of their life is that they were the victim of a crime (see e.g. the chancellor of justice’s prosecution of Cissi Wallin for her autobiography).
>One upside is that the court does not have to delve into the question of truth as a part of legal proceedings.
That's only an upside for lazy jurists. For the people who say true things and punished for them, it is only repression.
I think should follow the basic view that we have always had: that the courts may consider anything they have knowledge of, the free evidence evaluation.
The primacy of freedom of speech must central, and I think we should think as if though everyone were psychologically very strongly compelled to speak about what he does and that we should have the presumption that he speaks honestly.
Truth is also special, and rightly holds a special place in people's psychology and in religion.
7 replies →
Can you give five examples?
There aren't five cases in the Swedish court system where this has been relevant.
There's only really been two cases. One is a case where a Swedish Christian Democrat politician brought up what the opposing council in a certain dispute had done previously and was convicted of defamation for this. Another is a case where a Swedish journalist was convicted of defamation for that he brought up that a guy who was suing people for all sorts of rubbish was himself criminal-adjacent in that he had been prosecuted for animal cruelty, but had remained outside the country until the state of limitations came into effect.
17 replies →
> In this way, one’s reputation, like one’s hand or one’s home, is an aspect or extension of oneself, at least insofar as damage to it suffices as a harm to oneself, quite apart from any further impact it might have. It is, in other words, inapt to ask, “Your reputation may have suffered, but how exactly did that hurt you?” There is also another important way reputation is an aspect of oneself: It is not primarily constituted by the voluntary acts of other people, like a store owner’s share of the consumer market or a school board candidate’s share of the electorate. Unlike purchases or votes, the appraisals of others that constitute their reputation do not reflect the appraisers’ choices—some decision to begin viewing the person this way or that—but are instead generally formed as natural, passive consequences of learning the relevant information.
If a tree falls and no one hears it, does it make a sound? I can only know about my reputation from the voluntary acts of other people. These actions may be more or less conscious, just like the choice to buy from a store or to vote for a candidate, but they are not "a passive consequence of learning the relevant information".
The point is that people might unconsciously harm you, in ways you can't identify.
If I set a fire and you die from lung cancer caused by the smoke, I hurt you, even if neither of us knows it.
One point not covered but clearly understood tacitly by the author is that the representativeness of a fact degrades over time. While it may be true that someone did something 10 years ago, that fact may not be a true reflection of their character today. Thus a statement may be technically true, but practically false, and thus should be considered defamatory (under the modern American definition).
I like this notion (that any ancient past actions must carry facts of subsequent actions) better than trying to push a "right to be forgotten."
I think what this paper attempts to argue, distilled to its simplest form, is that revenge is not justified.
The act of tearing someone down purposefully, either with facts or non-truths, is almost always an act of revenge. Someone felt wronged by someone's current or previous actions, and they move to "take revenge." This paper essentially argues that no one is entitled to revenge.
Revenge or not, it should never be illegal to speak the truth of a matter, on any subject. Facts are facts. Truth is truth. Withholding true facts only worsens our models of reality.
Facts, devoid of context, released with the specific intent to harm someone, should not be something someone executes on - argues the paper anyway.
Skimmed it, so perhaps I missed something, but what is the purpose of reputation if negative facts can never be incorporated into one’s reputation?
Seems like the harm caused to a person through true defamation is outweighed by the benefit to society of holding people to account for bad behavior.
TFA is difficult to read; because the author, having argued that "defamation" should include true but harmful remarks, proceeds to use the word "defame" as if that term included truthful utterances.
E.g., concerning Tilley: "Yet he was indisputably defamed by it". Yes, his reputation was harmed, so arguably he was defamed by 17thC standards; but "indisputably" is simply wrong on the present definition of "defame". If he was indeed a bad manager, then having that information in the public domain seems to be a social good; bad managers harm all of us, and this guy was trading on his reputation as a good one.
It would be even harder to read if the author didn't do that.
We are being invited to consider a premise (i.e. presume that it is true) and explore the consequences. At any point, we can choose to disagree with this premise, but at least we understand it.
Imagine instead if the author, after inviting us to accept the premise, proceeded to write as if we were to assume the premise were false. It would be much harder to understand what they were proposing or why they even wrote the piece in the first place. At best it would be a maze of obligatory qualifiers and nested hypotheticals.
Instead of reviving defamation, we should introduce the right of rebuttal. The right of rebuttal should replace defamation and libel lawsuits. It's compatible with the freedom of speech and the first amendment.
Thoroughly wordy; this could have been 3 pages. Deeply unconvincing, to boot. (am I defaming the author by saying their writing sucks?) I'm more convinced "true defamation" is not defamation at all.
> as long as we understand the “opinions” involved in people’s reputation to be something formed more or less involuntarily as a consequence of receiving information being circulated about them.
What? Involuntarily? My opinions are certainly not formed involuntarily as a consequence of information. That's not something I can "understand".
One's reputation is not their property. How can my opinion be your property? Step off.
> It is wrong, all else equal, to knowingly damage an aspect of other people—like their face or their farm—in which they have strong interests.
No, it is not. If James Taylor has a strong interest in singing, it is not wrong to say he sings flat. It can be mean to criticize people for things they cannot change, but it's hardly wrong.
1. Opinions are involuntary. You see rain, you don't decide to think it's raining. You just think it.
2. The piece doesn't say rep is property, just like property in 2 ways (no others).
3. Not wrong to damage stuff you have a strong interest in, only stuff that's also an "aspect of yourself," how the paper defines this. Doesn't apply to Taylor case.
Agree, too long and wordy. But still worth getting right what it says before hating on/disagreeing because of what it doesn't.
I don't think that defamation is the right lens to view the arguably legitimate cases here through, a better one may be harassment or privacy violation.
Whatever one's views on defamation before coming Helmreich's well-researched and well-argued paper it's highly doubtful that afterwards their views will remain unaltered.
Let's assume that if beforehand one agreed wholeheartedly with Helmreich's position—which I'd suggest would be unlikely—then I'd posit this paper would further nuance their views. This is an excellent and authoritative paper, and I have learned much about a subject of which I thought I already had reasonable knowledge.
This article, and I suspect much of "journal" it is published in, is an attempt to recast right-wing complaints about cancel culture into respectable legal language. Make it appear (in true right wing fashion) as if they are defending some time honored truth that has recently been corrupted.
I don't have the knowledge or scholarship to go point by point verifying or refuting the actual article, and it does bring up up a lot of interesting points.
But I beg you not to be suckered by academic phrasing, calls to the past or the mere length of the article. How we treat defamation should be based on what has the best outcomes for society today, and you should be able to come to you own conclusions about what a world where "true defamation" is prohibited would look like.