Comment by denton-scratch
1 year ago
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.