Bluebird of happiness

I haven't read others' comments yet, but one criteria that strikes me is this: if the "other" choice violates the target's rights, then so does the holdup. If you want to put things on some sort of ethical "scale", I guess I'd say the holdup will be less "bad" than just carrying out the threat, but linearly proportional to the "badness" of the threat. Does that make any sense? As for where you put various dividing lines of ethical badness, that seems fairly arbitrary. I suppose I'll go read comments now...