Don ' t ever play yourself <| sep |> your reputation is everywhere all at the same timeI think this whole notion of ' reputation ' is nonsense . It ' s not a physical object . It doesn ' t exist . It ' s nothing more than a fairy tale . One can ' t own a reputation any more than one can own a feeling or an hour or a color . And it is your contention that some changes in one ' s reputationthis thing that doesn ' t existconnote harm ? The reputation is a metaphor for how other people think about you . It doesn ' t make any sense at all to say that we have ownership in what other people think . And which sort of changes in others ' thoughts about us are immoral ? Is it always libel to lie about someone ? Are all such changes to how one is viewed by others considered to be harm ? If someone lies and says that I am honest , and I gain a reputation for being honest , is that harm ? Have I been libeled in that case ? I think this is an incredibly wrong idea . The person who is harmed by a lie is the person who is lied to , not the person who is lied about . The person who mistakenly believes the lie is the one who is harmed , not the person who is a thousand light years away who was lied about . Maybe the more relevant question is what are you going to do about it ? The questions I care about are theseAre there reputations ? Who is harmed by lies ? Is harm the same as a rights violation , or is this a case of equivocation ? For instance , a surgeon might harm me by cutting me open to removal a tumor , but this is not at all the same thing as my rights being violated . These are two clearly distinct meanings of the word ' harm . ' They cannot be used interchangeably . Can rights violations travel faster than light ? Can such a thing make sense if general relativity holds ? Wouldn ' t that imply that there is a universal reference frame ? Don ' t you think liars should be identified in society so that people know to avoid them ? I think I want them to be . That isn ' t the same as believing that someone saying I have twelve arms has violated my property rights . Nor is it the same as saying that anarchocapitalist legal structures would not have rules to deal with this . My only real concerns are with the nature of the concepts and the morality involved .