Justice or Revenge (2)
Once again this is a topic we have
discussed in the past and we also discussed the topic of justice in many contexts
in the past. I will, therefore, on this occasion focus on revenge.
Justice is a very common subject in
philosophy, but not revenge. In language and in high street morality revenge is
negative and frowned upon. The accepted view is that if we allow revenge to be
the norm we’ll soon spiral into lawlessness and rule by violence.
Nevertheless, we can even put
forward a forceful argument for revenge, but the problem with revenge is that how
do we establish: what would be a justifiable amount of retribution and what
would be a justifiable nature of retribution? If we’re hit in the face with a
fist, are we allowed to use a right hand full swing of a baseball bat?
But once we exclude some of the historical
baggage from revenge we end up with something more manageable for example the golden
rule. The reason why revenge is very like the golden rule is that a moral justification
is based on subjective criteria of the victim in the case of revenge. The
golden rule is based on the justification of the actor and hoping they are not
too outrageous.
A weakness of the golden rule, both
in the positive and negative version, is that it does not distinguish between
what we hypothetically want to be done to us and what we can actually do.
Hence, if we know we can achieve something, then we are justified in wishing
what we want to be the moral law, irrespective of what others can achieve for
themselves. Revenge is very similar to this way of thinking, the rational
victim would only seek revenge if they can get away with their actions: an irrational
victim would act without thinking whether they will be hurt again or not.
The Kantian version (or even
versions) of the Categorical Imperative includes an argument to avoid the
subjective standard and appeals to rationality and universalizability of what
we want to formulate as moral law. This is all well and good but there are two
issues with this Kantian view and philosophy: 1) as moral agents we want
principles that will help us solve real world problems now. Thus when we are in
a position of hitting someone in the face for an injury caused we don’t want to
become at that instant an architect and engineer of moral principles but rather
an administrative agent of moral principles. 2) How can categorical imperatives
manifest themselves into hypothetical imperatives and thus solve real world
problems? We’ve already seen this conundrum in philosophy with Cartesian duality:
how does the soul or mind cause the body to act? And that hasn’t evolved very
well in the history of ideas.
In modern times we come across a
more sophisticated argument for revenge that of a tit-for-tat strategy, although
the term itself has a historical pedigree (see Wikipedia). Couched in the
language of game theory and mathematical analysis basically a tit-for-tat
strategy solves “what is justifiable retaliation” and the answer is replicate
what has been done to one’s self. The strategy itself is a successful strategy
for cooperation. Indeed cooperation is the best strategy we have to maintain a
stable balance in competing interests. The issue with this strategy is that everyone
is very happy when people reciprocate acts of kindness and good will, but the
problem is acts of evil and harm.
The real issue, I would argue, with
acts of evil and harm is that we want the evil to stop now and not for us to
muster enough energy to retaliate. Revenge is not only about emotional satisfaction
but a rational sense of neutralising the threat. At the instant when we have to
decide whether to fight or flight we don’t want to analyse the niceties of the
induction problem that what happened in the past might not necessarily repeat
itself in the future.
We see this idea of acting to stop
harm carried out with the nuclear attacks on Japan during the Second World War.
The only advantage of these bombings was that it took only two bombers to
achieve a similar horrific level of human and material destruction in each of
the two cities of what took hundreds of bombers to inflict on Tokyo.
But revenge is an old problem after
all we all remember the teachings of the bible to avoid an eye for an eye strategy,
which is basically the negative side of a tit-for-tat strategy.
Thus our topic comes down to deciding
whether a theory of justice is in effect a polite form of language of a revenge
strategy or whether we have a choice between justice and revenge. If the choice
is between justice and revenge then how do we come to decide whether to adopt
the justice way or the revenge way? And this is something game theory and
decision theory can help us with our thinking. But the weakness with revenge is
that even though we can devise formal strategies to help us out it cannot
account for the unmeasurable factor of emotions: how do we measure the
intensity and force of emotions? Or to put it in a different way, how much
emotional force does it take to ever justify revenge?
Best Lawrence
Essays for Justice or Revenge 2019
- Justice or Revenge? By Ruel F. Pepa
- Justice or Revenge (2) by Lawrence JC Baron
Previous essays on Justice
- Is Justice Revenge? By Ruel F. Pepa
- Is Justice Revenge? By Lawrence JCBaron
- Justice and Revenge By Lawrence JCBaron
- Social Justice Warriors By Lawrence JCBaron
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