[QUOTE=Kendall Jackson]
While this can be true in rare isolated cases, it’s flat fucking wrong when it’s applied to society as a whole. Killing in response to killing is the whole damn problem in the Mid-East.
There are a lotta good arguments against retributional death (e.g. the death penalty), but one of the best ones is simply that the truly civilized societies are beyond the notion that justice is best served if the punishment meted out exactly matches the crime. The eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth, blood-for-blood stuff comes from ancient, tribal societies. And it doesn’t work in a multi-ethnic world.
But what we try to do as justice now (in our better moments, anyway) is punishment as an abstraction. When somebody breaks the law, we take away their time. Sentences are for months or years or decades, and the guilty are imprisoned away from the world they were in. For something as horrible as murder, we take so much of their time that it lasts the rest of their lives.
This is vastly different than blood for blood, the heated choice, the province of barbarism. To stop endless cycles of violence, you need to bypass that primitive monkey desire for revenge and overlay it with a veneer of abstract rationalism. We cool our heads and start a process, a trial against the accused to determine whether the person we have in custody is actually the guilty party. And then it’s even better to keep that person alive just in case somebody fucked up, which happens all the time.
Innocents aren’t saved when you kill the guilty as a matter of policy. It might look good in theory that a crime so horrible as murder deserves a penalty that matches, but that just reinforces the standard that blood must pay for blood, and when things start to get crazy (like when we lose 3,000 people in one day), we just want blood and it no longer matters who has to die to satisfy our thirst. So we indiscrimitely kill a bunch more of them, which creates a whole new generation of grieving families who don’t care which of us they kill to pay back the blood debt. And so on and so on.
We would save countless more innocent lives in the future if we moved away from the idea/ideal of responding to death with death.
[/QUOTE]
While I do agree with the gist of your post (indiscriminate vengeance begets more of same) a sense of “proportionality” is certainly in order. Saying that if a man commits murder then he must be put to death is a far cry from “One of your clan killed one of my clan, so 10 of you must die!”
The legal procedures we have established here in the U.S. takes most of the venom or “passion” out of the sentence of death; it’s not like a lynch mob, or firebombing, in retaliation. And I’m talking legal trials in courts-of-law, not Black Book assassination ops.
Assuming, of course, that you can catch said killer(s) and put them on trial, instead of trying to sort through the rubble of their suicide attack for their charred remains.
Or sort through the rubble of their home after a laser-guided bomb blew it, and every houseful of people around it, to smithereens, in an attempt to “neutralize an ongoing terrorist threat.”
