What I mean is that I think the fact the justice system does punish criminals (though not as cruelly as the average person would like) and punishes vigilantism prevents most people from taking their own revenge. If it didn’t punish criminals I do think more victims would try to get revenge even if it meant they might themselves be imprisoned for it, but the threat of punishment prevents them from doing it.
Also serial killers and career criminals tend to suffer from cognitive disorders that most people do not have. They don’t have as good a sense of consequences and the future as the average person, tend to have less fear despite people wishing to believe they are all cowards, and obviously have a deficiency of empathy.
Although legally insanity is a very specific thing calling your average murderer “mentally normal” is inaccurate to say the least.
OK, except you’re kind of jumping around with your parameters. Vigilantism would increase if criminals weren’t punished, but to say that would be the case even if it meant going to prison violates the original parameter that that criminals aren’t punished.
Getting back to your original premise, though, why do you assume that revenge is immoral?
Well wishing and “taking pleasure from” are different things. If you have a bad coworker who makes your job very difficult you may wish that they would be fired–but you won’t necessarily take pleasure from it. Under our legal system incarceration is not considered cruelty, it’s an appropriate punishment administered by a neutral state party and not any individual citizen. So the sadism charge simply does not apply. Dangerous criminals belong in prison, stating that and hoping they end up there has nothing to do with sadism. That’s an “emotional” word you’re using to try and make (and doing badly by the way) some sort of fallacious moral argument about how it’s intrinsically immoral to want to see justice carried out–it isn’t.
Our justice system is designed to give the government a monopoly on justice. It replaced the traditional system of justice via vendetta - the idea that if you harmed a person, you would be harmed in turn by your victim’s social group.
There were problems with this system. It minimized individual rights because it saw people primarily as members of their social group. This in turn pressured people to subordinate themselves to their social group. It meant that there were different levels of justice available depending on how powerful the social groups involved were. Some groups became powerful to the point where they were not restrained by the threat of vengeance and became lawless. And the system led to long-term violence because when a social group harmed somebody for hurting one of its members, the social group of that person would seek vengeance in turn and you’d enter a back-and-forth cycle.
So we replaced this system with a single source of justice. Every person had equal rights before this system and the government had the sole power to impose justice and to declare justice had been imposed and the issue was finished. So it was a major advance.
As for the means of punishment, we’ve tried different ideas. Making death the punishment for all crimes seems to severe and leads to an overthrow of the system. Corporal punishment leaves the criminal in society and people don’t like criminals having the opportunity to keep committing crimes. Exile works the opposite way - it removes the criminal from the society where he committed the crime but doesn’t punish him beyond that. Some people feel this isn’t sufficient punishment to stop people from committing crimes. And with modern society, exile is no longer practical - no society wants to accept the outcasts of other societies.
So we came up with imprisonment as punishment. It works like internal exile. A person who commits a crime is removed form the general society and confined to a restricted environment where he can commit crimes against society.
2 or 3 free meals a day, a place to play with your fellow inmates, free medical care, library, TV and other amenities.
There are people starving in 3rd world countries that would appreciate this kind of punishment.
Now if you want to bring up how inmates treat each other then it’s a function of goose meeting gander. We could lock everybody up in solitary with kennel style dog runs for exercise.
You have to keep in mind it’s all relative. Most people in American prisons weren’t starving in a third world country before they were imprisoned. So imprisonment isn’t an improvement in their life.
Prison is still painful emotionally and cruel things inevitably happen to people there. I agree with you that sometimes wishing for negative consequences doesn’t mean people take pleasure in seeing them punishment. However my observation of the public suggests people take a strong pleasure in seeing criminals go to jail, that has nothing to do with society being safer and everything to do with taking pleasure in seeing them get their comeuppance.
I think justice (used in the sense of criminal justice) is nothing but a euphemism for revenge. It’s no different from revenge in reality but since English speakers tend to see it as a “good” rather than “bad” form of the same phenomena we give it a different name.
Actually most people in 3rd world countries nowadays have most of these things. And they are free to roam where they please and do not have to fear being raped and shanked by crazy inmates.
Revenge is immoral because it does nothing constructive aside from give the victims a satisfaction that is sick in nature anyhow. I think forgiveness is much more moral than revenge and should be promoted. Of course sometimes forgiveness is impossible for the offended to feel but the state shouldn’t pander to their emotions because it would ultimately tear apart the fabric of the law.
Due to humans’ instinctively vengeful nature it’s a good thing we have a justice system so that the state can moderately and dispassionately avenge the victims of crime while at the same time protecting the offender from reprisal. If people were naturally forgiving and sought amends and reform for their offenders rather than blood there would be no need for a criminal justice system of the kind we have now.
I’d make an analogy between legal punishment and vaccination. Neither are pleasant and it would be better if we didn’t have to do them at all, but since revenge and disease both exist, respectively, it’s better for everyone to give a small survivable dose of the “poison” and keep things under control than just to get nature run its course.
Of course some people are going to be unhappy about the state having such power to tell people they have to get justice through them, and have to vaccinate their children.
Well, there you are. If you don’t belief justice exists as a concept, then of course you’re puzzled by a system of procedures designed to bring about justice. If I was convinced that no one could ever truly represent another’s interests, I’d find our American democracy baffling too, for instance. Suffice it to say that the vast bulk of humanity does believe in and have a sense of justice.
To your opinion, it’s fairly simple to demonstrate that justice and vengeance are distinct. For one, attaining revenge only benefits the individual who was wronged. For two, revenge is a personal matter. If revenge guided our society, I wouldn’t care what became of a man who attacked or robbed you. It’s no skin off my nose, after all. But a sense of justice demands that moral rightness be achieved; I have a real stake in a just outcome, even though I stand to lose or gain nothing material.
But how does punishment as an end of its own benefit anyone aside from appealing to the base need for payback? How is that any different from revenge?
Is justice “good revenge” as opposed to “bad revenge” (such as hurting someone because a member of their racial group did something wrong, or getting huge revenge for a very small slight)?
Justice is right and good in itself. You’re looking for a benefit to individuals, which is looking in the wrong place. Justice fulfilled has its own, immaterial value. If you only look for material value, you will come away frustrated in discussing this topic.
For one, it’s impersonal. I want justice for everyone, as opposed to revenge on those who’ve wronged me and mine. For another, the motive is not “payback”, the punishment is the means by which justice is achieved, as opposed to being the end in itself.
There are some countries that are hurting don’t get me wrong. But the idea that most of the world is a hell hole is inaccurate. Most countries are doing pretty okay.
I’ve always argued that vengeance is one part of the justice system. Vengeance is retaliatory punishment in response to an offense of some kind and it’s the bread and butter of every justice system since the Code of Hammurabi. But under a justice system vengeance is tempered and limited to punishments that fit the crime. Though an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth as codified by Hammurabi seems barbaric to us today it actually limited the amount of punishment one could receive for an offense.
As for what benefit punishment has, well, we’ve covered that a bit. Punishment preserves order in a variety of ways. It acts as a deterrent and it prevents people from becoming vigilantes. The threat of punishment certainly isn’t a 100% effective prophylactic against crime of course. You say punishing criminals appeals to our sadistic nature but I think it appeals to our sense of fair play. We’re outraged when people break the rules without suffering consequences. We’re outraged when people are harmed when they didn’t break the rules.
I find it amusingly ironic that placing individuals in a society of like minded individuals is considered punishment. It would seem to me a learning experience in and of itself to realize that one did not want to be like these people after all and instead more like the society one had harmed and thus distanced oneself from. Of course for some it is a punishment in that they are deprived of their victim pool.
We don’t have justice. We will never have justice. Justice would be for those who commit a crime to suffer the exact thing they inflicted. We can’t do that because that would damage us individually and as a society. We instead fall back on an approximation which is nowhere near the damage the criminal inflicted in most cases as it just takes a small portion of their lives and has the dual function of protecting the rest of society from them for a time. They can decide when they get out whether they fit in with relatively good people or prefer the company of those who prey on them as they themselves have done. It’s the best we can do to give them the opportunity to learn which they prefer. What we can’t allow is for them to be outside preying on victims without consequences. Vengence has nothing to do with that.