The objective of justice is to compel the offender to bring the wronged party back as much as possible to the state he was in before the wrong happened, and discourage repeats of the same offense by others. It is primarily concerned with the wronged party and society in general.
The objective of vengeance is make the offender hurt as bad as the wronged party does. It is primarily concerned with the offender.
I think that your envisioning of justice vs vengeance is the rehabilitative punishment versus punitive punishment.
Justice is the process of attempting to judge a violation of law or custom and resolve the case in a just manner. People are punished who deserve it and people who do not deserve it are let go. It’s opposite would be a judicial system setup to favor a specific person/group/class, such as a system that let all white defendants go and sent all black defendants to jail (As a very, very simple idea of an unjust judicial system).
In recent years, it has sort-of morphed into a call for fairness, especially when one or more people consider the disposition of the process not “just”.
Vengeance is a type of retaliatory punishment. X was done, so Y will be done to the person that perpetrated X, especially in the cases where Y is equal to or more severe than X was in the first place. It can be individual or through the state.
The rule “An eye for an eye” is a classic example of vengeance. It demands punitive punishment equal to the original act. (Steal ten dollars, pay ten dollars. Poke out an eye, get an eye poked out.)
Of course there is. A parent who sends her child to his room without dessert for throwing food at the cat is administering punishment, but that punishment isn’t vengeance.
If there’s a bat costume involved…
Justice is what society (not necessarily the Judge) deems as appropriate punishment.
Vengeance is what the victim deems as appropriate punishment.
I would say that in the case of justice there is the idea of a social compact. That there are certain actions that are forbidden and in order to prevent those actions there needs to be consequences for those who engage in them.
Vengeance is entirely emotionally based. A person has done something that hurt you so they have become your enemy, and hurting that person will make you feel good.
Note: it is perfectly possible for a society to take vengeance or for an individual to dispense justice (although the latter is rare outside of movies and comic books).
There seems to be a newar universal feeling that justice is a form of punishment.
It is not. Justice may mean no punishment. In a broader than legal context, justice may even be a reward for some good behavior.
Vengeance is always punishment.
Not necessarily. If purely punitive punishment is applied as part of a goal to improve society, (e.g. to discourage others from committing the same wrong) it can be justice, even if no direct rehabilitation is applied. If the same punishment is applied without a goal of extracting societal benefit from it, it is vengeance.
More explicit rehabilitation (e.g. being forced into a drug treatment program after a drug-related crime) is much harder to execute vengefully, but traditional punishment is not necessarily vengeful with the right mindset behind it.
I’m sorry for not wording this better.
I meant that your idea of “Justice” includes punishment where as I contrast that by saying that “Justice” is a particular process. Punishment, deserving, undeserving, vengeful or just is a separate concept in my argument.
I don’t believe that justice and revenge are ever the same thing. As a society, we like to think that we value justice as a virtue, but there are plenty of times when, say, someone gets off on a technicality and we collectively groan because, though the result was to the letter of the law, it was not just. Rather, as a society, we can only value law, which we hope is generally a social concensus on what we all believe justice to be. But I don’t believe justice requires any social or government aspect to exist.
Instead, how I think of justice is an attempt to restore balance and equity to the situation. To accomplish this, there are two aspects that must be considered. On the part of the wronged, what is most just is to restore him as closely as possible to the state he would be in had he not been wronged. On the part of the offender, he should be punished in a manner that is equitable to the amount that he wronged the other person. These goals are seldom possible to achieve perfectly, so we have to make certain concessions. For instance, if a person is injured, we will tend to compensate with a reasonable amount of money on the part of the offender. Similarly, we may consider certain acts of an offender either too barbaric or just plain impossible to return, and so we have some other method of punishment. The closer we can get to accomplishing these goals, the more just it is.
The goal of justice is not to prevent recidivism, or rehabilitation, or protecting the population. Those may or may not be laudable goals, and they are often considered along with justice and can get confused with it, but they are not part of jusice directly. For instance, those three goals are a good reason to favor imprisonment for many crimes over corporal punishment or simple restitution. But I believe it is, in some cases, less just to do things to further those goals, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a bad thing.
Revenge or vengence, on the other hand, is taking one (or both) of those aspects of justice, particularly the punishment aspect, farther than is equitable. For instance, I would argue that it is equitable that if someone punches me it would be just–though a terrible idea, as I don’t believe that this concept of justice is above all other virtues–to punch him with equal force. I would be also quite justified to pursue other means of justice, such as pressing charges. I think that that avenue would be technically slightly less just but would further other laudable virtues, such as social order. That said, what would be an act of revenge would be to consciously strike him back harder than he struck me, or to press charges and knowing seek a harsher prenalty than the act rightfully deserves.
So all of that said, I think there are situations where we can see various combinations of legality, justice, and vengence as examples to help illustrate how I see these concepts. So, for example, we could take a typical burglarly law as an example of legal justice. But there’s also plenty of legalized forms of revenge, such as particularly harsh penalties for drug related offenses. I also think there are times that the law fails to mete justice, it’s a bad idea for other reasons to go vigilante for it, but I don’t think vigilantism is necessarily unjust. Or it can be something as simple as organizing protests, boycotts, or social awareness. And, of course, extralegal vengence, like assaulting/killing a cheating spouse.
It’s one of the first examples we have of justice. “An eye for an eye” means that the punishment must fit the crime. It introduces the concept that some punishment is too excessive compared to the crime committed.
Nicely done:)
Next case.
I disagree. The Hammurapi code was fairly “Just” and is a lot more complete and was earlier-on. Instead of “equal harm for harm done” it listed a rule and what happens when you break said rule. I believe the Biblical texts in the “laying down of rules” came later on in the religion.
I always considered “eye for an eye” to stem from the time of the largely rural (you’re on MY land, so i get to decide what to do to you! Eye for an eye!) ancient books…But now that I think about it, it could have come from the slightly newer “small town Village Elders as judge” period.
I’ll have to see if I can research which author of the first five books entered that into the biblical accounts.
Justice seeks to restore victims to their pre-crime state and prevent repeat offenses by rehabilitation or sequestration of offenders.
Vengeance seeks to inflict the same, or greater, harm upon the offender as they inflicted upon their victim(s).
The classic example is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. This is vengeance. It may be limited vengeance, but it is vengeance nonetheless.
Justice has the often impossible task of restoring the damaged eye/tooth and taking away the means of damaging other eyes from the criminal. Since we often can’t restore the individual victims(no way to restore eyesight, or raise the dead) we have to settle for other types of compensation whenever possible. Often the assets of the criminal are not enough to cover the costs of making the victim whole again, so society steps in.
Enjoy,
Steven
Actually, the Code of Hammurabi DOES contain “an eye for an eye”… though only in the case the victim’s a freeman; and “a tooth for a tooth” only if the victim is of equal class. Otherwise it’s paying fines. And other crimes have greater and lower degrees of severity in punishment.
The point in the law codes when they came to be in different ancient lands was to provide a defined punishment system in order to avoid a vicious cycle of vengeance. If Ab injures Zer, let him suffer an equal injury; if Ab’s son gets Zer’s daughter pregnant, let him marry the daughter and pay a fine for what the dowry should have normally been, and it stops right there. Not have escalating counterstrikes of revenge.
No, an impartial third party doesn’t necessarily know the answer
I don’t understand what you’re disagreeing with.
This. The term “just” and “justice” are derived from the same Latin roots. So to say that something is just, means that it’s appropriate and proper.
The concept of “justice” means that in a situation of crime and punishment, that the punishment fits the crime in all ways. This means that it’s not always “an eye for an eye”- in a just the person caught stealing bread to feed his starving family would receive a lighter sentence, if at all, relative to someone stealing bread to make a profit.
Vengeance is an emotionally driven urge for punishment for a perceived wrong. There’s no concept of justice here- it’s simply a matter of one person/group is believed to have wronged another and the wronged party demands retribution, no matter how just or unjust the original issue may have been.
To use a modern example, in the Trayvon Martin case, the black community mostly wanted vengeance, not justice in my opinion. Nothing short of murder and life imprisonment or execution would have satisfied them, no matter how just or unjust that punishment may have been.
not even close