Revenge vs Justice

Revenge and justice are closely related because both arise from the recognition that someone has been wronged and that the wrong should somehow be answered. Both may involve punishment, and both can be motivated by the intuition that a person who deliberately harms another ought not simply to escape the consequences. Yet revenge and justice differ in a fundamental respect.

• Revenge is primarily concerned with making the wrongdoer suffer. Revenge is therefore essentially retaliatory

• Justice is concerned with determining what the wrongdoer deserves and ensuring that the appropriate response is made. Justice is intended to be principled and impartial.

The simplest form of revenge is expressed in the thought, 'You hurt me, so I will hurt you.' The emphasis is upon retaliation. The original harm creates a desire to inflict a corresponding harm upon its perpetrator. This can produce a powerful sense of psychological satisfaction because the offender appears to be made to experience something resembling what he or she inflicted upon the victim. The suffering of the offender is itself part of the desired outcome.

Justice, by contrast, does not necessarily require the victim to want the offender to suffer. It requires an assessment of what is owed in consequence of the wrong. If a person steals £1,000, for example, justice might require the return of the money and perhaps an additional proportionate punishment. It would not normally be considered just for the victim to steal £10,000 from the offender simply because this would produce a greater feeling of satisfaction. Justice therefore introduces the idea of proportionality. The punishment must bear an appropriate relationship to the offence.

This difference becomes particularly clear when we consider the role of the victim. Revenge is inherently personal. The person who has been wronged has a special emotional interest in seeing the wrongdoer suffer. Justice, however, ideally requires impartiality. The judge who sentences an offender is not supposed to be motivated by personal anger towards the offender or sympathy for the victim. The judge is required to apply general principles to the particular case. The fact that the victim is exceptionally angry, or that the offender is exceptionally disliked, should not by itself determine the punishment.

Justice therefore involves a degree of detachment from emotion. This does not mean that justice must be emotionally cold. Anger at serious wrongdoing can be morally appropriate, and indignation at injustice can motivate people to demand that wrongs be corrected. But justice requires that these emotions be controlled by principles. A person may understandably want a burglar to suffer, but a just response asks a different question: what punishment is proportionate to the offence, taking into account the circumstances, the offender's responsibility and the legitimate interests of the victim and society?

Another important difference concerns purpose. Revenge is usually backward-looking and retaliatory: something bad happened, and the offender should now experience something bad in return. Justice can also be backward-looking, particularly in a retributive theory of punishment, but it can incorporate other purposes as well. A just sentence may aim to deter future offending, rehabilitate the offender, protect the public, compensate the victim or restore relationships damaged by the offence. Justice therefore has a potentially wider conception of what an appropriate response to wrongdoing should achieve.

This distinction is particularly important in relation to criminal punishment. If punishment were simply an institutionalised form of revenge, the state would effectively be doing on behalf of the victim what the victim might otherwise do personally. But modern criminal justice attempts to transform retaliation into something more controlled. The police investigate, courts establish guilt according to rules of evidence, and judges impose sentences according to principles of law. The purpose is not to satisfy the victim's desire for retaliation but to establish a legitimate and proportionate response to the offence.

The difference can also be seen in the treatment of mistakes. Revenge is vulnerable to the emotions and assumptions of the person seeking it. Someone may sincerely believe that another person has wronged him when, in fact, the accusation is a mistake. The desire for revenge does not contain any mechanism for establishing whether the accused person is actually responsible. Justice, by contrast, requires procedures for determining responsibility. Evidence, a right to a hearing, the presumption of innocence and the opportunity to challenge accusations are all designed to prevent punishment from being inflicted merely because somebody wants retaliation.

Revenge is also prone to escalation. If A harms B and B retaliates, A may regard B's retaliation as a new wrong and retaliate again. Each party can then regard himself as responding to an injustice committed by the other. There is no inherent stopping point and the the situation can escalate into vendetta. Justice attempts to break this cycle by establishing an authoritative and final response. Once the court has determined guilt and imposed a proportionate sentence, the matter is supposed to be settled. The offender does not acquire a right to retaliate against the state or the victim because he has been punished.

There is nevertheless an important connection between revenge and retributive justice. Retributive theories of punishment maintain that wrongdoers deserve punishment simply because they have committed wrongdoing. This can sound very similar to revenge. Both involve the intuition that wrongdoing should be answered by suffering. The difference is that retribution attempts to remove the personal and potentially unlimited character of revenge. The question is not, 'How much suffering would satisfy the victim?' but, 'What punishment does this offender deserve, given the seriousness of the offence and the degree of responsibility?'

Retribution therefore represents an attempt to preserve something morally significant in the desire for revenge while eliminating its more dangerous features. The desire for revenge contains an important intuition: wrongdoing should matter. If a person deliberately causes serious harm and society simply ignores the offence, victims may reasonably feel that the moral significance of what happened has not been recognised. Justice responds to this intuition by holding the offender responsible, but it insists that responsibility must be determined through fair procedures and that punishment must be proportionate.

Justice also differs from revenge in that it can sometimes require mercy. A person seeking revenge is naturally inclined to concentrate upon the wrong that has been suffered. Justice, however, may take account of circumstances that reduce culpability or make a severe punishment inappropriate. Age, mental capacity, coercion, remorse, previous conduct and the possibility of rehabilitation may all be relevant. This does not mean that justice excuses wrongdoing; rather, it recognises that treating people justly requires more than simply inflicting upon them whatever suffering their offence makes us feel they deserve.

There is also a distinction between justice and forgiveness. Justice does not necessarily require forgiveness, and forgiveness does not necessarily eliminate the need for justice. A victim may forgive an offender while believing that the offender should nevertheless be punished. Conversely, society may impose a just punishment even though the victim personally wants nothing to do with the offender. This again illustrates the impersonal character of justice: it is not simply an expression of the victim's emotional response.

The deepest difference, then, is that revenge seeks retaliation, whereas justice seeks right proportion and right relationship. Revenge asks, in effect, 'How can I make the person who harmed me suffer?' Justice asks, 'What response does this wrong, committed by this person in these circumstances, properly call for?' Revenge is driven principally by the desire to answer harm with harm; justice subjects that desire to rules concerning evidence, proportionality, responsibility and impartiality.

This distinction does not mean that every act carried out in the name of justice is genuinely just. States can punish excessively, courts can make mistakes, and public anger can influence criminal justice. Nor does it mean that every desire for revenge is morally worthless. The emotional impulse behind revenge may contain a legitimate recognition that serious wrongdoing deserves a response. What separates justice from revenge is the attempt to discipline that impulse. Justice takes the understandable human desire that wrongs should be answered and places it within a framework intended to prevent anger, partiality and retaliation from determining the result.

In this sense, the development of criminal justice can be understood partly as an attempt to move from private revenge to public judgement. The victim is relieved of the responsibility to avenge the wrong personally, while the state assumes responsibility for determining whether an offence has occurred and what response is appropriate. The moral challenge is to ensure that this public response does not merely reproduce revenge on a larger scale. If punishment is to be genuinely just, the suffering imposed upon the offender must be justified not simply by the satisfaction it produces, but by a defensible principle of responsibility, proportionality and the legitimate purposes of punishment.