A few weeks ago was reported in the newspapers in HK a case wherein a gang of youngsters, from mid teens to early twenties variously, were found guilty of manslaughtering a girl after no less than ten hours of continuous torturous assault on the victim. The case was gruesome to the utmost; lead culprits were sentenced to nine years of imprisonment, others less severely punished. Learning of the decision shortly afterwards, the father of the victim was reported to have cried that had they been tried in the mainland, these murderers of his daughter would have all been condemned to death. Justice had for him not been done.
There are many theories in modern times to underpin the vision that criminal punishment should aim only at rehabilitating the condemned and deterring the rest, not at avenging the victim. There is even a strong tendency for modern commentators to despise the very idea of revenge, thinking that it can only belong to the uncivilized age of glorified aggression - an eye for an eye, and nothing less than an eye. Love, presumably, and especially in Christian, or Christianized, and Christianizing circles, has overcome that abject barbarity; by some discursive infiltration if not categorical fiat, it is declared that this overcoming is universal and complete: Revenge has no place in modern societies.
But, to take a better look at the question, it is imperative that we clarify, in the first place, what we mean by revenge. Revenge, in the abstract, denotes the moral right of one party, or its delegate, to harm another party, or some designated associate thereof, privately or publicly, and in some customarily stipulated way, on cause of the harm previously done to the former by the latter, and which has so far not been balanced on the moral account between the two parties. Revenge, on this rough delimitation, does not confer any moral right to the second party to harm the first once the moral account is balanced. In brief, revenge need not - and should not - be equated with a thirst for vendetta. Every description of revenge in terms solely of resentment, hatred, blood, blindness, destruction already presupposes that revenge must be morally wrong, without paying the slightest heed to the haunting cry of the avenger, who in his hellish anger means nevertheless to advance a perfect claim of right in the highest court of morality.
Proposers of the said kind of description of revenge might exhibit the potential pain of the wrong-doer (should revenge be allowed) as a ground for liberal mercy, arguing that the doing of a further harm adds nothing to justice but everything to ruthless hatred. And yet, this generous plea can be sustained only if one has a very short memory: i.e. only if one can imagine perfectly the potential pain of the wrong-doer, but nothing, be it just a matter of days since the wrong, of the actual pain of the victim. The pleader must therefore face this question squarely: Does the actual pain of the victim support any moral right for him or his avenger at all? To banish revenge categorically from the realm of modern civilization is to rule once and for all that however much pain a victim has suffered, he has no additional moral right ipso facto. This is clearly a moral judgment of the highest order, and not something that can be so easily presumed as many among the said proposers and pleaders would like it to.
We do not take it as the object of this essay to advance a full justification for revenge. But to re-open the case for such a justification, contra the proclaimed moral sensibility of the time, we do aspire. The inclination to find criminal punishment only justifiable on prospective grounds - rehabilitation and deterrence - suggests, very uneasily in moral matters but, one must say, largely in accord with a forward-looking mentality of the modern, a kind of leniency whose obverse must be tacit neglect of the victim's moral claim.
The prevailing penchant for dismissing revenge as barbaric has much of its origin in starting the investigation restrictively from its effect on the wrong-doer. In this way, some sort of utilitarian ethic has already creeped into the pleading. But as soon as we remove the case to a less conventional court, and demand that the question be reformulated as one concerning the moral right of the victim - be he dead or alive - the whole case should re-emerge in a new light. And there even the case against the death penalty should no longer be deemed unchallengeable. It comes to no avail to cry that the state kills, if capital punishment be allowed. The state certainly kills in this way, but the question is: Whether it, as representative of the victim, have the right to avenge him. If it does, it kills with perfect moral justification, and its not killing would in fact be a grave moral lack.
Y.T.
Sept. 6, 2006.
Cambridge, MA.