Some readers of my first Discourse on the subject, whom I must thank for their patience, expressed a great discomfort with the notion that man has a moral right to revenge, let alone to kill under certain circumstances or after some series of events. Such a discomfort, which I doubt should be quite prevalent among participants in this Forum, is understandable. The assertion that a moral right to revenge can be justified, appears to readers as an open invitation to hurt, even though my original conception of the right restricts its application only to those who have previously been harmed, and to such manners of revenge as befit the crime. Qualifications as these have not impressed readers sufficiently, who can see, in the articulation of the right, nothing but a wicked desire to fan hatred.
For these readers, it is unreasonable of anyone even to attempt justifying revenge, whatever form it takes. If revenge can have no moral basis, and these readers alleged it could not, then the only kind of justification for criminal sanction available to them must be utilitarian in nature: Bygones are bygones, punish only so much as can deter future harm. But then the said readers must admit that they can, regarding criminal sanction, treat human beings only as means and never as ends. For they can recognize in the justification for punishment only the utilitarian calculation of deterrence, but nothing like the moral right of the victim to punish. To speak of the moral right to revenge is, contrary to what these readers apparently thought, an attempt to argue that the right to punish need not be tied to a calculus of costs and benefits of future deterrence; it can rather be grounded on what moral claim the victim might have in view of the situation into which fate has thrown him.
It is peculiarly annoying to hear readers characterize my endorsement of a moral right to revenge as fanning flames of hatred. For if the recognition of a right, the necessary consequence of which being some antagonism between certain members of society, is to be avoided at all cost, inasmuch as that antagonism can hence be avoided; then I must say no sense could be made of much of what has been mentioned, justified, advocated, discussed on this Forum. How much hatred indeed those slogans for or against, frequently posted on this Forum, signaling an unreserved attempt to arouse consciousness, to acknowledge the claim of certain individuals or groups, to relate their plight, and to demand their restitution. Shall we, with the said readers, condemn all these attempts as attempts to fan flames of hatred? Why recognize a woman's right to freedom from marital sexual abuse if voicing that right too much simply creates tension on the marital bed? Why recognize the right of the poor to certain social benefits if that can easily be recharacterized as fanning class hatred?
Revenge is a sensitive word. To delimit what right there might be to revenge, is to limit its scope, to distinguish, as best as human articulation could, just revenge from unjust revenge. In fact, many people, many readers of my former Discourse included, do not hesitate to seek justice in a court of law. They can call it by any name but revenge: redress, retribution, restitution, restoration, condemnation of unjustified enrichment; but the act is in essence no different from just revenge as I meant by the term.
There is an air in which an enthusiastic promotion of forgiveness is deemed uncontroversially good, whereas any recognition of the moral right to revenge, invariably bad. I do not think anyone holding such an opinion has thought through his position at all. Forgiveness can doubtless be a good; so can love, mercy, charity, etc. But no reader, I suppose, would contradict me should I propose that blind love can spoil a child, and overflooding mercy can harbor cruelty in its shadow. The right to revenge does not preclude the practice of love, mercy, charity, or forgiveness. But it does qualify the goodness proclaimed in these virtues, urging us to be sensitive to what our articulations, made in the passion of high moral idealism, might actually imply.
Theodor Adorno, if I may quote one author not known for any passion for wicked vengeance, once wryly intimated: "The attitude that it would be proper for everything to be forgotten and forgiven by those who were wronged is expressed by the party that committed the injustice." (See his essay "What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?") Why, readers, did the Germans still in the sixties try to prosecute former Nazis who had engineered the killing of Jews? Did the Jews, long vanquished, have in the cosmic scheme of things a moral right to such revenge?
Some readers are eager to see the end of killing, so eager that they would regard any further killing as unjust. So they cite Jesus or some other figure befitting their moral vision. I do not know if they are prepared to demand even the prohibition of killing for the sake of self-defense. Some seem so: for they like ironically to ask whether one man could ever have a right to kill another man.
It is easy to say that it is sick to try to kill a man because he had killed another. There are two possibilities: In one possibility, the patient - sickened by the proposal - reject the killing simply because it is a killing. To hold this view, he should also prohibit killing for the sake of self-defense. In the other possibility, he is against the very motive of punishing the wrong-doer so severely. To hold this view, he should also reconsider the very ground on which some very serious crimes are currently quite severely punished.
But we should not, in arguing for or against capital punishment, lose sight of what is the chief object here, namely, the moral right to revenge, its grounds and its implications. It is not difficult, I regret to say, to sense a great deal of suppressed hatred in many contributions to this Forum. Those who have been actively opposed to this or that prevailing doctrine or practice, have, curiously enough, condemned an attempt to clarify the moral basis of revenge. The Adorno quote above should remind us that the verdict cannot be so straightforward as these writers like to fancy it to be.
Y.T.
Sept. 12, 2006
Cambridge, MA