How do you feel about vengeance?
- Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
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shadowyxgold, why do you disagree that vengeance is petty?
"The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master."
I believe spiritual freedom (a.k.a. self-discipline) manifests as bravery, confidence, grace, honesty, love, and inner peace.
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Vengeance
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As opposed to...? I think outlawry should be re-instated so that people can choose by themselves whether or not to take vengeance on criminals.Scott wrote:You say that individuals and society would be better off if they did not bottle up their emotions. Generally speaking, I agree. However, people can find other outlets for their emotions than by violently attacking other people against those other people's will.
Interesting example. I wouldn't judge one way or another if he shot his wife for cheating. It's an interesting moral conundrum.Scott wrote:For example, consider the man who catches his wife cheating; he goes home, cries and pains over it, and then goes back and kills her; Do you think he is going to feel better or do you think indulging in his vengeful desires will just make it worse? He might unsurprisingly shoot himself after he realizes how counter-productive shooting his wife was.
Interesting idea. I'm certainly not saying people should randomly take revenge, but revenge is behind the concept of justice. "An eye for an eye" etc.Scott wrote:If anything, I think society is more disrupted when people go around attacking others, not out of defense or to rectify damage, but out of a desire for vengeance. In fact, I believe most acts of offensive interpersonal victimization (e.g. rape, murder, battery, vandalism, etc.) are done out of vengeance.
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Should revenge be behind the concept of justice? If we can have justice without revenge, we might not have to lose so many eyes (which is, essentially, the inverse of the adage, "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind").Daniel Owen wrote:I'm certainly not saying people should randomly take revenge, but revenge is behind the concept of justice. "An eye for an eye" etc
Put another way, what is the real goal of justice? Presumably, it is to prevent as much crime as possible. If we can prevent more crime by implementing non-vengeful policies of justice, why shouldn't we? The only advantage of a vengeance-based justice is that it makes people feel a little better. There are other types of things which harm people but make other people feel a bit better: rape, murder, assault, et cetera, et cetera.
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"Revenge is a confession to pain" must be my favourite : if you act (and yes ACT, it might have actually harmed you) like it didn't harm you, you are showing the "offender"'s efforts are futile, and that he might lack intelligence for making a useless attempt.
I think i might be perverting the whole idea of the proverb...but it's how i interpretted it.
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'Vengence' doesn't exist in 'my' worlds as I don't 'believe' in 'free-will' or 'choice' or 'cause and effect', hence there can be no personal 'responsibility' for one's behavior. I am more inclined to determine and offer 'healing' rather than 'retribution/punishment'. The 'win/win' concept is growing and the win/lose is dying. Good riddance.
'Compassion' vs 'vengence'? I find that 'vengence' falls into the same 'base and low' behavior as any other predatory and victimizing criminal. More of the same.
I find myself moved to 'compassion' the more that I get to know the 'perp'. One cannot hate someone that one gets to know beyond the superficial.
'Vengance' is already obsolete.
Peace
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The trouble with an eye for an eye is that it is literally impossible to make retribution equitable.What retribution can equal the murder of one's child? None.
Another bad thing about vengeance is that it is not rational. The more one rationally knows about the causes of the person's crime, the more one can forgive it.
True, to wreak violent vengeance on someone who is currently doing wilfull harm can be tempting. However, other sorts of vengeance besides violent retribution which will not harm man or beast may be available.For instance sanctions within the law.
Regards
Belinda
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'A strategy is a plan of action that cannot be upset by an opponent or nature. The purpose of strategies is to secure the most favorable game value in the long run. A common strategy is tit-for-tat, in which the player responds to a given game move with a mirroring move.'
Tit-for-tat is essentially vengence written small - where one cooperates until the other defects, then defect in revenge, before returining to cooperation. It's an extremely sucessful strategy - related to evolutionary biology.
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Vengeance is undue force in retirubtion of a wrong caused by the party inflicting such said retribution.
Undue it is because our societies are the ones hurt by the Vengeance. An example!
Our petty Vandal breaks a window, not a nice thing to do. Our vandalized person goes out and breaks our Vandal's window. They both only see their own window, but society now has two broken windows instead of one. Now society has to repair two windows instead of forcing the vandal to repair the first. What's the harm? twice the damage as before, had we not become vengful. Let's make this more extreme:
Our angry boy friend has discovered his girlfriend is cheating on him with another man. Boy that's terrible, better get out my gun and shoot her. Well, now society has lost its wonderfuly productive (if rather seductive as well) person because of vengeance. Had they just have broken up, we would still have our productive person still toiling away for the machine, not dead as a doorknob. Say that woman was a social worker for orphans, who cares about her dating ethics--We now have more children in danger! save your vengance for your video games, WE need those people, that money, and the time invested in vengeance to better ourselves.
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He'll only do it again, or worse, until you have to retaliate, perhaps as disproportionately as when your girlfriend cheats on you.
Alternatively, it might be argued that an eye for an eye, rather than an eye an arm and a leg for an eye, is a call for proportionality of vengence. Tit-for-tat.
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Having read Scott's blog, and given Belinda's contrubution, I'd supposed we were trying to get at the difference between an eye for an eye and turn the other cheek - which in turn can be reduced to tit-for-tat and always cooperate. Logically, the former is the better strategy - but i would have entertained (and dismissed) arguments about the emotional appeal of forgiveness, the tendency to disproportionality in real human relations as opposed to logic games, and/or an endless cycle of revenge and counter revenge.
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