I'm not necessarily looking to debate here. I just want to make sure it's coherent, that it makes sense, flows well, etc.. In other words, I'd like a review of the quality of writing.
(It's not a creative work, though, so I didn't put it in Media.)
The thoughts.
Please bear in mind that I haven't had any sleep yet.
The scale.
There is a scale. Not a physical one, but a conceptual one. This scale measures the prevalence of good and evil, and right now, it's out of balance. It has been for a long time. Evil is high, good is low.
A discussion of revenge.
Revenge is when someone who was victimized despite being undeserving of pain -- in other words, an innocent person -- retaliates, and inflicts that pain back upon their assailant. It is when the good strike back at the evil.
It is evil, you see, to inflict pain upon the innocent. This is the principle upon which virtually all systems of morality are, and have been, based. So when the good are harmed, pain is deposited upon their side of the scale. The good are struck down, and evil rises to supremacy.
Revenge balances this scale. Justice, on the other hand, does not.
And why not?
Justice involves the punishment of evil, just as revenge does. Justice, however, is not punitive enough. Let's consider a typical example of justice at work.
Jane Doe is an innocent, good person going about her life. One day, however, as she walks from her office to the parking garage where her car is located, she is attacked and subdued by John Smith. He drags her into a dark, secluded alleyway, and rapes her.
John Smith is caught and put on trial. Jane is subject to scrutiny, blame, criticisms, an invasive probing of her past and present, and ultimately psychological warfare, thanks to the efforts of a soulless defense lawyer working diligently to free a depraved, subhuman monster. She is at the mercy of an uncaring, cynical, and likely oblivious jury, who will probably blame her for an attack that she did nothing to deserve.
Yet despite these massive disadvantages and imbalances in the system, Smith is found guilty and jailed. He now gets free food, shelter, and clothing, and even limited forms of entertainment, while living in an environment where depravity and cruelty often become prestige.
Jane is left to deal with Rape Trauma Syndrome and Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. For those of you too lazy to click on links, the symptoms of both of those include: profound self-blame; the development of phobias; the loss of a sense of safety and self-worth; loss of a sense of self; persistent sadness; suicidality; anger; helplessness and despair; a feeling of guilt, shame, or of being dirty/filthy/defiled; a feeling of alienation, of being different, abnormal, a freak; isolation, distrust; anxiety; persistent fear and depression; powerful flashbacks; extreme disturbances in sexual function and habits.
Jane Doe is in pain, yet John Smith suffers only from monotony. If you think that's fair, then please do the human gene pool a favor by removing yourself from it.
And yet for Justice, that's a win. For while Justice knows that the scale must be rebalanced, it fails to understand a key concept: the weight added to the evil side must equal the burden added to the good side. To Justice, a plastic bucket of feathers is a perfectly reasonable counterweight to a ten-pound stone.
With revenge, on the other hand, the victim -- or someone acting on their behalf -- inflicts about as much pain as the victimizer did.
Revenge balances the scale.
Ironically, however, Justice punishes revenge! If Jane Doe's boyfriend, Tom Roe, were to kill John Smith before the trial began, then Tom Roe would be tried and imprisoned for murder! This despite the fact that Tom would be rebalancing the scale. Tom would be doing what Justice sought out to do, and he'd be doing it far more effectively than Justice ever could -- and yet Justice would punish him for it! Justice, in that scenario, would be again unbalancing the scale by harming an innocent man. Hell, it would happily punish even Jane, if she attempted to balance out John Smith's hypothetical crime.
From this, I can only determine that Justice, regardless of its actual intentions, serves only to ensure that the scale is perpetually unbalanced in evil's favor.
Why is the scale important?
They say that you should judge a person by their actions -- "don't judge a book by its cover". The scale is a species-wide application of this axiom. The scale shows mankind's morality. When evil is higher, mankind as a whole is evil. When good is higher, mankind as a whole is good. This is why we must -- at minimum -- rebalance the scale. (Whether or not it is possible to unbalance it in good's favor is unknown.) To rebalance the scale is to redeem mankind of its crimes.
How do we balance the scale?
Adopt harsher punishments. A crime's punishment should depend on the pain the crime caused. Obviously, we cannot commit (some of) these crimes in the course of punishing them. We can, however, approximate the pain using physical harm. I'm sure you know what I mean. (If it comforts you, I am only considering severe crimes -- rape, murder, torture, etc. -- and not trivial ones, like theft or trespassing. The lesser crimes have an immeasurably small effect on the scale, and hence we need not bother with more extreme methods for balancing them.)
So a punishment should total up the pain -- physical, psychological, and otherwise -- and inflict an equal amount of physical pain upon the offender. (This is because the chances of inflicting psychological pain, e.x. guilt, upon sadists and sociopaths are... slim.) For extremely severe crimes (such as repeated child molestation), medical intervention can ensure that the offender lives to experience the entirety of their punishment.
The effect will be that the (near-)exact amount of pain that was deposited upon the good side of the scale will subsequently be deposited upon the evil side of the scale. Balance will be restored.
In other words, we need to use revenge as a punishment for the most serious crimes, using the inadequate concept of justice to deal only with the lesser ones.
"But then we're no better than them!"
Not necessarily. The reason that an offender's actions -- be they torture, rape, or just murder -- are evil is because those actions are committed against innocent people. Punitive torture against these offenders would not be harming innocent people, and it would therefore not be evil.
"But these actions are always bad!"
I could contrive countless scenarios where the actions are good.
If someone breaks into your home and tries to kill you, but you kill them first, then the murder you have committed is perfectly fine -- it was self-defense. Even Justice agrees with me here.
If you know with absolute certainty that someone has information on a terrorist attack that will be committed today, and the only way to obtain this information is to coerce it out of them, then torture's quite all right. You'll save hundreds of lives by harming -- not even ending! -- a life that deserved the pain it got.
Really, the only crime that one could not possibly conceive a rational, justified scenario for is rape. That is the only action that is intrinsically evil, regardless of whom commits it against whom, or what circumstances lead to it.
So any non-rape method of inflicting pain upon those who are evil is an acceptable if not necessary way to rebalance the scale and hence redeem mankind.
"What if we punish the wrong man? Wouldn't that further unbalance the scale in evil's favor?"
That is outside the scope of this discussion. It is not my concern. But in the interests of being helpful, I know of a way to partially integrate revenge into our legal system without potentially torturing an innocent.
The method would only be used on repeat offenders of serious crimes. If a person is convicted for rape and murder once, then yeah, he could possibly be a wrongfully-convicted man. But if, after he is released from prison, he is convicted of rape and murder again... Well, either he's a rapist, or our forensics technology is irreparably faulty. Chances are, the former is correct, though an argument could certainly be made in support of the latter possibility. Probably best to go with the former... and give him both the pain he earned for his second crime, and the pain he never received for his first.
This certainly wouldn't fully rebalance the scale. If someone commits murder, torture, or rape against an innocent only once (or if they are not caught for subsequent offenses), then their crime(s) would never be balanced out. But some repeat offenders would have their crimes balanced, and a little is better than none whatsoever. The scale would still be unbalanced in evil's favor, but less so.
"But wait. Even if we balance the scale, it's still buried under mountains of pain. Pain is heaped onto the good side, and then we balance it by dumping pain upon the evil side."
You're right. Neither revenge nor justice can deal with the accumulation of pain itself. Even after the victimizer is punished, the victim is still in pain. To use my first example, even if John endures the suffering he deserves, Jane must still endure near-unspeakable psychological horrors.
If you find some way to fix this fundamental flaw in both justice and revenge, please do let me -- and the rest of the world -- know.
The scale.
There is a scale. Not a physical one, but a conceptual one. This scale measures the prevalence of good and evil, and right now, it's out of balance. It has been for a long time. Evil is high, good is low.
A discussion of revenge.
Revenge is when someone who was victimized despite being undeserving of pain -- in other words, an innocent person -- retaliates, and inflicts that pain back upon their assailant. It is when the good strike back at the evil.
It is evil, you see, to inflict pain upon the innocent. This is the principle upon which virtually all systems of morality are, and have been, based. So when the good are harmed, pain is deposited upon their side of the scale. The good are struck down, and evil rises to supremacy.
Revenge balances this scale. Justice, on the other hand, does not.
And why not?
Justice involves the punishment of evil, just as revenge does. Justice, however, is not punitive enough. Let's consider a typical example of justice at work.
Jane Doe is an innocent, good person going about her life. One day, however, as she walks from her office to the parking garage where her car is located, she is attacked and subdued by John Smith. He drags her into a dark, secluded alleyway, and rapes her.
John Smith is caught and put on trial. Jane is subject to scrutiny, blame, criticisms, an invasive probing of her past and present, and ultimately psychological warfare, thanks to the efforts of a soulless defense lawyer working diligently to free a depraved, subhuman monster. She is at the mercy of an uncaring, cynical, and likely oblivious jury, who will probably blame her for an attack that she did nothing to deserve.
Yet despite these massive disadvantages and imbalances in the system, Smith is found guilty and jailed. He now gets free food, shelter, and clothing, and even limited forms of entertainment, while living in an environment where depravity and cruelty often become prestige.
Jane is left to deal with Rape Trauma Syndrome and Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. For those of you too lazy to click on links, the symptoms of both of those include: profound self-blame; the development of phobias; the loss of a sense of safety and self-worth; loss of a sense of self; persistent sadness; suicidality; anger; helplessness and despair; a feeling of guilt, shame, or of being dirty/filthy/defiled; a feeling of alienation, of being different, abnormal, a freak; isolation, distrust; anxiety; persistent fear and depression; powerful flashbacks; extreme disturbances in sexual function and habits.
Jane Doe is in pain, yet John Smith suffers only from monotony. If you think that's fair, then please do the human gene pool a favor by removing yourself from it.
And yet for Justice, that's a win. For while Justice knows that the scale must be rebalanced, it fails to understand a key concept: the weight added to the evil side must equal the burden added to the good side. To Justice, a plastic bucket of feathers is a perfectly reasonable counterweight to a ten-pound stone.
With revenge, on the other hand, the victim -- or someone acting on their behalf -- inflicts about as much pain as the victimizer did.
Revenge balances the scale.
Ironically, however, Justice punishes revenge! If Jane Doe's boyfriend, Tom Roe, were to kill John Smith before the trial began, then Tom Roe would be tried and imprisoned for murder! This despite the fact that Tom would be rebalancing the scale. Tom would be doing what Justice sought out to do, and he'd be doing it far more effectively than Justice ever could -- and yet Justice would punish him for it! Justice, in that scenario, would be again unbalancing the scale by harming an innocent man. Hell, it would happily punish even Jane, if she attempted to balance out John Smith's hypothetical crime.
From this, I can only determine that Justice, regardless of its actual intentions, serves only to ensure that the scale is perpetually unbalanced in evil's favor.
Why is the scale important?
They say that you should judge a person by their actions -- "don't judge a book by its cover". The scale is a species-wide application of this axiom. The scale shows mankind's morality. When evil is higher, mankind as a whole is evil. When good is higher, mankind as a whole is good. This is why we must -- at minimum -- rebalance the scale. (Whether or not it is possible to unbalance it in good's favor is unknown.) To rebalance the scale is to redeem mankind of its crimes.
How do we balance the scale?
Adopt harsher punishments. A crime's punishment should depend on the pain the crime caused. Obviously, we cannot commit (some of) these crimes in the course of punishing them. We can, however, approximate the pain using physical harm. I'm sure you know what I mean. (If it comforts you, I am only considering severe crimes -- rape, murder, torture, etc. -- and not trivial ones, like theft or trespassing. The lesser crimes have an immeasurably small effect on the scale, and hence we need not bother with more extreme methods for balancing them.)
So a punishment should total up the pain -- physical, psychological, and otherwise -- and inflict an equal amount of physical pain upon the offender. (This is because the chances of inflicting psychological pain, e.x. guilt, upon sadists and sociopaths are... slim.) For extremely severe crimes (such as repeated child molestation), medical intervention can ensure that the offender lives to experience the entirety of their punishment.
The effect will be that the (near-)exact amount of pain that was deposited upon the good side of the scale will subsequently be deposited upon the evil side of the scale. Balance will be restored.
In other words, we need to use revenge as a punishment for the most serious crimes, using the inadequate concept of justice to deal only with the lesser ones.
"But then we're no better than them!"
Not necessarily. The reason that an offender's actions -- be they torture, rape, or just murder -- are evil is because those actions are committed against innocent people. Punitive torture against these offenders would not be harming innocent people, and it would therefore not be evil.
"But these actions are always bad!"
I could contrive countless scenarios where the actions are good.
If someone breaks into your home and tries to kill you, but you kill them first, then the murder you have committed is perfectly fine -- it was self-defense. Even Justice agrees with me here.
If you know with absolute certainty that someone has information on a terrorist attack that will be committed today, and the only way to obtain this information is to coerce it out of them, then torture's quite all right. You'll save hundreds of lives by harming -- not even ending! -- a life that deserved the pain it got.
Really, the only crime that one could not possibly conceive a rational, justified scenario for is rape. That is the only action that is intrinsically evil, regardless of whom commits it against whom, or what circumstances lead to it.
So any non-rape method of inflicting pain upon those who are evil is an acceptable if not necessary way to rebalance the scale and hence redeem mankind.
"What if we punish the wrong man? Wouldn't that further unbalance the scale in evil's favor?"
That is outside the scope of this discussion. It is not my concern. But in the interests of being helpful, I know of a way to partially integrate revenge into our legal system without potentially torturing an innocent.
The method would only be used on repeat offenders of serious crimes. If a person is convicted for rape and murder once, then yeah, he could possibly be a wrongfully-convicted man. But if, after he is released from prison, he is convicted of rape and murder again... Well, either he's a rapist, or our forensics technology is irreparably faulty. Chances are, the former is correct, though an argument could certainly be made in support of the latter possibility. Probably best to go with the former... and give him both the pain he earned for his second crime, and the pain he never received for his first.
This certainly wouldn't fully rebalance the scale. If someone commits murder, torture, or rape against an innocent only once (or if they are not caught for subsequent offenses), then their crime(s) would never be balanced out. But some repeat offenders would have their crimes balanced, and a little is better than none whatsoever. The scale would still be unbalanced in evil's favor, but less so.
"But wait. Even if we balance the scale, it's still buried under mountains of pain. Pain is heaped onto the good side, and then we balance it by dumping pain upon the evil side."
You're right. Neither revenge nor justice can deal with the accumulation of pain itself. Even after the victimizer is punished, the victim is still in pain. To use my first example, even if John endures the suffering he deserves, Jane must still endure near-unspeakable psychological horrors.
If you find some way to fix this fundamental flaw in both justice and revenge, please do let me -- and the rest of the world -- know.
None.
"
)