What is the difference between revenge and justice? Is wishing Justice for somebody's murder the same thing as wishing revenge? For example, is the death penalty for murder justice or is it actually revenge?
Stupid question I know. But this is been a topic I've been seeing a lot on Facebook.
This is
not a stupid question at all! It's a very important question. The difficulty is that in our age every word for retribution has been twisted into a pejorative, which means that we are no longer able to think clearly about your question, or even ask it. In order to avoid this terminological swamp, I am just going to use the two terms: [good kind of revenge] and [bad kind of revenge].
According to Thomas Aquinas the difference is quite simple:
- [Good kind of revenge] = punishing a malefactor in proportion with their offense.
- [Bad kind of revenge] = punishing a malefactor excessively, disproportionately to their offense.
In some ways it's just that simple. So if you are behind someone when a red light turns green and they just sit there, oblivious to the green light, you might want to punish them for their negligence. You might give them a long honk of your horn, and it seems to me that this would constitute the good kind of revenge, which is proportionate to their offense. On the other hand, you might get out of your car and smash all of their windows with a baseball bat. It
seems to me that this would constitute the bad kind of revenge.
For Aquinas this is going to be exactly correlative to whether your anger is virtuous or vicious (good or bad). The good sort of anger results in the good kind of revenge, and the bad sort of anger results in the bad kind of revenge.
The secondary consideration asks whether you are the proper authority to mete out a punishment. Someone may steal your car, and although you may want to take revenge
personally, in this sort of case your revenge must be mediated by the legal system. To oversimplify, this is because the punishment which a car thief deserves is a larger punishment than a private citizen has the power to mete out. To try to mete out a severe punishment personally is sometimes called "revenge," but it is more precisely called "vigilantism" or "vigilante justice," or more commonly, "taking the law into your own hands."
In conclusion, revenge can be bad either by being disproportionate to the offense, or else because the person meting out a punishment is not the competent authority for such a task. Revenge which avoids these two problems is right and just. "An eye for an eye" (Leviticus 24:19-21) is intended as a limit, and is meant to prevent the primary sense of bad revenge (disproportion). That Old Testament law means, "An eye for an eye,
and no more."
