Thoughts on Revenge and Retribution

J. Daryl Charles

RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

Although there is much talk in contemporary therapeutic culture about "social justice," the concept of justice has largely lost its meaning. Justice—that cardinal virtue and moral tissue by which and in which a moral society coheres—requires that crimes against humanity be punishable and that temporal consequences proportionate in their magnitude attend those crimes. Evil incurs a public debt that is only addressed adequately by retributive justice.

The moral outrage that is expressed through retributive justice is one that is first and foremost rooted in moral principle, not mere emotional outrage or hatred. Its outrage is the expression of abiding moral markers—for example, "Thou shalt not murder." The nature and extent of retribution are lodged in two unbending ethical realities: the degree of wrongness of the criminal act and the degree of the party's criminal responsibility in committing such acts. Retributive justice, then, requires that wrongdoers get no more but no less than what is proportionate—or just—to their crimes.

But someone is likely to object: Isn't retribution merely a pretext for vengeance and the retaliatory impulse? Isn't the U. S. at the present time guilty of blood-thirst, in the final analysis only wanting to exact vengeance? And is it possible, in practice, to distinguish between vengeance and retribution?

Despite our doubts and deep-seated cynicism, the retributive act distinguishes itself from revenge or vengeance in several important and unmistakable ways. Whereas revenge strikes out at real or perceived injury, retribution speaks to an objective wrong. Whereas revenge is wild and "insatiable," not subject to limitations, retribution has both upper and lower limits, acknowledging the moral repugnance of assigning draconian punishment to petty crime as well as assigning light punishment to violent, heinous crime. Whereas vengeance has a thirst for injury and delights in bringing evil upon the offending party—the avenger will not only kill but rape, torture, plunder and burn what is left, deriving satisfaction from its victim's suffering—retribution has as its goal a greater social good and takes no pleasure in punishment. And finally, whereas the avenger will operate out of the retaliatory mode due to something done to him or to his group, retribution is impersonal and therefore demands impartiality, not subject to personal bias (for this reason Lady Justice is depicted as blindfolded).

Retributive justice, when properly understood, serves a civilized culture in several important ways. It isolates individuals who endanger the community; it expresses social outrage at morally perverse acts; it controls the extent to which the citizenry is victimized by criminal acts; it rewards the perpetrator proportionately with consequences befitting the crime; and it rehabilitates the offender by forcing him to reflect on the grievous nature of the crime. Each of these elements is critical in preserving the social order.

MORAL INTUITIONS

When we express social outrage at morally heinous acts, we are responding to moral intuitions; it is virtuous, not vicious, to feel anger at moral evil. In truth, if we do not express anger and moral outrage at evil, something is very wrong with us. To affirm retribution, which is integral to the history of Judeo-Christian moral thinking and foundational to any self-governing society, is not to abandon one's belief in mercy or forgiveness. Rather, it is to acknowledge the difference between private and public spheres and to recognize that mercy does not release the public demands that justice imposes.

Moral philosopher Oliver O'Donovan has wisely cautioned against driving a wedge between "justice" and "retribution," in the end reducing "justice" itself to incoherence. O'Donovan prefers to make the helpful distinction between retribution and "retributivism." His affirmation of the moral underpinnings of retributive justice are important in light of the widespread and mistaken notion of forgiveness that exists among both religious and non-religious pacifists. In the name of "forgiveness," they conflate the demands of justice with the release of criminals from the consequences and public debt of their crimes.

In Judeo-Christian ethics, forgiveness is predicated on a prior contrition and repentance on the part of the offender. Moreover, the biblical teaching on forgiveness occurs in the context of personal relationships, not duties of the state or magistrate. Where social evil occurs, a public debt is incurred, and judgment—which is to say, the execution of justice—ensues, regardless of whether it applies to individuals or to nations.

In his provocative essay "Payback: Thinking about Retribution," O'Donovan describes the necessary tension between justice and mercy that must be preserved and not loosened: In Christian thought retribution is one pole of a dialectic with forgiveness. One reason, indeed, that Christians have insisted on retributive justice (when they have insisted on it) is that if one pole is lost, the opposite pole will be lost, too. The theological doctrines of forgiven sin, redemption from punishment, reconciliation of the offender with the offended God, those and nothing else are what have held the philosophical notions of desert and retribution firmly in place.

What we have labeled "retributive justice" O'Donovan calls "corrective justice" or “adjudicative justice,” i.e., justice that expresses itself in the correcting of ruptures or imbalances in society or between nations. And while individuals or groups can work for "social justice," only governments can practice "corrective justice," which is to say, justice as judgment. It is the latter that undergirds just war theory, which as a form of "retributive justice" is also guided by upper and lower limits, just cause and intention, proportionality, and exercise by legitimate political authority.

The distinction between vengeance and retribution, between the spheres of personal relationships and governing authority, is precisely the rationale behind St. Paul's argument in the epistle to the Romans. Whereas Romans 12 passionately proscribes private vengeance ("Do not repay anyone evil for evil"; `Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for the wrath of God"; "Vengeance is mine, says the Lord; I will repay"), Romans 13 clearly and unambiguously prescribes government's ordained role to execute wrath on evildoers.

St. Paul condemns revenge in the private sphere, delegitimized by the absence of legitimate political-legal authority (Romans 13:1-2,5), while condoning and authorizing retribution, symbolized by the sword of vengeance (Romans 13:4). Contextually, the one follows on the heels of the other. Taken together, Romans 12 and Romans 13 illustrate the distinction we are making: intention and legitimate authority distinguish revenge from retributive justice.

Retributive justice, in other words, is a necessity for a civilized society. In responding retributively to moral evil, we channel our energies in several directions. We respond to the victim(s) being wronged, to wider society which is "scandalized" by the wrong done in its midst, to future offenders who might be tempted to do the same wrong, and not last, to the actual offending party. Understood rightly, retributive justice performs a multifaceted moral good. Yes, there will always be the cry of the retaliationists who, in the name of "justice," demand that torture be meted out to the torturer. But that outcry in itself does not cancel the fact that retributive justice performs a necessary social good. Pacifists will frequently argue that retribution constitutes an "uncivilized" or "barbaric" response by society to crime and moral evil. But is this the case? The answer to this question depends fundamentally on how a society perceives the moral difference between the criminal act and the punitive act. Those who contend that retribution is unsuited to "civilized" society, whether in the realm of criminal justice or military engagement, are mistaken on two fronts. They conflate the punitive and the criminal act on the basis of a moral equivalence, and they fail to understand the rupture in society caused by moral evil that must be redressed in the temporal order. Both errors are catastrophic to any society that conceives of itself as "free" and "just."

To distinguish between the criminal and the punitive act is to be guided by (and held accountable to) the cardinal virtue of justice. If the standard of justice is not abiding and universally upheld through deliberate action, then it is impossible to denounce moral evil—anywhere, in any form, at any time. Thus seen, the Nuremberg trials were wrongheaded, since Nazi war crimes by definition cannot be denounced; much less can mass murderers be put on trial and sentenced. In the end, one man's torture is another man's good time. Might, as it were, makes right (with a little help from stealth), and the Nazis merely came out on the wrong end of the war. In such a moral vacuum, retribution is indistinguishable from revenge, and moral chaos follows.

American society's deeply-entrenched moral evasiveness begins with its indifference to the moral marker "Thou shalt not murder." The Torah, it must be remembered, does not forbid taking the life of a human being; rather, it forbids premeditated murder. Indeed, Jewish and Christian moral traditions concur in acknowledging justifiable forms of homicide such as self-defense, civilian protection and resisting insurrection. In a morally courageous society, this list would be extended to include just war, which represents a middle way between "holy war" and pacifism, and executing those who murder innocent human beings.

When murder occurs, whether in a single life or the perishing of thousands of innocents, society is obliged, regardless of how unpleasant the business at hand, to clear its throat as it were and declare a communal response. Yale professor of computer science David Gelernter, who was letter-bombed in June 1993 by Theodore Kaczynski and nearly lost his life, has put the matter rather succinctly. He writes in "What Do Murderers Deserve?" that murder requires a social proclamation: it is an evil so terrible and so utterly defiling to society that it is intolerable. Murder forces us to assume forever the burden of moral certainty; our response must allow no waffling, no equivocating, no negotiating. The murder of innocents, a civilized society announces, is absolutely evil and absolutely intolerable, period.

The impulse toward retribution is innate in humanity, but it is by no means a "lower" impulse; rather, it sets us apart as moral agents. For men or nations to be dealt with, however severely, because they in fact should have known better—and they do know better—is to be treated as human beings, endowed with dignity and moral agency. A society unwilling to direct retributive justice toward those who murder in cold blood is a society that has deserted its responsibility to uphold the unique value of human life.

J. Daryl Charles is an associate professor of religion and philosophy at Taylor University.

This essay was originally published in Touchstone (December 2001). Reprinted with permission.