Revenge Isn’t Justice, Even When We Cover It with the Sheen of Law

True Justice is Restoration, Not Retribution

All harm is evil.

Harm is anything that reduces an individual’s agency.

Harm is anything that causes pain.

Harm is anything that damages, that destroys.

Harm is evil. It is a moral debit on our ledger.

And that is true in every scenario. Even when the person who is being harmed has themselves done harm.

If someone punches you in the face, striking back feels right.

More important, it feels righteous.

You were harmed. To prevent that harm again, you must show that harming you has consequences. You need to stop harm in the future.

But when you swing your fist at the person who harmed you, you are increasing the net harm in the world.

Even when everyone else agrees that the person being harmed deserves it. That you earned the right to harm them.

That harm is evil.

When you carry it out as an individual, it is a moral debit on your ledger.

When we do it as a society and call it justice, it is a moral debit on our ledger as a society.

I’m not naïve. I understand that crime exists, that people do bad things. People do harmful things. People do evil things.

We live in a world of systems built, evolved, and maintained by people. People aren’t perfect, and our systems reflect our imperfections. But like anything where the efforts of many are aligned to a common goal, systems have a multiplying effect.

Together people can come together to do amazing acts of good. We eradicate diseases. We lift millions out of poverty. We deliver water to people in the desert. We build systems that increase human rights and respect individual human dignity.

Obviously, the opposite is also true. The same chemistry discovery that enabled us to feed billions also was used to destroy people at an industrial scale. We pooled our knowledge and resources to split the atom and then used that to build weapons capable of destroying the world.

Those are recent developments in the grand scope of human history. But ever since we began to settle down from a nomadic hunter gatherer lifestyle into ever larger communities built around agriculture, we have had crime.

People hungered were not able to get even stale bread. People we able to accumulate goods, and disparity generated envy and anger. We built permanent walls to define what was “mine” versus what is “yours” when once it was all “ours”.

Crime was the tarnish taking away from the shine of our burgeoning societies. And so we created laws to punish those who committed crimes. People who committed crimes took from others their property, their agency, their health, and in the worst cases, their lives.

So to scrub away this rot we made laws, prescribing punishment for crime. Consequences to prevent people from doing harm, by promising equal or greater harm in return. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, this was the law in ancient Babylon. In these earliest incarnations most crimes were punished not with the loss of freedom, but the loss of life.

The Code of Hammurabi was clear.

Break into someone’s home? Death.

Kidnap someone? Death.

Receive stolen goods? Death.

Murder? Oh, you know that’s death.

We’ve changed the scale and complexity of punishment, but the principles remain the same. Break the law, harm another, and you will be harmed.

Many places have done away with the death penalty. But we still take away lives for crime. We break apart families. We take away years of lives and pile people into confinement together confident that they will do further harm to one another.

Crime is evil. So too are the punishments for it. Criminal justice is simply state sponsored revenge that only introduces more harm and evil after transgression.

What are we to do though? If we stop punishing crime, crime will not disappear into a puff of sunshine and rainbows.

Which takes us back to systems. In the US, we have attached a profit motive to delivering government mandated harm to people. We have due process, true, but it is applied unequally across those with means and those without.

Money amplifies the motive to punish more people, and do it longer. Punishment that does not end when one leave their confinement. People labeled with “criminal” are deprived of opportunities and dignity in a society that sees them as little more than threats.

We have built powerful systems to apply revenge. But that revenge, no matter how justified, no matter how satisfying, no matter how righteous it feels, is still just more harm. Every harm, both the crime and the punishment, increases evil in the world.

What do we do? In all things related to morality we begin with empathy and reason. This is true for how we engage with people individually, but also with how we build the systems that undergird society.

This essay is just the first in a series on Architectural Humanism, Ledger Ethics, and Criminal Justice.

How do we prevent crime?

How do we restore the victims?

How do we treat those who’ve done harm?

What is restoration, and how is it different from what I call retribution?

Ultimately, how do we create more good, and less harm?

I’m not going to promise all the answers. But we need to seek them out. We do not arrive at a better world waiting for perfect solutions. We do it by understanding the impact we have on others and choosing to build something better.

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