When offenders are believed to have gained an unfair advantage over others by breaking the law, justice systems attempt to move beyond punishment. Healing victims by fining them or ordering reparations are concepts aimed at making reprisals fairer for society as a whole. Unfortunately, these attempts do not always work as intended. A libertarian approach to the issue argues that complete restitution (in the broadest sense and not in the technical-legal sense) is compatible with both retaliation and a utilitarian degree of deterrence. [17] Long before Hammurabi, the ancient king of Babylonia, codified the laws of the countries he ruled, societies addressed crime and punishment based on religious beliefs. For example, the teaching “an eye for an eye” is biblical, but it is also contained in the Code of Hammurabi, which is supposed to exist before Scripture. This means that ancient societies believed in a form of retaliation that was closer to retaliation. To the extent that the meaning of retaliation says that it is intrinsically good for a legitimate punisher to punish the culprit, it also seems to have a consequentialist element. This property must be weighed against other possible assets to decide what would be best done (Cahill 2011).
Therefore, most people who fight back would accept that it is justified to waive the punishment of a deserving person if it would punish two equally deserving people or another deserving person – as is routinely done in plea negotiations (Moore 1997: 157-158; Berman, 2011: 451–452; See also section 4.4). The concept of responding to crime with retaliation is ancient, and many primitive human societies have left behind documentation of the types of activities they classified as crimes and how they were punished. One aspect of punishment that was historically common was that authorities felt it had to be equivalent to a crime in some way. The saying “an eye for an eye” recorded in the Bible reflects this widespread belief. Over time, attitudes toward the judiciary changed to find sentences that were not necessarily as brutal as the crime in question, but had real consequences for the criminal acts. Retribution, however, only means punishment, and in this broader definition, vigilant justice corresponds to the meaning of retaliation. I don`t want to start cutting hair, but I think any dictionary would help me do that. Transformative justice is a strategy, as the name suggests: it is a way of treating a crime as an educational and transformative opportunity for the perpetrator. Transformative justice focuses more on healing than on other forms of retribution. Transformative justice can be applied to many areas, including family law, corporate law and bankruptcy law. The problem with transformative justice is not so much whether the abuser can do something similar in the future, but whether the community is willing to support both the abuser and the victim.
In the context of retaliatory justice, it is also important that the perpetrators are actually guilty of the crime for which punishment was imposed. The true doctrine of deterrence, according to Jeremy Bentham`s utilitarian philosophy, allows innocent individuals to be punished if it fulfills a valuable social function (for example, creating and maintaining the image that crimes are detected and punished so that others are deterred from committing crimes). This idea is repugnant to retaliators who believe that punishments should only be imposed on those who have broken the law. The value of reprisals cannot be diminished by using them to compensate for shortcomings in the justice system. Desert has been analyzed in a triple relationship between the person who deserves something he deserves and the one for whom he deserves it. These can usefully be presented as desert subjects, desert objects and desert bases (Feinberg 1970; Berman, 2011: 437). A fourth dimension must also be taken into account: the person or persons who can give appropriately about the desert or have the duty to give what it deserves. I call these people agents of the desert. They raise a number of issues which are addressed in Section 4.2. Of course, there are more sophisticated ways of thinking about retaliation, and it`s a good idea to know about them, because a judge (and that other type of judge, the professor of criminal law) is unlikely to accept “because it`s a natural impulse” as justification for retaliation in punishment. And for good reason.
My question is: Is vigilant justice really retaliation in the legal sense, or is it simply revenge? Restitution and economic reprisals are two different things. Restitution is the act of compensating a person for harm or loss resulting from the actions of another person. For example, if someone steals $7,000 from their employer, the court can order a payment of $7,000 as compensation and how to settle things. For this reason, restitution is also called “restorative justice” because it “restores” a person to their pre-incident position, or at least as close as possible. Consider what Jeffrie Murphy (2007: 18) said as a mature philosopher who looked back on his own efforts to justify retaliation: Retribution is based on the concept of lex talionis – that is, the law of punishment. At its heart is the principle of equal and direct punishment, as expressed in Exodus 21:24 as “an eye for an eye.” Destroying the eye of a person of equal social rank meant that his own eye was annihilated. Some penalties for the culpable conduct of individuals were specifically related to prohibited acts. Branders who used their skills to remove slave tracks from runaway slaves, for example, had their hands amputated.
Punishment is perhaps the most intuitive – and questionable – objective of punishment in criminal law. Contrary to the idea of rehabilitation, and contrary to the utilitarian objectives of restraint and deterrence, the purpose of retaliation is to actively injure offenders, ideally in proportion to the injuries they have sustained in society, and thus trap them from guilt. One of the reasons for the abandonment of retaliation by 20th century reformers was that they had abandoned the idea of personal autonomy, believing that science had discredited them. [7] Although retaliatory justice is generally considered to be the cornerstone of criminal sanction, it has also been shown to play a role in private law. [10] While “it`s natural” tends not to carry much weight in criminal law, “it can be morally right.” .