Nobody can morally deserve anything. (And why we still want to make them hurt.)

No one deserves pain from outside the causal order. That doesn’t mean revenge is doing nothing. What's it mean to get payback when God leaves the room.

Rejecting ultimate moral desert may undermine the classic case for revenge—but it doesn’t automatically explain away the human needs revenge seems to serve.

Okay, so what I’m trying to do here is I think pretty simple. Or maybe not. I’ve been wrong before, but let’s just do this and see.

The basic thought is that a lot of people think that once you reject the idea of ultimate moral desert, revenge becomes obviously incoherent and we can throw it in the bin. And maybe.

But every time I start feeling that kind of confidence, it usually means I’ve smuggled something in without noticing. So I don’t think it’s quite that straightforward.

I want to see whether, after we strip away the fantasy that people somehow deserve suffering in a cosmic sense, there’s still something real that revenge is doing for human beings that we’d need to understand before we dismiss it.

Maybe after we think this through we’ll have done for revenge what compatibilism did for freedom.

Okay, let’s do it. Here we go.

Revenge and moral desert

Revenge is usually treated as a dirty word by people who reject moral desert. That makes sense at first.

If no one ultimately chose their genes, parents, brain, early conditions, formative injuries, impulses, capacities, opportunities, or the precise causal materials out of which their choices arose, then the idea that someone basically deserves to suffer becomes very hard to defend. Not hard in the casual sense. Hard in the “what could that even mean?” sense.

A person can still be dangerous. A person can still need to be stopped. A person can still be isolated, restrained, watched, deterred, treated, condemned, and never trusted again. None of that requires pretending they somehow authored themselves from outside the causal order.

So if revenge means “I want this person to suffer because they basically deserve pain,” then revenge should go into the incoherence box. Fine. But that may not be all revenge is.

The compatibilist-shaped move

There is a move compatibilists make in the free will debate that’s worth noticing here. Compatibilists say, in effect: maybe we don’t have the magical kind of freedom people imagine. Maybe we aren’t little gods standing outside physics. But we still respond to reasons, deliberate, understand consequences, make choices, and participate in social life. So, they argue, there’s a thinner but real kind of freedom worth keeping.

Whether that argument works for free will isn’t the point right now. The point is the shape of the move, to take away the metaphysical fantasy. See what remains.

Now apply that to revenge. Maybe the old version of revenge does fail. Maybe no one deserves suffering in the basic, ultimate, cosmic sense. Maybe that whole object dissolves under pressure. But when it dissolves, does nothing remain?

I don’t think so.

What revenge might actually be doing

Imagine a person is harmed badly. The harm isn’t only physical, but interpretive. The victim now has to live in a world where, from at least one conscious point of view, what happened to them was acceptable, trivial, enjoyable, profitable, or worth it.

That’s admissable in the court of mind. Human beings don’t form a self in total isolation; we partly understand ourselves through how we imagine we’re seen by other minds. I think that’s just ordinary human architecture, the self isn’t a sealed marble sphere, it’s socially exposed tissue, like it or not.

So when a perpetrator walks away untouched, still pleased, still proud, still advantaged, the victim may not merely think, “He got away with it.”

They may experience something closer to: “The world still contains an active interpretation in which what happened to me was fine.”

That’s not necessarily a small thing.

Now suppose the perpetrator suffers. Not necessarily because he understands, feels remorse, or becomes morally purified in some Hallmark little prison chapel of the soul. It’s just that for whatever reason, it’s HIS turn to suffer.

Something can change anyway, because the perpetrator no longer stands in the same relation to the victim, in the victim’s mind, anyway. The original hierarchy has been toppled. The implied message of the offense has been psuedo-answered by consequence. The world in which the victim must understand themselves is no longer quite the same world, it’s not as accommodating to this scumbag.

That doesn’t prove the suffering’s ultimately justified in and of itself. Nothing can; that’s still my stance.

But it does something more precise: It moves revenge out of the basic desert column and into the instrumental column.

The question is no longer, “Does he deserve pain?” The question is, “What work is this pain doing?”

That’s the question we tend to not look into. At least I haven’t. Maybe we prefer the primitive version because it feels clean: Just, fucker deserves it. Period. End of story. No machinery exposed. No psychological accounting. No need to say the ugly part out loud. We all get it.

But maybe the ugly part isn’t what we thought. The desire for revenge may not always be a belief in cosmic moral bookkeeping. Sometimes it’s an ineffable craving in your gut, in your bones, for restored intelligibility. A demand that the victim not be forced to live inside a social reality where their degradation remains, somewhere, endorsed.

That doesn’t make revenge a good thing automatically. Maybe it makes it more serious, though. More high-brow, somehow.

The load-bearing possibility

Because if revenge is performing a real function, then abolishing it rhetorically doesn’t abolish the need underneath it. You can tell people that revenge is irrational, primitive, confused, morally contaminated, beneath them. Maybe sometimes it is.

But if revenge is carrying part of the burden of identity repair, status restoration, recognition, narrative correction, or psychic equilibrium, maybe it’s necessary. Maybe it’s the lesser of two evils.

We think we’re evolving when we reject revenge, but if we don't replace the work it was doing, we haven't actually solved anything. We've just left the wound open.

This is where the issue gets tense. Because society probably needs less revenge than it thinks. (We do tend to get carried away by these compatibilist cartes blanche.)

Contrariwise, we may need revenge more than certain moral theories (like hard incompatibilism) want to admit.

Unequal wellbeing is sometimes doing social and psychological work necessary for IWRS (increase wellbeing, reduce suffering – my de facto philosophy). And while that sentence is unpleasant and goes against my “brand,” it really should be unpleasant.

Unpleasant isn’t the same as false.

If we can change the human need for revenge, we should look into it. If we can build forms of recognition, repair, protection, and restoration that make retaliatory suffering unnecessary, that would likely be better. But we shouldn’t pretend the existing mechanism is doing nothing merely because we dislike what it costs.

Revenge may be morally dangerous and also load-bearing. Both or either can be true.

If there’s any gold dust in the pan

If there’s any gold dust at the bottom of this little pan of mine, I hope it’s this: rejecting ultimate moral desert doesn’t automatically tell us everything we need to know about revenge. The cosmic justification may disappear, but there may still be a human (and humane) function left behind. And if that’s true, then the real question isn’t whether revenge is good or bad but rather what it’s solving, and whether there’s a better way to solve it. (If there is, we should do the better one, of course.)

If I had to name the concept in one phrase, I'd be tempted by Compatibilist Revenge, because you immediately understand the analogy. “Morally justified revenge” can be looked at in a way that survives the collapse of basic desert in much the same way responsibility survives the collapse of ultimate sourcehood.

So now what?

I guess my question to you is how you feel about the possibility that revenge is partly doing the work of recognition, status repair, and restoring a victim’s place in the social world. Or maybe there’s a different angle that occurs to you. Tell me what it is.

Because if we get this right it could change how we think about justice, punishment, forgiveness, and repair. Or if not for the world, it could at least clarify those questions for us.

And over the next few weeks we might start noticing changes in our own lives: seeing resentment more clearly, understanding our own desire for payback a bit better, or spotting needs that are hiding underneath it.

And that’s not nothing. But before any of that, I want to hear from you. Let me know what you’re thinking.

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Netzach Yisrael Lo Yeshaker