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.
"I 100% reject the idea that compatibilism is true. However, apart from that, I do think it is natural for humans, animals, or any agents to develop a desire or willingness to seek revenge. Even so, the reasonable thing to do is not to simply let criminals continue causing harm, but rather to penalize them in a way that is useful for society as a whole.
If you punish a criminal, you should extract something from them that is useful to the victim. For example, if someone cuts off your finger, the response shouldn't be to cut off their finger too, because in that scenario, both parties lose. But if you extract monetary compensation from them, at least one party wins.
This is more or less how laws should govern human behavior: the state should guarantee that the victim is compensated for their pain, and the person who caused the harm must pay back what they have destroyed. The best approach would be a system of monetary payback. Of course, there will be cases where someone harms so many people that full financial compensation is impossible. Ultimately, it just isn't rational to want the offender's finger cut off in return. It doesn't even pay the medical bills from the original injury. Furthermore, while your finger might be worth a great deal to you, the criminal's finger might not hold that same value at all
Great points. My thinking on this is centered on practical ways to find ways to restore a reasonable expectation of internal self conception that might’ve been knocked out of whack. As long as my sense of reality and self is in part connected to how I think others see reality, we can’t talk this off the table. I think it’s a fact that the victim’s internal state is in at least some ways impacted by their conception of the internal state of the perpetrator. So if there’s a way to repay the victim by creating the reasonable perception by the victim of the perpetrators internal state, this qualifies as a practical form of protection and containment that should be better understood.
I am weird about this if someone cut my finger I would almost always want money instead of the perpetrator just to suffer however only if I know he suffered consequences harsh enough that he wouldn’t repeat that
I don’t know if it’s weird. Getting their money is literally payback. But yeah I think it’s common to have a “I’ll show them” it’s like wanting to palpably watch their inner universe change how powerful they see the victim. The victim wants to know that the perpetrator sees the victim as powerful, and then how the perpetrator sees the victim is somehow layered into how the victim sees the victim. And it’s like they can’t help it because for whatever reason a lot of self conception works in exactly this way, the we are what we think others think we are, and if you can make them think you got the last laugh or the pain is coming courtesy of you via those who protect you, the victim’s reality shifts and a voice quiets in their head. What’s cool is that you don’t need to believe in moral deservedness for this to work. You just need to make a decision about the practical tradeoffs and what’s better for society.
True but I do think most people want to be more vindictive. My mom was told me she would want ‘way more than 50,000usd’ reperation. Like the choice being that the perpetrator gets a finger cut in sense of an eye for an eye, and she basically said she would choose his finger the perpetrators finger to get cut over 50k. Which is wild for her. Also we are not that rich either. So it surprised me
I’m thinking more like what happened on October 7th. Like raping and killing family members while forcing you to watch. I wasn’t really thinking about pinkys when I wrote this.
It’s when you can’t stop seeing the fully committed, all-in, gleeful, elated, confident, pleased with themselves kind of vibe as they force families at gunpoint into humiliating sexual acts before snuffing them out slowly.
Sorry to pick an extreme edge case but I find you get better philosophical fidelity in these situations.
It’s not even a question someone might want to find them and rub their face in the snow (to put it mildly) and wipe that arrogant grin off their stupid face.
Maybe just want to see it register in their faces, what suffering actually feels like, want to see it, because it might thaw or unclench something important to the victim’s psyche that can’t be done in other ways. Something like “I saw myself thru your eyes that day, and I became what you saw ever since, a joke, a piece of indispensable meat whose suffering was a good thing. And I see my family that way too now. So I need to see myself through your eyes again, except this time as someone who is strong, valuable…and the exact wrong person to have messed with.”
And even still, I’m not saying it’s deserved. And if it’s not done in the spirit of “giving them what they deserve” it becomes something that’s not incoherent, per se, not fallacious. It may be ineffective, cruel, illegal, damaging, I don’t know.
That’s a different argument. Point is, if revenge can be removed from deservedness, that’s compatibilist revenge. A revenge that has forward-looking utility.
So then a society would have to decide if this tradeoff was needed.
If it was me I’d probably scare them a little and then say I’m above torturing people and let them sit with that.
Ok wait this is horrendous. If someone does that they stop being moral subjects for me and I think we should use their flesh to conduct medical experiments on them. Not in order to punish them but to extract as much utility from them as possible. Raping someone and then killing them is especially disgusting because just killing would mean perhaps you think it’s an enemy . Just raping could mean you are deranged, but doing both is on an other level
Revenge may indeed appear to restore a person's place in the social world, but maybe this points to something deeper. What seeks restoration is not only status, recognition, or dignity in the eyes of others, I think. It is the felt sense of a separate self that has been diminished, overlooked, or wounded. When someone humiliates us, betrays us, or treats us unfairly, it can feel as though something has been taken from us. We do not simply want the wrongdoer to suffer; we want the balance restored. We want the world to acknowledge that what happened to us mattered.
Revenge seems to be a promise to repair that wound by changing the outer situation. If the person who harmed us is exposed, punished, or brought low, we imagine that our own sense of worth will somehow be restored. Yet its satisfaction is often fleeting because the wound itself was never truly in the event or in the social order. Two people can suffer the same insult, and one remains deeply wounded while the other quickly moves on. This suggests that the suffering is not created by the event alone, but by what the event seems to say about who we are.
The longing for revenge, from this perspective, is a distorted expression of a more fundamental longing: the desire to be whole again.
Recognition, respect, and justice have their place, and the social world cannot function without them. I genuinely believe this. But the inner peace we hope to gain through revenge is not actually produced by the punishment of another (at least that is my experience). The peace we seek is the relief from the sense of lack, humiliation, or incompleteness that the injury appeared to create. We imagine that by restoring our position in the eyes of others, we will recover ourselves.
Actually, we should ask whether what has been harmed is what we truly are. If our essential nature depends upon social standing, then every insult is a threat and every loss of status requires repair. But if what we are is prior to all images, roles, and reputations, then although injustice may still call for a response, it no longer defines our identity. We may still seek justice, set boundaries, or hold others accountable, ofc. The difference is that these actions are no longer attempts to repair a damaged self. They are practical responses to a situation, rather than psychological attempts to recover a sense of worth that was never actually lost.
I agree. But doing it for third party awareness is something I’d like to fully remove from the essay. The whole concept I’m looking at is between perpetrator and victim. It’s that the victim knows that the perpetrator sees them, the event, himself, a certain way. Just knowing another mind sees it this way, might have a spooky action at a distance on how the victim sees themselves. Not literally supernatural. More about how the ego doesn’t fully harden until there’s data involving how we think we are seen.
An old expression: you are not how others see you, you are how you think they see you.
We could also argue we’re none of those things, and that we’re how we see ourselves. But those are just words. My piece is more about biology perhaps than I let on. Or psych. The self is definitely a composite of our own construction and the awareness of how we are seen by an other. We can try to diminish the importance of this component when it’s convenient, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s there and has a critical function, not good or bad, but neutral.
So if you’re aware you’re seen by another, or the worst thing that ever happened to you is regarded by another, the one who did knowingly and still has dismissive feelings about it, that’s going to have some impact on who you are. And it’d be naive to suggest there’s no way it can’t change. If their view of you or the event changes.
For example, the view of what it cost them. A simple thing like that, could have a downstream effect of how one sees themselves through another’s eyes.
I know the whole thing has an almost immature, pathetic vibe in that mature people are taught to ignore how others see them. Try to think past that, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about a critical psychological layer of how ego is formed in the first place, where given we are social animals, the awareness of a third person triangulates the mental picture we carry around of ourselves, our world, and our place in it. We see this critical dependence on philo and psych time and again in various guises. Kierkegaard comes to mind. Having to literally create your belief in God for the purpose of avoiding fatal despair of how you’re seen (or in his case not seen) is a sickness unto death. Perhaps a clearer way to describe what I’m saying is revenge in the vein of Kierkegaard’s faith, and the transformative power of triangulating the ego through modeling what you and your life means from different vantage points that have the meaning-making power human minds ostensibly have.
Our identities are always collaborative efforts. If there’s a flaw on your identity that you can shake from the inside, a bone deep feeling of weakness or shame you can’t shake, no matter who rationally you try, and there’s a way to get rid of it, we should be open to what those ways are. My first choice would be conscious and purposeful therapeutic extraction, no revenge needed. I’m not at all arguing revenge is good. Just like I’m not arguing punishment is good. I’m arguing there might be a practical need for it in some cases. And if we were to find there is, it doesn’t change my principle of feasible reduction, we’d still aim to reduce it at almost all costs. But being a hard incompatibilist (which I am) never entailed removing punishment wholesale. It means reducing it to the point of its utility and not layering more on top because “fuck deserves it.” But my point is that maybe “fucker deserves it” is load bearing in ways I hadn’t considered. Doesn’t mean it’s good, just puts it in the practical column and still needs to be clipped to the nub of its minimum viable necessity.
Thanks for reading and making me think, as always. And just remember, I’m in the business of reducing unnecessary suffering. I’m not looking to pick sides. For the record, a raping, kinocidal murderer can’t morally deserve to suffer any more than the proverbial Jesus himself in my opinion.
So all things equal, I’d abhor revenge that wasn’t serving some countervailing purpose in a way nothing else could. It’s not enough to do it just to make the victim feel vindicated. I’m talking about how it may be about restoring something taken, a view of oneself that was disfigured permanently, illegally, in a way that can only be fixed by the victim “seeing” the world from the window of the perpetrators eyes and seeing that her tragedy was in fact more serious than previously thought.
That in no universe did my pain mean very little; it at the very least meant his, too. And him knowing that, me knowing he knows it, could have a biological therapeutic impact on mental health that nothing else can at this time. To say it’s only temporarily restorative would need to be substantiated, but let’s say that’s not true.
Let’s say for practical purposes it works. (For sake of argument.) Then would you consider it as a morally acceptable tradeoff? This isn’t a scientific research paper, I’m analyzing the moral landscape of “what if.” Since such a thing is conceivable, I’m interested in know how the morality of it fans out. To play with at least the possibility that we may have a responsibility to conceive of a kind of Compatibilist Revenge, a revenge compatible with morally and coherence, and actually has a place in the list of unfortunate tradeoffs.
This is no mere mindless bloodlust. This is IWRS at its most uncomfortable.
Thanks for your thought-provoking post, I'm pantsing a revenge serial (Hunter and Collector), in which I try to make sense of what Revenge even means, and how--as the saying goes--if successful, it will result in two casualties.
"I 100% reject the idea that compatibilism is true. However, apart from that, I do think it is natural for humans, animals, or any agents to develop a desire or willingness to seek revenge. Even so, the reasonable thing to do is not to simply let criminals continue causing harm, but rather to penalize them in a way that is useful for society as a whole.
If you punish a criminal, you should extract something from them that is useful to the victim. For example, if someone cuts off your finger, the response shouldn't be to cut off their finger too, because in that scenario, both parties lose. But if you extract monetary compensation from them, at least one party wins.
This is more or less how laws should govern human behavior: the state should guarantee that the victim is compensated for their pain, and the person who caused the harm must pay back what they have destroyed. The best approach would be a system of monetary payback. Of course, there will be cases where someone harms so many people that full financial compensation is impossible. Ultimately, it just isn't rational to want the offender's finger cut off in return. It doesn't even pay the medical bills from the original injury. Furthermore, while your finger might be worth a great deal to you, the criminal's finger might not hold that same value at all
Great points. My thinking on this is centered on practical ways to find ways to restore a reasonable expectation of internal self conception that might’ve been knocked out of whack. As long as my sense of reality and self is in part connected to how I think others see reality, we can’t talk this off the table. I think it’s a fact that the victim’s internal state is in at least some ways impacted by their conception of the internal state of the perpetrator. So if there’s a way to repay the victim by creating the reasonable perception by the victim of the perpetrators internal state, this qualifies as a practical form of protection and containment that should be better understood.
I am weird about this if someone cut my finger I would almost always want money instead of the perpetrator just to suffer however only if I know he suffered consequences harsh enough that he wouldn’t repeat that
I don’t know if it’s weird. Getting their money is literally payback. But yeah I think it’s common to have a “I’ll show them” it’s like wanting to palpably watch their inner universe change how powerful they see the victim. The victim wants to know that the perpetrator sees the victim as powerful, and then how the perpetrator sees the victim is somehow layered into how the victim sees the victim. And it’s like they can’t help it because for whatever reason a lot of self conception works in exactly this way, the we are what we think others think we are, and if you can make them think you got the last laugh or the pain is coming courtesy of you via those who protect you, the victim’s reality shifts and a voice quiets in their head. What’s cool is that you don’t need to believe in moral deservedness for this to work. You just need to make a decision about the practical tradeoffs and what’s better for society.
True but I do think most people want to be more vindictive. My mom was told me she would want ‘way more than 50,000usd’ reperation. Like the choice being that the perpetrator gets a finger cut in sense of an eye for an eye, and she basically said she would choose his finger the perpetrators finger to get cut over 50k. Which is wild for her. Also we are not that rich either. So it surprised me
I’m thinking more like what happened on October 7th. Like raping and killing family members while forcing you to watch. I wasn’t really thinking about pinkys when I wrote this.
It’s when you can’t stop seeing the fully committed, all-in, gleeful, elated, confident, pleased with themselves kind of vibe as they force families at gunpoint into humiliating sexual acts before snuffing them out slowly.
Sorry to pick an extreme edge case but I find you get better philosophical fidelity in these situations.
It’s not even a question someone might want to find them and rub their face in the snow (to put it mildly) and wipe that arrogant grin off their stupid face.
Maybe just want to see it register in their faces, what suffering actually feels like, want to see it, because it might thaw or unclench something important to the victim’s psyche that can’t be done in other ways. Something like “I saw myself thru your eyes that day, and I became what you saw ever since, a joke, a piece of indispensable meat whose suffering was a good thing. And I see my family that way too now. So I need to see myself through your eyes again, except this time as someone who is strong, valuable…and the exact wrong person to have messed with.”
And even still, I’m not saying it’s deserved. And if it’s not done in the spirit of “giving them what they deserve” it becomes something that’s not incoherent, per se, not fallacious. It may be ineffective, cruel, illegal, damaging, I don’t know.
That’s a different argument. Point is, if revenge can be removed from deservedness, that’s compatibilist revenge. A revenge that has forward-looking utility.
So then a society would have to decide if this tradeoff was needed.
If it was me I’d probably scare them a little and then say I’m above torturing people and let them sit with that.
Ok wait this is horrendous. If someone does that they stop being moral subjects for me and I think we should use their flesh to conduct medical experiments on them. Not in order to punish them but to extract as much utility from them as possible. Raping someone and then killing them is especially disgusting because just killing would mean perhaps you think it’s an enemy . Just raping could mean you are deranged, but doing both is on an other level
Revenge may indeed appear to restore a person's place in the social world, but maybe this points to something deeper. What seeks restoration is not only status, recognition, or dignity in the eyes of others, I think. It is the felt sense of a separate self that has been diminished, overlooked, or wounded. When someone humiliates us, betrays us, or treats us unfairly, it can feel as though something has been taken from us. We do not simply want the wrongdoer to suffer; we want the balance restored. We want the world to acknowledge that what happened to us mattered.
Revenge seems to be a promise to repair that wound by changing the outer situation. If the person who harmed us is exposed, punished, or brought low, we imagine that our own sense of worth will somehow be restored. Yet its satisfaction is often fleeting because the wound itself was never truly in the event or in the social order. Two people can suffer the same insult, and one remains deeply wounded while the other quickly moves on. This suggests that the suffering is not created by the event alone, but by what the event seems to say about who we are.
The longing for revenge, from this perspective, is a distorted expression of a more fundamental longing: the desire to be whole again.
Recognition, respect, and justice have their place, and the social world cannot function without them. I genuinely believe this. But the inner peace we hope to gain through revenge is not actually produced by the punishment of another (at least that is my experience). The peace we seek is the relief from the sense of lack, humiliation, or incompleteness that the injury appeared to create. We imagine that by restoring our position in the eyes of others, we will recover ourselves.
Actually, we should ask whether what has been harmed is what we truly are. If our essential nature depends upon social standing, then every insult is a threat and every loss of status requires repair. But if what we are is prior to all images, roles, and reputations, then although injustice may still call for a response, it no longer defines our identity. We may still seek justice, set boundaries, or hold others accountable, ofc. The difference is that these actions are no longer attempts to repair a damaged self. They are practical responses to a situation, rather than psychological attempts to recover a sense of worth that was never actually lost.
I agree. But doing it for third party awareness is something I’d like to fully remove from the essay. The whole concept I’m looking at is between perpetrator and victim. It’s that the victim knows that the perpetrator sees them, the event, himself, a certain way. Just knowing another mind sees it this way, might have a spooky action at a distance on how the victim sees themselves. Not literally supernatural. More about how the ego doesn’t fully harden until there’s data involving how we think we are seen.
An old expression: you are not how others see you, you are how you think they see you.
We could also argue we’re none of those things, and that we’re how we see ourselves. But those are just words. My piece is more about biology perhaps than I let on. Or psych. The self is definitely a composite of our own construction and the awareness of how we are seen by an other. We can try to diminish the importance of this component when it’s convenient, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s there and has a critical function, not good or bad, but neutral.
So if you’re aware you’re seen by another, or the worst thing that ever happened to you is regarded by another, the one who did knowingly and still has dismissive feelings about it, that’s going to have some impact on who you are. And it’d be naive to suggest there’s no way it can’t change. If their view of you or the event changes.
For example, the view of what it cost them. A simple thing like that, could have a downstream effect of how one sees themselves through another’s eyes.
I know the whole thing has an almost immature, pathetic vibe in that mature people are taught to ignore how others see them. Try to think past that, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about a critical psychological layer of how ego is formed in the first place, where given we are social animals, the awareness of a third person triangulates the mental picture we carry around of ourselves, our world, and our place in it. We see this critical dependence on philo and psych time and again in various guises. Kierkegaard comes to mind. Having to literally create your belief in God for the purpose of avoiding fatal despair of how you’re seen (or in his case not seen) is a sickness unto death. Perhaps a clearer way to describe what I’m saying is revenge in the vein of Kierkegaard’s faith, and the transformative power of triangulating the ego through modeling what you and your life means from different vantage points that have the meaning-making power human minds ostensibly have.
Our identities are always collaborative efforts. If there’s a flaw on your identity that you can shake from the inside, a bone deep feeling of weakness or shame you can’t shake, no matter who rationally you try, and there’s a way to get rid of it, we should be open to what those ways are. My first choice would be conscious and purposeful therapeutic extraction, no revenge needed. I’m not at all arguing revenge is good. Just like I’m not arguing punishment is good. I’m arguing there might be a practical need for it in some cases. And if we were to find there is, it doesn’t change my principle of feasible reduction, we’d still aim to reduce it at almost all costs. But being a hard incompatibilist (which I am) never entailed removing punishment wholesale. It means reducing it to the point of its utility and not layering more on top because “fuck deserves it.” But my point is that maybe “fucker deserves it” is load bearing in ways I hadn’t considered. Doesn’t mean it’s good, just puts it in the practical column and still needs to be clipped to the nub of its minimum viable necessity.
Thanks for reading and making me think, as always. And just remember, I’m in the business of reducing unnecessary suffering. I’m not looking to pick sides. For the record, a raping, kinocidal murderer can’t morally deserve to suffer any more than the proverbial Jesus himself in my opinion.
So all things equal, I’d abhor revenge that wasn’t serving some countervailing purpose in a way nothing else could. It’s not enough to do it just to make the victim feel vindicated. I’m talking about how it may be about restoring something taken, a view of oneself that was disfigured permanently, illegally, in a way that can only be fixed by the victim “seeing” the world from the window of the perpetrators eyes and seeing that her tragedy was in fact more serious than previously thought.
That in no universe did my pain mean very little; it at the very least meant his, too. And him knowing that, me knowing he knows it, could have a biological therapeutic impact on mental health that nothing else can at this time. To say it’s only temporarily restorative would need to be substantiated, but let’s say that’s not true.
Let’s say for practical purposes it works. (For sake of argument.) Then would you consider it as a morally acceptable tradeoff? This isn’t a scientific research paper, I’m analyzing the moral landscape of “what if.” Since such a thing is conceivable, I’m interested in know how the morality of it fans out. To play with at least the possibility that we may have a responsibility to conceive of a kind of Compatibilist Revenge, a revenge compatible with morally and coherence, and actually has a place in the list of unfortunate tradeoffs.
This is no mere mindless bloodlust. This is IWRS at its most uncomfortable.
But I agree that making anyone suffering is bad even the 0 worth moral agents I described in my text
Thanks for your thought-provoking post, I'm pantsing a revenge serial (Hunter and Collector), in which I try to make sense of what Revenge even means, and how--as the saying goes--if successful, it will result in two casualties.