Proofs that retribution is vengeful
Retribution is seen as giving a person fair treatment while revenge just wants to hurt them and use something wrong they did as an excuse.
To take retribution and not knowing you are right when you do so means it is revenge. The moment you act you have only one thought in your head and the ones that judge it are not there so you don’t know what you are doing the moment you do it.
Revenge is not to be considered to be illegal retribution because the law only gets its authority from right and wrong and should be respected when it is right and opposed when it is wrong. To define revenge as illegal retribution is to beg the question or assume that revenge is wrong when the question is: “Is the law right to forbid it?” The law is just not necessarily right. If revenge is right you should do it though it is illegal as long as you are sure it won’t be traced back to you and you are sure the person has wronged you. The law should not punish you for revenge unless it turned out you were wrong to take that revenge.
How can the law avoid being vengeful when it punishes when there are many reasons for doubting that it is retribution therefore that it is revenge? Even if it looks like revenge but isn’t, people don’t know or understand so the law will demoralise people and make criminals less keen to reform with all the abuse and bad example they see.
Whatever a law does not punish it allows. Every person has committed at least a certain amount of harm. The law cannot punish everybody so anybody who commits a crime should be made to pay for that certain amount too. As long as that is not done, there can be no retribution but only revenge.
You cannot say that revenge is punishing without a trial or fair trial. It is that all right but it is not just that. To exact retribution without being sure of the person’s guilt is to exact revenge. But when you know the person is guilty you don’t need a trial.
It is not those who commit crimes who are punished but those who are caught. You are punished for being found out.
Rights are based on justice, giving people back what they send out of them. If we have free will there have been times in which we would have killed. If there had been a magic power in us that could kill the person we would have used it. The First Epistle of John is right to say that wishing somebody dead is as good as attempted murder. And we have hurt others a lot. If free will is true then we all deserve to be put to death or hurt badly.
Justice involves agreeing with tit for tat no matter what the experts say. Justice erases the need for a fair trial. Why not incarcerate the person suspected of murder without a trial when he deserves it even if he has not committed the murder?
Perhaps, if it is true that we deserve all suffering but we cannot let people hurt one another for we all have to live in reasonable comfort. But if we deserve to suffer we don’t have to. We can live in reasonable suffering like many people do.
Justice combined with free will is not a suitable basis for ethics in any way at all for it removes all restraint in some areas and situations and justifies anything in those cases for we would all have done frightening things if we could have and so would deserve great suffering. Absolutism is the idea that some actions are wrong regardless of how much good even greater good that they do. Absolutism that is grounded on the concept of justice is largely fraud.
Moral systems permit you (or friends) not to turn yourself (themselves) in for a crime and then to put somebody else in jail for committing a crime against you. If that is not revenge what is?
Retribution is revenge.
