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An Eye for an Eye
No ethicists believe this is a good idea. Why do people keep on using the phrase as a legitimate justification?
Comments
Secondly, I don't actually think this. I just thought it worked well into what I said.
That's not an eye for an eye. "You knick someone's DVD player, they knick yours."
If you steal somebody's identity, giving theirs to you isn't exactly going to help.
I guess when it comes to violence based crimes, it's okay.
full control of their actions? What if the victim was threatening you
and you acted in the defense of yourself or others? What if it was an accident?
1) Depends on how much "not in control" they were. People who are not capable of controlling their actions are usually not living alone, and any charges would be issued against their guardians, not them. If they are simply frunk or stoned - well, getting drunk or stoned in the first place is their decidion. So they should own up to the consequences.
2) Buy threatening you or others the attacker forfeighted their own right to not be harmed. S/he is a fair game. In fact, by harming them in defence of others you are acting out their punishment as well.
3) If it was an accident, next time an "accident" is happening to them noone would do anything to compensate them, no charges, no investigation. Let them suffer fully from the accident if it happens to them.
4)No, they won't. They areknoking out eye of someone who, by doing the same to an innocent other, forfeighted their own right not to have their eye knocked out. The original criminal no longer has any protection against knocking out an eye, so those who issue the punishment do not break any right themselves.
But really, the most productive use of justice is to motivate people to
better society and to discourage them from harming it. Any punishment
past that is just acting on emotions.
I basically agree. The reasoning you present here is part of the reason why I think that the victim's family or the victim should not be able to determine what kind of punishment a criminal gets on their own. I think that if they did have that ability, there would be many more unfairly harsh punishments. Basically, I like "blind justice" and I think that just because a victim or his or her family feels that someone deserves the harshest punishment possible does not mean giving them that penalty would be just.
Sorry, I guess that is a bit off topic. I think it is somewhat relevant though because I imagine that some people would be more or less willing to support "an eye for an eye" type punishments depending on whether they were personally harmed by an unlawful action. However, I believe that demonstrates that such judgments are not impartially just.
I actually think that "an eye for an eye" type punishments can often be disproportionate as strange as that may sound. As Tnophelia brought up, that type of punishment does not seem to make much sense for some crimes. I would add drug-related crimes to the ones she mentioned. Additionally, aside from the death penalty (which is a different issue in my mind), I think that many people consider giving the state the power to violently harm people to be a pretty significant human rights abuse.
I guess the question of human rights itself is kind of at issue here though, so what I just said does not mean too much. Basically, if one allows the state to have the power to paralyze people, amputate their limbs, torture people, or even sexually assault them, there is a risk of innocent people being harmed in such a way. Also, even if one assumes that only guilty people will receive such punishments, I do not believe it is the government's job to harm people like that. I like the idea of human rights because I think that each person has individual worth. I do not believe that just because a criminal happens to disrespect human rights the government should give up on that idea.
Anyway, I realize the things I have said in this post are not incredibly well-supported, so I could be quite wrong. I am not really a fan of Hammurabi's Code as a present day legal system though, especially how it discriminates based on class (and sex) and allows for one to kill another person's child if one's own child dies in an accident by that person's hands. Still, I understand that no one here is really advocating that.
I did not concede anything, quite the contrary. I argued that people should get exactly what they inflict on others, specifics of situation icluded. Clear enough?
Specifics of situation specify exactly which right the criminal infringed upon, and whether there was any.
People who violate the rights of others void their own same rights.
Murderer is the one who kills person that has a right not to be killed (most of the people)
By doing that, murderer loses their own right not to be killed
So, killing them is not breaking any rights. The one who killed them does not become murderer in turn and do not lose their own right not to be killed since, bear with me, they did not deny the same right to another.
People who cause avoidable accidents lose their right to be protected from the same happening to them
Thieves lose the right to portion of their money, but not to their freedom (yes, I consider imprisonment for property crimes way too harsh, since those criminals did not deny others their freedom, they only infringed upon property)
That is exactly what I've been stating for a couple of months. However, it seems that people are prone to assumptions when they see "an eye to eye", without regard to what is actually being said.
Hmm, does it mean that if punishment does not dissuade people from harming others, they should be free to do so?
I may have some bias here, but seeing as how human rights are a societal concept, I have some trouble seeing how what Gelzo mentioned earlier was worse than the type of punishment for which you are advocating.
One of my problems with the "eye for an eye" system, in addition to it being difficult to pragmatically apply for most crimes (in my view), is that the state is disrespecting the idea of human rights by giving punishments such as amputation and the like.
I think that disrespecting certain people's human rights can lead to the dehumanization of certain persons since those people are deemed unworthy of what every human should have. I feel as though seeing people as less than human is quite dangerous and leads to many other problems.
It is not about seeing people "less than human". It is simply not applying the rules they do not accept to them. After all, for them to claim protection of the same very right they choose to disregard is nothing but hypocritical. If they think that it is ok for them to beat people in the head with an iron tube, then why is it is suddenly not okay when they are affected?
Whether I consider people "worthy" of something or not is irrelevant. Someone might be the lowest scum on the earth but as long as they do not cause a particular harm to another, they are protected against the same type of harm.
Now, the reality of the situation is that, a person's expected punishment is always less than the received punishment, because you have to multiply the received punishment by the chance (represented as a percentage) of actually being caught/prosecuted/found guilty/not being eaten by wolves in the meantime, etc.
Ultimately, this means there is a huge difference between actual punishment, and expected punishment. An actual punishment is so severe that no individual can truly expect to receive it-therefore, we are returned to a state of moral hazard. And having a less severe punishment will create some circumstances where the individual can "Get away with murder" so to speak.
Of course, the elephant in the room is that if it only costs 10 million dollars to society if Steve dies, then Bill Gates can pop off a Steve every minute as long as he wants (whether or not it's really worth 10 million to Bill Gates is kind of irrelevant at this point). This is why our understanding of punishment cannot be single threaded, but it must be meta; the cost to society for allowing a simple "out" in the form of "paying the costs" is itself a decision that must be made. Thus, even if it's more socially efficient to allow people to buy their way out of murder (and it isn't, for other reasons related to transaction costs etc), we would have to weigh that cost against the cost to society for that actually being the precedent just by virtue of it being the precedent. Human psychology is like that.
The reality, of course, is that humans are-by and large-not complete monsters. People are not fully rational entities that measure every decision as a costs/benefits analysis with a reckless abandon for human life outside of an individual's reduction to numbers. Punishment does not have to be rational-it can simply be scary and emotional. Likewise, if those who are criminals pursue a path of crime for a reason, rather than simply reinforcing the notion of punishment, we can address the reasons for those crimes.