Is Revenge Ever Morally Justified? The television show Leverage features a group of thieves who come together to provide their services to those who have nowhere else to go after being cheated. “The rich and powerful, they take what they want. We steal it back for you. Sometimes bad guys make the best good guys. We provide… leverage.” (Leverage) The characters do not follow the regular legal path in their pursuits for justice, instead they operate under the belief that their actions are morally justifiable due to their well-meaning intentions. This raises the question of whether revenge can ever be justified and if so on what grounds can it be justified? The questions of morals and revenge that are raised will be answered through normative This statement leads one to ask what the things that are being discussed here that would violate rights? Knowing that Nozick is a believer in the capitalistic ideals for a society, it can be inferred that the actions being referred to are related to one’s property. In Leverage, the characters are seen as going against this idea of property being a right. When an antagonist commits a crime against a more vulnerable person, they are seen in the eyes of the Leverage crew, to have lost their right to their property. The act of having gained that property at the expense of others causes them to be seen as having no rights to The Leverage team is the husband, Castleman Security and Congressman Jenkins are in the place of the druggist, and instead of an ill wife there is a wounded Corporal Perry who needs treatment that he is entitled to but is not receiving due to finances and the reality of the health care situation. In the episode the circumstances were far more complicated, however this is simply focusing on the part where Leverage stole back the currency. Is it ethical that the Leverage team steal from wealthy, powerful sources (who obtained the funds in question illegally) if the funds are going to victims of the crime and the thievery is the only way to ensure that Corporal Perry and other veterans will receive the treatment that they
Marshal Steiber has his own issues, he begins to take inside information about investments from his client Peter Macondo in order to gain wealth. Dr. Steiber later find that the information was false and now struggles with the fact that he has lost a lot of money and with revenge on his client who gave him this faulty information. Marshal hires Carol to be his attorney and help find Peter and get back his money. This ends up putting Carol in an awkward position because she now is becoming somewhat of a therapist to a therapist and listening to Marshal’s problems when no one else will. This is unethical because Dr. Steiber shouldn’t have gotten involved in financial bonds with his client, because it clearly affected treatment. It also puts a strain on Carol because although she is an attorney and there to help people in tough situations, she is in no way a train therapist and Dr. Steiber should know better than to put that type of role reversal on
Evil exists naturally in the world, and there are many acts that are considered evil. As a result, evil is often a theme in literature. “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” by William Shakespeare, and “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe each rely heavily on evil to portray a message. Out of all of the evil acts that exist, exacting revenge is the evilest act that a person can make, for a person’s rash decision to exact revenge will ruin their sense of morality. The characters of Hamlet and Laertes in “Hamlet” each commit terrible acts of revenge, as does Montresor in “The Cask of Amontillado.”
In The Unvanquished by William Faulkner, the theme of revenge appears throughout the story. Primarily, Bayard and Ringo avenge the death of Rosa Millard, their grandmother. By violently shooting the sociopath Grumby, Granny’s killer, their revenge is wrought through the traditional Southern form of closure, bringing about the death of the killer and avenging the victim. Next, Drusilla, Bayard’s cousin, displays revenge by joining Colonel Sartoris of the Confederate army in order to avenge the death of her fiancé. By joining the Confederates, Drusilla gains the opportunity to kill the Yankee soldiers responsible for her fiancé’s death in battle. Finally, Bayard exacts vengeance upon Redmond for murdering Colonel John Sartoris, Bayard’s father. However, Bayard achieves his goal of seeking revenge in a nonviolent way, avoiding killing anyone, breaking the traditional Southern code of revenge. Each character struggles with the necessity to avenge the death of their loved ones, seeking the ultimate, most appropriate punishment for the murderer who harms their family.
Revenge is best served cold or so says the well-known expression. This idea of revenge that they seek is usually to restore balance and take an “eye for an eye” as the Bible says. Revenge, if by chance everyone were in Plato’s perfect utopia, would be in a perfect form, where justice and revenge would be one, and the coined phrase “eye for an eye” would be taken literally. By taking an eye for and eye, and punishing those who did wrong equally as they did wrong, there is justice. However, this revenge sometimes goes too far and is consequently not justice.
Retribution – is a correctional aim which is to hold a person who has committed a crime accountable for committing a crime against another or society in the form of punishment. (Stojkovic and Lovell 2013) What we look at in retribution is when someone is punished there is legitimacy in the punishment of a particular crime that was committed. Some of the pros of retribution are retribution can make a person or society feel safer or a feeling of justice being served when a person is punished for the crime they committed. The con of retribution is during court proceedings the prosecution and the offender’s lawyer may come to a plea agreement which could give the offender a lesser sentence than what he or she would have gotten originally. (Stojkovic and Lovell 2013)
Revenge, on the other hand, refers to an action taken by an individual as a response to an act of injustice. The principle of revenge is “an eye for an eye”…. Can revenge be justified and be as equally part of justice if they both seek retribution for a wrongdoing? The universal distinction between justice and revenge is quite distinctive, is there more beyond their differences? Revenge is retaliation by a wronged party against the person or people they see as having caused the wrong.
Throughout history, revenge, or vengeance, has been altered by several cultures and even the American culture. This is shown throughout many ancient greek epics. Throughout these two epics, what is just revenge and what the action of revenge is are much different than what Revenge is seen through today’s society. Revenge is the main theme in The Iliad, with Achilles’ revenge on Agamemnon and Hector, and in The Odyssey, with Poseidon’s revenge on Odysseus and Odysseus’s revenge on the Suitors, and these epics define how revenge was seen in the ancient Greek world.
Revenge is such an enormous part of a being human. It is something that no matter how much you try to avoid part of you will persistently lust for it. When you are hurt in any way your natural instinct will always tell you to make the one who hurt you feel just as bad if not worse as how you felt. It is such a natural and powerful feeling, that when revenge is incorporated into a story it makes it so much stronger. Revenge will make you see so many more sides of characters and make them seem much more complex. Revenge can give fictional characters a more human quality. That is why so many writers use it as their theme.
The idiom “revenge is sweet” appears so frequently that one might think the cliché is true, yet the nature of revenge is far more complex and may leave more bitterness in its wake. The cyclical nature of revenge and man’s inhumanity to man means it has a propensity to intensify and devastate the people in its wake including the inflictor. Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits examine the theme of the nature of revenge through the presence and significance of prominent characters seeking revenge in both Latin American novels.
In their book Homicide, evolutionary psychologists Margo Wilson and Martin Daly identify one such conflict between human nature and the contemporary cultural order. They argue that humans have an innate concept of justice which is based on the idea of personal revenge. According to this concept of justice, it is legitimate and even praise-worthy for people to whom a wrong has been done to avenge the wrong-doing themselves.
The famous French writer Victor Hugo said, “Hamlet like each of us real, but must be greater than us. He is a giant, is a real person. Since Hamlet is not you, not I, but for all of us. Hamlet is not a person, but people ("Victor Hugo Quotes.")”. This means that our body can be seen in the shadow of Hamlet, he is such a real life live around us, familiar and strange. Hamlet is a person, a person who has love, just like us, but when the love is gone, he will revenge his dead loves. Love is the source of power, doesn’t matter the loved one is alive or dead, it will help you to grow up or to be changed. In William Shakespeare’s book “Hamlet,” the protagonist Hamlet is a prince who watched friend, mother and lover died. So he finally could not suppress the thoughts of revenge, killed the wicked king, who killed his father, his friends, his mother, make himself become wildly out of control. No matter who destroyed the “love” of others, he will receive the endless revenge, because “love” just like forbidden lamella of dragon, nothing could stop this kind revenge. Just because the “love” can make people become blind, in front of love, everything is so small.
In the play, Hamlet, William Shakespeare explores the theme of revenge. Throughout the work, Hamlet acquires a moral dilemma; he cannot decide how to carry out revenge without condemning himself. Thus, although the play promotes the idea of revenge at the beginning, the cultivation of dialogue, relationships, and complications provide evidence of the detrimental consequences and limitations of the theme.
Taking revenge is a bitter sweet thing. I have always thought that people should always get what they desire, whether it be a grade, a smile and hug or in some cases, revenge. When I was in high school there seemed to be someone always trying to get me in trouble, they would say things that wouldn’t be true or do things to make me look bad. The fact that I never seemed to do anything to them would make me mad and wonder what I could do to get them back. Revenge would usually come in some sort of verbal put down or I would try to physically hurt them. It always seemed when I would get the revenge right away I would feel really good but as I thought about what I did, and what they did to me I would always feel guilty or wish I would have never done anything to them in return.
“With God as my witness, I have been falsely accused of these crimes. I did not commit them. I am an innocent man, and I just pray in the name of Jesus Christ that all this will be brought out. The truth will eventually be brought out.” That is a direct quote from Calvin C. Johnson Jr. that he said in 1983, at his sentence hearing (Hamikian). The death penalty is slowly depleting from countries and more than two-thirds of countries have stopped using is it as a form of punishment (Dying Out). Thirty five percent of Americans oppose the death penalty, which is the highest number in forty years. That percentage needs to be higher and the death penalty should be eliminated. (Strauss). It should not even be an option as a form of punishment. More citizens should see that having the death penalty has a more negative than positive outcome (Douthat). The death penalty should be done away with; many innocent people are on death row, states with the death penalty have a higher murder rate, and it is a more expensive alternative.
People can be motivated to take revenge on others for various reasons. While these reasons may be considered as very serious or rather trivial, they are all motives for revenge. Revenge occurs when a person has been offended or angered by an individual and in result they have the desire to pay them back. People’s opinions on revenge differ from each other, some may believe it is justified and some don’t. Mahatma Ghandi believed that revenge is not the answer and he stated that “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”. This quote portrays the opinion that if everyone gets even then there will be no one else; if we all take an eye for an eye everyone would be blind. Revenge can be learnt through real life experiences as well as fiction and can be shown as justice or unacceptable. It becomes difficult to determine when revenge can be justified but is revenge always worth it?