Human beings all long for justice. We are drawn to fairness. All is not right in the moral universe when those who have caused harm go unpunished, when the killers and the cheaters, the rule breakers and advantage takers, are not required to pay for the damage they leave behind.
Nicole Brown Simpson, the wife of O. J. Simpson, and Caylee Anthony, the daughter of Casey Anthony, are tragic symbols of justice denied, of legal failure, of the false promise that it is possible to right a wrong. Bankers and traders, who risked the money, homes, and livelihoods of others without ever having to spend a night in jail for their own excesses, provided the inspiration and resentments of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The assassination of Osama bin Laden and the imprisoning of Bernard Madoff to an unprecedented 150 years were appreciated by most people as just deserts.
These were not mere news items, tidbits of tabloid fodder for the culturally informed. These stories were obsessively followed because we are all sensitive to unfairness that has gone too far. During such times we zero in on moral outrage knowing that the difference between justice and injustice is very much a zero-sum game. We all gain when wrongdoers are punished, and we all lose when they are not.
Justice is not an abstract concept; it also evokes palpable feelings. Believing that wrongs should be righted is not a matter merely of personal opinion. The idea that people can get away with murder or highway robbery epitomizes moral revulsion at its most revolting. Injustice summons forth feelings that are deeply visceral—causing minds to race and emotions to stir. No one is casual about it, and no one is indifferent to it. Injustice strikes at the core of what it means to live in a just society, to live in a world that makes moral sense.
And the same is true with revenge. Victims who have been unavenged elicit strong emotional sympathies, sensations that suggest that something has gone seriously and terribly awry. It pulls at the same heartstrings, strikes similar nerve endings, as feelings of injustice. The gut-wrenching sensation of justice denied is precisely what sickens the soul of victims whose payback went unredeemed. Emotionally we all appreciate that victims cannot be expected to forget what happened to them. No one should be forced to accept that wrongdoers will not receive their due. Whatever debt was created surely cannot remain forever unsettled, written off like a bad loan that the victim can ill afford to let go.
Justice is not as dispassionate as the legal system has instructed us to accept. And vengeance is not as irrational as we have been taught to believe. They are not polar opposites but, rather, codependencies. Their moral appeal is lodged in the same sectors of the human brain. Actually, justice and vengeance are mirror images of one another. There is no justice unless victims feel avenged; and vengeance that is disproportionately taken is not just.
We accept legal rulings when justice is served—not simply when the law has spoken. If we don’t feel the just in justice, we will walk away from the law like any unavenged victim who knows that the score remains unsettled and that payback is still owed. This is why running away from revenge, pretending that reclaiming honor is not an honorable pursuit, presents similar moral consequences as living in a society where the guilty go unpunished while citizens are asked to accept that justice was done.
Justice and vengeance arouse the same emotional feelings and spring from the same moral imperatives. Revenge justly owed and justly taken feels morally right not because humankind has a voyeuristic fetish for violence but because vengeance is one of the ways in which human beings demonstrate their commitment to moral order and just treatment. Yet in civil society revenge is taboo while justice operates beyond the sway of human feeling, only vaguely connected to the emotional life of victims who come before the law precisely to be avenged.
It’s time to finally humanize justice by restoring the face of vengeance. Doing so is not an invitation to lawlessness but a mandate that the law must act with the same moral entitlement, and the same spirit of human fulfillment, as the righteous avenger.