Revenge is an action due to which people act blindly and without any particular reason. It can also be called as, the act of taking vengeance for hurting the other person or doing something wrong. Selfishness can be said one of the outcomes of revenge. King Claudius says, ”Revenge should have no bounds”. Revenge never has a positive outcome, as it usually leads to a person’s degradation. Whereas, people fail to realize this as they blindly take their revenge from the other person.
We’ve all experienced the desire for revenge, whether its when someone cuts you off in traffic or you discover that your friend has been cheating on you. Wanting vengeance when you’ve been wronged is a natural response. The question we’re asking here is whether …show more content…
Of course even experts are going to deny that revenge is the ethical option most of the time. Revenge is basically flawed because the person seeking revenge has a personal interest in the matter they are unlikely to take only the vengeance they should, and are likely to go overboard. Thus the best results, in most cases, are achieved by allowing wrongdoers to be tried by an impartial system. However, the experts may accept revenge as the ethical alternative when such an impartial system is missing or ineffective, reasoning that over-punishment of wrongdoers is a better alternative than no punishment whatsoever. So here the expert’s position seems to be a one that places more stress on justice, because revenge may occasionally be the option that is most just, or perhaps because the person seeking revenge has proper self-control. On the other hand this is opposed by our intuitions that mercy and goodwill towards others are essential to ethics, as revenge has little to do with either of those. Really this division goes back to our fundamental reasons to act ethically, namely that ethics is for the benefit of the community as a whole. And most of the time this involves being nice to the other members of the community, and lending them a helping hand from time to time. And hence most of our ethical …show more content…
While we can all agree that revenge is less than optimal when wrongdoing can be handled by the justice system there are plenty of cases that the law can’t deal with. There are many “conventions” that cannot be enforced by law, such as that you are obligated to pay back even small sums of money that you borrow, that you must pick up your own trash. It seems reasonable that revenge may be an appropriate reaction to small infractions such as these, assuming the revenge is kept small as well. But because we have such strong intuitions against revenge there is little incentive not to act unethically, and take advantage of people who do act ethically, on a small scale. And the fact of the matter is that people do tend to abuse ethics on a small scale; while people obey the larger laws a fair percentage of the population tends to treat people outside their circle of friends relatively poorly. And I think it is fair to say that the fact that ethics has a weaker hold on people when it comes to these smaller matters is because there is no enforcement mechanism, even though we have as much reason to act ethically with respect to these minor matters as we do to act ethically in the situations that the law does consider. Thus I think it is reasonable to say that we should be more open to revenge, at least some of the
We’ve all experienced the desire for revenge, whether its when someone cuts you off in traffic or you discover that your friend has been cheating on you. Wanting vengeance when you’ve been wronged is a natural response. The question we’re asking here is whether …show more content…
Of course even experts are going to deny that revenge is the ethical option most of the time. Revenge is basically flawed because the person seeking revenge has a personal interest in the matter they are unlikely to take only the vengeance they should, and are likely to go overboard. Thus the best results, in most cases, are achieved by allowing wrongdoers to be tried by an impartial system. However, the experts may accept revenge as the ethical alternative when such an impartial system is missing or ineffective, reasoning that over-punishment of wrongdoers is a better alternative than no punishment whatsoever. So here the expert’s position seems to be a one that places more stress on justice, because revenge may occasionally be the option that is most just, or perhaps because the person seeking revenge has proper self-control. On the other hand this is opposed by our intuitions that mercy and goodwill towards others are essential to ethics, as revenge has little to do with either of those. Really this division goes back to our fundamental reasons to act ethically, namely that ethics is for the benefit of the community as a whole. And most of the time this involves being nice to the other members of the community, and lending them a helping hand from time to time. And hence most of our ethical …show more content…
While we can all agree that revenge is less than optimal when wrongdoing can be handled by the justice system there are plenty of cases that the law can’t deal with. There are many “conventions” that cannot be enforced by law, such as that you are obligated to pay back even small sums of money that you borrow, that you must pick up your own trash. It seems reasonable that revenge may be an appropriate reaction to small infractions such as these, assuming the revenge is kept small as well. But because we have such strong intuitions against revenge there is little incentive not to act unethically, and take advantage of people who do act ethically, on a small scale. And the fact of the matter is that people do tend to abuse ethics on a small scale; while people obey the larger laws a fair percentage of the population tends to treat people outside their circle of friends relatively poorly. And I think it is fair to say that the fact that ethics has a weaker hold on people when it comes to these smaller matters is because there is no enforcement mechanism, even though we have as much reason to act ethically with respect to these minor matters as we do to act ethically in the situations that the law does consider. Thus I think it is reasonable to say that we should be more open to revenge, at least some of the