REVENGE

Not long ago I wrote a paper on retributive justice, exploring the rational and non-rational justifications for punishment. Throughout history, oceans of blood have been spilled and an endless number of lives ruined in an effort to settle scores – even when nothing good could possibly come out of it. I was interested in why makes people seek justice, where the primal urge of seeing the foe who wronged you suffer came from, and whether it is after all, rational. My conclusion was a rather dismal one, alluding somewhat to Foucault’s belief that no punishment is ever justified – it is inextricably tied up with assumptions and beliefs that have no independent rational foundation and the very idea that penal institutions can be justified is suspect and self-delusive. Despite the more balanced conclusion I provided (that justice is a construct of both reason and emotion – the all-time cliché ‘middle path’), a part of me still thinks that retribution, revenge has its roots in punitive emotions – a primal instinct and expression of irrational vengeance.

Admit it: we relish punishment for people who did us injustice. Even a saint would fume and determinedly declare the heretic would burn in hell when he blasphemies God. It’s only human. And human beings are not rational (whatever that word means).

Ernst Fehr’s Ultimatum Game is probably the simplest illustration. It goes something like this: You’re paired with another participant and kept in separate rooms. The experimenter gives each of you $10; you get to make the first move and decide whether to send your money over to the other participant or keep it for yourself. If you keep it, both gets to keep the $10 and the game is over; if you send over your money, the experimenter quadruples the amount so that the other player has their original $10 plus $40. He can either keep all them money, in which case you’re left with nothing, or send half the money back to you so that both of you ends up with $25. So the obvious question is: Do you trust the person on the other side? But here’s the rub: if your partner chooses to keep the $50 for himself, you can use your own money to punish the bastard (for each dollar of you own money you give the experimenter, $2 will be confiscated from your greedy partner). Would you sacrifice your own money to make the other person suffer?

Results of the experiment were as expected: most of the people who had to opportunity to exact revenge did so, and they punished severely. A PET scan reveals that while making their decisions, the part pf the brain associated with pleasure is stimulated – and this was consistent with other findings I had in the paper: recent neuroscience discovered that the emotional centre of the brain (the limbicsystem) has far more connections sending messages to the rational centre of the brain (the pre-frontal cortex) than vice versa, showing why emotional impulses so often overwhelm rational cognition. The fact that rationality is a recent arrival in human evolution, while emotional forces have long dominated behaviour also suggests that retributive judgements normally stem from the more general intuitive based judgement. In other words, retribution, revenge, punishment all has biological and emotional underpinnings. Our sense of justice is far from rational. Funny how ‘justice’ might actually be an euphemism for the deeper primal urges we all share.

Does that make it right, then, to exact revenge? That’s an "ought" question which ironically demands REASON & RATIONALITY to answer. But then again, with whose rationality?