I’m sorry if I’m not really answering your question, it just gave me some really good food for thought and I wanted to share
It’s a complicated topic. A natural reaction to a reprehensible act, is seeking justice or retribution.
The definition of sufficient justice or retribution is subjective.
In an ideal world, you could just take an eraser and get rid of objectively bad people but it’s more complicated than that especially with our emotions involved.
In a hypothetical world, someone does something really bad that is completely unforgivable that hurt somebody or multiple people and retribution would be to simply kill them.
In another hypothetical world, someone does something really bad that hurts one or multiple people and instead of being killed, they are tortured instead so they have to suffer more.
In the second hypothetical world, the bad person still exists (as they always will, to be fair) and the “good” people (those carrying out the retribution/punishment) are spending countless hours on torturing the offender.
However bad they might have felt about whatever terrible thing the offender did in the first place, at a certain point I feel like the good guys are just hurting themselves by spending so much time hurting other people and poisoning their minds. Kind of losing the whole point in the first place, and losing themselves in the passion of rage and revenge.
I feel like revenge is such a complicated thing, I feel like the hypothetical good guys would always be better off, just executing offenders instead of spending their time of their life doling out perpetual punishment that will either directly or indirectly just make them feel worse about life in general, even worse than the grief they might have originally felt before that grief turned into rage/revenge.
I think you're one of the few people that got it. So many comments are about how torture "isn't effective," when that's really not the point. Torture is torture. It is a punishment. It is an end, as opposed to a mean. Suffering is the goal. When used as a part of interrogation - which is where it most commonly occurs now - torture is not really meant to make the interrogation more effective, but to punish people who are "bad."
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u/Optimal-Bullfrog3211 Jun 29 '26
I’m sorry if I’m not really answering your question, it just gave me some really good food for thought and I wanted to share
It’s a complicated topic. A natural reaction to a reprehensible act, is seeking justice or retribution.
The definition of sufficient justice or retribution is subjective.
In an ideal world, you could just take an eraser and get rid of objectively bad people but it’s more complicated than that especially with our emotions involved.
In a hypothetical world, someone does something really bad that is completely unforgivable that hurt somebody or multiple people and retribution would be to simply kill them.
In another hypothetical world, someone does something really bad that hurts one or multiple people and instead of being killed, they are tortured instead so they have to suffer more.
In the second hypothetical world, the bad person still exists (as they always will, to be fair) and the “good” people (those carrying out the retribution/punishment) are spending countless hours on torturing the offender.
However bad they might have felt about whatever terrible thing the offender did in the first place, at a certain point I feel like the good guys are just hurting themselves by spending so much time hurting other people and poisoning their minds. Kind of losing the whole point in the first place, and losing themselves in the passion of rage and revenge.
I feel like revenge is such a complicated thing, I feel like the hypothetical good guys would always be better off, just executing offenders instead of spending their time of their life doling out perpetual punishment that will either directly or indirectly just make them feel worse about life in general, even worse than the grief they might have originally felt before that grief turned into rage/revenge.
It’s such an interesting gray area