On the topic of vengeance versus vindication, I will recommend my friend Lara Bazelon's book Rectify. Lara has been a leader in the US on correcting miscarriages of justice, and in trying to find ways for the guilty to _actually make amends_ to those they've harmed rather than just being arbitrarily punished. (On the "miscarriages of justice front", there also was an amazing series on the podcast Suspect that covered one of her Innocence Project cases: https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/suspect/id1580881826 )
"Someone who kills the one who wrongs them doesn’t harm someone who is under their power, whereas, the state, when it is harsh or cruel, does so."
This doesn't make sense to me at all. I'd definitely count killing someone as a type of harm. And they're under your power pretty much by definition, otherwise you wouldn't have been able to kill them.
Durably under their power, then? Here I think we’re assuming the wronger was imprisoned and put to death after a trial, not killed in a confrontation attempting to subdue them. If granted, the state has already prevented them from doing active harm (at least, outside of prison, to the people whose harm was the state’s rationale for the imprisonment) by imprisoning them.
Whereas if the wronged kills the wronger when they are e.g. asleep, it doesn’t necessarily imply that the wronged has acquired a *durable* power to prevent further wrongdoing. The wronged (in reports I happen to have read, anyway) is often motivated by a felt sense of desperation and urgency, that this rare chance has arisen where their power has coincidentally risen just as the power of those who wronged them has coincidentally faltered.
On the topic of vengeance versus vindication, I will recommend my friend Lara Bazelon's book Rectify. Lara has been a leader in the US on correcting miscarriages of justice, and in trying to find ways for the guilty to _actually make amends_ to those they've harmed rather than just being arbitrarily punished. (On the "miscarriages of justice front", there also was an amazing series on the podcast Suspect that covered one of her Innocence Project cases: https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/suspect/id1580881826 )
"Someone who kills the one who wrongs them doesn’t harm someone who is under their power, whereas, the state, when it is harsh or cruel, does so."
This doesn't make sense to me at all. I'd definitely count killing someone as a type of harm. And they're under your power pretty much by definition, otherwise you wouldn't have been able to kill them.
Durably under their power, then? Here I think we’re assuming the wronger was imprisoned and put to death after a trial, not killed in a confrontation attempting to subdue them. If granted, the state has already prevented them from doing active harm (at least, outside of prison, to the people whose harm was the state’s rationale for the imprisonment) by imprisoning them.
Whereas if the wronged kills the wronger when they are e.g. asleep, it doesn’t necessarily imply that the wronged has acquired a *durable* power to prevent further wrongdoing. The wronged (in reports I happen to have read, anyway) is often motivated by a felt sense of desperation and urgency, that this rare chance has arisen where their power has coincidentally risen just as the power of those who wronged them has coincidentally faltered.