Thursday, October 06, 2011

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind....”

By Nicholas Stix

At an article on the mass shooting in Cupertino, California, Wendy Fong Mai responded to Nicolas Herrera’s statement,

Message to the Cops:"When you find the shooter please just spray him with bullets, save tax payer money" Thank you

Mai wrote,

Wow, really? We have a justice system for a reason since we supposedly live in a "civilized" society. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind....

Actually… no. That is one of those idiotic phrases that people mindlessly repeat because: 1. They’re catchy; and 2. Famous people have said them. In this case, that would be Gandhi, though most people nowadays think it came from Martin Luther King Jr.

The saying would only be valid in a world in which either everyone were equally guilty of at least two outrages (murders?), or in which vendettas ran without end, neither of which is the case … yet.

The concept of an eye for an eye is the foundation of all morality and law. It presupposes both equality and proportionality. Those who attack it, claiming to speak for some “higher” morality, would destroy all morality, and leave us in the state of nature. The alternatives are typically of the form ‘no eye for an eye,’ or ‘1,000 eyes for an eye.’

In the West today, one typically hears variations on ‘no eye for an eye’ (Gandhi), which means that evildoers get a free pass. You folks need to explain yourselves, which I’ve never heard any of you do.

But suppose someone argued that Mai was calling for the suspect to get a fair trial. But that has nothing to do with her statement about “an eye for an eye.” If you don’t believe in an eye for an eye, why bother with a trial? As idiotic as Gandhi’s statement was, Mai outdoes him, by joining it to an incongruent notion.

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