by martin-t | 2025-09-07 03:13:13+00:00
> the justice system

Lately, I've come to hate this phrase. It's the legal system, not justice system.[0] One reason is that legality is limited by provability - the people working for the legal system, even if they intended to serve justice in full, are limited by uncertainty so they must only punish when proof is sufficient. Another reason is that they don't serve justice but the law which in turn is written by people who benefit greatly from leniency (especially for crimes which rich and powerful people tend to commit, such as property crimes and rape) and from generally making the system of laws a maze (so that rich people who can afford better layers, such as themselves, are more likely to get the results they want).

> issues of standing

This is related to how I earlier said only people who have sufficient standard of proof of what happened can morally punish the aggressor. But if a random stranger sees a rape, I have no issue with him killing the rapist, whether in the act or after. IT does not matter whether he was harmed himself or not.

In this particular example it also protects people genuinely defending themselves (killing aggressors during, not after, the act) from being too good at it and getting charged with murder because they kept defending themselves after the aggressor was no longer a threat. These cases make me angry because they reveal another double standard. Soldiers are trained by the state to confirm kills (which is a euphemism not for checking pulse but shooting even seemingly dead enemies in the head or chest from close range). But people are not legally allowed to confirm their kills in self-defense. Why? Because in war, it's the state's existence on the line. In self-defense, the state could not care less.

> proportionality

Valid, but as long as the victim chooses a proportional punishment, nothing wrong with that.

> reprisal

This is another argument I don't like. Basically the state says "we punish you for carrying out punishment yourself instead of leaving it to us to protect you (from the initial aggressor's friends)". IMO, anybody has the right to take the risk, it's not the state's business whether people harm themselves directly (suicide used to be illegal in the west and still is in some countries) or indirectly (through causing reprisal as you said).

> Once vigilantism begins, there may be no end to it. Just ask the Hatfields and the McCoys.

I think we should differentiate vigilantism and one-off cases. Nothing wrong with one off cases. Vigilantes OTOH are sometimes people who enjoy hurting others and are simply looking for someone who is socially acceptable to hurt: https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/21/i-am-thirty-eight-years-old/

BTW, reading the sequence of events, I couldn't help but feel like they were both groups of people who went out of their way to attack each other even if justice would have been served legally. Basically bad people taking each other out. I felt quite validated in that opinion when I got to the Genetic disease section.

> That doesn’t excuse or justify their behavior

I think it does exactly that. Even legally, it was clearly self-defense - he wouldn't have stopped if he wasn't killed. They couldn't even flee - he extorted his wife to return to him, he was likely to do the same to them.

And morally, it's even more clear cut. If at any point his aggression reached a level which justified death as proportional punishment (which it did), then he kept being deserving of that punishment until, well, punished.

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[0]: Well, _a_ legal system because there's plenty of them, different ones, and there's only one justice which does not depend on lines drawn on a map. So even if one legal system was the justice system, the others wouldn't.