Yes, if you apply this to rape, why not other crimes?
White collar crimes don’t get the death penalty, but a victim who lost their entire life’s savings might think they should. What if victims take their own vengeance? Or, what about a drug dealer who sells someone a drug that results in an overdose and then death. The courts won’t give that dealer a death penalty, but the family might decide they want to. Then there are religious types who might think that a girl or woman who dishonoured her family by getting pregnant outside wedlock deserved the death penalty for bringing shame to their family. If each victim gets to decide on their own what counts as justice for everything they perceive to be a crime, you get chaos.
It’s true that when you’re born you automatically fall under the authority of some random state that you had no role in selecting. For millennia there weren’t even laws. There were just the whims of the rulers. In a modern system with laws, you’re subject to that state’s justice system from the moment you’re born even if your moral code is completely different from the state’s legal code. If you’re lucky enough to have been born in a democracy, you can do what Greta Thunberg has done, and start advocating for the laws being changed before you’re even old enough to vote on those laws. On the other hand, if you were born in the 1700s you might have been born to slaves and the law would say that you were the property of someone else.
For the most part, we do listen to the victims of crimes in modern western democracies. Too often that means ramping up punishments more and more and forgetting about rehabilitation. That just costs society more and more as people are locked up forever. Occasionally it goes the other direction, as when a lot of countries got rid of capital punishment.
Laws are always going to be a compromise. The rich and powerful have the greatest ability to influence laws, and as a result the laws tend to benefit them over other people. Men have also historically had more power than women, so crimes involving sex are often biased in favour of men. In democracies, the people have some say and if enough people care enough it’s possible to change laws. But, that process is slow and sometimes doesn’t work. It’s sometimes morally the right thing to break or ignore laws, especially when doing so doesn’t result in anybody else getting hurt. If you’re the victim of a crime and you don’t think the punishment was enough, so you take matters into your own hands and mete out vigilante justice and kill someone, that’s just going to cause chaos. And, who’s going to come out on top in that chaos? It’s the rich and powerful, mostly men.
When it works, democracy is about slowly passing laws that bit by bit strip power away from the rich and powerful and hand it to everyday people. The rich and powerful are willing to put up with that because it results in stability which they appreciate too. If someone feels that the punishment for their rape wasn’t sufficient and takes justice into their own hands and kills their rapist, I’m going to hope that they are tried for that murder. Depending on the circumstances, I might hope that they get acquitted at that trial. Fundamentally though, I want to live in a place where laws exist and are enforced, rather than one where we get vigilantes and vendettas.
Yes, if you apply this to rape, why not other crimes?
White collar crimes don’t get the death penalty, but a victim who lost their entire life’s savings might think they should. What if victims take their own vengeance? Or, what about a drug dealer who sells someone a drug that results in an overdose and then death. The courts won’t give that dealer a death penalty, but the family might decide they want to. Then there are religious types who might think that a girl or woman who dishonoured her family by getting pregnant outside wedlock deserved the death penalty for bringing shame to their family. If each victim gets to decide on their own what counts as justice for everything they perceive to be a crime, you get chaos.
It’s true that when you’re born you automatically fall under the authority of some random state that you had no role in selecting. For millennia there weren’t even laws. There were just the whims of the rulers. In a modern system with laws, you’re subject to that state’s justice system from the moment you’re born even if your moral code is completely different from the state’s legal code. If you’re lucky enough to have been born in a democracy, you can do what Greta Thunberg has done, and start advocating for the laws being changed before you’re even old enough to vote on those laws. On the other hand, if you were born in the 1700s you might have been born to slaves and the law would say that you were the property of someone else.
For the most part, we do listen to the victims of crimes in modern western democracies. Too often that means ramping up punishments more and more and forgetting about rehabilitation. That just costs society more and more as people are locked up forever. Occasionally it goes the other direction, as when a lot of countries got rid of capital punishment.
Laws are always going to be a compromise. The rich and powerful have the greatest ability to influence laws, and as a result the laws tend to benefit them over other people. Men have also historically had more power than women, so crimes involving sex are often biased in favour of men. In democracies, the people have some say and if enough people care enough it’s possible to change laws. But, that process is slow and sometimes doesn’t work. It’s sometimes morally the right thing to break or ignore laws, especially when doing so doesn’t result in anybody else getting hurt. If you’re the victim of a crime and you don’t think the punishment was enough, so you take matters into your own hands and mete out vigilante justice and kill someone, that’s just going to cause chaos. And, who’s going to come out on top in that chaos? It’s the rich and powerful, mostly men.
When it works, democracy is about slowly passing laws that bit by bit strip power away from the rich and powerful and hand it to everyday people. The rich and powerful are willing to put up with that because it results in stability which they appreciate too. If someone feels that the punishment for their rape wasn’t sufficient and takes justice into their own hands and kills their rapist, I’m going to hope that they are tried for that murder. Depending on the circumstances, I might hope that they get acquitted at that trial. Fundamentally though, I want to live in a place where laws exist and are enforced, rather than one where we get vigilantes and vendettas.