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Justice delayed is justice denied. I am on the side of justice, through the justice system, because I think that it is a social good to see injustice brought,

Justice delayed is justice denied. I am on the side of justice, through the justice system, because I think that it is a social good to see injustice brought, well, to justice. In the moment, judgement calls are sometimes necessary, but this is not ideal, as it legitimizes self-help justice, which is fraught with issues of standing, proportionality, and reprisal. Once vigilantism begins, there may be no end to it. Just ask the Hatfields and the McCoys. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfield%E2%80%93McCoy_feud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfield%E2%80%93McCoy_feud Justice is a social good, but not an unqualified good; there are failures to convict and miscarriages of justice. My heart goes out to those who have no escape from injustice or legal avenue to rectify illegal acts. But at the same time, these women are expected to just walk away from their abuser, the very same man who raised them, indoctrinated them, to be his subordinate and subservient playthings. They were set up to fail to protect their own best interests in favor of their father’s whims and fancies. That doesn’t excuse or justify their behavior, but it does situate it in a context of ongoing violence, trauma, and lawlessness under the same roof as their captor, so I can see why they were not able to seek justice through the proper channels. They had no way of conceiving of a future world free of their father’s will, and so all hopes rang hollow, a bell their father rang as surely as Pavlov himself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning Vigilantism is doubling down on bad behavior and hoping the house doesn’t win when the chips are down and we’re going for broke. It’s a flawed strategy for bettors to gain leverage over their supposed betters. I don’t find that self-help is a strategy for a stable society, because it engenders an unstable equilibrium that favors those already willing to dispense violence contrary to the interests of the community and the justice system. The girls are not hardened criminals, but their actions give cover to those who are, by pointing out the flaws in the legitimate monopoly on violence that the state holds. I am rather in favor of correcting the shortcomings and failure modes of the justice system itself so that victims need never take matters into their own hands in the first place, because that way lies madness and corruption. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and bad actors run roughshod over the little people as a matter of course. We ought to do better for each other, as that is what society is. I only hope that the girls are able to be freed, and that their actions are viewed in a light that accommodates the long shadow cast by the long arm of the law they lived under, the same arm that should have defended them from their own father, but did not.

martin-t 1y ago
> 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/ 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. --- [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.

martin-t 1y ago

> 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/ 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. --- [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.