Where do you personally draw the line between what you would and wouldn’t “wish on your worst enemy”?

It's too tricky to try to ask what would be justice for the victims because it's going to be so different across the board. Some might feel like they can't go on without revenge. Others will feel that they can't stand to have the world tainted by one more act of evil.

Maybe if you have the victims vote, I could get behind you, but the only thing I think you and I can discuss knowingly is what is just for the person we want to torture. What do you want to accomplish? If you want to punish--in the true sense of deterring him from doing it again--would torture be more effective than death or life imprisonment? If you seek to deter others from doing what he did... does it really seem like the kinds of minds capable of doing what he did will be deterred by fear of international reprisal? Can we be sure that the desire to torture is not about revenge? That it's not about the specific dopamine rush that we would get knowing something bad happened to a bad person? You can say he deserves to get back what he got, but is it justice for there to be any special cases where it is ok for a government or an individual to do something monstrous? I guess that you would disagree, which is fine. I do wonder I'd you would be capable of the torture yourself.

When victims of hate crimes stand up in court and forgive their aggressors, they aren't saying the person should not be held accountable. The victims who do that understand that hate is poison, and they are purging themselves of it because they need to heal more than they need for the world to make a rigid kind of sense.

/r/AskReddit Thread Parent