“Retaliation” can mean many different things to different people, and it covers a broad range of instances. If a wild man murders an innocent person, then clearly he must be eliminated from ever doing it again. It’s the same with a rapist, or even a thief. If a person cannot live their life as they wish because another person initiates force against them, then often retaliation is the only rational way to deal with the rights-violator. This is a common justification for the State, which in theory would codify the standards under which a force-initiator is retaliated against. The theory says that if there were “Rule of Law,” then all of the Individuals in a society would know what the rules are, and could behave in a manner which doesn’t draw “objective retaliation.” Voila, no force initiation. It’s a fine theory except that there are only people available to rule on this planet, not law.
But what of pure retaliation? This would be retaliation only for the sake of the retaliation itself, without the additional benefits of one’s defense or the defense of a community. We may call it “retaliation as retaliation,” or retaliation qua retaliation. Is that rational?
By what standard? By the standard of morality as it’s been taught for thousands of years, the answer is yes. “An eye for an eye” and so on.
What if the standard were to be benefit…benefit for oneself and benefit for others in one’s chosen community? That answer isn’t so clear.
It was once known as a Fallacy…the “Tu Quoque Fallacy.” Literally it means, “You did it.” We all recognize it as a fallacy and mostly teach our children that it’s immoral—-”Just because Johnny did X to you does not mean that you should do X to Johnny.” Yet as the child grows, we also teach that such retaliation is the basis for morality. We make hundreds of thousands of laws, theoretically (again!) for the purpose that a person won’t do that which we believe is bad. Many of us like to pretend that these laws serve to protect the Individual rights of people to not have force initiated against them. But as we see, it doesn’t actually work that way in reality. We concoct a billion ways to imagine others as force-initiators, often through the use of terms like “public good” or “public health.” You must, under penalty of law, wear a seat belt because otherwise you will drain too much from the “public pool of money” that “we all” have to pay if you get injured otherwise. Where is the benefit?
If a chap punches you for no reason at all and then goes to his home 1,000 miles away, will it serve you to go after him to punch him back? No, of course not…your life won’t be improved a drop for doing that and in fact will suffer for it, because of the resources required for that pure retaliation.
When considered from the perspective of the person alone, retaliation qua retaliation is never rational. There is never any benefit from it alone. This makes sense, because what sort of role model for ourselves is a common thug? Somewhere along the way over these many millennia, most of us became convinced that the other person should be the cause of what we ourselves do. It sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous. The only rational motivation for any action is being the person we truly wish to be. For most people that’s not a pacifist nor an appeaser. It’s someone who does what they do because they think it best, not by copying the actions of evil people.