Retributive Justice and the Blood Feud

Today's post on the EN is not the first time I've discussed the blood feud aspect of retributive justice, which is the alternative Aristotle wants to avoid with what he calls "rectificatory justice." It does play up this notion of equality and the seeking to re-balance affairs in matters of vengeance or justice for crimes.

* An aside on the subject of the feud, for Mr. Walker. You write:

My cousin's actions are, by extension, mine. If your cousin killed my cousin, I might just kill you, because one kinsman is pretty much as good (or bad) as another. To us, this seems ridiculous. 

I don't think this is right. I've observed the blood feud at work not only in reading the sagas, and Anglo-Saxon history, but also as it is still lived today among tribal groups in Iraq. The idea isn't that one cousin is as good as another, but rather that the feud is an attempt to balance an account of honor.

Let's say that I kill someone very important in your family (perhaps your father). If I am not also very important, you may not be satisfied with killing me. Killing me won't balance the scales. So, you may go and kill my uncle -- who is a better man than me -- in order to create balance.

The problem is that different families value members of their kinship at different rates than do outsiders. I may think that your father wasn't worth half what my uncle was, even though to you it seemed to even the scale. Thus, I think I now have a blood debt to repay: and so I go and kill your cousin. But to you, this upsets the scale again, so now you feel you have a debt.

This is why the reconciliation system in all of these tribal/honor cultures follows the pattern of getting the elders together to sort out a blood price. A group of people who are respected (or sometimes, if he is respected enough, a single judge) decides where the remaining debt lies, and sets a price that both sides accept. This settles the remaining debt so that peace becomes possible.  The hard part is finding a payment -- weregild or diyya -- that both sides agree makes it even.

In other words, the system actually does make sense once you understand the mechanism at work. My killing your cousin isn't irrational, but rather a measured response based on my sense of how important the various people are within the community of honor.

I think I might have drawn that example of killing the uncle from a passage in a scholarly work, but I have not been able to remember which or to locate in my library or the internet. Even the Scholarly version of the AI doesn't know what I'm talking about, so perhaps my memory is wrong -- more and more often it is not reliable -- but I would happily credit the original source if any of you remember it. I don't know if DanielUSMC happens to be around, but I think I remember discussing it with him long ago; or perhaps Joel Leggett remembers it. Or, as may be more likely, perhaps those old memories are in error.