The Case Against Revenge

Recently, I watched Sleepers, that late‑1990s film about four boys whose lives are shattered after a reckless childhood prank delivers them into the hands of a juvenile detention system that mistakes cruelty for discipline. What follows is not punishment in any meaningful moral sense, but a sustained regime of degradation — a choreography of violence enacted by the very adults entrusted with their care. The boys leave the institution, but the institution never leaves them. Decades later, two of them, now men shaped by hardness rather than healing, encounter one of their former abusers in a pub. Recognition flickers, memory ignites, and they kill him.

The film left me with a question that refuses to settle: To what extent is one ever permitted to kill? Where does moral outrage end and moral transgression begin? Sleepers feels like a contemporary echo of the old revenge myth — a stripped‑down, unromantic Count of Monte Cristo refracted through the stark realism of American life. It asks whether vengeance can ever be clean, whether retribution can ever restore what was broken, and whether the desire to right a past wrong inevitably reshapes the victim into something unrecognizable.

My own conviction has long been steady: Taking an already existing life isn’t ethically justified except in the narrow realms of unavoidable self‑defence, mercy, or survival. For example, I believe it is fundamentally wrong to eat animals — and yet, if a single chicken stood between me and the end of my own existence, I would eat it. Survival does not erase the moral tension, but it does define the boundary of necessity.

This same conviction is why I have always opposed the death penalty in any form. The idea that the state — or any individual — could claim the right to end a human life as punishment strikes me as a moral line that, once crossed, cannot be uncrossed. To kill in the name of justice is to corrupt justice at its core, to turn the very concept of moral order into an instrument of irreversible harm.

But holding such a view comes with a price. Believing that no one should ever be killed outside those narrow exceptions demands a difficult kind of moral stamina. It requires learning to carry past harms lightly — or at least without allowing them to calcify into vengeance. It means accepting that the systems meant to protect us will often fail, and that the people who caused the harm will walk freely through the world. Sometimes, evidence is insufficient. Sometimes, perpetrators vanish into anonymity. Sometimes, the law is more humane than it should be. And yet, this is the cost of refusing to cross that irreversible line: the cost of insisting that justice must remain justice, even when it is imperfect.

This discipline of restraint becomes visceral when confronted with suffering as raw as the boys’ in Sleepers. Watching the film, I felt an immense sorrow for them — a sorrow that sits heavy in the chest. It is unbearable to think that children endured brutal rape and beatings, and that the adults responsible for their safety became the architects of their suffering. And yet, alongside that sorrow, I felt a quieter, more unsettling compassion for the guards as well — a grim curiosity about the kind of inner void a person must carry to inflict such cruelty on children. What produces a human being capable of that? What sadness, insecurity, or moral collapse makes such violence possible?

I do not see the world divided into the mentally healthy and the mentally sick — those labels are too sharp for something so fluid. We all move along a shifting spectrum, drifting toward steadiness, drifting away from it, returning again. No one stands permanently at either pole. What troubles me is how quickly we reach for the word unstable, as if naming someone that way could spare us from the deeper, more complicated truth of who they are and what they’re carrying. It becomes a shortcut, a way to flatten an entire inner landscape into a single, convenient explanation. But people are never that simple. Our minds are not tidy rooms; they are weather systems — changing, layered, full of reasons.

This is a conflicted compassion toward cruelty: an attempt to understand the void without denying the wound, a search for the human truth inside the inhuman act. It asks not for absolution, but for clarity. I have come to believe that this is the only way to build a better world — by showing that we are capable of understanding the non‑understandable. Because if we cannot imagine the sadness that gives rise to cruelty, we will never learn how to stop cruelty at its source. And so this difficult compassion becomes a discipline — a choice to insist that understanding, even when uncomfortable, is a moral act.

And that is why I am convinced that the two men in the film should not have killed their perpetrator. Their suffering was immense; I do not trivialize it. But learning to carry pain lightly is the only way to live with oneself. Not by forgetting, not by pretending the harm never happened, and not by abandoning the forms of justice that remain available. No — the discipline lies in refusing to let memory harden into vengeance. Because once anger becomes a compass, it points only toward more destruction. And the moment we let it guide us, we lose the very part of ourselves that was trying to rise above the wound.

Yet, this is precisely where the philosophical debate sharpens. Some argue that refusing vengeance is itself a moral failure — that justice demands action when institutions collapse, that moral outrage is not only understandable but necessary. Others insist that violence in response to violence is simply the oldest human mistake, a repetition of the very harm one seeks to condemn. And still others claim that compassion for perpetrators is a luxury available only to those who have not suffered enough.

I do not claim to have the final answer. I only know that choosing to see the pain in those guards changes everything. It does not excuse their actions, and it should not. But it shifts the perspective in a way that makes living as a victim far less suffocating. When we allow ourselves to imagine the thoughts, feelings, and histories that make a person capable of harming children, the story becomes less about what they did and more about the bleakness of their own inner world. It turns the narrative from one of pure injury into one of human complexity. In that recognition, cruelty no longer defines the meaning of the story. It becomes a testament to how profoundly a person can fail their own humanity — and how much more possible it is to rise beyond such ruin.