Justice vs. Revenge--Ethan

If you’ve ever watched or read The Walking Dead , you’ll know that all of the
characters, especially Rick, constantly have to deal with deciding what the “morally correct” way to deal with an issue is. Being caught up with the show, I started to read the comic while waiting until February for the show to come back, and I realized how often Rick changes his view on how he should deal with other survivors. One thing that changes is his view of justice, and how that sometimes strays into something that’s more on the lines of revenge. Where I’m at right now, I would gladly say I agree with his sense of justice. He and I both believe that justice comes in the form of punishment for those who do something deserving of it, such as stealing, murder, and other crime. In a modern society, justice usually ranges from disciplinary action to help the person fix themselves for small issues, to prison for huge crimes such as murder. Without getting the law involved, justice dealt by an individual person to another individual person may seem justifiable to the person, but outside eyes might be a little more skeptical. An example of this would be if someone’s friend was at their house one time, and they stole something from their house, the value being besides the point. Already feeling betrayed, that person is likely to do something they would see as dealing justice. They may do this by going to their house and talking it out, or even simply stealing it back, which most

people would deem is fair. Or they may take it a step further, and maybe steal some of their stuff, or even make a mess and damage their house or property. Once they cross a certain line, they shift from bringing justice to the person who wronged them to getting revenge on them, which is fueled by more angry emotions and is less morally acceptable. In The Walking Dead comic, after someone Rick’s group found had killed two of their friends, everyone is outraged and Rick declares “You kill. You die.”(Issue 18) as a rule for killing any other fellow survivor. Of course he couldn’t say this without getting some form of objection from the others, but he believed that it was the right thing to do. The reason for this disagreement was that Rick was fueled by anger and hatred for the man’s actions, and he wanted to deal with that by hurting the person who hurt him and his friends. The people he was trying to protect bring up how I feel about it, which is that it is hypocritical to seek revenge on someone because it makes you no greater than them, even if YOU are convinced they deserve it, and it discredits your character. By definition, I think that both justice and revenge have relatively similar meaning, but different motivations. Both are methods of righting the wrongs done by other people by way of punishing them for their actions. However, justice is done to protect others or oneself by preventing someone from commiting more wrongs against others while thinking about the “greater good”, and people seek revenge with the idea of making other people suffer for harming them, which proves they are driven by the same evil emotions that cause people to do immoral acts in the first place, so they are on the same moral level. After Rick brings justice to a selfish, cheating and thieving murderer,

he lets him live and sums up that “He lives because we’re better than that, Better than him.”(Issue 126). Be better, bring justice, not revenge.