Justice vs. Vengeance — Is There a Difference?

Nietzsche and Girard on the nature of justice

We tend to think of justice as a noble ideal we should strive for and vengeance as a small negative pettiness driven by the darker angels of our nature. But when we drill down on the mechanisms of justice a different image emerges. As the French philosopher and anthropologist René Girard has put it:

"public vengeance is the exclusive property of well-pol…