Eye for an Eye

This is a daring book, it challenges the status quo.It offers insight on the game-theory behind the current disaster in which there is NO SUCH THING as an OPEN and SHUT CASE. For example Brian Nichols, the defenders were able to get more than a million dollars of state-funds to defend him, when due to the shootings being accomplished with the gun he stole from his jailer, this WAS an open-and-shut-case if there ever was one.SO this book, plus "The Forever War", in which the author describes that at least under the Taliban there WILL be payback, between these two books you see why foreigners looking for a justice system, they read about the trial of Brian Nichols, and they say no we can't afford a system lacking efficient processing of the open-and-shut-case, "An Eye for an Eye".

Quite an eye opener. Haha. There were parts of the book I had trouble following but the information is very interesting. Opened up my eyes to difference between honour cultures vs guilt cultures and shed light on why we as westerners do not understand MIddle Eastern cultures that are based on honour cultures. We aren't even speaking the same culture language and that's why there isn't any productive communication going on.

A gem. I love it, my high school aged kids love it, and anyone who hears what the book's about is intrigued. Revenge comes to life as a rational, well-ordered system of justice and incentives, of bargaining in the shadow of disaster. Miller's books are always insightful and entertaining, but (along with "Disgust") this one is my favorite.

After five dazzling books each penned - in its own way - at the outlands of the vast intellectual map he is master of - William Ian Miller now gives us Eye for an Eye - a supercharged book fixed inexorably, brilliantly and meticulously at the core of his unrivaled expertise on revenge cultures; a book which explicates with extraordinary sensitivity, precision, even delicacy Miller's tough-minded sensibility about justice. In his preface Miller calls his book "an anti-theory of justice." The appellation is less a description of his own work than a concise critique (so very concise, indeed, as to be a flat dismissal) of the abstract theories of justice that have dominated the academy in the past century and have made scholarly writings about justice irrelevant to 99.99% of the world. Yet Miller's book is a theory of justice - one which insists that justice is about righting the balance, achieving reciprocity and cultivating a willingness to bear the not inconsiderable costs of getting even. Miller explores and explains the nuances of balance in its relation to wrongdoing and he argues convincingly that revenge - to be worthy of the name - must be finely tuned, skillfully measured, and meted out with intelligence (not to mention style). Miller demonstrates the admirable sophistication of revenge cultures. He shows us both how vengeance within such cultures was not indiscriminate, unbridled violence and that much intellectual agility and practical reasonableness went into getting it right when getting even.Eye for an Eye is also a theory of the body and the body in its relation to justice. We may call it an "anti-theory" here too, since to do so will imply an equally flat dismissal of the generation of academics whose cooler-than-thou theorizing about "the body" has successfully bullied us into to thinking about "the body" as a brainy idea - too feeble, however, to stray too far from its intellectual bolsters like "culturally constructed" "articulated" or "inscribed upon." Miller's theory of the body never lets us forget all that we already know only too well about eyes, teeth, arms, legs, hands, fingers, feet, toes and toenails. (Anyone who has lost a big toenail or broken their pinky will identify acutely with Miller's discussion of the value of these parts.) Miller proves that bodies can and have paradoxically done double duty both as the nuclei of human dignity and as more or less valuable currency in economies of getting even. Bodies and body parts are money, both as measures of value and sometimes also as means of payment.The crucial - and genuinely earth shattering - insight of this book and the core of Miller's theory of justice is that the lex talionis - the law of an eye for an eye - facilitates rather than ruling out what we see as the more "civilized" processes of negotiation and compensation. He makes a fascinating and compelling argument that - in the language of Calabresi and Melamed - the lex talionis protects our eyes, teeth, and the like with "property rules" not "liability rules." This means that the victim not the wrongdoer, and not a third party, decides how much the wrongdoer must pay for putting his eye out. If the wrongdoer balks at the victim's price - very well. But the credible threat of a return brooch in the eye might just (as we would say) bring the wrongdoer back to the table. Miller masterfully show us that eyes, teeth and lives have greater value in such a regime; and it is in our own culture - not in the revenge cultures that we look down on as barbaric - that life is cheap.Miller's discussions of the scales of justice, the subtlety of discourse particles like "just" and "even," circumcision, cannibalism, accountants, Shylock and The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, compensation and commensurability, and the significance of the seating arrangements at Viking feasts are among the many virtuoso performances in this book that are not to be missed.

This was a fascinating book presenting a a far different, and more interesting, take on the meaning of justice than most people would form for themselves. Writing about various ages, from Mesopotamia to honour societies, from ancient practices to the formation of the modern court system, Miller presents modern justice as merely a codification of the concept of 'an eye for an eye'.Referencing sources both modern and ancient, including the Bible, the Torah, Shakespeare and Harvard Law Reviews, Miller makes his point thoroughly and often. My main gripe with this book (and the one thing that prevented me from completing it) is that it tended to become quite repetitive - I feel it could have been quite a bit shorter. Having said that, the author makes some good points and this book is worth reading.

William Ian Miller pinpoints the key difficulty in dealing with compensation for bodily loss: the market price of the lost part cannot match the value of its former contribution to the unmolested organism. Lex talionis affords a solution to this disparity by enabling the victim to opt for incurring a reciprocal loss in lieu of accepting monetary compensation offered by the party responsible for his injury. The ensuing threat of losing a valuable organ inspires the perpetrator to raise his offer to the level implicit in its ownership.