You can make all these arguments in a court. I'm saying he should face the court. That was assault. It doesn't matter if you think it was justified. Tell the court that.
Discussion
Why a court? Does a court have more of a right to enact retribution than the father of the kid? If the court doesn't have the right to enact retribution either, why should he face a court at all in the first place? I don't want to make these arguments in court, I want to understand exactly hwrte youre coming from because right now I just don't see a coherent moral framework here.
And I have a side question, why should I face a court just because I agree with the guy? Why shouldn't I, say, sit on the jury?
A jury is supposed to be randomly selected. There's a chance you would sit on the jury, or someone who agrees with you.
It has to be a court because a society where people do violence when they feel like it is just a violent society, or more like a warlord situation. That exists in plenty of places - you can pick from Somalia (great name for wines), or Afghanistan (taliban gasolina, best gasolina), South Sudan, parts of Central America... You have options.
Well, the discussion seems to have petered out. I just want to recognize the fact that no one called each other names (unless batman counts, my bad), and I like that. Thanks for that.
Batman and buffoon lol but I also called myself a buffoon.
Yeah I dunno. You don't want it to be acceptable to just hurt people. But there's a difference between just hurting people and hurting people justly in response to wrongdoing. I view negligence as wrongdoing.
I think justice is defined as making things right, and that sometimes that involves retaliation. And on that front, justice to me is measured and reasoned retaliation, and not defined by who perpetrates it. A jury of your peers is a lynch mob. It's no better than the person wronged retaliating, except that the person wronged knows with 100% certainty that you wronged them.
There is a subset of people in this world that would harm you if they knew you wouldn't retaliate. I agree with you that those people need to be removed from the environment. I disagree with you that caging them is the way to do that. But you can't get them all, and so sometimes they harm people, and they must fear consequences for that.