Eye for an Eye

by William Ian Miller

Book Overview

Analyzing the law of the talion--an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth--literally, William Ian Miller presents an original meditation on the concept of "pay back". Miller's unique theory of justice offers redemption via retaliation. It espouses the view that revenge is a highly structured phenomenon that requires a deep commitment to balance in order to get even in a strict but fair manner. As a result, we find that much of what is assumed to be justice,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521856809
• ISBN13: 9780521856805
• Release Date: December 2005
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 278 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

An Insightful Contrast of Approaches to Just Recompense

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.

An Unsurpassed Wealth of Insight about Justice.

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, t