As usual, this week’s question comes from Gregory Stock’s The Book of Questions: If someone you loved was brutally murdered and their killer was acquitted on a technicality, would you seek revenge?

I’ll be honest—when I first read this question, my immediate gut reaction was something along the lines of “Heck yes, I’d make sure justice was served one way or another.” There’s something viscerally satisfying about imagining yourself as the protagonist in a revenge thriller, methodically hunting down the person who destroyed your world while the credits roll to a perfectly curated soundtrack of righteous fury.

But then I actually thought about it for more than thirty seconds, and reality came crashing down like a bucket of ice water on my vigilante fantasies. Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: I’m not John Wick. I don’t think I have it in me to seek revenge. Not the real kind, anyway—not the “eye for an eye” variety that turns ordinary people into killers and transforms personal tragedy into a cycle of violence that destroys everyone it touches.

Don’t mistake this for some noble moral stance or evidence of my evolved spiritual consciousness. It’s not that I’m above wanting revenge—it’s that I’m probably too much of a coward to actually pursue it, too aware of my own limitations to believe I could pull it off, and too cynical about human nature to trust that my quest for justice wouldn’t just create more injustice in the end.

So let me surprise myself by admitting that no, I wouldn’t seek revenge. But that doesn’t mean I’d just shrug and move on with my life, because the alternative to vigilante justice isn’t passive acceptance—it’s finding other ways to fight back against a system that failed when you needed it most.

The Seductive Logic of Personal Justice

Let’s start by acknowledging why revenge feels so appealing in the first place. When someone you love is murdered and their killer walks free due to some legal technicality—contaminated evidence, procedural errors, prosecutorial misconduct—it feels like the universe itself has malfunctioned. The basic social contract that promises consequences for actions has been shredded, leaving you with nothing but grief, rage, and the maddening knowledge that justice will never come through official channels.

In that moment, the logic of personal revenge becomes almost irresistible. If the system won’t deliver justice, why shouldn’t you? If the law has failed to protect your loved one and punish their killer, what moral authority does it have to prevent you from taking matters into your own hands? When institutional justice fails, personal justice starts to feel not just justified but morally imperative.

This logic is reinforced by virtually every revenge narrative in popular culture, from Death Wish to John Wick to countless true crime documentaries that implicitly celebrate families who refuse to accept unsatisfying legal outcomes. We’re culturally conditioned to see revenge as a valid response to systemic failure, a way of restoring moral balance when official channels have proven inadequate.

But there’s a difference between the clean, satisfying revenge of Hollywood fiction and the messy, destructive reality of actual vigilante justice. In the movies, revenge plots always work out exactly as planned, with surgical precision and minimal collateral damage. In real life, they tend to create more problems than they solve, turning victims into perpetrators and ensuring that more people get hurt in the process.

The Institutional Failure Problem

Part of what makes this question so difficult is that it forces us to confront just how often our justice system actually fails. We’d like to believe that acquittals on technicalities are rare exceptions, unfortunate but necessary byproducts of a system designed to protect the innocent. But anyone who’s paid attention to high-profile criminal cases knows that the system fails with depressing regularity—sometimes due to incompetence, sometimes due to corruption, and sometimes due to structural problems that prioritize procedure over justice.

Take the O.J. Simpson case, perhaps the most famous example of a brutal double murder followed by an acquittal that left most people convinced that justice had not been served. The criminal trial became a circus of prosecutorial bungling, evidence contamination, and racial tensions that overshadowed the actual question of guilt or innocence. When the jury delivered its not-guilty verdict, it felt to many observers like a complete system failure—a case where legal technicalities and procedural errors had prevented obvious justice from being served.

But here’s what’s interesting about the Simpson case: the families of the victims didn’t resort to vigilante violence. Instead, they pursued alternative legal channels, filing a civil lawsuit that ultimately held Simpson liable for the wrongful deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. They couldn’t put him in prison, but they could hold him financially accountable and establish a legal record of his responsibility for the murders.

This approach—pursuing alternative forms of accountability when criminal justice fails—represents a middle ground between passive acceptance and violent revenge. It acknowledges that the system failed while still working within legal boundaries to achieve some form of justice.

The Psychology of Grief and Rage

What complicates this entire discussion is the psychological reality of what it feels like to lose someone you love to violence. Grief doesn’t follow rational patterns or respect moral boundaries. When someone you care about is murdered, the combination of overwhelming loss and burning rage can make revenge feel not just justified but necessary for your own psychological survival.

The desire for revenge in these circumstances isn’t really about abstract moral principles—it’s about the desperate need to do something, anything, that feels proportional to the magnitude of your loss. When someone has taken everything from you, the idea of letting them continue living their life unpunished feels like a form of ongoing torture. Revenge offers the promise of resolution, a way to finally balance the scales and find some kind of peace.

But here’s the thing about revenge psychology: it’s based on a fundamental illusion about how satisfaction actually works. We imagine that hurting the person who hurt us will provide closure, that violent justice will heal the wound they created. But research on revenge suggests that people who actually pursue it often find it less satisfying than they expected. Instead of bringing peace, it tends to keep the wound fresh, maintaining the connection to the person who hurt you and preventing the kind of psychological healing that comes from letting go.

This doesn’t mean the desire for revenge is wrong or pathological—it’s a completely understandable human response to devastating loss. But it does suggest that acting on that desire might not actually provide the relief and resolution that it promises.

The Slippery Slope of Vigilante Justice

Even if we accept that revenge might be psychologically understandable and even morally justified in extreme cases, there’s still the practical question of where it leads. Once we decide that individuals have the right to pursue violent justice when institutional justice fails, we’ve opened a door that’s very difficult to close.

The problem is that everyone thinks their case is the exception, their grievance is the one that justifies taking the law into their own hands. The person whose loved one was killed by a drunk driver who got off on a technicality feels their rage is just as valid as the person whose family member was murdered by someone who was acquitted due to police misconduct. Pretty soon, you have a society where anyone who feels wronged by the justice system considers themselves authorized to pursue violent remedies.

This isn’t just a theoretical concern—we can see it playing out in real time in communities where trust in law enforcement has completely broken down. When people don’t believe the system will protect them or deliver justice, they start taking matters into their own hands, and the result is usually more violence, not less. Vigilante justice tends to escalate rather than resolve conflicts, creating cycles of retaliation that destroy communities and claim more innocent victims.

The other problem with vigilante revenge is that it assumes perfect knowledge about guilt and innocence that even the formal justice system struggles to achieve. Yes, sometimes killers are acquitted on technicalities despite overwhelming evidence of their guilt. But sometimes those technicalities exist for good reasons—to prevent false convictions, to ensure due process, to protect the rights of people who might actually be innocent despite appearances.

When you decide to pursue personal revenge, you’re essentially declaring yourself judge, jury, and executioner based on your own interpretation of the evidence. That’s a level of moral certainty that most of us probably shouldn’t trust ourselves to possess, especially when we’re operating under the influence of grief and rage.

The Alternative Channels Option

This brings us back to the question of what you do when criminal justice fails but vigilante violence isn’t an acceptable option. The Simpson case suggests one answer: pursue alternative legal channels that might not result in prison time but can still establish accountability and provide some form of justice.

Civil lawsuits operate under different standards of evidence than criminal trials—they require proof by a preponderance of the evidence rather than beyond a reasonable doubt. This means that cases where criminal conviction fails due to procedural issues or high evidence standards might still result in civil liability. It’s not perfect justice, but it’s something—a way to hold wrongdoers accountable and potentially prevent them from harming others.

Public accountability campaigns represent another option. In an age of social media and viral information sharing, it’s possible to ensure that people face social consequences even when they escape legal ones. This isn’t without risks—we’ve all seen how online mob justice can spiral out of control and target innocent people. But when used carefully and responsibly, public pressure can serve as a form of accountability that complements rather than replaces formal legal processes.

There’s also the option of working to reform the system that failed you. Many families who’ve experienced injustice channel their grief and anger into advocacy work, pushing for changes in laws, procedures, or policies that might prevent similar failures in the future. This approach doesn’t provide immediate satisfaction, but it offers a way to transform personal tragedy into broader social good.

The Corruption Problem

One of the reasons I find myself skeptical of both vigilante justice and institutional justice is my general cynicism about power and corruption. People in positions of authority—whether they’re judges, prosecutors, police officers, or politicians—seem almost universally unable to resist the temptation to abuse that authority for personal gain. This isn’t unique to the justice system, but it’s particularly corrosive when it affects institutions that are supposed to be dedicated to fairness and accountability.

When prosecutors drop cases because they’re politically inconvenient, when police plant evidence to ensure convictions, when judges make decisions based on personal relationships rather than legal merit, they’re not just failing individual victims—they’re undermining the entire foundation of social order that prevents us from descending into cycles of personal revenge.

But here’s the paradox: the corruption and incompetence that makes institutional justice unreliable also makes vigilante justice more dangerous. If you can’t trust the system to investigate crimes properly, gather evidence competently, and weigh guilt and innocence fairly, why would you trust your own ability to do these things better? If professional prosecutors with unlimited resources and investigative powers can get it wrong, what makes you think your personal quest for revenge will be more accurate or more just?

The Moral Courage Question

I suspect that part of my reluctance to embrace revenge isn’t high-minded moral principle but simple cowardice. It’s easy to fantasize about tracking down your loved one’s killer and delivering the justice that the system failed to provide, but the reality of actually committing violence—even justified violence—is something most of us are psychologically unprepared for.

There’s a reason that successful revenge stories are mostly fiction. Actually killing someone, even someone who deserves it, is traumatic in ways that permanently change you. It requires a kind of moral courage that most people don’t possess, and even those who do possess it often find that exercising it comes at a psychological cost that makes the victory feel hollow.

This isn’t necessarily a criticism of revenge—maybe moral courage is exactly what’s required in situations where institutional justice fails. Maybe the problem isn’t that people seek revenge but that too few of us have the stomach to pursue the justice that the system won’t provide. Maybe my reluctance to embrace vigilante justice says more about my own limitations than about the moral validity of personal revenge.

But I’m not convinced that moral courage always requires violent action. Sometimes it takes more courage to resist the urge for revenge, to find non-violent ways of holding wrongdoers accountable, to work within broken systems to make them less broken rather than abandoning them altogether.

Living with Imperfect Justice

The hardest part about rejecting revenge isn’t the moral complexity—it’s accepting that sometimes there simply won’t be justice in any satisfying form. Sometimes killers will walk free, victims will never get the closure they deserve, and the people responsible for horrific crimes will continue living their lives without facing adequate consequences.

This is perhaps the most difficult truth about living in a world with imperfect institutions and flawed human beings: sometimes bad people win, good people suffer, and there’s nothing you can do about it that won’t make things worse. Sometimes the best you can do is focus on healing yourself and protecting others rather than pursuing the satisfaction of seeing wrongdoers punished.

That doesn’t mean accepting injustice passively—it means channeling your response to injustice in ways that create more good than harm. It means supporting reforms that might prevent similar failures in the future. It means holding wrongdoers accountable through civil courts when criminal courts fail. It means using public pressure and social consequences to ensure that people face some form of accountability even when they escape legal punishment.

Most importantly, it means recognizing that your own healing and peace don’t actually depend on seeing your loved one’s killer punished. As satisfying as revenge might feel in theory, the research suggests that people who pursue it often find it less healing than they expected. The path to psychological recovery usually involves letting go of the need for vengeance rather than satisfying it.

The Bottom Line

Would I seek revenge if someone I loved was brutally murdered and their killer was acquitted on a technicality? Honestly, no—I don’t think I have it in me. Not because I’m morally superior to people who do seek revenge, but because I’m probably too cowardly to follow through and too cynical to believe it would actually make things better.

But that doesn’t mean I’d just accept the injustice and move on. I’d pursue civil remedies if they were available. I’d work to ensure that the killer faced social and professional consequences for their actions. I’d probably become one of those annoying advocates pushing for systemic reforms to prevent similar failures in the future.

What I wouldn’t do is take the law into my own hands, because I don’t trust my own judgment enough to believe I could deliver better justice than the flawed system that failed me. And because I think the cure of vigilante violence is usually worse than the disease of imperfect institutional justice.

Maybe that makes me a coward, or maybe it makes me realistic about human limitations and the unintended consequences of violence. Probably both.

The real tragedy isn’t just that killers sometimes escape justice—it’s that we live in a world where these impossible choices exist at all, where love and loss and the failure of institutions can drive good people to contemplate becoming the very thing they despise.

What do you think? Would you seek revenge if the justice system failed someone you loved? Where’s the line between acceptable accountability and dangerous vigilantism? And how do we live with the reality that sometimes there simply won’t be justice in any form that feels adequate? Share your thoughts in the comments—because as our institutions continue to fail us in various ways, these aren’t just philosophical questions anymore.