Why courts drown in cases they have no way to measure
Picture two cases. In the first, someone's arm is broken. In the second, someone is called an insulting name. Both today easily fall under the same conversation about "aggression," "intolerance," "hate" — and both are sometimes handed to the same instrument: a court. The result is predictable. Either the court refuses to hear the insult case, and the offended party feels unheard, or it takes the case on, and the accused is punished for something no one can actually measure.
Behind this confusion lies a conflation of two things that the history of law once carefully separated but that public discourse has fused back together: violence and evil.
Violence: what can be measured
Violence is an external act that destroys another person's body or property. It has four properties that make it a fit subject for a court.
It is objective: a knocked-out eye is knocked out regardless of how either side interprets what happened. It is measurable: the harm can be assessed — in hours of lost work, cost of repair, size of a medical bill. From measurability follows compensability: since the harm can be assessed, a proportionate remedy can be assigned. And from measurability and compensability follows justiciability: there is a shared measure, so there is something for a judge to rule on.
Evil: what a court cannot measure
Evil is a different matter entirely. It is an inner state in which an act is experienced as offensive or destructive to the soul. Its properties are the mirror opposite.
It is not self-evident: unlike a broken bone, an insult is invisible from outside, and its content depends on the recipient — one person hears a joke where another hears an insult. It is immeasurable: there is no socially agreed unit for the severity of an offense. From this follows the impossibility of compensation in the same sense as with property: an apology can be offered, but it operates within a different system — a system of relationships, not a balance sheet. And from this follows non-justiciability: without a shared measure, there can be no shared judge.
None of this means evil does not matter or that nothing can be done about it. It means the remedies for it lie outside the courtroom: in conversation, upbringing, social disapproval, personal forgiveness, or simply the refusal to treat an insult as an insult.
"An eye for an eye" — a limit, not a licence for cruelty
The formula "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" is usually read as permission for equal revenge: your eye was struck out, so you may strike out the offender's eye. Read this way, the principle looks like a barbaric relic incompatible with civilized law.
But there is another, more precise reading — as a limit rather than a licence. A victim of violence feels not only physical harm but a rage that pushes toward revenge far exceeding the injury received. In the heat of the moment, a knocked-out eye makes one want to kill; a stolen cow makes one want to wipe out the thief's whole clan. Left unchecked, revenge escalates without end, generating an endless chain of blood feud.
Talion halts this escalation from above: you are entitled to this much compensation, and no more. An eye for an eye, not a life for an eye. But it also sets a floor: the victim is not obligated to forgive — they are entitled to demand full compensation, no less than the harm suffered. This is not revenge; it is the restoration of an order that could not hold together without it.
Crucially, talion applies only in matters of violence. For matters of evil, the same body of texts gives a different rule — turn the other cheek — and it does not contradict the first; it simply applies in a different domain, where, in the absence of a shared measure, the only way to keep a conflict from escalating is to refuse to treat the offense as an offense.
Who has the standing to use force
The principle of proportionate compensation carries a less obvious implication about where the right to use force actually comes from. The right to demand compensation belongs to the person harmed — not to their clan, their party, or the state as such. If my cow is stolen, the right to demand it back is mine.
That right can be delegated to an agent — a judge, an arbitrator, the police, an insurance company — but delegation does not erase its origin: I remain the holder of the right, and the agent acts on my behalf. This gives a simple test for telling legitimate force from mere power: the use of force is legitimate when it executes a right delegated by the person harmed, and illegitimate when it originates in the actor's own decision, with no chain leading back to an actual victim. A police officer and an armed robber can look identical from outside; structurally, they are opposites.
Why courts need their old subject back
This yields a practical conclusion for the present day: law works where harm is measurable, and stops working the moment it is stretched to cover hurt feelings. Attempts to extend the courtroom into the domain of evil — laws against insult, against "hate speech" in its broadest sense — repeatedly produce one of three outcomes: either the court applies the measure arbitrarily, at its own discretion, becoming a political instrument; or it does not apply at all; or it applies selectively, to some parties and not others. In all three cases, the authority of the court declines.
Returning the court to its own proper subject is not an ideological stance. It is the condition for law to remain law, rather than an arena for settling disputes that, by their nature, have no shared measure.