There's this recurring argument in certain circles and especially on tumblr that posing a risk to someone actively victimizing you in some way is always unacceptable, but particularly if it's 'disproportionate.' If someone breaks into your house and gets shot, that's disproportionate because they 'probably' weren't going to physically injure you (worse if they weren't themselves armed with a firearm, how dare you engage in an 'unfair' fight). If a mugger gets killed because their victim fights back that's disproportionate because how dare you value someone's life over the contents of your wallet. If a woman stabs her would-be rapist and he bleeds to death that's disproportionate because 'rape lasts a few minutes, death is permanent.' If someone's harassing you by smashing your mailbox and wrecks their own arm after you reinforce it that's disproportionate because hey, it's not like they broke your arm, just your possessions.
And I feel like an alien every time I encounter this sort of thing, because it's so antithetical to any kind of logic or self-consistent ethical framework I can wrap my brain around. It's taking the genuine virtues of mercy and valuing human life and blowing them out of proportion into grotesque parodies of themselves. The victim here is not the one responsible for the ultimate outcome.
Does that mean that we should approach everything with infinite escalation forever? Hell no! But that doesn't change that almost all 'disproportionate' escalation the victim performs is dwarfed by the act of trying to harm an innocent victim in the first place! If I take the 'total violence' of a situation from a 1 to a 3, I've tripled it, but if I take a previously non-violent situation and amp it up from 0.00000000001 to 1, I've scaled it by an insane degree that makes that factor of three look minuscule despite technically being a lesser net increase.
And it's never even applied consistently! The victim has agency and is responsible for their role in escalating things, but the aggressor isn't held to the same standard. They're infantilized, they're treated like an automaton, the damage they do is treated like a foregone conclusion when the entire situation could have been avoided by them simply not going out of their way to hurt someone else. Is the victim's choice to react when backed into a corner somehow less predictable than the attacker's choice to harm someone unprovoked?
It's like that old line from Lewis about the errors coming in complimentary pairs to keep you bickering about which one is worse and so slowly nudge you towards the other. Yes, vengefulness and mercilessness are the enemies of justice and goodness, as are callousness and indulgence.
