An Eye for an Eye or Drown the Book? Project:
An Examination of Revenge and Forgiveness
The "Eye for an Eye or Drown the Book?" project began when we read The Tempest, by William Shakespeare, and discussed examples of revenge and forgiveness therein. Our area of focus quickly expanded, though, from The Tempest to examples in history and modern day, such as the Dachau Reprisals in 1945 when American troops massacred SS guards after liberating Camp Dachau, and the case of Mary Johnson, who forgave her son's murderer, Oshea Israel, after he spent 12 years in prison. The project culminated when we created claims defining justice and determining whether revenge or forgiveness was better, and held a series of Socratic seminars, one per class on our teaching team, to put together all of our knowledge and findings. Coming up with a claim was probably the hardest part of this project. I worked with Matthieu Rada, and we basically had to have a two-person Socratic seminar just to come up with a claim. We finally decided on the claim, "Retribution, in the proper measure, is the only way to achieve justice; forgiveness merely comes to terms with a loss." This was after analyzing multiple cases to attempt to determine why people did what they did, and then coming up with basic definitions for pain and justice, before finally determining what revenge, or retribution, and forgiveness actually do from a human perspective. Only then could be create a claim defining whether revenge or forgiveness was better in any situation; our claim only defines which creates justice, not which is moral. (Since morals differ per person, it may be impossible to come up with a universal definition for morality.) That being said, I loved the challenge. This project involved a lot of discussion; not only did Matthieu and I have a discussion to create a claim, but the entire class had discussions around The Tempest, the Dachau reprisals, the case of Eva Kor, who forgave an SS doctor who experimented on her in a camp during WWII, the LA riots, and the case of Mary Johnson, and there was the final Socratic seminar. Since I love analyzing things, I absolutely loved the discussions.
The files below are all of work that done for the project. The upper left document is a notes document that my group used to compile evidence and write arguments before the Socratic Seminar. The upper right image depicts the notes from my discussion with Matthieu about our claim. The two bottom images are notes from our class discussions about the Dachau reprisals (left) and the LA riots (right).