An eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth would lead to a world of the blind and toothless.

That's one of your best. Good work 👍

That maxim is usually misrepresented. The point was to limit retaliation so that a brawl wouldn't escalate to a full-blown blood feud depopulating whole villages.

@Fast-Nop The approach actually works very well outside of that.

It’s quite literally the application of the ‘golden rule’:
> “treat others the way you want to be treated.”

@Fast-Nop Indeed. Though humans being human, when harm comes to your kin, regardless of cause, you tend to want to retaliate. So a life for a life is never really a life for a life — those that lost a loved one do not heal from the mere death of their loved one’s murderer and the loved ones of the killer do not generally go on, harboring no ill will or resentment. As much as we try to see other people as being either good or bad, we are, all of us, shades of gray, with the capacity to be either, or both, or neither.