Then what’s the question?

I’ve been seeing a lot of people responding to the attacks in Paris with a similar response: Revenge is not the answer.

I’m sure that idea feels good and makes people feel all morally superior. But is that really the superior stance to take? Will it really stop the killing?

The reality of ISIS is that they will keep on killing until they either run out of infidels to kill or someone stops them. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not volunteering to die so that ISIS runs out of victims. But if revenge is not the answer, then that’s the only option. Or do people seriously imagine a point where ISIS will lose interest and be ready to settle down, plant crops, make babies, and give up the power rush they get by destroying everything around them, if only we can be patient and wait for their bloodlust to be sated? If you believe that, are you willing to offer yourself up toward that quota?

ISIS will not be stopped by patience. It will only be stopped by everyone else making it too painful for them to continue. But…that would mean taking revenge, and that is evidently double-unplus-bad.

There’s one small problem with that stance. It means that whomever resorts to violence first wins. Once someone steps forward and draws first blood, any subsequent and opposite reaction is “revenge”, and therefore verboten. Boom. Aggressor wins with one punch.

Or are they merely implying that there should be a response, but not from people who were wronged? So in order to stop the aggressor, someone else who was not harmed has to be willing to step forward and put them down? I suppose that would work, since revenge is not the answer, and the first aggressor shouldn’t take revenge against the second aggressor not getting revenge on behalf of the first victim.

Or not. Such convolutions of logic make my head hurt just trying to think them.

It’s true that in certain cases revenge is not the answer. If someone cuts me off in traffic I shouldn’t pull out my Glock and start shooting at their car. If a fast food clerk gets my order wrong I’m not justified in seeking the heads of their family for the next five generations. I shouldn’t go blow up the house of the manager who laid me off.

But if a group like ISIS kills people and shows no indications that they’re going to stop killing people, call it revenge if you want, but the moral high ground is actually in doing whatever it takes to stop them from wanting to kill any more people. Other people’s lives to not belong to them. They have no business taking lives, and it is moral to stop them.

But we’ve been doing things to them that made them this way, you say? Huh. So why is revenge bad for us, but not for them? Are you implying they incapable of moral behavior or should be held to a different standard? If our “revenge is evil” stance is so morally superior, we should be holding everyone to that standard, not allowing a lower standard for anyone who can’t or won’t live up to it. And if enforcing that standard requires violence, then would that violence be merely upholding the morally superior standard rather than revenge?

So perhaps people are right, and revenge is not the answer. But in the case of ISIS and others of their ilk, violence in sufficient quantities to disincentivize the violence they display is not revenge, it’s the moral response. It’s messy, and it means others might be killed along the way, but it is a moral imperative to not allow those who refuse to live peacefully to prey upon and win out over those who desire to do so.

“But what about Ghandi?”, people will say. What about him? Ghandi was fortunate enough to be matched against the British who, in spite of what people like to think these days, were among the most moral people in the world at that time–moral enough to find it distasteful to beat up and imprison people who just sat there, doing nothing to resist. Do we for one moment believe that ISIS would respond the same way? No, ISIS has already shown that, when given power over people who are unable to resist, they are quite happy to butcher them en masse–or worse. This is not a people you can stop by appealing to their humanity. This is a people you can only stop by appealing to their self-interest.

“But the fighters of ISIS believe that dying in their cause is an intrinsic good,” you’ll say. True. That makes them especially difficult to stop. They are convinced of the superiority of their cause and the certainty of their reward. If we are incapable of summoning an equal or greater measure of certainty in our own morality and cause we will not prevail, and our only real choices as a people are to either join them in their depravity or to die.

Revenge may not be the answer, but a moral defense of all we hold dear, even to the point of violence, is. If we’re not certain enough in the superiority of our cause to stand against them in theirs we need to rethink our cause rather than hide behind weak platitudes that allow us to avoid the hard decisions while maintaining our moral smugness. Insisting “Hey, I was against revenge,” will probably not deter an ISIS terrorist if he’s got you in his sights. It’ll likely just give him something to laugh about as he hacks off your head.

No, revenge–blind, furious violence that goes beyond deterrence–is probably not the answer. But violence–rational, deliberate and as moral as possible–may very well be. By all means we should try lesser methods, but if we are unprepared with an adequate response if those measures fail we are providing no incentives for peace.