Well this here is where you run into a technical difficulty…
Human nature is unknown to us in all of its complexity. The nature vs nurture debate rages as strong as ever…
As a consequence the actual “minimum” of harm realistically possible is an unknown.
So the question becomes, IF reaching a state of zero harm should turn out to be impossible, or only possibly in an undesirable circumstance, can violence ever be used to “minimise” the level of harm we DO suffer?
I would argue, that’s unquestionably true.
If a serial killer is in the process of trying to murder someone and you happen to find yourself witnessing this then the use of violence to stop it is not only permissible but I would say admirable
If a bully is beating the daylights out of a kid half his size in the schoolyard… when the next door neighbor gets drunk and takes his anger out on his 6 year old kid… the list goes on.
So it’s clear that violence can be used to mitigate harm… harm can mitigate harm.
All it takes now is for us to imagine that receiving a beating for a suitably severe transgression might discourage someone from committing such a transgression again in the future.
How many more times this person would have transgressed without the beating is an unknown, one might argue, and that’s technically true.
But a further mitigating factor one might imagine is the knowledge it produces in others…
if you watched someone who received such a beating, YOU might very well be dissuaded from such an act…
It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to envision how instances of violence or even retribution could in sum total minimise the harm suffered.
There was a reason that people in ancient times invested so much creative thought into prolonged and public methods of torture and execution.
This was in a place and time without security cameras, fingerprints, or any modern forensic equipment.
It was vitally important to them that while the risk of getting caught was infinitesimal… the price was so extreme as to be dissuasive.
Certainly a starving man would still steal no matter what the price, out of desperation and necessity…
But middle class teenagers, unlike today, would not casually take up shoplifting as a form of rebellion or means of seeking attention…
Don’t get me wrong, I believe in a lot of cases it’s possible to mitigate harm in other more productive ways…
By no means is violence our only tool for mitigating harm… but to dismiss it totally as though ineffective or obsolete seems premature.
What someone “deserves” would be an estimation of an appropriate, or suitable response to their actions.
What all people consider appropriate or suitable tends to shift with our culture and the prevailing conventional wisdom…
I tend to believe how people arrive at “deserve” is they inject themselves into the shoes of the parties they can relate to and then measure their own response.
Hence why psychopaths and sadists who regular people cannot relate to at all, seem truly evil and to be deserving of limitless horrors… or hell one might say.
Mind you, this is an observation I’m making
I don’t believe anyone “deserves” anything in an objective way… it refers to a subjective or intersubjective assessment and as a consequence is prone to change and negotiation.
Something that needs to be taken into account in any ethical discussion is what can realistically be expected of human beings, so as to propose a conduct that’s not only possible, but comfortable on a larger scale.
Otherwise the imposition and repression necessary would counter any good it purports to achieve.
Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that people may never be able to forgive certain transgressions… they may never be able to reconcile. Admonishing them to act like they can may not be the most healthy solution.