Logiche follie. Sacrifici umani e illusioni della giustizia

«He made a mistake, he has to pay», «if I sacrifice something, in return...»: there is a reasonable madness in the human being who accounts for justice, earthly and otherwise. And this has always happened. Both human sacrifice and the scapegoat, of which the first represents a sort of extreme exasperation, constitute authentic "anthropological follies" which nevertheless reveal, as often happens when one is confronted with the deepest and most extreme aspects of human experience, their irreducible reasonableness. But if vengeance or balance is followed in judging, where does one arrive? In order to try to understand the meaning of such follies, it is necessary to go back to the primacy of the economics which is at the origin of the sacrificial drive, which not by chance has always contaminated religious experiences and the practices of justice. And it did so by dressing up in appearances, often respectable and captivating, different in its attires , but always the same in making use of punitive "logical follies" for a perennial exercise of self-deception. Does increasing the severity of punishment really decrease the crime? Can sacrificing one life in exchange for another be reasonable? Yet mirroring itself in the shadow of its prisons and its penalties, legal or social, every era can win a hope of truth. Even if only that of the grimace on the face that withdraws from the light, to quote Franz Kafka. An inspiring study by a philosopher-anthropologist and a jurist on the intricate intertwining of economics, religion and justice.