Is there a word for something done to you because you did it to someone else?

I was wondering because when coming across videos about people who went to jail for abuse and murder, comments will say they should have to go through the same thing they inflicted on the other person. Even with the death penalty being a thing, the torture penalty sounds weird.

Solution 1:

Another instance being the, almost petty, expression 'tit-for-tat'. This expression is defined, by Google, as a noun and means: the infliction of an injury or insult in return for one that one has suffered, i.e. "as we struggled for those last two votes, the tit for tat continued."

Also, tit-for-tat can be used in a sentence, e,g, "I noticed she didn't send me a card - I think it was tit for tat because I forgot her birthday last year" https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/tit-for-tat

There may be additional discussion as to whether one shoud write the hyphenated 'tit-for-tat' or simply tit for tat.

Solution 2:

Some might call it ...

Karma

The idea of karma originated in Indian religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, but is also used in the West to mean that good deeds will be rewarded with good results, with the opposite for bad deeds. This assumption is captured in the popular saying “What goes around comes around” and in the much older proverb “As you sow, so shall you reap.”

As noted in Psychology Today, Americans often say:

What goes around comes around.

Both suggest a type of philosophy that indicates an unavoidable retribution for wrong past deeds...

Comments are locked. These ideas are not exactly unique. It should not be necessary to post links and citations to such obvious ideas, but I did.. I will leave this up for a while, then maybe delete and vote to close for SWR issues.