Terrorism and the ethics of war

Abstract

Although terrorism has been around for a long time, I, like most Americans, first began to take it seriously on the morning of September 11, 2001. On that day of stunned grief and horror, I, like others, was appalled at the death and destruction created by the attacks and worried about the possibility of more attacks. But from very early on, I also worried about what American leaders would do in response. At some level, I sensed that while all of us were condemning terrorism in the strongest moral terms, the temptation to commit or support comparable acts of violence is actually very great. Victims of wrongdoing often feel justified in doing what they would see as wrong if done by others. Although President Bush described the 9/11 terrorists as "flat evil," I suspected that they may have seen themselves as heroic soldiers fighting and dying for a good cause.1 One result of the 9/11 attacks has been that the belief that terrorism is morally wrong has become a kind of moral axiom within American public morality. The whole idea of a war on terrorism seems to rest on the belief that terrorism is always wrong and should be warred against. While I share the belief that terrorist acts are always wrong, I do not see it as axiomatic or self-evident. In fact, I believe that given many people's beliefs, it will be hard for them to justify a categorical condemnation of terrorism. So, I want to begin by asking why terrorism is wrong. What are the features that make terrorist acts always immoral? I also want to discuss a puzzling fact about moral criticisms of terrorism. If terrorism is so obviously immoral, why is it that moral condemnations of terrorism often provoke cynical responses? Indeed, there is even a kind of sympathy that flows from the view that terrorists are unfairly maligned by criticisms of their deeds. Some of the flavor of these responses is captured by Connor Cruise O'Brien, who writes: In order to respond effectively to this sort of challenge and make moral criticisms of terrorism more credible, we need to be clear about just what terrorism is and what makes it wrong. In what follows, I will focus first on questions about what makes terrorism wrong and then turn to the problem of giving credibility to moral criticisms of terrorism.While much of the credibility problem arises from inconsistencies in the ways that public officials label and judge terrorism and other acts of violence, it may come as a surprise that it is hard to find a prominent theory of the ethics of war that condemns terrorism in all cases. Far from being axiomatic and self-evident, the absolute wrongness of terrorism is hard to square with widely held views. If this is the case, then we face a difficult choice: either we must admit that terrorism can be morally justified, or we must reject widely accepted views because they condone some terrorist acts. My own view is that terrorism is always wrong and that ethical theories that fail to yield that result are defective. © 2007 Springer.