The Meaning of Terrorism 2021932110, 9780199603961, 9780192650696

Table of contents :
Introduction
1. Shaping a Concept of Terrorist Acts: A Clarifying Proposal
2. Further Objections: The Tactical Definition Too Wide? Too Narrow?
3. Terrorism and its Claims to Distinctive Significance
4. Combatants, Non-Combatants, and the Question of Innocence
5. Justifying Terrorism: Four Attempts
6. Justifying Terrorism: Three More Attempts
7. Counter-Terrorism and its Ethical Hazards
8. Religion, War, and Terrorism

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The Meaning of Terrorism

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The Meaning of Terrorism

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C. A. J. COADY

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © C. A. J. Coady 2021 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

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You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2021932110 ISBN 978–0–19–960396–1 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199603961.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books Limited Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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For Samuel and Rosa Coady in the hope that their future lies in a world in which the values of peace and justice are at last genuinely respected.

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Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction

ix

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1. Shaping a Concept of Terrorist Acts: A Clarifying Proposal

10

2. Further Objections: The Tactical Definition Too Broad? Too Narrow?

33

3. Terrorism and Its Claims to “Distinctive Significance”

54

4. Combatants, Non-Combatants, and the Question of Innocence

81

5. Justifying Terrorism: Four Attempts

110

6. Justifying Terrorism: Three More Attempts

129

7. Counter-Terrorism and Its Ethical Hazards

149

8. Religion, War, and Terrorism

176

References Index

207 217

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Acknowledgments Philosophers writing on and often discussing together urgent issues related to war and terrorism form a relatively large, if internationally dispersed, community of concern. My thinking has profited greatly from both personal and non-personal interaction with many of its members. Unreliable memory and space limitation do not permit acknowledgment of all those in the community to whose stimulation in person or in print I owe intellectual debts in the matter of discussing terrorism, so what follows is a necessarily select list (in both the honorific and the choice senses). The References will indicate other influences. Such a list should begin with Michael Walzer, of course, whose influence is pervasive in philosophical discussions and beyond them, and whose visit to the University of Melbourne for a workshop I had the pleasure of hosting; Henry Shue, a long-standing friend whom I met back to the 1960s in Oxford, and with whom I began exchanges on war-related ethics in the mid-1980s when involved with him in a project on nuclear weapons at the (then) University of Maryland Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy (we have had many intensive and helpful discussions of morality and political violence since, and I later enlisted him in a project on armed humanitarian intervention at the University of Melbourne); Robert Fullinwider, David Luban, and Judith Lichtenberg, also colleagues at the Maryland Institute as well as visitors to the University of Melbourne in the 1990s; my colleagues at the University of Melbourne over many years—Igor Primoratz, of course, along with Andrew Alexandra, Sagar Sanyal, Ned Dobos, and Sagar Sanyal, were invaluable; very much has also been learned in person and in print from Jeff McMahan, Cecile Fabre, Helen Frowe, David Rodin, Tony Coates, Steven Lee, Christopher Finlay, Seumas Miller, John Langan S.J., Seth Lazar, Virginia Held, Stephen Nathanson, Cheyney Ryan, Larry May, and others from that community mentioned above. Kieran McInerney gave me valuable research assistance and feedback on the book. Corrections to, and developments of, my thinking on this topic have followed from helpful and challenging comments from audiences at papers and lectures given over the years on the topic. Locales for some of those audiences have been: University of Melbourne, Australian Catholic

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University, University of Sydney, University of Adelaide, University of Oxford, University of Glasgow, University of Warwick, University of Bradford, University of Bonn, University of Leipzig, University of Bielefeld, Mt. Holyoke College, MA, University of Arizona, Georgia State University, Hiroshima Peace Institute, Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy, Oxford-Australia-China Summer School on Political Philosophy in Suzhou, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and Nanjing University. My thanks to those institutions and to the Australian Research Council for an ARC Grant on “Contemporary Terrorism: Ethical and Conceptual Perspectives,” and also for supporting me for work in this area and others for five years as an ARC Senior Research Fellow.

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I should also acknowledge various permissions to use copyrighted material in epigraphs in the book and for the painting displayed on its cover: The painting “Civilised” by New Zealand artist, A. Lois White, reproduced courtesy of Sue Disbrowe and other members of the family of the artist. Extract from Aileen Kelly, “Aftershock: 1. The city, burning,” reproduced courtesy of the Kelly family. Extract from Algerian Chronicles by Albert Camus, edited and with an introduction by Alice Kaplan, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Extract from Bruce Dawe, “Travelogue,” reproduced courtesy of the estate of Bruce Dawe. Extract from John Lahr, column “Questions for John Lahr,” courtesy of Lahr and The New Yorker. Extract from The American Heretic’s Dictionary, courtesy of author Chaz Bufe.

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The Earth quakes, the earth shakes the child. For us it was bombs. We huddled in shelter. The earth shook, the air howled and flamed. The city burned. Aileen Kelly, “Aftershock: 1. The city, burning”

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Coady.

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Introduction As witnessed by the arrival and continued presence of the “war on terror,” the threat of terrorism has been particularly prominent in public consciousness and in political rhetoric and action during the early years of the twenty-first century. For the relatively comfortable, economically advanced countries of what is (somewhat curiously) called “the West,” this attention owes much to the attacks of September 11, 2001 on New York and Washington, DC. These attacks, and their aftermaths, even resonated in many less affluent countries where terrorist attacks were associated more with national disintegration and civil wars. The 9/11 attacks killed just over 3,000 people and resulted in military retaliations in Afghanistan and Iraq that killed vastly more thousands and had political and military effects, many of them dire, that continue still. The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 had the effect of displacing this apprehension from the foreground of attention in those more affluent countries, though the hordes of damaged and displaced victims of day-to-day terrorist acts by state and sub-state agents in parts of the Middle East and Africa suffered much less of a shift in focus, finding in the pandemic just one more grave anxiety to besiege them. The pandemic has indeed been a calamity on a dreadful scale throughout the world, with deaths in New York City in the early days of the disease’s spread, for instance, rapidly coming to outstrip the number killed in the 9/11 attacks and then careering beyond. The shift in perspective was not only imaginatively understandable, but it also had one salutary aspect in suggesting how the threat of terrorism, or some forms of it, can itself too readily displace attention from other important though less directly dramatic dangers to civil life from multiple diseases and poverty through to environmental degradation. Even so, contemporary terrorism certainly poses not only genuine, continuing threats to lives and expectations, but also important challenges to our intellectual comprehension, moral understanding, and capacity to respond and counter the threats without panic or overreaction or damaging compromise to moral, legal, and political values. It must be added that

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terrorist acts understandably arouse a particular sort of apprehension because they make a special impact on us in exhibiting human intentionality in gross harming. The virus, by contrast, if we ignore fanciful theories about Chinese malevolence in somehow creating it, sprang from nothing of the sort, though its spread may well have been helped by human negligence, incompetence, or stubborn ignorance. To bring out the significance of the perception of intention in our reaction to terrorist acts, we might consider how our attitudes to road fatalities and injuries might be affected by adding an element of intention. Most of us are rightly careful about our driving because of the real risk of accidental harms on the road, but our caution and sense of danger would be vastly greater if it was known that there was even a small percentage of drivers out there who were not merely irresponsibly negligent, but bent upon killing other drivers.

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Philosophy and Terrorism Although philosophers have eventually devoted a great deal of attention to terrorism, especially, though not exclusively, since 9/11, there was very little to consult of philosophical material directly dealing with it when I first came to concentrate on the topic in the early 1980s. Michael Walzer, whose Harvard seminar I had attended in 1978, had a brief, stimulating chapter (of nine pages) in his important book Just and Unjust Wars published the year before, but he was one of the very few philosophers to address this question around that time.¹ This is particularly surprising given that there had been plenty of public focus on terrorist acts in Northern Ireland and in England throughout the 1970s, as well as on others, including the 1972 Munich Olympic killings of eleven Jewish athletes and a German policeman. There had also been numerous spectacular hijackings of civilian airplanes in the 1970s, many of them politically motivated, and a number of them involving killings or injuries. Initially, my own stimulus to write on the topic came partly from this surprising dearth of philosophical treatments and partly from a startling exchange of views when I was running an Interdisciplinary Programme on Problems of Peace and Conflict at the University of Melbourne in the late

¹ Carl Wellman and Martin Hughes were notable for doing so, and I discuss some of their views in this book. See Carl Wellman, “On Terrorism Itself,” Journal of Value Inquiry, vol. 13, no. 4 (1979); Martin Hughes, “Terrorism and National Security,” Philosophy, vol. 57 (1982).

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1970s to early 1980s. At a committee meeting with colleagues in the program something came up about terrorism, and several of my friends from other disciplines, notably English, Politics, and History, objected with puzzlement and a certain degree of scorn to my proposed definition of terrorist acts, and even more so to the idea of using moral philosophy in the discussion of such acts. No doubt my early attempt at definition needed refinement, but their reactions showed two things that had already begun to trouble me. The first was a fuzziness about what terrorism or terrorist acts could be, a fuzziness that was a reflection of a state of confusion in the public debate at large about what was actually being discussed, condemned, excused, or even justified in talk about terrorism and terrorist acts. This confusion, which is still rampant today, meant that people were often at cross-purposes in discussions of terrorism with regard to its moral status, significance, and need for countermeasures. The second was their scorn about the prospects for philosophical clarification of the concept and for bringing moral considerations to bear upon the phenomenon of terrorism, especially moral considerations informed by philosophical reflection. When this was not cynicism about philosophical pretensions or politics generally, it seemed a dim reflection of those political theories and practical policies, known as political realism, which apparently deny or strongly downplay a role for morality in matters of the deployment of political violence and much else in politics, insisting instead on the idea of national interest as the sole or primary relevant normative consideration.² These things helped prompt my writing the paper “The Morality of Terrorism,” published in Philosophy in 1985, and later republished in various places. In the following years, I have written and spoken frequently on the subject of terrorism and sought to meet some of the objections to my views and to heed what other philosophers and theorists have had to say about the subject in its various aspects. Revising, developing, and integrating my position on the matter has now produced this book. I have called it The Meaning of Terrorism partly because I have tried to fashion a concept of terrorism that reflects to an important extent a semantic core in reports, arguments, and responses to terrorist acts that will be useful in clearing up the confusions mentioned above and, moreover, in connecting moral judgment about such acts with philosophical theory and, to a degree, with what Sidgwick called “common-sense morality.” But I also have attempted to address questions of ² I have discussed political realism at some length in C. A. J. Coady, Messy Morality: The Challenge of Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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the meaning of terrorism, in a sense broader than that of conceptual analysis, semantics, or even fruitful conceptual tidiness. This is the sense in which we use the word “meaning” to scrutinize the significance of activities, policies, connections, institutions, work, and even, at the limit, life itself. This sense of “meaning” applies to a concern for a focus on bad things as well as good. In such scrutiny, we are involved both in description and in normative examination, just as, for instance, in discussing the meaning of work, we need not only an account of what work (in its manifold forms) is, but also what it could and should be, and why that matters. By contrast with a concept like work (assuming that work properly understood can be considered a good thing), an idea like racism would require in an exploration of its meaning not only clarification of what it was, but also of the moral status of its effects on those subject to its operation, effects that might range from the subtle to the gross, and apart from direct racist acts, such an exploration would attend to the normative dimensions of the entrenchment of racist attitudes in social and political institutions. The Meaning of Terrorism is then a title to indicate a voyage into the territory of those various dimensions of the idea of meaning. By contrast with the earlier philosophical neglect of the topic, the amount of ink spilled on aspects of terrorism, terrorists, and terrorist acts over the past forty years by philosophers and indeed theorists from many other disciplines and beyond academia is enormous, and I make no pretense of having heeded all of it. Nor indeed have I dealt with all the relevant philosophical literature, though I have concentrated upon a number of prominent authors, and I have tried to utilize ideas, in both a critical and appreciative spirit, from selected non-philosophical sources, such as political theory, history, law, journalism, and even theology.

A Brief Outline of Themes in the Book’s Chapters Chapter 1 is concerned with bringing some clarity to the widespread conceptual confusion around what terms like “terrorist,” “terrorist act,” and “terrorism” mean. Without being too rigid about definition, it is important to operate with some agreed definitional clarity in the area. I defend the value of such a definitional enterprise and then provide what I call a tactical definition of a terrorist act that aims to capture a central core involved in talk about terrorism and opens discussion of terrorist acts to cogent moral assessment. My definition of a terrorist act is: “A political act,

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ordinarily committed or inspired by an organized group, in which violence is intentionally directed at non-combatants (or ‘innocents’ in a suitable sense) or their significant property, in order to cause them serious harm.” The rest of the chapter discusses advantages of the definition and criticizes a number of objections to it. In the rest of Chapter 1, I discuss what I see as conspicuous advantages of the definition, particularly that it treats terrorism as a specific means toward political goals and hence available to any sort of agent, including states, not merely to insurgents or other sub-state agents. It also leaves it open whether revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries, or other groups can employ political violence, whether justified or not, without using terrorist tactics. I then proffer six clarifications and defenses of the expanded definition’s key terms: the normative status of the tactical definition with respect to moral neutrality or commitment; the implications of the reference to “serious harm” in it; whether threats or plans should have been included; the discussion of the phrase “ordinarily committed or inspired by an organized group” and the issue of the “lone wolf” terrorist; the scope of the term “political”; and whether, in philosophical terminology, the object of the intention in the definition should be read as opaque or transparent, i.e., to what degree is the determination that an act is terrorist decided by the agent’s belief about the status of their victim or the objective facts about that status? In Chapter 2, a number of objections to the definition are discussed that criticize it either for being too narrow or too broad. The narrowness criticisms object that (a) there are terrorist acts that target combatants, (b) there are terrorist acts that do not involve a political motive, e.g., certain criminal or religious acts, and (c) certain non-intentional violence afflicting noncombatants, basically some of those covered by the phrase “collateral damage,” should be encompassed by the definition. The “too broad” category of objections argues that (a) the tactical definition should be restricted by the inclusion of an ingredient of intentionally provoking fear, and sometimes add that the inducement of fear should be directed at others than those attacked, (b) the definition’s extending to states the possibility of committing terrorist acts is mistaken, (c) the inclusion of non-combatant property in the definition is mistaken, and (d) my approach simply defines terrorist acts as murder and loses what is distinctive of such acts. These objections are criticized and rejected for the most part, though some elicit concessional comments about their possible ancillary benefits in relation to the preferred tactical definition.

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Chapter 3 addresses four philosophical attempts to show, mostly without dependence on a definitional account of terrorist acts, that terrorist attacks have a special moral significance. In doing so, in their very different ways, these philosophers articulate a concern about terrorism that is widely held amongst non-specialists. The philosophers who address the idea of special significance most directly are Samuel Scheffler, Jeremy Waldron, and Lionel McPherson. Waldron does not use the phrase “special moral significance,” but the idea of such is pretty clearly at work in his discussion. The fourth is Karen Jones, who also does not use the language of “special significance,” but her discussion of “basal security,” the disruption of which “makes a really efficient” terrorist campaign work, seems to function in the same line of territory as marking some particularly distinctive feature of terrorism in addition to its being a tactic distinguished by its commitment to attacking non-combatants.³ The claim she makes is worth addressing in this context. I argue that these various attempts fail to make the strong case that they promise, and that the failure is instructive for the understanding of terrorism and for policies to deal with it. Chapter 4 tackles the difficult issues surrounding the concept of combatant/non-combatant, and the related notions of guilt/innocence and the connection of these to the soldier/civilian distinction. The investigation is partly conceptual, but it also inevitably raises moral questions and their significance, since the tactical definition’s reliance upon such concepts relates immediately to the moral assessments enshrined in the just war principle of discrimination which prohibits the direction of lethal violence upon non-combatants, and reflects a wider moral principle that prohibits violence against the innocent. Whether one or both of these principles should be rejected, modified, or allow of exceptions are further questions that are addressed in Chapters 5 and 6. The fact that they need to be so addressed is why my tactical definition is in a sense morally neutral, though it points toward the immorality of terrorist acts. The chapter requires extended discussion of contemporary debates within the complex just war tradition, particularly between those loosely styled “traditionalist” and “revisionist.” I offer a judgment on the debate, and discuss its relation to my account of the nature of terrorist acts.

³ Karen Jones, “Trust and Terror,” in Moral Psychology: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory, edited by Peggy DesAutels and Margaret Urban Walker (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004).

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Chapters 5 and 6 provide an extensive discussion of seven philosophical positions that attempt to justify terrorist acts in certain circumstances. Each one, in different ways, reflects less formal and less carefully articulated views that are proclaimed not only by active terrorists but also many members of the general public throughout the world, especially when the acts purporting to be justified are committed by their own people or others with whom they sympathize. In Chapter 5, four categories of attempted justification are examined: utilitarian/consequentialist arguments that may reject the principle of discrimination outright; the argument from self-defense; the tit-fortat argument; and the argument from the need for a fighting chance. In Chapter 6, three more categories are scrutinized: the argument from collective responsibility; the argument from redistributive justice; and the argument from supreme emergency. All seven of these attempted justifications raise a more general and very challenging issue about the difficulties of moral philosophizing in the face of absolute moral prohibitions. Chapter 7 discusses some of the problems posed by contemporary terrorism for counter-terrorism measures. The discussion is primarily focused on reactions of states to sub-state terrorism broadly understood. There is an initial discussion of issues to do with whether, and if so when, terrorists should be treated as combatants or criminals, which raises the relations between military and non-military forms of counter-terrorism. Problems with military responses connected with the inflammatory slogan “the war on terror,” including those responses entitled “targeted killing,” are also discussed. Thereafter, the chapter deals mostly with non-military responses and their moral and political hazards. These are examined under the three categories of: (1) domestic and to some extent international legal and regulatory measures, especially those introduced specifically to deal with terrorism; (2) diplomatic measures, both internal and external; (3) measures to remove or deal with the grievance. Under (1), the difficulties connected with legal definitions of terrorism, and the strong tendencies of legislation to promote abuses of power and damage to civil liberties, are explored with the aid of many examples, and the difficulties of the preventive imperative in legal contexts is analyzed; under (2) and (3) the path of political diplomacy that takes account of grievances, genuine or purported, is supported, but obstacles to its success in practice are discussed, including issues of conceptual confusion and problems to do with bad faith. Chapter 8 is concerned with common views, amounting to something like presuppositions, affirming links between religion and terrorist acts. One such view is that religion itself has an inherent, distinctive, possibly unique

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tendency to promote violent acts and hence also terrorist acts; another is that, whatever may be the case about such a general tendency, many past and present wars and terrorist acts were in fact wholly caused by specific religious commitments; yet another is that whatever the full story about causes may be, religion inevitably promotes particularly bad features of war and terrorism, such as their ferocity and duration. These views and some important difficulties with them are analyzed and critically assessed, and it is argued that the common views oversimplify and often exaggerate the importance of religious elements in violent conflicts. As a result of this, not only are positive aspects of many religious traditions of condemning wrongful resort to violence neglected, but the focus on religion also often leads to ignoring the political and non-religious ideologies that drive so much war and terrorism. The chapter examines claims and arguments by a range of theorists, both those in favor of the strong causal connections between religion and political violence and those against. Interestingly, religious and non-religious people can be found on both sides of the debate. As a general point about my definition of terrorist acts and the moral discussion that follows it, I should note here that like many others who write about war and terrorism, such as, to name only two prominent philosophical figures, Jeff McMahan and Cecile Fabre, I rely upon the important role of intention in discussing the morality of many acts, and relatedly, to some extent, upon what is called the doctrine of double effect (DDE). I say “to some extent” partly because it does not explicitly figure heavily in my text, but also because, as I discuss briefly in Chapter 2 and have in more detail elsewhere, I have reservations about the actual and possible abuses of the DDE in, for example, some of the recourses to it in the practice and theory of “collateral damage.”⁴ It is, however, important to acknowledge that there is considerable controversy in contemporary philosophy about both the DDE and connected distinctions, such as that between doing and allowing. Some of the critiques of the DDE and related matters even extend more surprisingly (to me, at least) to the very role of intention at all in assessing acts and their moral permissibility. These critiques have been prominent in some of the philosophers who write on terrorism and war, but a full discussion examining this complex of issues is too large a project for my purposes in this book. I would, however, strongly recommend Jeff McMahan’s paper on “Intention, Permissibility, Terrorism, and War” (Philosophical Perspectives, ⁴ See C. A. J. Coady, “Collateral Damage,” The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, edited by Hugh LaFollette (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, revised 2019).

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23, 2009) as a thorough account of the debate and a strong defense of the significance of intention in the assessment of permissible acts, and also of the suitability of some version of the DDE to the discussion of terrorism and war.⁵ Intention may not be all that need concern us in the moral and legal assessment of human acts—their permissibility, condemnation, praiseworthiness, or desirability—but it remains crucially important to that task, and the philosophical exploration of terrorist acts is imperiled by its neglect or diminishment.

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⁵ Jeff McMahan, “Intention, Permissibility, Terrorism, and War,” Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 23, no. 1 (2009).

Coady.

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1 Shaping a Concept of Terrorist Acts A Clarifying Proposal

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TERRORIST, n. One who uses violence in a manner contrary to the interests of US based multinational corporations. The American Heretic’s Dictionary¹ At the height of the Cold War (and beyond), admitting to having been a member of the Communist Party was very likely to disqualify an immigrant from legally entering the United States. This barrier was much debated, and another question that more recently continued on application forms for a non-immigrant visa to the US asked: “Do you seek to enter the United States to engage in export control violations, subversive or terrorist activities or any unlawful purpose?”, to which a visitor bent on subversion, etc. is unlikely to answer “Yes.” From the point of view of subversion or terrorism, membership of al-Qaeda or ISIS is likely to be more pertinent today than membership of the Communist Party, though even more unlikely to be admitted. In any case, many people complained about these sorts of questions for various reasons, but at least some of the questions were relatively clear in their own terms, especially the first: membership or non-membership of the Communist Party was a pretty straightforward category. At the height of the Cold War much vaguer terms were of course in currency, such as “fellow-traveler,” “communist sympathizer,” “pinko,” and “neocommunist,” and the vagueness of these categories could have pernicious consequences. But the visa questions were not vague in quite these ways. Today, terrorism has replaced communism as (in the phrasing of Marx and Engels) “the specter” that is haunting much of the world and we have a new cold, and in some parts of the world distinctly hot, war on terror. But what terrorism is can be much more opaque than the parallel question about communism, particularly in some legal and quasi-legal formulations. ¹ Chaz Bufe, The American Heretic’s Dictionary: Revised and Expanded (Tucson, AZ: Sharp Press, 2016).

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Consider, for instance, the question I had to answer in 2012 on my application for a visa to the UK. It formed part of the UK Border Protection Questionnaire for obtaining a UK visa: It said:

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Have you ever, by any means or medium, expressed views that justify or glorify terrorist violence or that encourage or that may encourage others to terrorist acts or other serious criminal acts?

I answered “No” in all sincerity, but I wondered what they meant by “terrorist violence,” not to mention “may encourage,” because I was sure that many of my philosophical colleagues from various Western countries could not answer the justification question in the negative as honestly as I thought I could, given my own understanding of “terrorist violence.” This is partly because some of them understand the term “terrorist” differently, but even some who think of terrorism in the same way that I do might struggle to answer “No” honestly. Nor could I have answered honestly had I accepted some other understandings of the term.² In Chapter 7 I will address some of the conceptual difficulties of legal definitions and prohibitions of terrorist acts and related matters. In Chapters 5 and 6, I will also address some of the problems in attempted justifications of terrorist acts. Those I will consider are advanced by academics, mostly philosophers, but they embody in different ways justifications that are not only advanced by other academics but that are also common in more everyday discourse.

Why Bother with a Definition? As the quotation from the visa application form suggests, and as consultation of the terrorism literature—learned, popular, and historical—reveals, politicians, philosophers, political theorists, and lawyers have offered and still offer a bewildering variety of definitions of terrorism or terrorist acts; and much of this disarray afflicts the understanding of the word and its cognates in non-specialist speech and discussion. For instance, the UK Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1989 defines a terrorist act as: “the use of violence for political ends, and includes any use of ² As for the “may encourage” clause, that is simply preposterous since all manner of otherwise harmless or positively healthy views can be taken as encouragement to bad behavior; for example, publication of statistics about the economic prosperity of one country may encourage illegal migration from another.

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violence for the purpose of putting the public or any section of the public in fear,”³ whereas the US State Department defines it at one point as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.”⁴ The UK definition makes no distinction between the type of agents who may commit terrorist acts, whereas the US definition restricts agents to subnational or clandestine groups, and the UK statement places no restriction on the type of targets against which the acts may be directed, whereas the US definition restricts the targets to non-combatants. These differences are amongst those that are of the first importance in practice and theory and their significance will be discussed in what follows. At this point, we should just note that the UK approach would allow for states to commit terrorist acts, whereas the US definition does not. Both emphasize political motivation, but purposely creating fear is involved in the first but not the second. There are many other confusions amongst legal and political and popular understandings of terrorism and terrorist acts; indeed, Walter Laqueur has claimed convincingly that there are about one hundred such definitions in the terrorist literature, so I won’t attempt to sort out all this confusion bit by bit.⁵ I shall, however, try to provide a relatively clear definition that does two things. It will aim to capture something central about terrorism that most people seem to have in mind when they talk about the topic, and it should contribute to the possibilities of sane and coherent thinking about the morality of terrorism and also the moral issues involved in responding to the threat or threats of terrorism. There is inevitably a degree of stipulation about any such approach since not only does “terrorism” share with most political concepts a messy shape, but its use in common discourse is also more than usually loaded with rhetorical and polemical baggage. This is evident in the way repressive governments of various types rush to label the critics or protestors against their policies “terrorists,” as can be seen in, for just one instance, the Egyptian government’s arrest of eight people they accused, amongst other things, of joining a terrorist group because of their merely committing such acts as playing a song on a car video fiercely satirizing the Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. One of the eight, Abdel Shady Habash, a twenty-four-year-old film-maker, died two years

³ Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1989, Section 20 (1). ⁴ Title 22 Chapter 38 U.S. Code § 2656f, (d) (2) “Annual Country Reports on Terrorism.” ⁵ Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 5.

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later in prison after never having been brought to trial. The song was written by an exiled Egyptian dissident to whom most of those arrested had little connection.⁶ An awareness of such distorting effects of political manipulation and exploitation should motivate a search for more clarity about what a claim about terrorist activity should really mean, since we are inevitably made to pay a hefty conceptual and moral cost for such exploitation of the concept’s fuzziness. Even so, suspicion of stipulation and awareness of the messiness of ordinary and sophisticated talk of terrorism has moved quite a few theorists to shun definition altogether. Virginia Held, Russell Hardin, Samuel Scheffler, and Jeremy Waldron are just four who, in different ways, try to avoid defining terrorism.⁷ Such reactions are understandable, and I have sympathy with the desire to avoid definition-mongering and the search for excessively sharp boundaries to discussion. Badgering people about definition can be tiresome and even counter-productive, as illustrated by an exchange in John Updike’s novel Couples when the victim of such badgering responds to it by demanding: “Define ‘define’!”⁸ Nonetheless, the opponents of definition have their own problems, since those who work with no definitional constraints can elide important distinctions and offer conclusions prone to ambiguity that can promote unfortunate policy and misleading moral judgments. Virginia Held’s argument for the permissibility of terrorist acts in some circumstances as just distribution rests in part, as I will later argue, on an unwitting conflation of two distinct categories of violence under the one heading of “terrorist.”⁹ Held’s argument will be analyzed more fully in Chapter 6. What I would take from the critics’ skepticism about definition is that any definition of terrorism should be understood as a stipulation that produces certain benefits for social, political, and even legal discussion, captures something central to what is contained in common usage, and remains flexible about some variations from the definition. Of the more plausible of these variations, it should be able to give explanations for

⁶ For a report of these events see Ruth Michaelson, “Egyptian Film-Maker Who Worked on Video Mocking President Dies in Jail,” The Guardian (May 3, 2020). https://www.theguardian. com/world/2020/may/02/egyptian-filmmaker-who-mocked-president-dies-in-cairo-jail. ⁷ See Virginia Held, How Terrorism Is Wrong: Morality and Political Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Russell Hardin, “Civil Liberties in the Era of Mass Terrorism,” Journal of Ethics, vol. 8, no. 1 (2004); Samuel Scheffler, “Is Terrorism Morally Distinctive?”, Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 14, no. 1 (2006); Jeremy Waldron, “Terrorism and the Uses of Terror,” The Journal of Ethics, vol. 8, no. 1 (2004). ⁸ John Updike, Couples (New York: Knopf, 1968). ⁹ Virginia Held, “Terrorism and War,” The Journal of Ethics, vol. 8, no. 1 (2004).

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their appeal and arguments against their being considered as central. Indeed, perhaps the best way to think of my proposed definition is that it gives something like what G. E. L. Owen once called, in reference to Aristotle’s procedures, the “focal meaning” of the term.¹⁰ Owen takes Aristotle’s examples of the contrasts between uses of “healthy” in the phrases “healthy substance” (or, as might be more everyday, “healthy individual”), “healthy diet,” and “healthy complexion” to indicate a significant difference between mere semantic puns that involve uses of the same word that have different definitions and are related solely by the common word, and uses where the definitions are different but have some relation to each other. Without exploring Owen’s concept in detail, I take from him the idea that the use of some term can be defined in a way that is central in significance, but more or less closely related to other uses and their definitions. So “terrorist acts” will be analyzed as a concept having what Wittgenstein called “family resemblance” characteristics, but with a definition that insists on capturing a central or core set of features while allowing that only some of those will be present in other examples or ranges of the concept’s use, and that other features absent from the core cases may be present in those other instances.¹¹ The further removed from the focal meaning a use and its definition becomes, the less value it has for illuminating discussion. Some uses will have little or no direct relation to the core at all other than the use of a common word, though they may have some relation to one of the outlier concepts that have some link to the core. An example of this remoteness is Carl Wellman’s definition to be discussed later in this chapter, in which what I argue to be core features of a terrorist act, such as its violence and its political orientation, are ignored; the idea of violence is replaced by a broad reference to coercion, while the political dimension doesn’t figure at all. There is a reference to the creation of fear which connects Wellman’s definition with some other more plausible definitions in the conceptual space of what I will call tactical definitions, though not, as it happens, with the tactical definition I shall defend.

¹⁰ G. E. L. Owen, “Logic and Metaphysics in Some Earlier Works of Aristotle,” in Aristotle and Plato in the Mid-Fourth Century, edited by I. Düring and G. E. L. Owen (Göteburg: Elander Boktryckeri Aktiebolag, 1960). For the complexities in Owen’s interpretation of Aristotle on focal meaning see Gail Fine, “Owen’s Progress: Logic, Science, and Dialectic—Collected Papers in Greek Philosophy by G. E. L. Owen, Edited by M. Nussbaum,” The Philosophical Review, vol. 97, no. 3 (1988). ¹¹ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953).

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A further point about the need for some definitional clarity is that debates around the topic of terrorism very often display a degree of intellectual and political myopia and a lack of self-awareness that can come close to hypocrisy. Denunciation of the other’s awful acts of terrorism cohabit comfortably with ignorance or even praise of one’s own behavior, even when that behavior significantly matches features of the other’s acts. Sometimes this myopia is promoted by a fuzzy grasp of what one means by terrorism and this feeds into the general human tendency to give oneself the benefit of the doubt denied to others. This tendency works at both the individual and the collective or state level. So we condemn a stranger’s resort to violence where we fail to acknowledge our own or regard our own resort as a legitimate use of “force.” Reactions to killings by our “enemies” involved in Islamic fundamentalist militancy sometimes show this myopia dramatically with the use of the word “terrorism” and its cognates. Consider, for instance, the dreadful killing of a British soldier, Lee Rigby, on the streets of London on May 22, 2013 by two British Muslims who attacked him in response, they said, to British troops killing Muslims in Afghanistan. This was immediately declared a terrorist act by British news media, even though the victim was a soldier who had served in Afghanistan and was acting as an army recruiter at the time of his death. This puts the act into the context of the war on terror campaign being acted out around the globe and in which British and other Allied troops have killed enemy soldiers and many innocent civilians as well. As dramatic illustration of the double standard, the Obama drone campaign in Pakistan actually treated “any military-aged male in a strike zone” as a combatant for the purpose of drone attacks.¹² If Rigby’s killing was a terrorist act, why not these other acts by “our” side? As the comedian Michael Moore darkly remarked: “I am outraged that we can’t kill people in other countries without them trying to kill us!”¹³ Similarly, we tend to be outraged by foreigners spying on us but ignore, condone, or praise our own “intelligence services” doing the very same to foreigners. Perhaps we can in certain circumstances be right about the asymmetry, but we need to argue this in terms of the similarities and differences between what they do and what we do. The example of violence is close to the question of terrorism,

¹² Joe Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” New York Times 29 (2012), 5. ¹³ Michael Moore, Twitter Post (May 22, 2013, 11:14pm). https://twitter.com/mmflint/sta tus/337451498369851393?lang=en.

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but, as I shall argue, terrorism is a distinctive form of violence, and if we want to avoid the trap of hypocrisy and the dangers to which it can give rise, we need to be clear about what distinctive form of violence terrorism is. These issues to do with hypocrisy and political manipulation in the use of terrorism and related terms can give rise to a rejection of the concept of terrorism altogether as a meaningless item in a vocabulary of obfuscation. Its residual reality may reside solely in intentional political manipulation or in some vaguer, unconscious collective need to shroud a perceived enemy in the darkness that contrasts with the opposite light we enjoy. Such a rejection goes beyond philosophical concerns about the difficulties of definition, though it may be allied to them. It can be found powerfully articulated in the investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald’s campaign against the way the discourse of terrorism is generally conducted in the United States. In a number of different online articles, Greenwald has argued that government and media characterizations of violent events show a determination to represent as terrorist only and all attacks by foreigners against Americans (and sometimes Allies). Any parallel attacks by Americans (or Allies) cannot merit the title “terrorist.” He instances as one case in point the striking reluctance at the time by US commentators to call terrorist the Charleston shootings of nine black Christian worshippers by Dylann Roof in June 2015.¹⁴ By contrast, any serious violence by a Muslim often immediately attracts the term “terrorist,” even if no real political motive can be found. I shall have more to say about Greenwald’s claims after I have developed my definition of a terrorist act, since the phenomenon he describes is best seen as a very extreme version of what I have labeled a “political status” definition in competition with my own “tactical” definition.

Focusing on Terrorist Acts I shall begin with a discussion of the idea of “a terrorist act” because launching straight into defining “terrorism” or “terrorist” has certain disadvantages. In particular, starting that way tends to prejudge questions such as: is terrorism an ideology or a specific philosophy? The “ism” ending may suggest a coherent body of belief constituting terrorism, whereas, as we shall see, this is very dubious. We shouldn’t proceed by trying independently to ¹⁴ Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept (June 19, 2015). https://theintercept.com/2015/06/19/ refusal-call-charleston-shootings-terrorism-showsmeaningless-propaganda-term.

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identify terrorists or terrorism and then determine what are terrorist acts by seeing what those people do or what that ideology licenses, but instead proceed the other way around. As the Bible says: “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7:16). In spite of what some psychological studies of terrorism claim, terrorists are seldom weirdly different types of people who can be somehow identified by their terrorist personalities. There was an academic vogue for this sort of thing some years ago, but more recently psychological studies have debunked the stereotype of a distinctive and pathological “terrorist personality.” As one professor of psychology, Clark R. McCauley, put it: A common suggestion is that there must be something wrong with terrorists. Terrorists must be crazy, or suicidal, or psychopaths without moral feelings or feelings for others. Thirty years ago this suggestion was taken very seriously, but thirty years of research has found psychopathology and personality disorder no more likely among terrorists than among nonterrorists from the same background. Interviews with current and former terrorists find few with any disorder found in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Comparisons of terrorists with non-terrorists brought up in the same neighbourhoods find psychopathology rates similar and low in both groups.¹⁵

Terrorists are people who do certain distinctive things and those things are distinctive because of what they are rather than because they are done by certain people identified by aberrant personality or by group membership, or because they flow only from certain shared ideologies. At a minimum, as already suggested, it would seem that a terrorist act is a certain sort of violent act, and if we are going to talk of terrorists and terrorist groups, they should be defined by their orientation to deliver that certain form of violence. In addition, terrorist acts are violent acts that are regarded by most people who use the expression “terrorist” as being of a particularly reprehensible nature, though I don’t think that this feature should be part of the definition. It is merely worth noting at this juncture. This starting point may seem very obvious, and indeed it is intended to be so, but it is indicative of some of the difficulties in reaching agreement on starting points concerning terrorism that some theorists don’t want to ¹⁵ Clark R. McCauley, “The Psychology of Terrorism,” Essay for the Social Science Research Council, http://essays.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/mccauley.htm, accessed 6/12/2014.

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include any reference to violence in their definition of terrorism. Robert Goodin, for instance, defines terrorist acts as any acts that are performed “with the intention of frightening people for political advantage.”¹⁶ In terms of a definition that seeks to capture key or focal elements in the admittedly messy concept of terrorism, an approach that excludes violence from the definition is, I think, close to perverse. Goodin’s approach would group together as equally terrorist both the action of a concerned climate scientist delivering a factual speech which they rightly hope will frighten their audience sufficiently to moderate their contributions to climate destruction and the bombing of a busload of schoolchildren by a political activist who wants to bring about a change in military policy. My own definition of terrorism is more restricted and would count only the second as a terrorist act.¹⁷ Something akin to Goodin’s approach was earlier anticipated by Carl Wellman in one of the very first modern philosophical discussions of terrorism. Wellman defined terrorist acts as “the use or attempted use of terror as a means of coercion,” whether violent or non-violent, and he gives several examples that I find quite unconvincing, for instance threatening to fail “any student who hands in his paper after the due date.”¹⁸ Goodin’s definition at least keeps the political orientation of my tactical definition (an earlier version of which he cites), but in other respects it is far remote from my focal emphasis. Both Wellman and Goodin include the fear motivation which, as we shall see, other tactical definitions unlike mine include, but Wellman makes no reference to the political motivation and so is even more remote from the focal core. It should be said that Goodin’s style of definition reflects in certain respects some other non-academic public declarations about terrorism. The 1987 “Geneva Declaration on Terrorism,” for instance, is commendable in placing a focus upon state terrorism (in this respect being narrower in emphasis than Goodin), but spreads its understanding of terrorism far wider than the category of what would normally be understood as violent acts. Thus, its item 10 of a list of manifested acts of state terrorism includes: “the abrogation of civil rights, civil liberties, constitutional protections and the rule of law under the pretext of alleged counter-terrorism.”¹⁹ ¹⁶ Robert Goodin, What’s Wrong with Terrorism? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 156. ¹⁷ For my initial account and defense of my version of a tactical definition and its moral implications see C. A. J. Coady, “The Morality of Terrorism,” in Morality and Political Violence (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). See also C. A. J. Coady, “Defining Terrorism,” in Terrorism: The Philosophical Issues, edited by Igor Primoratz (London: Palgrave, 2004). ¹⁸ Carl Wellman, “On Terrorism Itself,” Journal of Value Inquiry, vol. 13, no. 4 (1979), 252. ¹⁹ For the Declaration, see UN General Assembly Doc. A/42/307, May 29, 1987, Annex.

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Earlier the declaration commits itself to the dubious concept of structural violence that I have criticized elsewhere, so probably the framers of the Declaration think such legal enactments are instances of violence.²⁰ But however morally repellent such abrogations may be, and I regard them as highly repellent in most circumstances, many of them can come into existence without actual violence, though of course they may give rise to violence in the implementation of it or in resistance to it. Several of the Declaration’s other condemnations include within the scope of terrorist acts those that can only be regarded as violent because of a very wide and confusing concept of violence, or more charitably because they may lead to some acts of unjustified violence. Item 2, for instance, treats as terrorist “the introduction or transportation of nuclear weapons by a state into or through the territory or territorial waters of other states or into international waters.” Such introduction is indeed normally dangerous, and partakes of the moral condemnation that should encompass the policy of nuclear deterrence, the immorality of which I, and others, have argued elsewhere, but such transportation need not itself involve any terrorist or even violent act.²¹ Possibly there is an implicit threat of a terrorist act, namely the massive intentional destruction of innocent lives, and that raises a question to be discussed later concerning whether a threat to perpetrate a terrorist act is itself a terrorist act. But in any case, the transportation itself may, admittedly on rare occasions, be quite harmless, even praiseworthy, as when it is being done in order to disable the nuclear weapons. But it is time to come explicitly to my proposed definition.

My Tactical Definition I define a terrorist act as: A political act, ordinarily committed or inspired by an organized group, in which violence is intentionally directed at non-combatants (or “innocents” in a suitable sense) or their significant property in order to cause them serious harm. ²⁰ C. A. J. Coady, “The Idea of Violence,” in Morality and Political Violence (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), ch. 2. ²¹ For my most developed critique of nuclear deterrence see C. A. J. Coady, “Escaping from the Bomb: Immoral Deterrence and the Problem of Extrication,” in Nuclear Deterrence and Moral Restraint, edited by Henry Shue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

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The term “terrorism” can then be defined as “the tactic or policy of engaging in terrorist acts,” and a terrorist is one who carries out such acts. Let us call this a “tactical” definition. There is some further scope for the application of these terms to threatened, planned, or attempted but unsuccessful terrorist acts, and I shall discuss this later in the chapter. The definition of “non-combatants” or indeed “innocents” or “civilians” is a complex matter that I will treat more thoroughly in Chapter 4. But briefly here, let me indicate that there are two strands to the understanding of the idea covered by these terms in discussion of war and violent political conflict. One is external and one internal. The external refers principally to role and the internal to individual moral condition. The external strand for which the term non-combatant or civilian is most appropriate demarcates those people who are not in the armed forces or groups prosecuting hostilities or not involved in directly supporting the violent activities of those who are. The internal strand puts a focus on the guilt or innocence of people who have little or no moral responsibility for any purported wrongdoing that might serve to legitimize the resort to political violence against the supposed wrongdoers. For many purposes the two strands connect sufficiently to mesh with our concern to provide a working definition of terrorist acts that dispels confusions and opens up the possibilities for sensible moral judgment on such acts. With this preliminary understanding, I will use noncombatant and innocent as roughly interchangeable, while postponing until Chapter 4 a closer discussion of the complex philosophical issues lurking in the background bushes.²² This style of definition I call a tactical definition because it concentrates not upon anti-state violence in general, or even politically motivated anti-state violence in general, but upon the specific political tactic of targeting non-combatants (or, if you like, innocents, though more on this later). I think that this targeting of people who don’t deserve to be targeted is what people are commonly getting at when they speak of terrorism as “indiscriminate” or “random,” but I will avoid these terms because they can strongly suggest uncontrolled or haphazard resorts to violence, whereas there is at least a case to be made that terrorism is governed by a certain rationality, since terrorist attacks have a variety of aims, some of which, the immediate objects, often succeed, even if the ultimate aims often fail. I will have more to say on this later. Michael Walzer is one eminent ²² One could use “civilian,” suitably understood, instead of either “non-combatant” or “innocent,” though such a suitable understanding of the term raises further problems.

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theorist in the area who uses “random,” not only because terrorist acts target non-combatants but also to indicate that the terrorists choose which noncombatants to target willy-nilly as part of their campaign to spread extensive fear.²³ So he is not denying rational choices altogether to terrorists, but emphasizing that they don’t care which non-combatants they attack for creating fear and for their further purposes. This is probably true of some, perhaps many, terrorist attacks but clearly not of all. The rape and killing of four Catholic women missionaries (three nuns and a lay missionary) in El Salvador in 1980 by the right-wing military government’s disguised agents was palpably an act of terrorism by the tactical definition, but the victims were carefully selected for their non-violent witness to human rights abuses and their standing with the oppressed peasantry. Selection of civilian targets whose loss will be particularly damaging to the morale of the wider population is a clear candidate for the description “terrorist,” whether the perpetrators are state or sub-state agents. There may be another reason why the expression “random” appeals to theorists attempting to define terrorist acts. That reason is a focus, less upon the motive and outlook of the terrorist, and more upon the way in which the population to which the victims belong will usually view the act and others that are likely to follow. They will often think of such acts as unpredictable intrusions into arenas of life that are normally far removed from violence, arenas such as coffee shops, homes, supermarkets, and suburban streets. When a suicide bomber impacts such arenas, the explosion will seem random: “why here?”; “why these children?”. Yet this understandable reaction should not mean that the definition of terrorist acts must include a reference to a necessary intention on the terrorist’s part to choose targets at random, as the example of the nuns in El Salvador has shown. Even the psychological effect of randomness may be mitigated or even disappear in the experience of repeated terrorist acts, as for the civilian populations of British, German, and Japanese cities under repeated terror bombing by their

²³ Walzer’s definition of a terrorist act is a tactical one close to mine, though he imports not only randomness, but also the creation of fear, as essential to the definition or understanding of terrorism. His definition of terrorist act is: “the random killing of innocent people, in the hope of creating pervasive fear.” Michael Walzer, “Terrorism and Just War,” Philosophia, vol. 34, (2006), 3. Earlier in his influential Just and Unjust Wars, he states: “Randomness is the crucial feature of terrorist activity.” Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 4th edition (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 197. Since he obviously thinks that targeting innocent people is also crucial, he must be conflating here the innocence of the targets and the supposedly random method of selecting them.

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enemies. (Similar issues will arise with the idea of terrorist acts as unpredictable in the discussion of Karen Jones’ “basal security” in Chapter 3.) I said that an acceptable definition would have to “capture something central about terrorism that most people seem to have in mind when they talk about the topic,” and my definition not only matches one important sense of the way “indiscriminate” is commonly used to indicate a defining feature of terrorist acts, but also reflects what is at work in so many excuses or justifications for terrorist acts offered by their perpetrators. So, we find Osama bin Laden defending the 9/11 massacres by claiming that no Americans could be regarded as innocent of the wrongs that America, the nation, was inflicting on Muslims throughout the world. As he put it: “the entire America is responsible for the atrocities perpetrated against Muslims. The entire America because they elect the Congress.”²⁴ Disregarding bin Laden’s confused understanding of American democratic politics, we can see that he wants to rebut the charge of terrorism by rejecting any claim for the innocence of any of those intentionally killed in the 9/11 attacks. Whatever else ordinary people think about terrorist acts, a vast majority of them seem to think of them as attacks upon the innocent, or those who have done nothing to warrant attack. This is what they, inchoately perhaps, think terrorist acts are, and of course they usually condemn them morally because of it. As Jeff McMahan has put it recently in discussing intention in the understanding of terrorism: “What is important for our purposes is that virtually everyone agrees that terrorism involves intended harm to innocents and most people have seen that feature as an essential part of the explanation of why terrorism is almost always wrong.”²⁵ Of course, it is true that terrorist acts are generally the object of moral condemnation, but my definition does not explicitly embody this moral rejection, though it points the way to a certain endorsement of it—an endorsement that I personally accept, as will later become clear. The moral question will receive detailed separate treatment later, though the discussion here and in Chapter 2 will inevitably have moral overtones and invoke moral issues. In addition to satisfying the condition of some fidelity to a central core in common usage of the term, my definition has some other significant advantages which I’ll now sketch before turning to numerous objections and ²⁴ Interview between Hamid Mir and Osama bin Laden, November 9, 2001, at http://www. dawn.com/2001/11/10/top1.htm. Fuller text of bin Laden’s comments will be analyzed in Chapter 4. ²⁵ Jeff McMahan, “Intention, Permissibility, Terrorism, and War,” Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 23, no. 1 (2009), 360.

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difficulties that my style of tactical definition faces. In looking to these advantages, I am seeking to give an account of the point of my definition. Of course, part of the point is, as already indicated, that it captures something that virtually all users of the term are getting at, but for many concepts, particularly political ones, it is also important that one’s analysis of them shows the further point of having the specific concept defined.²⁶ Here, the advantages are partly moral, partly in a broad sense political.

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Advantages of This Tactical Definition First, the tactical definition does not make all revolutionary or insurgent violence count as terrorism. It seems plausible to think that, amongst the many types of acts available to them, revolutionaries can use terrorist acts or they can avoid them, and we should clearly distinguish between those who use violence in a way that avoids attacking innocent or uninvolved people and those that don’t. If there is room to describe wars as just or unjust, then there can presumably be just or unjust revolutions, and those with a just cause can be criticized for using terrorist methods and those whose cause is unjust can be given credit for avoiding such methods. Second, it doesn’t make the imputation of terrorism turn on differences between the status of the agents of terrorist tactics. Many definitions of terrorism are what I call “political status” definitions in that they insist that terrorism is something that can only be attributed to non-state actors. This would make it impossible to talk coherently of “state terrorism” which is surely undesirable. It is natural and, I believe, morally important to utilize the vocabulary of terrorism to refer to the city bombings of World War II, or, more recently, the Syrian government’s systematic destruction of the homes and lives of their own citizens who were taking no part in the armed uprising against the government.²⁷ Even Winston Churchill, after the

²⁶ The idea that in addition to defining a concept’s use we may often need to explore its point or utility has been discussed by Sally Haslanger in connection with the concepts of race and of gender in her “Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?”, Nous, vol. 34, no. 1 (2000). ²⁷ As is common in such cases, the Syrian government promiscuously referred from the beginning to all the insurgent violence against it as “terrorist,” which is not to say that there may not have been some terrorist acts committed by insurgent forces, especially when the uprising developed into a complex and widespread civil war. Indeed, some of the dominant insurgent groups, notably Da’ish (or to give it its preferred grandiose name, “Islamic State”), standardly used terrorist tactics as well as conventional war techniques.

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destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, referred to the city bombings of World War II as “acts of terror” and belatedly called for restricting attacks to “military objectives” instead of “wanton destruction,” and his predecessor as Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had earlier denounced proposals for such bombing as “mere terrorism” and “blackguardly.”²⁸ There can, moreover, be forms of state terrorism different in important respects from those examples mentioned above. Aside from state attacks upon civilian/non-combatant populations of other states, and state attacks upon their own innocent civilian populations, there can be attacks by substate agents in one state whose efforts are sponsored in various ways by the authorities of another state. I will discuss this form of terrorism in Chapter 7 in connection with problems about responding to terrorism. Of course, it is possible in theory that there could be forms of political status definitions that restricted the application of “terrorist act” to state agents, and then the problem would be that the means employed and the targets selected would have striking similarities with those used by sub-state actors, so that a “sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” objection would apply in reverse. I say “in theory” because I don’t think this sort of political status definition or understanding is used explicitly by, for example, supporters or apologists for revolutionary violence, though there may be a temptation toward it. Another advantage of the definition is that it links the phenomenon of terrorism to the useful moral tools of just war theory, since terrorist tactics violate the principle of discrimination or distinction as usually understood. This, as already noted, is one reason why people sometimes think of terrorism as “indiscriminate violence.” This is acceptable if it means not discriminating in favor of non-combatants but not if it means irrational behavior or even a total disregard for all morality. One notable terrorism expert, Paul Wilkinson, for instance, claims that “what fundamentally distinguishes terrorism from other forms of organised violence is not simply its severity but its features of amorality and antinomianism.” Terrorists are, he says, “implicitly prepared to sacrifice all moral and humanitarian considerations for the sake of some political end.”²⁹ But terrorists frequently offer some rationale for what they do and defend their actions using moral arguments, even if we may have good reasons for rejecting either or both. ²⁸ For Churchill’s remark (in a letter to Sir Charles Portal) see Noble Frankland and Charles Webster, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany 1939–1945, vol. 3 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1961), 112. For Chamberlain’s comment see J. F. C. Fuller, The Conduct of War 1989–1961 (London: Eyre Methuen, 1972), 280. ²⁹ Paul Wilkinson, Political Terrorism (London: Macmillan, 1974), 16–17.

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Often, for instance, they see themselves or the group they identify with as having suffered grievous moral wrongs to which their acts of terror are a response. The linkage with just war theory is not meant to canonize that theory (which is better called a tradition rather than a theory since there are plenty of contested, divergent elements within it), but it has the advantage that the tradition is widely respected, at least in theory, in Western military academies and training, and has played a significant part in the formulation of the legal regulation of warfare in the UN conventions and other declarations at the basis of humanitarian law and international military law. This is not to claim that the tenets of just war theory are uncontentious. Recently there has been a great deal of philosophical work criticizing, revising, and rejecting aspects of the theory, but most of this is itself a testimony to the intellectual vitality of the tradition. In Chapters 4 and 5, we will examine some of these criticisms.

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Clarifications I will turn to the major objections to the tactical definition shortly, but it may be as well to offer some further clarifications and explore two alternative conceptual approaches, reliance upon which, either implicitly or explicitly, underlies many of the objections. The first clarification concerns the normative status of the definition. Many theorists are concerned that the definition should be morally neutral, while others are equally insistent that it should be explicitly moral. What lies behind both approaches, in spite of their opposition, is the insight that the common discourse about terrorism invariably has pejorative import. The neutralists react by treating the pejorative feature as something that may well show a political bias and begs an important question about the possible justification of terrorist acts; the moralists insist that the ordinary discourse correctly concentrates on the loathsome nature of acts that are invariably criminalized by very diverse societies.³⁰ But it is one thing to acknowledge the normative force of the term “terrorism” in ordinary discourse, and another to build moral ³⁰ For advocacy of the neutralist approach see Robert Young, “Political Terrorism as a Weapon of the Politically Powerless,” in Terrorism, edited by Igor Primoratz (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). For a good statement of the drive toward a moral definition see Alex J. Bellamy, Fighting Terror: Ethical Dilemmas (London: Zed Books, 2008), 31. Bellamy says: “It (‘terrorism’) is a label one attaches to particular acts of political violence to delegitimize

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condemnation into the definition. My definition does not make terrorist acts immoral by definition. Whether or not they are immoral turns upon whether we accept the principle of discrimination or some similar principle that rules out attacks upon non-combatants. Given the widespread appeal of the principle, however, and the widespread revulsion from the broader notion of intentionally harming the innocent, the definition helps explain why terrorism is generally believed to be immoral. Even so, it leaves room for those who reject the principle or do not fully accept it to argue, as we shall see later, that terrorism can be morally justified. The second clarification is that the reference in the definition to “serious” harm is intended to capture the fact that most people would not classify the deliberate infliction of small harms upon non-combatants by minor acts of violence as terrorist acts. If enemy soldiers forcibly removed civilians from a bridge, thereby causing minor injuries, in order to make way for the passage of their tanks, I doubt that this should be called terrorist. This is a point of more than terminological interest, since if such a removal constitutes a terrorist act, then a complete moral condemnation, or even a strong presumption in favor of one, is endangered since we may readily envisage circumstances in which such acts of what might be called “minor terrorism” could be morally justified. For instance, if the troops are fighting a just war, the removal might be justified in the pursuit of just objectives, and even if they are unjust troops, then the removal might be justified as far better than other options, such as driving the tanks over them. In earlier versions of my tactical definition I had not included the qualification “severe” and therefore had resort to a separate category of “minor terrorism.” That is a possible maneuver but I think it less confusing to proceed as I now do. My reference to “significant property” has a similar function since it is intended to counter the objection that my proposal is wrong to include a reference to damage to property, of which more below. A third clarification concerns the role of threats. Several people have objected to me that threats to inflict violence upon non-combatants should count as terrorist as well as the actual infliction. I am in two minds about this.³¹ I suspect that there is some linguistic warrant for including threats in them. This is a useful starting point for building a moral definition.” In fact, however, he goes on to provide a definition based on mine which, as I argue above, is not straightforwardly “moral.” ³¹ Indeed, I find in reviewing what I have written over the years that my two minds are displayed in sometimes endorsing the inclusion and sometimes rejecting it! For the rejection see C. A. J. Coady, “Defining Terrorism,” in Terrorism: The Philosophical Issues, edited by Igor Primoratz (London: Palgrave, 2004) and for acceptance C. A. J. Coady, Morality and Political

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the definition in that many people would treat the proclamation of a serious intent to inflict violent acts on non-combatants as itself a terrorist act. Nonetheless, X is not normally to be identified with the threat to do X, and correctly calling something a terrorist threat shows only that it is a threat made by a terrorist or that it is a threat the projected content of which is a terrorist act. Similarly, a threat to murder someone is not itself an act of murder. On the other hand, it might be argued that a sufficiently alarming threat to torture someone is itself a form of torture, and here the argument and our intuitions are influenced by the fact that some forms of the sort of distress caused by torture can already be aroused by the threat of it. For my tactical definition, in fact, a good deal turns on whether a threat can be a form of violence, and this in its turn depends on how one defines violence. I have elsewhere offered a restrictive definition of violence (in contrast to expansive definitions such as “structural violence”) and would resist the idea that any form of harming or even deliberate harming counts as violence, but I allow that there is room for a category of psychological violence where threats or intimidations have a forceful and immediate harmful effect upon the recipient.³² Where threats of terrorist acts (in the more obvious sense) have this sort of effect, they are candidates for classification as terrorist acts. Somewhat similar questions can be raised about planning and attempts. Again, the parallel with “murder” seems instructive since a threat, plan, or attempt directed at a murder is not a murder, and since many terrorist acts are a sort of murder (on some plausible definitions of murder), then we should expect that plans, threats, and attempts directed to a terrorist act as defined earlier would not themselves be terrorist acts. Nor can plans or attempts be seen as themselves inflicting psychological harm in a fashion that would count them as violent acts, except where a failed attempt at terrorist act A involves the successful perpetration of another terrorist act B. It may be that someone who threatens, plans, or attempts unsuccessfully to carry out a terrorist act is commonly thought of as a “terrorist”; indeed, there may be reasons for the laws against terrorism to consider them so and

Violence (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). My argument here for limited inclusion now seems to tilt the balance. But perhaps, like other “great souls,” I should simply disdain this inconsistency. As Ralph Waldo Emerson so wisely put it: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, SelfReliance (1841). ³² C. A. J. Coady, Morality and Political Violence, ch. 2.

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include such terms as “terrorism” and “terrorist” within their legal proscriptions of such threats, plans, or attempts, but it still makes sense, and seems a more accurate description of what was done, to say that such a person has threatened, planned, or attempted a terrorist act, but not succeeded in carrying it out. In any case, perhaps this is an instance where for much of our discussion it doesn’t matter too much whether we stretch or restrict the definition of “terrorism” or “terrorist” for certain contexts as long as we understand what is involved in those contexts. So, I think it best not to include threats, planning, or attempts in my definition, but feel relatively unscathed if others disagree. Threats can then fall slightly outside the focal meaning into the penumbra of meanings close to the focal area. Another interesting phenomenon that falls within this penumbra and has been somewhat more in evidence in recent times is that of hoax “terrorist” acts that are meant not as bad jokes but as often successful attempts to alarm or intimidate immediate targets and perhaps wider audiences. The sending of sinister-looking letter or parcel “bombs” that mimic more or less closely genuinely lethal weapons is the classic case. One of the more extreme cases occurred on October 24, 2018 when clumsily constructed pipe bombs, some apparently containing real explosive material, were posted to a number of prominent Americans somewhat on the political left, such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and George Soros. There was apparently very little chance of these actually being detonated by the recipients opening them, and indeed some other earlier incidents in this category contained substances that only looked dangerous.³³ These “hoaxes” were pretty certainly meant to cause a degree of distress to the recipients, but for most of them it was probably short-lived, and certainly vastly less serious than the impact of actual well-constructed bombs or poisoned letters. These sorts of examples should be distinguished from other instances of posted missives that have contained materials that were poisonous to touch and were no form of hoax at all. The anthrax-filled letters posted to two Democratic Senators and several news organizations in the USA in September 2001 are cases in point. They killed five people and injured others, and were palpably terrorist acts.³⁴

³³ See William K. Rashbaum, “Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and CNN Offices Are Sent Pipe Bombs,” The New York Times (October 28, 2018). ³⁴ See Amerithrax Investigative Summary, The United States Department of Justice (February 19, 2010). https://www.justice.gov/archive/amerithrax/docs/amx-investigative-sum mary.pdf.

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A fourth clarification is of the phrase in the definition: “ordinarily committed or inspired by an organized group.” The first point is that “inspired” has been added to my formulations in earlier publications lest “committed by” suggests that the whole group or its leadership must commit the act or directly authorize or sponsor the act; sometimes, it will be the group that promotes, endorses, or positively sponsors the act as its own, even if it is carried out by an individual or a small group of members or sympathizers. But in other contexts the “organized group” may not even itself be aware of the act in advance, yet it may be their writings or other messages that have intentionally motivated those who commit the act: if al-Qaeda or ISIS calls for terrorist acts to be committed by its supporters throughout the world, then when someone unknown to the leadership carries out such an act in its name, that may be enough to satisfy the definition. I say “may be” since we need to take account of some varieties of what are often called “lone wolf” attacks. These are not merely acts by individuals, but, as the lone wolf metaphor suggests, they are acts carried out in isolation from the pack. This isolation can take several forms, but the most interesting from the point of view of our definition is that in which the individual is not only unconnected organizationally but also relatively adrift ideologically and politically. Consider the hostage event in Sydney, Australia in December 2014, in which a lone individual invaded a café in the center of Sydney and held seventeen people hostage with a gun while he displayed an Islamic flag and made some hostages read aloud to camera various semi-coherent messages about the Middle East. After a shot was fired inside the café, police stormed the café and killed the gunman, though two of the hostages were killed. This episode caused some media confusion about whether to call the episode terrorist or not, partly because the lone perpetrator, Man Haron Monis, did not approximate to the usual picture of an Islamist terrorist. He was not a disaffected youth, but a weird, probably deranged middle-aged man with a criminal record who was facing charges of being an accessory to the murder of his former wife and multiple charges of sexual assault. His previous public activities denouncing Western interventions in the Middle East were mostly viewed by authorities as publicity-seeking stunts, and as a refugee from Iran he was a Shiite, and hence an unlikely adherent to ISIS, though he had recently declared himself a convert to Sunni Islam. He apparently meant to display the ISIS flag, but brought the wrong Muslim flag to the café. All this strongly tends to show how remote his act was from being committed by an organized group, and it is even dubiously inspired by one. In this respect, it is also noteworthy that for some time afterwards no extremist Islamic group

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claimed his act for their cause. On the other hand, the hostages were innocent people and the death of one of them fits part of the tactical definition (the other death was accidentally caused by police). Even so, his strange personality makes one wonder both about any connection to the ISIS cause and the centrality of any political motivation to his acts. Indeed, so erratic was his behavior that it has been seriously alleged that he had previously approached Australian security organizations offering to act as an informer. Of course, some of the palpable terrorists more fully committed politically to organizations like ISIS or al-Qaeda may well be as mentally disturbed as Monis, and as obsessed with self-promotion (as indeed may be some members of national military forces that commit terrorist acts), and the depth of their religious or ideological knowledge is often also very shallow. So, Monis and some other “lone wolf” perpetrators may be said to commit terrorist acts on the periphery of the conceptual range I am defining with the tactical definition, and I allow room for this with the adverb “ordinarily.” A fifth clarification concerns the scope of the term “political” in the definition. The slogan “the personal is the political” was fashionable in the 1960s and 1970s principally to mark the importance of having political concerns about areas of “private” or personal life that had been regarded as off-limits to state intervention. It was a typical slogan of “second-wave” feminism (though there is much debate about who originated the expression) expressing concerns about domestic violence against women and other aspects of male oppression of women and the often-unacknowledged societal structural support for it. It was also sometimes understood as a call to collective action rather than merely individual (“personal”) responses. There was undoubted value in such appeals, and there continues to be a need to promote public awareness and political action against such things as domestic violence. But two important points need to be made about the slogan. The first is that the very slogan has to distinguish between the personal and the political in order to make its point, so that there is already some implausibility in any wholesale reduction of the personal sphere into the political. What the slogan aims to do is to mobilize support for people to get the power of the government and its agencies and laws to deal with abuses that have hitherto been considered beyond its concern: the point being that matters of grave injustice and injury should be a concern of government (and its agencies, such as police) in areas previously thought not to involve such injustice. That said, however, there is every reason in the history, for example, of twentieth-century totalitarian governments to insist that there

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should be areas of citizens’ activities and strivings that remain at a distance from state control and surveillance. The fight to remove the state’s punitive powers over such “offenses” as adultery, homosexual acts, adverse political commentary, and disturbing acts of artistic freedom has required a separation of politics (in one important sense) from areas of personal freedom. The sense of politics that I want to invoke in connection with terrorism is precisely that to do broadly with governmental power, either sought or entrenched. A final clarification concerns the reading that should be given to the intention specified in it. Though an act must be intended to harm noncombatants in order to count as terrorist, there may be disputes about whether those harmed are non-combatants, and part of this we shall explore in Chapter 4. So it may appear that whether some acts are terrorist (and their perpetrators, terrorists) depends on what the agents believe. In philosophical jargon, this is the question whether in such sentences as “The ISIS operatives intended to kill innocent people in that attack” the context governed by the verb “intended” is to read as opaque or transparent. Less technically, does terrorist status turn on objective facts about the nature of the target or on the attackers’ subjective beliefs? Where an attacker mistakenly believes their targets to be somehow combatants, does this mean they are not a terrorist? (Though this is not the same question as whether the attack is justified or excusable, even if there are some connections between the two questions.) Here, as elsewhere in discussion of intention, the nature of the mistake is important. I would hold that if the mistake is factual, then the attack is not an act of terrorism, but if it is conceptual, then the attack is. If a soldier shoots an innocent civilian who has been forcibly dressed in an enemy uniform and shoved into the line of fire as a decoy, the soldier’s action should not be called terrorist; but someone who shoots the enemy’s babies because they regard all the enemy as collectively guilty is palpably a terrorist. In the former case, the agent’s action involved an ordinary, understandable (if tragic) factual mistake; in the latter case, the agent (if sincere) is conceptually confused, and the confusion should not be allowed to infect our characterization of the type of action. In both cases, there is a false belief but its character and origin are different. Another way of putting it is that there should be a bias in favor of the objective characterization of the victim’s status in determining whether the agent intended to kill a combatant or non-combatant, though there will be exceptions for such “factual” mistakes such as the example of the soldier and the forcibly disguised victim mentioned above. There will of course be gray areas in the application

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of this factual–conceptual distinction, but it provides sufficient guidance for clarifying the tactical definition, and explaining why we sometimes seem to be using a subjective criterion and at other times an objective one. It also leaves room for reasonable discussion of whether certain acts can be regarded as terrorist or not, depending on the arguments for determining what the status of the victims actually was. This is relevant to the “Too Narrow” objection (a) considered in Chapter 2. These clarifications deal with some uncertainties or indeed objections that a reader might well feel or that have been raised by critics. In Chapter 2, I will consider further objections that can mostly be grouped under two headings. Both are objections of scope: the first claims that the definition is too narrow and the second that it is too broad.

Coady.

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2 Further Objections The Tactical Definition Too Broad? Too Narrow?

Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and you know your way about; you approach the same place from another side, and no longer know your way about. Ludwig Wittgenstein¹ In this chapter, the tactical definition of terrorism that was given, clarified, and defended against certain objections in Chapter 1 faces the challenge posed by two widespread forms of objection that need to be considered, the exploration of which helps show its role and merits.

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Definition Too Narrow There are a class of objections that raise counter-examples in which ordinary language, or the objector’s intuitions and arguments, purport to show that certain acts should count as terrorist where my definition disallows them.

(a) Terrorism against the Non-Innocent Seumas Miller has argued, for instance, that targeted killings and violent torture by government agents of dissidents who have been using non-violent methods to achieve justice or even to bring about the removal of the government are clearly terrorist, yet the dissidents are not innocent.² Virginia Held cites the suicide-bombing attack upon the United States marine base in Beirut, Lebanon in 1983 which killed 241 American

¹ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd edition, translated G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958). ² Seumas Miller, Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 38.

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servicemen, and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, as cases of terrorism in which combatants were the targets.³ Stephen Nathanson has responded to Miller’s South African example and a similar one concerning attacks upon those connected with the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal in 1984 by pointing to a significant ambiguity in his use of innocence.⁴ If the behavior of the South African dissidents can be plausibly viewed by their opponents as actively prosecuting an evil, then they are at least candidates for combatant status and hence for legitimate counter-attack. (The form of the attack could be criticized as grossly excessive on moral grounds, of course, as in the case of torture, which is condemnable whether used against combatants or non-combatants.) Because the government in this example does not in fact have a just cause in its war against the African National Congress, they are clearly in the wrong in attacking the demonstrators, but that doesn’t mean the attack is terrorist. Terrorism is not the only form of wrongful use of violence (if indeed it is always wrong). If we regard the government’s view of the protestors as prosecuting an evil in the light of the government’s beliefs that the protest represents a major threat to civil order, violation of the security laws, and so on, then the government agents’ violent response to them may not provide a counter-example to the tactical definition; it is clearly different to a similar attack upon a crowd of black shoppers going about their normal business at a market. This is not to say the police attack on the protestors is not a great wrong, since the government is perversely mistaken in thinking that the protest is an evil of any sort. Indeed, if we think (correctly) that the non-violence of the demonstration makes it palpably obvious that the protestors are not in any way prosecuting an evil, then we have to regard them as innocent, and again the tactical definition is intact in declaring the government’s actions terrorist. Nathanson’s line of argument defuses Miller’s objection, but it is also worth calling attention to the fact that the protestors, while they remain non-violent, are not combatants or non-innocents in a relevant way because they are not engaged in, or supporting, any form of violent action. When we speak of noninnocence in the context of terrorism, we are standardly concerned with the status of persons who are liable to violent treatment because they bear some

³ Virginia Held, How Terrorism Is Wrong: Morality and Political Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 55. ⁴ Stephen Nathanson, Terrorism and the Ethics of War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 51–55.

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sort of responsibility for the performance of violent acts (whether justified or not), hence the relevance of the contrast combatant–non-combatant. We are not interested in uses of “non-innocence” that may relate to other forms of wrongdoing; the fact, for instance, that some people have gained influential academic positions with fraudulent credentials, or that a large group of persons are involved in widespread tax-avoidance, has no relevance to whether they are legitimately subject to violent military or political police attack. It’s a stretch at the very least to claim that the non-violent South African protestors are involved in any sort of attack even if they were considered (mistakenly) to be engaged in disruptive political wrongdoing. No doubt some people might regard any form of demonstration against governmental policy or practice that is unauthorized or involves even peaceful civil disobedience as akin to violence in some extended sense of the term. This connects with the point that it is important for the understanding of terrorism whether we measure innocence/non-combatant status objectively or subjectively; that is, in terms of what is the case or what is believed to be the case. As argued in Chapter 1, I think we tend to measure it mostly objectively and partly subjectively, depending upon whether the false belief about innocence or non-combatant status is attributable more to factual error or to conceptual error, whether confused or perverse. But who is right about the objective judgment will obviously be a matter of dispute from case to case. Held’s examples also seem to contain a tacit but contentious assumption of innocence. She thinks the fact that these attacks upon US military personnel are “routinely offered as examples of terrorism”⁵ shows the defects of the tactical definition, but, on the contrary, such routine reactions should be viewed with suspicion. It is understandable that any nation will regard “unprovoked” attacks upon their armed forces as outrageous, especially in what they see as “peacetime,” and reach for the strongest terms of condemnation they can find. In the case of the United States, this is compounded by the “American exceptionalist” conviction, held, if often unconsciously, by many Americans that the nation offers the world a uniquely benign mission of security and civilization. In the Beirut case, the US “peace-keeping” troops were widely perceived by locals as actively favoring the Maronite Catholic faction in the Lebanon civil war and US naval gunfire had supported Lebanese army action. Those who see the US troops in their midst as foreign elements engaged in coercive violence ⁵ Virginia Held, How Terrorism Is Wrong: Morality and Political Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 17.

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or the standing threat of it can, accepting the tactical definition, plausibly argue that attacks upon those troops are not terrorist. Those who see them, in spite of their uniforms, arms, and deployment for foreign political purposes, as being in context non-combatants or innocents can understandably describe attacks upon them as terrorist and still accept the tactical definition. What is difficult is to admit their role in coercive deployment of violence but still insist that armed resistance to it is terrorist. Similar points can be made about the awful 2013 attack on the British soldier Lee Rigby, mentioned in Chapter 1 in connection with double standards, who was hacked to death by two Islamist extremists shouting slogans against British military involvement in Afghanistan. UK politicians and media described the attack as a terrorist act, but, although it deserved to be condemned, it is doubtful that it was a terrorist act. The soldier had served in Afghanistan and the attackers saw themselves as using violence against violators of a national sovereignty and a communal identity, a clearly political motivation. It is not surprising that the unfortunate Rigby was viewed as a combatant since not only had he served in Afghanistan and was still in the army, but he was also working as a recruiter. Some would argue that warriors well away from the battle ground are no longer combatants, but it is difficult to see how that point could be conceded by Western governments who condone or participate in the drone bombing of merely suspected Taliban or al-Qaeda “combatants,” or indeed “any military-aged male in a strike zone” in rural Pakistan and elsewhere.⁶ The discussion of these objections suggests the influence of an idea of terrorism as connected to any illegitimate deployments of political violence, or, in terms of just war theory, any violations of the jus ad bellum or the jus in bello. This would account for a tendency, possibly at work in the objections of Miller and Held, toward classifying certain morally repellent acts of violence as terrorist that the tactical definition does not. Such a concept may be coherent, but it has the huge disadvantage that all wars and revolutions that failed the tests of the jus ad bellum would consist only of terrorist acts. Against this, it is important to allow that a state or a sub-state group can be engaged in violence that is, all things considered, unjustified, but nonetheless be scrupulous in respecting non-combatant immunity. Some revolutions or state repressions may fail one or several of the jus ad bellum conditions, in being disproportionate or too hasty a resort to violence even in a good cause, ⁶ Joe Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” New York Times 29 (2012).

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or in having little prospect of success or in other respects, but nonetheless their agents may “fight fair” in their tactics by respecting the immunity of non-combatants. Neither side can then be accused of terrorism, though one or both may be in the wrong about fighting at all.

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(b) Political Motive Too Restrictive The reference to a political motive or context for the terrorist act has been rejected as too narrow, especially by those who want to include religious motives within its scope. They point to recent militant Islamic fundamentalist outrages as evidence that religious terrorism is distinct from political terrorism. But the fact is that even where there is a prominent religious factor involved in such terrorist acts, what the terrorists seek by their acts is invariably a political goal, as long as politics is not construed too narrowly; for example, as essentially secular in containing no reference to religious motivations. Terrorism in Northern Ireland had religious elements but it was predominantly aimed at political objectives such as republican unification of Ireland or loyalist continued integration with the UK, and similarly for al-Qaeda’s terrorist campaigns which have such political objectives as the removal of Western bases and invading forces in the Middle East, or the liberation of Palestine from Israeli control, or more extremely the destruction of the current state of Israel. (There will be more discussion of the role of religion in war and terrorism is Chapter 8.) Some critics who raise the religious objection are also concerned that the political focus of the definition rules out criminal terrorism. Igor Primoratz is one of these, and in criticizing my approach he says: “the method of coercive intimidation by infliction of violence on innocent persons has often been used in non-political contexts: one can speak of religious terrorism (e.g., that of the Hizballah) or of criminal terrorism (e.g., that of the Mafia).”⁷ Regarding religious terrorism, he immediately largely concedes the point by allowing that “much” religious terrorism can “perhaps” be subsumed under the political, but denies that this is true of criminal terrorism. In fact, the contexts where we are most drawn to speak of criminals as engaging in terrorist tactics are precisely those in which the criminals gear their violence to political objectives, as is the case when criminal drug gangs in Colombia ⁷ Igor Primoratz, Terrorism: A Philosophical Investigation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 23.

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attack innocent people in order to put pressure upon the government. (Insofar as the drug gangs are engaged in a sort of war on the government—and the government on them—government officials such as ministers may not count as innocent, but attacks upon their family members would so count.) The Mafia’s violence was commonly directed against police or rival groups or individuals who count as enemy “combatants” and they tended to avoid “civilians” as complicating matters too greatly. A great deal of everyday criminal violence is indeed directed at innocent people: victims of assault, rape, and murder are typically completely innocent. But it would be most unusual for the perpetrators of rape or battery, for instance, to be described as terrorists. Primoratz and others who make much of the intent to create fear in a group other than the direct victims would rule many such cases out because that intent is absent, but criminal acts where that motivation is present would most plausibly be describable as terrorist only where there was present some agenda with a political flavor, such as might occur when an attack upon an innocent person took place in the context of “gang wars.” Moreover, the history of the use of the term “terrorist” clearly locates it within the realm of the political, as indeed Primoratz’s own account of that history has shown.⁸ Nonetheless, the Primoratz objection is interesting in raising an issue about the point of the definition. He is interested in grounds for a certain sort of overall condemnation (supposing that terrorism can be shown to be immoral, at least for him, in most cases), whereas I am principally interested in the way the concept is enmeshed in the political realm where it has its origins in general usage and contemporary discussion.

(c) Non-Intentional Terrorism? A final and very important objection is sympathetic to much of the thrust of my tactical definition (and several others that rely heavily on the idea that terrorism involves intentionally harming non-combatants), but those making this objection regard the tactical definition as too narrow for interesting reasons. This objection urges us to classify as terrorist acts those that are unintentional, but gravely negligent or reckless about lethal or extremely damaging effects upon non-combatants. David Rodin has most persuasively presented the case for this definitional treatment by arguing that the wrong ⁸ Igor Primoratz, “What Is Terrorism?”, in Terrorism: The Philosophical Issues, edited by Igor Primoratz (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 23.

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done to non-combatants by so-called collateral damage is often the very same wrong that is done to them by attacks that intentionally target them.⁹ Since I regard a great deal of the widespread military resort to the category of collateral damage as morally indefensible (and have argued as much in detail elsewhere),¹⁰ I have a good deal of sympathy with the motivation behind Rodin’s carefully argued case.¹¹ This is because the plea of collateral damage is often used to justify attacks that “incidentally” kill large numbers of noncombatants with scant regard for proportionality or with insufficient concern for non-combatants. So Rodin and I agree that reckless and negligent resort to incidental collateral damage is to be condemned as a violation of the respect that is owed to non-combatant rights. And, for that matter, the same applies to accidental killing of non-combatants that is gravely negligent. Reckless deployment of drones aimed at combatants but with little regard for the likely effects on non-combatants nearby, or with insufficient evidence about who are combatants and who are not, should stand under almost as heavy moral condemnation as the intentional targeting of noncombatants. Likewise, the use of weapons that are ill-suited to discriminate combatants from non-combatants, and should have been known to be so, deserves severe moral condemnation, whatever the protests of lack of intention to attack non-combatants may be. Given this level of moral agreement, should I not concede the title terrorism to such “collateral” attacks? To do so would still deliver a serviceable concept of terrorism in terms of the conditions on a definition that I set out at the start of Chapter 1. Nonetheless, I do not think that Rodin’s proposal is as serviceable as the definition in terms of intention. There are several reasons for this. First, as Rodin admits, his account is further from ordinary usage than a definition in terms of intention to damage noncombatants. Such ordinary usage should not be totally constraining, but the more central elements in it such as the intention to kill or injure noncombatants should be given conceptual priority in order better to gain a purchase in broad debates about the morality and politics of terrorism and ⁹ David Rodin, “Terrorism without Intention,” Ethics, vol. 114, no. 4 (2004). ¹⁰ See C. A. J. Coady, Morality and Political Violence (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), ch. 7. ¹¹ I should note that despite this and other areas of agreement, Rodin and I disagree about how morally loaded a definition of terrorism should be: he thinks it can be an explicitly moral definition without entirely foreclosing further moral argument about use of the tactic, whereas I think we need to defend the principle of the immunity of non-combatants beyond propounding a definition that highlights their targeting. But in the end, we agree that terrorist tactics (with the intentional component) are gravely morally objectionable.

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counter-terrorism not only in academia, but even more importantly beyond it. Second, the emphasis on intentional harming in contrast to negligent or reckless harming mirrors, as Rodin concedes, the very common distinction in the criminal laws of numerous jurisdictions between murder and manslaughter (or in the United States between different degrees of “homicide”). This widespread legal practice is an acknowledgment of the central moral significance of intentional behavior. There are many things that are indirectly under our control, and law and morality are rightly concerned with them, but intentional acts are those we directly control and they enter into our purposes and plans in ways that reflect on our characters and moral status. Intentional actions that aim at harming others give those others particularly grave reasons for fear and preventive action. It is one thing to worry and take precautions about reckless or negligent drivers on the road; it is another even graver concern when there are drivers actually aiming to kill you. In either case, the outcome may be your death or severe injury (and this equality is a factor motivating Rodin’s proposal), but the lack of intention in the former case means that usually you will have more opportunity to avoid the outcome since systematic malevolence is not directed at you. For all these reasons, it seems to me better to maintain the tactical definition in its intentional form, but there are two further comments on Rodin’s case that seem appropriate. The first is that some instances of “collateral damage” are dubiously non-intentional. And the second is that Rodin is right to stress that the immunity of non-combatants to direct attack is based on a deep respect for their status so that something very important is violated by the infliction of reckless or negligent severe harms upon them. On the first point, we touch upon the so-called doctrine of double effect. This (the DDE, as it is sometimes called) has been the subject of intense philosophical debate in recent years involving complex defenses, critiques, and adjustments into which I cannot enter fully here.¹² The doctrine purports to show when unintended but foreseen (or reasonably foreseeable) bad side-effects of an otherwise morally legitimate action are morally permissible. But, as Elizabeth Anscombe pointed out with typical forcefulness many

¹² As discussed in the Introduction, there are significant debates around the value of the DDE, the significance of a distinction between doing and allowing, and the importance or unimportance of intention in the assessment of the moral status of acts. I recommend again Jeff McMahan’s paper on “Intention, Permissibility, Terrorism, and War” (Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 23, no. 1 (2009)) as a fine account of the debate and a strong defense of the significance of the DDE and of intention in the assessment of moral permissibility in relation to terrorism and war.

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years ago, we should not think of intentions and intentional action in too Cartesian a fashion.¹³ The context and circumstances of action can determine that an action is intentional even if agents avow that in the private realms of their minds they had directed their inner gaze thus rather than so. In a somewhat grisly example I have given elsewhere, consider a person who is obsessed with killing flies and who has nothing but a sledgehammer handy, and then seizes the opportunity when the fly alights on their friend’s bald head to smash the hammer down upon the fly and head. Such a person, unless hallucinating or suffering from temporary insanity, cannot reasonably plead that only the killing of the fly was what they intended. A doubleeffect story that treated the friend’s death as incidental killing would be seriously misleading, to say the least. And this remains true even if such a double-effect treatment concluded that the act was morally wrong because disproportionate. The self-evidently disproportionate nature of the act casts doubt upon the non-intentional claim rather than, or as well as, providing a post hoc rejection of permissibility. Either way of rejecting the permissibility involves being alert to what Anscombe, being rightly concerned with the phony denial of intention to harm or kill, labeled “double think about double effect.”¹⁴ And a second point about the DDE that is relevant to Rodin’s argument is that it is very important when thinking about incidental harming or killing to bear in mind that the innocent people who will be damaged by such sideeffects of otherwise legitimate actions are losing important rights or immunities that we should be very concerned to respect and honor. Rodin takes this to be a reason for skepticism about the DDE and thinks that such skepticism supports his proposal regarding terrorism. But I would argue that it is rather a reason to insist that statements of the DDE should stress what I have called a precondition that insists upon the restrictive underpinning of the permission that the DDE gives. So the DDE only comes into play permissively when the agent has satisfied themself that there are no other feasible ways of achieving the good end that do not involve the harmful sideeffects at all or do not involve as many such effects. Though this precondition is not stressed in modern debates as much as it should be, it has always been present to some extent in the just war tradition. The influential sixteenth-century theologian-philosopher Francisco de Vitoria puts it this ¹³ G. E. M. Anscombe, “War and Murder,” in Nuclear Weapons: A Catholic Response, edited by Walter Stein (London: Merlin, 1961), 57–58. ¹⁴ Anscombe, “War and Murder,” 57.

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way: “It is never lawful to kill innocent people, even accidentally and unintentionally, except when it advances a just war which cannot be won in any other way” (my italics).¹⁵ There are indeed interesting borderline cases that involve what might be called secondary intentions. This could be illustrated by one possible interpretation of the infliction of civilian deaths in the 1916 Irish Easter uprising. Historians have been puzzled by the rebels’ seizing of the Dublin General Post Office as the key site for their offensive since it had no military significance, and was inferior as a redoubt to many other possible sites. In addition, it was not only primarily a civilian asset itself, but it was so central to civilian activities that a battle against the loyalist forces was bound to involve large non-combatant casualties in crossfire. Let us suppose that the revolutionaries chose the Post Office for its symbolic significance and did not themselves intend to target such non-combatants, but chose the site partly because they foresaw and welcomed their probable deaths and injuries in crossfire as contributing to the cause since the public would blame the casualties principally on the loyalist forces. If this was the case, then the rebel leadership had a secondary intention to help bring about those deaths and injuries by their choice of the Post Office, and that raises the question of whether their activities were terrorist. Rodin would certainly answer “Yes,” and I am strongly inclined to agree with him, but that is because of the element of intention involved. On the other hand, if their choice of the Post Office was the result of amateur incompetence, or shortsightedness in thinking only of the strategic symbolic significance of capturing and commanding the GPO as a headquarters, and they had little comprehension of the high probability of civilian deaths (though no doubt they should have), then they certainly bear some culpability for those deaths, but not, for me, to the point of terrorism. Rodin would presumably disagree. Of course, it is a further matter whether and to what degree the British troops bore responsibility for civilian deaths. There are plausible reports that some British troops deliberately killed non-involved Irish civilians; if the reports are true, those actions of the troops were terrorist. A related twist to the scope of the tactical definition concerns the status of what Christopher Finlay has described as “mediated terrorism.”¹⁶ He means

¹⁵ Francisco de Vitoria, Political Writings, edited by Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 316. ¹⁶ Christopher J. Finlay, Terrorism and the Right To Resist: A Theory of Just Revolutionary War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 299.

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this to characterize an act by, say, justified insurgents which does not directly target non-combatants or innocent civilians but which intends it and otherwise non-terrorist acts against the enemy state to provoke that state into reprisal attacks on their own innocent civilians, thus moving those victims into supporting or more actively supporting the insurgents. The enemy state thus clearly perpetrates terrorist acts, but the insurgents have intentionally provoked their doing so. Finlay cites some of Franz Fanon’s arguments as endorsement of this mediated terrorism.¹⁷ Such acts seem akin to Rodin’s extension of terrorism that I have sometimes called “neo-terrorist” in that they have a kind of indirect structure, but their structure is really different. Neo-terrorist acts do not intentionally target non-combatants but are irresponsible with regard to the violent known side-effects, whereas the mediated terrorist acts in contrast involve a direct intention to bring about non-combatant casualties. The indirectness of the mediated act consists in one of the intentions of the act being dependent on another implementing it. This, I think, makes mediated terrorism a form of terrorism since it is a case of someone deliberately provoking or inciting someone else to do the wrongful act in their stead. It is akin to the role and acts of a husband who wants his wife murdered but for squeamish or reputational reasons will not do the deed himself, so brings it about that another party murders her for him. Finlay cites a real-life example that has features in common with this but at another remove still. It concerns Nelson Mandela’s description of one of the potentially beneficial outcomes of revolutionary violent acts by the group MK that did not involve attacks on non-combatants or their property but rather on government economic resources and buildings “and other symbols of apartheid.”¹⁸ These benefits would, he believed, inspire the oppressed people and also, by provoking mass reprisals, produce sympathy for the liberation cause in other countries so that greater foreign “pressure would be brought to bear on the South African Government.”¹⁹ It is ambiguous in Mandela’s statement of the case whether the benefit of increasing foreign support in reaction to the expected mass reprisals was an intended outcome of the non-terrorist attacks or merely a welcome outcome of reprisals that the MK in no way intended. One test of this, though not decisive, is whether the MK attacks would have gone ahead even if there was

¹⁷ Finlay, Terrorism and the Right to Resist, 106. ¹⁸ Finlay, Terrorism and the Right to Resist, 298. ¹⁹ Finlay, Terrorism and the Right to Resist, 298.

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reason to believe that mass reprisals would not have taken place. Suppose that were the case, and that further, in the event of the mass reprisals, the MK leadership would have been genuinely grieved at the slaughter of innocent non-combatants even as they welcomed the increases in overseas pressure on the apartheid government. Then, I think, they would not be guilty of mediated terrorism at all. On the other hand, if the mass reprisals did not occur and the leadership were deeply disappointed at that, and perhaps considered attacking their own people and disguising it as a government attack in order to get the foreign support, then their initial attack on government targets did embody the intention to provoke a terrorist attack by the government for their strategic purpose and is itself mediated terrorism.

Definition Too Broad

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(a) The Status of Extreme Fear Some have objected to the absence of reference to the creation of fear, or extreme fear, in the definition and others to the absence of further specification of the terrorists’ aims in acting or their ways of achieving their objectives. This criticism sees the definition as too narrow in the sense that it doesn’t specify enough detail, but of course it is really an objection to the definition’s being too wide in scope or extension. These responses are most interesting in coming from those who advocate a version of the tactical definition close in spirit to my own. They make much of a specific type of intended impact, to the point where we might call them impact definitions. Most put a strong emphasis on the intent to create fear (after all, we are talking of “terror-ism”) and sometimes the intent to influence the behavior of a group other than that specifically attacked. So, Igor Primoratz, in a typical definition of this kind, defines terrorism as: “the deliberate use of violence, or threat of its use, against innocent people, with the aim of intimidating some other people into a course of action they otherwise would not take.”²⁰ The inclusion of fear (“intimidation”) is understandably supported by appeal to widespread reactions to terrorist attacks and by the supposed ²⁰ Igor Primoratz, “What Is Terrorism?”, in Terrorism: The Philosophical Issues, edited by Igor Primoratz (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 24.

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etymology of the word. But widespread fear is occasioned by many things, and is not necessarily part of the intention with which terrorists act, as I shall argue below. As for etymology, the origins of the term are often sourced to the French Revolution and its “reign of terror,” but, as Alex Bellamy has claimed, the characterization of Robespierre’s savage regime of “justice” as terror was largely the work of its opponents.²¹ Far from being a concerted effort to instill fear in the populace by attacking the innocent, most of the regime’s executions and imprisonments between 1792 and 1794 were supposedly legally inflicted upon those convicted of what were defined as treasonable offenses. Of course, very much of this legal process was arbitrary and unjust and the punishment cruel and unjustly disproportionate by a higher standard than that prevailing in much revolutionary law and practice. The main role of fear in The Terror seems to have been that of fueling the paranoid fantasies of the revolutionary leaders, motivating them to root out their real or imagined enemies. All in all, the supposed revolutionary source for the inclusion of intent to produce fear in the definition of “terrorism” lacks plausibility.²² Apart from the historical origins of the term, it is understandable that the word “terrorism” would be thought to have an inevitable semantic connection with the creation of extreme fear, but there are many expressions that enter the language with some semantic connection signaled by the word initially used, but do not have that connection in their subsequent meaning. For example, the term “two by four” began life with an intrinsic reference to the dimensions four inches wide by two inches thick, but it is commonly used simply to refer to a smallish plank of wood roughly twice as wide as it is thick. Even in more technical carpentry circles the “two by four” plank is often about 11.5 inches wide by 3.5 inches thick or nearer to “three by one.” The anti-revolutionaries who are said to have introduced the word “terrorism” to discredit their enemies could be seen as beginning a similar process. Admittedly, the widespread effect of inducing fear is certainly a feature of what terrorist acts often produce, and I will have more to say about this when we come to discuss the topic of what is claimed to be “morally distinctive” about terrorism. But common as the fear reaction may be, it does not seem to be true that this is what terrorists invariably aim at. A common revolutionary aim, for instance, and one sanctified by the declared strategy of communist insurrectionists in the past, has been to ²¹ Alex J. Bellamy, Fighting Terror: Ethical Dilemmas (London: Zed Books, 2008), 35. ²² See Bellamy, Fighting Terror, 35–36.

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employ terrorist attacks to create anger and outrage and thereby to provoke enemy overreactions that alienate the citizenry from the government. Those tactical definitions, like Primoratz’s, that include intent to create fear would have to say that such attacks upon non-combatants were not terrorist. This is distinctly counter-intuitive. Moreover, many terrorist attacks are simply aimed at killing the most accessible members of the enemy population as revenge for the killings or other wrongs that they believe have been done to their own people. Other terrorist attacks seem primarily aimed at communicating or showing something important to some group that the terrorists regard as a constituency, for instance the message that those in the constituency are not alone or impotent in the face of perceived oppression. As Finlay puts it: “But terrorism can also be addressed to an audience that the terrorists hope will sympathize. An attack might impress or inspire the constituency in the name of which the terrorists claim to act, especially where rival factions within a wider resistance struggle to compete with one another to be seen as the strongest and most effective.”²³ Or the message may be aimed at showing foreign groups, either actually or potentially sympathetic, that the insurgency still has to be taken into account. Given these facts, it is better not to include intended fear as a necessary element in the definition, especially since there should be a preference for definitions of contentious political concepts that leave as much room as possible for empirical investigation into the actual intentions and motives of political actors. Making the fear-producing intent crucial restricts such investigations too greatly. The intended effect of seeking to influence a group other than those attacked is a different matter. On one interpretation, it must be the case, since if the terrorist act is intended to kill all in group A, the political purposes it serves must be aimed at living members of some other group B; this is so inherent in the circumstances of such an attack that it is hardly worth building into the meaning of “a terrorist act.” On the other hand, if the act is not certain to kill all of group A, and the perpetrators know that, then it may well be that they are aiming to bring about the political results they seek, at least in part, through the agency of those in group A who survive. So the reference to seeking to influence a different group than the one attacked is either redundant or mistaken.

²³ Finlay, Terrorism and the Right to Resist, 251–252.

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As for the fear-inducing motive, it will not, for the most part, matter greatly for the value of related forms of tactical definition if the fear aim is included in the definition with some qualification “sometimes intended” or even more dubiously “commonly intended.” My own preference again is for a definition that leaves as much as possible regarding terrorist intentions and motives open to empirical research. One issue that is indirectly related to the fear outcome is the claim made by some theorists that terrorist acts are expressive. The term “expressive” can denote different things in different contexts; if it means that some terrorists attack civilians or non-combatants merely to vent their rage or frustration about their lack of success in war or other political endeavors, then that may well be true of some terrorist acts and serve as a corrective to the idea that they must aim to create fear in order to achieve specific ends. On the other hand, “expressive” is sometimes used to insist that terrorist acts are communicative in intent, and this point is sometimes made in terms of the need to “send a message.” The claim here is sufficiently broad to incorporate all the political aims that agents may have in deploying terrorist tactics since presumably they want to get something across to a target “audience,” even if it is only their rage at other failures or at having been forgotten. This is even compatible with those instances of “silent terrorism” where the perpetrators don’t identify themselves as the attackers, so that the message is anonymous and seriously incomplete. Yet so broad is this interpretation of the communicative point that it is unnecessary to include it in the definition.

(b) The Inclusion of State Terrorism Then there is the objection that, far from being a virtue of the tactical definition that it makes it possible to speak of state violence, it is a defect because only non-state agents can commit terrorist acts. This objection is essentially a resort to the political status account of terrorism that I have already briefly criticized, but more needs to be said under this heading. It seems to me basically a form of political myopia brought about either by an uncritical attachment to the overwhelming value of state sovereignty or sometimes to the undoubted values of democratic rule. Political status definitions typically claim that terrorism is the use of political violence by sub-state groups against the state, or sometimes, more rarely, merely against democratic states. Admittedly, the objection does capture something about

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the common discourse on terrorism that concentrates heavily upon nonstate groups and individuals using violent means to achieve objectives against state authorities. This is most plausibly seen, however, as a feature of the political climate in which the discourse frequently operates rather than as a definitional feature. If you are in a relatively stable society, violent threats to its order by groups inside or outside the polity will often have more salience than most uses of state violence against insiders or outsiders. This picture will look very different if the stability is maintained by brutal tyranny which the sub-groups are resisting. Outsiders seldom regarded the violence used by the initial “Arab Spring” revolutionaries in the 2011 upheavals in the Middle East as terrorism, though the besieged dictators regularly denounced it as such. In such cases, sympathetic observers see the state’s violence as suspect and at least open to the charge of terrorism. This illustrates the importance of determining what type of political violence counts as terrorist, not which agents are resorting to it. This importance remains even when the state agent concerned is a democracy. Walter Laqueur, for instance, whilst disclaiming the need for definitions, insists that terrorism “is an attempt to destabilize democratic societies and to show that their governments are impotent.”²⁴ As a conceptual maneuver that would have the curious consequence that terrorism could never be directed against non-democratic regimes, an implication that would surely be absurd. It would also ignore the fact that the term “democratic societies” covers a multitude of states, many of whom have used terrorist tactics against other states and even against their own subjects. An extreme and paradoxical offshoot of the political status definition in recent times is involved in the widespread tendency to restrict the title of terrorist to certain types of “outsiders” so that even many sub-state actors within one’s own community who direct violent attacks on civilians will not count as terrorists or their killings as terrorist acts. This is a clear effect of the “war on terror” being directed at such outsiders. As we earlier noted with Glenn Greenwald’s reasons for dismissal of the whole discourse of terrorism, the habit is now becoming ingrained in the United States, and probably elsewhere to a lesser degree, of thinking that only Muslims can commit terrorist acts. By contrast, any serious violence by a Muslim immediately attracts the term “terrorist” even if no relevant political motive can be found. Greenwald cites the Charleston shootings of nine black Christian

²⁴ Walter Laqueur, “Reflections on Terrorism,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 65 (1986), 87.

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worshippers by Dylann Roof in June 2015 which were palpably terrorist by the standards of the tactical definition, but, he claims, the description was widely rejected in the US media on the bizarre grounds that Roof was not a Muslim extremist.²⁵ Recent publicity around shocking attacks by distinctly non-Muslim right-wing perpetrators such as the Christchurch, New Zealand slaughter on March 15, 2019 of fifty-one people at two mosques and nearby during Friday prayers by an alt-right white supremacist have effected a significant change in this narrow outlook, at least in many places. A less politically jaundiced version of a political status definition is defended by Louise Richardson, whose definition of terrorism is clearly a tactical one, since its most “crucial characteristic,” as she puts it, is “the deliberate targeting of civilians,”²⁶ but she also claims that terrorism “is the act of sub-state groups, not states.”²⁷ She admits that “this is a controversial point” and I would certainly reject it on the grounds already given, though our disagreement is mitigated by her admission that states “use terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy” by sponsoring sub-state groups’ employment of terrorist acts abroad, and themselves commit action “that is the moral equivalent of terrorism.”²⁸ She cites the Allied bombing campaigns of World War II, culmination in the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and sees such acts as “a deliberate effort to target civilian populations to achieve a political purpose.”²⁹ If so, what is the reason for her restrictive definition of terrorist acts? Rather mysteriously, she gives it as: “Nevertheless, if we want to have any clarity in understanding of the behaviour of terrorist groups, we must understand them as sub-state actors rather than states.”³⁰ I call this “mysterious” because it simply ignores the fact that states are themselves groups to be studied and the question whether ²⁵ Glenn Greenwald, “Refusal to Call Charleston Shootings ‘Terrorism’ Again Shows It’s a Meaningless Propaganda Term,” The Intercept (June 19, 2015). https://theintercept.com/2015/06/ 19/refusal-call-charleston-shootings-terrorism-shows-meaningless-propaganda-term. In reaction to this sort of myopia, some commentators in the USA have been calling “terrorist” the 2016 defiance of the National Parks government authority in Oregon by disgruntled farmers. A Los Angeles Times editorial criticized this description by accurately citing my definition of terrorist acts. Jesse Walker, “Op-Ed: Are the Activists Occupying Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon ‘Terrorists’?”, Los Angeles Times (January 6, 2016). The author seemed to me right since, although the defiant group were certainly armed, they had made no attacks or threats of attack upon “non-combatants.” At most, they threatened to defend themselves against any attack by government police or soldiers. Their actions were certainly weird, disruptive, foolish, and probably wrong, but eventually not terrorist. ²⁶ Louise Richardson, What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat (New York: Random House, 2006), 4. ²⁷ Richardson, What Terrorists Want, 5. ²⁸ Richardson, What Terrorists Want, 5. ²⁹ Richardson, What Terrorists Want, 5. ³⁰ Richardson, What Terrorists Want, 5.

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they are terrorist or not is just as open for analytic examination as the question whether sub-state groups are. Ruling out states for analysis on this issue simply reinforces the tendency to exempt states from the charge she rightly brings that they engage in morally equivalent acts to terrorist acts. Indeed, they are morally equivalent just because they are the same sort of act; that is, terrorist. The analytic utility (and clarity) of defining terrorist acts in such a way that they can be committed by states is even more starkly illustrated by taking examples of state violence against innocent civilians within its own jurisdiction, rather than parallel acts of state against state. States often respond to revolutionary violence, or even non-violent protests, with lethal violence against those who are not in any sense combatants: the Assad regime’s bombing of its own civilian populations that had the misfortune to be in rebel areas is only a recent example of a widespread tendency. Analytic clarity in the discussion of groups involved in such conflicts is unachievable if the definition of terrorism excludes such episodes and attends only to attacks on non-combatants by rebel groups. If, for some reason, one wants to concentrate only upon the violent political behavior of sub-state groups, then the use of the expression sub-state terrorism is readily available (and I shall employ it in Chapter 7). It is worth noting here that the use of the term “terrorist groups” is itself problematic. It has great currency, but its currency is politically loaded in just the way that political status definitions encourage. One uncertainty in the usage is whether a group is “terrorist” because it commits occasional terrorist acts (or even just one terrorist act); or must it be a systemic part of its repertoire of violent acts before the “terrorist” label is appropriate? Or does one or a few terrorist acts qualify for the label as long as they are spectacular? It seems to me the most helpful criterion here would be the systemic test.

(c) Property Terrorism? Some have argued that the reference to property in the tactical definition is mistaken and we should concentrate merely on severe harms to non-combatant persons, but severe harms to personal property, such as homes, can constitute severe harms to the person.³¹ Even severe harms to ³¹ One who objects to my inclusion of property in the definition is Jenny Teichman in “How to Define Terrorism,” Philosophy, vol. 64, no. 250 (1989), 512.

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community institutional property such as public facilities like dams, power stations, hospitals, transport capacities, and so on will often have major consequences for personal wellbeing. An interesting case that seems to me to come under the property condition and involves severe harm is attack upon objects of high artistic, religious, or historic significance.³² The cultural impact upon people of the deliberate damage or destruction of their cultural heritage is less direct than, say, the destruction of a hospital, but it is significant nonetheless, as so much anguish amongst indigenous communities at the loss of culture at the hands of colonizers can testify. Another significant aspect of property damage and destruction that has become prominent in discussion and has provoked widespread apprehension in the past twenty to thirty years is what has come to be called cyber warfare. The damage that can be done, by computer hacking and the like, to institutions that people rely upon not only for information but also for many of the essentials of life can be extremely serious, and of course individuals can be targeted directly. Some of the cyber warfare can be assimilated to the model of attacks of combatants upon combatants, as when American military intelligence or their allied spy networks target military or related networks in “enemy” countries like China, and vice versa. But targeting banking, health, or education facilities is a different matter altogether and makes innocent (non-combatant) people deliberately subject to possibly serious harms, and, where it has a political purpose, deserves the name of cyber terrorism. Of course, there is room for debate about what is or is not severe in the case of property terrorism, as there is with the seriousness of direct harms to the person, but this sort of borderline indeterminacy is to be expected. In some earlier inclusions of property in the definition I had omitted a reference to severity and utilized the notion of minor terrorism to deal with the present objection.³³ The inclusion of the severity qualification is a better way of dealing with the objection. If we omit the severity qualification, then we could speak of minor terrorism and admit that it might be morally justifiable in certain circumstances where major terrorism isn’t.

³² For stress upon this significance and cautionary regulations to protect such objects see Protection of Cultural Property: Military Manual, UNESCO (2016). ³³ Though I included it in my definition in Coady, Morality and Political Violence, 159.

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(d) Not Just Murder Then there is the objection that my definition is simply a definition of murder and does not catch the distinctive nature of terrorism. Robert Goodin, for instance, has claimed as much, saying that I am treating terrorist acts as “ordinary murder” and “terrorism seems worse than that somehow.”³⁴ He thinks I make a terrorist seem like “a common or garden lunatic gone on a killing spree.” But this criticism ignores the fact that the definition insists on a political motivation and on the non-combatant status of the victims (not to mention that the definition makes no reference to lunacy and implies a degree of rationality in the perpetrators). In addition, the definition’s reference to severe damage to property moves it further from “ordinary murder.”

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Concluding Remarks It may be worth mentioning in conclusion that what I have said in definitional clarification does not preclude certain exercises in typology. As already discussed with reference to Louise Richardson’s position, we could restrict discussions of terrorist acts to sub-state agents for certain purposes, and hence qualify our discourse by referring to sub-state terrorism (or terrorists). This would be consistent with maintaining a commitment to the tactical definition overall, though we should always be conscious that we have narrowed our focus for specific purposes. Similarly, we could attend to the sub-category of religious terrorism where religion can be shown to have a strong causal role in the perpetration of violent harm to innocents, though there are perils in doing so that will be examined in Chapter 8. Other concepts that might figure in a typology of terrorism could be “cyber terrorism,” “lone-wolf terrorism,” or even “revenge terrorism.” This concludes the treatment of my tactical definition, but there remain two other difficulties facing the sort of tactical definition I propose. The first concerns problems around the use of the concepts of non-combatant or innocent in the definition and another involves the criticism that a focus on definitional issues ignores a more important issue of meaning, namely that

³⁴ Robert E. Goodin, What’s Wrong with Terrorism? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 10.

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of the “distinctive significance” of terrorism. The question of this supposed distinctive significance has not only stimulated popular opinion but in recent times has also been the concern of serious intellectuals, including a number of philosophers. What is it, these thinkers ask, that makes terrorist acts so emotionally and morally confronting? This worry seeks to scrutinize terrorist acts for their meaning or significance in a way that goes beyond definition and aims at finding something distinctively different that marks off terrorist acts from other forms of violent deeds. In Chapter 3, we will examine this question in detail. The other objection, or cluster of objections, to do with the concepts of non-combatant or innocent will be addressed in Chapter 4.

Coady.

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3 Terrorism and Its Claims to “Distinctive Significance”

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We live in a time of terror, and contrary to what we see on television and allow ourselves to believe, the real goal of terror is not to kill people but to kill thought; to so demoralize a society that it implodes from within. John Lahr¹ The issue of fear discussed in Chapter 2 raises another question that has recently begun to receive closer philosophical and public attention. It seems related to definition but purports to go beyond it by asking: what is the distinctive significance of terrorism; why is it that we take the phenomenon so seriously and rank it so highly as a political and moral concern? This takes us partly into the territory of the moral status of terrorism, which we will treat later, but it has sufficient affinity to definitional questions to deal with now. Jeremy Waldron has made a contribution to this enterprise and so have Samuel Scheffler and Lionel K. McPherson.² There is also a related contribution of Karen Jones³ that I will discuss. In their different ways these authors reflect concerns that abide in less sophisticated forms in much political and public arenas. I will begin with Scheffler. Waldron’s proposal, and Jones’ analysis, as we shall see, have different orientations from each other and do not use the terminology of distinctive significance, but cover similar territory to that Scheffler seeks to capture, whereas McPherson takes a different tack altogether on the distinctiveness dimension. There are other philosophers who try to show some moral element in terrorist acts that mark ¹ John Lahr, “Questions for John Lahr,” The New Yorker (January 23, 2009). ² Jeremy Waldron, “Terrorism and the Uses of Terror,” in Torture, Terror, and Trade-Offs: Philosophy for the White House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Samuel Scheffler, “Is Terrorism Morally Distinctive?”, Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 14, no. 1 (2006); Lionel K. McPherson, “Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?”, Ethics, vol. 117, no. 3 (2007). ³ Karen Jones, “Trust and Terror,” in Moral Psychology: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory, edited by Peggy DesAutels and Margaret Urban Walker (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004).

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them off as distinctive resorts to violence, but many of them, though not all, tend to build the element into a definition and so are beyond the scope of my argument here, and would often be ruled out by my arguments for the tactical definition I favor and defend in Chapters 1 and 2. Igor Primoratz has discussed more briefly and effectively criticized some of these thinkers, and he also there criticizes Scheffler’s approach in a way that partially overlaps with my objections below, but with a different emphasis and without discussion of the potentially dangerous political consequences of Scheffler’s thesis.⁴

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Scheffler and Destabilizing the Existing Social Order Scheffler argues that it is possible to be relatively neutral about definitional matters and still pose his question. There are echoes here of Walter Laqueur’s approach mentioned in Chapter 2. Laqueur also disclaims any concern for definition but asserts that terrorism “is an attempt to destabilize democratic societies and to show that their governments are impotent.”⁵ This restriction to democratic societies, as we saw, creates serious problems about how to characterize terrorist attacks on non-democratic societies, problems that Scheffler avoids by taking a more general line on the destabilization account, applying it to all societies. To achieve neutrality about definition, Scheffler chooses certain examples of politically oriented violence that people “would not hesitate, prior to analysis, to classify as instances of terrorism”⁶ and he seeks to analyze what is distinctively morally repellent about them. Surprisingly, he doesn’t give any actual descriptions of such central examples, but borrows from elements in some common definitions (including Primoratz’s and mine) and then extrapolates from the etymology of “terrorism” to give some general characterizations that he thinks any such examples would have to meet. His answer to what is so morally wrong and distinctive is that such acts in such “a familiar range” are committed “in order to induce fear or terror in others, with the aim of destabilizing or degrading (or threatening to destabilize or degrade) an existing social order.”⁷ These he calls “the standard cases,” though curiously this nomenclature is not ⁴ Igor Primoratz, Terrorism: A Philosophical Investigation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), ch. 7. ⁵ Walter Laqueur, “Reflections on Terrorism,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 65, no. 1 (1986), 87. A more charitable interpretation of Laqueur’s remark could see it as claiming only that terrorist attacks on democratic societies aim at these effects. ⁶ Samuel Scheffler, “Is Terrorism Morally Distinctive?”, Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 14, no. 1 (2006), 2. ⁷ Scheffler, “Is Terrorism Morally Distinctive?”, 5.

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     “ ”

intended (he says) “to beg the very questions of definition that I said I would not be addressing.”⁸ I call this curious because a selection of standard cases to the exclusion of what others would equally readily pre-theoretically classify “unhesitatingly” as terrorist acts is an obvious definitional move, even if it is definition by selective paradigm case rather than explication of necessary and sufficient conditions. Significantly, many of these other excluded cases are clear counter-examples to Scheffler’s thesis, so he treats them as somehow peripheral instances of terrorism, or, for one set of cases, as not terrorism at all but “terror.” Scheffler’s strategy means that he excludes from consideration the numerous examples of (what would otherwise be) terrorist acts in which the aim of the perpetrators has nothing to do with “destabilizing or degrading an existing social order” such as terrorist acts (in the sense of the tactical definition) aimed at securing the release of political prisoners, or the removal of an occupying force, or the removal of an oppressive government. None of these need to aim at the degrading or destabilizing of the existing social order to which the victims belong; the attackers need not care about that social order, other than for its influence on the specific grievances they hope to remedy. Of course, the expression “destabilizing or degrading an existing social order” is open to unconstrained interpretations, and one can imagine political commentators who would view any removal of a government or pressured release of political prisoners as “destabilizing or degrading an existing social order.” I doubt, however, that Scheffler wants to count himself in that camp. Nor, as he admits, does a great deal of what is commonly called state terrorism have his favored aim; indeed, much of it aims to bolster the existing social order, and, for this reason, he wants to call it “terror” rather than “terrorism,” thereby exhibiting a previously disavowed interest in definition, though this time a purely stipulative one. Attacks aimed at releasing political prisoners, or at simply showing that an insurgent group is still a force to reckon with, are relegated to the periphery of the Scheffler concept. Perhaps we could concede that Scheffler’s approach is idiosyncratic in failing to match so much of what most would recognize as “standard,” but allow that he provides insights into a sub-class of terrorist acts that have a special interest. This would be to admit, however, that what insight he might provide is far from a comprehensive one into some special significance held

⁸ Scheffler, “Is Terrorism Morally Distinctive?”, 5.

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by terrorism more generally. The term “terrorism” is, of course, situated at the heart of political controversy, polemic, and often propaganda and any account of its special significance or any definition will inevitably involve a degree of stipulation about what it is. Yet, as I argued in Chapter 1, any useful definition should seek both to capture something central about terrorism that most people seem to have in mind when they talk about the topic and contribute to the possibilities of balanced and coherent political thinking about its morality, as well as the moral issues involved in responding to the threat or threats of terrorism. Scheffler’s relegation, however, of so much that most people “would not hesitate, prior to analysis, to classify as instances of terrorism” to the periphery of the discussion or to another concept altogether (“terror”) contributes neither to clarity nor to sound policy for responding to terrorist acts. Some terrorist attacks may indeed have something like the purpose Scheffler identifies, but making this the prime focus of our moral concern with terrorism has dangerous implications. One is that the degrading or destabilizing story shifts attention away from possibly remediable grievances that many terrorist acts are concentrated upon. It seems clear, for instance, that much of the stimulus to terrorist activity directed against the United States and its allies arises not principally from some wholesale rejection of democracy but from hatred of certain American military and geo-political strategies and activities, especially in the Middle East. The presence of US military bases and other troop facilities often supporting or countenancing despotic or unpopular regimes combined with almost wholesale support for regionally detested Israeli policies have been potent causes, often invoked in terrorist literature. This point about Islamic terrorist aims in the Middle East is made vividly in an interview in 2011 with the London Times by Michael Scheuer, a former CIA agent who directed the “Alec Station” dedicated bin Laden CIA team during the 1990s. As Scheuer put it: There are almost 900 pages of primary sources on bin Laden—sermons, speeches, etc. . . . There is almost nothing in there about waging a war against the West for its freedoms or liberty or gender equality or drinking alcohol. It is support for Israel, support for the Saudi police state, it’s our presence in the Arab peninsula, it’s support for the Russians in the Islamic Caucasus. There is no more effective recruiter for al-Qa’ida than the status quo of American foreign policy.⁹ ⁹ Tom Coghlan, “Al-Qaida ‘Winning War against the West,’ ” The Times (May 28, 2011).

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If terrorist attacks are part of a campaign to achieve, for instance, decolonization, removal of foreign military bases or forces, or what is seen as a foreign invasion or occupation, then the more cosmic destabilization or degradation story obscures this reality in favor of what may well be a fantasy, or a minor factor. A second likely outcome is that the more cosmic account of terrorist purposes can contribute to unnecessary and physically and morally dangerous military and security measures in response to real or perceived terrorist threats. This could have serious consequences for the success of counter-terrorist strategies. This is particularly so if the terrorists’ intention to destabilize and degrade has little prospect of real success, as will often be the case (depending, of course, on how strong or weak an interpretation is given to the phrase “destabilize or degrade”).

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Waldron and the Psycho-Social Condition Jeremy Waldron is alert to the ways in which understanding terrorism and its broad significance can be important for counter-terrorist strategies. This is one reason why, in his essay “Terrorism and the Uses of Terror,” he engages in what he calls “a sort of general reflection that, as I say, resembles definitional inquiry.”¹⁰ He also calls it “a definitional discussion” rather than a quest for a satisfactory definition. He declares that his purpose is to “gain insight into the intentional structure of the phenomena that most of us describe as terrorism.”¹¹ While skirting thus around definition, he makes a number of remarks about definition that do not always sit comfortably with each other. In addition, in spite of an aversion to defining terrorism, he offers (as we shall see presently) a detailed, typical philosopher’s definition of what turns out to be only one form—though, for Waldron, a significant form—of a terrorist act. Unlike Scheffler, Waldron does not use the phrase “the distinctive significance of terrorism,” but he devotes one lengthy section of his discussion to similar territory. This is the section that deals with the way that terrorist acts aim at coercion by intimidation. In this section, Waldron seems to argue that all terrorism has this feature; indeed, he offers the definition-seeming description of terrorism mentioned above. It goes as follows:

¹⁰ Jeremy Waldron, Torture, Terror, and Trade-Offs: Philosophy for the White House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 50. ¹¹ Waldron, Torture, Terror, and Trade-Offs, 51–52.

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[Terrorism] . . . looks to the possibility of creating a certain psycho-social condition, R, in a population that is radically at odds with the range of psycho-social states {N1, N2, . . . Nn} that the government wants or needs or can tolerate in its subject population. The terrorist group performs various actions—explosions, killings etc.—which tend to put the population or large sections of it into condition R. The terrorist group does this with the aim of giving the government a taste of what it would be like to have its subject population in condition R. And it threatens to continue such actions, with similar effects, until the government yields to its demands.¹²

In Chapter 2, I argued that any such definition (were this a definition) fails as an account of all terrorist acts because there is no one single “psychosocial condition” that must be aimed at by perpetrators of terrorist acts, nor need such acts always aim at any governmental responses (though they often do). And, whether it is called a definition or not, the same is true of a comprehensive description of terrorist acts such as that offered by Waldron. Curiously enough, Waldron seems to recognize as much later in his essay when he explicitly discusses the ways in which many acts that he acknowledges to be terrorist do not aim at R. Indeed, he lists seven categories of such acts that do not aim at R and at least four of which do not seem even to aim to influence a government to meet demands. This gives his discussion a rather baffling shape. It is probably best to treat his comprehensive description as a definition-like statement aimed at demarcating only one form of terrorist acts: call that category demoralizing terrorism. But his extensive treatment of the other categories that don’t fit the demoralizing story makes it clear at the very least that the significance of the demoralizing motivation and effect is much less than he wants it to be. To see this, we should attend more closely to the way he characterizes R. He begins his path to R by discussing Hannah Arendt’s account of the sort of “bestial, desperate panic”¹³ created by totalitarian regimes like Nazism, a state of mind and society that induces a sort of paralysis of will in those subject to it. But Waldron admits that the efforts of sub-state terrorists and “ordinary” government terrorism cannot reach to this extreme; at most, the R he seeks operates in some more remote but analogous fashion. The key explanatory clause is that R is a radical departure from ¹² Waldron, Torture, Terror, and Trade-Offs, 65. ¹³ Waldron, Torture, Terror, and Trade-Offs, 65.

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the state of normality that governments rely upon to conduct their business of ruling; at least this seems a plausible reading of the import of Waldron’s words, “the range of psycho-social states {N1, N2, . . . Nn} that the government wants or needs or can tolerate in its subject population.” Of course, what different governments need and can tolerate of their subject populations may be pretty unpleasant depending on the style of government, but a charitable interpretation of Waldron’s intent would restrict it to democratic or at least “decent” governments (in something like Rawls’ sense) where the government itself doesn’t rule by requiring anything like the sort of abject demoralization that Arendt talks of. Unless we do this, we risk characterizing as terrorist perfectly defensible insurgent attempts that avoid targeting non-combatants but aim to mitigate or eliminate the “normal” conditions of totalitarian or despotic domination. Restricting thus the scope of a terrorist definition to that directed against democratic states clearly suffers from some of the drastic problems posed by Scheffler’s account, since many external or non-governmental attacks on the civilian populations of non-democratic regimes deserve the name terrorist. The promotion of R may also fit ill with terrorism directed by nondemocratic states (and possibly in some circumstances democratic ones) against their own innocent citizens, since they will often be aimed at enforcing their version of N. But since Waldron admits that his defensivesounding strategy does not encompass all terrorism, we shall set this difficulty aside for the moment. One of the examples of R that Waldron gives is the disruption of economic activities, such as that caused by the 9/11 bombings in the USA. These involved the reluctance of people to travel, especially by aeroplane. The nervousness about travel certainly had widespread consequences, and though the acuteness of the fears has subsided with time, the fears were symptomatic of a disruption of the normal expectations of people in a largely comfortable, advanced capitalist community. But in addition to the economic effects, there were significant changes in the social, legal, and political culture of the United States and other countries apprehensive of terrorist attacks that might plausibly be regarded as R effects. These included the passage of highly restrictive laws and regulations, and the development of internal political and social policies that flouted existing laws, as in the surveillance of citizens’ communications and the resort to torture. The latter, disguised by such euphemisms as “enhanced interrogation” and “rendition,” involved the legally dubious incarceration of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay and the export of others for torture in foreign countries

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with no scruples about the practice. The attacks also provided a rationale (if not exactly an excuse) for the mismanaged military intervention in Afghanistan, and the disastrous and morally indefensible invasion of Iraq. These forays may not have represented a drastic shift in American cultural attitudes to military adventurism, but the terrorist attacks clearly overrode any abiding reluctance to risk another Vietnam. It is doubtful that precisely these changes, or their widespread nature, were aimed at by the terrorists, but the psychic shock of 9/11 made them possible. Waldron does not cite all these changes as underpinned by the disruption of “the range of psycho-social states {N1, N2, . . . Nn} that the government wants or needs or can tolerate in its subject population,” but he would not, I think, disagree markedly with my characterization of the facts at issue. What is notable about most of them, however, is that the government of George W. Bush positively welcomed, encouraged, and utilized the disturbance of the attitudes N. So it is implausible to think that the Bush government wanted, needed, or even tolerated the stability of attitudes N. Of course, it is possible to argue that an ideal democratic government would need these psycho-social states so that a sensible democratic government would abhor their absence, and that is perhaps another way to understand Waldron’s claim. But so understood, the aim of terrorists to produce R loses most of its plausibility and bite, since the terrorists are not likely to be at all concerned with what would damage an ideal democratic government, but rather to promote circumstances that would be unwelcome and stabilitydisturbing to an actual democratic government hostile to them. Nor of course are the proposed aims of disrupting N restricted to terrorism against democratic governments which are unlikely to find disturbances of N states problematic unless they reach such panic status as to undermine their grip on power. More generally, most actual governments seek support and compliance from their subjects as a very high priority (if not above all else) and a disruption of N states can cement such support and compliance. It may be replied that terrorists nonetheless aim at the disruption of N states either because they do not realize that this effect will often be welcome and beneficial to the enemy government, or because they think that such benefits will be short-lived and the overall longer-term outcome will be detrimental to the enemy government’s counter-terrorist efforts against them. Call the first leg of this disjunction the ignorance response and the second the provocation response. The ignorance condition may well be met by terrorists who aim to produce R, but, if so, the significance of R as something very notable, perhaps unique, about the intent of terrorist acts is

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dramatically reduced since their failure in the circumstances is testimony not to fiendish and alarming cunning in the production of damaging governmental and community disarray, but to a confused and doomed purpose. Of course, the terrorist acts will still have done something terrible—that is, injuring and killing innocent people—but the further “distinctive significance” of terrorism will be beside that point. On the provocation argument, I have already urged as a criticism of the necessity of the fear element in a tactical definition that terrorists may sometimes want to create reactions of anger rather than fear as an inducement to overreaction, so I am certainly open to the suggestion of the provocation response that terrorists could aim at producing longer-term goals than immediate fear or panic or even aim at other psychological states altogether to procure those goals. The aim of producing overreactions in order to mobilize more support for one’s cause in those who are then badly affected by the violent or coercive overreactions has long had a place in some revolutionary and counter-revolutionary theory and practice. The dreadful beheadings of kidnapped journalists staged by the Islamic State organization in 2004 were plausibly analyzed by several commentators as aimed precisely at goading Western powers into increased military interventions in Iraq and possibly Syria with short-term disadvantages to IS but longer-term benefits in the shape of a tragic re-run of the 2003 intervention in Iraq, or at any rate, and less dramatically, considerably increased local support and recruitment for IS. In the suggested provocation or strategic adjustment of Waldron’s story, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 could then be seen as a plausible strategy for al-Qaeda, though its eventual success for them is far more debatable: it may be that the outcome for both provoked and provocateurs (judged in their own terms) has been dismal. The first point to note about the provocation argument in connection with Waldron’s claim is that he himself sees the creation of R very differently. In the full quotation I cited from him earlier, he says that the terrorist group tries to create R “with the aim of giving the government a taste of what it would be like to have its subject population in condition R. And it threatens to continue such actions, with similar effects, until the government yields to its demands” (p. 65). This explanation is much shorter term than the provocation one usually is, and trades upon the target government’s negative reaction to the disruption of N to the point of conceding terrorist demands. The purpose is one of creating anxiety and weakness, whereas the provocation purpose is one of creating anger and overconfidence. But I will explore the strategic provoking purpose as a possible maneuver that

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Waldron might have used in order to rescue the significance of R from the criticisms made. Evaluating the recasting of Waldron’s position in terms of a provocation strategy requires a more subtle account of R and N than that he provides or than is more generally imagined in much of the “distinctive significance” literature. We need to appreciate that the N states as defined by Waldron can and do vary with circumstances, so that what is normal and desirable (by the government and perhaps the people) at one time may be quite different from what is normal at another. Governments can welcome one set of N at time t¹ but welcome its disruption and partial or even whole replacement when that turns into something more welcome to them in different circumstances at t². On the provocation account of intending to produce R, the terrorists can then be interpreted as aiming at turning one state of N into a different state of N with the purpose of producing the overreaction effect. But then it becomes clear that the aim is not one of general disruption of N states, since the attackers may well seek to produce a situation in which the target government is more secure (at least for a time) in its community support so that it can pursue the policies of overreaction that the terrorists want. It now seems clear that part of the problem with Waldron’s analysis is his emphasis on N states as those the government needs to govern effectively. Perhaps a shift to stress something like N states as those that the citizens themselves need would be more promising, and that brings us to some relevant work by another theorist concerned with ramifications in the idea of trust.

Jones and Basal Security With issues of terrorism in mind, Karen Jones has developed an interesting account of a concept she calls “basal security” which she argues is put at risk by terrorist attacks. She first offers a complex and illuminating theory of trust that casts our basal security as “interpretive and affective dispositions”¹⁴ feeding into the sort of trust that we have in our institutional and other surroundings that provides a deep sense of security. “A really efficient terrorist campaign,” she goes on to say, “works by attacking basal ¹⁴ Karen Jones, “Trust and Terror,” in Moral Psychology: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory, edited by Peggy DesAutels and Margaret Urban Walker (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004), 9.

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     “ ”

security.”¹⁵ She ties this effectiveness to the randomness of such attacks and the inability to predict them and protect against them.¹⁶ She adds that “if terrorists can succeed in shaking basal security, they can radically transform behaviour.”¹⁷ Jones nowhere makes an explicit claim that this “shaking” constitutes the distinctive significance of terrorism, but she does claim that attacking basal security is what makes “a really efficient terrorist campaign” work. And she says that the randomness of terrorist attacks suggests that “terrorists understand that inability to predict and thus protect against attack magnifies the effectiveness of their fear campaigns.”¹⁸ This strongly suggests that she thinks that terrorists intend to disrupt basal security (though not under that description, of course) as a means of securing their ends. We have already noted in Chapter 1 the misleading connotations of “random” in discussions of terrorism, but here I will take it to mean the targeting of the innocent in a sense already adumbrated and to be discussed more fully in Chapter 4. It certainly should not mean irrational or unthought-out, though no doubt some terrorist attacks are less planned and intelligent than others. Nor is it clear how unpredictable a terrorist attack must be: to make unpredictability a necessary feature of terrorist acts would be to rule out too much. The terrorist acts that have been committed by such groups as Islamic State or the Nigerian group Boko Haram have become to some degree predictable, at least in broad terms, if not specifically as to time and place. Some, like the almost routine beheadings by Islamic extremists of innocent captives in 2014, were explicitly threatened publicly and then played out on public video so that future such brutal performances could hardly be surprising. Yet it would be absurd, on that account, to deny them the title of terrorist acts. Here, Jones, like Scheffler and Waldron, has been perhaps too focused on the surprise of the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington and the July 2012 attacks on London transport travelers. Such attacks may have been unpredictable, though better intelligence operations could have made them less so, at least to the government, and various experts have since then been predicting that similar outrages in Western countries are all too possible, and have indeed occurred, if not on that scale. Moreover, the city bombing of World War II by Axis and Allied powers was, certainly after the initial attacks, all too predictable to their

¹⁵ Jones, “Trust and Terror,” 12. ¹⁷ Jones, “Trust and Terror,” 12.

¹⁶ Jones, “Trust and Terror,” 12. ¹⁸ Jones, “Trust and Terror,” 12.

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many victims, but, on the tactical definition, it provided clear examples of terrorist acts by states on a massive scale. Should we conclude that terrorist attacks only tend to disrupt basal security when they are unpredictable so that Jones is only talking about a sub-class of terrorist acts (as Waldron admits he is doing), or is it better to say that basal security as a felt and operating framework of trust can be disrupted by attacks which are predictable? If the disruption of basal security is what makes “a really efficient” terrorist campaign work, as she says, then it would seem that the claim is directed to whatever terrorist attacks are deemed efficient. On some views, of course, all terrorist campaigns are eventually futile and hence inefficient, but whatever the truth of this, I doubt that Jones is making a claim about terrorist campaigns that achieve an ultimate success, but rather about those that are efficient in achieving short-term objectives that are (perhaps futilely in the event) aimed at longerterm success. But carefully calculated and effectively presented terrorist acts, such as the Islamic State beheadings, seem to be perfectly efficient in this way even where they are all too predictable and indeed non-random. Jones is probably drawn to the unpredictability ingredient in her account by the fact that a framework of trust geared toward security and normalcy in everyday life contains the idea of being able to rely upon outcomes and expectations that are involved in trusting attitudes. A terrorist attack can disturb or even shatter that reliance. But this means that something unpredictable, or insecurely predictable, has come into one’s life as a result of a terrorist attack, not that the terrorist attack must itself be unpredictable. So I think that the most plausible response available to Jones is to detach the basal security account from the predictability of the attack or other disruption. Of course, an event can be predictable in one respect and not in others, so that a terrorist event may be predictable in that there are good reasons to believe that it will occur in region X during some stretch of time T, but not exactly where or when or with what weapons and what degree of severity. So it is unlikely that every salient aspect of an expected attack will be known in advance; even for the well-publicized and promised ritual beheadings of captured foreigners of the kind mentioned earlier, we can know that the ritual will continue to take place regularly and be presented on video by a hooded killer, but not know precisely when and where it will occur or the identity of the killer. So, perhaps some element of the unpredictability will always remain, but it will be less important than Jones seems to want as a general condition on disturbance of basal security. Of course, totally, or nearly totally, unpredictable attacks do occur and unpredictability of that

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order may generate more shock to the framework of trust involved in basal security than other attacks. But basal security admits of degrees, as Jones allows, and some serious level of decline in basal security can follow from the actual occurrence of largely predictable attacks. This is because the occurrences themselves, and (significantly) the failure to prevent them, still have the sort of shock value that poses a threat to the mostly implicit system of trusting that underpins so much of a normal social life. A further point about the effect of terrorist attacks is that they can actually reinforce social bonds in the community affected by them. This is a point that Jones makes with reference to the 9/11 attacks in New York. As she says, after commenting on the way that rape victims can form intimate and trusting relations with each other: “Likewise, after September 11, 2001, united in their shock and sense of facing a common, if poorly quantifiable risk, New Yorkers formed trust relations with each other that were previously unimaginable.”¹⁹ These new relations of trust are (she holds) conceptually unlike the trust of basal security itself because they are three-place relations whereas basal security is not, but changes in three-place relations can presumably affect the nature of basal security just as changes in basal security bring with them changes in three-place relations. So it seems that if basal security can be damaged by terrorist attacks, it can be repaired or adjusted positively in their wake. This conclusion is related to a common criticism of terrorist policies, couched in other terms, namely that terrorist attacks are counter-productive when they are aimed at breaking the morale of enemy citizens. The horrific Allied terror bombings of German cities in World War II were sometimes justified as a means of breaking German civilian morale; killing hundreds of thousands and dispossessing even more was believed to be a way of turning the enemy civil population against the Nazi leadership and shortening the war. But in fact the predicted speedy collapse of German morale and support for the regime didn’t occur, and the terrorist tactics may have strengthened support for the war effort even among those who had little taste for Hitler, since it could have convinced Germans that they had little comfort to expect from the victory of terrorists.²⁰ Certainly, Germany’s terrorist attacks upon British cities, though it ¹⁹ Jones, “Trust and Terror,” 13. For Jones, trust is generally a three-place relationship because it has the form “A trusts B to do X” or “to be Y” and so on. She thinks basal security is not so constrained. ²⁰ There is considerable debate about the effects. Georg Friedrich’s controversial book The Fire (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) argues, inter alia, that the bombings strengthened morale and support for the German war effort. For a good overview of the

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caused great distress, had no devastating effect on morale or support for the war effort amongst ordinary citizens. Similar points can be made about the strengthening of resistance against sub-state terrorism. Of course, such bonding effects are not inevitable and some terrorist attacks may produce such demoralization as makes positive bonding impossible, though this seems unlikely for sub-state attacks on relatively stable democratic societies in the foreseeable future. In any case, the twofold responses to Waldron regarding ignorance and provocation made earlier arise again in considering Jones’ admission of a bonding outcome. If the terrorists are ignorant of the likely positive outcomes of their attacks for the morale of the target population, then the futility of their efforts tends to make the supposed distinctive significance much less a significant feature of their attack. If, however, they welcome that outcome as a step toward misguided political and/or military reactions from the target state, then they are aiming at disrupting one condition of basal security in order to produce another condition of basal security that will serve their purposes better. Whether this new condition will serve the terrorists well is again highly debatable since what they hope to be counter-productive may actually not result, or if it does, then what results may prove effective against them rather than counter-productive. In fact, I suspect that what often results from a provocation strategy of this sort is mostly bad outcomes in the long run for many of the interests of both provocateurs and provoked. For Jones, this elaboration of the provocation response does not pose problems in the way that it does for Waldron. For one thing, she does not pin her basal security analysis on what the government needs or wants; for another, she need not deny, though she does not affirm, that destruction of one form of basal security at time T1 may provoke, or be intended to provoke, establishment of a different form of basal security at time T2. Her discussion of terrorism seems primarily a way into the analysis of a previously ignored form of trust or underpinnings of trust, but her “basal security” concept provides a possible way of making some more plausible sense of the “distinctive wrong” story told by Scheffler and Waldron. My argument has been that, although more plausible, it will not rescue the story.

effectiveness issues and a tally of the civilian death toll, see “Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940–1945: The Bombing of Germany 1940–1945,” Centre for the Study of War, State and Society, The University of Exeter. https://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/history/ research/centres/warstateandsociety/projects/bombing/Germany.

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     “ ”

It is a common feature of the arguments of Scheffler, Waldron, and Jones that the states of affairs they take the terrorists to aim at, and that are meant to be so distinctively significant (respectively, destabilizing/degrading, a disruptive R condition, and basal insecurity), are states that can be and are sometimes produced by other things than terrorist attacks. Some of these are not directly agent-produced at all, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions; others have an agent focus in that they come about through some degree of agent negligence or disregard, as is the case with nuclear plant accidents such as Fukushima, and many outbreaks and spread of contagious disease, and seem plausible for some of the effects of poor political leadership in some places concerning the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Governmental policies that marginalize substantial sections of the governed community can also create hostility and incivility that erodes an environment of trust and damages the democratic fabric. Natural disasters can bring about a breakdown in the conditions of law and order that a well-functioning democracy needs, and can erode other important conditions like N, and the trust framework described by Jones. Another interesting case concerns military occupation which need not be terrorist in attacking or otherwise directing intended harm to non-combatants, or intending by their deeply discomforting and disorienting presence to bring that effect about. It is important that, unlike terrorist acts, none of the above events is directly intended. Yet they can produce the same or very similar outcomes as those supposedly giving terrorist acts their “distinctive significance.” These examples of non-terrorist events show that distinctiveness must be given a much narrower interpretation than might appear at first blush. The distinctiveness is restricted to, or contextualized to, intentional violent attacks on the innocent that also aim at the claimed effect. So the thesis amounts to the proposition that some terrorist attacks aim at R (or something like it) where the effects of R may also include intended or unintended restoration of N in a somewhat different form. This much might be conceded without the claimed “distinctive significance” having the high theoretical or practical value claimed for it as demarcating terrorist acts.

McPherson and the Authority Aspect Another contributor to the distinctiveness story is Lionel K. McPherson, who argues for a rather different account of it in his article “Is Terrorism

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Distinctively Wrong?”²¹ McPherson’s picture differs from the three discussed above in that his distinctive feature does not concern some special outcome of terrorist acts but rather their normative source. Although McPherson explicitly rejects what I have discussed as “political status” definitions of terrorist acts, and criticized, in Chapter 1, his discussion echoes something of the import of those definitions in that he concentrates on the idea that terrorist perpetrators lack a certain sort of authority for their deeds. He does not want to call it “legitimate authority” but rather “representative authority” and he does not want to exempt states from being open to the charge of terrorist for some of their activities.²² His reasons for avoiding the term “legitimate” are based on a somewhat thin view of political legitimacy, and a rather strict account of representational authority. The former he draws from Thomas Hobbes, though it is also a common element in the recognition of states as having standing in international relations and law—the view, namely, that provision of order and security confers legitimate state authority. This allows that quite unrepresentative and morally repugnant regimes can be legitimate states. By contrast, McPherson wants to say that a representative authority is conferred upon political agents by their decisions being made on behalf of “a people” after “a process of relevant public review and endorsement” by that people.²³ The moral distinctiveness of sub-state terrorist acts will then stem from the terrorists’ failure in this sense to represent the people on whose behalf they engage in those terrorist acts. This is the sort of legitimacy that their acts lack and it constitutes “the distinctive wrong” of terrorism. As we will see, much of McPherson’s purpose in proceeding thus with the “moral distinctiveness” claim is to undermine certain attitudes toward terrorism that cast it as particularly morally distinctive because of the nature of terrorist acts, particularly as this relates to a contrast between war and terrorism. In the opening paragraph of his paper, he presents as “the dominant view” of terrorism one that argues it to be “necessarily and egregiously wrong,” and claims that it thereby portrays terrorism as distinctively wrong in a way that warfare is not. So, before addressing his positive proposals about representative legitimacy, we need to see what he understands terrorist acts to be and what can be made of the broader purpose of his critique. ²¹ Lionel K. McPherson, “Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?”, Ethics, vol. 117, no. 3 (2007). ²² McPherson, “Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?”, 539. ²³ McPherson, “Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?”, 545.

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     “ ”

Although I said that his approach to the nature of terrorist acts seems to echo the import of political status definitions, it is important that he doesn’t himself subscribe to such definitions, nor is he averse, as Scheffler and Waldron are, to the need for a definition in this context. Indeed, his definition of terrorism is a version of the tactical definition explored in Chapter 1 and it goes as follows: “the deliberate use of force against ordinary noncombatants, which can be expected to cause wider fear among them, for political ends.”²⁴ This is close enough to my tactical definition, and to several others in that family, for us to spend little time on it in the present context, though it is worth noting that the reference to “can be expected to cause wider fear” among non-combatants is more loosely phrased than the usual fear elements in tactical definitions, since it does not make it clear who is to have these expectations, in particular whether it is necessary for the terrorists to expect this and have it as part of their intentions, or whether it would suffice that someone or other can expect it. The oddity of the latter, which seems to posit some mere possibility that might become available to parties unspecified, suggests that this expression is only an unusual looseness on McPherson’s part and the former (an intent by the terrorists to cause widespread fear) is what he means to convey. I will not repeat my objections to the inclusion of the fear element since it doesn’t matter in what I have to say about his distinctiveness proposal. So McPherson and I are close enough on the meaning of “terrorism” or, as I would prefer, “terrorist act,” but McPherson objects to that content giving us the clue to the moral status of terrorism.²⁵ His primary reason for this is that (what I call) the tactical definition in his version of it is not a moral definition, even though others regard their similar definitions as morally loaded. McPherson cites David Rodin as propounding his tactical definition as a moral one that explains the general moral condemnation of terrorist acts.²⁶ He objects to this idea as prejudging the moral status of terrorist acts and contributing to “the dominant view” of terrorism as “necessarily and egregiously wrong.”²⁷ Again, I agree with him (as I argued in Chapter 1 and have done often enough in the past) because I think that the tactical definition is best seen as not so morally loaded as to make it impossible for an argument to be mounted justifying some terrorist ²⁴ McPherson, “Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?”, 545. ²⁵ I’ll adopt his term as long as it is clear that, most of the time, it is the terrorist acts that need moral assessment, not the ideology of terrorism or the phenomenon of the same. ²⁶ McPherson, “Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?”, 526. ²⁷ McPherson, “Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?”, 524.

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acts. To determine the immorality of terrorist acts as defined, we need the principle of discrimination of just war theory or something similar, and this principle, though intuitively appealing as a moral and quasi-legal principle, is open to interpretation and dispute in various ways. These are the ways we will discuss in Chapter 4.²⁸ But McPherson bolsters his case by two moves that need close attention and do less than justice to the tactical version as I have developed it. The first is a tendency to identify supporters of a tactical definition as committed to “the dominant view” of terrorism as “necessarily and egregiously wrong,” and the second is to cast either the dominant view or the morally loaded tactical definition as holding that the immorality of attacking non-combatants shows terrorism to be distinctively wrong in a way that warfare is not. Any such tendency as the first is dispelled by the fact that McPherson himself offers a (non-moral) tactical definition; moreover, my own definition does not make the wrong of terrorism “necessary” by turning entirely on the definition, but on ancillary moral principles. In this connection, McPherson states in the opening paragraph of his article when introducing “the dominant view” that it maintains that terrorism is “akin to murder” and that this “forecloses the possibility that terrorism under any circumstances could be morally permissible,” since “murder, by definition, is wrongful killing.”²⁹ There seem to be a number of confusions in this set of claims. McPherson cannot mean that the definition of murder is fully given by “wrongful killing” since (as he wants to insist in another context) there are many wrongful killings that are not murder, such as manslaughter, or in lay terms gross negligence leading to death. This shows the necessity of defining such terms as “murder” that are widely regarded as signifying wrongful acts in terms of their nature as acts rather than the right moral judgment to make upon them. To do so also helps with the understanding of the expression “akin to murder” and with evaluating McPherson’s claim that talk of “akin to murder” rejects the possibility that terrorist acts could be permissible in some circumstances. Suppose we define “murder” as “the intentional killing of the innocent,” which is a common enough definition (though one that has some difficulties), and terrorism in similar terms, though with some special comments needed in connection with the correct understanding of “innocent” in just war thinking. Without further argument, neither of these

²⁸ I should say that it isn’t clear that McPherson correctly interprets Rodin as denying any of this. ²⁹ McPherson, “Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?”, 524.

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definitional moves “forecloses” the possibility that such intentional killing might be permissible in some circumstances. Indeed, a number of philosophers who advance a tactical definition of terrorist acts that makes them “akin to murder” also allow that such terrorist acts might be permissible in some circumstances; indeed, as indicated below, this view is probably the most common position amongst philosophers who write on the topic. Whether the wrong of terrorism is “egregious” in the sense of distinctively and greatly wrong depends on what is conveyed by the terms “distinctive” and “great” or similar expressions. The sense of “distinctive” is important here, as elsewhere in the topic addressed in this chapter, and McPherson’s paper has the great merit of saying precisely what he means to convey by the notion of distinctiveness. He does not mean uniquely different, but, as I signaled earlier, his purpose in attacking “the dominant view” is to show that terrorism understood as a tactic of attacking non-combatants for political purposes is not thereby morally distinctive as compared with war. He thinks that the claim that it is so morally distinctive is implicit in the dominant view. I do not want to deny that there may be some proponents of “the dominant view” that merit this criticism. But advocates of the tactical view in either a non-moral or even some moral versions can and should be immune to it: David Rodin, for instance, holds that terrorism can be a part of waging war and often is, and similarly so do I, Igor Primoratz, and many others. Taking a tactical approach to defining terrorism will inevitably allow that terrorist acts can be identified in either war or rebellion or insurgency or whatever other uses of political violence may be discussed. Furthermore, even if one is a proponent of the dominant view, there is nothing compelling about admitting the necessary and egregious moral character of terrorist acts and applying this to acts of terrorism committed in war and outside of it. Indeed, one might hold that the terrorism of war is so integral a part of it that, if terrorism deserves moral condemnation, then both war and sub-state or non-state political violence that involve terrorism are equally to be condemned morally, or both are to be condemned but war even more so because of the scale of innocent death and suffering that is usually involved in the terrorist acts within it. So there is something very puzzling about McPherson’s overall strategy of seeking to undermine the supposed contrast between war and terrorism. I suspect that the explanation for it rests in his belief that, despite these theoretical possibilities, the dominant view is mostly held by people who want to sanitize, glorify, or normalize war on the one hand and think of terrorism as something

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uniquely awful that only occurs among sub-state actors on the other. This is probably a widely held popular view, but it is one that the tactical definition undermines. A further problem for McPherson’s position on “the dominant view” is his claim that those who regard terrorist acts as “akin to murder” must hold that such acts are never morally permissible. Leaving aside his curious definitional account of murder as “wrongful killing,” it must be said that those tactical definitions that contain an element that comes close to the definition of murder in terms of the intentional killing of the innocent are not committed to claiming an “unqualified wrongness of terrorism.”³⁰ Whether one allows or disallows exceptions to a moral prohibition on murder (or terrorism) will turn on whether one is an absolutist about that prohibition. Philosophers who are “threshold deontologists” or “supreme emergency/dirty hands” theorists will always be in a position to allow such exceptions depending on circumstances. Igor Primoratz, for instance, holds that terrorism as necessarily involving “the intentional killing of innocent civilians” is an overwhelmingly profound wrong in most circumstances but can be allowed in the extremity that constitutes what he calls “a moral disaster.”³¹ So the moral prohibitions on terrorism are, as he puts it, “almost absolute: they may be overridden only in the face of a true moral disaster.”³² Other theorists, who defend a tactical definition of terrorism with the emphasis on intentional killing of the innocent, do adopt an absolutist position (myself and Stephen Nathanson are two such), but such theorists do not rely upon the meaning of words such as “murder” but offer arguments for their position, and must do so in a context where any form of absolutism about moral principles is out of fashion amongst contemporary moral philosophers. We will discuss this complex and difficult question in moral philosophy later in Chapter 4 dealing with various philosophical justifications for terrorism, but here it is worth merely noting the realities with which McPherson’s comments clearly conflict. Having examined and I hope defused McPherson’s understanding of the moral implications of tactical definitions of terrorist acts and of their relation to a contrast between war and terrorism, let us return to a consideration of his positive proposal about the distinctive wrong of terrorism. The

³⁰ McPherson, “Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?”, 524. ³¹ Igor Primoratz, Terrorism: A Philosophical Investigation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), ch. 6. ³² Primoratz, Terrorism, 113.

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first thing to note about his “representation” criterion is that it echoes the just war jus ad bellum condition of “legitimate authority” but gives it an interpretation that at least allows for non-state agents to satisfy it. Viewed in that light, it has the advantage of allowing that there is at least room for nonstate and sub-state political authority that is sufficient to undertake justified violent revolution or secession, a concession that anyone who wants to defend, for instance, the revolutionary American War of Independence must admit. It has, however, what appear to be serious disadvantages in that states that do not satisfy what is actually a very strong condition cannot wage a just war, given that, for a just war, satisfaction of all the jus ad bellum conditions is required. This would seem to imply that a benevolent dictatorship unjustly attacked by a savage but equally dictatorial foreign power is unjustified (by just war conditions) from defending itself and its people, on the plausible assumption that the people have available nothing approximating to a “process of relevant review and endorsement.” Moreover, even a despotic totalitarian regime that is far from benevolent, such as the Soviet Union in World War II, was probably justified in resisting Nazi aggression. Denying such states a right to the authority to defend themselves with violent means in such circumstances seems wrong, even though it is plausible to assume that some form of looser approval by the subject people of a defense against an invasion that is going to worsen their condition can be assumed. Some awareness of this problem moves McPherson to loosen the apparent stringency of his criterion to allow that in extreme situations such as “indisputable humanitarian disaster” (he instances the Rwandan genocide), a military intervention by a state can assume the endorsement of “the victimized people.”³³ He wants such circumstances to be “dire,” but presumably they would encompass the right of the Soviet Union to defend itself against the Nazi invasion. Even so, this looks a long way from his emphasis on “reasonable institutional procedures” that exist at least ideally in democracies and also in what John Rawls calls a “decent consultation hierarchy.”³⁴ And when he comes to deal with non-state groups, he wants to allow that they can also sometimes have a relaxation of the sort of “license” that is given by his formal processes of consultation and review. He thus softens the test of representation to allow “credible measures of approval” such as “mass

³³ McPherson, “Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?”, 544. ³⁴ John Rawls, as quoted in McPherson, “Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?”, 541.

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demonstrations, general strikes, and polling.”³⁵ And he adds that even these raise concerns about their reliability “and their interpretation by actors unfettered by the responsibilities of formal political leadership. These concerns are less of an issue when the right to resort to political violence belongs only to the state, that is, when the state has morally robust legitimate authority.”³⁶ This raises the important question of how realistic is McPherson’s picture of actual legitimate states, democratic or otherwise. (Before dealing with that, it should also be noted that McPherson’s citing of the Rwandan example exposes an important ambiguity in his “approval of a people” criterion.³⁷ The approval that he cites the example to illustrate is not quite the sort of approval for which the test was designed. The objection that he is supposed to be considering concerns cases where some group resorts to violence in the absence of explicit approval via processes of “relevant review and endorsement” from a constituency it claims to represent; that is, in some sense its own people. But his example of the Rwandan victims is not one concerning the assumed support of the people the employers of military (interventional) violence purport to represent as a constituency, but of the foreign people they purport to help. This suggests an interesting ambiguity in the term “on behalf of” since a purportedly humanitarian intervention by nation X in the affairs of nation Y seems to require support from both the people of X and those people of Y who are subject to extreme persecution. Nation X may lack support (implicit or explicit), for instance, for intervention from either or both peoples. Often enough, they cannot legitimately assume support from their own people, even if it is assured from the foreign victims. This is an important issue that I cannot pursue further here.) Returning to the issue of representational legitimacy of actual states, it seems that McPherson’s test as explicitly stated is in any case very strong, even for those democratic states that he may have in mind as morally legitimate; given the falsehoods and manipulation involved in government decisions to go to war as in the Coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003 or the Tonkin Gulf incident in 1964 that escalated the Vietnam conflict into a fullscale war, it is doubtful that anything approaching McPherson’s authority criterion was available to the peoples of the United Kingdom, the United States, and others involved. There are indeed processes of consultation and ³⁵ McPherson, “Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?”, 542. ³⁶ McPherson, “Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?”, 542. ³⁷ McPherson, “Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?”, 544.

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review in democratic societies, but not only are they imperfect in various ways, they are also often ignored or flouted in decisions to take the country to war or to engage in covert military operations. Indeed, McPherson shows some awareness of this because when he stresses consultation and transparency, he does briefly allow that his ideal democracy embodying a considerable degree of popular control and transparency of process is not “closely approximated in real-world scenarios.”³⁸ Even so, he believes that “Reasonable institutional procedures can provide checks and balances on the exercise of political power, presumably with a tendency to yield political decisions that are not egregiously unjust.”³⁹ Yet when he mentions flaws in actual democratic processes (such as politicians providing the public with selective information about going to war), he does not consider the fact that democratic politicians lie outright with remarkable frequency and success, and pays no heed to the way that powerful, wealthy lobby groups are able to manipulate the political process in ways that defy checks and balances. On the first point, McPherson was writing well before the astonishing arrival in the Presidency of Donald Trump whose political record of lying is egregious, but lies, furtive secrecy, and other deceptions directed at the people supposedly represented have long been a feature of political leadership in democracies, and of course less palatable political societies. On the second point regarding pressure groups, the United States has awful gun laws because of the power of the National Rifle Association and despite a clear majority of citizens wanting stricter controls on gun ownership.⁴⁰ Nor is the pressure of the wealthy medical insurance companies irrelevant to the fact that the United States, in spite of some watereddown changes under President Obama, has anything like a health system that could be described as just. In Australia, and elsewhere, the enormous behind-the-scenes power of the fossil fuel lobby has prevailed time and again against serious, desperately needed action on the threat of climate change, even though polling increasingly shows that significant majorities of the population want it.⁴¹ And this is not even to mention the often covert power ³⁸ McPherson, “Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?”, 541. ³⁹ McPherson, “Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?”, 541. ⁴⁰ A Pew Research Center poll in October 2019 showed 60 percent support for stricter gun laws. See Rachel Treisman, “Poll: Number of Americans Who Favor Stricter Gun Laws Continues To Grow,” Criminal Justice Collaborative (October 20, 2019). https://www.npr.org/2019/10/20/ 771278167/poll-number-of-americans-who-favor-stricter-gun-laws-continues-to-grow. ⁴¹ A Guardian Essential poll reported on November 25, 2019 that 60 percent of Australian voters thought that the government was not doing enough on climate change. Katharine Murphy, “More Voters Think Australia Not Doing Enough on Climate, Guardian Essential Poll Shows,”

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of the military-industrial complex in various democracies that was so rightly but ineffectively deplored by President Eisenhower. These unconsidered facts about flaws in democratic representational authority in decision-making are damaging to McPherson’s perspective, but they need not invalidate his theoretical account of representational authority for he could admit that decisions so arrived at by democratic governments were to that extent unauthorized and unrepresentative, and hence any resorts thus made to political violence were morally wrong as unauthorized. The problem for this response is that it undermines drastically the supposed “distinctive wrong” in terrorism. If we think of such cases of democracies going to war without appropriate representative authority as not involving terrorist acts in those wars—the immunities of noncombatants being strictly observed—then such non-terroristic wars display exactly the distinctive wrong that terrorism is supposed to have and wars to lack. There are other problems with the representative authority approach, a major one being the identification conditions for “a people.” This term is one used by John Rawls in his discussions about the “Law of Peoples” and issues of international justice but is largely unanalyzed.⁴² For McPherson it is important to be clear about its scope because he rules out many terrorist groups as having legitimate authority for their resort to violence (of any sort, terrorist or not) on the grounds that their resort is not endorsed by the people they purport to represent. For McPherson, a people is constituted by individuals who “collectively identify on the basis of their self-ascribed nationality, ethnicity, culture, or religion, or on the basis of being victims of common oppressors.”⁴³ Recognizing that this opens the unwelcome possibility that “all kinds of groups could have gerrymandered representative authority,”⁴⁴ so that al-Qaeda could have representative authority derived only from the support of militant, fundamentalist Muslims rather than Muslims generally. He thinks that this is not as worrying as it seems

The Guardian (November 26, 2019). https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/ 26/more-voters-think-australia-not-doing-enough-on-climate-guardian-essential-poll-shows. An Australia Institute poll in April 2019 recorded 68 percent support for a rapid transition to 100 percent renewable energy, which directly opposes federal government policy. “Polling— Support for Climate Action across States,” The Australian Institute (April 2019). https://www.tai. org.au/sites/default/files/Polling%20%20April%202019%20%20North%20South%20%5BWeb% 5D_0.pdf. ⁴² See John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). ⁴³ McPherson, “Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?”, 543. ⁴⁴ McPherson, “Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?”, 543.

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since non-state actors usually purport “to represent as broad a constituency as possible in undertaking political violence,”⁴⁵ since representing the wider group, such as the Muslim people, provides a more compelling authority. But as Helen Frowe has argued, there are, and have been, plenty of terrorists who don’t claim such a wide mandate, and in any case we need to distinguish the wide-claiming rhetoric from the beliefs the terrorist leadership has about their actual constituency.⁴⁶ On the first point, consider the Basque separatists of ATA who made pretty specific claims of very local representation when committing terrorist acts: it is clear that they do not enjoy popular support in the Spanish Basque community these days, but may have done so for some substantial segment of that community in the 1960s. The Islamic State terrorists do not claim to “represent” all Muslims since they are bent on killing or subjugating those who are not Sunnis and many of those who are. They do (or did) hope to rule the whole Muslim world somehow, but they see themselves as representing, in McPherson’s sense, a sub-section of Sunni people in the Iraq-Syria region who have been marginalized and who need a fundamentalist state implementing Sharia law established by a military jihad. It may well be that they did at some stages, anyway, represent some such segment that is their “people,” in which case their terrorist acts against non-combatants are not “distinctively wrong” in McPherson’s sense.

Concluding Comments Having examined these four different accounts of the morally distinctive significance of terrorism, I conclude that they have all failed to make a convincing case for their different versions of the distinctiveness. The first three seek it in something distinctive in the terrorist agent’s intended effects on social/political stability or harmony via psychological impacts, whereas the fourth looks to the lack of a certain sort of representativeness in the agents that carry out the attack. But if these fail, are we to say that terrorism has no morally distinctive significance? My answer is that we should first of all seek what distinctive moral significance terrorism has in the tactical definition of terrorism already given and defended in Chapters 1 and 2. Terrorism is a tactic of politically oriented violence that aims to kill or otherwise seriously harm innocent ⁴⁵ McPherson, “Is Terrorism Distinctively Wrong?”, 543. ⁴⁶ Helen Frowe, The Ethics of War and Peace (London: Routledge, 2011), ch. 9.

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people. As such, it brings the infliction of grave harms into the arena of civilian life in a particularly alarming way by making subject to direct attack those people who have done nothing to make them in any reasonable sense liable to such attack. This in itself is significant and distinctive enough without further ventures into the psycho-social effects such an alarming status might have or into whether the attackers lack some further representative standing. When such targeting is unpredictable, or when it disturbs existing basal security or tends to destabilize society, this will no doubt be a matter for alarm, anxiety, regret, or condemnation additional to what regret or condemnation the act itself has. Similarly, when insurgent or other substate groups deploy political violence without really representing the people they claim to fight for, that may be a bad thing, and it may, as McPherson believes, be fairly common, but that does not constitute a “distinctive moral significance of terrorism” because for one thing, they may not commit terrorist acts at all (on the tactical definition that McPherson, for instance, apparently accepts), and for another, if they do, their behavior is similar to the terrorism of many states, including democracies. The fashion for exploring the “distinctive moral significance” of terrorism as some matter beyond, and often independent of, any clear definition of terrorism is not only mired in confusions but also likely to promote the misunderstanding of actual motivations behind the employment of the terrorist tactic by sub-state groups, deflect attention from the terrorism of states, and exaggerate the significance of the occurrence of terrorist acts by non-state groups and the threat those groups pose. Where sub-state terrorism is directed against people in societies, or segments of society that have hitherto enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle and a high degree of stability and sense of “basal security,” their alarm can readily generate real and rhetorical responses that view the attacks as much more important than they are by casting them as “attacks on (our) civilization,” “undermining our basic values,” and so on. The irrationality of so much talk and action about “the terrorist threat” to such countries from militant Islamic extremism is exemplified by the then Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s ludicrous warning that ISIS is “coming to get us”; as if the basically miniscule, though vicious, semi-state then operating in part of Syria/Iraq with an army of approximately 20,000 was about to invade Australia.⁴⁷ An even more explicit peddling of this ⁴⁷ Abbott’s remark in full, as a response to then recent attacks in France, Tunisia, and Kuwait, was (as quoted on Australia’s ABC radio on June 27, 2015): “This illustrates yet

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fantasy was produced by then Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump on October 12, 2016, when he claimed that the election of his rival Hillary Clinton would actually mean the takeover of the United States by ISIS, who therefore were “hoping and praying” for Clinton to win.⁴⁸ This kind of deceit and exaggeration is of course bizarre, but it may well have short-term political benefits for a beleaguered political leader, given that it relies upon and fuels widespread fears of a dimly understood threat. Ironically, however, it may produce reactions that themselves threaten “our” values, and give comfort to tyrants throughout the world who can clothe their repression, and often terrorist acts, in anti-terrorist garb, sometimes with “our” assistance. Overreactions based on such fears may also provide encouragement to terrorist groups such as ISIS by boosting their own assessments of their power and significance and even increasing their appeal for disaffected youth within Western countries. Ironically, such overreaction may also help increase the threat of terrorism, as evidenced, I believe, by the follies of the American-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. It would be unfortunate if philosophical elaborations of the supposed distinctive significance of terrorism made even a small contribution to the respectability of such developments.

again, as far as the Daesh death cult is concerned, they’re coming after us. We may not feel like we are at war with them, but they are certainly at war with us.” For the AAP report of the speech see: https://www.news.com.au/national/politics/tony-abbott-says-daesh-death-cult-is-comingafter-us/news-story/3ac9ef07472f0689a0a4277eae51fb0b. ⁴⁸ Lauren Gambino and David Smith, “Isis Will Take Over US if Clinton Wins, Says Trump,” The Guardian (October 13, 2016). https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/12/donaldtrump-florida-rally-isis-hillary-clinton.

Coady.

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4 Combatants, Non-Combatants, and the Question of Innocence

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We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror. Martin Latsis, Red Terror¹ A final objection to the tactical definition of terrorism is not directly related to its narrowness or width but to its employment of the categories of noncombatant (or “innocent”) and combatant. This challenge has obvious implications beyond definitional matters since the employment of these categories in the definition leads to the possibility of a moral judgment on terrorist acts by way of the just war principle of discrimination, or, as some call it, “distinction.” In discussion of that principle’s role in just war theory there have been numerous difficulties raised in the philosophical literature and elsewhere about the distinction between combatants and noncombatants and its moral significance. Hence, we will have to venture into some matters that concern the moral assessment of attacks upon noncombatants, as well as the question of how to distinguish combatants from non-combatants and the relation of this distinction to such categories as civilian, soldier, and innocent. First, there is the sweeping objection that in modern conflicts there can be no way of making the distinction since modern societies are so integrated that everyone is making a contribution to the conflict in ways that make

¹ Martin Latsis, Red Terror (November 1918).

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them combatants and hence legitimate targets because of what they do. Sometimes the objection is given a metaphysical flavor by claiming that all members of a collective are morally responsible for what the collective does because their very membership subsumes them into collective moral responsibility for what is done, and hence also, when what they do is wrong, into guilt for that wrong. The outlook is not entirely, as often claimed and as mentioned above, a product of modern war and the close integration of contemporary societies, since some version of this outlook on collective responsibility has ancient roots, for instance in the view held by many Christians for centuries that “the Jews” were all guilty of Christ’s dreadful death. I shall not spend time on the sweeping collective guilt claim as a critique of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants in the context of war since it seems to me both foolish and (perhaps unintentionally) malicious; it is surely sufficient refutation to point out that it includes “enemy” babies and small children within its sweep, as well as citizens of the enemy state who are objectors to their country’s war and other citizens or residents who are alienated from their own state by its persecution or enslavement of them. It does, however, raise the question how we should distinguish between combatant and non-combatant and why. The “why” question relates more to the moral assessment of terrorism, to which we shall turn more fully in Chapter 5. But it does have some relevance to the “how” question, since the point of distinguishing the categories is to mark some appropriate differences of treatment due to each, in particular with respect to the moral legitimacy of targets for lethal violence. There are really three crucial questions about the status of non-combatants. Who are non-combatants, why should they have moral significance, particularly the moral significance of immunity from direct attack, and how far should their proposed immunity extend? These are questions that have recently been subjected to considerable philosophical scrutiny and, given the significance attributed to the distinction and its moral pertinence by my tactical definition, we must address them here. Most of this scrutiny has been concerned with war rather than terrorism, but there are obviously close connections, especially, given my definition, with jus in bello considerations about the immunity of noncombatants (or in some formulations, civilians). Hence, much of the following will be concerned with the context of war but the relevance to terrorist acts will be apparent.

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What Distinguishes Combatants from Non-Combatants? Who then counts as a non-combatant? A rough criterion, and one that has been influential, is that a non-combatant is anyone who is not bearing arms. But this test is open to several objections. Indeed, it seems neither necessary nor sufficient. Soldiers seem to be prime candidates for combatant status but they are not always bearing arms, as when they are on leave or resting behind the front lines. Moreover, there are many people who play an important role in prosecuting a war who do not bear arms, but can be argued with some plausibility to be legitimate targets in war because of the way their role and activities are related to the prosecution of the war. These include those parts of the political leadership most involved in directing a war, civilian-style administrators of the war processes, scientists designing new weapon systems during a war, and workers in munitions factories. To that extent, such people can be viewed as part of the enemy’s combatant forces. Similarly, we might think of the soldiers on leave as part of the army that is engaged in fighting and as standing ready to resume arms and hostilities. Equally, work in the munitions factory is surely integrated directly into the war effort in a way that can make the factory and its operators, if not themselves “bearing arms,” at least direct contributors to the violent means of conducting the combat. The “civilian” politicians may be civilians in the sense that they may neither be in military uniform nor bearing arms, so not directly involved in the actual day-to-day prosecution of combat, but they are hardly mere civilians given that they scheme, plan, and control violent hostilities from the safety of an often remote office. In testimony to their martial role, some of them do strut about in military uniforms, and the United States President is officially entitled “Commander in Chief.” Nor are those people, whether in uniform or not, who operate the controls of an armed drone from the security of a building in the American “heartland,” even if they are not personally armed. These examples point toward abandoning the criterion of “bearing arms” in favor of something more explanatory that seems to underpin it. There are plenty of people, for instance, who bear arms (in one sense of that phrase) but who have no part in prosecuting anything that could seriously be called a combat or a war. Consider armed police in a predominantly peaceful society whose weapons are carried for emergencies that are seldom upon them; on those rare occasions when they are called upon to threaten or use the weapons in defense of themselves or others against a criminal, they cannot

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be regarded as combatants in any but a stretched sense. Nor are hunters carrying and using lethal weapons to kill animals for food combatants merely in virtue of their “bearing arms.” So it is clear that the idea of a combatant (and that of non-combatant) should be understood in terms of the context and purposes for which the arms are carried at the ready. The context of police carrying and sometimes using weapons, for example, is most commonly not to engage in military activity or to deploy violence in any fashion that could be called political. Nor are the arms normally carried by police with the standard aim to kill those opposed to them; indeed, in most situations where police confront dangerous people, their primary aim is, or should be, the use of arms to effect an arrest rather than the killing of the offender.² Things are different when police assume something close to a military role, as might be the case in certain revolutionary situations or as would be the case in the operations of a repressive “police state.” In such circumstances police would be, or be close to, combatants—just ones in some cases and unjust in others. Some of these difficulties could be met by combining with the armsbearing criterion a condition of wearing distinctive military uniforms, and perhaps by being more expansive about the meaning of “bearing.” The former would not deal with most of the difficulty about “civilians” who play crucial and often dominant roles in prosecuting a war, but it neutralizes some of the other difficulties such as the police objection (as long as their uniforms are different enough). As for reinterpreting “bearing” in some way, it might be plausible to say that the hunters are not “bearing ” arms in some relevant sense, but this move, even if successful for the hunters, does not deal with the political leadership and the scientists. The uniform criterion has featured as part of international law serving, as Michael Walzer, amongst others, has pointed out, precisely to bolster the security of non-combatants from attack.³ That element in international law has been somewhat eroded, however, by recognition that there could be legitimate insurgent forces who do not operate with such distinctive uniforms. Instead, something of its significance for distinguishing combatants ² See Jeff McMahan, “War, Terrorism, and the ‘War on Terror,’” in ‘War on Terror’: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2006, edited by Christopher Miller (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), section 5, “The Requirement of Arrest,” for a theoretical discussion of the rationale for the arrest constraint on police resort to violence. ³ Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 179. The point is made within the context of Walzer’s subtle discussion of the difficulties in implementing military attack policies that respect noncombatant immunity in conditions of guerrilla war where the enemy combatants are indistinguishable from the non-combatants they hide amongst (in villages, for instance).

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from non-combatants has been retained in the Geneva Convention Protocols of 1977 by stressing the criterion of openly carrying arms at least “during the engagement and during such time as they are visible to the adversary while engaged in a military deployment preceding the launching of an attack in which they are to participate.”⁴ This amplifies the “bearing arms” test by its specifications of context with the terms “military deployment,” “adversary,” and “attack.” It helps make the test more manageable, though the problems remain untouched, for instance about how to classify certain political leaders and others engaged directly in promoting the conflict. Moreover, it raises difficult questions about how captured fighters who do not wear distinctive clothing or carry arms openly should be treated in captivity: whether, for instance, they deserve the privileges accorded to combatants, a topic signposted by the Bush administration’s invention of the category of “illegal combatants” in order to deny some of them such privileges (confusingly so by its using the term “enemy combatants” for the same purpose). Interestingly, the Bush terminological contortions are related to the fact that, given the exhaustive nature of the combatant/noncombatant distinction, the amplified test would seem by default of categories to grant members of irregular insurgent forces who do not wear uniforms and are furtive in their “bearing of arms” non-combatant status and hence immunity from attack under a principle of discrimination. This again points to the theoretical inadequacy of the modified “bearing arms” test, though it can be better seen as an attempt to provide a rule with some pragmatic value for protecting non-combatants from being too readily confused with combatants. Even so, combatants cannot be defined solely in these terms. One move away from the bearing arms theme, with or without the military uniforms test, is to cash the concept of combatant in terms of an underlying idea of responsibility for the infliction of military violence, and non-combatant in terms of the lack of such responsibility in the prosecution of hostilities. This gains some of its plausibility from parallels with individual “domestic” contexts where the resort to possibly lethal violence can be justified in terms of a right to self-defense or even defense of others. In those contexts, an attacker who has no right to inflict violence on an innocent victim is legitimately open to counter-violence and can lose their right to life. These two are, or have become, combatants (one justified, or just, and the other unjustified, or unjust), but the just combatant is not entitled to resort ⁴ See Protocol I, Article 67, as reported in International Committee of the Red Cross, Basic Rules of the Geneva Conventions and Their Additional Protocols, 232.

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to violence against a mere bystander (who is thereby a non-combatant, innocent of the dangerous behavior) even if attacking the bystander could help their defense against the attacker, perhaps by distracting the attacker. This plausible domestic analogy, however, and the innocence it invokes, need further investigation. Such a notion of innocence and associated notions of moral responsibility have a long history in just war thinking, both with regard to distinguishing combatants from non-combatant civilians and with respect to its moral significance in warfare. Francisco Vitoria, for instance, in his landmark treatise on war, says of the deliberate killing of the innocent:

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The deliberate slaughter of the innocent is never lawful in itself. [He then cites the authority of its condemnation in Exodus ch. 23 but goes on secondly to argue from natural reason.] Secondly the basis of a just war is a wrong done, as has been shown above. But wrong is not done by an innocent person. Therefore war may not be employed against him. Thirdly, it is not lawful within a State to punish the innocent for the wrongdoing of the guilty. Therefore it is not lawful among enemies.⁵

Cogent as this argument is, it nonetheless raises a difficulty posed by the domestic analogy. The problem is that, just as the justified responding combatant is not entitled to direct violence against the non-combatant bystander, the unjust attacker combatant, in addition to being unjustified in directing the initial violence against the primary victim, is surely not morally entitled to respond with violence to the just defensive violence of that innocent victim. This seems to break the analogy with war, since it puts one set of armed combatants (the just ones) in the same moral camp as noncombatant civilians, whereas the laws of war and many versions of the related just war theory keep them apart and allow both sets of opposing military the right to attack the other. This important problem will be addressed later in the chapter. The move to responsible agency and associated notions of innocence and guilt, illustrated by the domestic context, remains initially plausible nonetheless because it gives some moral significance to the classifications combatant/non-combatant (so answering the second question raised at the ⁵ Francisco de Vitoria, Francisci de Victoria de Indis et de Ivre Belli Relectiones, edited by Ernest Nys (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917 [1932]), 178 (section 35).

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chapter’s beginning), since using preventive violence against those whose activities make them guilty of prosecuting some grave offense makes more moral sense than attacking those who are not. It was for this reason that I referred in my definitional discussion in Chapter 1 to “non-combatants (or in a certain sense ‘innocents’),” and some reference to innocence also tracks the common reaction of ordinary folk of describing terrorist acts as attacks upon innocent people. We shall see later, however, that further complexities remain to be examined in the notions of guilt and innocence at work in both the domestic example and the context of political violence.

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The Role of Two Different Underlying Strands of Thought and Nathanson’s Solution Much of the difficulty in relating the domestic examples to large-scale political violence, either for war or terrorist attacks, is caused by the fact that the idea of a combatant or “non-innocent” and the contrasting notion of non-combatant or “innocent” in the context of political violence is influenced by two different strands of thought, those that I briefly identified in Chapter 1 as internal and external. One strand is concerned with a type of individual agency and the other with a type of public role. If we concentrate on the former, we will emphasize some more or less strict notion of moral or other responsibility (or the lack of it); if we focus on the latter, we will be concerned with classification under a public political status or role to be contrasted with a more private one. The external strand for which the term non-combatant or civilian is most appropriate demarcates those people who are not in the armed forces or groups prosecuting violent political hostilities or not involved in directly supporting or managing the violent activities of those who are. Those “militants” and those directly supporting or managing them are combatants. This is the strand that most naturally accords with international humanitarian law regarding warfare and with some suitably modified version of the “bearing arms” story.⁶ The internal strand puts a focus on some sort of moral standing regarding guilt or innocence of those actively engaged in or directing violent hostilities (combatants) in contrast with those who have little or no obvious personal moral responsibility for any

⁶ Nils Melzer, Interpretive Guidance on the Notion of Direct Participation in Hostilities Under International Law (Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross, 2009).

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purported grave wrongdoing that might serve to legitimize for others the resort to political violence against designated wrongdoers (non-combatants). One theorist, Stephen Nathanson, has suggested resolving the difficulty by a conjunctive account whereby a person is only an “innocent” if they satisfy both the conditions of being morally innocent and having nonoccupancy of a military role.⁷ This has the advantage, in accordance with international law and what seems to be “common sense,” that soldiers who have been coerced into fighting or are non-culpably ignorant of the wrong they are doing and hence arguably morally excused or even morally nonresponsible for their objectively immoral actions will still be legitimate targets, since whatever their moral innocence as coerced or ignorant agents, they will still count as combatants. Ordinary citizens will not occupy the relevant military role and will also not be sufficiently morally responsible for the killing in the war, so will be “innocent” in the relevant sense. The sufficiency rider allows for the fact that many citizens may approve of the (objectively) unjust war, write supportive letters to their relatives at the front, and so on, though they take no serious more considerable part in waging hostilities. It also allows for a way of saying that just warriors are innocent, but in virtue of their military role, they are legitimate targets and count as combatants. Nathanson’s ingenious suggestion rescues the ideas of innocent and noncombatant from some of their intuitive problems. In virtue, for instance, of their public role as soldiers, the just combatants, though morally innocent of wrongdoing in their fighting against enemy troops, are not overall innocent in the required sense that exempts them from lethal attack and so can be (unfortunately for them) legitimate targets for their enemies. But the solution has its own costs. Most importantly, there seems to be insufficient philosophical rationale for the public role criterion if it is entirely independent of the agency criterion. Why should it matter morally which role a person occupies unless we know something about the moral significance of their acts in that role? The role of soldier, for instance, is not seriously specified by the sort of unusual clothing the soldier wears, but by what the soldier characteristically is intentionally engaged in doing or being ready to do qua soldier. This suggests that a concentration on some typical sort of intentional behavior or agency geared to the prosecution of harms or injuries must play some part in our understanding of public role and ⁷ Stephen Nathanson, Terrorism and the Ethics of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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hence of combatant and by contrast non-combatant. That concentration has been much discussed, as already mentioned, in a “domestic analogy” that begins by discussing the morality of self-defense (and defense of others) in contexts of individual violent confrontations within the setting of a civil order. That such defense cannot reach to the opportunist killing of innocent bystanders then serves as a model for non-combatant immunity in largerscale conflicts. It seems clear enough that a search for such an agency feature must begin with a focus upon something about the agent’s mental states, and these mental states must have something to do with individual responsibility. Just what kind and degree of responsibility is a vexed question, as already suggested. With regard to non-combatant status, the bystander, in the domestic example, may have had some prior opportunity of forestalling the attack but have been too preoccupied with significant but less important concerns, or in some contexts may be confused or mistaken about who is attacking whom or mistakenly believe that the unjust violence is a just response to an attack they haven’t seen or been falsely informed about. These circumstances may be a matter for serious moral regret about the bystander’s behavior, but it does not accord the bystander the status of someone who can be legitimately open to lethal attack (a “combatant”). Indeed, whatever the bystander’s views, they may be, or have been, powerless to act effectively against the attack. Similar considerations apply in the case of war to some members of the unjust enemy’s civilian population who may have missed some opportunity to prevent the attack, or be sympathetic toward, even supportive of, the attackers’ actions because misled or confused about their nature. A further relevant consideration is the powerlessness of individuals or most groups in the face of their state’s power. Yet if these considerations offer some support for the non-combatant role and its relation to a presumptive immunity, it must be conceded that they also cast some doubt, from the opposite direction so to speak, on the status of unjust warriors. When just wars are fought against “unjust warriors,” some number, perhaps many of them, will be either heavily coerced into fighting or understandably mistaken, even gravely deluded, about the supposed justice of their cause.⁸ This fact at least raises a question about their degree of moral responsibility for their involvement in what is in reality ⁸ There will of course be (and have been often enough) wars in which neither side is justified in going to war, as for example when two nations fight each other over the opportunities to dominate unjustly another nation.

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unjust war-fighting. They approximate to an attacker in the domestic scenario who has either been coerced into attacking or is seriously mistaken in believing that their victim must be prevented from launching a lethal attack on them or another. But again, it would be strange to confer anything like non-combatant status on such an attacker.

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Walzer’s “Moral Equality of Soldiers” and Its Implications It is partly these latter considerations about coercion and ignorance that influenced Michael Walzer to propound his doctrine of the “moral equality of soldiers” and to insist that responsibility for the moral justice of waging war was entirely a matter of “the king’s business” and no concern of citizens called upon to fight “the king’s” or in more modern terms “the ruler’s” war.⁹ His position concerns moral responsibility under the jus ad bellum, the conditions that must be met for going to war, and his argument is that the young citizens called upon to fight the state’s wars are either or both under too much duress or in no epistemic position to determine the proposed war’s justice. So Walzer’s argument can be seen as supporting the moral significance of the “public role” criterion by making the moral status of the soldier’s role simply derivative from justified obedience to the status of the ruler. Consequently, the only relevant internal state of the soldier or the citizen contemplating enlistment or facing conscription is that of deference to their state authority. When it comes to morality within war, however, Walzer thinks the responsibility reverts to the individual soldier who must resist calls to commit atrocities, such as intentionally killing noncombatants, even if such atrocities are ordered by the ruler’s representatives in the field, or even directly by the ruler themself. Walzer’s doctrine of the “moral equality of soldiers” and its accompanying approach to individual moral responsibility has been strongly criticized by a number of contemporary philosophers.¹⁰ As I have elsewhere argued, a major problem for Walzer’s view is that it seems to make a nonsense of

⁹ Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 39. ¹⁰ See, for instance, C. A. J. Coady, “Just and Unjust Wars by M. Walzer,” Philosophy, vol. 54, no. 209 (1979), 418; C. A. J. Coady, Morality and Political Violence (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), ch. 6; Jeff McMahan, “On the Moral Equality of Combatants,” The Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 14, no. 4 (2006); Helen Frowe, The Ethics of War and Peace: An Introduction, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2015), 128; Cecile Fabre, “Guns, Food, and Liability to Attack in War,” Ethics, vol. 120 (2009).

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conscientious objection to a particular war by ruling out any obligation upon individual citizens to scrutinize a government’s decision to go to war and refuse on reasonable conscientious grounds to serve. Walzer’s idea that the war is “the king’s business” would mean that someone who refuses to serve in a war declared by their “king” can only be regarded by fellow citizens as violating a strict obligation to serve, even if they genuinely claim their resistance to be morally motivated. Walzer presumably agrees with the now widely accepted view that they can be excused opprobrium if they have some unusual but sincerely entrenched beliefs rejecting all wars, for this would accord with the common practice until recently in those countries that did allow conscientious objection of allowing only religious objections and only to all wars. The religious element has been extended in some countries to secular “comprehensive” beliefs that have a similar depth of conviction. Yet in the vast majority of countries that allow legal exemption from military service, it is still required that they object to all wars rather than have a reasoned objection to a particular war. I have also elsewhere argued that such a restriction of objections is unwarranted and that an individual’s conscientious understanding that a particular war is unjust requires that individual to reject participation, in part because they are being invited to unjustly kill enemy combatants. Such an individual cannot retain integrity yet surrender their moral authority to the state in such a matter.¹¹ Another position that has some similarities to Walzer’s, although it need not explicitly endorse the “king’s business only” thesis, is one that has been put by Henry Shue and by Noam Zohar and endorsed in one way or another by several philosophers.¹² This is the idea that those who emphasize individual agency conditions are ignoring the fact that war is essentially a contest between collective political entities, very often states, so that a focus on individual moral responsibilities regarding violence is misguided. This argument is often bolstered by the claim that those who stress the individual agency dimension are wrongly reductionist about the moral status of collective entities. Shue in a co-authored article with Janina Dill argued that “two of the most basic, evidently unchanging characteristics of war make impossible the full moral assessment of individual conduct in war ¹¹ See Coady, Morality and Political Violence, ch. 11; Coady, “Conscientious Objection,” International Encylopedia of Ethics (2013). ¹² Henry Shue, “Do We Need a ‘Morality of War’?”, in Just and Unjust Warriors: The Moral and Legal Status of Soldiers, edited by David Rodin and Henry Shue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Noam J. Zohar, “Collective War and Individualistic Ethics: Against the Conscription of ‘Self-Defense,’” Political Theory, vol. 21, no. 4 (1993).

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and therefore block the moral individualization of the rules that should guide the fighting.”¹³ The first of these two (I will consider the second later) is what I’ll call the collectivity thesis as a result of which “few individuals will be liable entirely on the basis of their own behaviour to the treatment they are subjected to as adversaries.”¹⁴ They quote Rousseau approvingly as saying, “War, then, is not a relation between men, but between states; in war individuals are enemies wholly by chance, not as men, not even as citizens, but only as soldiers.”¹⁵ We will consider their second relevant characteristic later, but the collectivity claim can be criticized in several ways. An initial problem with the Shue/Dill version of this is that it seems to prove too much. If the full moral assessment of individual conduct in war is made “impossible” by the collectivity thesis regarding conduct toward “enemies” or “adversaries,” then it would seem to be wrong to hold individual soldiers morally accountable for atrocities in violation of the jus in bello. This is something that, like Walzer, they would want to avoid in respect of conduct toward enemy civilians and captured troops. Perhaps enemy civilians don’t count as enemies or captured troops are no longer enemies, but, if so, the individual’s attitude to this, in the context of their state’s always possible determination that they are, needs to be explained. A second problem is that the collectivity thesis tends to conflate two very different claims, one descriptive and the other evaluative. That wars are basically conflicts between groups is uncontestably true, but the implications of this for individual responsibility for involvement in those conflicts are another matter. At one point, Dill and Shue acknowledge that their collectivity claim is a “purely descriptive” one but they believe that individual physical confrontations with war “take on their meaning, and at least some of their moral status, as part of the physical confrontation between the collective entities.”¹⁶ I find this link to morality somewhat obscure, or at least not fully explicated. That personal involvement, as a soldier, in such conflict gains some of its meaning from the collective nature of war seems undeniable, but what this “meaning” entails for individual responsibility is, on the face of it, unclear. Shue and Dill talk of the individual’s being “at the disposition of the state” and tellingly add that the state is “traditionally the only legitimate belligerent and the subject of international regulation.”¹⁷ But ¹³ Janina Dill and Henry Shue, “Limiting the Killing in War: Military Necessity and the St. Petersburg Assumption,” Ethics and International Affairs, vol. 26, no. 3 (2012), 312–313. ¹⁴ Dill and Shue, “Limiting the Killing in War,” 313. ¹⁵ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, cited in Dill and Shue, “Limiting the Killing in War,” 313. ¹⁶ Dill and Shue, “Limiting the Killing in War,” 314. ¹⁷ Dill and Shue, “Limiting the Killing in War,” 313.

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one key point in just war theory as a moral outlook is that states can be illegitimately at war, and if so, the individual’s being at the “disposition” of such a state should be morally problematic for that individual and, for that matter, for states. It may, in some sense, be a “purely descriptive” reality that states act as if they can dispose of their citizens as they please and that many citizens accept this, and perhaps this is all that Shue and Dill mean, but unless one thinks that citizens have a passive duty to comply with state demands, then a question still remains about individual moral responsibility. Shue seems to concede as much, with a strong qualification, in an earlier, single-authored paper, when he says: “assignments of moral liability to harm on an individual basis must be made whenever they can be made.”¹⁸ In fact, their second argument suggests arguments that I will address more fully later. Those arguments are independent of any unwelcome moral implications of the collectivity thesis, and have much more morally persuasive weight in attempting to show certain special features of war and their relevance to assessing the moral responsibilities of individual soldiers. It may even be that the Dill/Shue claims about the collective nature of war can be treated not as independent of their second argument, but as a somewhat confusingly indirect statement of it. This second argument, which in various forms Henry Shue has urged in a number of places, is concerned with the concrete epistemic difficulties of applying any form of an individual agency condition to opposed soldiers in the context of the realities of actual warfare. Before considering that argument in detail, I want to discuss two areas of relevance to our discussion so far. The first involves a brief look at the international laws of war and, more generally, the moral status of regulating war, which have been central concerns of Shue and Walzer. The second concerns a strongly contested contemporary philosophical debate between those called “revisionists” and those called “traditionalists” about just war theorizing. This should illuminate the complex relations between agency, moral responsibility, role, and prudence in the context of war and terrorism.

Law, Regulation, and the Revisionist vs. Traditionalist Debate Walzer’s position, and Shue’s (and Dill’s), cohere to a considerable degree with the letter of the international law regarding criminal responsibility in ¹⁸ Henry Shue, Fighting Hurt: Rule and Exception in Torture and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 439.

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war, for international law does not hold soldiers on either side responsible for fighting in an unjust war. But if Walzer’s moral argument, for instance, and the state of international law coincide in conclusions, they are not necessarily based on the same reasoning since the legal norm can plausibly be understood as the outcome of prudential considerations. By “prudential” I do not mean something contrasting with morality, and here I stand opposed to a contemporary trend to contrast prudence with morality and treat it as a species of “mere” self-interest. In opposition to this trend, it is enough to say that prudence considered as a concern with the consequences and the specific morally relevant circumstances of implementing moral values and principles need not be restricted to self (or even national) interest. Just as I am being prudent if I remove a dangerous obstacle on the road even if it poses no threat to my wellbeing, nations can be prudent as well as charitable in providing aid to other nations facing natural disasters even where their not doing so would pose no danger to their national interest. Indeed, aid that honors the name of charity, or, even better, justice, needs prudent application or its honoring will be in vain. In the case of international law, it is not surprising that it rightly takes account of the feasibility of proposed legal regulations, of likely difficulties of implementation, and of the scale of probable negative effects. Just as national laws are appealing to moral considerations, and making complex prudential judgments when regulating alcohol or drugs, as in the legal establishment of safe injecting rooms for what otherwise remain illicit activities, so international law faces comparable prudential implementation when facing the task of regulating war. These are considerations that those philosophers who seek to emphasize the agency criteria relevant to individuals in war must also take into account. We shall address the significance of these prudential concerns and the debate about how attention to individual agency can deal with them later. These reflections return us to Nathanson’s emphasis on the significance of military role (broadly understood). The question remains whether that significance can be treated simply as a brute fact or explained in some way that also takes into account the realities of individual agency, short of some Walzerian “king’s business” denial of its relevance.¹⁹

¹⁹ In fairness to Walzer, it should be stressed, as already mentioned, that his denial of the individual citizen’s responsibility for going to war does not extend to denial of responsibility for atrocities within war. Whether this disjunction can be consistently maintained is a matter for dispute, given that the battlefield conditions that sometimes facilitate atrocities may be just as

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Issues of individual agency and responsibility, however, require us to confront a contemporary debate between those philosophers who emphasize strongly the significance of the moral responsibility of individuals for their part in waging war (and hence for its justice or otherwise both in its jus ad bellum and jus in bello aspects) and those philosophers who criticize their approach and conclusions. The former are usually called “revisionists” and the latter more commonly “traditionalists.” On this account Walzer is clearly a traditionalist, but other critics of the revisionists, such as Henry Shue and Seth Lazar, differ from him in rejecting his strong underpinning of the moral equality of soldiers. I am uncomfortable with the terminology of revisionist and traditionalist in this debate because, apart from its obscuring the differences among adherents lumped in both camps, I think that part of the revisionist outlook is actually a revival of elements in the complex tradition of just war thinking just as part of the so-called traditionalist outlook ignores those and other elements in that tradition while stressing some others. However, in what follows I will keep to this terminology for convenience, relying on the reader to keep in mind my reservations. The primary problem with the revisionist position, at least in its strongest form, for the importance of the non-combatant immunity condition enshrined in the just war principle of discrimination is that it tends to undermine that principle. As Seth Lazar has argued, there is a “responsibility dilemma” for revisionists that primarily resides in how high or how low they set the bar for the sort of moral responsibility that eliminates innocence and makes its bearers liable to be subject to potentially lethal attacks.²⁰ If the bar is set low, in the sense that a relatively small degree of responsibility makes one liable for killing, then it removes the problem that too many “unjust” warriors are really innocent and not liable to attack. This happens if we accept that, in spite of their ignorance of the injustice of their cause or their being subject to pressure to fight, they could and should have dispelled the ignorance or resisted the pressure. To put it in terms of excuses, as Jeff McMahan does, they are liable to self-defensive attack because they are (or can be presumed to be) only weakly partially excused for fighting in an

coercive, if not more so, than those Walzer cites in his arguments for the moral equality doctrine. See my review: Coady, “Just and Unjust Wars by M. Walzer.” ²⁰ In what follows I briefly summarize the line of criticism by Seth Lazar in his book Sparing Civilians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). See especially pp. 9–10, though the argument is sustained throughout. The book develops and summarizes points made originally in Seth Lazar, “The Responsibility Dilemma for Killing in War: A Review Essay,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 40, no. 1 (2010).

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unjust cause.²¹ But then far too many civilians will be liable to such attack, which pretty much erodes the force of the principle of discrimination, since their ignorance, minor contributions to the war effort, and/or voting for the war party may be culpable enough to make them liable also. This low level would solve one problem by creating another. Yet if we make the bar a high one, in the sense that a great and direct degree of responsibility is required to be liable to attack and killing, then the immunity of many civilians as noncombatants will be assured. So, it seems that the high bar is the right way to understand the role of agency in assigning civilian immunity. The high-bar solution, however, forces consideration of the other horn of the responsibility dilemma since it appears to deliver the verdict that very many of the unjust enemy troops will not be liable to lethal attack because their ignorance and subjection to pressure is also not sufficient for culpable liability. Biting the bullet (so to speak) about this status of so many of the objectively unjustified enemy troops prosecuting an unjust war on the grounds of what they could and ought to have done is unpalatable, however, in several ways. For one thing, it makes many people voluntarily engaged in killing and maiming to have the same moral status as non-combatants, which is intuitively bizarre, and for another, it flies in the face of the possibility of realistically regulating war. This brief summary of the problems of relying solely upon the moral responsibility conditions for distinguishing combatants from non-combatants suggests that the high-bar agency condition needs to be supplemented by other considerations. A set of such considerations is readily to hand, and they are principally prudential in the way mentioned earlier. I shall consider them first of all with respect to the status of combatants and then to the status of noncombatants.

Prudential Arguments to Buttress the High-Bar Agency Condition A first consideration that returns us to the Shue/Dill second argument regarding combatants is the epistemic objection that there is, for the most part, no way that just warriors in the course of battle could determine the respective states of responsibility amongst their enemy that make some ²¹ Jeff McMahan, Killing in War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), ch. 4; see especially the conclusion on pp. 186–187.

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liable to be killed and some not. This is true on either a high- or low-bar approach to culpability or responsibility more generally. There is obviously no room for hesitation and deliberation about this in the heat of battle, where indecision may mean death for oneself and one’s comrades. An additional point is that very many soldiers fighting in what is objectively an unjust cause will strongly believe that their cause is just, even if this belief is one that some, perhaps many, of them should not responsibly have arrived at. On the high-bar criterion, many of these will not be liable to attack. This ought to give pause to any soldier or partisan onlooker determining that there is a sharp division between just warriors on one side and unjust warriors on the other, since it not only suggests that the soldiers on the objectively unjust side are not fully culpable for their prosecution of that cause, but also at least raises a question about whether any soldier’s strong belief in the justice of their cause has been responsibly arrived at. Certainly, it is a fact about many warriors fighting, as it happens, in a just cause that they fight for reasons unrelated to a serious evaluation of the justice of their cause; many instead volunteer in search of adventure, or in fear of being labeled cowards. Indeed, one young Australian in World War I is recorded as merely desperate to escape the boredom of suburban Perth!²² It is also significant, in this connection, that the idea of just cause, although it is necessary for any viable version of just war theory, is subject to several forms of complexity, if not ambiguity, in particular with regard to the varying conditions of protracted warfare and also the sort of means used to prosecute the war. The first complexity arises from the fact that wars are phasic: an armed force that begins with a just cause (say, the defense against illegitimate invasion) may move into a phase of fighting that is unjust. This could happen because it continues the war when its leadership should have agreed to conditions for surrender reasonably offered, or in relation to means used (involving the jus in bello) when it decides upon systematic violations of non-combatant immunity. Persistence of either of these phases makes the continuance of fighting by the originally justified side at least morally problematic for that continuing phase, and it makes armed resistance by the initially unjustified side morally defensible. Furthermore, when it comes to the moral and legal issues of regulating war as an ongoing

²² I viewed the letter in which this sentiment was expressed by a West Australian youth at the Melbourne Museum’s “Love and Sorrow” memorial in September 2014 to the Australian soldiers (“diggers”) in World War I.

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if usually regrettable feature of international affairs for the foreseeable future, relevant facts are that, as mentioned earlier, often enough both (or the various different) sides in a conflict will with differing degrees of plausibility regard their cause as just, and external adjudication of the question will often be fraught with difficulties both with regard to the inherent complexity of the issues and the extrinsic difficulties of enforcement and partiality. A further prudential consideration arising from the above factors is that making the justified status of the warriors determine their moral immunity from attack as a regulatory principle for warfare is likely to have very bad outcomes, since each side is certain to claim, and often sincerely believe, that their cause is just and their fighting on its behalf justified. Hence, the giving of such moral emphasis to the conviction that their own warriors are “innocent” victims is likely to increase the ferocity of combat between forces (already great enough) and encourage the refusal of quarter, the rejection of negotiation, and thereby the espousal of “unconditional surrender,” and more brutal treatment of captured enemy soldiers who have killed our “innocent” soldiers and are thus something like mere butchers and war criminals. Second, on the innocence of just warriors thesis combined with the supposition that the just side has won the conflict, the aftermath of armed conflict is very likely to require the wholesale prosecution of the unjust enemy troops. Such a prosecution, though apparently urged by the leadership of the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II, would face massive practical difficulties of implementation, and pose major challenges to the reestablishment of peace. A more sweeping argument from “bad effects” for contrasting noncombatants to combatants on either side of a war is that respect for the non-combatant immunity of most civilians on both sides will lead to vastly less harm in warfare than abandoning or diminishing drastically respect for it. When we consider the extraordinary direct and indirect toll on civilian populations of most twentieth- and twenty-first-century wars, the plausibility of this consideration is clearly considerable. There have been counterarguments, of course. The military historian Liddell Hart, partly in reaction to the horrors of extended trench warfare in World War I, argued a case in 1925 for the bombing of civilian populations (and their industrial/political sites) as a prime objective in war that would more rapidly end the conflict than concentrating on defeating enemy soldiers. Given a “sufficiently swift and powerful” blow, Hart claimed that “there is no reason why, in a few hours, or at most days, from the commencement of hostilities the nerve

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centre of one of the contending countries should not be paralysed.”²³ Hart’s “no reason” was always dubious but its influence, along with others, was a factor in the appalling and extended slaughter of civilian populations in World War II that lasted far longer than a few hours or days and meant that the casualties of the later war far outdid those of the former. Given these considerations, the moral standards appropriate for the reality of warfare as a depressingly familiar feature of the international scene are likely to work best when implications of just cause for the status of combatants are held in a degree of abeyance for the duration of the war, and emphasis is placed heavily upon compliance with jus in bello, including the immunity of non-combatants. This has the consequence that soldiers on both sides of the battle should be treated as combatants who are presumed morally entitled in appropriate circumstances to direct lethal violence toward their opponents, whereas neither justified nor unjustified combatants are morally entitled to direct such violence at non-combatants. Thus, when supplemented in this way, the high-bar condition allows for a sense of combatant that avoids the counter-intuitive conclusion that justified soldiers in the field of battle must somehow be classified as non-combatants. Even so, on such a criterion, there will remain certain similarities between some of those on either side engaged in hostilities upon the field of battle and some of those who are not. Some soldiers on the unjust side (or sides) may have been heavily coerced into fighting, or understandably deluded about the justice of their cause, so that their state of mind may be similar to many of their citizens at home who support the war. Others, of course, may have no such excuses and may more fully and culpably endorse the unjust cause. It is also worth noting, as mentioned earlier, that some of those fighting on the just side may have predominantly slight or disreputable reasons for fighting and care nothing or little for the justice of the cause, and this may parallel disreputable attitudes to the war by some of their citizens at home. The former may be primarily motivated, for instance, by a lust for dangerous adventure, or even in some (one trusts, rare) cases, a desire for authorized killing. The latter may see the conflict primarily as an opportunity for financial gain, imperial expansion, or national glorification. This last point again poses the question why such non-combatants cannot be legitimate targets for attack. A partial answer, which I endorse, is that ²³ Basil Henry Liddell Hart, The Memoirs of Captain Liddell Hart, vol. 1 (London: Cassell & Co., 1965), 11.

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some civilians, normally classed as non-combatants, are indeed sufficiently implicated in the chain of agency conducting the war to qualify as combatants. Examples include those parts of the political leadership most involved in directing a war, scientists designing new weapon systems during a war, and workers in munitions factories. And there is room for other candidates to be considered. Often enough, those in such categories will be sufficiently distinguishable so that prudential arguments about the difficulty of detecting those who qualify on the high-bar criterion from others who don’t will not be available. Of course, it may be that there are other prudential arguments that work to protect even such categories from attack, such as the likely disproportionate danger to lives of genuine non-combatants with whom such targets may be surrounded. This argument is indeed also relevant to ordinary fighting between combatants in certain contexts where nearby non-combatants are greatly endangered. Yet another prudential argument against attacking such (actually combatant) civilians concerns the likelihood of its encouraging the unjust enemy to engage in tit-for-tat attacks on civilians (who are actual, though just, combatants on “our” side), and indeed of encouraging attacks on civilians, whatever their status.

The Cumulative Effect of Such Arguments Some of the prudential considerations discussed earlier to supplement the high-bar criterion may not be wholly convincing in some real or imaginary circumstances, but their combined weight seems decisive. Seth Lazar has argued for such a combinatorial approach to immunity, especially the broad immunity of civilians.²⁴ He argues for five considerations which he thinks together make a very robust case for such immunity via the controlling idea that killing civilians is generally much morally worse than killing soldiers. Some of these considerations are reflected in the prudential issues raised above, though our vocabularies for the discussion are different (though closely related). I avoid using “civilian” and “soldier” in favor of “noncombatant” and “combatant” because I hold that some civilians may well count as combatants: because, as argued earlier, of their significant and relatively direct causal contribution to the fighting, as with some government figures. Lazar has a similar view about liability to lethal attack so, in

²⁴ Lazar, Sparing Civilians, 19.

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terms of final conclusions, our differences here may be largely verbal. Another more substantial difference is that at least two of his arguments seem less prudential in my sense, but more directly stressing an intrinsic moral principle. These are arguments (2) and (4) below. His five arguments are: (1) an instrumental futility argument; that is, that attacking civilian populations is unnecessary; (2) an argument that killing civilians involves an intrinsically wrongful use of them in a more objectionable way than killing soldiers; (3) an argument that civilians are more likely to be innocent than soldiers and hence attacking civilians involves more moral risk; (4) an argument that killing the vulnerable and defenseless is more wrong, other things being equal, than killing the less vulnerable and defenseless; (5) an argument that soldiers have certain characteristics that make a morally strong case to prefer attacking them to attacking civilians.²⁵ Such characteristics are a mixed bunch, including the soldiers’ willingness to risk injury and death, their recklessness, their willingness to draw fire away from their civilian population, the role of complicity and positive duties in their situations, and the significance of the legal rules of war for their status. Lazar believes that none of these five considerations is without possible exception or complex questioning, and hence not individually decisive, but taken together they make a powerful case for “moral distinction” and what is called civilian immunity. I cannot pursue Lazar’s argument in further detail here, but it is, I think, in harmony, for the most part, with the contours of my argument above. Some of his arguments, indeed, encompass further issues and considerations than those I have discussed, and he is somewhat more sympathetic to exceptions than I would be, but I think that his subtle and thorough analysis adds to (and overlaps with to some degree) the strength of the case I make for the viability of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants and its moral importance.

Do the Theoretical Debates Really Matter for the Discrimination Principle? Finally, it is necessary to note an important fact about the debates concerning how to distinguish non-combatants from combatants and the degrees of

²⁵ Lazar, Sparing Civilians, 19.

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responsibility and/or liability thereby relevant. That is, that although the disagreements between traditionalists and revisionists, and of course disagreements within both camps, are philosophically important in various ways, they do not very seriously affect the conclusions relevant to the operation of the principle of discrimination for terrorist acts as it is at work in the tactical definition, or the principle’s apparent consequences for moral evaluation of terrorist acts. Helen Frowe, for instance, is one of the most radical theorists advocating the extension in principle of the scope of liability to deadly attack to large proportions of civilian populations on the unjust side who are normally protected as non-combatants, and is relentless in her criticisms of arguments on behalf of their exclusion from liability to lethal attack. She finally concedes, however, that there are two prudential considerations that support acknowledging widespread immunity from lethal attack to civilians, effectively treating them, in my terms, as non-combatants. She writes: “However, the combined difficulties of identifying liable non-combatants and attacking them without causing collateral harm provides non-combatants with fairly widespread immunity from attack. But this immunity is based upon contingent features of the situation of a typical non-combatant. It is not grounded in any deep moral principle about the innocence—either material or moral—of non-combatants.”²⁶ Similarly, Jeff McMahan, who is less extreme than Frowe about liability but would view rather more non-combatants than I would as having sufficient moral responsibility for their nation’s unjust war-waging to be in some circumstances morally liable to potentially lethal attack, nonetheless wants to settle for an absolute legal ban on attacks on those same non-combatants. McMahan more broadly endorses the principle of discrimination as the best way to regulate war (and hence to condemn terrorism as I define it)²⁷ in the foreseeable future with regard to the treatment of combatants and noncombatants, but he sees this as a pragmatic matter of appropriate law that does not fully reflect the deeper morality of war. As he says, “In current conditions, the law of war cannot aspire to congruence with the morality of war. It must be formulated with a pragmatic concern for the consequences of its implementation. And pragmatic considerations argue decisively for an absolute, exceptionless legal prohibition of intentional military attacks against civilians.”²⁸ ²⁶ Helen Frowe, Defensive Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 197. ²⁷ A definition for which he has some sympathy. ²⁸ McMahan, Killing in War, 234.

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These concessions bring the revisionist and traditionalist positions closer in certain ways, but revisionist expressions of the concessions still invoke in somewhat different ways a sharp contrast between positions such as those of Frowe and McMahan and “traditionalists” such as Shue. On the one hand, (for Frowe) there is a contrast between “deep moral principle” and judgments affected by “contingent features of the situation”, and on the other (for McMahan) between true or deep morality and correct legal measures or conventions necessitated by pragmatic considerations that conflict with that morality. On the traditionalist side, these pragmatic, conventional, or legal rules are usually themselves treated as significantly, possibly deeply, moral, because they are the morally best rules or principles for the conduct of war as it is. To quote Shue: “I believe that just as in ordinary life—on this point, analogy holds—one morally ought to obey the morally best laws for the circumstances even when their content differs from the content of the rule morality would hypothetically have required if one did not in fact need law.”²⁹ I find these contrasting explanations problematic even though they converge on practical requirements. This is partly because I have sympathies with both sides. To explain: what I find distorting in the dispute is that, on the one hand, the revisionist concession is often couched in terms that make too light of the deep moral importance of the laws or conventions regarding the immunity of non-combatants, whereas, on the other hand, the traditionalists sometimes seem blind to or to minimize the potential significance of the individual citizen’s or soldier’s need to assess the morality of a war that their leaders require them to be involved in, and to blur questions of moral responsibility that thus arise beyond that of the leadership, and can arise even in some combat situations.³⁰ On the first point, all moral judgments are concerned both with principles and with the contingent features of the world in which they need to be implemented, and prudent moral judgment is essential in creating conventions and laws that must take account of certain features of reality that are part of the contingent world. I instanced earlier the example of legislating ²⁹ Shue, Fighting Hurt, 426–427. ³⁰ My own revisionist instincts have sometimes made me speak in similar ways to McMahan and Frowe. I once proclaimed “a dislocation between morality and law that often arises in an imperfect world” and referred to “plausible and practical arguments for a legal regime,” which suggest that such reasonings were not considerations of a moral nature. I now remove such a suggestion by referring to these sorts of consideration with the term prudence, understood as part of morality. See C. A. J. Coady, “The Status of Combatants,” in Just and Unjust Warriors, edited by David Rodin and Henry Shue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 166.

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safe injecting houses for the drug-addicted as a case of what is possibly (I would think probably) a morally sound prudential practice when implemented with due regard for limiting repercussions on nearby communities. This is so even if the taking of such drugs were conceded to be a morally bad thing, and not only for its effects on the user. Similarly, people who regard prostitution as seriously immoral can quite plausibly support its decriminalization on other moral grounds because of the serious evils of police corruption and other criminal activities that flourish when the law drives the activity into the criminal underground. And indeed the arguments that move both Frowe and McMahan to their concessions are palpably prudential moral arguments similar to those that I have cited earlier, such as the serious difficulties in knowing which civilians are liable to lethal attack and which are not, with the attendant risk of direct killing of the innocent, the risks of disproportionate collateral damage to genuinely innocent noncombatants, and the dangers of opening a can of worms for unjust combatants to attack civilians on the just side, and even just combatants to abuse the license to kill certain civilians by resorting to unwarranted attacks on far too many.³¹ On the second point, however, traditionalists seem inevitably driven to minimize the important moral insight that drives revisionists concerning what is morally incumbent upon individual citizens or soldiers when faced with the prospect, or indeed the actuality, of waging or supporting an unjust war. The revisionist talk of “deep morality” has some important resonance here. McMahan rightly discusses the importance of conscientious objection in this connection³² and Frowe argues that: “A consequence of the widespread acceptance of the principle of non-combatant immunity is that it undermines the moral pressure on non-combatants to think about the justness of their country’s war, just as the putative independence of jus in bello from jus ad bellum discourages combatants from thinking about whether their war is just.”³³ While I agree that there are elements in the traditionalist position that can lead to the undermining that Frowe refers to, I think it is misleading to pin that tendency on the principle of the immunity

³¹ Henry Shue has been emphatic in arguing for the moral nature of claims about the best ways to regulate war, though some of his arguments deploy the plausible thesis that “ought implies can” in a way that I think needs a little more nuance. I won’t enter into that here, however, because I think my discussion in terms of the requirements of moral prudence is sufficient for purpose. ³² McMahan, Killing in War, 97–99. ³³ Frowe, Defensive Killing, 185.

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of non-combatants (which she ultimately endorses anyway, for prudential reasons).³⁴ My argument is rather that the stress on various forms of the “moral equality of soldiers,” associated with the collectivity claims about where responsibility for killing just combatants lies, tends to remove the onus upon individual citizens to decide whether they are being called upon to kill people who don’t, strictly speaking, deserve to be killed. In other words, a serious danger in the traditionalist position is to promote a licensing of citizens to ignore any responsibility for examining the morality of their own and their nation’s involvement in the war and thereby ignoring or obscuring the need for conscientious refusal to participate in it where it is judged unjustified. Walzer’s position is particularly prone to this, and my strongest objection to Walzer’s “moral equality” thesis, aired in my review of his book in 1979 and in an article shortly thereafter, was precisely its shifting responsibility for the waging of possibly unjust war to the ruler as “the king’s business,” since this removed any obligation upon citizens faced with fighting a possibly unjust war to consider what was involved in that event in their killing enemy soldiers who didn’t deserve to be killed.³⁵ Other traditionalists, such as Henry Shue, are more cautious about the removal of moral responsibility, as we noted earlier with reference to his remark that “assignments of moral liability to harm on an individual basis must be made whenever they can be made.” This is an important concession, but the general tendency of their position, however, is still too neglectful of the conditions under which such responsibilities and liabilities are pertinent. Shue’s other comment, noted earlier on moral and legal judgments, shows this tendency when he says: “one morally ought to obey the morally best laws for the circumstances even when their content differs from the content of the rule morality would hypothetically have required if one did not in fact need law.” This implies that “hypothetical” or perhaps ordinary moral requirements on individuals ³⁴ As Henry Shue has remarked (in correspondence), Frowe’s phrasing of the point in her reference to the immunity principle makes it seem as if it is only, or primarily, the loss of immunity and hence the fear of being bombed that could make civilians think about the justice of the war, whereas such a loss might be more likely to encourage solidarity with the war effort. I recall, in this connection, Mary Midgely, a philosopher I admired greatly, making a similar point to me in Newcastle years ago. Interestingly, George Orwell had expressed, with more crankiness, a somewhat similar view that I discuss briefly in Chapter 6. Aside from the psychological improbabilities of such speculation (as illustrated by the effects of World War II city bombings), it ignores the obvious moral difficulties urged earlier. ³⁵ C. A. J. Coady, “Just and Unjust Wars by M. Walzer,” Philosophy, vol. 54 (1979); C. A. J. Coady, “The Leaders and the Led: Problems of Just War Theory,” Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 3 (1980).

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always must give way in the face of the best laws, but this clearly makes too sharp a division between morality and law in general. The import of this division is particularly relevant to an individual’s moral judgments and actions in the light of them when they are actually fighting in a war. The point is that allowing the moral room for a citizen to refuse to be enrolled in what they conscientiously judge to be an unjust war has implications for conduct within that war. That is to say, the moral question raised for individuals does not only arise in the context of their deciding whether to join the war, for it also remains a live one for soldiers who fight in what they initially believed to be a just war and then come to realize that it is not. A traditionalist like Shue can allow this, since his concern is with the jus in bello equality of opposed troops, and he does not deny the right of troops in certain circumstances to make negative judgments about their war’s jus ad bellum status. In this, his position is very different from Walzer’s “king’s business” view. Allowing such judgments, however, has some consequences for any strong separation of jus ad bellum and jus in bello since recognition that you are fighting in an unjust cause must reflect upon what you should permit yourself to do to enemy troops and to inflict upon their citizens in what otherwise would be legitimate collateral damage. In both cases, the actions you should take are likely to be constrained by circumstances that are morally complex and sometimes coercive, but in recent years we have seen examples of courageous ways of rejecting service in what have been judged (rightly, in my view) unjust wars. Some of these involved brave choices to refuse on moral and legal grounds to return to further service in a war, for instance the British soldiers Ben Griffin and Malcolm Kendall-Smith who refused further service in Iraq, and Joe Glenton who refused further service in Afghanistan and who wrote an impressive book on his experiences, including his punishments for refusal.³⁶ Other similar examples of soldiery refusal to serve could be cited from Israel (often in connection with service in the Occupied Territories) and involve groups such as Yesh Gvul. Also significant is the related phenomenon of soldiers who have finished service in a war they have come to consider in conscience to be unjust and have returned home to express their condemnation of that war. The most recent and very striking example of this is Erik Edstrom’s book Un-American: A Soldier’s Reckoning

³⁶ For more detail on the two Iraq cases see Coady, Morality and Political Violence, 234. Also see Joe Glenton, Soldier Box: Why I Won’t Return to the War on Terror (London: Verso, 2013).

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of Our Longest War.³⁷ These examples indicate that the epistemic barriers plausibly cited by traditionalists are not always decisive. Even during the conduct of a war, soldiers who realize that they are fighting an unjust war might encounter circumstances where they can realistically follow moral insight and refuse participation at the time. Often the cost of refusal, such as summary execution, may be too great, but such consequences are not invariably in prospect. S. L. A. Marshall’s claims about the surprisingly high percentage of US troops in certain theatres in World War II who failed to fire at the enemy have been challenged, though the drift of his argument has been elsewhere supported by other research.³⁸ In any case, firing above the enemy or even not firing at all would be an option not readily detectable in some contexts of battle, but consistent with conscientious judgment that one’s participation was no longer morally valid. As, of course, would be desertion if it were feasibly available. In the largely jingoistic nonsense celebrating World War I as “Australia’s coming of age,” the desertion rate of Australian troops from the hell of battlefields in France is little remarked. It has been estimated as being as high as 119 troops, and it is likely that some rejection of the war as “futile” or otherwise beyond moral and psychological toleration played some part in this defection. Interestingly, Australia was the only Allied country that would not execute deserters, much to chagrin of the British and French military authorities.³⁹ It may well be, however, that decisions on how to act on one’s realization that one is engaged in an immoral conflict raise issues of what I have called elsewhere “extrication morality.” This is the moral arena in which agents have engaged in immoral conduct either knowingly or unknowingly and come to regret it, but also find that immediate cessation will have serious moral costs to others that their involvement and projected

³⁷ Erick N. Edstrom, Un-American: A Soldier’s Reckoning of Our Longest War (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020). Also notable is Andrew I. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Edstrom fought in Afghanistan, and Bacevich in Vietnam. ³⁸ S. L. A. Marshall, Men against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947). I discuss Marshall’s claims and their impact upon military training more fully in Coady, Morality and Political Violence, 50–51. Jeff McMahan also cites Marshall and the recourse to the tactic of not firing at the enemy in McMahan, Killing in War, 133–134. ³⁹ “Desertion and the Death Penalty,” Australian War Memorial site at: https://www.awm. gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/desertion. See also C. E. W. Bean, The Australian Imperial Force in France during the Allied Offensive, 1918: The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, vol. 6 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1942).

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conduct can make them responsible for. Finding a way to minimize and negotiate these costs can in certain contexts require continuing the condemned conduct while working to extricate from it.⁴⁰ A further strong and legitimate implication of the revisionist emphasis is that non-combatant citizens who realize that their government is proposing or conducting an unjust war have an obligation to do what they can to oppose it. This is highly pertinent to those citizens who face conscription or pressures to enlist, but is also relevant even to those who are not called upon for combatant duties themselves, since they should not be unconcerned about their fellow citizens and their political community conducting an unjust conflict. There may, of course, be very little that they can do by way of opposition, especially in authoritarian regimes that punish dissent severely, but there is an obligation to do what they can. Limitations may apply not only to what such citizens can do but also to how they can come to know or reasonably believe that their nation’s cause is unjust, but there remains an obligation to try to find out and to act where possible against the resort to unjust war. A traditionalist, like Shue, need not deny this particular obligation (and in fact doesn’t), since his focus is primarily on what is permitted or required during the conflict, but, as I have argued, that emphasis does inhibit a focus upon the individual’s moral obligations during a war in which that individual conscientiously concludes that they are furthering an unjust cause.

Conclusion This chapter has been concerned to clarify what is at stake in employment of the concept of non-combatant and a special sense of innocence in the tactical definition of a terrorist act. The discussion has necessarily required an assessment of the state of play around these concepts in a sophisticated philosophical debate that is principally played out in connection with the morality of war. In Chapter 1, I made it clear that terrorist acts can be committed by states in both interstate warfare and in internal wars of a more or less formal kind. Moreover, terrorist acts by sub-state agents are often part of a violent political conflict that constitutes a form of warfare or ⁴⁰ For more on extrication morality see C. A. J. Coady, “Escaping from the Bomb: Immoral Deterrence and the Problem of Extrication,” in Nuclear Deterrence and Moral Restraint, edited by Henry Shue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

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episodes within it, and even non-paradigmatic acts of terrorism, such as those of “lone-wolf” actors, invariably invoke a wider context of political contestation that involves violent acts or provocations to them. Hence the relevance of the discussion of moral issues in the philosophy of war that employ concepts such as non-combatant status and innocence. These invariably bring with them moral resonances of condemnation and involve an appeal to the just war principle of discrimination. This chapter has already moved us a considerable degree from the clarification of concepts to the issue of the moral status of terrorist acts, and has provided material for the moral condemnation of such acts. In Chapters 5 and 6, we will examine the many ways in which theorists, particularly philosophers, have attempted to justify acts of terrorism in certain contexts.

Coady.

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5 Justifying Terrorism Four Attempts

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Ye know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not. High Priest Caiaphas justifying the execution of Jesus, John 11:49–50 KJV Although I have not defined terrorist acts in a way that necessarily casts them as immoral (or illegal), the drift of further discussions in Chapters 2 and 3 has indicated that, given the just war principle of discrimination, and its basis in what seem to be profound moral insights, genuine justifications for terrorist acts and campaigns embodying them would be very difficult to find. In fact, however, morally justifying terrorist acts in some circumstances is something many theorists are prepared to do. And indeed, in spite of the condemnatory rhetoric usually forthcoming from so many governments and their citizens about terrorism, those same governments and citizens are often prepared to excuse or justify what are terrorist acts on the tactical definition when the acts are committed by those same governments. Sometimes, this phenomenon can be explained by the fact that the justifiers think of terrorist acts in some of the ways that I have argued are confused, wrongheaded, or unhelpful. But not always. In what follows, I shall be concerned with a variety of types of justification offered by philosophers which, in most cases, reflect justifications made by other theorists and sometimes, in less sophisticated ways, by ordinary people. To take a case in point, the American atom-bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 seem to have been classic examples of terrorist acts on a massive scale in which well over 100,000 non-combatant civilians were killed outright and many others died lingering deaths or suffered long illnesses from radiation. Yet, this has been defended then and now by the supposed consequence that it was necessary to save thousands of other lives by ending the war sooner than it might otherwise have concluded. This sort

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of thinking is exemplified in several of the argument-types considered in this chapter.

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Rejecting Discrimination: The Case of Utilitarianism/ Consequentialism? According to the tactical definition, terrorism violates the principle of discrimination and so it would seem that terrorist acts must be immoral if the principle stands. The first issue about justification therefore arises from the rejection of the principle. Leaving aside moral cynicism or moral skepticism, many theorists think the discrimination principle would most certainly be rejected by a consequentialist moral theorist who took the view that the only moral consideration relevant to terrorism was the overall outcome of terrorist acts. Any idea that the innocence of non-combatants provides some kind of intrinsic objection to their being targeted seems foreign to this exclusive emphasis on outcomes. This appearance is correct as far as it goes, but there are two caveats that must be registered at once. The first is that the principle might be acceptable to consequentialists or utilitarians on extrinsic grounds such as its providing the best way to limit the cost of warfare, an issue we considered in Chapter 3, and the second is that there are sophisticated versions of consequentialism that provide indirect support for the intrinsicalist basis that the principle otherwise has. In fact, there are versions of consequentialism, and more narrowly utilitarianism, that could accept the principle. Even act utilitarians or, more broadly, act consequentialists might accept the principle as a rule of thumb, or generally useful principle, but not one that can have more basic application; if the outcomes of ignoring the principle are beneficial overall, the principle can be legitimately rejected. Some utilitarians are more careful about allowing such exceptions since this might itself produce sub-optimal results from the point of view of utility. Those who follow this path sometimes think of a rule adopted in this way as fine for the common people who cannot be trusted with utilitarian calculations. So the principle of the immunity of non-combatants could be recommended, at least to the common folk, as an absolute principle because it is the morality best supported (for them at least) by well-considered outcomes accessible to clever theorists. The theorists themselves would think it best for the basic role of the principle of utility in this matter to be kept secret from the masses lest their calculations disrupt the moral stability required to maximize utility; the

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theorists can reserve for themselves the privilege of operating the concealed utility theory in circumstances they judge appropriate. Sidgwick and Peter Singer sometimes write in this vein.¹ I am not particularly sympathetic to these rather condescending theories (an unkind response might dub them “posh boys’ theories”), but the point here is simply that consequentialism need not be so dismissive of the principle as is often supposed. Indeed, other forms of indirect or rule utilitarianism (or consequentialism) do not involve such elitism. For example, Stephen Nathanson has gone so far as to argue that rule utilitarianism should embrace the immunity of non-combatants as an absolute moral principle that should govern the conduct of all.² He argues that an absolute principle is clearly the best rule to minimize the slaughter of war. Even various act utilitarians (or consequentialists) who fall short of Nathanson’s uncompromising attitude need not be as concessive to terrorism as it is often supposed. Quite apart from the fact that they can support the discrimination principle as a rule of thumb, their attitude to the likely outcomes of acts or policies of terrorism should be more complex than is often claimed, even by consequentialists themselves. Indeed, the general feeling that consequentialist considerations favor terrorism (as I define it) is highly dubious. It gets what plausibility it has from the concentration on consequences, but ignores or downplays the universalism implicit or explicit in consequentialist and utilitarian theories. It may be plausible in some circumstances that terrorist tactics will serve a particular cause well, but what has to be shown is that they will serve it better than any other available methods that produce less harm, and, in addition, that the success of the cause will produce the greatest benefits for the greatest number all round, not just for the agents and their associates who espouse that cause. Terrorists may very well think that the triumph of their cause is for the benefit of the universe, but this has to be established by arguments that they seldom employ. It is not just that their cause may be a bad one, for even if it is a good cause, its triumph by such means may not serve the greater good overall. Many justifications of terrorism that appeal to consequences are not really thoroughgoing enough to be genuinely consequentialist in the ethical sense. To be specific, the defenders of terrorism seldom advert to the likely ¹ See Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th edition (London: Macmillan, 1907 [1874]), 489–490. Also see Katarzyna De Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer, “Secrecy in Consequentialism: A Defence of Esoteric Morality,” Ratio, vol. 23, no. 1 (2010). ² Stephen Nathanson, Terrorism and the Ethics of War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ch. 14.

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general effects of their resort to attacking the innocent, such as the impetus it may give to other less worthy agents of violence to do the same. In the same category of unconsidered effects is the effect of their terrorist policies upon their own characters and future behavior. It may be that their terrorist inclinations can be left on the doorstep when they enter their kingdom of independence or win their victory, but there is plenty of history to show that this is by no means certain. Terrorists are also sometimes fairly cursory about the other options available to them, and about the likely connection between their tactics and eventual success for their cause. Nonetheless, it is possible that a consequentialist justification for terrorism could be available in certain circumstances, since utilitarianism and consequentialism do not regard the intentional killing of the innocent as inherently wrong; it all depends upon the contingent outcomes consequent upon such killing. This is, I think, one of many reasons why consequentialism is a defective moral theory, but my brief here is not to refute consequentialism, but merely to show its relevance to any project for justifying terrorism in some circumstances. It is noteworthy in Stephen Nathanson’s treatment of terrorism that he dismisses such circumstances as deeply unrealistic for the real world.³

Terrorism and Self-Defense This discussion leads on to another form of justification that is often confused with the consequentialist approach. This is the justification of self-defense. When terrorists—either state or non-state—defend their actions by saying that they had no alternative if they were to succeed, the form of their purported justification can often be better framed as an appeal to self-defense, or something very like it, rather than an appeal to best overall consequences. The idea is that when someone (or some community) is threatened with very great evils, they may defend themselves whether or not this has the best overall consequences, more broadly considered. Of course, there are some prudential limits on what they can do: if defense is totally futile and capitulation will involve bad outcomes for the defenders but well short of annihilation or slavery, then there is a case for surrender. But the right of self-defense does not seem to be postulated on having the best overall outcomes for the world. If I am being attacked by a man

³ Nathanson, Terrorism and the Ethics of War, ch. 15.

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wielding an axe, it does not seem relevant to my right of self-defense that my injuring or killing the attacker may have disastrous consequences for his family or his non-complicit associates. Suppose he is a doctor with certain unique specialist skills working in an isolated community that desperately needs him. He has become temporarily deranged and thinks I pose a grave threat to him. My killing him in self-defense, or even badly injuring him, might therefore have worse overall effects than my allowing myself to be killed. Knowledge of this fact may well have a bearing on my seeking other methods than defensive violence in dealing with the attack, but if they are not available, then it would seem clear that I am entitled to defensive violence, certainly for the purposes of restraining and disarming the attacker, and even, most would say, to the point of killing. Extended to the collective level, there seems at least as strong a case for group self-defense. (There are problems about the extension when it is not lives that are at risk from the attack, but territory or political rights, as argued by David Rodin, Richard Norman, and others, but I will discuss this later as it is not directly pertinent to my point here.) This is enough to make a case that the self-defense justification is distinct from consequentialist or utilitarian justification in general. How then might it pertain to justifications for terrorism? Here the argument is that defense of your community against attackers and oppressors entitles you to do whatever you can to defend yourself. This is not strictly a consequentialist claim (in the theoretic sense of “consequentialism”), as we saw, though it appeals to some important consequences. Nonetheless, it shares some of the problems of the consequentialist mindset. A major difficulty is that when it comes to attacking the innocent as a means of self-defense, this response involves spreading the meaning of the selfdefense justification too broadly. To see this, we should note that there is a significant moral difference between self-defense and self-preservation. The former is much narrower than the latter. The justification for the discrimination principle is related to this difference. To illustrate that difference, we should revert briefly to the domestic analogy already mentioned in Chapter 4. Suppose you are walking peacefully home from work one night when someone jumps out of an alleyway and attacks you with an axe. You struggle with the assailant and call for help, but to no avail. Then you remember that you have confiscated a handgun from one of the children you teach at school (it’s that sort of school) and you still have it on you. As you struggle, your hand closes on it, and you find yourself able to point it at your attacker’s chest. Surely, when all else has failed, you are entitled to shoot and even kill

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the assailant? Extended to collective agents, this is the basic idea of legitimate violent defense against aggression that lies at the heart of modern just war theory. The assailant has by their actions placed themself beyond the normal moral protection against violence directed against their person. This has implications for what violence you are licensed to employ. We can see this by varying the example a little. The axe attacker is again your problem and you have been forced to reach for the confiscated gun. Now suppose in the course of the struggle that your gun was pointing not at the attacker but across the street at a small child who is staring in amazement at what is going on. You reason that if you shoot the child, that act (plus any screams the child might make) will distract the attacker and perhaps attract to the scene others who can offer you help. Are you entitled to shoot the child? Surely not. The child is not attacking you, nor are they complicit in the attack. The prosecution of the aggression gives you the right to direct violence against those who are attacking or positively assisting the attack—not against others, even if maiming and killing others helps your cause. Intentionally killing or wounding the child is aimed at helping your self-preservation, and may well achieve it, but it is not an act of self-defense. Nor would it be if the child were the attacker’s child or niece/ nephew, though such a target might increase the attacker’s distraction.⁴ Self-preservation is, of course, a powerful human motivation, and, as a value, it also provides a moral warrant for many things. It licenses the refusal to take certain sorts of risks, even risks related to helping others. In extreme cases, it allows one person to refrain from seriously risking their own life to save the life of another. Even so, it will not stretch to killing innocent others in order to protect one’s own life. This important truth may be generalized from the individual to the collective level. A community may be entitled to defend themselves from death by directing lethal violence at their attackers, but they have no warrant from self-defense to attack bystanders (including neutral nations as well as civilian non-combatants), even where such attack offers the prospect of preservation from the original assault. Moreover, the self-defense justification at the communal level often goes beyond the need to defend lives, since it is usually thought that a nation or community has the right to kill, if needs be, in defense of such things as selfgovernment, property, freedom, and (ambiguous phrase) way of life. As mentioned earlier, doubts have recently been expressed about this more

⁴ Here I repeat an illustration used in Coady, Morality and Political Violence, 109–110.

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extended claim. Critics such as David Rodin and Richard Norman have argued that while defensive violence might be morally permitted for the defense of life, it is much less clear that it could be allowed for the defense of territory or political values, such as the right to vote, and still less in defense of oppressive political regimes or ways of life.⁵ David Rodin has argued this case, and indeed quite radically since he rejects the value of the domestic analogy for any war of self-defense, except perhaps for defense against population annihilation or slavery. Consequently, he expresses profound doubts about the value of just war theory as providing an entitlement to engage in war.⁶ My own view is that the critics have made strong cases against too bland and sweeping a claim for the legitimacy of lethal defense at the level of communities and nations. Moreover, I think Rodin is right that, in the real world, the appeal to self-defense is consistently abused for illegitimate and disastrous military ventures. Nonetheless, I think that the critics tend to undervalue the significance of some of the things that can be defended other than life, and some of these do seem to have relevance at the communal and even national level. (Rodin expresses some worries about this for the case of serious threats to liberty.⁷) This is not, however, the place to enter fully into this debate, though it is relevant to our topic in raising some questions about the legitimacy of some forms of revolutionary violence short of terrorism. But these are principally questions about just cause rather than just means, as authors like Rodin recognize. Here, I shall assume for the sake of our present topic that communal self-defense can provide a legitimate reason for resort to violence for communities and individuals in certain circumstances that may go beyond the central case of protection of life and encompass certain other highly significant values. Even so, self-defense will not license the attack upon those who are not prosecuting, or aiding in the prosecution of, the attack. Hence, on the face of it, self-defense cannot be enlisted in support of terrorism. I say “on the face

⁵ David Rodin, War and Self-Defense (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); Richard Norman, Ethics, Killing and War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). ⁶ Rodin summarizes his position clearly in his final chapter. See Rodin, War and Self-Defense, ch. 9. ⁷ Rodin expresses his worries and seeks to resolve them in War and Self-Defense, 198–199. It should be noted that Rodin is not quite advocating what would normally be seen as a pacifist position, since he follows Kant in urging an independent international body with a standing armed force to intervene militarily where appropriate to enforce international law (see Rodin, War and Self-Defense, 180). Provision for establishing such an independent standing army was advocated during the period of establishing the UN and has had many varied advocates since, but has been stoutly opposed, especially by the major powers in the Security Council.

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of it” because there is a twist to the self-defense story that we will need to examine later under the heading of “supreme emergency.” Before doing so, however, I think it would be interesting to explore another defense that, as far as I know, has not been deployed in justification for terrorism, at least in terms of the self-defense of a nation or state or similar collective. It picks up a theme that has been a part of some mainstream Christian theological-philosophical thinking through the ages, but in a different way has seen a sort of revival in more recent debates about armed humanitarian intervention. The Christian theme concerns a contrast between personal self-defense and defense of others. A tradition stemming from St. Augustine and later St. Thomas Aquinas has combined a prohibition on killing in personal self-defense with a permission or even a duty to kill to protect others. In classical just war thinking in the medieval period and in some later strands of the theory, the legitimacy of killing in a just war (and indeed of capital punishment for some crimes) is not modeled on the right to kill intentionally in personal self-defense, which is indeed forbidden, but on the right to defend others, and this right extends to and justifies the state’s right to protect the community from attack.⁸ Irrespective of the merits of this demotion of the right of self-defense, it is interesting to see if the right to defend others might have such force as to defeat the criticism of self-defensive arguments for justifying terrorist acts. The appeal to otherinterest in the case of terrorist acts might have an intra- or extra-communal dimension. On the extra-communal, the idea would be that acts of terrorism could be justified for one nation (or collective entity) in defense of another nation subject to attack. Certainly the widespread sympathy for “humanitarian intervention” seems based on the idea that there is a permission or even a duty to protect foreigners from extreme attacks upon them even by their own state authorities, hence the support for the United Nations’ proclamation of a “Responsibility to Protect.” But again, this is a duty to protect against attackers, and indeed in its most plausible version unjust attackers, since the interveners themselves will sometimes be just attackers whom it is actually wrong to resist. Hence, someone urging terrorist tactics in such humanitarian interventions would be guilty of the same confusion of a legitimate form of defense (of others in this case) and preservation at all

⁸ I say “kill intentionally” because Aquinas, in his discussion of the morality of killing, allows that defensive action may lead unintentionally, though foreseeably, to the attacker’s death. In this discussion lies the genesis of the controversial doctrine of double effect. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica Part II–III, Question 64, Article 7.

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costs that was pointed out in the case of the self-defense justification. An analogy with the axe-attacker example is again in point. The axe-wielder is this time not attacking you but another innocent person nearby, and you raise your confiscated gun to shoot at the attacker, but you cannot get a clear shot at them so propose instead shooting and probably fatally wounding a child nearby who is helplessly watching the attack in dismay. Your plan is that the child’s screams and death throes will distract the attacker and give you a clear shot at them. Whatever your duties and good intentions concerning the life of the attack victim, the rights of the innocent child cannot be violated to further those intentions. In the terms derived from Kant, such an attack on the child is using the child as a means only rather than treating that person as an end worthy of deep respect.⁹ I see no reason to change argumentative course from the lessons of this example where the agents are nations or other relevant collectives. It may be that recourse to terrorist acts in aid of humanitarian intervention is unlikely, though some of the external interventions in Syria purportedly in defense of innocent people against the terrorist acts of ISIS and sometimes other insurgent groups have themselves been accused of using what are terrorist acts (and would be on my account) in the bombing of cities occupied by ISIS or other groups. Russian and Syrian government bombing campaigns, for instance, have been plausibly accused of deliberately bombing innocent civilians in Idlib province and elsewhere, including in an indictment of Russian (and Syrian) non-discriminatory bombing of civilians in a recent United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria.¹⁰ These accusations have indeed been vigorously denied, and there has been a good deal of talk about accidents, but even these responses, contentious as many of them are, provide testimony to the unacceptability of the idea that terrorist acts might be justified to defeat unjust attacks upon others. And the situation is similar in the intra-communal variation where you decide to kill an innocent person as a way of saving the life of another innocent person who is under attack. Some might argue at this point that the numbers make a difference, so that a terrorist act or acts to save many is more acceptable. This challenge not only puts us in mind of the famous, or infamous, Trolley Problem much ⁹ With somewhat similar intent, some recent authors discussing the ethics of war speak of the contrast between the use of violence opportunistically (in contrast to an eliminative use). See, for example, Lazar, Sparing Civilians, 57–60. ¹⁰ Nick Cumming-Bruce, “U.N. Panel Says Russia Bombed Syrian Civilian Targets, a War Crime,” The New York Times (March 2, 2020).

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discussed by moral philosophers and some cognitive scientists (though no question of self-defense is involved in Trolley), but also more pertinently raises the issue usually discussed under the rubric of dirty hands or supreme emergency, to which we shall turn later.

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The Tit-for-Tat Argument A third justification might be called the tit-for-tat justification. The idea here is that terrorism is immoral, as long as the other side isn’t doing it, but if the enemy resort to it, then you may do so as well. This response has an undoubted psychological appeal, but its form surely admits of the reply that two wrongs don’t make a right. More expansively, the tit-for-tat idea is most persuasive where the prohibitions in question are basically conventional. If two neighbors, A and B, have an agreement not to have noisy parties that will disturb the peace of the other, then it is incumbent on both to adhere to the rule, but if A ignores it, then B may be entitled to respond by having a noisy party themself. Certainly, clear evidence that A will not adhere to the prohibition releases B from any duty to do so. Yet it is surely clear that not all moral prohibitions are of this nature. Social contract theory has some plausibility for some areas of morality, but it is quite implausible for others. If some depraved person murders my child, then this gives me no license to murder their child, or any other child. Nonetheless, something of this sort is often suggested in the context of what is sometimes called asymmetrical war. When one side targets noncombatants, perhaps in order to make up for its inferiority in conventional military power or, where it has superiority, in order to reinforce that superiority, then the other side can at least appear to be placed at a disadvantage unless it follows suit. When Michael Walzer talks of the “war convention” and includes the prohibition on attacking non-combatants within it, he makes it sound as if the prohibition stems from an agreement.¹¹ Such an agreement might lapse if one side abandoned it. But his actual account of the moral basis of that prohibition is rather different, and somewhat nearer to the account I have given earlier. That account grounds the prohibition in the fact that the non-combatants are not prosecuting the evil to which one’s violent measures are a defense, so that one gains no moral

¹¹ Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 44.

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license to attack them, by contrast, for instance, with the permission to defend oneself against the actual aggressors. Where there are explicit agreements to respect the immunities of non-combatants, that adds icing to the moral cake, but the cake’s essential ingredients are independent of the agreements. But this brings us to the fighting chance argument.

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The Fighting Chance Argument A recent version of something akin to the tit-for-tat strategy has been advanced in rather different forms by a number of philosophers including Michael Gross, David Rodin, Christopher Finlay, and Cecile Fabre.¹² All of them are concerned with what is called asymmetric warfare and with problems they see for restrictions of the jus in bello that it is supposed to raise, including the respect for non-combatant immunity that is, as I have argued, at the heart of the condemnation of terrorist acts. The drift of these authors is in the same direction, but their arguments differ in complex ways, as well as overlapping in others, and I will not have space to deal fairly with each in turn. My procedure will be to discuss Gross and Rodin, whose final conclusions are very different, with occasional asides to the other authors. I trust that the interested reader can see for themselves what lessons this discussion might have for those authors whom I thus regrettably neglect. I will begin by discussing Gross who, in his book Moral Dilemmas of Modern War, has many interesting things to say about asymmetrical warfare in the course of arguing for the relaxation of many of the traditional moral norms aimed at regulating and civilizing war (insofar as this can be done), but, of most relevance here, is his offering the mutual “right to a fighting chance” as a prime argument for weakening respect for the immunity of non-combatants that is at the heart of prohibitions on terrorist acts. This right is, as some philosophers concerned with reshaping the jus in bello constraints for asymmetric war recognize,¹³ connected in complex ways ¹² Michael L. Gross, Moral Dilemmas of Modern War: Torture, Assassination, and Blackmail in an Age of Asymmetric Conflict (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); David Rodin, “The Ethics of Asymmetric War,” in The Ethics of War, edited by Richard Sorabji and David Rodin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Cecile Fabre, Cosmopolitan War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). ¹³ For example, Christopher J. Finlay, Terrorism and the Right to Resist: A Theory of Just Revolutionary War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 233. Finlay, like some other theorists, tends to conflate the success condition with proportionality which has some plausibility, but is, I believe, unfortunate. For a strong defence of the independent status of the

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with the prudential condition of the jus ad bellum that requires a just war to have a reasonable prospect of success. Of which more later. Gross, like the others mentioned above, is concerned that insurgents or revolutionaries might not have such a fighting chance right unless they can attack non-combatants, but he is as much, or more, concerned that powerful state armies might be denied this right by the difficulties they face in combating their “weaker” asymmetric opponents. Gross worries, for instance, that the usual immunity of non-combatants may mean that the stronger side “quickly runs out of targets.”¹⁴ His argument could be applied in the context of tit-for-tat when one side resorts to terrorist tactics and the other sees itself as very disadvantaged unless they do the same, and he does claim that “reciprocity” breaks down in asymmetric warfare. But it also has application, as he seems to intend, to situations where one side can only fight on by certain attacks upon non-combatants, regardless of whether the other side does that. This is not tit-for-tat but more an argument from “the only recourse” for success and it requires military necessity to override morality. Gross is very concerned to balance the moral and legal restrictions on the conduct of war against the requirements of military necessity, and, although he makes occasional respectful reference to the importance of civilian immunity against direct lethal attack, he is anxious to extend noncombatant liability to military harm in various ways, particularly by employment of his concepts of “associated targets” and “quasi-combatants.” More on this shortly, but it is important to note here that the balancing act he attempts is confused. The “balance” between the moral and legal restrictions and the military necessity of “a fighting chance” are not between two values to be traded off at the discretion of the military or their ethical advisors. What is necessary for military success is already constrained by the moral and legal restraints: perhaps you can only defeat the enemy by poisoning their water supplies or slaughtering their children, but that does not license such atrocities; it means rather that you cannot defeat them. From the viewpoint of winning the war, this is no doubt unfortunate and regrettable, even in some cases tragic, if your cause is just, but the likelihood of unfortunate outcomes such as defeat is intrinsic to engaging in war, and assessment of such probabilities should count among the reasons for avoiding it where possible. Interestingly, “fair fight” arguments concerning success condition when suitably construed see Kieran McInerney, Reconceiving the Reasonable Probability of Success Criterion (PhD dissertation, The University of Melbourne, 2019). ¹⁴ Gross, Moral Dilemmas of Modern War, 160.

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warfare have been advanced by other theorists in connection with the idea of the moral equality of soldiers, even by comparing combatants with fighters in a boxing match. Whatever its utility there, it helps point up the difficulties in Gross’ fairness argument since boxing matches involve many restrictions on what can be done to win, and the suggestion that a losing contestant should be entitled to attack their opponent’s parents, children, or even their supporters in the crowd in order to achieve victory is plainly wrong. Gross is clear that his notion of “associated targets” is a diminution of the rights of civilians (or non-combatants). His basic idea is that asymmetric war means that when a state (“the stronger side”) runs out of military targets,¹⁵ then the need to win the war presents it with the question, as he puts it: “Whom do you bomb when there are no more accessible targets?”¹⁶ His answer is that you can bomb schools, welfare agencies, media outlets, and banks, though he shrinks a little from the full force of his argument by stressing that he would prefer nonlethal attacks on such targets so that they are “disabled” by serious harms short of death. But in his discussion of Israel’s more lethal attacks on such institutions in the second Lebanon war of 2006, he objects only that they may have been ineffective. This implies that he remains open to lethal attacks that are likely to work where nonlethal are not. In any case, the question is not effectiveness, but the prior question whether the contribution such institutions and people (if any) make to a war is significant enough to render them morally liable to attack. In the case of schools and welfare agencies, his few remarks on their contribution to the war effort (focused principally on Israeli claims about their role in the Lebanese war of 2006) are distinctly inadequate to the harms he allows to be appropriately inflicted. Throughout, Gross, with his focus on military necessity as the governing value, shows a tendency to treat the moral and legal issues as determined by what armed forces (usually those of states) have decided to do when they think that military necessity demands it or when “reciprocity” (shades of tit-for-tat) has broken down. This seems to involve the belief that the moral status of non-combatant immunity is a matter of mere agreement, rather than primarily based upon deeper moral insights, as was argued in Chapter 4. One wonders whether a concerted campaign of non-violent resistance by oppressed people that endangered the success of a state’s military efforts against their political (and perhaps militant) representatives would so endanger those efforts to succeed that ¹⁵ Gross, Moral Dilemmas of Modern War, 160. ¹⁶ Gross, Moral Dilemmas of Modern War, 158.

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targeting them with lethal or nonlethal violence would meet Gross’ criteria for “associated targets.” Certainly, various state forces have in practice responded in exactly that way, but their efforts have rightly been greeted with moral condemnation.¹⁷ Appeals to homely notions and analogies like “fighting chance,” “fair fight,” and so on are not plausible for the case Gross wants to make partly because they show how far warfare is from a sport or game. Another theorist who uses the game analogy, though admitting its significant distance from the context of the killing “game” of warfare, is David Rodin.¹⁸ Rodin compares war to chess which, on the face of it, is even stretching things further than the analogy of a boxing match, which is at least somewhat akin to war in involving violence. Rodin is primarily interested in the comparison that both chess and war are contests for victory and require not only normative restrictions on how the contest can be waged but also the idea of fairness between the contestants, residing in the opening equality of pieces and positions and equal application of rules. From this he moves to the proposition that the ideal of fairness, which he contrasts with the governing norm of justice, has implications for the morality relevant to warfare between sides that are radically unequal in military power, a feature related to what is called “asymmetric war.” In passing, I will only note that the equality and fairness of the opposing sides in chess, in terms of equal pieces and positions, suggest an equality of power that is palpably false in the case of many wars often cited as examples of symmetrical war; indeed, it is misleading even for the case of chess inasmuch as the artificial equality and fairness of opening positions and so on mask the reality of the often disparate powers and skills that obtain between chess players in such contests. That said, Rodin makes many interesting points in developing his case, but the gist of what he argues, relevant to the present discussion, is that contemporary insurgencies often take place in a context of marked ¹⁷ Gross’ category of “quasi-combatants” (and even that of “associated targets”) raises problems about expanding the scope of the permissible collateral damage allowed by just war thinking. But the collateral damage issue, although it does relate to what I called in Chapter 2 “neo-terrorism” (in partial deference to David Rodin’s view of terrorism), is not strictly part of my discussion of terrorism as defined in my tactical definition, so I will not discuss it here. Suffice it to say that more permissive views on what can count as collateral damage face the problem that the concept is already widely abused in military activities, and more philosophical relaxation is particularly problematic in that context. I have discussed collateral damage more extensively in C. A. J. Coady, “Collateral Damage,” in The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, edited by Hugh LaFollette (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, revised 2019). ¹⁸ Rodin, “The Ethics of Asymmetric War,” 153, 158–159.

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inequality of military power, understood primarily in terms of traditional armies and the economic power to back them up. This inequality means that where, for example, the less equal side has a just cause, it is placed by the standard jus in bello requirements at a disastrous disadvantage in its struggle for self-defense or vindication of important rights.¹⁹ Such a situation, claims Rodin, is morally unfair and is part of what has given rise to the advocacy amongst many theorists that the principle of discrimination, for example, be relaxed, or even abandoned, for the disadvantaged group, thus legitimating their deployment of terrorist tactics. Rodin takes the support for this claim seriously, but seeks a different way of leveling the playing field. He argues that a better course is to strengthen the jus in bello requirements for the militarily stronger side rather than relaxing them for the weaker side. He then considers objections to the practicality of his proposal, but I will not discuss these here. Rodin’s suggestion is, I believe, clearly better than the alternative he rejects, but I think the whole debate is based on flawed assumptions. To begin with, there is something of a paradox in the inequality story insofar as it relies upon the notion of “overwhelming superiority of force” (as Rodin puts it),²⁰ since the cashing of that phrase in terms of prospects for eventual victory tends to undermine the thesis itself. This is because the very problem supposedly requiring changing the jus in bello conditions, when examined more carefully in the light of history, shows that the side with conventional military superiority need not thereby have “overwhelming superiority of force” where this phrase is cashed in terms of likely victory. Even without persistent violations of jus in bello protections of civilians, it seems highly likely that the Viet Cong would have eventually triumphed against the US and its allies, partly because they were fighting in familiar conditions against an adversary that was ill at ease with those conditions, unprepared for a long contest, and eventually lacking strong support at home. Other “unequal” wars exhibit a similar pattern; the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan show how unclear “victory” to the militarily mighty side can become, and it seems at least plausible that a primary problem for the “weak” side of insurgency in Syria has been not so much the massive might of the Syrian government and its allies as the fractured nature of the insurgent groupings, not to mention the complications of various foreign interventions. ¹⁹ This concern clearly also motivates Fabre, Cosmopolitan War, 239–240. ²⁰ Rodin, “The Ethics of Asymmetric War,” 166.

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Of course, a number of these insurgent groups did resort to breaches of the jus in bello, in particular the targeting of non-combatants, but there are several comments to be made on this. The first is that the picture of their terrorist acts as a balancing resort required to counter overwhelming conventional enemy force that did not so resort is quite misleading. In many cases the apparently more powerful force included terrorist acts in its weaponry already, either by explicitly licensing such acts or condoning them by silence or cover-up.²¹ That might inspire a resort to the tit-for-tat argument, but that has already been criticized.²² The inequality narrative has, as already suggested, another string to its argumentative bow which concerns the idea that if the “weaker” side of the asymmetry equation cannot be allowed to violate the jus in bello constraint on attacking non-combatants, then it will have been denied the opportunity to satisfy the jus ad bellum condition of reasonable prospect of success.²³ Let us suppose we are talking of insurgents facing powerful state forces (rather than Gross’ example of inhibited state forces), since that is the conceptual site in which the problem is usually posed. And let us further take it that the insurgents have a just cause, and have satisfied what I have called all the other morally prudential conditions, but are considering only the reasonable prospect condition. If that condition is defensible, then it rides on the back of the non-prudential conditions of just war, especially the core value of the immunity of genuine non-combatants. It is perversely wrongheaded to treat such immunity as a surmountable obstacle to one’s prospects of success. The same is not true of less fundamental jus in bello conditions that have prevailed in the past, such as bans on ambushes and requirements of combatant identification (such as uniforms).²⁴

²¹ Cecile Fabre, for instance, whose discussion of the asymmetric issues is characteristically careful, nonetheless concentrates upon cases where one side (basically the insurgent side) “resorts to conventional air, land, and naval power (tanks, missiles, submarines, and so on), whilst the other resorts to non-conventional methods.” Although this is certainly not her intention, such a focus can obscure the important fact about the real world that characteristic “asymmetric” conflict is not unbalanced in this way. She acknowledges that in Fabre, Cosmopolitan War, 240. ²² The “asymmetry” is complex in other ways, as demonstrated by Gross’ anxiety that the side with overwhelming military force might be disadvantaged by its enemy providing too few “military targets.” ²³ See, for instance, Cecile Fabre: “Second, and relatedly, I assume that the use of those tactics is a necessary condition for W to stand a reasonable chance of success.” Fabre, Cosmopolitan War, 241. By “such tactics” she means inter alia the tactic of direct lethal attack on noncombatants, and by “W” she means a weaker combatant side with a just cause. ²⁴ Though, as discussed in Chapter 4, the uniform issue is related to the need to distinguish combatants from non-combatants, and is (or was) not as superficial as it has seemed.

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The success condition has been somewhat neglected in contemporary philosophical writing on the just war, but clearly a lot turns on what counts as “success” as well as how great are the stakes involved in failure. Perhaps, as many believe, some heroic insurgence or armed resistance against tyranny might count as success in some sense, even if militarily doomed from the beginning. Michael Walzer, for example, considers the Finland–Soviet war of 1939 in this light. The Finns rejected a Soviet bid to take over some Finnish land in exchange for some (poorer) Russian land; the Soviets wanting the Finnish land in order to extend their border to protect Leningrad from a German attack. The Finns did so knowing that the rejection meant war with the Soviets. Walzer endorses the decision, even though the success condition had no chance of being met, and the resistance to Soviet invasion meant the death of thousands of Finnish soldiers (and even more Russians). He does so because it was a “vindication of Finnish independence.”²⁵ I am skeptical of the claim to the overriding value of such vindication in this context, but there are more compelling cases where a hopeless fight may be justified by a success of vindication or assertion of deep value. The heroic Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghetto against the Nazi slaughter machine may be a case in point, even though their courageous defiance failed to stop (except briefly) the deportations they aimed to prevent, and resulted in a wholesale loss of life of the ghetto inhabitants, the razing of the ghetto, and continued persecution. More generally, however, the prospects of success condition, as a warning against futility, has a significant role in constraining the exercise of otherwise justified violence for the vast range of cases, even if prospects as extreme as facing extermination may stretch the meaning of “success.” There is nonetheless a deep issue here about whether morality can really bind when its constraints are very severely disadvantageous. Certainly, there can be no guarantee that conforming to morality will not prove disadvantageous, even severely so, from time to time. Any moral theory that advocated abandoning morality when it didn’t prove individually or communally advantageous would appear to be theoretically defective and morally questionable. Nonetheless, certain forms of social contract theorizing, and of other moral outlooks, want to hold that when adherence to morality will be disastrous, then “all bets are off.” Hobbes articulates this very clearly in a famous passage when he says in chapter 15 of Leviathan: “The laws of nature

²⁵ Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 70–71.

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oblige in foro interno, that is to say, they bind to a desire they should take place; but in foro externo; that is, to the putting them in act, not always. For he that should be modest and tractable, and perform all he promises, in such time and place where no man else should do so, should but make himself a prey to others, and procure his own certain ruin, contrary to the ground of all laws of nature, which tend to nature’s preservation.”²⁶ I have criticized Hobbes’ position elsewhere and will here have to be brief. Let us begin with the interpersonal, relatively small-scale case that was Hobbes’ principal concern in Leviathan. The first point to make is that, although self-preservation is a great good, it is not the only great good. Many people have been prepared to sacrifice their lives, not only for others, but also for moral principles, and it is far from clear that such behavior is irrational. Hobbes’ version of natural law has some continuity with medieval accounts, but departs from them in its resolute monism about the basic rational drive of the theory, namely self-preservation. This had been viewed as a fundamentally rational motivation in ethics as far back as the stoics who insisted on “the primary impulse” to self-preservation.²⁷ Aquinas also stresses self-preservation in his account of natural law but goes on to give a more pluralistic theory of the basis of such law, in which other values mitigate the drive to self-preservation. That this is no mere theoretical possibility, of interest only in academic exegesis, is clear from many historical situations. Even in the Nazi death camps, where the breakdown in the conditions of mutual compliance with moral dictates approximated something like a state of nature, there were examples of resolute commitment by prisoners to moral norms that defy the Hobbesian outlook. As already mentioned, I have discussed this issue more fully in another place, so will merely remark here that buying your survival at the cost of taking innocent lives is not obviously a price worth paying.²⁸ Moreover, in the case of warfare of whatever kind, it is often advocated where survival is not the issue, but merely the gaining of an important advantage or greater security, and moreover again, the efficiency of the maneuver, whether in tit-for-tat response or that of “only recourse,” is by no means assured. There are other matters raised by this appeal to survival that I shall consider under ²⁶ Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, parts I and II, edited by A. P. Martinich and Brian Battiste (Ontario: Broadview Editions, 2011), 147. ²⁷ See Brad Inwood, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). Hobbes speaks of the drive to avoid death and protect oneself as “an impulsion of nature” in Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, part II, section 18, and part I, section 7. ²⁸ C. A. J. Coady, “Hobbes and the Beautiful Axiom,” Philosophy, vol. 65, no. 251 (1990).

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the heading of “Justification by Supreme Emergency” in Chapter 6. That chapter will deal first with an appeal to collective responsibility that is not exactly a justification of terrorist acts as portrayed by the tactical definition, but so spreads the scope of combatant or guilty status as to nullify the point of it; a further objection is one from the requirements of distributive justice, and finally supreme emergency and its implications.

Coady.

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6 Justifying Terrorism Three More Attempts

No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people. Albert Camus, Algerian Chronicles¹ In this chapter, the examination of justifications begins by considering the appeal to collective responsibility as a way of nullifying the force of the discrimination principle, and then moves on to a justification in terms of distributive justice, before concluding with a lengthy discussion of the justification of supreme emergency and related outlooks.

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The Argument from Collective Responsibility A fourth justification consists in agreeing with the principle of discrimination, but denying that it has application in the context of some particular conflict. This is not so much a justification of terrorism, but a dismissal of criticism of terrorism by denying the innocence or non-combatant moral status to the victims of the violence in question. But since it is a justification of what many people are often understandably disposed to call terrorism, it is worth consideration in this chapter. This denial of innocence may be wholesale or quite specific. When it is wholesale, it often proceeds via some doctrine of collective guilt. Some of the terror bombing of World War II was defended on the grounds of the comprehensive guilt of all Germans, just as Osama bin Laden alleges the guilt of all Americans. As indicated in Chapter 4, I am quite skeptical of all such moves. It seems to me a sufficient refutation of wholesale collective responsibility stories to point out that they treat German (or American or Israeli or Palestinian) babies as perpetrators of a grave evil, on a par with the actual suicide bombers, soldiers, and ¹ Albert Camus, Algerian Chronicles, edited and with an introduction by Alice Kaplan, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 118.

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defense ministers who are prosecuting the war, the persecution or the oppression that justifies, or purports to justify, a violent response. It is similarly absurd that the enemy’s political dissidents, conscientious objectors, and militarily inactive five-year-olds are also included in the net of communal responsibility. You cannot become an agent of aggression merely by “belonging” to a nation or community whose military and political agents are engaged in violent aggression. Beyond the categories I have mentioned, of course, there is more room for dispute, but many of the reasons offered in recent literature for extending collective responsibility widely into the enemy population are deeply implausible. Interestingly, in the debate about the vexed question of “German guilt” for the Holocaust, many intellectuals who survived the Nazi death camps flatly rejected the broad use of the idea of collective guilt. These survivors saw too great a parallel between the group-think of the Nazi murderers and that of the retributive advocates of wholesale German guilt. Primo Levi put it this way: “I cannot tolerate the fact that a man should be judged not for what he is but because of the group to which he happens to belong.”² What needs to be shown in arguments for broad responsibility is that the people claimed to be legitimate targets are playing the part of agents in a chain of prosecuting a wrongdoing of the relevant kind, most notably violent aggression. It may well be that people normally regarded as not so involved really are. This is why I said earlier that the idea of a combatant was broader than that of a soldier, and the idea of a non-combatant narrower than that of a civilian. As argued in Chapter 4, I am, in principle, prepared to include politicians who direct a war or violent campaign or technologists who design new, or improve old, weapons for the campaign as combatants, though there may be good prudential reasons in particular circumstances for not extending the category in this way. But I resist extensions of the category that include silent sympathizers, people who voted for the government, and so on. The follies that such extensions court can be seen in the following quotation from Osama bin Laden: The American people should remember that they pay taxes to their government, they elect their president, their government manufactures arms and gives them to Israel and Israel uses them to massacre Palestinians. The American Congress endorses all government measures ² Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, translated by Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2017), 160.

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and this proves that the entire America is responsible for the atrocities perpetrated against Muslims. The entire America because they elect the Congress.³

Osama bin Laden is palpably confused about the nature of the American electoral system, and much else, but his confusion is hardly worse than many of his opponents who favor strong ideas of collective guilt.⁴ Of course, where some genuine attribution of group or individual responsibility can be made out, even against immediate appearances, the violent response in question may be justifiable, subject to its fulfilling just war criteria, such as prospect of success and last resort, but it is no longer a case of terrorism, whatever it may look like. But I have discussed more well-argued philosophical attempts to extend responsibility for unjustified war to a wider range of citizenry than is usual in Chapter 4, and will have something more to say about it in the next section below.

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The Defense of Redistributive Justice A fifth justification lies in the idea of resort to terrorism to protect rights. This defense has been urged by Virginia Held in a paper entitled “Terrorism, Rights and Political Goals.” She does not advance it as a utilitarian or consequentialist consideration but as a matter of fundamental justice.⁵ The basic idea is that when the rights of some group of innocent people have been violated, then the violation of the rights of other innocent people may be justified by an appeal to distributive justice. There are some echoes here of the tit-for-tat story, but there is no suggestion in Held’s argument here, or in her general approach to morality, of a merely conventional or social contract outlook on the issues, so her argument requires separate treatment from that given already against the tit-for-tat position.

³ Hamid Mir’s interview with Osama bin Laden, Dawn (November 10, 2001), at http://www. dawn.com/2001/11/10/top1.htm. ⁴ For more detailed discussion of the collective guilt issue see C. A. J. Coady, “Terrorism and Innocence,” The Journal of Ethics, vol. 8, no. 1 (2004), 55–57, and Coady, Morality and Political Violence, ch. 7. ⁵ Virginia Held, “Terrorism, Rights and Political Goals,” in Terrorism: The Philosophical Issues, edited by Igor Primoratz (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), ch. 6. Reprinted with some amendments as ch. 4 in Virginia Held, How Terrorism Is Wrong: Morality and Political Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). My references will be to the book chapter, though there will also be some reference to other parts of the book.

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Held’s justification via distributive justice is an unusual philosophical approach to terrorist acts, though an argument from something like distributive justice was advanced during World War II by George Orwell who thought that the doctrine of the immunity of civilians was “one of the things that made war possible,” and that there was an unfairness in the slaughter of the young in war being approved while it was considered “barbarous” to kill the old at home. Orwell seems to have forgotten that city bombings killed plenty of the young, including babies and older children.⁶ In any case, his somewhat dyspeptic ferocity is far from Held’s careful discussion. Held’s model scenario is a society S₁ in which group A enjoys the satisfaction of human rights both morally and legally but group B does not. This is contrasted with a society S₂ where both groups equally enjoy respect for such rights. Held’s argument is that, given certain empirical assumptions about the effectiveness of terrorism in moving from S₁ to S₂, then distributive justice allows members of group B to use terrorism against members of group A. Indeed, since we are talking of the demands of justice, it may be suspected that “allows” is too weak; in cases of such seriousness the imperatives of justice are surely strong enough for the word “requires.” But since Held’s explicit claim is couched in terms of permission, I will consider the case solely in terms of “allows.” First, some comments on the hypothesized empirical facts upon which Held’s case, as she says, explicitly depends. These concern the precondition that the remedial rights violations are likely to be effective in moving from the disharmonies of S₁ to the harmonies of S₂. It is a significant problem for this precondition that powerful members of group A already regard the people in B as unworthy and this disregard is likely to intensify and spread throughout their group with counterproductive effects for the proposed distribution. These effects are of two kinds: first, the reinforcing of the determination of members of A to deploy their considerable power not to move to S₂, and second, even if movement occurs in the required direction, it will very probably be accompanied by the production of a degree of hostility that hardly makes it likely that the members of the two groups ⁶ Orwell puts it thus: “The immunity of civilians, one of the things that have made war possible has been shattered . . . I don’t regret that. I can’t feel that war is ‘humanized’ by being confined to the slaughter of the young and becomes ‘barbarous’ when the old get killed as well.” See The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968), iii, 151–152. I owe this reference to Igor Primoratz who effectively criticizes Orwell (without reference to his blindness to the existence of civilian children) in Igor Primoratz, “Civilian Immunity in War: Its Grounds, Scope, and Weight,” in Civilian Immunity in War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 23.

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will be genuinely according each other the moral respect that underpins legal rights. These empirical considerations about the effects of the proposal are ultimately relevant to evaluating it as a proposal about a just distribution, since the effectiveness of distributive measures is surely relevant to the question of implementation; nonetheless, I am not going to press this point since Held’s proposal is more significant for the deontological claim she makes, given the assumption of effectiveness. There are several potential sources of confusion in this argument. The first concerns what terrorism is and hence what human rights violations we are referring to; the second concerns issues of group responsibility. On the definition of terrorism, Held wavers somewhat in the different chapters of her book, arguing at times that there is no point in defining it, at others that those who define it in terms of the intentional killing of the innocent (or non-combatants) are wrong, and generally refusing to offer a definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. But in the chapter we are concerned with here she gives a disjunctive condition as “perhaps” sufficient to turn political violence into terrorism, namely either the intentional harming of non-combatants or the intentional spreading of fear.⁷ So, if we are justifying terrorism, then part of what we justify could be the intentional killing of non-combatants. As we have seen, there is a debate in current just war theory about whether all non-combatants are innocent, in the sense of having lost their right not to be killed, and Held thinks that some noncombatants are not innocent or at least less innocent than many combatants. I think this may be true of some civilians, but I distinguish civilians from non-combatants and don’t think it is true of non-combatants. But no matter for present purposes, since there will be palpable innocents in group A: babies, young children, brave critics of A’s repressive policies toward B, people who have been imprisoned for trying to change the repressive policies, and so on. Held is committed, by her “perhaps” definition, to the view that it is permissible to kill some or all of these people if it is reasonable to believe that only this will move B and A from S₁ to S₂. Certainly, on the definition I have defended, that is what her redistributive acts will involve. If they involved only the other leg of the disjunction, namely acts intended to spread fear, then they might be legitimate acts of a just revolutionary war; for example, if they were aimed at oppressive government political police, military buildings, or military forces of group A perpetuating

⁷ Held, “Terrorism, Rights and Political Goals,” 76.

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the deprivation of B’s human rights. These would not be terrorist acts, but those allowed by the first leg of her definition would be. What could make such a suggestion palatable to a deontologist? It is important to note that Held is not resorting to a “dirty hands” story since that resort would require the killing of the innocent to be and remain a violation of justice, though made “necessary” by considerations of supreme emergency. For Held, the killing is precisely an instance of justice. But the proposal surely misconstrues distributive justice. To see this, consider her example of a redistribution that she sees as parallel to her proposal. This concerns the unequal provision of police services in a community. Where a society dominated by group A provides very poor police arrangements to establish security and personal safety rights for members of group B, there is clearly a case in justice for redistribution. But the case requires redistribution of protective police services, not directly redistributing deaths and injuries. It would hardly, for instance, be a requirement of justice to increase the number of deaths and injuries all round just to make them equal in both groups if, by some freakish chance, that would result in movement from S₁ to S₂! Held doesn’t of course envisage this, but the case shows how carefully we must proceed with the idea of distributive justice of harms. She thinks of distributing police more fairly with the consequence that there will be more deaths/injuries/burglaries in group A and fewer in group B. This may well be a regrettable but required consequence of a fair distribution of protective services. But it is still protection that is being distributed, not killings and maimings per se. What the example obscures is that the terrorism proposal is aimed at licensing agents to intentionally commit murders by way of distribution. The full implications of Held’s proposal are masked somewhat, and made more palatable, by her tendency to imply some form of guilt or responsibility for every member of A. So she says: “If transition to a situation such as S₂ involves violations of the rights to personal safety of the oppressing groups, why should this violation be less unjustifiable than the other?”⁸ The reference to “oppressing groups” carries the problems of strong collective responsibility. Are the babies and children in A oppressing? Are the activist, persecuted critics in A themselves oppressors? But a negative answer to these questions should strictly be irrelevant to Held’s proposal, even though it should, I believe, make it morally repugnant.

⁸ Held, “Terrorism, Rights and Political Goals,” 75.

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Elsewhere, Held says that ethnic groups have a responsibility for ethnic crimes committed by their members, but it is unclear what this implies for the distribution of responsibility to all members of the group.⁹ On the one hand, she cautions against the idea that attributing such communal responsibility amounts to saying that all individuals in the group are equally responsible or even responsible at all,¹⁰ but she nonetheless holds that even people who protest and dissociate themselves from their group’s crimes have a diminished responsibility for them. She gets to this conclusion partly through the idea that ethnic group members should “take responsibility” for ethnic group crimes and partly by arguing that benefiting from wrongdoing creates responsibility for it. But neither of these moves is entirely convincing in the context of her terrorism proposal. The concept of “taking responsibility” is, I believe, best read as accepting responsibility for remedying the effects of some wrongdoing, not as being held personally responsible for its occurrence. Held’s resort to the concept hovers disconcertingly between the two meanings. Can we seriously maintain that an English Jew with no specific connections to Israel who is fiercely critical of Israeli war crimes against Palestinians nonetheless has some responsibility for them merely because they are Jewish? Or that a Han Chinese critic of the Communist regime bears some responsibility for its oppressive policies toward Tibetans or Uyghurs, even as a critic of those policies? Or what of the Uyghurs themselves as citizens of China? Do they (or at least those vast majority of them who have never resorted to any violence against other Chinese citizens) bear some of the responsibility? As for benefit, the fashionable idea that A’s unintentionally benefiting from B’s wrongdoing somehow makes A responsible for the wrongdoing seems to me at a minimum to need far more argued support than it gets from Held. And, absent the usual conditions for individual responsibility, I doubt that ethnic membership plus unwitting benefit will yield any interesting case for attributing personal responsibility or liability for the commission of remote or recent past wrongs of other members. Of course, if group responsibility did (contrary to my argument) extend as far as Held’s claims seem to require, then it would paradoxically mean that the people killed or injured in oppressive group A were not actually innocent (noncombatants) and hence that the acts directed against them were not terrorist acts after all! At least this would be true on a tactical definition such as mine, and on one leg of Held’s tentative disjunctive definition.

⁹ Held, How Terrorism Is Wrong, ch. 5.

¹⁰ Held, How Terrorism Is Wrong, 98.

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My comments above are not meant to deny any value to the notion of “group responsibility,” especially where there is a requirement to take responsibility for remedying past (or even some present) actions. Some primary cases where “taking responsibility” is appropriate or demanded can arise from group membership; I do not deny that certain forms of group membership, especially when associated with manifest benefit directly attributable causally to past wrongs committed by some group members, or associated with certain forms of inherited authority, can bring a moral necessity to seek to remedy the continuing effects of that wrong. The nature of the groups for which such responsibility arises and the circumstances in which it is appropriate are matters, as Held frankly acknowledges, for further, complex discussion. Even so, it seems clearly to apply in the case of the grievous wrongs inflicted on native populations by invading colonizers, the consequences of which have continued on to the present day and mandate succession governments to take remedial steps. For another example, the horrible damage of historical clerical sex abuse of children makes it incumbent upon those present Church leaders who may neither have done nor condoned those crimes to provide remedies as well as safeguards against repetition. Some former Church leaders, alive today, actually did commit such crimes and too many others effectively endorsed them personally by shameful evasion and cover-up. Held further offers to support her case by citing the potential advantages of holding group members responsible for things they haven’t done. These include such things as making those members more concerned to avoid such group wrongs in the future. This seems to be an uncharacteristic resort to typical, and rather crude, utilitarian thinking whereby scapegoating is fine if it has good results. But just as wrongly condemning an innocent person remains an injustice even if it is done to promote the greater good, so falsely attributing responsibility remains a false attribution even if it is done to promote good effects. Nor is it clear that such a project will have the good effects, since being blamed for what others have done (even if they are one’s relatives by ethnicity) is all too likely to create resentment and intransigence.

Justification by Supreme Emergency A sixth and final justification proceeds via the route of “supreme emergency.” This is the justification offered by Michael Walzer for some of the British employment of state terrorism in the city bombing campaigns of

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World War II. Walzer does not explicitly offer supreme emergency as a justification for sub-state terrorism; indeed, elsewhere he argues (with a qualification to be mentioned later) that this recourse is unavailable to such terrorists. Before dealing with the implications of his position for different forms of terrorism, I should explain what the nature of supreme emergency is envisaged to be. Michael Walzer introduces the idea in his influential book, Just and Unjust Wars, and offers it as an alternative to the sort of exemptions from the principle of discrimination likely to be offered by utilitarian (or other consequentialist) theorists. He doesn’t use the expression “dirty hands” in this connection, but supreme emergency is obviously in the tradition of dirty hands (the phrase is Walzer’s own coining in an earlier article).¹¹ In fact, he makes it clear in a later reflection on supreme emergency that this is so.¹² Unlike the utilitarian theorists he has in mind, Walzer does want to treat the immunity provided by the non-combatant restriction as profound, and he worries about any permissions to breach it. He doesn’t believe that ordinary calculations of utility can possibly override these sorts of constraints. Nonetheless, Walzer and those who think like him believe that certain circumstances can allow the regrettable but morally painful choice to violate such deep norms. The basic idea we may here take from the dirty hands tradition, plausibly traceable to Machiavelli, is that certain necessities of life may require the overriding of profound and otherwise “absolute” moral prohibitions in extreme situations.¹³ Walzer’s defense of the terror bombing of German cities in World War II in terms of “supreme emergency” is clearly in the tradition, but he does not defend the bombing unequivocally. He thinks that,

¹¹ This is not the place for a full discussion of this complex tradition, but I have discussed it elsewhere. See C. A. J. Coady and Onora O’Neil, “Messy Morality and the Art of the Possible,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volumes, vol. 64 (1990); C. A. J. Coady, “Politics and the Problem of Dirty Hands,” in A Companion to Ethics, edited by Peter Singer (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1993); C. A. J. Coady, “Dirty Hands,” in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, edited by Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit, and Thomas Pogge (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2012); C. A. J. Coady, “Dirty Hands,” in The Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2nd edition, edited by Laurence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker (London: Routledge, 2001). For Walzer’s influential statement of the position see Michael Walzer, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 2, no. 2 (1973). ¹² Michael Walzer, “Emergency Ethics,” in Arguing about War (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2004). See especially 45–46. ¹³ The idea of such political expedience, without the philosophical elaboration, goes back a lot further, as indicated by the quote from the High Priest Caiaphas at the beginning of Chapter 5 regarding the need to eliminate Jesus.

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though it was morally wrong as a violation of the principle of discrimination, it was justified by the plea of supreme emergency in the early stages of the war. In the later stages, however, it was just plain morally criminal since an Allied victory could be reasonably foreseen on the basis of morally legitimate targeting and fighting. The bombing of Dresden was therefore an outright atrocity, though the bombing of other German cities up to 1942 was not. He is clear that the bombing in this earlier phase was a violation of the principle of discrimination and actually refers to it at one point as “terrorism.”¹⁴ It was morally wrong, and implies guilt, but had to be done. Walzer’s use of the category “supreme emergency” here is based on the idea that the need to defeat Nazi Germany was no ordinary necessity. The enormity of Hitler’s regime and its practices was such that his extended empire would have been a disaster for most of the people living under its sway. In addition, the threat of that victory was present and urgent, and the bombing of German cities aimed directly at the civilian populations was the only offensive weapon the British had. I have elsewhere argued against the strength of Walzer’s claim that the threat of Nazi Germany, though certainly dreadful, was quite distinctive in requiring a supreme emergency (in the early stages of the bombing) where other state conflicts, most notably the war against Japan, were not. I will not repeat that argument here. Instead I want to address the idea that supreme emergency can justify sub-state terrorism. Walzer does not envisage this possibility in Just and Unjust Wars, where his discussion has a distinct statist bias. In his discussion of “supreme emergency,” Walzer makes this bias explicit. “Can soldiers and statesmen override the rights of innocent people for the sake of their own political communities? I am inclined to answer the question affirmatively, though not without hesitation and worry.”¹⁵ And he goes on to speak of nations in a way that identifies political communities and nations. Of course, even Walzer’s language here leaves logical space for the idea that nations or political communities can be driven by necessity even where they do not possess a state or have been deprived of one. Yet it is clear that recourse by such people or their real or imagined leaders to “supreme emergency” is far from his mind. Indeed, in another place, the original publication of the article “Terrorism: A Critique of Excuses,” where he is explicitly concerned with sub-state agents employing terrorism, Walzer argues that such terrorism can

¹⁴ Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 260.

¹⁵ Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 254.

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never be justified or excused. Although he doesn’t define terrorism very clearly, it is obvious that he is operating with a version of the tactical definition, saying such things as “[terrorism] is indefensible now that it has been recognized, like rape and murder, as an attack upon the innocent.”¹⁶ He makes his total condemnation explicit: “I take the principle for granted: that every act of terrorism is a wrongful act.”¹⁷ Although even this leaves theoretical room for a “dirty hands” move to claim the wrongful act as necessary, it is clear that Walzer does not envisage such room being available for sub-state terrorists. In fact, his article is devoted to examining excuses for terrorism since he takes it as axiomatic that there can be no justifications of any sort. But he reaches the same conclusion about excuses, even though some of the excuses he examines are formally very similar to the necessity arguments he endorses as justifications under the rubric of supreme emergency in the case of the terror bombing of World War II. Most notably, when he examines the argument that no other strategy is available and the similar one of “last resort,” he rejects them for non-state agents, even though “no other strategy available” figures prominently in his case for the necessity of the early Allied terror bombing,¹⁸ and even though he had in the earlier book described that bombing as “terrorism” necessitated by the legitimating supreme emergency.¹⁹ Why should states, or the political communities they represent, enjoy the supreme emergency license when other groups do not? This is particularly pertinent when we admit, as Walzer earlier did, that states can employ terrorism (in the tactical sense). The primacy of the political community that Walzer sees as validating the special role of (most) states is highly suspect. Walzer admits of individuals that they can never attack innocent people to aid their self-defense.²⁰ He then adds: “But communities, in ¹⁶ Michael Walzer, “Terrorism: A Critique of Excuses,” in Arguing about War (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 51. Actually, Walzer’s understanding of terrorism as an attack upon the innocent also includes the idea that the attack is intended to spread fear amongst other members of the group attacked. This would clearly include acts and policies of state terrorism such as the British bombing of German cities as well as the attacks by sub-state groups. ¹⁷ Walzer, “Terrorism: A Critique of Excuses,” 52. ¹⁸ Walzer, “Terrorism: A Critique of Excuses,” 54. In Just and Unjust Wars, Walzer accepts as part of a valid “dirty hands” justification that the bombing was the only offensive weapon the British had—“the bombers alone provide the means of victory,” as he quotes Churchill saying in September 1940. See Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 259. ¹⁹ Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 260. (This reference is 260 in the first four editions of the book, but 259 in the fifth.) ²⁰ Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 254. At least this seems to be what he is saying. The issue is confused by his tendency here as elsewhere to put the point as though he is reporting common

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emergencies, seem to have different and larger prerogatives. I am not sure that I can account for the difference, without ascribing to communal life a kind of transcendence that I don’t believe it to have.”²¹ Walzer goes on to try to locate the “difference” in the supposed fact that “the survival and freedom of political communities . . . are the highest values of international society.”²² Perhaps these are the highest values of international society, but this is hardly surprising if one construes international society as a society of recognized states. What is needed, at the very least, is an argument that locates the survival and freedom of states as the highest human value, and one that is capable of justifying the overriding that “supreme emergency” requires.²³ I doubt that any such argument exists. We should certainly avoid the temptation to identify the survival of a state with the survival of the regime that runs it. But neither should we identify the survival of the state with the survival of its subjects. Some states may deserve to perish and their former subjects may be better for their demise. And even where threatened states do not deserve to perish, their disappearance is not equivalent to the massacre of their subjects or citizens. Nor is it enough to point to the undoubted value of political life, for there are many other values, such as family relationships, friendship, and moral integrity, that are equally if not more significant. And even if some argument could show the pre-eminent value of political community and the life it allows, this would still leave a gap between political community and state, a gap that Walzer’s argument here obscures. (I stress “here” because in later publications Walzer is more explicit about the gap and qualifies his position on terrorism. This is something I shall discuss below.) At least some revolutionary or dissenting groups can plausibly claim to be or to represent political communities and to deploy violence in defense of a threatened political life. If so, the value that is

opinion: “it is not usually said of individuals in domestic society that they necessarily will or that they morally can strike out at innocent people, even in the supreme emergency of self-defence. They can only attack their attackers.” ²¹ Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 254. The strong emphasis on the preservation of the state or nation as the locus for a supreme emergency exemption also has echoes of Caiaphas and his reference to preventing the “whole nation” from perishing (quoted in the epigraph to Chapter 5). ²² Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 254. ²³ Henry Shue discusses this issue under the rubric of “General Threat to Principled Society” in his Fighting Hurt, 254–258. Though skeptical of any general claim that such survival and freedom is the highest human value, he allows that a threat to it of the gravity of a Nazi conquest may well be such as to count as a “supreme emergency” admitting of some violation of the principle of discrimination. In this, he is to an extent in Walzer’s camp.

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supposed by Walzer to legitimate resort to supreme emergency should be available to them as well. Yet this is precisely what Walzer seems at pains to deny. The contrast in treatment is stark in what Walzer says of the terrorist excuse that attacking the innocent is the only option they have. Walzer objects to this that other strategies are available if you are opposing liberal and democratic states, and in a remark relevant to a very similar excuse that “terrorism works (and nothing else does),”²⁴ he insists that terrorism never works against totalitarian states.²⁵ In discussing what he treats as a further excuse, he adds that this efficiency excuse depends for its success on that of “the only option” excuse or that of the structurally similar “last resort.” Indeed, these three excuses are closely related and, as Walzer admits of the efficiency test, it goes beyond an excuse and aims to constitute a justification in consequentialist terms. If so, the question of a “dirty hands” justification surely arises, and Walzer even mentions the “dirty hands” of the terrorists, but he doesn’t invoke any form of supreme emergency on their behalf. This must be, at least in part, because he thinks that the consequentialist considerations are defective in their own terms. As he argues: “I doubt that terrorism has ever achieved national liberation—no nation that I know of owes its freedom to a campaign of random murder—although terrorism undoubtedly increases the power of the terrorists within the national liberation movement.”²⁶ These arguments are hardly decisive as they stand, and they become still less persuasive when set against what Walzer says of the World War II bombing. As to the arguments themselves, the claim that terrorism will work (and nothing else will) need not mean that terrorism must work all by itself, as Walzer’s comment about failure to achieve national liberation might suggest. The “nothing else” claim need only mean that nothing else will fulfill the role that has been assigned to terrorism. Hence the terrorist is not committed to the view that national liberation can be achieved by terrorism alone. So understood, the question is whether terrorism has ever made a crucial, irreplaceable contribution to national liberation (or the achieving of the significant revolutionary goals, whatever they are). To say the least, this is a very difficult matter to decide. Did the terrorism of groups like the Stern gang play such a part in establishing the state of Israel? But, in any case, the

²⁴ Walzer, “Terrorism: A Critique of Excuses,” 55. ²⁵ Walzer, “Terrorism: A Critique of Excuses,” 56. ²⁶ Walzer, “Terrorism: A Critique of Excuses,” 56.

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question is structurally very similar to that Walzer poses for the legitimacy of the British bombing. Walzer is sympathetic to the “only option” story for the early stages of the terror bombing, even while admitting that some serious studies subsequently indicate the campaign to have been futile on its own terms. He thinks Churchill had to gamble because the stakes were so very high and the danger imminent. Walzer doesn’t, of course, think that this means that probability has no relevance to the gamble, but just that the estimated probability doesn’t have to be set so high. It can also be pretty vague. As Walzer says, of the bombing, “It makes no sense at this point to quantify the probabilities. I have no clear notion what they actually were or even how they might be calculated given our present knowledge, nor am I sure how different figures, unless they were very different, would affect the moral argument.”²⁷ This is strikingly at odds with what he says about non-state terrorists who argue that attacking non-combatants is the only option they have. They have no such latitude with probabilities, no matter how imminent and awful the threat. It seems that threats to their political community can never be great enough to constitute the sort of “immeasurable evil” that Walzer sees in the Nazi threat. I am at a loss (inevitably) about gauging “immeasurable” evils, but it would not seem impossible that various struggles against brutal, murderous, tyrannical regimes could sometimes reasonably be viewed as confronting supreme emergency. Of course, they cannot hope to succeed against a totalitarian state, according to Walzer, because terrorism never can succeed against a totalitarian state. Yet the terrorism of the bombers was itself directed against a totalitarian state and was posited on the subjects of that state being able to influence the state’s policy and workings. We should conclude that the attempt to restrict the supreme emergency exemption to states is unpersuasive. Either it applies more generally or it does not apply at all. It is noteworthy that Walzer seems himself to have come close to this conclusion, much as it goes against the grain of his discussion in the original version of “Terrorism: A Critique of Excuses.”²⁸ In his reprinting of this essay in his later book, Arguing about War (which I have referred to throughout this discussion), he has added a brief bracketed paragraph that

²⁷ Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 259. ²⁸ In Michael Walzer, “Terrorism: A Critique of Excuses,” in Problems of International Justice, edited by Steven Luper-Foy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988).

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partially acknowledges the problems posed by an asymmetry between states and sub-state political groups. He now says that considerations of supreme emergency may also apply to (sub-state) terrorists, “but only if the oppression to which the terrorists claimed to be responding was genocidal in character,” and he construes this as involving “an imminent threat of political and physical extinction.”²⁹ He then claims that this has not been true of any recent terrorist cause. It is hard to adjudicate this claim, partly because of difficulties with the term “genocidal,” but two comments are apposite. First, if “genocidal” means political and physical extermination of people because of their membership of an ethnic, national, or religious group, or attempts at the same, then there seem to be at least genocidal aspects to many conflicts in which sub-state agents have been tempted to terrorism. The Ottomen government’s assault upon the Armenians during World War I, for instance, is commonly regarded as genocidal and thus could have provided resisters against such extreme injustices with a prima facie supreme emergency justification for killing “enemy” non-combatants. Second, the criterion for supreme emergency that Walzer here requires of sub-state terrorists seems much stricter than that used for states. In his essay, “Emergency Ethics,” Walzer speaks of the criterion as “either the elimination of the people or the coercive transformation of their way of life.”³⁰ But if the second clause is applicable to states, then why not to sub-state groups, quite a few of which may plausibly appeal to it, including Palestinians subjected to ongoing Israeli occupation?

The Danger Objection and the Challenge of Absolute Prohibitions My general point so far has been to throw suspicion on the idea that the supreme emergency defense is only available to states. If it works for them, it may very well work for sub-state groups too.³¹ Apart from the pleas for consistency, however, I would also urge more crucially that the appeal to supreme emergency is too dangerous to be allowed as a publicly available ²⁹ Walzer, “Terrorism: A Critique of Excuses,” 54. ³⁰ Walzer, “Emergency Ethics,” 49. ³¹ Fabre’s and Finlay’s conditional acceptance of permitting violation of non-combatant immunity for insurgents in some circumstances is of a piece with my argument that supreme emergency exemptions cannot be permitted solely to states. We part ways on whether such exemptions are so clearly acceptable for either state or sub-state agents.

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vindication for terrorism, no matter how rare the circumstances are meant to be. Walzer himself admits that the city bombing he believes to have been justified led on to wholly unjustified episodes such as the bombings of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. He does not indeed intend the supreme emergency story to apply to those later episodes, but it is no accident that it could have been so applied. Any group, state or sub-state, will see the prospect of defeat by a serious enough enemy as posing a supreme emergency. Virtually any armed conquest could plausibly be held to involve coercive transformation of a way of life, so this phrase opens the way, despite Walzer’s concern to avoid it, to widespread resort to supreme emergency. And this prospect should be apparent to anyone considering the validity of allowing the exemption.³² In the context of the counter-terrorism atmosphere sustaining so much international politics at present and arousing so much fear of threats to ways of life, the promulgation of a doctrine of supreme emergency is fraught with danger. Igor Primoratz makes the point against Walzer that some of his various descriptions of conditions in which a supreme emergency arises (particularly in his essay on “Emergency Ethics”) differ significantly from each other and some describe situations that are either opaque or not as dire as others described.³³ I have already mentioned Walzer’s use of the disjunction “either the elimination of the people or the coercive transformation of their way of life” in connection with the availability of the latter phrase to insurgents as well as states, but such a coercion, as Primoratz notes, is also far removed from physical slaughter of a whole people. Walzer also declares as another “touchstone” for supreme emergency “the destruction of the moral world,” which is, as Primoratz argues, barely an intelligible state of affairs.³⁴ These dire touchstones have a rhetorical power that is inversely proportional to their relevance to the morality of slaughtering innocent people, and also clearly related to the very high dangers of misapplication. Primoratz himself wants to treat the principle of discrimination as an “almost absolute” prohibition but endorses one of Walzer’s “touchstones”: the situation, in Primoratz’s words, of “a people facing extermination or ethnic cleansing,” and this he calls “a moral disaster” scenario. Moreover, Primoratz insists ³² It is true that the objection involves attention to tendencies or likely consequences, but like many other considerations to do with likely or possible consequences, it is open to use by nonconsequentialists. ³³ Igor Primoratz, Terrorism: A Philosophical Investigation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 105–106. ³⁴ Primoratz, Terrorism: A Philosophical Investigation, 106.

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that such a resort to terrorist acts can only be morally valid if there are “very strong reasons” for “believing that it will work and nothing else will,” thereby rejecting Walzer’s claim that supreme emergency requires much less in the way of weight of reasons, namely the need to “wager” on the outcome because the “risk otherwise is too great.”³⁵ That serious danger aside, a final point that the supreme emergency justification and other justifications naturally introduce is that contemporary moral philosophers are generally averse to absolute prohibitions of any sort. Hence there are bound to be, for them, imaginable circumstances in which terrorism, slavery, judicial imprisonment of the innocent, rape, torture, and so on can be justified. Nor is the rejection of absolutism confined to most utilitarian or consequentialist philosophers, for what I have elsewhere called “balanced exceptionism” is apparent in intuitionist theorizing (following in the footsteps of W. D. Ross) and most other deontological or virtue theorists (though certainly not in Kant).³⁶ Another name for much the same thing is that popularized by Thomas Nagel, namely “threshold deontology.”³⁷ This gets its name from the explicit postulation of a threshold of balancing beyond which violation of a profound moral prohibition is allowable: Nagel’s example is overriding the wrong of killing one innocent person when that would save the lives of “say 50” innocents.³⁸ This may strike the average layperson, not to mention the average lawmaker, as pretty astonishing, and it opens up questions like: “if fifty, why not forty-nine, or thirty-five, or perhaps two?”, but even more fundamentally, it raises a difficult question about how one can argue for or against an absolute ban on terrorism (or, for that matter, any other great wrong, such as rape or torture). Those who reject the idea of exemptions from this profound moral imperative are arguing with people who take it as a basic fact that there will always be exemptions to any moral prohibition. It is hard to see how either

³⁵ Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 260. ³⁶ I discuss “balanced exceptionism” and its difference from dirty hands in C. A. J. Coady, “Terrorism, Morality, and Supreme Emergency,” Ethics, vol. 114, no. 4 (2004). A version of this paper has been republished in Primoratz, Terrorism: A Philosophical Investigation. I have drawn upon this paper in discussing supreme emergency here. ³⁷ Another name that has a place in this family of exemption theories, and is currently fashionable, is that recommended under the heading of “the lesser evil.” This term is favored by some philosophers writing about morality and political violence when they discuss possible exceptions to the discrimination principle. I think its use is open to serious ambiguity, and will not discuss it here beyond noting its close resemblance to the categories discussed above. For a use in connection with violating non-combatant immunity see, for example, Lazar, Sparing Civilians, 5, 7, 10, 65 passim. ³⁸ Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 62.

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side can have a compelling case in such a situation. Nonetheless, it is worth pointing out that even utilitarianism accepts absolutes insofar as it treats its basic injunction to act so as to produce the greatest good of the greatest number as beyond exemptions. And much the same is true of various forms of consequentialism. Indeed, it is plausible that something similar will be true of all moral theories, so I suspect that the debate is not really about whether there are moral absolutes, but about how many there are, and at what level of thinking they may be found.³⁹ Of course, any absolute commitment will face problems when the commitment confronts messy realities that challenge the very basis of the commitment. The category of “moral dilemma” itself speaks to the alarming prospect that our deepest moral imperatives may not always cohere. It may be that, faced with certain ghastly concrete choices such as that confronting the mother Sophie in the book and film Sophie’s Choice, the resources of even the richest morality run out. But, if so, I think we do violence to our situation by proclaiming in advance general conditions or circumstances in which exemption must be given to our deepest moral prohibitions. It is pertinent here that moral dilemmas must be distinguished from dirty hands. In the former category, there is no ordained right answer to the problem; whatever choice Sophie makes is right and wrong, so to speak, because morality is speechless in that situation. In dirty hands scenarios, on the contrary, it is supposed to be obvious that one should choose the “necessary” course over morality. Consider the parallel with rape. According to supreme emergency or even “balanced exceptionism,” we cannot exclude the theoretical possibility that rape may be what is somehow required to preserve some great value, such as community continuity. But anyone who goes about seriously contemplating conditions under which rape may be obligatory (though still immoral, as insisted by advocates of the dirty hands category) is tempting fate in a profound way that goes to the heart of what moral character and a moral life can be. Certainly, we need to be careful about cultivating any attitudes that might undermine the resolute commitment to virtuous action. The path of exemptions in either of its forms seems capable of doing just this. I do not want to say, with Elizabeth Anscombe, that the advocates of dirty hands or balanced exceptionism should not be spoken to because they “show a corrupt ³⁹ Considerations rather like these have led Shelly Kagan, himself a consequentialist, to conclude: “Talk of absolutism reveals little if anything about a person’s normative theory.” Shelly Kagan, Normative Ethics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 94.

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mind.”⁴⁰ Discussion should always proceed with people who show goodwill, but any such discussion should be open about the dangers attendant upon attitudes adopted. It is not ipso facto corrupt to think hard about some circumstances that might challenge or strain our moral comprehension and imagination, or to be uncertain and concerned about how we might be entitled to act or have acted in imagined circumstances, for instance had we lived in Nazi-occupied France or Holland and been approached by a Jewish fugitive for shelter. In a high-risk situation such as this, would we have had the courage and the right to put our own safety and that of our family, including children, in dire jeopardy to try to save an innocent life? This imagined situation is close enough to real life, though extreme in its painful circumstances, understandably to haunt our moral understanding. When, however, contemplation of imagined circumstances is fueled by consideration of bizarre, complex examples and confident intuitions about how to react morally to them, then conclusions about modifying our deepest moral convictions and adjusting our consciences must be approached with great caution, if not skepticism. When presented with some such examples it is hard to know why we should suspend judgment about their probability and causal landscape. So we are told that surely Jones is entitled/obliged to torture, rape, and murder one innocent child where that will prevent the same vile misery being inflicted on fifty or 1,000 or maybe a million other such children. Really? How is this supposed to work? Or consider Seumas Miller’s example of the drowning man confronted by a passerby who sees his plight but neglects to help even though she could do so “at no cost to herself.” Miller argues that the man is entitled to shoot and kill the woman to save his life since she is culpably neglectful of her duty to save. But how the man comes to have a usable gun in his drowning throes, how the woman can act in this dire situation with no cost, and how shooting her will aid his rescue requires, to say the least, some explanation.⁴¹ Two things are important in doing moral philosophy: one is intellectual openness to a range of views, including confronting ones, and another is an awareness that intellectual exercises in this area present not merely interesting abstract puzzles—they can also have profound implications for life.

⁴⁰ G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy, vol. 33, no. 124 (1958), 17. ⁴¹ Seumas Miller, Shooting to Kill: The Ethics of Police and Military Use of Lethal Force (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 25. To be fair, Miller usually employs more realistic illustrative examples plausibly drawn from historical conflicts or reasonable extrapolations from them.

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In the case of terrorism, we face a choice. Either we insist that terrorism (as characterized by the tactical definition) is always morally wrong and never to be allowed, or we accept that there can be circumstances in which the values served by terrorist acts are so important that it is right to do them.⁴² If the latter, then this exemption, for supreme emergency or otherwise, cannot be allowed only to states. Its legitimacy must in principle be more widely available, and decided on a case-by-case basis. My own conviction is that we surely do better to condemn the resort to terrorism outright with no leeway for exemptions, be they for states, revolutionaries, or religious and ideological zealots of any persuasion.

⁴² I am here ignoring those cases of what I called at one point in Chapters 1 and 2 “minor terrorism”; that is, acts that deliberately involve minor damage to the property or other aspects of the lives of innocent people. Cases of that which concern only minor damage, not itself deeply threatening to the wellbeing of the non-combatants themselves, will merit lesser condemnation, and may even sometimes be justified, though regrettable, as discussed in Chapter 1. So, justified revolutionaries, with their backs to the wall, may argue plausibly that they can destroy some non-essential non-combatant property in order to escape an attack. Even here, issues of restitution or restoration may arise. The point is similar to that made by Joel Feinberg about a case not involving political violence.

Coady.

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7 Counter-Terrorism and Its Ethical Hazards

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As for freedom of speech, We all spoke (through our interpreter) To dozens of ordinary people who, without exception, Vigorously assured us (through our interpreter) That there was perfect freedom of speech, perfect! Bruce Dawe, “Travelogue”¹ In considering the way that states react to terrorist attacks, we need to bear in mind certain background facts about or perspectives on states. Since terrorism is a form of political violence, we must first consider the state’s normal attitude to that. This is premised on the fact that states are certain to view political violence within the state that they do not control as something to be punished and suppressed. As Max Weber once argued, states are partly constituted by their having a monopoly on the use of violence within their boundaries.² They regard this monopoly as essential to the fulfillment of their purpose in maintaining stability and order within their boundaries. Challenges to this monopoly are inevitably greeted with strong emotional, rhetorical, policing, and legal reactions. A second background fact is that states, and particularly modern states, exercise tremendous power over their citizens, a power which is, as Lord Acton famously noted, inevitably prone to corruption. This is true even of those states we tend to view most favorably, namely those we call democratic. One reason for the favorable assessment and for the title “democratic” is that these states are constrained in the exercise of great power by some recourse, varying in degree and quality, to the will of the people governed, and in those states that are not only democratic but liberal in orientation,

¹ Bruce Dawe, No Fixed Address: Poems (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1962), 33–34. ² See Max Weber, “Politics as Vocation,” in From Max Weber, translated. and edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Free Press, 1946).

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there are forms of constitutional protection and judicial redress to protect against abuses of state power or even the power of majorities. Such protections are in principle very important, but it must also be conceded that in practice they can and do from time to time fail in their task, either because of the human defects of their appointed custodians, the political influences sometimes involved in their appointments (a paradigm of the effect of such appointment issues is the Supreme Court of the United States), radical changes to the powers and forms of such protective institutions, and the power of widespread cultural attitudes. None of this is to deny that state power can be used for good and noble purposes: the creation and maintenance of public broadcasting services such as the BBC in the UK and the ABC in Australia, and of national health services in the UK, Canada, and elsewhere, stand as testimony to this possibility. Nonetheless, the tendency to corruption and abuse of state power is very real, and for those of us who believe in this inherent tendency to abuse, the crisis brought about by the events of September 11, 2001 and subsequent attacks by Islamic extremists is cause for concern, not only about terrorist events but also about government reactions to them. These reactions have not been restricted to internal police, security, and legal measures, of course, since they have also involved a considerable military response by many powers, most notably by the USA, but also a number of its allies. This raises a question about the relative value of political responses, legal responses, and military responses and of the connections between them. So, in this chapter, I will mostly refer to terrorism or terrorists with basically sub-state agents and their activities in mind, for example when raising a question about whether terrorists should be considered as criminals or soldiers. On the tactical definition, such a question could indeed be raised about states and their agents in a different way, but a common locus of discussion about anti-terrorist measures is understandably a concern with sub-state agents hostile to their own or other states. It is thus necessary to narrow our vision here somewhat in a chapter concerned mostly with the problems facing states dealing with sub-state terrorist agents, such as appropriate legal and regulatory regimes. This pragmatic narrowing of vision for expository purposes should not be seen as any departure from the main thrust of the tactical definition which allows that states can use terrorism (and use it more dreadfully) either against their own people or against other states or external groups. Some states might even qualify for the title “terrorist state.” Indeed, legal and other measures to prevent state terrorism should preoccupy us more than they do and the prevention of the use of

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terrorism by states has claims to be an even more urgent task than the prevention of terrorist acts by sub-state groups. The long-running chaos in Syria after the Arab Spring demonstrations of 2011 and the uprising against the Assad government demonstrates, amongst other things, the various ways in which state terrorism can operate and also the way in which it can aggravate anti-state terrorism by sub-state agents. It needs to be acknowledged, however, that the contrast between state and sub-state agency is further complicated by the fact that there are people who appear to be sub-state agents but whose activities against a particular state, including terrorist acts, are sponsored in one way or another by an external state or states. A vivid example is provided by the armed Contra revolt against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the 1980s which was surreptitiously funded, encouraged, trained, and advised by the United States government. As is now widely recognized, the United States certainly countenanced and probably actively supported the numerous terrorist killings of civilians by Contras in the course of this rebellion. So the distinction between state terrorism and sub-state terrorism is not marked by a bright line. Nonetheless, sub-state terrorism raises the question of prevention in an acute form since the threat posed is usually not one that is indicated by massive increase in conventional military forces or the conspicuous buildup of armaments. Another consideration about the focus on the legal or regulatory issues with understanding and dealing with sub-state terrorist acts is the need to distinguish groups using violence on behalf of a political cause who respect the immunity of those who are not deploying violence against them (or not intentionally aiding substantially in its deployment) from groups who don’t show that respect in seeking to advance their cause, whether that cause is justified or not.³ This point is obscured by the deployment of political status definitions that brand all sub-state political violence as terrorist. The distinction between such groups is important from the point of view of legal measures against terrorist acts since there are clear dangers in wielding the anti-terrorist measures too broadly, a number of which we shall discuss below. When the distinction is disregarded, then such labels as “terrorist,” ³ That this is not merely an idle theoretical possibility is given some reality in the fact that some revolutionary leaders themselves emphatically declare the importance of respecting a version of non-combatant immunity. Whether they do so in practice is a matter for empirical investigation, but for some cases the evidence is plausible. For the claims of Che Guevara, Regis Debray, and George Grivas, see my chapter on terrorism in Coady, Morality and Political Violence, 168–169.

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“terrorist group,” or “terrorist supporter” can lead to dangerous failures to understand the nature of the problem that different sorts of insurrection pose, and hence to grasp and address the grievances, real, exaggerated, or even supposed, that the resisters declare. Such failures will have implications for the success of governmental counter-measures. What might further concern us is the interesting question, which has many practical consequences, whether terrorists should be treated as soldiers or civilians. This tracks the issue whether terrorists should be dealt with by the criminal law, the laws of war, or mixtures of both. I have so far proceeded by invoking just war categories such as combatant and noncombatant because one locus of attention to terrorism is in the context either of war or of armed struggle for broadly political objectives. It is not surprising that IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland sought status as prisoners of war instead of criminals in order that it be recognized that they were fighting for political objectives and not the usual criminal aims. Those of them who were terrorists (and not all were, on my definition) should of course be regarded as guilty of what would be war crimes in a normal war, so there was certainly a strong taint of criminality in a broad sense about what they did, even if they were also guilty of breaking normal criminal laws, such as the law against murder. Jeff McMahan has argued that it is better to treat terrorists as criminals, though he thinks their status hovers somewhere between criminal and combatant.⁴ He is partly moved by worries about the Bush administration’s determination to treat them as combatants, indeed “illegal combatants” or “enemy combatants” (in an unusual sense of that phrase), so that they could be killed outright rather than arrested and tried. He much prefers the path of arrest and trial. I have a good deal of sympathy with this, but much depends on context. Where the individuals are working on a terrorist project alone or in a small group with only remote and fragile connections to an organized force, it seems better to view them in a context of criminal efforts and seek arrest and trial, unless killing the offenders in self-defense or defense of others is imperative in the situation. This will be particularly pertinent where the suspected terrorists are citizens/ residents of the state attempting to deal with them (state A); where the suspected terrorists are citizens/residents of another country (state B) but planning an attack on state A, then recourse to the policing capacities of

⁴ Jeff McMahan, “Terrorism and the ‘War On Terror,’ ” in War on Terror (Oxford Amnesty Lectures), edited by Chris Miller (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).

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state B is again preferable, but that depends, of course, on the integrity and efficiency of those forces. Where terrorist tactics are used by organized armed forces engaged in insurrection or the like, in something resembling a “theatre of war,” the response must have more of a military flavor, even if it falls short of all-out war. And even police may have to use lethal violence where necessary against people who are in the process of perpetrating a terrorist attack. Indeed, modern-day police have armed response units that have quasimilitary roles in, for instance, hostage situations, and these seem appropriate to such dire circumstances, even if the existence of such units creates the temptation, too often succumbed to, in my view, to deploy them in less extreme circumstances.⁵ Generally speaking, the arrest and trial path, in spite of some of its disadvantages mentioned below, has the obvious merits that it is less prone to error, is likely to cause far less “collateral damage,” normally has review procedures capable, in principle at least, of dealing with abuses of power, and probably has less potential for fanning more terrorist flames than do military measures. Treating terrorists as criminals raises the question of the utility of the tactical definition in legal practice. Against its use is the understandable reluctance of the state to make distinctions about violence used against it from within. As already noted, the state sees itself as having a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within its domain and so is resistant to admitting that individual citizens, or still worse sub-state groups, could in any sense legitimately resort to violence against it. This resistance encompasses both the legitimacy of cause and of means. As to cause, it is understandable that the state, whether democratic or dictatorial, will dismiss the idea that revolutionary or reformist violence could be legitimately or even excusably used against it, even though outsider states and individuals may think otherwise. My concern here, however, is less with this issue than that of distinguishing means since that is crucial to the tactical definition. The first point to make is that differentiating violence against the state into different categories does not in itself create a problem for the state’s instinct to treat all such violence as illegitimate. Even if violence of this sort is ipso facto illegitimate (and those who admit just revolutions will deny that ⁵ I will merely note here a further problem that tends to blur the contrast in the roles of police and military which is the increased tendency in many countries to militarize more generally the equipment and weaponry of police forces. The significance of this is very well explored by Ned Dobos in his Ethics, Security, and the War Machine: The True Cost of the Military (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

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this is necessarily the case), there may be some types of violence that are less wrong than others and merit different legal treatment. Although the topic of mercy killing is controversial, there seems a difference of moral category between mercy killing that is effectively assisted suicide and the murder of a kidnapped child who is no longer valued by the kidnappers when the ransom has been paid. Even when treating both such cases as violations of law, there is no reason why the legal processes should not acknowledge the significance of such differences, at least at the point of sentencing and perhaps in other ways. Similarly, consider the difference between prison escapees who shoot and kill an armed prison guard who is shooting at them while they are attempting to escape and similar escapees who deliberately shoot and kill innocent bystanders in order to distract their pursuers. There is a case for regarding the latter as a more heinous crime even though both are murders. If so, it should be possible to treat political violence directed at state agents (and agencies) that can intelligibly be viewed as opposing forces by those whose grievance leads them to violence in a quite different way from political violence that is manipulatively directed at people who are in no sense opposing forces. Both may be wrong, but they are different wrongs and could very well receive different treatment in domestic law. I said that in the example of the prison escapees there was a case for regarding the intentional shooting of innocent bystanders as more heinous than killing a prison guard by returning fire. Against this, it may be argued that the state has a special interest in safeguarding those who enforce its laws and so should treat the killing of state officials as more grievous than the killing of ordinary citizens. Certainly, the state needs to be vigilant in defense of those charged with the sometimes-dangerous duty of enforcing the laws and protecting the public, at least where those laws are just and the relevant public deserves protection. But such vigilance need not involve rejection of the point I made, for two reasons. First, the vigilant attitude is consistent with there being a requirement for an even more powerful condemnation of such atrocities as the child-killing in my example. Second, it should be remembered that there are a range of cases that can fall under the heading “killing of state officials” and some will be more grievous than others. In a famous case in Australia known as the Walsh Street murders, two young Victorian police constables were lured to a Melbourne suburban street in October 1988 on the report of an abandoned car, then ambushed and shot to death by a group of criminals. The killings were apparently undertaken as revenge for an earlier fatal police shooting of a gang member that was widely viewed by the underworld as an illegal execution. The case created great

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community concern and even greater police outrage and several career criminals suspected of involvement in the Walsh Street crime were subsequently shot and killed by police in controversial circumstances. The callous killing of the two constables was indeed a horrible crime, but very different from the example of the escapees mentioned above. Indeed, the two young constables might well be regarded as palpably innocent if, as seemed to be the case, they were in no way involved in the earlier police killing. This is certainly how they were portrayed in the media. (In fact, there had been a number of earlier police shootings, and one of the murdered constables had been involved in one of these, but that involvement does not seem to have been a reason for the ambush. The killers could not have known who would respond to the report of the abandoned car.) A further consideration about legal practicality is that whatever the problems of implementing the tactical definition into law and policing, they create no more difficulties than the existing legal definitions. Indeed, their relative precision contrasts usefully with the sweeping vagaries of such definitions as the UK Act, as we shall see.

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Responses to Terrorism This brings us to the more general question of how best to deal with terrorist attacks. A striking feature of the response to the Islamic militant terrorist attacks on Western “homelands” has been the deployment of military metaphors and military realities in counter-terrorist measures. They have not been the only forms of response, of course, but they have had a significant role, from the slogan “war on terror” to the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and various outside state-sponsored interventions in Yemen and Syria. Moreover, employment of the military to deal with terrorism is not new, as witness the British Army’s involvement in Northern Ireland. A full discussion of the merits of this sort of response would take us beyond the main focus of this chapter, which is upon the mostly internal measures, regulatory, deterrent, and punitive, that states have deemed appropriate for dealing with terrorist threats, but I think that overall the record of such military ventures is not encouraging, either in terms of success or in terms of the license it has given for governments to deploy military force against sometimes real but also often spurious terrorist threats, as in Russia’s war in Chechnya and most recently the Syrian

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government’s attacks (and those of its allies) upon non-combatants amongst its own population in rebel-held areas. One military tactic that should be briefly noted at this point, however, is what has come recently to be called “targeted killing.” Of course, the term is somewhat inept, given that most killing in “traditional” war obviously involves targets, whether of enemy combatants or non-combatants, but these targets are overwhelmingly anonymous, whereas those covered by the new terminology are usually not, or not altogether. The new terminology actually denotes a form of assassination whether directly by human agents or indirectly by the remote use of machines, such as drones. Obvious examples of the former are Russian assassinations of their own citizens, perceived as traitors, or dangerous defectors, in foreign countries, and Saudi Arabia’s abduction and slaughter of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, both cases almost certainly directed by the respective governmental leaderships. In these, the targets were hardly terrorists, though some of the perpetrators and their superiors may have mistakenly viewed them in that light—itself an ironic fact, given that the killings were palpably terrorist acts, certainly on the tactical definition. Other nations have used human agents in assassinations against individuals or small groups where the selected targets were believed to represent actual or potential violent threats to their military or citizens. Israel’s spy agency Mossad, for one, has a notable record of killings abroad by their assassins. The use of drones is a prime example of the mechanization of targeted killing from a distance, and has been made a routine response to terrorism by the United States, whereby selected individuals or groups in foreign countries who are regarded, at least in part, as posing a terrorist threat to the US or its global interests are “eliminated.” This was developed into a major anti-terrorist procedure under the rule and strong approval of President Obama. There is much to contest about this tactic, and I will not be able to pursue its problems and complexities here beyond a few remarks. It seems that Obama himself favored the drone killings because their apparent precision in contrast to, for instance, bombing by planes was more consistent with the just war principle of discrimination. There are, however, several problems with this since, firstly, the drone attacks do not “precisely” kill just the single suspected terrorist or a small group of such suspects, but commonly kill more, often many more, people nearby who are not suspects at all. Secondly, the intelligence that goes into finding suspects—that is, people who are not engaged in terrorist acts at the time but are thought to be planning some attack or belong to some group bent upon terrorist acts—have proved

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fraught with the possibility of grave mistake, which is not surprising given that the history of intelligence agencies on the score of ethics, intellect, competence, and accountability is a mixed bag.⁶ Thirdly, the operation of the program has been marked by extravagantly loose criteria for determining who counts as a combatant or legitimate target. At one stage, the instructions on this included permissible attacks on all military-age males in what is called a “strike zone.” According to government information leaked initially to the New York Times, the policy that controls official accounts of enemy combatants and non-combatants killed by such strikes “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” In further explanation: “Counter-terrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good.”⁷ Fourthly, such strikes on foreign countries usually far removed from the home base of the drones have arguably proved to be counter-productive in encouraging terrorist reprisal attacks usually on countries allied with the United States. There is also the risk of escalation, in that the tactic may well encourage other states to deploy drones in dubious causes.⁸

Non-Military Measures: Advantages and Difficulties Turning to non-military measures, there seem to be basically three such approaches: (1) domestic and international legal and regulatory measures, especially those introduced specifically to deal with terrorism; (2) diplomatic ⁶ The secrecy surrounding such organizations and the fetish of “national security” makes current full assessments of such matters difficult, especially in closed societies, but Tim Weiner’s histories of the CIA and the FBI and some revelations by disillusioned ex-spies suggest that efficient production of useful intelligence, or effective implementation of secret policy, is distinctly patchy. See Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes (London: Allen Lane, 2007), and Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (London: Allen Lane, 2011). ⁷ See Conor Friedersdorf, “Under Obama, Men Killed by Drones Are Presumed to Be Terrorists,” The Atlantic (May 29, 2012). https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/ 05/under-obama-men-killed-by-drones-are-presumed-to-be-terrorists/257749. ⁸ For an extended philosophical discussion of some problems with “targeted killings” see Jeremy Waldron, “Death Squads and Death Lists,” Constellations, vol. 23, no. 2 (2016). For a good account of some of the practices of targeted killing by Israel and the United States, and of problems that beset it, see Adam Entous and Evan Osnos, “Last Man Standing: The Killing of Qassem Suleimani and the Calculus of Assassination,” in Annals of Covert Action, The New Yorker (February 10, 2020), 40–51.

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measures, both internal and external; (3) removing the grievance. There is some overlap between the categories, but it is still useful to distinguish them. I’ll examine the pros and cons of each, though I will concentrate heavily upon the first. All of the three have the primary advantage over heavily military measures that they do not involve a commitment to killing and maiming on a large or relatively large scale. If the Iraq war was supposed to stem terrorist killing of Americans at home, as some apologists argued, then it has done so (on a dubiously optimistic causal concession to its supporters) at the cost of more Americans killed than died in the 9/11 attacks, a very large number of Iraqi civilians killed (the exact number difficult to calculate but certainly involving many tens of thousands), probably many more wounded, dispossessed, and self-exiled, an economy and social order badly damaged for many years, and a great increase in terrorist activity and other violent outbreaks in Iraq itself during the conflict-occupation and continuing to the present. The invasion has, moreover, been a significant factor in the rise of ISIS which certainly has strong claims to be an organization devoted to terrorist activities as well as much else that is deplorable. Somewhat similar considerations apply to the Western intervention in Afghanistan which was promoted primarily as part of the campaign to defeat terrorism and where the vicious Taliban remain powerful. Measures (1) to (3) involve none of this. At worst, their failure may lead to many deaths in terrorist attacks that are not prevented, but, in contrast to military attacks, such deaths are not inevitable, and no measure can guarantee success, certainly not full-scale military measures, as Afghanistan and Iraq in their different ways show. Nor is it clear (to say the least) that the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions have prevented further attacks upon nations outside Iraq and Afghanistan; indeed, they have clearly played a part in provoking such attacks since 2001. By contrast, legal and policing measures, in spite of their problems discussed below, actually seem to have been successful in preventing terrorist attacks, though the extent of that success is difficult to determine, partly because it involves establishing truths about the causing of the nonhappening of events, and partly because it requires penetrating the powerful shield of secrecy that protects the work of intelligence units and other antiterrorist agencies. Such organizations are quicker to claim success in prevention than they are to reveal detailed evidence of it. Diplomatic efforts (including some removal of grievance) have also had some conspicuous successes, as (eventually) in Northern Ireland. This presents a good initial case in favor of (1), (2), and (3) as against military

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responses, but they have downsides and we need to assess them and assess each category to measure them against the others. In doing so, we need to bear in mind the background facts that I outlined at the beginning of this discussion concerning the innate tendency of great power to be abused and to corrupt. Regarding (1), there are many problems with domestic legal measures, some of which can be reflected in international legal efforts. Those involving the criminal law, and they are the main ones likely to have an appropriate rationale, can be threatening to significant civil liberties within the state enacting them and are arguably often superfluous. There is a further question about their effectiveness. There is also the fact that they are stretching the scope of the criminal law in dramatic and, in certain respects, alarming ways. Some of these effects can be traced to incautious wording and also to the influence of dubious or ambiguous definitions of terrorist acts. The UK Terrorism Act (2000) with its subsequent amendments is typical in this respect, as in its blurring of various important distinctions. Although its vague and far-reaching language makes its scope somewhat unclear, it is plain that violence or the threat of it against governments is central to what it seeks to prohibit with the term terrorism. To summarize its convoluted sections and sub-sections, it counts as terrorist (subject to a proviso noted below) those actions that involve either “serious violence” against a person or property, or that endanger the lives of persons (other than the actor), or that “create a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public,” or that are “designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.”⁹ Let us call these actions the primary actions. Primary actions are terrorist provided only that they are firstly “designed to influence the government or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public or a section of the public,” and secondly “the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious racial or ideological cause.”¹⁰ In a curious additional clause, however, the first part of this proviso is withdrawn for certain acts by exempting from its governance any use of firearms or explosives to perform one or other of what I have called the primary actions. Someone who has a political grievance against a ramshackle, disused governmental building structure that impinges upon

⁹ The United Kingdom Terrorism Act 2000 (c.11), Part 1, Section 1.2. I am taking the primary acts listed in 1.2 as disjunctive since it makes no sense to treat them as conjunctive conditions. ¹⁰ The United Kingdom Terrorism Act 2000 (c.11), Part 1, Section 1.1.

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their land in some significant way and who has been unsuccessful in seeking redress through normal channels may be foolish and reprehensible if they vent their frustration by blowing up the offending edifice, but it seems contrary to common sense to treat them as a terrorist. This curious clause (depending upon what is meant by “serious” and “electronic system”) might also make a terrorist of someone who is enraged with some aspects of government regulation of telecommunication services and so shoots their or another’s phone, television set, or computer (with a licensed rifle), thus seriously damaging an electronic system in order to make a political statement. Leaving aside the doubtful effects of this additional clause, we can see that the definition restricts the idea of a terrorist act to acts of violence or serious coercive behavior by sub-state agents fundamentally aiming to influence government policy. This pro-state bias extends even to the criminalizing (as terrorist) within the UK of such acts directed against governments anywhere in the world, no matter what their political complexion or their oppressive practices. This is made clear in an explanatory note to the definitions: “(d) ‘the government’ means the government of the United Kingdom, of a Part of the United Kingdom or of a country other than the United Kingdom.”¹¹ This would make terrorists of Burmese dissidents defending themselves with arms against brutal attacks by government forces, and would retrospectively count as terrorists Jewish armed resisters to Nazi troops in the Warsaw ghetto (as long as such troops could be viewed as representing a foreign government) or French resisters attacking German military facilities, but rule out as terrorist any violent acts against civilians committed by Russian troops in Chechnya, Serbian troops in Kosovo, or government troops in apartheid South Africa. It would also mean that the American revolution of independence consisted wholly of terrorist acts. In fact, the stress on substate agents as exclusive perpetrators of terrorist acts is strongly implicit in the legislation rather than openly declared, so it is possible to read its provisions as going beyond sub-state agents and covering one government’s violent acts against another, so that the 2011 military interventions by Western governments in support of Libyan rebels would be terrorist. It is unlikely that this is the intent of the legislation, though a consequence of its imprecise wording. The Act’s inclusion in the primary actions of serious

¹¹ The United Kingdom Terrorism Act 2000 (c.11), Part 1, Section 4.4.

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disruption or interference with an electronic system is highly problematic and will be discussed below. No less a person than the UK’s top prosecutor, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald, warned of some of these risks (and realities) in his final speech before leaving office at the end of 2008.¹² He claimed that centuries of British civil liberties were at risk from the relentless pressure of the “security state.” He referred to various anti-terrorism measures and proposals as the “paraphernalia of paranoia.” After the defeat of the British Labour government in 2010, Macdonald was appointed to provide “independent oversight” to the review of the country’s counterterrorism and security powers by the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism in the Home Office, and his oversight report was published in early 2011.¹³ I have no space to discuss the report in detail, but it is worth noting a few points. One is his comment in the introduction that “the promise of total security is an illusion that would destroy everything that makes living worthwhile . . . some risks are worth running in order to enjoy liberty.”¹⁴ He supports the reduction of the maximum period of pre-charge detention to fourteen days, the abolition of the stop and search provisions of section 44, and the report’s recommendation that groups that espouse violence or hatred should not be proscribed. In connection with the latter, Macdonald argues that the proscription would be “strikingly illiberal, extraordinarily difficult to enforce and it would probably run counter to the Review’s overriding purpose to roll back State powers.”¹⁵ In addition to this, such proscription runs foul of the point I made earlier about the superfluity of some anti-terrorist legislation. It is a superfluous measure since incitements to violence and racial and religious hatred by individuals are already criminal offenses, and nothing seems to be achieved (other than the deleterious effects cited by Macdonald) by making them group offenses. This is a classic example of the way overreaction to terrorism produces legislation that is both unnecessary and damaging. The twenty-eight-day detention period has had similar problems, being rarely invoked and thus abandoned in 2011 with a return to the less restrictive fourteen days, though

¹² Frances Gibb, “DPP Chief Sir Ken Macdonald Attacks Big Brother State Surveillance,” The Times (October 21, 2008). ¹³ Kenneth Macdonald, “Review of Counter-Terrorism and Security Powers: A Report by Lord Macdonald of River Glaven QC” (London: The Stationery Office, 2011). ¹⁴ Macdonald, “Review of Counter-Terrorism and Security Powers,” 2. ¹⁵ Macdonald, “Review of Counter-Terrorism and Security Powers,” 8.

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remnants of it remain with a clause allowing detention for twenty-eight days in an “emergency.” It is worth asking whether many other anti-terrorism legislative measures are also superfluous: agencies like police or security services are seldom willing to advise against giving them more and more powers, powers that will invariably work to restrict the liberty of citizens. Of course, the interpretation of the law by judges is sometimes proof against the pressure for more prosecutorial powers and discretions. This was shown in 2010 during proceedings in the UK by six British residents who claimed that the UK government was complicit in their having been tortured and secretly transferred to Guantanamo Bay: they sued the government for abuse and wrongful imprisonment. The secretive agencies MI 5 and MI 6 urged the courts to suppress a great deal of evidence from the plaintiffs and the public and to make it available only to a judge and specially appointed and vetted counsel. But the Court of Appeal has rejected this procedure as tantamount to “undermining one of the (common law’s) most fundamental principles.” The judges insisted that it was essential that “a litigant should be able to see and hear all the evidence which is seen and heard by a court determining his case.” Subsequently, the authorities decided not to appeal further and the plaintiffs were bought off with huge tax-payer-funded compensation settlements. We must not, however, assume that the judiciary will always be a barrier to bad procedures and malpractice in the context of terrorism. The poor record of even very distinguished judges during the 1970s IRA terror alarms in the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four, and Maguire Seven trials shows that public outrage, political pressure, and panic can reach to the highest levels of the law. A further problem with anti-terrorism laws is that the widening of police and other state powers that they involve presents a permanent temptation to use them or powers that are associated with them against persons other than terrorists. (This parallels, on the international stage, the way that oppressive governments quickly invoked anti-terrorist rhetoric in order to resort readily to military or police violence against non-terrorist protesters as in Egypt, Libya, and Syria in 2011.) The UK Terrorist Act 2000, as discussed earlier in connection with definitions, includes in its primary actions a reference to serious disruption or interference with electronic systems (whether or not it involves violence), but this would seem to make terrorists of Rupert Murdoch’s crew at the News of the World, given only that some of their hacking was designed to have a degree of influence on the government. This

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outcome might be welcome in some quarters, but surely distorts our understanding of terrorism and unduly extends the scope of severe anti-terrorist penalties and emergency investigative techniques. Even more alarmingly, the clause about electronic systems would criminalize as terrorists those dissidents in tyrannical regimes who hack into the phones or computers of government torturers or secret police to get information that will enable them to expose government malpractice and persecution in order to reform or remove the regime.¹⁶ Other aspects of the Terrorist Act, notably those concerning wide powers of search and arrest in section 44 and related sections that have been criticized by Sir Ken Macdonald and others, have been used in absurd and disturbing ways, as in the case of the photographic artist Reuben Powell, who was arrested in 2009 for photographing the old HMSO print works located near a police station in London. Powell was handcuffed and spent five hours in a cell after police seized the lock-blade knife he uses to sharpen his pencils. His release only came after the intervention of the local MP, Simon Hughes, but not before his genetic material had been stored permanently on the DNA database.¹⁷ Another problem with the use of legal measures against terrorism concerns the scope and use of legislation that is not specifically geared to counter-terrorism but has been motivated by anxiety about terrorism. The extradition processes in the United Kingdom, for example, have come under criticism in recent years because of their connection with the European Arrest Warrant, a legal instrument that was introduced by a European decision made just one week after the attacks of September 11, 2001. It was promoted to the public as a way of ensuring cross-border cohesion in prosecuting terrorists and other serious criminals across Europe. Since then it has been increasingly used to extradite people for alleged offenses that are either trivial or not criminal offenses in the UK. The extradition proceedings against Julian Assange have highlighted some of the problems with these

¹⁶ Some anti-terrorist legislation has tried to avoid such a consequence by special provisions. The Victorian government in Australia has even broader prohibitions on interference with electronic systems but, unlike the UK Act, it exempts “advocacy, protest, dissent or industrial action” where it “is not intended to cause serious harm that is physical harm to a person, or to cause a person’s death, or to endanger the life of a person, other than the person taking action, or to create a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public.” See the Victorian Terrorism (Community Protection) Act 2003 (Act No. 7/2003), Part 1, section 4, especially 4.3 (as amended, November 3, 2011). ¹⁷ Jonathan Brown, “Photographers Criminalised as Police ‘Abuse’ Anti-Terror Laws,” The Independent (January 6, 2009).

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processes, but there have been other startling examples. A notable instance, discussed in The Guardian’s op-ed pages in December 2010, concerned a Polish man, Jacek Jaskolski, a disabled fifty-eight-year-old science teacher living in the UK since 2004 who was sought for extradition to Poland over a ten-year-old “offense” of having overdrawn his bank limit.¹⁸ The bank recovered the money and there is no allegation of dishonesty. In the UK, such a case would at most involve civil proceedings, but the desperate desire for new legislation to deal with terrorism has played a part in bringing about this absurd situation—not to mention other absurdities such as the 2008 extradition to Poland of a man who had stolen a dessert from a Polish restaurant!¹⁹ A more recent and striking example of the same tendency to deploy laws that make no explicit reference to terrorism, though they are fashioned in response to it, and are then used in terrorism-irrelevant contexts to restrict important democratic rights and freedoms, is the use of Australia’s 2004 National Security and Information Act (NSI) in the prosecution of the anonymously named whistleblower Witness K and his lawyer Bernard Collaery.²⁰ They are being prosecuted, at the time of writing, under another piece of security legislation for their roles in the leaking of information about the Australian government’s use of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) to plant 200 bugs in the Cabinet Offices of the Timor-Leste government at Dili to obtain information in order to ensure Australian interests held the upper hand in tense negotiations with Timor-Leste over the rich oil and gas fields in the Timor Gap. This bugging took place under cover of an Australian aid program that included building the Cabinet Offices. Witness K is a former ASIS officer who was in charge of the operation but revealed it in 2012. Apart from the operation’s being a disastrous piece of moral, legal, and political folly, and representing a betrayal of Australia’s positive support for the tiny nation’s independence struggles, it was also “justified” by a characteristically slippery resort to the concept of national security. The prosecutions of K and Collaery have been shrouded in secrecy under the NSI, even though the issues have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism,

¹⁸ Afua Hirsch, “The Julian Assange Case: A Mockery of Extradition?”, The Guardian (December 14, 2010). ¹⁹ Hirsch, “The Julian Assange Case: A Mockery of Extradition?”. ²⁰ A good account of the alarming practices and the threats to liberal citizens’ rights posed by this case, and the extraordinary secrecy surrounding it, is given by award-winning journalist and lawyer Richard Ackland in his “The Court Case Australians Are Not Allowed to Know about: How National Security Is Being Used to Bully Citizens,” The Guardian (April 11, 2020).

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but a good deal to do with further exposure of cover-up, bad faith, and possibly corruption by Australian national governments of different persuasions. It is also noteworthy that the NSI legislation is only one of seventy laws invoking national security passed in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Indeed, on some accounts, Australia leads the Western world in passing laws restricting civil liberties, and most of them invoke some more or less nebulous concept of national security, an electorally popular invocation in times of terrorist fears.²¹ Similar measures to these and the UK laws have been enacted in many Western democracies. Democratic politics, partly because of its very responsiveness to public feeling and opinion, has a tendency to react to any new crisis by passing laws. Sometimes the relevant law is a good one, but often it is not, since its primary purpose, or effect, is to assure the public that the political leadership is doing something. Often those who exercise power under the new laws— police and security agencies—especially in a climate of heightened suspicion and anxiety will stretch the interpretation of the law. Moreover, once enacted, such “gut-reaction” legislation has a strong tendency to stay on the books, whatever its defects. All this suggests the virtue of an adaptation of Occam’s razor to the criminal law: “Do not multiply laws without necessity.”

The Prevention Imperative Many of the problems that arise with the employment of the criminal law in connection with terrorist acts are created by the fact that the primary aim of this employment is direct prevention of crime rather than punishment, reform, deterrence, or communication. One British account of the rationale for anti-terrorist law-making talks of the four “p”s: Pursue, Prevent, Protect, and Prepare.²² Of these, the protecting and preparing are themselves prevention-oriented, where pursuit is more related to capture of those who have performed terrorist acts. It would be wrong to see prevention as an

²¹ See Kishor Napier-Raman, “How Australia Tilted Even Further Towards Police State in 2018,” Crikey (December 21, 2018). https://www.crikey.com.au/2018/12/21/how-australiatilted-even-further-towards-police-state-in-2018 and Kishor Napier-Raman, “A Big Year for the Australian Police State,” Crikey (December 16, 2019). https://www.crikey.com.au/2019/12/ 16/2019-australia-authoritarianism. ²² Home Office, Pursue Prevent Protect Prepare: The United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering International Terrorism (March 2009), 8–9.

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entirely new element in law-making and law enforcement since such things as restraining orders, consorting laws, and laws against attempts and conspiracy have a preventive rationale, at least in part. Nonetheless, the rationale is central to a great deal of anti-terrorism legislation in ways that are sometimes more tenuous than in the cases just mentioned. The criminalizing of attempts is partly aimed at preventing their outcomes, but the attempts themselves involve actions that are directly aimed at producing full-blooded crimes, so that they are, in a sense, those crimes already in the process of enactment. Restraining orders and restrictions on associating usually arise from crimes or wrongs already committed (e.g., assaults, threats, harassment) and likely to be committed again. Conspiracy is somewhat different but, for that reason, the reach of this crime has often been viewed with some suspicion by liberals (and others) who are anxious about the misuse of state power. The primary drive of anti-terrorism legislation is toward prevention broadly considered. One of the problems relates to the definition of terrorism and terrorist group. Most definitions in the legal campaign in different countries are broader than the tactical definition in most respects, though narrower in terms of the agents of terrorist acts, and, even where the concerns of the tactical approach are taken into account to some degree, the various offenses related to support for or encouragement of terrorist groups or organizations are dangerously broad. Even on the tactical definition, an organization like, say, Hamas may be engaged in armed struggle against Israeli troops which would not count as terrorism, but also various governmental activities beneficial to the people of Gaza (as well as inefficient and corrupt activities related to their way of governing), and also in terrorist acts, such as suicide bombing in crowded civilian areas or delivering rockets against noncombatants. Someone in the UK or Australia sending money to Hamas officials for the non-terrorist and non-corrupt activities may well be caught in the net of support for terrorism, certainly as defined in Australian and UK legal instruments. Where the definitions encompass all acts of political violence against governments, including governments overseas (and they never reach to acts of political violence by governments), then they potentially criminalize intellectual or financial support and encouragement of resistance movements that many people plausibly consider legitimate, such as, in former times, the African National Congress struggle against apartheid, much of which (though by no means all) was non-terrorist in the tactical sense. Another example would be support for Burmese dissidents forcefully defending their homes from rapacious government forces. These

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are examples where the tactical definition of terrorism, even if not explicitly embodied in the law, could be a beneficial influence in determining the nature of anti-terrorism laws or in restricting their scope. It might, for instance, produce more caution about what groups are to be designated “terrorist organizations” or what defenses are available to those who “support” such organizations. Although the various legislations in different jurisdictions have many points of divergence, there is a good deal of overlap and there is a general problem with the wide scope of preventive measures and the language used to codify them. Notions like “facilitate,” “promote,” “support,” “encourage,” or “possession of information useful to terrorism”²³ show an understandable anxiety to forestall terrorist acts, even to forestall the possibility of them, but they are alarmingly open to abuse. As I remarked in Chapter 1 a propos a clause in the application form for a UK visa, a philosophy article offering a limited case for terrorism, or even examining in an objective way apparently plausible justifications for terrorist acts, could easily come under such headings as “information useful to terrorism.” The UK Act even proscribes inviting some member of an organization deemed to be a terrorist group to give a talk or assist in the organization of such a talk.²⁴ Admittedly, it is a defense to show that you had no reason to believe that the speaker’s address would “support a proscribed organisation or further its activities.”²⁵ But if some academic invited a significant member of Hamas, for instance, to give a talk on the organization’s political goals, and thereby to open their claims to interrogation, it is barely possible that an inviter could fail to realize that the speaker in the course of their explanations would very likely seek to defend its activities in ways that nullify this defense. Do we really want to use the law to limit debate in this way? Or, to vary the case, consider a similar invitation to Nelson Mandela while he was still on the terrorist lists of various nations, including the USA which had him listed up until 2008. Of course, one might hope that common sense would prevail at the level of implementing such laws, but liberal democratic societies should not rely too much on such hopes. Part of the problem of framing criminal laws to deal with politically motivated violence is that the framing of new laws or the stretched use of them or of existing laws invariably takes place in an atmosphere of

²³ See, for example, The United Kingdom Terrorism Act 2000 (c.11), Sections 3 and 12. ²⁴ The United Kingdom Terrorism Act 2000 (c.11), Section 12.2c and 12.3. ²⁵ The United Kingdom Terrorism Act 2000 (c.11), Section 12.4.

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heightened fear or even panic. This atmosphere has the understandable effect on politicians, especially democratically elected politicians, that they do not want to be seen to have been remiss in dealing with future threats. They live in apprehension that if a terrorist event occurs, they will be blamed for not having prevented it. These are reactions, though understandable, that often make for bad laws, bad policy, and bad policing of laws. This was abundantly illustrated in 2007 in the Mohamed Haneef fiasco in Australia where a terrorist attack on the other side of the world (at Glasgow airport) produced an arrest, lengthy detention, and then aborted prosecution of an innocent man for what always seemed at best a trivial “offense” and turned out to be no offense at all.²⁶ Haneef, an Indian doctor working in Brisbane, had a relative in the UK who was supposed to have some connection with one of the suspects in the Glasgow incident. He was believed to have given his phone sim card to his cousin in England whose brother was one of the perpetrators of the Glasgow airport attempted bombing. British police mistakenly reported that the card had been found at the terrorist scene. In the course of this sad process, the court was profoundly misled on central facts by the prosecution, the public was asked to trust the authorities that secret information would justify the process, the character of the accused was besmirched by government ministers, and bail for the accused was effectively set aside by the intervention of the then Conservative Coalition government’s Minister for Immigration who, apparently acting on more secret information, canceled Haneef ’s visa. All this, and much more mischief impacting on Haneef, occurred after the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) advised early in a report either ignored or “not seen” by the Immigration Minister that there was no evidence against him.²⁷

²⁶ For a good account of the Haneef case and a discussion of the ethical dimensions of the legal defence (and prosecution) of Haneef see Francesca Bartlett, “The Ethics of ‘Transgressive’ Lawyering: Considering the Defence of Dr. Haneef,” The University of Queensland Law Journal, vol. 28, no. 2 (2009), 309–323. ²⁷ This sort of legal bungling in reaction to heightened fears of “terrorist” attacks can be paralleled even in the remote past, as the prosecution of Richard Brothers in 1795 for “imagining the King’s death” illustrates vividly. In an atmosphere of anxiety, suspicion, and governmental insecurity focused on the war against republican France and a rising tide of political radicalism at home, proceedings invoking an archaic law were instituted against the weird religious eccentric Richard Brothers who posed no real threat to the regime. For details see John Barrell, “Imagining the King’s Death: The Arrest of Richard Brothers,” History Workshop Journal, vol. 37, no. 1 (1994), 1–32. See also Hugh Chisholm, “Brothers, Richard,” in Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911).

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I have written of the pressures of fear upon political leaders arising from fear amongst the ordinary population below them where those transferred fears, as it were, lead to often gross mistakes and malpractice by the leaders. It is also clear, however, that political leaders themselves can deliberately fan and even create those fears in order to gain political mileage. This is not restricted to democracies, of course, but it can be particularly tempting in democracies where gaining office or continuing in it is subject to popular support at the electoral polls. Mantras such as “getting tough on terrorism,” “upholding national security,” as well as accusations against opponents of weakness in these areas can be potent electoral assets, and the passing of laws that look to be aimed at better protection can receive scant scrutiny for their bad effects and even possible exploitation. The creation of public fear or the exploitation of it where it exists has been routinely used to political effect by President Trump in connection with draconian immigration policy in the United States, sometimes citing terrorist fears, sometimes criminal or racist fears, and something similar has been true of Australian governments and their offshore detention laws and practices with respect to refugees coming to Australia by boat, seeking asylum. In the case of Trump, of course, the self-serving creation of unwarranted fears was a constant political strategy. The preventive imperative not only can involve the clumsy implementation or outright misuse of old or new laws but can also support governmental resort to non-military policy measures that violate existing laws. The United States government, for instance, secretly instituted surveillance phone-hacking techniques on US citizens without any of the required legal warrants at least as early as 2002, even though these were in clear contradiction of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The National Security Agency used the major telecommunication agencies to tap vast numbers of private communications of US citizens in the name of antiterrorism. The program was exposed in 2005 by the New York Times,²⁸ but President Bush defended the policy and was openly defiant of charges that it breached the clear letter of the law. He and his associates argued that the Patriot Act virtually placed the President above the law. Civil legal proceedings were brought against the telecommunication companies that had palpably broken the FISA law (and several others) in complying with government requests for access to their clients’ phones, so a campaign was mounted to exempt them retrospectively from the provisions of the FISA ²⁸ James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers without Courts,” The New York Times (December 16, 2005), 1.

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law, a campaign that was eventually successful. Various amending and supplementing legislation regarding FISA has since been enacted that seems to give the government increased powers of surveillance while maintaining a semblance of external supervision, but such is the secrecy surrounding the relevant activities of the National Security Agency that it is hard to know how extensive or how illegal current surveillance of citizens remains.²⁹ There are many other examples in different parts of the world of the disadvantages that the law and its policing face in dealing with the real or imagined threat of terrorism. These range from the British police in July 2005 shooting dead an innocent man, Jean Charles da Silva e de Menezes, whom they misidentified, to the numerous squalid detentions in Guantanamo Bay, the revival of torture techniques in democracies often under euphemistic headings like “enhanced interrogation,” and the victimizations of “extraordinary rendition.” Moreover, the consternation caused by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 resulted in the arrest of thousands of “suspects” in the United States, very few of whom were found to have terrorist connections even after lengthy periods of detention.

Diplomacy and Removing the Grievance For reasons of space, I shall have to be brief in dealing with responses (2) and (3)—diplomacy and removing the grievance. Although these have obvious advantages at first blush, they can be eliminated or much diminished as possibilities by some ways of regarding terrorism. At the extreme, if terrorism can be seen as deranged, as one reading of the idea of “indiscriminate” violence may encourage, then there is no room to engage diplomatically with terrorists, with groups using terrorism, or with states that encourage or promote terrorist acts. The mantra “no negotiation with terrorists” partly encapsulates this outlook, though it also has an instrumental rationale concerned with not encouraging further terrorism, a rationale that I don’t

²⁹ There are many accounts of the complexities surrounding the warrantless surveillance scandal, but a good summary is provided in Glenn Greenwald, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2011), ch. 2. Greenwald is primarily concerned with what he argues is the extraordinary routine immunity from the law that the powerful enjoy in America.

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find decisive in every case and which is often enough abandoned via secret negotiations. The paths of diplomacy and of removing grievances (which can intersect) are also impeded by concentration on the account of terrorist motivation discussed in Chapter 3 in discussing the distinctive moral wrong in terrorism in Samuel Scheffler and others. As noted then, that emphasis on the intent to destabilize or degrade the existing social order and so on makes the perpetrators of terrorism seem quite removed from the category of enemies with whom one could negotiate. Of course, a good deal turns on what such destabilization or degradation is supposed to mean, and Scheffler, for instance, is quite unforthcoming on this, but it seems to involve such massive damage that there is nothing that could be yielded to such adversaries. But where the enemy has quite specific objectives, such as removing foreign settlements on what they regard as their land or forcing an occupying power to leave or getting prisoners released, there is clearly much more room for concessions, even if such concessions remain politically difficult. Much will turn on how legitimate the terrorists’ grievances are, or how plausible a case they can make for those grievances even where they remain controversial. All compromise, and most negotiation, involves risk and the prospect of a serious degree of loss for both parties. But that is part of the nature of politics, and terrorism and counter-terrorism exist within the domain of politics as well as that of morality and law. A final interesting issue concerns the condemnation of terrorism and the right to speak such condemnations. It might seem that where terrorist acts are as morally wrong as I have argued they are, then anyone who correctly sees that wrong is entitled, perhaps obliged, to condemn such acts unequivocally. Politicians and diplomats clearly do see such condemnations as a stock-in-trade of responses to terrorist acts, and understandably so. But as G. A. Cohen has interestingly argued, this is not obvious at all.³⁰ We are familiar with such retorts as “look who’s talking,” “who are you to say,” “that’s the pot calling the kettle black,” or in Latin “tu quoque.” These retorts object not to the truth or correctness of what the speaker says but rather call into question the authenticity and authority of the speaker to put forward a criticism or condemnation. The Conservative Australian Prime Minister, ³⁰ See G. A. Cohen, “Incentives, Inequality, and Community,” Tanner Lectures in Human Values, delivered at Stanford University, May 21–23 (1991), reprinted as G. A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), ch. 1. I am much indebted to Cohen’s fascinating and, at times, moving discussion of this phenomenon and his professed personal reasons for addressing it.

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Tony Abbott, came to power in 2013 by waging a relentless campaign against the previous Labor Party Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, for her broken election promise about not imposing a carbon tax. In power, he then proceeded to break most of the plethora of election promises he had himself made, thus ensuring that any time he criticized his opponents for breaking a promise he could not be taken seriously—even if what he said happened to be true. Being in a position to criticize or condemn is a presuppositional feature of those speech acts and failing such conditions of communicative authority renders the speech in question “infelicitous” (as J. L. Austin put it).³¹ Another way of making the point would be in terms of the concept of “bad faith,” although Cohen does not develop this. Condemning others for some acts that you yourself regularly engage in is one striking way to show bad faith. It is to undermine an audience’s confidence in your sincerity, and part of the underpinning of genuine communicative exchanges is the sincerity behind a speaker’s utterances. Lying is a central violation of the sincerity condition, but hypocrisy is not far behind it; the hypocrite presents themself as fully apprised of the wrongness they denounce in others when elsewhere they regularly disregard that wrongness in their own behavior, either by indifference to the wrong of the acts or by specious justification of them. This loss of authority to speak extends beyond cases where one has done exactly the same deed that one now seeks to condemn in others; as Cohen points out, it extends to some similar or related deed of the speaker’s (or of those they represent) which is just as morally grave or even worse than that the speaker tries to condemn. The points about bad faith apply to non-verbal communications as well. A singularly depressing, but instructive, example was the participation in the Paris free speech marches that followed close on the appalling terrorist murders at the Charlie Hebdo magazine offices on January 7, 2015. Numerous national leaders and representatives from countries infamous for their intolerance of a free press made prominent appearances in the marches. Among the most prominent were the Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, the Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shukry, the Bahraini Foreign Minister Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, the Gabonese President Ali Bongo Ondimba, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to France, Mohammed

³¹ See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered in Harvard University in 1955, 2nd edition, edited by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011).

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Ismail. And there were others, less infamous but shady enough with respect to their own behavior in the very area they were self-righteously condemning. In all these countries, acts akin to the disrespectful bawdiness of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists would have seen official condemnation, and even punishment, in many cases very severe.³² There is a further element of bad faith that has been charged against the condemnations of the Charlie Hebdo atrocity (and the almost contemporaneous attack at the Jewish supermarket in Paris). This is the failure to register similarities between these acts of terrorism and the often much more extensively damaging acts of recent Western military assaults upon civilians. This comparison was forcefully made by Noam Chomsky in the aftermath of the Hebdo incident. Chomsky compared the Paris attack with the NATO missile attack upon Serbian state television in 1999 that killed sixteen journalists, but was widely justified and praised by Western diplomats and media because the TV station was regarded as complicit in the Serbian government’s violations in Kosovo. Indeed, there is a parallel with the Charlie Hebdo incident in that very claim since Islamic militants allege that the various cartoons ridiculing Islam and the Prophet are connected with the long-lasting Western military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Two comments seem in order about the comparison invoked by Chomsky: the first is that in both cases the victims were innocent in that they were insufficiently connected with the wrong that was supposed to make them targets (see the discussion of innocence in Chapter 4); the second is that the inability to see the parallel and to react accordingly in both cases is probably a function of the power of the “political status” definitions of terrorist acts whereby only sub-state actors can engage in terrorism and states doing the same thing get off scot-free of the capacity for terrorist acts. These two comments can be supplemented by the observation that the inability to see one’s own behavior in the same light we cast on the similar behavior of others is deeply ingrained in human dispositions. This is famously encapsulated in Jesus’ admonishment in the Sermon on the Mount: “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”³³ ³² For a good account of the records of these leaders see the blog “Hella Tel Aviv,” The Jewish Journal, February 21, 2015. The blog, incidentally, does not spare the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas who were present in the front row of the march. See http://www.jewishjournal.com/hella_tel_aviv/item/the_10_biggest_ hypocrites_marching_in_paris, accessed 2/21/2015. ³³ Matthew 7:3 KJV.

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Chomsky also highlights the failure of most Western commentators and politicians to see certain parallels between the Paris killings and the devastating drone attacks authorized by Barack Obama, and discussed earlier in this chapter. As he puts it:

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the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times—Barack Obama’s global assassination campaign targeting people suspected of perhaps intending to harm us some day, and any unfortunates who happen to be nearby. Other unfortunates are also not lacking, such as the 50 civilians allegedly killed in a U.S.-led bombing raid in Syria in December, which was barely reported.³⁴

Some of this may not strictly be terrorism (on the tactical definition) since some of the killing of innocent people may be incidental to intention, but where it is disproportionate, grossly negligent, or uncaring about the extensive “collateral” deaths (and hence what is discussed in Chapter 2 in connection with David Rodin’s definition), it is also highly reprehensible and in many cases just as morally bad, if not worse, than some incidents of terrorism proper. It may be that some of the incidental killing is actually terrorism if its “incidental” nature is spurious in that the side-effect killing is really intended to spread “shock and awe” or achieve other political effects and hence counts as a case of mediated terrorism, as discussed in Chapter 2. Cohen describes a second factor that disables a speaker’s authority to condemn, and that is where the speaker has some responsibility for the very wrongdoing they purport to condemn.³⁵ It is not one of Cohen’s examples, but consider the status of nation A’s indignation at nation B’s terrorist attacks on nation A when it is A that has supplied B with weapons and military training, knowing that they are likely to use the weapons and training in mounting terrorist attacks against another country C. A real case somewhat akin to this is, arguably, the United States’ arming and training Afghan mujahideen (and manipulating their tribal and religious instincts) to fight against the Soviet occupation of their country. It has been plausibly claimed that this contributed to the rise of militant Islamic terrorism in later years of which the United States has been loud in condemnation. ³⁴ Noam Chomsky, “Paris Attacks Show Hypocrisy of West’s Outrage,” CNN (January 20, 2015). https://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/19/opinion/charlie-hebdo-noam-chomsky/index.html. ³⁵ G. A. Cohen, “Incentives, Inequality, and Community,” Tanner Lectures in Human Values, delivered at Stanford University, May 21–23 (1991), reprinted as G. A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), ch. 1.

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The two great English political philosophers near the beginning of the modern political era, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, were both concerned with the need to control violence, animosity, and power, though their methods differed in ways that exhibit the tension discernible in current governmental responses to the threat of terrorism. Hobbes thought that the awful effects of natural tendencies to violence and domination could be controlled by an all-powerful sovereign endowed with the sole “right of the sword” and empowered to make laws that the sovereign was effectively above and constrained only by regard for the natural law promulgated by God.³⁶ By contrast, Locke was aware that such untrammeled sovereign power itself posed dangers (even possibly greater dangers) to human security and natural rights. Consequently, Locke thought that citizens had rights, including the right of revolution, against the sovereign who was also under the law and that protections against the abuse of sovereign power were needed. Plainly commenting on Hobbes’ doctrine of sovereignty without explicitly naming him, Locke says: “This is to think that men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by polecats or foxes, but are content, nay think it safety, to be devoured by lions.”³⁷ In the face of serious terrorist attacks, the pressure for greater and greater legal (and often enough illegal) measures in the name of national security poses the very danger that concerned Locke. So too do the pressures to so demonize the terrorists as beyond any understanding that it becomes easy for governments to abandon the normal options for international diplomacy and negotiations, thereby self-righteously ignoring grievances that may have been provoked by one’s own behavior and policies. The quasi-militarization of police and security forces and the worrying extension of police and security powers under the blanket of a dubious appeal to the multiply vague notion of “national security” all contribute to a legitimate apprehension of the devouring lion potential of the national state, even a democratic one, in the face of terrorist acts.

³⁶ See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by C. B. Macpherson (London: Pelican Books, 1968 [1651]). ³⁷ John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (New York: Hafner, 1961), ch. 7, para 93, 167.

Coady.

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8 Religion, War, and Terrorism

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Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Blaise Pascal, Pensées¹ Every era has assumptions that pass for the merest common sense in influential and powerful circles and upon which social and political outlooks and programs often depend, but which are dubious when considered thoughtfully. Indeed, to call them assumptions is perhaps to misstate the depth of their entrenchment; they are better called presuppositions, in something like the sense given that term by R. G. Collingwood. To a considerable degree they operate to structure discussion rather than to be subject to it.² These presuppositions are often backed by cultural outlooks that link the assumption to ingrained rituals, procedures, and beliefs. Sometimes the outlooks are religious, sometimes ideologically secular, and sometimes related to economic and social advantage, and all have widespread ramifications for conduct. Until far too recently in Europe and its former colonies, for instance, the supposed incapacity of women for the sort of reasoning and sensibility required for political participation or leadership in other spheres of governance was one such presupposition, and it remains influential still in these places, and more strongly entrenched elsewhere. When challenged,

¹ This is a common translation of Pascal’s dictum, but it is controversial, even highly dubious. For further discussion of it see footnote 5. ² Collingwood actually characterized philosophy as the scrutiny of presuppositions, though he distinguished absolute and relative presuppositions. The absolute ones are basic to any form of inquiry and cannot be assessed as true or false within that inquiry, or perhaps at all; relative ones are not up for assessment as true or false in more narrow contexts, though the propositions they express are susceptible to such assessment otherwise. Whatever the merits or defects of Collingwood’s account of philosophy’s task, his talk of presuppositions (echoed later in some of P. F. Strawson’s work as well as that of Paul Grice on conversational implicatures) highlights the way in which areas of discourse operate with deep and relatively hidden assumptions. See Robin George Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), Peter F. Strawson, “On Referring,” Mind, vol. 59, no. 235 (1959), 320–344, and Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

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various “justifications” for subordinate role assignments for women in political, religious, and secular spheres would be produced, but the grip of the presupposition clearly has had connections with male interests in access to political, social, and economic power. Another example is provided by the pervasive managerialism that has infected so many public institutions in democratic societies, including our universities. The apparent obviousness and widespread instinctive acceptance of an outlook that regards social institutions purely as things to be managed for efficiency in terms of narrowly measurable outputs often with a rigidly conceived economic focus, and carrying a scant regard for what is inherent in the life and significance of the institution, make the outlook hard to expose to critical evaluation or to have such evaluation taken seriously. In our own time and even earlier, another widespread assumption amounting almost to a presupposition has been that which assigns to religion and religious difference an inherent tendency to violence. An indexical version of the assumption whereby only other people’s religion is prone to violence has also had currency, and it occasionally colors present discourse. In economically advanced “Western” countries amongst secular intellectuals, but also ordinary people and even amongst some intellectuals who are themselves religiously committed, this assumption (in either version) has become almost hardwired. Curiously enough, the two assumptions can sometimes reside in the one mind of individuals who are unaware that they are uneasy bedfellows. It seems to me, however, that both assumptions are wrong, or at least sufficiently wrongheaded, to distort our understanding of both religion and the resort to social and political violence, such as warfare or terrorism. In the case of terrorism (and certain forms of outright warfare that include it) the history of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has seen a great deal of terrorism that is widely and plausibly viewed as principally religiously inspired, and in fact principally inspired by one specific religion. The expressions “Islamic terrorism” or “Militant Islamic terrorism” or other similar titles have thus become familiar coinage in the twenty-first century, especially in the discourse and public imagination of citizens in Western democracies.³ The attacks of September 11, 2001 plus ³ In referring to “Western democracies” I am following a well-worn usage that is seriously distorting in real geographic terms since the term usually includes the political societies of many Southern democracies, such as South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and some countries in South America (not to mention South-Eastern democracies like India and Indonesia). This is a significant semantic caveat, though I will ignore it in following for convenience the usual

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subsequent atrocities have contributed to producing or popularizing this picture of religious violence as particularly concentrated upon Muslim faith, and this focus is already loaded with a specific version of the assumption about religion that I want to subject to critical examination. An interesting case study to pose as a contrast to the ready resort to the rhetoric of “Islamic terrorism” or “religious terrorism” would be the Taiping rebellion (“Heavenly Kingdom”) of the nineteenth century that might well have been called, in the words of former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott about ISIS, a “death cult.”⁴ It killed on various estimates between 20 and 30 million people, but, then and now, its leadership and members were not called by Westerners “Christian extremists” or “Christian terrorists,” even though their leader received supernatural visions and styled himself “the younger brother of Jesus Christ.” Instead, the rebellion has always (rightly I think) been seen as fueled principally by hatred of foreigners rather than by religion, though some distorted picture made up of elements in Christianity had a place in the rhetoric and no doubt some subsidiary place in the motivation of the rebels. One might speculate that had the leader of the Taiping rebellion mouthed some Islamic phrases and identifications, the contemporary reactions by Westerners then and now may have made more of a supposed religious motivation. In this chapter, I want to begin first with the assumption that religion is somehow inherently, and perhaps uniquely or distinctively, prone to violence and then examine the way that this supposed tendency is linked to terrorist actions. Later, I will discuss the weaker thesis that, as a matter of fact, religion has on occasion been the cause of terrorism, before moving on to the claim that, even when religion is not a cause of terrorist acts, religious motivation is characteristically responsible for some distinctive and unwelcome features of terrorist campaigns. This latter thesis is, in many respects, an echo of a comment in the epigraph at the head of this chapter that has been attributed to that very eminent religious thinker Blaise Pascal, who purportedly blamed religious conviction as the sole motive for people committing evil “so completely and cheerfully.”⁵ convention about “Western democracies.” But deployment of expressions like this, and the even more problematic “the West,” is loaded with misleading symbolic and rhetorical baggage that I will discuss later. ⁴ A frequently used description, for instance in the Prime Ministerial speech on the House of Representatives Condolence Motion on the Martin Place Siege, February 9, 2015. ⁵ I say “purportedly” because, although this quote in the epigraph from Pascal’s Pensées is widely cited, there is a dispute about the translation. Pascal’s French reads “Jamais on ne fait le mal si pleinement & si gayement, que quand on le fait par un faux principe de conscience.”

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Religion and Violence: Cavanaugh’s Critique Recently, the assumption of some sort of distinctive and intrinsic link between religion and violence, and the implications thereof for such issues as terrorism, have started to come under stringent scrutiny, most radically in William T. Cavanaugh’s writings culminating in his book, The Myth of Religious Violence.⁶ Cavanaugh’s thesis, to summarize his thought in somewhat simple outline, involves two separable but supporting arguments to the effect that claims about the inherent tendency of religions to promote violence are too opaque to be taken seriously. One argument is that the sharp separation of religion from other areas of human life is a peculiarly modern and mostly Western phenomenon. Consequently, much of the evidence for the violent propensities of religion is drawn from contexts in which motivations for the violence are multifaceted and what would now be called religion merely one integrated element in a motive set. This integration continues today in societies that have not embraced secularity in the way that most European societies have. The second argument is that the repeated failures by theorists to provide a satisfactory definition of religion shows that the idea of religion is too muddled, even incoherent, to support the claims about religion’s tendency to promote violence. In premodern eras there was no use for the contemporary Western concept of religion, such was the integration of what we now call religious concerns with the rest of life. Cavanaugh does not, of course, deny that there are particular faiths, such as Christianity and Islam, but he thinks the construct “religion” is a sort of vague portmanteau into which all sorts of old-fashioned things are put by the modern secular mind. The advantage for that secular mind of so doing is to facilitate a sharp contrast between its own benign propensities and the potential dark savagery of those who don’t conform to its prescriptions.⁷ Cavanaugh is right that it has proved notoriously difficult to provide a satisfactory definition of religion. The historian Martin Marty, cited by Cavanaugh, believes that religion has a particular tendency to be divisive and thereby violent but, after examining seventeen different definitions of A straightforward translation comes out as: “One never does evil so fully and gaily, as when one does it through a false principle of conscience.” The latter translation is not only more plausible but it also removes Pascal entirely from advocacy of anything like the presupposition I will be criticizing. For an online discussion of the issue visit: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/17776/didpascal-write-men-never-do-evil-so-completely-and-cheerfully-as-when-they-d. ⁶ William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). ⁷ See Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, ch. 4.

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religion, admits that “scholars will never agree on the definition of religion.”⁸ Belief in God seems a strong candidate as a necessary condition for religion, but it would seem perverse to exclude certain forms of Buddhism which have no belief in God, and many would think the same of Confucianism. Neither may it be sufficient because there are deists who might not be regarded as religious because they have no rituals or recourse to prayer or communal worship or spiritual techniques like meditation. And many religions believe in gods rather than God as the intelligibility of the term “polytheistic religion” attests. Moreover, even such a classically theistic faith such as Christianity can embody a quite practical account of the nature of “pure” religion such as we find in the author of St. James’ epistle: “Pure, unspoilt religion, in the eyes of God our Father is this: coming to the help of orphans and widows when they need it, and keeping oneself uncontaminated by the world.”⁹ It seems that the word “religion” at best expresses what Wittgenstein called a family resemblance concept whereby the concept’s unity, if it has one, arises from the overlapping and interconnecting of important features, none of which provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the expression.¹⁰ (This is what the philosopher John Hick and American legal theorist Kent Greenawalt have opted for in discussing religion.¹¹) Although Marty declines to give a definition of religion, he does list the following five features of religion: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

Focusing our ultimate concern. Building community. Appealing to myth and symbol. Employing rites and ceremonies. Demanding certain behaviors.

But, as Marty argues, perfectly secular politics also commonly embody all five features.¹² The common good of the community, the pursuit of liberty, ⁸ Martin E. Marty with Jonathan Moore, Politics, Religion, and the Common Good: Advancing a Distinctly American Conversation about Religion’s Role in Our Shared Life (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2000), 10. ⁹ The Bible, King James Version, James 1:27. ¹⁰ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd edition, translated G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958). ¹¹ See John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004) and Kent Greenawalt, Religion and the Constitution: Free Exercise and Fairness (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006). ¹² Marty, Politics, Religion, and the Common Good, 10–15.

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and similar political goals focus forms of ultimate concern for many people (especially but not exclusively politicians themselves). It is prominent amongst the aims of most secular politics to build community; witness the widespread fear that religious division will impair such efforts. Politics deploys symbols and myths in a variety of ways; in Australia, the myth of the Anzacs and Gallipoli, in England, the Royal Family (both a symbol and a sort of myth) and of course the deeds of the Dunkirk evacuation; in America, the flag, the leadership of “the free world,” and the log cabin to White House. Some of these reflect significant realities and offer healthy guidance; others distort reality and produce or reinforce unhelpful attitudes. As for rites and ceremonies: the openings of political assemblies, the inauguration of presidents, the grand balls, and the conferring of honors are all cases in point. And the demand for certain behaviors is constitutive of the political order; witness all its laws and regulations. There are at least three ways of responding to this apparent impasse. One is to abandon hope of comprehensive mapping of some “ordinary concept” of religion in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. As we have seen, with the example of “terrorist act,” such a definition is unlikely to catch every nuance of such a widely employed expression. But such an abandonment is compatible with importing a degree of well-motivated stipulation into the attempt at definition, as we have done with the definition of terrorism. In general, this is a more promising route for the explication of most social and political concepts of any interest, and in this way we can hope to gain enough clarity for the purposes of a discussion of any alleged tendencies of religion to violence. So we could insist upon a belief in a god or gods, or even simply in monotheism. This is roughly the strategy adopted by Daniel Dennett,¹³ whose “working definition” defines religions as “social systems whose participants avow beliefs in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought,”¹⁴ although he recognizes the diversity of the phenomena and the attraction of a family resemblance approach. In spite of Dennett’s invocation of scientific analogies from biology, this would not be good anthropology, since the heavily cognitive approach of his particular stipulative definition neglects the practical elements in religion involving personal transformation and ethical commitments. These are inadequately covered by the phrase about seeking approval. His “working definition” ¹³ Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006), 7–9. ¹⁴ Dennett, Breaking the Spell, 9.

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would thereby omit coverage of too much of the phenomena for the comprehensive claims about religion and violence to be settled. This might not worry Dennett particularly since he is not directly concerned with the violence question. A second and related procedure is to follow Wittgenstein’s example and treat the “ordinary” concept as one of family resemblance, using widely recognized examples from the family to illuminate discussion. As we have noted, this is employed by Greenawalt and Hick, and I call it “related” because it is consistent with a moderate recourse to “well-motivated stipulation” that acknowledges the family diversity while focusing upon the core features of widely recognized paradigm uses in stipulating a definition that fruitfully advances discussion. A third, radically opposite, maneuver is to abandon the idea that religion can be defined or even sufficiently demarcated so as to make the idea that religion has any special tendency to violence tenable. This was Cavanaugh’s move, but not only is it counter-intuitive to claim that ordinary people and scholars are simply chasing a will-o’-the-wisp created solely by political imperatives when they discuss or speculate about effects of religion, but the move unnecessarily puts an end to significant discussion of various features of apparently paradigm religions such as Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam that can be enlightening for both adherents and unbelievers. We would not, for instance, want William James’ fascinating book The Varieties of Religious Experience to be an intellectual non-starter.¹⁵ As Keith Yandell puts it in connection with the difficulties of defining religion: “There is agreement about neither religion nor religious experience. To await agreement is to write about neither.”¹⁶ Yandell goes on to provide an interesting definition the form of which is in line with my earlier suggestion about a definitional procedure that involves some stipulation but also attends to the family of usages current about the meaning of the term “religion.” It can be plausibly viewed as an attempt at what I called in Chapter 1 a definition of focal meaning. His definition is: “I take religion to be a conceptual system, embedded in persons and texts (verbal or written), rites and rituals, and institutions and practices, that diagnoses a universal deep nonmedical disease and prescribes its cure.”¹⁷ ¹⁵ William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1928). ¹⁶ Keith E. Yandell, “The Diversity of Religious Experience,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religious Diversity, edited by Chad Meister (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 89. ¹⁷ Yandell, “The Diversity of Religious Experience,” 89.

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In fact, some of Cavanaugh’s claims about how difficult it is in past cultures to find a phenomenon that matches what we today think of as religion and the supposed novelty of our current separation of religion from other aspects of life are disputable. Although premodern societies did not place such a wide gulf between the domains of religion and those of politics and other secular activities, there is plenty of evidence that they distinguished between them. Indeed, Christ’s dictum “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s”¹⁸ already contains such a distinction. Martin Riesebrodt’s fascinating book, The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion, provides a more nuanced picture than Cavanaugh’s of both the distant past and more recent understandings of the place of religion in society. He concludes that: “In the West, the concept of religion has a long history that does not begin with the Enlightenment, and can in no period be limited to a single definition.”¹⁹ Moreover, it is plausible that a broad, though no doubt fuzzy-edged definition or general account of religion can be serviceable, though it will probably contain some element of stipulation. Riesebrodt himself, in spite of his skepticism about a “single definition” that covers everything that religion has and does mean, provides an interesting such account predominantly in terms of characteristic action rather than belief. The actions and their patterns that he discusses in detail concern responses to promises emanating from supernatural power(s) geared toward ultimate coping with life and salvation from its crises. Moreover, even if we allow Cavanaugh’s claim that the concept of religion didn’t exist in premodern times and was an invention of the Enlightenment, that admission has no tendency in itself to show that it is a useless concept, even if a vague one. Even if the concept of religion were a late addition to our vocabulary, and even a “construction” of people who wanted to use it for various sociopolitical purposes inimical to particular faiths, it doesn’t follow that it fails to mark out anything interesting and even valuable for contemporary discourse. I suppose the concept of “virtual reality” is unknown before the late twentieth century, and may even have been coined with a dangerous bias against actual reality that should give us pause. Even so, the concept marks a significant phenomenon in our real lives that cannot be

¹⁸ The Bible, King James Version, Matthew 22:21. ¹⁹ Martin Riesebrodt, The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion, trans. Steven Rendall (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 9.

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ignored and has obvious utility for analyzing and discussing a new technical and social development, and may even illuminate past realities. For all these reasons, I shall continue to employ the concept of religion in the discussion of violence and terrorism, but take account of important insights that Cavanaugh’s work has brought to light. Unlike what I’ve done with terrorist acts in Chapter 1, I won’t offer an explicit stipulative definition of religion but simply rely upon some central paradigms and an implicit echo of flexible focal meaning that pays respect to what seem less central examples.

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How a Focus on Religious Motivation Obscures Complex Realities Whatever we think of Cavanaugh’s analytic rejection of the religion concept, the integration argument is detachable from his more sweeping claim, and initially more plausible. To take the terrorist activities of contemporary Islamic fundamentalists as simply manifestations of religion, for instance, is to ignore the way that their religious commitments complement and intersect with political outlooks and grievances that would make perfect sense to non-religious people if only they took the trouble to examine them without the blinkered conviction that the cause of the violence is wholly religious. One who has made such an examination is Robert Pape, who has argued that close attention to the motives and background of suicide bombers from 1980 to 2003 (a total of 315 attacks excluding those commissioned by states) strongly suggests that religion is seldom a significant factor in the motivations.²⁰ (Pape has more recently upgraded his database and has now examined over 2,000 cases of suicide bombing with similar conclusions.) As Pape summed up his initial findings: The data shows that there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world’s religions. In fact, the leading instigators of suicide attacks are the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion. This group committed 76 of the 315 incidents, more suicide attacks than Hamas. ²⁰ Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005).

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Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective.²¹

Inevitably, Pape’s work and methodology have come under criticism, especially his strong claims about the unique role of foreign intervention and occupation in provoking terrorist attacks. Nonetheless, his basic claims about the relatively slight or secondary nature of the religious motivation in most suicide bombings examined, compared to perfectly earthly ones, remain, I think, accurate enough to be instructive for my purposes. Similar skepticism about prevailing views regarding the predominant role of religious faith in generating contemporary suicide bombing and terrorism has been expressed by the anthropologist Scott Atran, who says in his book, Talking to the Enemy, that his extensive investigations, including many interviews with terrorists themselves, show that “Islam and religious ideology per se aren’t the principal causes of suicide bombing and terror in today’s world.”²² Atran, who is himself an avowed atheist, thinks that the more important factors are bound up with the sense of identification with a peer group who have developed strong feelings of outrage at what they see as examples of cultural and political domination over those with whom they identify. Atran and other investigators have often remarked on how superficial the understanding of any version of Islamic religion is with most of the young men drawn to the violent struggle called “jihad.” This superficiality has been borne out in examinations of the views of many Western-based recruits to ISIS in the terrorist activities of this appalling group in Syria and Iraq. A study of ISIS volunteers who returned to their original Western countries was carried out for the United Nations Office of CounterTerrorism in 2017 and found that, despite claiming to protect Muslims, most of the returned fighters were “novices” in their religion and some did not know how to pray properly. The study by Professor Hamed el-Said, of Manchester Metropolitan University, and terrorism expert Richard Barrett

²¹ Pape, Dying to Win, 4. ²² Scott Atran, Talking to the Enemy: Violent Extremism, Sacred Values, and What It Means to Be Human (London: Penguin Books, 2010), 425.

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found that most of the would-be jihadists were “lacking any basic understanding of the true meaning of jihad or even the Islamic faith.”²³ So there are at least four things that the focus on religion’s supposed special tendency toward violence tends to obscure:

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(1) Religions Have Played No Part in Many Extreme Outbreaks of Violence There are many dreadful outbreaks of unjustified violence the causal or motivational origins of which have nothing to do with religion. Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin in our own era were responsible for staggering massacres, most of them palpably terrorist by the tactical definition, that cannot be attributed to their authors’ religious inclinations or that of their followers. Nor, in spite of Richard Dawkins’ claims to the contrary, is it credible that Hitler’s murderous campaigns had a religious motivation. Since Dawkins wants to show that atheism can never produce violence, he makes an effort to cast Hitler as religious, basing the claim on some of Hitler’s conciliatory public statements about Christianity, but the public professions of a notorious liar cannot be taken at face value and there is plenty of evidence that Hitler privately disdained Christianity. He stated in private correspondence that he was determined to “eradicate” Christianity from Germany, and declared that: “You are either a Christian or a German. You cannot be both.”²⁴ Dawkins acknowledges such counter-evidence, much of it contained in Hitler’s Table Talk, and somewhat grudgingly allows that Hitler might have been “an opportunistic liar”²⁵ aiming to exploit the religious commitments of so many German people. But he triumphantly concludes that any success of such deception relied upon so many Germans being religious and it was such Christians who helped Hitler carry out the terrible deeds of his regime. It is no doubt true that many Christians carried out such deeds and that the Christian churches were depressingly compliant with the Nazi regime, but Dawkins’ argument requires that the Christianity of the German people ²³ Hamed el-Said and Richard Barrett, “Enhancing the Understanding of the Foreign Terrorist Fighters Phenomenon in Syria,” United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism (July 2017), 40. ²⁴ Adolf Hitler, as quoted in Martyn Housden, Resistance and Conformity in the Third Reich (London: Routledge, 1997), 46. ²⁵ Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006), 313.

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was the key causal factor in the perpetrations of violent injustices, and that remains to be shown. Indeed, merely being a believer in X doesn’t make your wrongdoings proceed from that belief, an obvious fact that Dawkins uses to reject any claim that atheism has ever been behind such evil deeds as unjust wars and persecutions. So he says that Stalin and (possibly) Hitler may have been atheists, but he insists that “individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism.”²⁶ Clearly, the question whether some atheists are moved by their atheism to monstrous evil is an empirical question not to be settled by assertion. Beyond assertion or empirical investigation, Dawkins seems to think he has a quasi-logical argument for the conclusion. So he asks imperiously: “Why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief?”²⁷ This question exhibits a serious confusion: it ignores the logical point that atheism is not absence of belief but belief in an absence. It is a simple fallacy to equate belief in the absence of an entity with absence of belief about the entity. It is, I suppose, conceivable that someone might not have a belief in God because the question has never occurred to them, but this would be an atypical form of atheism (if indeed it qualifies for the title at all). The typical atheist has a strong belief in the proposition “there is no God.” There is no reason why this belief should not have a dynamic effect on behavior. Certainly, Dawkins’ atheism is not a form of indifference or ignorance: it is a positively powerful, combative expression of a belief that God does not exist and that believers are in error and should abandon their belief for his, especially since their belief has a strong tendency to cause unjust war and atrocity. The foolishness of his question might be exhibited by a comparison: “Why would anyone write a vigorous, abusive book for the sake of absence of belief ?” Dawkins aside, however, the general point is that even in less dramatic conflicts than those caused by Stalin, Mao, and Hitler, factors like nationalism, border disputes, great power ambitions, imperialism, and racism have been significant in outbreaks of violence, including wars, often with little or no input at all from religion. Indeed, it could be argued that the Christian leaders and their followers who collaborated with Hitler had had their religious vision damaged by the corrosive effects of extreme nationalist fervor and institutional self-protection.²⁸ ²⁶ Dawkins, The God Delusion, 315. ²⁷ Dawkins, The God Delusion, 316. ²⁸ For an interesting account of the way in which German Catholic opposition to Hitler’s regime was altered partly by chauvinistic pressure from within the German Church and also by the external clericalist manipulations from the Vatican, led by Cardinal Paccelli, later Pope Pius XII, see John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Penguin, 2000).

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(2) Other Ideologies, Including Democratic Ones, Can Play a Role in Promoting Violence But not only are there many outbreaks of political and other forms of violence that have little or nothing to do with religion, but as some of the conflicts cited above show, non-religious worldviews, ideological outlooks, or what John Rawls calls “comprehensive doctrines” are sometimes themselves plausible candidates for playing an important role in causing or motivating widespread violence. They are usually exempted from the odium put upon religious motivations in connection with violence and terrorism, as we saw that Dawkins sought to do in the case of atheism. (Dawkins at least addressed that question directly whereas the usual assumption simply ignores the question of a role for non-religious ideology in promoting violence.) So even those who admit that the bombings of German and Japanese cities, culminating in the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were terrorist do not talk of “democratic terrorism” or “democratic extremism.” By contrast, at the height of the Northern Irish “troubles” there was a tendency to ignore the cultural, economic, imperialist, and nationalist aspects behind the conflict, and to speak exclusively of “Catholic terrorism” or “Protestant terrorism.” The defects of this tendency are well brought out in Anna Burns’ Booker Prize-winning novel Milkman set in an unnamed place clearly proxy for a Northern Ireland city during “The Troubles.” At one point, her central character reflects on common, misleading ways of speaking about the causes of the terrorist killings and maimings: “ordinary people said ‘their side did it’ or ‘our side did it’ or ‘their religion did it’ or ‘our religion did it’ or ‘they did it’ or ‘we did it,’ when what was really meant was ‘defenders of the state did it’ or ‘renouncers of the state did it’ or ‘the state did it.’ ”²⁹ That there is, however, at least a question to be addressed about the relevance of certain forms of democratic ideology to extreme political violence is suggested by the “neo-con” project of bringing democracy to the Middle East by violent invasion of Iraq; nor should we ignore the democratic rhetoric of defending our liberties that surrounds “the war on terror,” a war that includes the resort to torture and the drone attacks on Pakistan and Afghanistan and elsewhere which have killed so many

²⁹ Anna Burns, Milkman (London: Faber and Faber, 2018).

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innocent people as to come close to what I have called “neo-terrorism” and arguably even on occasions outright terrorism.³⁰

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(3) The Focus on Religion Can Obscure More Mundane and Specific Causes of Conflict Quite apart from obscuring the role of non-religious outlooks in the outbreak of violence, the focus on religion as a major cause of wars, terrorism, and other forms of political violence obscures many of the more mundane and specific causes of violent conflict that political leaders and many of the rest of us find inconvenient to acknowledge. This is true even when there are issues of religion invoked by the leaders of the campaigns of violence, and used to motivate their followers. Osama bin Laden’s various diatribes referring to holy duties and Caliphates also contain numerous claims about straightforward political grievances, such as Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, and of Israeli military, policing, and political persecution (as he saw it) of Palestinian people, claims about past and present Western support for Middle-Eastern dictatorships and Western exploitation of Middle-Eastern assets, such as oil, the United States’ historic deployment of troops throughout Arab lands, and more recently the US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. And, of course, the concept of a caliphate is a deeply political ideal as much as a religious one. A fascinating example of the way invocations of religious explanations can come to dominate and distort our understanding of violent outbreaks is to be found in Peter Wilson’s recent book A History of the Thirty Years’ War.³¹ Wilson argues that this war, so often invoked as the archetypical “religious war,” the duration of which was caused by religious fanaticism, was “not primarily a religious war” at all.³² There were of course religious elements since it could hardly have been otherwise in seventeenth-century Europe where Christian faith was an ³⁰ A case in point seems to be the drone killing of the sixteen-year-old American citizen, Abdulrahman al Awlaki, in Yemen in October 2011. His only connection with terrorism was that his father, Anwar al Awlaki, was a member of al-Qaeda, and had been killed two weeks earlier by a US drone. One member of Obama’s team defended the killing by saying that the boy should have had “a more responsible father.” See Conor Friedersdorf, “How Team Obama Justifies the Killing of a 16-Year-Old American,” The Atlantic (October 24, 2012). https://www. theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/how-team-obama-justifies-the-killing-of-a-16-yearold-american/264028. ³¹ Peter H. Wilson, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009). ³² Wilson, The Thirty Years War, 9.

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aspect of life integrated to varying degrees with other central aspects. But most contemporary observers “spoke of imperial, Bavarian, Swedish, or Bohemian troops, not Catholic or Protestant.”³³ The war indeed began with a somewhat religious episode, the famous “defenestration,” but its ferocity and duration was not due, argues Wilson, to religious fanaticism but dynastic ambition and political fissure. The defenestration occurred in Prague in 1617, when three imperial officials, Catholics all, were flung out of a window 50 feet above the ground by a group of armed Protestants angry at the Catholic Hapsburg rule in the Holy Roman Empire. They fell, apparently calling on the Virgin Mary for help. Amazingly, they escaped death by falling in a dung heap and survived to warn the Emperor of the disquiet. (I suspect that this surprising event will fill many of my readers with amusement rather than a respect for the efficacy of prayer. I will only remark that the two reactions are not incompatible—God may very well have something like a sense of humor.) As one reviewer of the book summarizes the argument about the causes of the length of the conflict: The empire’s hundreds of small territories were cash poor. To fight, they assumed impossible debts, adulterated their coinages and triggered a ruinous inflation. Unpaid armies could be neither supplied nor disbanded. They thus remained in the field, nourished on plunder.³⁴

(4) Religions Are Very Diverse Phenomena Such simple credos as “religion causes violence” ignore too many distinctions between and within religions themselves. This credo is all of a piece with Christopher Hitchens’ ludicrous subtitle to his book God Is Not Great: “How Religion Poisons Everything.”³⁵ There are, and have been, all sorts of different religions with a great many different practices, ethical commitments, and changes over the course of their histories. It may well be that some religions or some versions of the same religion are prone to spur their adherents toward violence where other religions or other versions of the

³³ Wilson, The Thirty Years War, 9. ³⁴ Jeffrey Collins, “A Continent in Carnage: Was Religious Fanaticism the Real Reason for Europe’s Decades-Long Conflict?” The Wall Street Journal (October 2, 2009). ³⁵ Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2007).

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same religion have no such tendency. This is an issue that needs to be resolved by detailed historical and sociological attention to the evidence. Loose talk about “Islamic terrorism” needs just such attention, but, even if it could be shown that versions of Islam, such as Osama bin Laden’s, or even more plausibly that of ISIS militants, had an inherent commitment to unjustified violence, this would have no relevance, for instance, to the Sufi version of Islam, or to a great deal of mainstream Muslim believers, whether they profess Sunni or Shia or some other variant of the doctrine. This is obvious enough to casual observation of Muslim citizens in various parts of the world, but evidence of it is available in the results of surveys such as the findings of a 2011 Gallup poll. This poll investigated attitudes toward attacks upon non-combatants in various groups across the world. It avoided the word “terrorism” or “terrorist” because of definitional problems, but polled attitudes to attacks upon civilians, so its findings are clearly relevant not only to the broad issue of violence but specifically to terrorist acts as I have defined them. It found that “placing high importance on religion generally relates positively with rejecting violence. Religious intolerance—a function of less, not more, religion—is generally associated with greater sympathy for attacks on civilians.”³⁶ To quote the survey further: An analysis of public opinion from more than 130 countries, conducted as part of the Gallup World Poll, finds that public acceptance of violence against non-combatants is not linked to religious devotion. In Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, those who reject attacks on civilians are as likely as those who see them as sometimes justified to hold religion in high esteem. Though there appears to be a difference linking religiosity and sympathy for attacks on civilians among the residents of the U.S. and Canada, this difference is not statistically significant. In Europe and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), those who reject military and individual attacks on civilians are more likely to say religion is an important part of their daily lives.³⁷

³⁶ Views of Violence: What Drives Public Acceptance and Rejection of Attacks on Civilians 10 Years After 9/11? https://news.gallup.com/poll/157067/views-violence.aspx, accessed 1/11/2016. ³⁷ Views of Violence: What Drives Public Acceptance and Rejection of Attacks on Civilians 10 Years After 9/11? https://news.gallup.com/poll/157067/views-violence.aspx, accessed 1/11/2016.

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A crucial point that underlies these four considerations is that a primary factor in outbreaks of violence is attachment to identity, and alarm at perceived threats to it. Religion certainly provides one focus for this attachment and alarm, but so do a great range of other things. Identity is closely related to power, self-respect, and perceived cultural positioning, so that religion will often be appropriated to bolster or create culturally significant identities by those who have or want power, or are in need of group-based support. The relations between the sexes provide a case in point. The fashioning of a male identity with often-dominant roles over females has been a feature of history to which religion has certainly contributed, but it seems to be even more diverse and deeper sociologically than any religious influence. In some Islamic communities and in the fanatically militant groups waging “jihad” against the modern world, for instance, the punitive obsession with hiding women from view within the home, and in all-covering clothing, as well as denying them education and other cultural opportunities is arguably as much an exercise of male domination as of religious piety, whatever explicit appeals to interpretations of religious teaching or tradition may be made. It is worth noting that the major religions (in terms of numbers of adherents) and many less popular religions contain a great deal of teaching about the importance of values like peace and charity. Peace is a complex concept with many interpretations and conceptions built around it over the ages.³⁸ Without being an expert on comparative religion, I would conjecture that there are very few religions that don’t make the value of peace a significant part of their doctrine. Augustine, for instance, places it at the heart of his Christo-centric ethical system, along with love. It is true that, as with many other Christians and non-Christians, he thought it compatible with the idea of a just war in extremis, though other Christians have thought that it required pacifism. Certainly, there is room for peace-makers and activists to build upon doctrines of peace within many religions.

An Important Objection It may be urged against much of the above discussion that whatever success it has against the idea that religious allegiance is inherently or even merely commonly prone to producing violence, it does nothing to dispel the ³⁸ I have dealt with some of the complexities of the concept of peace in ch. 13 of my book Morality and Political Violence, where I also discuss the intricate strands of Augustine’s concept.

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accusation that on occasion religion may be the cause of particular outbreaks of terrorist acts or other acts of unjustified violence. Nor does it damage the claim that some specific forms or interpretations of religion may be inherently prone to violence. I want now to examine these propositions. On the first proposition, many will cite contemporary, or near contemporary, events frequently referred to (as we mentioned above) as Islamic terrorism. We have already seen reason for skepticism about this appellation with regard to the causes of much terrorism that is frequently given that label. But although we can often find that leaders of groups such as al-Qaeda cite as reasons for their campaigns alleged offenses of a palpably political nature against groups or regions they identify with, it cannot be denied that they also employ religious rhetoric and appeals to religious interests in denouncing their enemies and exhorting their own followers. This much I have already conceded, but the pressing question is whether such rhetoric, along with other considerations, means that, in those circumstances, religion is the cause or primary cause of such terrorist acts. Obviously, a good deal turns on what we mean by “cause” and much philosophical ink has been spilled on this topic. One favored idea behind much ordinary thought about cause is that one event would not have occurred without the occurrence of the other antecedent event, or as the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume put it (in terms of objects rather than events): “where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed.”³⁹ This pregnant remark, though apparently in strong conflict with Hume’s official regularity theory of causation, has spawned a for-and-against industry of “counterfactual” theories given momentum by David Lewis’ analysis of counterfactual propositions in terms of possible worlds.⁴⁰ Clearly, some idea along the lines of “if it wasn’t for X, we wouldn’t have had Y” is at work when people talk of X causing Y, but it is a very patchy net in which to catch all that can be meant by such remarks. Usually, the X in question covers much more than one factor, or, to put it differently, if X is a single factor, then it will seldom trigger Y without being conjoined with several other factors or conditions. So the possibility exists that, aside from those many cases where religion plays no role at all in producing terrorist acts, the religious factor, when significant, remains nonetheless still one element conjoined with several others, and ignoring those others is fraught with risk, both intellectual and practical. Often the talk of what ³⁹ David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748), Section VII. ⁴⁰ See David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1986).

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causes terrorist acts is concerned with salience with what to the speaker is the most significant factor in bringing about the acts. Such claims of significance, however, are inevitably open to contestation and reasonable adjudication. That said, there seem to clearly be cases in which religion has played a very prominent part in bringing about some significant episodes of terrorism, such as the various Christian crusades that were waged against parts of the Muslim world in the Middle Ages. More recently, of course, the religiously loaded denunciations of infidels that have accompanied the ISIS massacres and enslavements of various groups regarded as hostile to the group’s religious outlook provide more evidence. The ISIS terrorist attacks upon the Yazidi sect, for instance, seem a primary case for religiously caused terrorism, though one must not thereby ignore secular aspects of the attacks such as the quest for political domination of an area, or the gaining of slaves, including sexual slaves. One must also take care not to generalize too quickly. The leadership of ISIS are committed to a particular interpretation of Sunni Muslim beliefs, but they are hostile to other Sunni believers who interpret their tradition differently, and many of their followers and rank-and-file soldiers are grossly ignorant of Islamic traditions and their often complex interpretations. Another important claim about religion in a good deal of academic literature on terrorism is that, even if it is often too simplistic to claim a sole or critical role for some forms of religion in terrorist activity, the appeal to religion when it does occur serves to make for more sustained and vicious resort to terrorism than is the case with predominantly non-religious motivations. The idea is that religious doctrines appealing to the support of an omnipotent God and the rewards of an afterlife make for an “absolutist” commitment to unrestrained violence that is unique to religious outlooks. Mark Juergensmeyer, for instance, seeking a middle path between the view that religion does cause terrorism and the view that it does not, argues that religion is at least a problematic factor in the mix of motivations because of the divine dimension it brings to conflict. As he puts it: Religion brings more to conflict than simply a repository of symbols and the aura of divine support. It problematizes a conflict through its abiding absolutism, its justification for violence, and its ultimate images of warfare that demonize opponents and cast the conflict in transhistorical terms.⁴¹ ⁴¹ Mark Juergensmeyer, “Religion as a Cause of Terrorism,” in The Roots of Terrorism, edited by Louise Richardson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 143.

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There are three claims about religion tied together in Juergensmeyer’s comment and they are distinct but related. I shall examine them in turn, but with an eye to the relations between them. The idea of religion’s “absolutism” has a great vogue, but its widespread acceptance is inversely proportional to its clarity. What is often meant, though seldom explained, is something epistemological to the effect that the religious hold their beliefs with more certainty and conviction than the non-religious, and that they are wrong to do so. Depending on the beliefs in question, this is, or ought to be, plainly false. I think that many atheists and agnostics have just as firm a conviction, as any religious, in their beliefs that rape is a great wrong to the victim, that democracy is preferable to tyranny, that slavery is evil, that friendship is a great good, and much else. Indeed, there may be more religious than non-religious who vacillate on the rape proposition, especially where religious views are allied to cultural traditions that treat the rape victim as dishonored or somehow complicit in their plight. And, as the philosopher G. E. Moore famously argued, there are a range of obvious truths (evident, as he believed, to common sense) on which nearly everyone is adamant, such as the facts that all my readers have a head, that none of us was born yesterday, that fire burns, that logical reasoning is mostly better than guesswork, and so on.⁴² These and also many moral convictions are too commonplace to require much notice, but nonetheless they are facts on which absolute conviction is necessary to ordinary life, and even more significantly to the existence of reasonable doubt, since for doubt to be reasonable it must have a firm foundation. Baseless doubt is just neurotic. Moreover, deep and firm moral convictions amongst some religious people constituted one central reason why the ghastly business of the slave trade in the West was eventually outlawed. The influence of crude versions of ethical and factual relativism upon popular culture, often fostered by some postmodernist simplicities filtering down from the academy, can obscure these realities. What is, really possible to extract from the sloppy allegations of absolutism is a genuine worry about fanaticism. Fanaticism is an intellectual and moral vice, though there is some complexity in assessing its nature. It can be a mere term of abuse, the application of which tends to be more in the eye of the beholder than anchored to clear criteria. In this it is much like the application of “stubborn” whereby your behavior evokes that adjective and my own identical actions evoke instead ⁴² See G. E. Moore, “A Defence of Common Sense,” in Contemporary British Philosophy (2nd series), edited by J. H. Muirhead (London: Allen and Unwin, 1925).

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(from me) the description “resolute.” Nonetheless, although we should be cautious in throwing the term around, there is a real phenomenon of fanaticism and it is a disturbing one. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines it in terms of “an excessive zeal or enthusiasm, especially for an extreme cause” and it mentions religion and politics as areas where the term is commonly in play.⁴³ The two key qualifiers here are “excessive” and “extreme,” and their application is clearly open to debatable judgment in context. Is someone who shows uncommon enthusiasm for abolishing the practice of enslaving women for prostitution a fanatic? Both “excessive” and “extreme” express negative evaluations, one on a disproportionate degree of enthusiasm or dedication and the other on the wrongness or dubiousness of a cause. Unusual acts of singular dedication may make many of us who lead cozy and regular lives feel uncomfortable but they are not thereby fanatical in this pejorative sense. Father (now Saint) Damien de Veuster’s selfless life of service to the leper colony on the island of Molokai was a dedicated commitment that is not for everyone, but it is not thereby fanatical. British politicians thought Mahatma Gandhi a fanatic for his campaign of nonviolent resistance to imperial rule in India, but that expresses their bias rather than an objective judgment of his cause and methods. This is not to deny that religions, like many other outlooks, have been involved in fanaticism, but fanaticism is a common risk of the implementation of belief systems generally, as is evident in the zealous prosecution of their cause by many free-market enthusiasts in the recent history of capitalism, not to mention the even more dangerous fanaticisms sometimes involved in nineteenth-century imperialism and twentieth-century totalitarianism. Some forms of fanaticism do not involve bad causes but rather a distorted pursuit of good ones, and here they are connected in complex ways with the phenomenon of moralism that I have explored elsewhere, in particular what I have labeled the moralism of misplaced emphasis.⁴⁴ So, it may be that someone has grasped an important moral truth or non-moral value but proceeds to implement it with little or no regard for other truths or values that should be held in balance with it. Someone who is fanatical about physical fitness, for instance, may institute a regime of exercise for themselves, or more alarmingly for others, that pays no heed to such values as relaxation, convivial time spent with friends, or education. Or environmentalists may be so determined to respect the natural environment that they ⁴³ Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). ⁴⁴ See Coady, Messy Morality, ch. 1.

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ignore the case for clearing trees near human habitation in order to prevent bushfire disasters—this is a real, though controversial, example that has been debated in Australia after the shocking loss of life in the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria during the southern summer of 2009, and renewed after the fire disasters of 2019–20. Avoiding fanaticism does not involve a total retreat from conviction but holding the right convictions in the right way. The Australian painter Stella Bowen seemed aware of this when she worried: “The difficulty is to avoid the perils of fanaticism as well as the paralysis that comes of seeing both sides at once.”⁴⁵ And G. K. Chesterton, who perhaps had rather too many firm convictions, was nonetheless right about vacuous talk of an “open mind” when he vividly remarked: “Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. Otherwise it is more akin to a sewer, taking in all things equally.”⁴⁶ But surely, it will be said, fanaticism is a more likely feature of outlooks that claim the authority of God for their beliefs and practices than those without such recourse? Juergensmeyer relies upon this proposition for his claim about absolutism, but also for his insistence that religion uniquely imposes an image of cosmic war between those fighting a spiritual battle against mere worldly opponents. Even Louise Richardson, who is one of the more nuanced commentators on terrorism, and who argues that the picture of religion as the cause of terrorist acts is simplistic and mistaken, even in the case of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, also insists that the religious elements in some forms of terrorism produce certain distinctive features such as reluctance to compromise or negotiate. Such terrorist groups, she says, exhibit a tendency “to be more fanatical, more willing to inflict mass casualties, and better able to enact unassailable commitment from their adherents.”⁴⁷ Again, this raises the question of the necessity of theism for religion, but leaving that aside, it does seem plausible that people who are confident in the Almighty’s support would be spurred to perhaps excessive determination in their pursuit of objectives they regard as divinely endorsed. Certainly the non-fanatical Fr. Damien attributed his steadfast dedication to the welfare of the lepers on the island of Molokai to his conviction that God had guided him to this role. So if people wrongly think God wants them to

⁴⁵ Stella Bowen, Drawn from Life: A Memoir (Maidstone: George Mann, 1974), 227. ⁴⁶ G. K. Chesterton, The Autobiography: Collected Works, vol. 16 (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1988), 212. ⁴⁷ Louise Richardson, What Terrorists Want (New York: Random House, 2006), 69.

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pursue some evil path, they may do so with determined energy. It must, I think, be conceded that the invocation of God’s support has often been a spur to fanaticism. But two considerations somewhat soften the force of this argument. The first is that utilizing God in an unworthy cause is a form of blasphemy, a manipulation of the Most High, which should be condemned on religious grounds. From within Christianity, to take one example, there is plenty of scope to caution against the invocation of God on behalf of our determined pursuit of objectives that cause harm to others. The Christian needs to be alert not only to false prophets elsewhere but also to assuming that role themself. So, invoking God on behalf of fanaticism can equally be met by appealing to God against it. And indeed this has often enough happened in the history of Christianity. The conquistadors who pillaged in the newly discovered Americas in the sixteenth century claimed a right to violent conquests because the natives they sought to dispossess and plunder were pagans and hence had no political legitimacy to their land and its treasures. We may well wonder how much of this theological appeal was seriously part of their motivation, given that their racism, greed, and venality would probably have sufficed for their activities, but in the European climate of the time, they needed a theological argument and my point is rather that the religious argument they made was rejected by some of the leading theologians of the day, and not merely in private. Two of the most outspoken of the New World prophets, as these critics were to be known, were the Dominicans, Bishop Bartolome de Las Casas and the Thomist theologian, Antonio Montesino. Montesino preached publicly against the genocidal activities of the Spanish colonists and, as reported by Las Casas, denounced “the cruelty and tyranny that you practice on these innocent people. Tell me, by what right or justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible slavery? By what right do you wage such detestable wars on these people who lived mildly and peacefully in their own lands, where you have consumed infinite numbers of them with unheard of murders and desolations?”⁴⁸ Montesino enraged his congregation but persisted in his criticisms, and the protests of others, such as the theologian-philosopher Vittoria also disturbed the politico-theological consensus of the time, and his criticisms of the idea that the Indians had no political rights of ⁴⁸ Antonio Montesino as quoted in H. McKennie Goodpasture, Cross and Sword: An Eyewitness History of Christianity in Latin America (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2000), 12.

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governance had some legal effect, though in practice his and others’ efforts failed to prevent the depredations of the gold- and domination-crazed colonizers. Secondly, some despoilers with non-religious ideologies seem to have had as much fanatical drive as any religious enthusiasts when it comes to spectacular resorts to violent persecution, as the history of the twentieth century illustrates abundantly. Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, as already noted, did well enough in the fanaticism stakes without resort to divine assistance. And when it comes to opposition to negotiation and compromise, the Allied powers in World War II were as adamantly opposed to negotiation and compromise to end the war with the Axis powers as any religiously inspired group. They ruthlessly pursued “unconditional surrender” and were happy to destroy by “terror bombing” vast swathes of civilian-occupied cities in Germany and Japan in defense of liberal democracy.⁴⁹ Nor were the leaders and many followers of Nazi Germany and Japan lacking in fanatical pursuit of their war aims, even when virtually certain defeat was looming, and their commitment to vicious tactics was as great as any sanctioned by religious zeal. It seems that support from whatever it is that you regard as the highest value or sanction, be it History, Ethnicity, Science, the Proletariat, the Nation, Democratic Liberty, the Super Race, or Manifest Destiny, will do to drive unrelentingly some fanatical enterprise, especially where it coheres with the usual human instincts for power, glory, and riches. Juergensmeyer emphasizes the way that religious commitments can instill apparently unrealistic expectations for victory and commitment to endless struggle. He cites a conversation he had with Abdul Aziz Rantisi, the late leader of the political wing of Hamas, in which Rantisi replied to his insistence that Palestinian military efforts could never defeat the military might of Israel by saying that Palestine had previously been occupied for 200 years and his comrades could now endure at least as long.⁵⁰ Juergensmeyer attributes this conviction to confidence in God’s support, but he doesn’t quote Rantisi invoking God, and confidence in the power to prevail in the long term can come from many sources and has sustained secular revolutionary movements of all sorts, notably in the twentieth century those inspired by Marxism. In fact, much of the argument about the special ⁴⁹ As mentioned in Chapter 1, even Winston Churchill admitted after the bombing of Dresden that it was time the Allied city bombing campaign of “mere acts of terror and wanton destruction” should stop. See Chapter 1, footnote 28. ⁵⁰ Mark Juergensmeyer, “Religion as a Cause of Terrorism,” in The Roots of Terrorism, edited by Louise Richardson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 142.

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motivational power of religion displays a common contemporary mindset amongst intellectuals that finds idealism and confidence about the future difficult to sustain or even comprehend. But this may itself be a symptom of cultural malaise rather than a form of maturity. In any case, there have been many non-religious people who have remained firm in their ethical commitments and endeavors even where the odds against success were high. No doubt some of the British citizens and their leaders who persisted resolutely against overwhelming odds in the military and political struggle against the Nazi war machine in the early years of World War II were sustained by religious motives, but many others drew upon secular resources of hope and conviction. A less edifying example is provided by the fanatical prosecution on both sides of the attritional trench warfare of World War I; in this conflict, the uncompromising dedication of the military and political leadership may have had a touch of religiosity about it for some, but the primary drivers seem to have been a mix of imperialist and nationalist instinct and ideology. Juergensmeyer also urges a close connection between religious outlooks and the demonization of the enemy, but once more World War I had plenty of that on both sides, without a strong religious element. Both Germans and Britons were predominantly Christian and what differences of religious doctrine were involved played no part in the causes of the war. Nonetheless, vilification of “the Hun” persisted in British propaganda, in a way parallel to that by which ISIS more recently vilified and “demonized” the enemy infidel. Another claim by Juergensmeyer, echoed by others in the terrorist literature, is that religious convictions also lead to the endorsement of more extreme and immoral violent measures than would otherwise be the case. Religious warriors have certainly behaved in morally atrocious ways, as in the medieval crusades where gross violations of widely accepted norms against atrocity were common, as when in 1099 Western Catholic crusaders massacred Muslims and Jews, not sparing “the elderly, the women, or the sick.”⁵¹ But, again, as we saw earlier in the discussion of absolutism, the existence of immoral ferocity in violent conflict is not the sole province of those with religious commitments. As Diarmaid MacCulloch commented in ⁵¹ Christopher Tyerman’s words in his How to Plan a Crusade: Reason and Religious War in the High Middle Ages (London: Allen Lane, 2015). The quote is taken from Diarmaid MacCulloch’s review of this book (“Tidy-Mindedness”) in the London Review of Books, vol. 37, no. 18 (September 24, 2015). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n18/diarmaidmacculloch/tidy-mindedness.

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the course of discussing and denouncing the violent horrors committed by religious people, “It is true that those who have rejected traditional forms of religion, including Hitler and Stalin, have perpetrated atrocities as heinous as those committed in the name of a god or gods.”⁵² A more recent example is the way in which the moral prohibition on and deep repugnance against torture was so rapidly abandoned in the West by some military and security practitioners with the support of many secular “liberal” intellectuals. The “war on terror” provided the context for this, and in many places the resort to hitherto unthinkable practices gained widespread popular endorsement.⁵³ No hint of religious motivation here, but plenty of democratic and selfprotective ferocity, usually invoking not God but the horrors of more or less fantastic “ticking bomb” scenarios and the civic duties of police, army, and political leaders when confronted by the prospect of them. We have dealt with Juergensmeyer’s first and third claims and, since they overlap somewhat, so has my treatment of them. His second claim is rather different and needs some unpacking, though on one construal, my response to it echoes responses to his first and third claims. The second claim is that religion is particularly problematic with respect to terrorism because of “its justification of violence.” This raises difficulties of interpretation since, in the first place, there is widespread acceptance beyond religious circles that violence can be justified in certain circumstances. Hence, the idea that religions have offered justifications for violence shows in itself nothing distinctive about religion. Indeed, only complete pacifists reject all justifications for violence. On another interpretation, it may be that Juergensmeyer means that religions offer unsatisfactory justifications for political violence like terrorism or war. The restriction to political violence is plausible because terrorism, for instance, is the topic of his discussion. But some religions, for instance the Quakers, offer no justifications for any form of political violence, and others offer justifications for some forms of political violence in ⁵² MacCulloch, “Tidy-Mindedness.” ⁵³ For evidence of popular support see Adam Goldman and Peyton Craighill, “New Poll Finds Majority of Americans Think Torture Was Justified after 9/11 Attacks,” The Washington Post (December 16, 2014), which showed that 58 percent of the population favored the use of torture in the war on terror “often” or “sometimes.” For information on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program see: The 113th Congress Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program together with Foreword by Chairman Feinstein and Additional Minority Views (U.S. Government Printing Office, December 9, 2014). For an intellectual defence see Alan Dershowitz, “Tortured Reasoning,” in Torture: A Collection, edited by Sanford Levinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 257–280.

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some circumstances, but not in others. The questions then are whether the justifications they offer for violence in some circumstances are morally and intellectually respectable, and also whether they are distinctive, or similar to respectable justifications offered by the non-religious. These questions can’t be answered by some comprehensive reference to religions as such, but must be treated on a case-by-case basis. In Christianity, for instance, some of the early Christians were pacifists, and then a just war doctrine was developed, principally in the early stages by St. Augustine, and then later by Aquinas and more fully afterwards by later Scholastics such as Vittoria and Suarez, and then the Protestant Grotius. The tradition outgrew its religious roots and became a common currency with Western thinkers, though it had some periods of decline before becoming more widely accepted in the second half of the twentieth century and embodied to a large degree in international law. There are two important features to note about this tradition in the West. The first is that it always placed restrictions on the right to go to war, and that these restrictions became more stringent over the course of the development, and the second is that the tradition, although it arose within Christianity, always relied upon an appeal to common reasoning, or in its later manifestations what was called “natural law.” That tradition was certainly at times polluted by the concept of Holy War, but the later medieval theorists gradually removed religious war from the scope of just war and with it the idea that the pursuit of supernatural ends sanctioned the use of otherwise immoral means, such as slaughtering children. In modern times, many Christians have been adamant about the stringency of the restrictions. So, for instance, religious people within the Allied countries were amongst the few who criticized the devastating tactics of their own leadership in the area bombing campaigns aimed at the wholesale destruction of German and Japanese cities. The Anglican Bishop of Chichester George Bell repeatedly condemned the bombing in speeches in the House of Lords and elsewhere during the war, and the American Jesuit priest John C. Ford wrote an article in stern condemnation of the practice in 1944.⁵⁴ Ford’s article marked an influential moment in the later development of aspects of the Catholic peace movement, especially with regard to nuclear deterrence. ⁵⁴ See George Kennedy Allen Bell, The Church and Humanity (1939–1946) (London: Longmans, Green, 1946), 140 and John C. Ford, “The Morality of Obliteration Bombing,” Theological Studies, vol. 5, no. 3 (1944).

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Two Further Clarifications Two clarifications finally need to be made. The first is that although religion may not be the cause, or even a noteworthy minor factor, in the outbreak of a given act of political violence, it may be appealed to by political leaders as a validating or supporting consideration in urging the local populace to endorse or continue backing the resort to such violence. So, war leaders may claim that “God will give us the victory” or less confidently “We will prevail, God willing.” Here the religious appeal functions in a similar way to such cries as “History is on our side” or “The workers united will never be defeated.” Just as these latter claims do not license any idea that history or the unity of workers were causes of war, so too the former license no such claim for religion. The second clarification concerns what we mean by claiming that religion has caused some war. The normal understanding of this, and the one I have been assuming, is that it is religious zeal or commitment in the souls of those who decide to go to war or undertake a terrorist attack that drives their decision. So it is an attachment to a pro-religious impulse held by the initiators or perpetrators that causes their violence. But religion might figure in the outbreak of violence in a different way by being, in whole or part, a feature or aspect of the victims of the violence that feeds back into the reasoning of the perpetrators, even when those perpetrators have no religious commitments of their own. It would, for instance, be mistaken to claim that the Nazi terrorist extermination of the Holocaust was caused by Hitler’s religion (for he basically had none), but his hatred of the Jewish population was partly a hatred of their ethnicity and of the religion bound up with it. Of course, Nazi anti-Semitism, and anti-Semitism more generally, is a complex, loathsome mix of myth, insane fantasy, and cultural fixations, in which the religion of the victims plays only a part. Similar things might be said about the Communist Chinese persecution of their Uyghur citizens identified by their Muslim faith. The persecutors are not moved by religious impulses but they fear various real or imagined risks to which a Muslim identity might give rise. I do not therefore mean to deny in my argument that wars that are not caused by religious conviction can be directed against peoples who are in part identified for violent treatment by their religious outlooks. Whether this is so in particular cases would require investigation of those cases, and would

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once more need to take into account the complexities already discussed in this chapter.⁵⁵

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Conclusion It has not been my intention to downplay the evil involved in the use of religion to support resort to terrorist acts or excuse in any way those avowedly religious people who have been moved too often by their understanding of faith to condone or perpetrate terrorist acts. I have been concerned rather to highlight confusions and misleading implications of common talk about religious terrorism, particularly the ways in which nonreligious aspects and factors involved in the causation and motivation of terrorist acts can be obscured by the concentration upon religious affiliation and rhetoric surrounding some terrorist perpetrators. This tendency is reinforced when the perpetrators are foreign or can be cast as foreign to the home culture. The idea that religion (or some particular religion) is inherently prone to violence can also impede understanding of the cautionary attitudes to violence or outright rejection of it within the religion in question. Even when religions countenance “justified” violence, they usually put restrictions on the justifications that can apply, as we have seen is the case with versions of the just war tradition within Christianity. Those cautionary attitudes, where they exist, can be cited and deployed against the use of religion for terrorist purposes.⁵⁶ Governments have increasingly acknowledged this option but have been reluctant to commit serious resources to foster the deployment, and in some cases have made their acknowledgment and efforts seem heavily condescending. Amongst the most condescending and potentially counter-productive of such efforts was that of Australia’s former Prime Minister Tony Abbott in a National Security address on February 23, 2015. Abbott first accused Australian Muslim leaders of not speaking out enough against terrorism, and then added: “I’ve often heard Western leaders describe Islam as a religion of peace. I wish more Muslim leaders would say that more often, and mean it.”⁵⁷ The entirely ⁵⁵ I thank Margaret Coady for drawing this important qualification to my attention. ⁵⁶ For an excellent discussion of this point and of Osama bin Laden’s eccentric version of jihad see Alia Brahimi, Jihad and Just War in the War on Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Brahimi compares bin Laden’s corrupted view of jihad to George W. Bush’s parallel view of just war. ⁵⁷ Shalailah Medhora and Michael Safi, “Muslim Leaders Outraged by Tony Abbott’s Chiding Over Extremism,” The Guardian (February 23, 2015).

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gratuitous “and mean it” was not only offensive and unsupported by evidence of insincerity; it could also only impede efforts at sympathetic engagement with the Muslim community to help combat what inclinations to terrorist activity there were in a section of that community. This last point about condescension is worth noting in connection with my earlier remarks in footnote 3 about the simplifying mythology encapsulated in many uses of terms such as “the West,” “Western civilization,” “Western values,” and the like. Critics of the role of religion in terrorist activities often speak from an assumed vantage point that evokes such values, and sometimes they add appeals to “Enlightenment values” to boost the historical credentials of the criticism. But if “Western values” is a description of what has operated in practice rather than a hope for what might have been, those values have included the ones used to support the city bombings of World War II, the use of torture in the war on terror, internment without trial, and much else that is morally dubious. As for the Enlightenment, it was a much more complex and contestable phenomenon than such appeals portray, and several of its genuine values were long disregarded in Western practice, as the persistence of slavery shows. We cannot enter into the interesting debate about what exactly the Enlightenment was and what was its moral significance, but empty rhetoric about “our” commitment to it is another unhelpful move in dealing with terrorism.⁵⁸

⁵⁸ For a good discussion of some of the complexities of the Enlightenment see Genevieve Lloyd, Enlightenment Shadows (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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Index Note: Notes are indicated by ‘n’ following the page numbers.

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For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abbott, Tony 79, 79n.47, 171–2, 178, 204–5 ABC 149–50 absolutism 73, 145–6, 194–5, 197–8, 200–1 Ackland, Richard 164n.20 Acton, Lord 149–50 Afghanistan 1, 15–16, 36, 60–1, 79–80, 106, 155–6, 158, 173, 188–90 African National Congress 34, 166–7 Alec Station team 57 Allied terror bombings 23–4, 49–50, 66–7 al-Qaeda 10, 28, 36–7, 57, 62, 77–8, 156–7, 193 al-Sisi, Abdel Fattah 12–13 American War of Independence 73–4 Anscombe, Elizabeth 40–1, 146–7 anthrax 28 anti-Semitism 203 apartheid 43, 166–7 ‘approval of a people’ criterion 75–6 Aquinas, Thomas 127–8, 202 Arab Spring (2011) 48 Arendt, Hannah 59–60 arguments, tit-for-tat 119–23, 125, 127–8, 131 Aristotle 13–14 Armenia 143 al-Assad, Bashar 50 Assange, Julian 163–4 assassination 156–7 associated targets 121–3 asymmetrical war 119–23 ATA (Basque separatists) 77–8 atheism 186–8 Atran, Scott 185–6 Augustine, St. 117–18, 192, 202 Austin, J. L. 171–2 Australia 29–30, 76–7, 96–7, 107–8, 154–5, 166–9, 180–1, 195

Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) 164–5 Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) 168 al Awlaki, Abdulrahman 188–9 Axis powers 199 Bacevich, Andrew 106–7 balanced exceptionism 146–7 Barrett, Richard 185–6 Bartlett, Francesca 168n.26 basal security 6, 21–2, 67–8 BBC 149–50 ‘bearing arms’ 83–8 Becker, Joe 15–16, 36 beheadings 64–5 Beirut suicide-bombing (1983) 33–6 Bellamy, Alex 25n.30, 44–5 Bell, George 202 bin Laden, Osama 22, 57, 129–31, 189–91 Birmingham Six trial 162 Black Saturday bushfires 196–7 blasphemy 198–9 Boko Haram 64–5 Bowen, Stella 196–7 Brahimi, Alia 204–5 Brown, Jonathan 163n.17 Buddhism 179–80, 182 Bufe, Chaz 10 Burma 166–7 Burns, Anna 188 Bush, George W. 84–5, 152–3, 169–70 caliphates 189–90 Camus, Albert 129 Cavanaugh, William T. 183–4 Chamberlain, Neville 23–4 Charleston shootings 16, 48–9

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Charlie Hebdo attack (2015) 172–3 Chechnya 143, 155–6 chess 123 Chesterton, G. K. 196–7 China 50–1, 135, 203 Chomsky, Noam 173–4 Christianity in 17th century Europe 189–90 caution against the invocation of God 198–9 classic theistic faith 179–80 collective guilt claim 81–2 early Christians as pacifists 202 and extreme outbreaks of violence 186–7 just war tradition in 204–5 paradigm religion 182 and self-defence/defence of others 117–18 and the Taiping rebellion 178 Churchill, Winston 23–4, 142, 199 clerical sex abuse 136 Clinton, Hillary 28, 79–80 Coady, C. A. J. and balanced exceptionalism 145–6 and collateral damage 122–3 collective guilt issue 131 concept of attacks 26–7 discrimination principle 103–5, 107–8 and Hobbes 127–8 introduction 8–9 and justification 115, 137 and tactical definition 38–9, 51 and Walzer 90–1 Coghlan, Tom 57n.9 Cohen, G. A. 171–2, 174 Cold War 10 Collaery, Bernard 164–5 collateral attacks 39–40, 174 collateral damage 5, 8–9, 38–40, 122–3, 153 collective guilt/responsibility 129–31 Collingwood, R. G. 176 Collins, Jeffrey 190n.34 Colombia 37 combatants/non-combatants 6, 81–109, 152–3 Communism 10, 44–5 comprehensive doctrines 188 computer hacking 50–1 Confucianism 179–80 conquistadors 198–9 conscientious objection 90–2

conscription 90, 108 consequentialism 111–13, 131, 145–6 conspiracy 165–7 Contras 151 Cornwell, John 187n.28 counter-terrorism ethical hazards 149–75 introduction 7 morality and politics of 39–40 Covid-19 pandemic 1, 68 Craighill, Peyton 201n.53 crusades 194 Cumming-Bruce, Nick 118n.10 cyber warfare 50–1 Damien de Veuster, St. 195, 197–8 danger objection 143–8 Davutoglu, Ahmet 172–3 Dawe, Bruce 149 Dawkins, Richard 186–8 death cult, see ISIS Debray, Regis 151n.3 defenestration 189–90 degradation 56–8 de Las Casas, Bishop Bartolome 198–9 De Lazari-Radek, Katarzyna 112n.1 Dennett, Daniel 181–2 Dershowitz, Alan 201n.53 DesAutels, Peggy 63–4 Descartes, René 40–1 destabilization 57–8 Dill, Janina 91–4, 96–7 diplomacy 175 dirty hands 137–8, 146–7 discrimination an ‘almost absolute’ prohibition 144–5 introduction 7 and just war principle 156–7 principle of 102, 129–30, 137 rejection of 108–13 relaxation of principle 123–4 doctrine of double effect (DDE) 8–9, 40–2 dominant view 68–73 Dresden 23–4, 137–8 drones 15–16, 36, 156–7, 188–9 Dublin General Post Office 42 Edstrom, Erik 106–7 Egypt 12–13, 162–3

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Eisenhower, Dwight D. 76–7 El Salvador 20–2 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 26n.31 Engels, Friedrich 10 enhanced interrogation 60–1, 170 Enlightenment 183–4, 205 Entous, Adam 156–7 ethnic cleansing 144–5 European Arrest Warrant 163–4 extermination 143–5, 203 extreme fear 44–7 Fabre, Cecile 8–9, 90–1, 120, 123–5, 143–4 fair fight arguments 121–2 family resemblance characteristics 13–14 fanaticism 195–9 Fanon, Franz 42–3 Feinberg, Joel 148n.42 feminism 29–30 fighting chance argument 16–17, 119–20, 127–8 Fine, Gail 13–14 Finland 126 Finlay, Christopher 42–3, 45–6, 120–1, 143–4 Finnish-Soviet war (1939) 126 Ford, John 202–3 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (US) 169–70 fossil fuel lobby 76–7 France 107–8, 146–7 French Revolution 44–5 Friedersdorf, Conor 156–7, 188–9 Friedrich, Georg 66n.20 Frowe, Helen 77–8, 90–1, 102–5 Fukushima nuclear accident 68 Gallup poll (2011) 190–1 Gambino, Lauren 80n.48 Gandhi, Mahatma 195–6 Gaza 166–7 ‘Gender and Race’ (Haslanger) 22–3 Geneva Convention Protocols (1977) 84–5 Geneva Declaration on Terrorism (1987) 17–19 genocide 142–3 Germany 10–11, 21–2, 66–7, 129–30, 137–8, 186, 199 Gibb, Frances 161n.12 Gillard, Julia 171–2 Glasgow airport bombing attempt 168

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Glenton, Joe 106 God 175, 179–82, 186–7, 189–90, 194, 197–201, 203 Goldhammer, Arthur 129 Goldman, Adam 201n.53 Goodin, Robert 17–19, 52 Goodpasture, H. McKennie 198n.48 Greenawalt, Kent 179–80, 182 Greenwald, Glenn 16, 48–9, 169–70 Grice, Paul 176n.2 Griffin, Ben 106 Grivas, George 151–2 Gross, Michael 120–3, 125 Grotius, Hugo 202 group responsibility 136 Guantanamo Bay 60–1, 162, 170 Guevara, Che 151–2 Guildford Four trial 162 Habash, Abdel Shady 12–13 Hamas 166–7, 184 Hamid Mir 22 Haneef, Mohamed 168 Hardin, Russell 13–14 Haslanger, Sally 23n.26 Held, Virginia 13–14, 33–7, 131–6 Hick, John 179–80, 182 Hinduism 182, 184 Hiroshima atomic attack 49–50, 110–11, 143–4, 188 Hirsch, Afua 164n.18 Hitchens, Christopher 190–1 Hitler, Adolf 66–7, 138, 186–7, 200–1, 203 Hizballah 37 hoaxes 28 Hobbes, Thomas 68–9, 126–8, 175 Holland 146–7 Holocaust 129–30, 203 Holy Roman Empire 189–90 Holy War 202 hostages 29–30 Hughes, Martin 2n.1 Hughes, Simon 162–3 humanitarian intervention 75, 117–18 Hume, David 193–4 Idlib province (Syria) 118 India 195–6 innocents 12–13, 19–20, 22, 35–6, 52, 86–7, 133–4, 145–6

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Inwood, Brad 127–8 IRA 152–3 Iran 29–30 Iraq 1, 60–2, 75, 77–80, 155–6, 158, 173, 185–6, 188–90 Irish Easter uprising (1916) 42 ISIS beheadings of 62, 64–5 clarification 31–2 and commitment to unjustified violence 190–1 a ‘death cult’ 178 and Hillary Clinton 79–80 and interpretation of Sunni Muslim beliefs 194 interventions against in Syria 118 introduction 10 and Iraq 158 and Man Haron Monis 29–30 and Mark Juergensmeyer 200 study of volunteers 185–6 Islam, effects of religion 182 extremism 79–80, 149–50, 174, 190–1 fundamentalism 15–16, 37, 77–8, 177–8, 184 and jihad 185–6, 192 militants 15, 37, 79–80, 155–6 and Osama bin Laden 22 and Tony Abbott 204–5 and the Uyghurs 203 and Western Catholic crusaders 200–1 Islamic State organization, see ISIS Ismail, Mohammed 172–3 Israel, 37, 57, 106–7, 122–3, 130–1, 135, 141–3, 156–7, 166–7, 189–90 James, William 182, 152n.15 Japan 138, 199 Jaskolski, Jacek 163–4 Jewish supermarket attack, Paris (2015) 173 Jewish uprising 126 Jews 81–2, 135, 146–7, 200–1 jihad 185–6, 192 Jones, Karen 6, 21–2, 54–5, 67–8 Juergensmeyer, Mark 194–5, 197–202 jus ad bellum 90, 95, 104–6, 120–1, 125 jus in bello 92–3, 95, 97–9, 104–6, 120–1, 123–5

justification 110–48 just war theory 25, 70–1, 81, 86, 96–7, 108–9, 156–7 Kagan, Shelly 146n.39 Kant, Immanuel 115–18, 145–6 Kaplan, Alice 129 Kendall-Smith, Malcolm 106 Al Khalifa, Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed 172–3 Khashoggi, Jamal 156–7 kidnapping 62, 153–4 ‘king’s business’ 90–2, 94, 106 Kosovo 173 LaFollette, Hugh 8–9, 122–3 Lahr, John 54 Laqueur, Walter 12–13, 48, 55–6 Latsis, Martin 81 Lavrov, Sergei 172–3 Lawrance, Jeremy 42n.15 Lazar, Seth 95–6, 100–1, 117–18 Lebanese war (2006) 122–3 Lebanon 33–6, 122–3 lesser evil 145–6 Levi, Primo 129–30 Lewis, David 193–4 Libya 160–3 Lichtblau, Eric 169–70 Liddell Hart, B. H. 98–9 Lloyd, Genevieve 205 Locke, John 175 London transport attacks (July 2012) 64–5 ‘lone-wolf’ attacks 28–30, 52, 108–9 McCauley, Clark R. 16–17 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 200–1 Macdonald, Sir Ken 161–2 Machiavelli 137–8 McInerney, Kieran 120–1 McMahan, Jeff and DDE 40–1 and intention 22 introduction 8–9 and revisionists/traditionalists 95–6, 102–5 and terrorists as criminals 152–3 use of arms to effect an arrest 83–4 McPherson, Lionel K. 6, 54–5, 68–78 Mafia 37 Maguire Seven trial 162 Mandela, Nelson 43–4, 167

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 manslaughter 39–40, 71–2 Mao Zedong 186–7, 199 Maronite Catholics 35–6 Marshall, S. L. A. 107–8 Marty, Martin 179–81 Marxist-Leninism 184 Marx, Karl 10, 199–200 Medhora, Shalailah 204n.57 mediated terrorism 42–4 Melzer, Nils 87n.6 Menezes, Jean Charles da Silva e 170 mercy killing 153–4 MI 5 162 MI 6 162 Michaelson, Ruth 13n.6 Midgely, Mary 105n.34 Miller, Seumas 33–7, 146–7 Mir, Hamid 130–1 MK group 43–4 Monis, Man Haron 29–30 Montesino, Antonio 198–9 Moore, G. E. 195 Moore, Jonathan 180n.8 Moore, Michael 15–16 moral dilemma 146 moral distinctiveness 68–9, 79 morality cumulative effect of arguments 100–1 dilemma 146 discrimination principle 102–9 distinctiveness 68–9, 79 equality of soldiers 91–3 and ideal of fairness 123 justification of terrorism 110–12 of misplaced emphasis 195 prudential arguments 99 revisionists vs traditionalists 93–6 and social contract theory 119 status of non-combatant immunity 122–3 when constraints are disadvantageous 126–7 Mossad 156–7 murder 26–7, 39–40, 52, 73 Murdoch, Rupert 162–3 Murphy, Katharine 76n.41 Muslims see Islam Nagasaki atomic attack 49–50, 110–11, 143–4, 188 Nagel, Thomas 145–6

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Napier-Raman, Kishor 165n.21 Nathanson, Stephen 34–6, 73, 88–9, 94, 111–13 National Rifle Association 76–7 National Security Agency (US) 169–70 National Security and Information Act 2004 (Aus.) 164–5 NATO missile attack, Serbia (1999) 173 N (attitudes) 59–63, 68 natural law 202 Nazism and Allied terror bombings 66–7 and anti-Semitism 203 and collective responsibility 129–30 danger objection 146–7 and fanaticism 199–200 justification 126–8, 142 need to defeat 138 psycho-social condition 59–60 and religion 186–7 and the Soviet Union 74–5 News of the World 162–3 Nicaragua 151 9/11 attacks 1, 60–2, 64–7, 158, 163–5, 177–8 non-combatants authority aspect 70 clarifications 31–2 definition of 20–1, 26–7, 50 and discrimination 111 and fighting chance argument 120–1 idea of 129–30 and innocence 81 intentional harming of 133–4 and morality 122–3, 129–30, 143 and non-intentional terrorism 38–9 and psycho-social condition 59–60 targeting of 125 non-military measures 163–5 non-state actors 23–4, 73–4, 138–9 Norman, Richard 113–16 Northern Ireland 37, 152–3, 155–6, 158–9, 188 nuclear weapons 17–19 Nussbaum, M. 14n.10 Obama, Barack 15–16, 28, 76–7, 156–7, 174 Occam’s razor 164–5 Office for Security and Counter Terrorism (UK) 161–2

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Ondimba, Ali Bongo 172–3 O’Neil, Onora 137n.11 Orwell, George 104–5, 132 Osnos, Evan 157n.8 Owen, G. E. L. 13–14 Pagden, Anthony 42n.15 Pakistan 15–16, 36, 188–9 Palestine 37, 130–1, 135, 143, 189–90 Pape, Robert A. 184–5 parcel bombs 28 Pascal, Blaise 176, 178 Patriot Act (US) 169–70 Poland 163–4 political status 16, 23–4, 47–50, 68–9 political violence 153–4 Pol Pot 186, 199 polytheistic religions 179–80 Powell, Reuben 162–3 prevention imperative 169–70 Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1989 (UK) 11–12 primary actions 159–60 Primoratz, Igor and balanced exceptionism 145–6 clarifications 25–7 criticism of Orwell 132 distinctiveness of terrorism 54–5 and extreme fear 44–6 and restrictive political motive 37–8 and supreme emergency 144–5 terrorism and war 72–3 prisoners of war 152–3 prison escapees 153–5 property terrorism 50–2 Pursue, Prevent, Protect, Prepare 165–6 Quakers 201–2 quasi-combatants 121–3 racism 3–4, 198–9 rape 145–6, 195 Rashbaum, William K. 28n.33 Rawls, John 59–60, 74–5, 77–8, 188 redistributive justice 135–6 reign of terror 44–5 religion a diverse phenomena 190–2 introduction 7–8 motivation and complex realities 184–92

problems of focussing on 189–90 and violence 183–4, 186–8, 190–2 war and terrorism 178 removing grievance 175 rendition 60–1 responses ignorance 61–2 provocation 61–2 restraining orders 165–6 revenge attacks 52 revisionists 95–6, 101–3, 108 revolutionaries 5 Richardson, Louise 49–50, 52, 197–8 Riesebrodt, Martin 183 Rigby, Lee 15–16, 36 Risen, James 169n.28 Robert Pape 184 Robespierre, Maximilien 44–5 Rodin, David authority aspect 70–3 and collateral damage 122–3, 174 and game analogy 123–4 and non-intentional terrorism 38–43 and terrorism/self-defence 113–16 Roof, Dylann 16, 48–9 Rosenthal, Raymond 130n.2 Ross, W. D. 145–6 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 91–2 R (psycho-social condition) 59–63, 68 Russia 118, 143, 155–7 see also Soviet Union Rwanda 73–5 Safi, Michael 204n.57 el-Said, Professor Hamed 185–6 Sandinista government 151 Saudi Arabia 156–7 Scheffler, Samuel diplomacy/removing grievances 171 distinctiveness of terrorism 54–8, 60, 64–5, 67–8, 70 introduction 6, 13–14 Scheuer, Michael 57 self-defence 7, 117–19 self-preservation 115, 127–8 Serbia 173 Sermon on the Mount 173 Shane, Scott 15–16, 36 Sharia law 77–8 Shia Muslims 29–30, 190–1

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 Shue, Henry 91–7, 103–6, 108, 140n.23 Shukry, Sameh 172–3 Sidgwick, Henry 111–12 silent terrorism 47 Singer, Peter 111–12 slavery 145–6, 194–5, 198–9 Smith, David 80n.48 social bonds 66–7 Sorabji, Richard 120n.12 Soros, George 28 South Africa 34–6, 43 Soviet Union 73–5, 98, 126, 174 Spain 77–8 special moral significance 6 Sri Lanka 184 Stalin, Joseph 186–7, 199–201 state power 149–50, 161–3, 165–6 state terrorism 24, 47–50, 56 Stein, Walter 41n.13 Stern gang 141–2 Strawson, Peter F. 176n.2 strike zones 15–16, 36, 156–7 Suárez, Francisco 202 sub-state agents 48–50, 72–3, 108–9, 138–9, 143–4, 150–3 sub-state terrorism 7, 50, 66–9, 78–9, 136–7, 142–4 Sufis 190–1 see also Muslims suicide bombing 21–2, 184–6 Sunni Muslims 29–30, 77–8, 190–1, 194 see also Muslims supreme emergency 16–17, 73, 116–19, 127–9, 141–6 Syria 23–4, 62, 77–80, 118, 124, 155–6, 162–3, 185–6 Taiping rebellion 178 ‘taking responsibility’ concept 134–6 Taliban 36, 158 Tamil Tigers 184 targeted killing 7, 155–7 Teichman, Jenny 50n.31 Terrorism Act 2000 (UK) 159–63, 167 Thomas Aquinas, St. 117–18 threshold deontology 145–6 Tibetans 135 Timor-Leste 164–5 Tonkin Gulf incident (1964) 75–6 torture 60–1

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traditionalists 95, 101–8 Treisman, Rachel 76n.40 Trolley Problem 118–19 Trump, Donald 76–7, 79–80, 169 Turkey 143 ‘two by four’ 44–5 Tyerman, Christopher 200n.51 Union Carbide disaster, Bhopal (1984) 34 United Kingdom and British civil liberties 161–2 definition 11–12 extradition processes in 163–4 and Hamas 166–7 introduction 10 and Northern Ireland 155–6 symbols and myths 180–1 and terror bombings 66–7 and Vietnam 75–6 United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria 118 United Nations Office of CounterTerrorism 185–6 United Nations (UN) 25, 117–18 United States and 9/11 attacks 1, 22, 60–2, 64–7, 158, 163–5, 177–8 and Afghanistan 174 and ‘American exceptionalist’ conviction 35–6 and the Cold War 10 and deployment of troops in Arab lands 189–90 discourse of terrorism in 16 and gun laws 76–7 and Iraq 158 and ISIS 79–80, 185–6 Muslims and terrorist acts 48–9 and Osama bin Laden 22, 129–31 phone-hacking techniques 169–70 and Sandinista government 151 and the Supreme Court 149–50 symbols and myths 180–1 and targeted killing 156–7 terrorism definition 11–12 terrorist activity against 57 title of President 83 and Vietnam 75–6, 124 Updike, John 13–14 USS Cole attack (2000) 33–4

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utilitarian/consequentialist arguments 7 utilitarianism 111–13, 131, 145–6 Uyghurs 135, 203

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Viet Cong 124 Vietnam 60–1, 75–6 virtual reality 183–4 Vittoria, Francisco de 41–2, 85–6, 202 Waldron, Jeremy distinctiveness of terrorism 54–5, 64–5, 67–8, 70 introduction 13–14 psycho-social condition 61–3 and targeted killings 156–7 Walker, Margaret Urban 63n.14 Walsh Street murders 154–5 Walzer, Michael and the Finland–Soviet war 126 introduction 2 and justification 136–45 and ‘king’s business’ view 106 moral equality of soldiers 90–5 and uniform criterion 84–5 use of random term 20–1 and the ‘war convention’ 119–20 war crimes 151–2

Warsaw ghetto 126 ‘war on terror’ 7, 48–9, 155–6, 188–9, 200–1 Weber, Max 149 Weiner, Tim 157n.6 Wellman, Carl 2, 17–19 Wilkinson, Paul 24–5 Wilson, Peter 189–90 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 13–14, 33, 179–80, 182 World War I 96–9, 107–8, 199–200 World War II and the Allied powers 199 and distributive justice 132 and the Nazi war machine 199–200 slaughter of civilian populations in 98–9 and the Soviet Union 73–4 terror bombing in 23–4, 49–50, 64–7, 129–30, 136–9, 141–4, 205 US troops not firing during 107–8 Yandell, Keith 182 Yazidi sect 194 Yemen 155–6 Yesh Gvul (group) 106–7 Young, Robert 25n.30 Zohar, Noam 91–2