Is terrorism distinctively wrong?

Ethics

Volumn 117, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 524-546

  McPherson, Lionel K ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34250320992     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/512781     Document Type: Review

References (50)

1. See, most notably, Virginia Held, "Terrorism, Rights, and Political Goals," in Violence, Terrorism, and Justice, ed. R. G. Frey and Christopher W. Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 59-85.
2. See, e.g., Michael Walzer, "Terrorism: A Critique of Excuses," in Arguing about War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 51-66.
3. See Adam Roberts and Richard Guelff, eds., Documents on the Laws of War, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
4. Louis P. Pojman, "The Moral Response to Terrorism and Cosmopolitanism," in Terrorism and International Justice, ed. James P. Sterba (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 135-57, 140.
5. For the revisionist view of the relevance of moral innocence and noninnocence, see Lionel K. McPherson, "Innocence and Responsibility in War," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (2004): 485-506; and Jeff McMahan, "The Ethics of Killing in War," Ethics 114 (2004): 693-733.
6. David Rodin, "Terrorism without Intention," Ethics 114 (2004): 752-71, 755.
7. Ibid., 753.
8. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 3rd ed. (New York: Basic, 1977), 255, 268.
9. Walzer's account of "supreme emergency" is controversial. For criticism of this alleged exception to the laws of war, see, e.g., C. A. J. Coady, "Terrorism, Morality, and Supreme Emergency," Ethics 114 (2004): 772-89.
10. See C. A. J. Coady, "Terrorism and Innocence," Journal of Ethics 8 (2004): 37-58, 40.
11. See McPherson, "Innocence and Responsibility in War."
12. Since the fear-effects clause is not tied to the intentions of the agents using force, there is no issue about assessing an intention to cause fear. The intentions motivating use of force can be irrelevant to the production of fear.
13. Rodin, "Terrorism without Intention," 758.
14. For an account of the just war that is widely cited and accepted, see Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars.
15. See, e.g., Coady, "Terrorism and Innocence," 39. Coady's definition refers to "use of violence to attack non-combatants," where "attack" means that the violence against them is deliberate.
16. Chris Hedges, What Every Person Should Know about War (New York: Free Press, 2003), 7.
17. See, e.g., A.J. Coates, The Ethics of War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 80.
18. I add the qualification "nonstate" since states have employed tactics (e.g., fire-bombing of cities) and weapons (e.g., chemical, biological, and nuclear) that could count as terrorist.
19. Roberts and Guelff, Documents on the Laws of War, 449.
20. Judith Gail Gardam, "Proportionality and Force in International Law," American Journal of International Law 87 (1993): 391-413, 410. To be clear, Gardam is not endorsing this interpretation. For a critical assessment of standard treatments of proportionality and an alternative approach, see Lionel K. McPherson, "Excessive Force in War: A 'Golden Rule' Test," Theoretical Inquiries in Law 7 (2005): 81-95.
21. James M. Dubik, Philosophy & Public Affairs 11 (1982): 354-71, 368. Dubik is responding to Walzer's more demanding requirement that combatants must accept greater costs to themselves for the sake of minimizing harm to noncombatants. See Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 155.
22. For criticism of the war convention as a source of moral obligation, see Lionel K. McPherson, "The Limits of the War Convention," Philosophy and Social Criticism 31 (2005): 147-63.
23. Virginia Held, "Terrorism and War," Journal of Ethics 8 (2004): 59-75, 69.
24. Nelson Mandela, "I Am Prepared to Die," in Mandela, Tambo, and the African National Congress: The Struggle against Apartheid, 1948-1990; A Documentary Survey, ed. Sheridan Johns and R. Hunt Davis Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 115-33, 121.
25. Ibid., 120.
26. Sheridan Johns and R. Hunt Davis Jr., "Conclusion: Mandela, Tambo, and the ANC in the 1990s," in their Mandela, Tambo, and the African National Congress, 309-17, 312.
27. Roberts and Guelff, Documents on the Laws of War, 489. Also see, e.g., Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 145-46.
28. See, e.g., F. M. Kamm, "Failures of Just War Theory: Terror, Harm, and Justice," Ethics 114 (2004): 650-92, 652-53.
29. See, e.g., Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 153.
30. Rodin, "Terrorism without Intention," 764.
31. Ibid., 769.
32. For arguments to a similar conclusion, see Kamm, "Failures of Just War Theory," 664.
33. Judith Jarvis Thomson, "Self-Defense," Philosophy & Public Affairs 20 (1991): 283-310, 293.
34. See also Kamm, "Failures of Just War Theory," 667-68; and T. M. Scanlon, "Intention and Permissibility," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74 (2000): S301-S317, S310-S312.
35. This response to Thomson was suggested to me by Jeff McMahan.
36. G. E. M. Anscombe, "War and Murder," in her Ethics, Religion and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 51-61, 58. It is tempting to believe that Thomson-type cases are peculiarly unrepresentative and thus misleading about the DDE's application to conventional war. In typical cases, combatants do not have prior knowledge of the evil effects of their acts. Instead, they foresee the risk of harm to noncombatants, and even foreseeable high risk is not knowledge. Yet the DDE does not invoke a distinction between prior knowledge of evil effects and risk of evil effects. The agent's intention is supposed to make a moral difference in its own right.
37. Kamm, "Failures of Just War Theory," 664.
38. A similar point, albeit against the DDE and its requirements of necessity and proportionality, is made by Rodin, "Terrorism without Intention," 765.
39. Christine M. Korsgaard, "The Reasons We Can Share: An Attack on the Distinction between Agent-Relative and Agent-Neutral Values," Social Philosophy and Policy 10 (1993): 24-51, 46.
40. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), chaps. 13-14. Also see Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), chaps. 2-4; and David Rodin, War and Self-Defense (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 144-48.
41. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 24.
42. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 28.
43. See McPherson, "Innocence and Responsibility in War," 494-97.
44. The fact that combatants for an unjust war fight under domestic legal and patriotic duress and in personal self-defense is immaterial to the permissibility of conduct that otherwise would be objectively unjust. This is not at odds with acknowledging that their conduct typically is excusable to some degree.
45. This is compatible with recognizing that punishment can be appropriately imposed on the political leaders, who, in administering the state's authority and sending combatants to fight an unjust war, bear primary moral responsibility for the injustice done by the combatants on the battlefield.
46. Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 71-72.
47. Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 65.
48. Sharon Street pressed me on this point.
49. Zayn Kassam, "Can a Muslim Be a Terrorist?" in Sterba, Terrorism and International Justice, 113-34, 130.
50. Jeff McMahan pressed me on this point.