Abstract
In this chapter, I will be using ‘terrorism’ in the sense of organized use of violence to attack non-combatants (’innocents’ in a special sense) or their property for political purposes.1 Is terrorism wrong? Given this definition — which I want to term ‘tactical’ — and given just war theory, the answer is, as I have argued more fully elsewhere,2 clearly yes. Terrorism violates a central principle of the jus in bello, the principle of discrimination, which declares the immunity of non-combatants from direct attack. It is not just that there are good utilitarian arguments for this principle or that it has been agreed between nations. The prohibition lies at the heart of the reasoning that allows for legitimate war in extremis since you are entitled to wage war only against those who are doing a certain sort of harm (and then only if other conditions are fulfilled). As John Locke put it: ‘they [those among the enemy population innocent of waging the war] ought not to be charged as guilty of the violence and injustice that is committed in an unjust war any farther than they actually abet it.’3 Here Locke echoes what is common in the just war tradition.4
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Notes
Coady, ‘The Morality of Terrorism,’ Philosophy 60 (1985).
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), sec. IL.xvi.179, p. 388.
As the sixteenth-century Spanish theologian and philosopher Vitoria, in similar spirit to Locke, had earlier put it: ‘the foundation of the just war is the injury inflicted upon one by the enemy, as shown above; but an innocent person has done you no harm.’ Francisco de Vitoria, Political Writings, ed. A. Pagdan and J. Lawrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 314–15.
Igor Primoratz, ‘The Morality of Terrorism,’ Journal of Applied Philosophy 14 (1997), p. 231.
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, third edition (New York: Basic Books, 2000), chapter 16.
John Rawls, ‘Fifty years after Hiroshima,’ in Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 565–72.
Walzer, Terrorism: A Critique of Excuses,’ in Steven Luper-Foy (ed.), Problems of International Justice (Boulder, Col. and London: Westview Press, 1988).
W.D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930).
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation,’ in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948), pp.117–28;
And Michael Walzer, ‘Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (1972/73).
C.A.J. Coady, ‘Messy Morality and the Art of the Possible,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 64 (1990);
‘Dirty Hands and Politics,’ in Robert Goodin and Philip Pettit (eds.), Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993);
And ‘Dirty Hands,’ in Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte C. Becker (eds.), Encyclopedia of Ethics, second edition (London: Routledge, 2001), vol. 1.
Stephen A. Garrett, Ethics and Airpower in World War II: The British Bombing of German Cities (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), pp. 10–11.
It is worth noting that Walzer makes the issue of Germany’s possible victory a matter of supreme emergency but not that of Japan’s. This is a further sign of the difficulties of interpreting the doctrine of supreme emergency since those who suffered the depredations of the Japanese Army could hardly think of their aggression as ‘a more ordinary sort of military expansion’ as Walzer calls it (Just and Unjust Wars, p. 268). Japan’s war really began with the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s, and it is soberly estimated that more than 400,000 Chinese civilians were massacred in Nanjing alone in a racist rampage of raping, beheading and bayoneting that lasted six weeks. (For the horrible details, see Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: the Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, New York: Basic Books, 1997.)
There are connections here with Kant’s principle of publicity and Rawls’s related, though rather different, appeal to publicity in his elaboration of an idea of public reason but this is not the place to explore the matter further. See Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, Appendix II, in Kant on History, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), especially pp. 129–30;
And John Rawls, ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,’ The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
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Coady, C.A.J.T. (2004). Terrorism, Morality, and Supreme Emergency. In: Primoratz, I. (eds) Terrorism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230204546_7
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