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Introduction 1
Acknowledgements 205
Notes 206
Index 214
Introduction
The six essays of this book, now revised after having previously been
published as Violence for Equality: Inquiries in Political Philosophy, are
the result of trying to inquire with an open mind into terrorism and
more particularly what some people think are justifications of it or
would be justifications of it. If you actually think about it, what can
be said for and against terrorism or political violence? When, if ever,
is terrorism right?
What can be said for or against terrorism of the kind of which we
know too well – the actual terrorism in Ireland, Colombia, flight 103
over Scotland, Palestine and elsewhere before September 11, and in
the United States on that day, and since then? Can some of this
terrorism have the name of being terrorism for humanity? What can
be said for or against not this actual terrorism, but possible or con-
ceivable terrorism instead, including terrorism for humanity?
To start with the actual terrorism we know and its possible grounds
and their relative worth is indeed to be led on to think of different
and perhaps better grounds – in fact to think of terrorism that does
not happen, or has not happened yet. To think about this is to shed
another light on our world as it is, with the injustice of ordinary and
extraordinary wretchedness and distress in it. What we in our
comfort do to others and what we could stop doing. To think about
it is to shed light on our own moral standing, and what we are
obliged to do about our world, whether or not with a prudential eye
on the future. This is my subject too.
Actually to inquire, to try to get away from preconception and
automatism and the like, this was my explicit intention, and indeed
I have found my way to some propositions uncongenial to me. Still,
I have done rather better at finding congenial ones. Perhaps this
helps to show that to open one’s mind is not necessarily to lose one’s
convictions.
All of the essays in this book are exercises in political philosophy,
or anyway attempts at it. Political philosophy is none of political
theory, political history, or the sceptical and rightly cynical exami-
nation of our past and present politics, economics and international
relations. It is not political science, reflective journalism however
good, religious morality however enlightened.1 Nor, of course, does
1
2 Terrorism for Humanity
societies. That is, the essay tries to deal rightly with the problem of
justice, the first and main problem of moral and political philosophy,
the first problem in thinking about terrorism and about wretchedness
and other distress.
The solution offered to the problem, the Principle of Humanity,
derives from a conception of categories of desire fundamental to all
our lives. The principle considers general policies for achieving the
end or goal of the principle, having to do with those great desires.
The concern of the book is mainly with terrorism related to this
principle, and our world as it is in relation to this principle.
The fourth essay, ‘Our Omissions and Their Terrorism’, begins from
what is said by the violent, or some of them, against those of us who
are law-abiding. It is that despite our moral confidence we contribute
in an essential way, by our omissions, to denials of life, to wretched-
ness and other distress. The essay has to do with the reply that there
is a great difference between acts and omissions, whatever else is to
be said. It has to do, too, with another reply to terrorists and those
who at least understand them. I mean the inevitable refrain about
any tu quoque, that the guilty are trying to avoid the subject of their
guilt. Those who kill and devastate are merely attempting an evasion.
‘On Democratic Terrorism’, the fifth essay, concerns democracy
and violence. It sets out answers to the questions of how violence
stands to the practice and to the rules of democracy, and, more
importantly, an answer to the question of how it stands to the ends
or values that are proposed in the fundamental arguments for
democracy. There is, as a result, analysis of a particular kind of
terrorism, named the democratic kind.
What can be saved of the tradition of an actual rather than hypo-
thetical social contract is a first part of the subject of the last essay,
‘Four Conclusions About Terrorism for Humanity’. Another part is
the consequences of a certain moralism, an affirmation of moral
necessities. Reflection on these two things leads to a further consid-
eration of the empirical issues of wretchedness and other distress
raised in the first essay and other great facts of distress. These in turn
lead to the four principal questions about terrorism for humanity,
and responses to them.
The essays were written as papers for philosophy conferences and
the like. They have had some unity put on them, but they remain
separate. Can they be thought to measure up to their awful,
spreading and sometimes intractable subject? Sometimes they seem
to me a bundle of materials for inquiry and argument, not an
Introduction 7
assembled thing. You, reader, can decide, and also wonder about the
usefulness of imperfect things in a dark time of need, a time of attack
on moral intelligence.5
The essays taken together will not fully satisfy a tidy kind of reader.
They deal more with our omissions than our commissions. They
bring together the subject of terrorism against our commissions, say
Islamic terrorism against our commission in supporting Israel in
Palestine, with the subject of our omissions elsewhere, omissions
that might have given rise to other terrorism, say African terrorism,
and may still do so. There are reasons for this over and above the
truth that there is no law of subject-matters for books, and that one
thing, as already remarked, leads to another. One reason is that moral
questions ask themselves, and certainly cannot be ruled out by tidy
or self-interested or cozened persons. There is some assertive truth in
morality. Another reason is that propositions turn up. One is that
our indubitably being in the wrong with respect to omissions, if that
is the case, must raise a doubt about any presumption of our being in
the right with respect to our commissions. Sometimes a guilt is
unlikely to go with an innocence.
The answers given to the four questions about terrorism in the last
essay, as I say after making them, give rise to an idea that also has a
place in this introduction. It needs somehow to be brought into con-
sistency with something said at the beginning of it, about inquiring
with an open mind.
If political philosophy should be an attempt to inquire with an
open mind, it is also something else. If it is not ideology, it is
advocacy, in a way related to the work of a decent barrister. Political
philosophers are more like barristers than judges, even if barristers
more or less convinced of the rightness of their cases, and it is
worth remembering.
22 May 2003
Index
absolutes, moral 177–84 see also egalitarianism 43–4, 90, 101, 105
integrity Engels 26
acts and omissions see omissions envy 97–8
Africa 7, 11, 19, 190 equality 43–4, 100–8, 151, 162 see
agents of violence and inequality also inequalities
21–3, 110, 207 Equality, Principle of 100
aid, economic 13 principles of 42–4, 59, 74, 78, 90,
anarchism, philosophical 46–58 100
Audi 211
authority 46–58, 208 Fanon 148
feeling and moral judgements see
badly-off see Humanity, Principle of morality
Barry 205 Finnis 209
Bedau 208 Frankena 209
Berlin 211 freedom 17, 84, 160, 162, 191
Brennan 205
Budd 205 Gilbert 206
Burnyeat 205
Ginsberg 209
Glover 210, 212
cardinal and ordinal judgements 86
goods 83–6, 88, 209 see also desires,
Chomsky 206
distress
Clayton 208
Govier 206
coercion 165–8
Gray 207
Cohen 205
Griffin 205, 212
Coles 206, 212
consequentialism 30, 32 see also
Hamlyn 205
judgement between alterna-
tives, Principle of Humanity Hampshire 179, 212
contract argument 6, 58–62, 67–8, Hannay 205
82, 172–7 see also Rawls Hare 212
Corlett 206 Harris 210
Held 20
Dahl 157, 211 Hobbes 173
democracy 18, 54–5, 149–53, 203, Holmes 211
211 Honderich, Ingrid 205
arguments for 159–64 Honderich, John 205
democratic terrorism see terrorism Honderich, Kiaran 205
desert 90, 103 Humanity, Principle of 4, 5–6, 77,
desires, great 6, 83–6, 133 83–108, 100, 92, 99, 100
Difference Principle see Rawls badly-off defined 93–6
distress 6, 13, 16, 26, 83 see also goal of 99, 102
badly-off humanity and equality 100–6
doctrines and commitments about policies and practices of principle
terrorism 86, 133, 172–92 96–100
214
Index 215