Terrorism, Moral Conceptions, and Moral Innocence

Since September 11, a new conception of terrorism has soared to prominence among philosophers and politicians. It holds that terrorism is gravely and distinctively wrong because it directly targets persons who are not responsible for, or morally innocent of, the terrorists’ grievance. Moreover, it holds that those properties capture and explain the conventional moral judgment that terrorism is almost always wrong. On this against-moral-innocents conception, to which I henceforth refer as “the AMI,” genuine terrorism cannot target people who are morally responsible for the alleged terrorists’ grievance: For an act to count as an instance of terrorism, it must target those who are not responsible for, or are morally innocent of, the grievance. Consider, for example, Hezbollah’s 1983 truck bombing of the U.S. and French barracks in Beirut. According to the AMI conception, whether the bombing counts as terrorism depends on whether the soldiers killed were responsible for Hezbollah’s grievance: If they were responsible, it cannot be terrorism; only if they were innocent could the act count as terrorism. Pari passu, if uprisen slaves captured a town and then, as a warning, massacred those civilian slave-owners who had vigorously and publicly supported slavery, that would not count as an act of terrorism, for the victims were deeply morally complicit in the slaves’ grievance.