I was planning to write an original piece on this topic, but soon discovered that better work already existed. Most notably, here’s a summary of a talk Michael Walzer delivered in 2007. It starts with some boilerplate:
Whether terrorism is wrong is a question that is often answered badly or at least inadequately, according to Walzer, who defines terrorism as the random killing of innocent people, in the hope of creating pervasive fear. “Randomness and innocence are the crucial elements in the definition,” said Walzer. “The critique of this kind of killing hangs especially on the idea of innocence, which is borrowed from ‘just war’ theory.”
By “innocence” Walzer means those noncombatants who are not materially engaged in the war effort. “These people are ‘innocent’ whatever their government and country are doing and whether or not they are in favor of what is being done,”Walzer explained. “The opposite of ‘innocent’ is not ‘guilty,’ but ‘engaged.’ Disengaged civilians are innocent without regard to their personal morality or politics.”
Terrorism attacks this notion of innocence and treats civilians as legitimate targets. The long-term purpose of the fear that terrorists inspire is the collective destruction, removal, or radical subordination of individuals as an associated group. “It is who you are, not what you are doing that makes you vulnerable; identity is liability,” said Walzer. “And that’s a connection that we are morally bound to resist.”
Implicit in the theory of just war is a theory of just peace, Walzer said, meaning noncombatant immunity protects not only individual noncombatants but also the group to which they belong. “Just as the destruction of the group cannot be a legitimate purpose of war,” observed Walzer, “so it cannot be a legitimate practice in war.”
But then it gets good:
Terrorism is a strategy that is chosen from a wide range of possible strategies, according to Walzer. “For many years, I have been insisting that when we think about terrorism we have to imagine a group of people sitting around a table, arguing about what ought to be done,” said Walzer. “When terrorists tell us that they had no choice, there was nothing else to do, terror was their last resort, we have to remind ourselves that there were people around the table arguing against each of those propositions.”
More importantly, I would add, even the best minds just aren’t very good at predicting outcomes controversial among experts. So as a practical matter, anyone claiming to know with confidence that terrorism is a last resort when many experts disagree is negligent at best.
Once terrorists choose terrorism, the answer as to how we should fight them, said Walzer, “is simple in principle, though often difficult in practice: not terroristically. That means, without targeting innocent men and women.” The second answer, according to Walzer, is within the constraints of constitutional democracy. “Right-wing politicians often insist that it isn’t possible to live with either of these limits: they sit around the table and argue for prison camps like Guantanamo or the use of ‘harsh’ interrogation methods,” said Walzer. “We must be the people at the table who say ‘no.’”
In particular, said Walzer, we must “insist at the outset that the people the terrorists claim to represent are not themselves complicit in the terror.” Just as the “terrorists collectivize the guilt of the other side, insisting that every single person is implicated in the wrongful policies of the government,” Walzer explained, “the anti-terrorists must collectivize in the opposite way, insisting on the innocence of the people generally.” Likewise, where terrorists dismiss the notion of collateral or secondary damage, setting out instead to inflict as much primary damage as possible, anti-terrorists have to “distinguish themselves by insisting on the category of collateral damage, and doing as little of it as they can. The rules of jus in bello apply: soldiers must aim only at military targets and they must minimize the harm they do to civilians.”
Walzer then echoes one of my earlier pacifistic analogies between waging war and fighting crime:
Once governments learn to kill, according to Walzer, they are likely to kill too much and too often so moral and political limits must be imposed. “The hard question in war is what degree of risk we are willing to accept for our own soldiers in order to reduce the risks we impose on enemy civilians,” said Walzer. “When the police are chasing criminals in a zone of peace, we rightly give them no latitude for collateral damage. In the strongest sense, they must intend not to injure civilians—even if that makes their operation more difficult and even if the criminals get away. That seems to me roughly the right rule for people planning targeted killings.”
If terrorists use other people as shields, then anti-terrorists have to try to find their way around the shields, Walzer said, just as we would want the police to do.
I severely doubt Walzer would buy my case for pacifism, but after reading this, I really wonder why.
READER COMMENTS
David Henderson
Sep 23 2019 at 9:23am
“But then it gets good.” I disagree. It’s good throughout. What you regard as boilerplate is well reasoned also.
Fred
Sep 23 2019 at 10:00am
Contemporary wars strike civilians very heavily. Wars are not fought between knights on a jousting field or even two armies on some battle ground. Deaths during WW II were around 75 million. Many of the dead simply had the misfortune to reside someplace that some strategist wanted to erase. Currently there is a war in Yemen which has led to famine and a cholera epidemic striking children for the most part. I read that it is the fiftieth anniversary of “Slaughterhouse Five” which inspires a cynical thought in me. It’s “terrorism” when they do it, and “just war” when we do it. Purely economic war via sanctions strikes civilians especially the least powerful members of a society while sparing the leadership…Castro died of old age and Kim Jong-un doesn’t look like he has missed supper very often. Are economic sanctions inherently terroristic?
Phil
Sep 23 2019 at 2:53pm
“When the police are chasing criminals in a zone of peace, we rightly give them no latitude for collateral damage. In the strongest sense, they must intend not to injure civilians—even if that makes their operation more difficult and even if the criminals get away.”
That is overly generous. There is a tremendous amount of latitude regarding what the police can get away with under the guise of “qualified immunity” (and here). It is, of course, better than terrorism but is still morally problematic.
Matthias Görgens
Sep 23 2019 at 10:57pm
Compare Gwern’s twin posts about how ‘Terrorism is not about Terror’ and how ‘Terrorism is not Effective’.
(I’d give the links, but the spam filter here doesn’t like links very much. You can easily find them with your favourite search engine, or directly on gwern’s website.)
Ghatanathoah
Sep 24 2019 at 12:59am
I like the distinction between “guilty,” “innocent,” and “engaged.” But I can imagine a pedantic terrorist who argues that all citizens of a country are “engaged” because they pay taxes to the government, or because they don’t actively help the terrorists fight the government (after all, if you aren’t part of the solution you’re part of the problem).
I think it’s important to push back against that kind of thinking. People are not morally implicated for going about their day-to-day lives. They are not worthy of death for being unwilling to go to jail for tax evasion, or being unwilling to sabotage their own government. A person who pays taxes, some tiny fraction of a cent of which goes to paying a war criminal’s salary, is not on the same moral level as a war criminal.
I should also note that you can find this kind of “everyone’s guilty for being a member of a group” type thinking outside of armed conflict too. Like with the Westboro Baptist types who think all Americans are guilty merely for tolerating gay people. Or the SJWs who think all white people or all men are guilty, even if none of them have personally done anything wrong, if they don’t devote their lives to doing SJ stuff 24/7.
nobody.really
Sep 24 2019 at 3:57pm
“Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed,” cried the phantom, “not to know, that ages of incessant labour by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed. Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!”
“But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.
“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)
nobody.really
Sep 24 2019 at 5:36pm
Does terrorism violate Western norms? Sure.
Does it work? Sometimes; consider the Algerian War of Independence.
Ideally, what strategy would Western nations adopt against terrorism? Treating it as a matter of crime, not of war.
But while democracies have many advantages in terms of legitimacy and stability (thereby reducing the incentive for assassination, for example), they have a soft underbelly: Public opinion. Sophisticated parties know how to manipulate that opinion. And terrorists can act with sophistication. If they succeed in riling up the public, democratic leaders will face difficulty restraining public demands for retribution. Retribution against terrorists often takes the form of collective punishment, which has the effect of unifying each nation in opposition to the other.
Thus, while I find little to dispute in Walzer’s argument, Walzer fails to articulate precisely HOW a democratic leader should resist popular demands for retribution—especially when rival candidates will be happy to pander to the public’s worst instincts. In short, the quoted passages make Walzer seems Polly-Anna-ish.
Comments are closed.