Terrorism and consequentialism

✍ Scribed by Burleigh T. Wilkins

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1987
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 605 KB
• Volume: 21
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5363
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00136166

✦ Synopsis

In discussions of terrorism one would expect to encounter a significant division between consequentialists on the one hand and deontologists on the other. One would expect to find consequentialists arguing that terrorism could be justified if, on balance, it advanced the cause of the good over alternative courses of action, and one would expect to find deontologists arguing that terrorism could not be justified even if, on balance, it did advance the cause of the good because terrorism involves the violation of the rights of the innocent. However, while it is the case that deontologists who write on terrorism condemn it for the reason I have given, consequentialists who have written on terrorism have tended to join in the condemnation of terrorism. While conceding that under some circumstances terrorism could be justified, consequentialists have quickly proceeded to state that, of course, such circumstances are in fact exceedingly rare or non-existent and that, given the world as we know it, terrorism cannot be justified. So far as I am aware, no consequentialists have given anything even approaching a justification of terrorism, and to me this seems very odd, odd enough to merit a close scrutiny of what consequentialists have had to say about terrorism. In this essay I shall consider arguments by R.M. Hare, Kai Nielsen, and Ted Honderich, who, despite significant differences among them, can all be considered as consequentialists.