Abraham Kaplan - The Ethics of Terror

THE ETHICS OF TERROR

Abraham Kaplan

"The chief scandal of our age is the assassination of innocence in the name of justice' [M. L. Rubinoff]" (p. 5).

"Killing was once a sin, then it became a crime, and at last an illness. Now it is no more than a political statement. Norms of every kind have been replaced by standards of political correctness; normative assessment has given way to calculations of political effectiveness" (p. 5).

"Much can be said for the view that 'all political problems are in the end ethical problems' [B. Blanshard]. Ethics may underlie all normative systems dealing with behavior--including not only politics but religion, law, and psychiatry. . . .
"Political norms must rest on an ethical basis or else they express nothing but naked self-interest, and that only as blind dogma defines it. A decade ago Vietnam and Watergate heightened awareness that politics is subject to ethics, not the other way around. When political interests shifted and new loyalties and identifications emerged, the lesson so painfully learned was unlearned--indeed, it is being systematically negated. As no less a moralist than Martin Luther once observed, it all depends on whose ox is being gored (p. 6).
"If history records any moral progress, it is in the progressive freeing of moral judgment from the distortions of groundless subjectivism. Just over a hundred years ago, slavery was still thought morally justifiable. In retrospect, it is easy to see how economic interest clouded judgment. Today oil and ideology work to sustain acquiescence in terrorist murder. . . .
"The fact is that in addressing the ethics of terrorism we cannot stipulate the immorality of terror. Widespread justifications for terror are being offered by terrorists and by their political supporters. . . .
"The terrorist ethic (or lack of it) is revealed in the semantics of 'claiming' responsibility for an act of terror rather than 'confessing' it. . . . No cowardice or cruelty shames the act of terror; on the contrary, terrorists take pride in their performance.
"Political semantics are notoriously irresponsible. Labeling an act 'terror' does not make it so, but merely may make people think it so. The term terror should not be applied to all violence of which the speaker disapproves. . . . Moral discrimination calls for more discriminating semantics (p. 7).
"Violence constitutes an act of terror when its victims are distinct from its target--those being coerced. The distance between target and victim varies from direct agents of the target (in political terror, diplomats, police, soldiers, officials) to totally uninvolved bystanders" (p. 8).

"Terrorist and their supporters repudiate the principle of democratic legal philosophy that 'better ten guilty person escape than one innocent suffer,' replacing it by its converse, that victimizing the innocent is justified if, through the victimization, the guilty are made to suffer. They may hold instead that the victims are not truly innocent, thereby blurring the distinction between victim and target, and so denying that the act was terroristic at all (p. 8).
"All violence evokes fear that coerces the target. . . . But unless the victims of an act are distinguished from its target, the act cannot be called terroristic.
"The distinction is not always easily drawn. Bystanders may become unintended victims . . . or incidental victims. . . . The difference lies in the intent. Terrorists intentionally involve victims, so as to produce the fear meant to coerce the target" (p. 9).

"The justification is sometimes offered that terror is the sole recourse of those who face a hopelessly superior power subjecting them to despotism or enslavement. Most terror, however, however, has been used by the powerful against the powerless--witness the reigns of terror of Robespierre and Danton, of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin; of Moamar Quadafi, Idi Amin, and the Ayatollah Khomeini.
"Those protesting injustice have effectively employed non terrorist measures--dissent, disobedience, and passive resistance. They have also used violence that was not terroristic, since it was directed against targets themselves rather than against innocent victims. . . . The defense of terror as a necessary evil is superficial and groundless.
"A more sophisticated defense claims poetic justice. It is the terrorist whois the innocent victim. The major premise of this defense is a generalization about prior wrongs now being redressed. . . (p. 10).
". . . the major premise of the poetic justice defense presents the terrorist as a victim of pervasive and unremitting violence; his victims are not innocent because they shared in perpetrating this systematic violence. . . . By this definition, poverty and discrimination are indeed forms of violence. So too are ideologies in defense of dictatorship or terror. . . .
"'It confuses the issue to use the emotively loaded word violence, when the grievance can be better described and treated under another name; the term 'injustice' also has much emotive force' [R. Audi]. The sweeping usage, however, gives the ideologue the opportunity to argue that the violence he defends is only a response to violence already inflicted. . . .
"The theme of counter-violence is developed by [Herbert] Marcuse with explicit reference to terrorism, and with a claim not only for moral justification for terror but even of a moral obligation to use it. 'Terror may become a necessity and an obligation. Here, violence, revolutionary violence, appear not only as a political means but as a moral duty. The terror is defined as counter-violence.' The argument is that the target has used violence all along; (p. 11) to object to terrorism is to hold that the target has a right to use violence but that his victims do not.
"Suppression and sacrifice are daily exacted by all societies,' Marcuse continues, . . . 'one cannot start becoming moral and ethical at an arbitrary but expedient point of cutoff: the point of revolution.' From his own premises the conclusion might instead be drawn, not that terror is a moral obligation, but that both suppression and terror are immoral. Why not start becoming moral and ethical right now, instead of waiting until after the revolution?"
"Whether the use of terror, as distinguished from other means of redress, is justified remains questionable even when the oppression undeniably exists. But when the oppression is merely alleged, the issue become far sharper, especially when that allegation is challenged. . . . A selective sense of justice makes these reasons suspect as rationalizations.
"Rationalization is invoked because realism and rationality cannot countenance the argument that two wrongs make aright. President McKinley's assassin explained, 'It (p. 12) is not right that the President should have everything and we should have nothing.' His disordered mind could not understand that killing the President does not give 'us' something to redress the balance. In the last century, the almighty dollar and gunboat diplomacy were widely condemned. In our time, petrodollars and the politics of terror not only escape condemnation; it is their victims who are condemned, on what purport to be moral grounds.
"One sin brings another in its train: First terror is excused, then it is glorified:

'Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.'

"That was written in the Age of Reason by Alexander Pope, in his 'Essay on Man.' To many people today, vice does not look so bad to start with.
"With regard to terror, more than familiarity is at work; an ethical variant of the genetic fallacy is applied. The causes of an action are treated as if they were reasons for it, and the reasons, in turn, are taken to be justifications. To understand behavior may require that we suspend moral judgment--but only suspend it, not abandon it. To understand all is not to forgive all, any more than discovering the etiology of a disease makes it any less unwelcome. Those who seek scientific understanding of behavior are not freed by their scientific aim from the obligation to make moral discriminations. Science and morals are not enemies except when pretended morality is irrational and when a presumptuous science puts itself above moral responsibility" (p. 13).

"The rhetoric of the apostles of terror is hardly new. Shakespeare has Brutus exclaim after the assassination of Caesar,

'. . . waving our red weapons o'er our heads,
Let's all cry, peace, freedom, and liberty!

to which Cassius adds,

'. . . How many ages hence,
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,
In states unborn, and accents yet unknown!

"We all have a duty to call things by their right names. Political motives do not automatically transform murderers into freedom fighters or guerrillas. The pretense of terrorists to the legitimacy of military action would sometimes be comic were it not for its tragic outcomes (p. 14).
". . . . The act of terror displays only cowardice; seldom do these 'heroes' attack anyone other than unarmed civilians.
"Making heroes of terrorists is reminiscent of the former glamorization of gangsters and the outlaws of the Old West. Children have played cops-and-robbers for untold generations; no doubt such fantasies have a constructive element. Maturity, as well as morality, requires that they remain fantasies and not be acted out."

"Hero or no, the terrorist today is unquestionably a celebrity. Terrorism, to a significant degree, is a product of the mass media, and might not survive without the media. The terrorist act must have an audience, or who will be terrorized? The terrorist group must maintain a high profile, or who will fear them? Public opinion must be mo- (p. 15) bilized in support of the terrorist aims, rival groups must be impressed, and potential sources of support must be won over and kept content.
"The media have special obligations in covering terror. . . . Their coverage, especially during the terrorist action but afterwards, too, must be severely restricted, so as not to exacerbate the situation in process, nor to intensify afterwards the gains terrorists can expect from further terrorist acts. Targets of terror have a similar obligation to deflate both the terrorist and his activity; public responses by high government officials serve the terrorists' aims whatever the content of the responses might be. In terror, the medium is the message.
"Responses to terror raise other ethical considerations. Negotiating with terrorists (instead of calling for their surrender) implies a relationship between equals that cannot be morally countenanced, unless one views terrorism as morally acceptable. In such negotiations the terrorist is given privileges ordinarily denied to law-abiding citizens, privileges like access to important officials and to the mass media. Honoring agreements reached with terrorists overlooks the glaring circumstance that the agreements were coerced, and so have no moral or legal validity. To keep faith with terrorists is to strengthen faith in terror."
"Many ideologues . . . advocate responses to terror in accord with an 'even-handed, balanced' policy. . . . This is an easy view for apologists in nations not under terrorist attack. To the vic- (p. 16) tim of terror this approach conveys the attitude that the tiger is only seeking food after all, and since his prey has four limbs, in all fairness he should be willing to part with one or two."
"The policy of even-handedness springs less from a sense of justice--not a conspicuous virtue of governments--than from venality and political cowardice. . . . 'The one means that wins the easiest victory over reason,' a writer has maintained, 'is terror and force.' The writer is Adolf Hitler. When economic pressures--not only oil but also billions of dollars in purchasing power--are also at work, the victory is virtually assured."

"Apologists for terror hold that assassination is not murder, taking hostages is not kidnapping, hijacking is not piracy. . . .
"Motives are significant for understanding what action has been performed and why. . . (p. 17). The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
"The political terrorist is usually not acting singly, or as part of a small conspiracy, but (at least in his own eyes) as the instrument of a broad political movement. . . . The immorality of terror does not lie in the assertion that a group is doing something that an individual may not do. . . .
"Even though an individual acts in the name of a group, it is always he himself who is morally responsible. This is the doctrine formulated in the Nuremburg trials: 'Crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced.' The United Nations Gen- (p. 18) eral Assembly, though today unwilling to outlaw terrorism, reaffirmed the principles of Nuremburg by a resolution of November 21, 1947.
"Not every individual is equally responsible for every action of the state or society. That is the assumption terrorists sometimes make, to prove that they are no innocent victims because everyone is responsible for the grievances the terrorists seek to redress. But an individual is responsible only to the extent of his individual impact on the group's actions. . . . In short, individual terrorists, not abstract political entities, are morally accountable.
"The morality of the individual terrorist hinges on the ethics of absolutism. In absolutism certain ends of action are assigned an absolute value and are considered worth pursuing no matter what the consequences. . .. Marcuse points to the destructiveness of religious absolutism: 'As long as a transcendent sanction of ethics was accepted . . . infidels could justly be exterminated, heretics could justly be burned.' He does not note that 'historical necessity' and 'national interest' may make equally deadly claims. Political doctrine is invoked to justify extermination just as is religious doctrine. (p. 20) Religion and politics can unite to form especially unyielding absolutisms, as in several of the Islamic dictatorships.
"Sidney Hook has tellingly criticized the absolutism of conscience. . . . Disobedience of any law that runs counter to conscience is a principle that, if unqualified, negates the rule of law, for conscience notoriously varies from person to person. If conscience is God-given, it is, in Freud's words, 'a careless and uneven piece of work.' The tyranny of conscience has claimed more victims by far than has merely unprincipled opportunism. The fact that the terrorist is driven by a conviction that he is claiming his 'just rights' does not automatically endow his acts of terror with moral justification.
"The besetting sin of the absolutist is a total lack of humility; he is utterly incapable of asking himself, 'And what if I am wrong?' He mistakes himself for God's vicar on earth, and his private fantasies of the good for a vision of Paradise. . . . Not all action is threatened by taking thought, only such action as scuttles from cover from the light of reason. Absolutism, like other forms of irrationality, is self-defeating. When we say, 'Let justice be done though the heavens fall,' they do fall, and justice lies broken in the ruins.
"Absolutism founders on the bitter truth that the means we employ shape our ends. The pursuit itself colors the worth of the pursued; the pursuit become part of the pursued's substance. To say of the terrorist, 'I sympathize (p. 20) with his ends, though I disapprove of his means' expresses the same naivete that would say of the rapist, 'He only wants love.' The Deuteronomist's injunction, 'Justice, justice shalt thou pursue!' repeats the word justice . . . because if there is no justice in our pursuits there will be no justice in our attainments.
"Morality is at one with the law in holding that whoever wills to use specific means is willing the ends that reasonably are to be expected from those means. That is why absolutism is self-defeating. 'There are forms of violence and suppression which no revolutionary situation can justify,' Marcuse acknowledges, 'because they negate the very end for which the revolution is a means. Such are arbitrary violence, cruelty, and indiscriminate terror.' Terror by its very nature is arbitrary, cruel, and indiscriminate. The terrorist is indifferent to the identity of his victims, and knows that the more cruel his act, the greater the terror it inspires.
"Morality, in weighing the consequences of action, looks particularly to effects on character, on life-style, on the quality of life. He that lives by the sword dies by the sword, not because cosmic powers are bent on punishing him, but because the swordsman is, at the last, unable to lay down his weapon. . . .
"The dissociation of ends from means is embodied in the fallacy of absolute priority: first I will get rich, then live a life of leisurely contemplation; first I will win office, (p. 21) then govern justly; first I will attain power, then promulgate peace and freedom. The terrorist's version of the Gospels teaches, 'Seek ye first the kingdom of this earth, and all these things shall be added unto you.' But that day never comes."

"It has been conjectured that, psychologically, the terrorist is seeking to regain a paradise lost. What he does is very real; what he hopes for remains fantasy. 'Radicals' and 'urban guerrillas' . . . suppose that bombing banks and shooting down corporation executives will replace capitalism with a more humane society. In fact, these acts do not make way for the new order, but merely destroy individual victims. Terrorists have been called 'revolutionists in a hurry'; the truth is that 'terrorism has tended to retard rather than advance the cause of social reform. The victims of the assassins are easily replaced; a regime . . . is galvanized into action; and all reformers are plausibly stigmatized.'
"The terrorist has committed himself to prophecy: He justifies what he does by predicting the future he is bringing about--a future so probable and so much more desir- (p. 22) able than the present as to make the act of terror worthwhile. He relies on what Marcuse calls a 'historical calculus'--the 'calculation of the chances of a future society as against the chances of the existing society with respect to human progress.' . . . There is a missing premise in this logic: Hegel's principle that whatever is, is right. Only a tortuous dialectic can provide the needed rationalization.
". . . . It is hard enough to predict the outcome of rational action; 'those who would predict the outcome of violence are brash indeed' [H.Girvetz]. When blood is spilled for the sake of such uncertain futures, pretended idealism is unmasked as savagery. All that can be predicted of violence is that if it is not resisted it will continue to claim its victims.
"The destruction that terror wreaks is sure, while its goals are visionary and doubtful. Taking such a risk is hardly grounded in rational realistic expectations; the inference that other motivations are at work is ineluctable. The terrorist does not turn to violence merely as a means to his ends--for him, it is an end in itself. The mugger typically beats his victim after robbing him; he robs to have occasion for the beating. The rapist is filled, not with lust, but with anger and hate. Widespread today is a cult (p. 23) of violence, complete with sacrifices, priesthood, and theologians.
". . . . An infantile belief in the magic of violence has become pandemic: the belief that any action, if it is violent enough, is bound to succeed."

"There are many ways to resolve conflicts, violence being but the final recourse. The cult of violence, though, gives force unchallenged priority in the political arena. 'The first maxim of our policy,' said Robespierre, 'should be to conduct the people by reason, and the enemies of the people by terror.' The irony is that only the so-called enemies of the people are ready to negotiate; terrorism has no use for talk. Frequent targets of violence linked to terrorist action are the mediators of nonviolent conflict resolution: law makers, judges, election officials. It has become a cliche of our time that law and morality live in the barrel of a rifle, provided the police are not wielding it.
"The ethics I am articulating do not condemn every use of force; pacifism may also be immoral. There is a moral obligation, after all, to struggle against injustice. Turning the other cheek is seldom an effective device for changing (p. 24) another's behavior. But ethics do condemn violence for its own sake, the same violence that claims innocent victims--in a word, terror. . . . Terror manifests the politics of hate. Who are the haters and who is the hated is a touchstone of political morality.
"Surrender to terror is moral as well as political cowardice. The rationale that to surrender is only to save lives disregards all the future lives put at stake when terrorism is allowed to succeed. . . . For rewarding an action can only encourage its repetition."

". . . . Moral integrity is not a species of absolutism; it means acting on our moral principles, not merely making pious declarations afterwards.
"Criminologists agree that the most effective deterrent (p. 25) to crime is swift and sure punishment. . . ."

"Where moral sensibilities have not been altogether blunted, demands for capital punishment of terrorists are often heard. Such executions might meet inner needs; but they cannot be justified on the basis of external consequences. Years of capital punishment in dozens of jurisdictions have failed to provide convincing evidence of its deterrent effect. To take a human life deliberately, whether of a terrorist or of anyone else, only because we think it might produce a desired result, is to be guilty of the same immorality condemned in the act of terror. Capital punishment may even encourage terrorism, for if the terrorist is performing a sacrament of violence, his own death is but the symbolic fulfillment of his life.
"A deterrent as effective as swift and sure punishment of the terrorist is punishment of the 'accessories'--governments that, before and after the fact, train and offer refuge to terrorist groups. Many nations have readily submitted to boycotts as a sanction. But these boycotts have been imposed for political ends; an international consensus on using boycotts to enforce moral standards seems far in the future" (p. 26).

"Those who mold opinion in the democratic countries--intellectuals, clergy, and others--have failed to take a strong moral stand, because they have split politically on this issue. But the issue is moral, not political. 'Terror commits its deepest injury when it tempts us to silence [J. O'Neill].' It may be committing a deeper injury when it induces ideologues to speak out in defense of terror. They do so because they are identifying with the terrorist rather than with his victims. . . .
"Some years ago I was a delegate to a White House conference on youth and heard a young man argue down a motion to condemn terrorism, on the grounds that 'you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.' He was quoting Robespierre's excuse for the Reign of Terror. In my ears it was a particularly lame excuse, for I had just returned from the Galilee, where a school bus had been machine-gunned by terrorists a few days before. My conviction was irresistible that had he been sitting in the bus along with the other youngsters, such an argument would have filled him with horror" (p. 27).
"'Do not stand idly by the blood of your fellows,' Scripture enjoins. When the blood is your own, morality coincides with simple self-interest, and duty with natural impulse. If terror is allowed to flourish anywhere, men everywhere are condemned to live in fear" (p. 28).

Kaplan, Abraham. (1983). The Ethics of Terror. In
Terrorism: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.Edited by
Burr Eichelman, David Soskis & William Reid.
Washington, D. C.: American Psychiatric Association,
pp. 5-29.

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Re:Abraham Kaplan - The Ethics of Terror, by Charles Dollins, 12/18/01

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