This essay is a critical philosophical analysis of the concept of “state terrorism” based upon an epistemological discussion. Taking proper account of the role of innocence in the context of armed conflict will alter our ordinary ways of thinking about the ethics of war, with respect to both jus in bello and jus ad bellum. Such misunderstandings make it all too easy to justify both terrorist actions and morally objectionable actions on the part of nations at war. Indeed, the philosophical positions in question tend to misunderstand the justification of both the prohibition against targeting noncombatants, and that of the permission to attack combatants, for which the paper offers a new account. I argue, however, that the arguments used to support these doubts are ultimately unsuccessful.

Yet contemporary philosophers tend to doubt that the concept of innocence plays any significant role here, and to deny that prohibitions against targeting noncombatants can be justified through appeal to their moral innocence. By applying the concept of 'mythicism' to the general idea of violent terrorism, I re-characterize the “limitlessness” of some violent terrorists’ ambitions in a fruitful new way that represents their activity as neither simply quantitative nor utterly novel.Ĭommonsense moral thought holds that what makes terrorism particularly abhorrent is the fact that it tends to be directed toward innocent victims. Therefore, I contend further that the fanaticism condition is salvageable when revised drastically. (I call these two putative necessary conditions 'the destructiveness condition' and 'the fanaticism condition,' respectively.) Nevertheless, the common intuition that some contemporary violent terrorists are more extreme than others still seems rather plausible.

I argue, first, that the EA cannot distinguish between “new” and “old” terrorists, because it mistakes two sorts of quantitative difference-i.e., the greater destructiveness of particular actions and the relative scales of particular ends-for qualitative ones. I show philosophy’s relevance to studies of violent terrorism by exposing and proposing corrections for some serious logical flaws in the most widely accepted analysis of the concept of the “new terrorist,” which I call the 'expert analysis' (EA).

Philosophers view on terrorism