British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

BA PDF Symposium 2006

26 April 2006

Abstracts

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Dr Graham Long

Terrorism, Relativism, and the Just War Tradition

According to the leaders of the “war on terror”, terrorism can never be justified. In this paper, I argue that the contemporary position of the just war tradition (the body of western thought from Aquinas to the present day which aims to lay down conditions for the ethical waging of war) is by no means unequivocal on this question. The scope for uncertainty over the possibility of just terrorism, I suggest, is highlighted by a relativist analysis of the conditions for a just war. Nevertheless, whilst my analysis of just war theory precludes the easiest forms that a condemnation of terrorism can take, the paper concludes that we need not be left in the situation of justifying or excusing terrorism.

The paper proceeds in four sections. The first establishes a preliminary definition of terrorism. The second examines two potential justifications for acts of terrorism in the just war tradition. The first of these, associated especially with Michael Walzer, holds that in conditions of supreme emergency, “necessity knows no rules”. This defence of necessity creates scope for the justified direct targeting of civilians when the situation is sufficiently grave. The second - offered, for example, by Jeff McMahon - holds that the moral guilt or innocence of targets, rather than their combatant or non-combatant status, should be the determining factor in deciding against whom force should be used. In setting aside the principle of non-combatant immunity to violence, it similarly creates scope for potentially justified terrorism. In the third section, I argue that both of these potential defences rest on the war in question being resorted to justly (most importantly, in the sense of being undertaken for a just cause). It might be thought that the rejection of terrorism lies here, in the distinction between the ends that are served rather than the means employed. However, I argue that a limited and defensible form of relativism about morality raises the possibility of what I term, following John Rawls, “reasonable disagreement” on such questions. A shortfall in compelling moral justification plagues both broad issues of the justice of a war and the narrower questions of risk and proportionality involved in calculations of supreme emergency or sufficient moral guilt. In my fourth and concluding section, I trace the implications of this line of argument. I suggest that acknowledging relativism about just cause need not mean abandoning either the just war tradition or our condemnation of terrorism. Instead, I conclude that value-neutral criteria for the justice of war can be brought to the fore and supplemented by a focus on public justification.

Graham Long is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University. He is the author of Relativism and the Foundations of Liberalism (Imprint Academic Press, 2005). His current research interests focus on the relationship between relativism and questions of international justice, particularly cosmopolitanism and just war theory.