| PHILOSOPHER TED
HONDERICH Thinks Terrorism Is Sometimes ‘Morally Acceptable’ by Lode Delputte DeMorgen, Brussels, 24 April 2006 translated by Jeremy McKenna, subsequently edited by Ted Honderich ‘The Palestinians will never get there through negotiations’
Some terrorism is morally acceptable, you say. How do you arrive at that conclusion? "Well, there is a lot to be said about that. One thing is that a guiding idea for thinking in 2006 and the new century in general is that ordinary propositions about terrorism are a matter of ignorant convention. We live in ignorant societies -- the US, Israel, a country such as Belgium. With the US, you can speak of paradigmatic stupidity -- people just don’t possess the facts to make intelligent judgement possible. One of the consequences of this is the way in which they think about terrorism. Many think it is a simple problem to which as a result a simple answer can be found. A philosopher can try to argue that things are precisely anything but simple. They are only presented as such by politicians like Blair.” But still, in what sense are some acts of terrorism OK? What is it in your opinion that allows desperate Palestinians to engage in suicide attacks? One approach we often follow when it comes to thinking about such terrorism is international law. We may think, also, of the Catholic theory of the just war, or about the UN declaration of human rights which legitimates certain liberation struggles, or about the liberal and conservative traditions in politics, or about going by democracy. If you look at any of these methods and doctrines, or put them together, you’ll
find that in the end they are not much help. They don’t really offer a solution to the question of terrorism. For that, we need a fundamental moral principle. We need one in order to decide, for example, what self-defence justifies war, or which human rights or claims to human rights are to have priority over others. And, of course, what judgements of democracies are right judgements. I think there is such a moral principle and I depend on it -- the Principle of Humanity.” Could you explain yourself in more detail? What is the link with terror? “Well, to say a little more about the Principle of Humanity, we have to start with our fundamental human desires, and, in connection with this, with what constitutes a bad life. There are, according to me, six fundamental human desires. One is for a decent length of life. People should reach 75 years of age and not 35. Another is for a bearable quality of life -- free of pain, a roof over your head, enough food. People also want to be able to exercise freedom and power, at home, in personal relationships, but also with respect to their own society or their own country. Further, we all want respect and self respect. Nobody wants to be the victim of racism, or be called ‘nigger’ of 'Jew'. We also want the goods of different kinds of interpersonal relations. A final desire has to do with culture, including education and religion. What constitutes a bad life? You can decide it's a life in which some of these fundamental conditions are absent, especially the first three.” Okay, but can a person with a bad life then kill another innocent person? “We, all of us, humanity, must take reasonable steps to raise people as much as possible out of bad lives. I understand reasonable steps as those that really reduce the number of bad lives, not the usual pretences. Reasonable steps really do something, and don’t make things worse, don't cause more bad lives than they prevent. This principle has to be the starting point for any response to the question of terrorism.” You’ve mainly concentrated on Palestinian terrorism in your reflections. Don’t you think that Palestinians, in their struggle for an independent state, would have got much further if they had abandoned terrorism? Maybe then the Israelis wouldn’t have become so radical? “If we try to settle on a principle of morality, it may not take us long to come to a consensus provided our own interests are not under threat. We may well come to the Principle of Humanity. There is something harder. It’s a lot harder to deal with factual questions. The question you ask as to whether Palestinians would have gotten further without terrorism against the Israelis, by negotiating more, is an outstanding example. But I am persuaded about an answer. Start with the division of Palestine in 1948. That was not a division into halves or anything like it. The Palestinians were left with only 20% of their historic homeland. I myself justify that coming into existence of Israel and I agree with the defence of that original state. But since the 1967 war of enlargement, neo-Zionists have been in power in Israel. They haven’t stopped trying to take more and more Palestinian land. They have been engaged in the rapacious violation of another people. They have been viciously intransigent. They haven't really tried to negotiate in the ordinary sense of the word. I don’t think more negotiations with them could have brought the Palestinians closer to their goal. To my mind there is a history that just proves otherwise.” And so they can turn to terror. You justify violence. "There's a lot to be said about that, of course. One thing is that it’s not at all abnormal to justify violence or terrorism. Throughout history, violence has continually been defended. Towards the end of the Second World War, the British government and the British people justified the bombing of Dresden. We called it, perfectly correctly, terror-bombing. I do not condone that bombing, only point out that such things are regularly defended. Neo-Zionist violence in Palestine is justified by neo-Zionists. They make appeal to their moral rights. Some of them even add in religious rights. I do not agree with them. On the contrary, I do think their adversaries have a moral right to resort to violence. But I am speaking of the ordinariness of justifying violence. There is a lot of unreflective convention in it. Philosophy can help us to judge this, help us get away from convention, get away from the dim talk of our politicians." Your statements are controversial and have brought you many opponents. More than a few call you anti-Semitic. What do you answer to that? “It is simply wrong to claim that I am an anti-Semite. I have no generally negative sentiments against Jews. None at all. I have had a Jewish wife, and I have Jewish grandchildren. I wrote a revealing autobiography before any of this stuff about anti-Semitism happened -- Philosopher, a Kind of Life. It's about academic life at the university in London, and people in my life. It just confirms beyond doubt to a reasonable reader that I am not a Jew hater. The only thing I am opposed to is neo-Zionism. In this, I’m a pretty typical left-wing British academic, on the side of the Palestinians. Maybe the only thing that distinguishes me from the rest, is that I am a philosopher, that I try to be explicit about certain things, that I have views about the nature of morality and moral principles, and that I talk about moral rights.” Back to terrorism. In law, a distinction is made between soldiers and civilians. Civilians may not be targets. What do you say about innocent civilians being the victims of terrorism? “That is a central question, but it isn’t difficult to answer -- it's not at all, as I once thought, a very difficult question. The biggest argument against terrorism is indeed that innocent or civilian or non-combatant people die as a result of it. But in war the intention can also be to kill the such people -- that intention is present to a large extent. It is not as if the intentional killing of the innocent is peculiar to terrorism and this allows us to reach a quick and easy judgement concerning terrorism. We cannot, because terrorism simply cannot be differentiated from war in this way. Look at what the Americans and the British are doing in Iraq. Consider the 20 to 80 thousand innocent people in Iraq who have died at the hands of the US and Great Britain and other groups. Bush and Blair knew perfectly well that innocent people would be killed. They foresaw that and went ahead. They intended it in the only really important sense. “People reply that there is another idea of unintentional killing. They say that the British and Americans save as many innocent people as possible – i.e. avoid killing them – because the primary target is to kill the insurgents and not ordinary civilians. Well, such an argument, not that it is worth much, can also be used by the Palestinians. They can say they would choose if they could to kill others than innocent people. Also, to mention another idea, it does not follow from the fact that the perpetrator has the courage to look at the people in the café he’s going to blow up that he is more wrong in what he does than the fighter pilot who drops a bomb at altitude over a city he can barely see and tears the limbs from people he’ll never look in the eye. It’s absurd to say that the one act is morally justifiable and the other not.” Defining terror is a tricky business. There are a lot of definitions in circulation. What is your definition? “That of the American army, which is also used by Noam Chomsky and a great many other people. It is quite simple. Terrorism is (1) killing and violence. It is (2) not done for personal gain but with a social goal in mind. Further, (3) it is unlawful, and (4) smaller in scale than war, and (5) prima facie wrong because it is maiming and killing. Now look at war. Some of it is as unlawful, in contravention of international law, anyway certainly not shown to be according to that law. Take the case in Iraq. If you compare the war in Iraq with terrorism, you see the war has all the characteristics of terrorism except one: the scale or size. Iraq is therefore a perfect example of a terrorist war, whatever the importance of that fact is.” One of the reasons often referred to in order to classify terrorism and to go some way towards understanding it, is that terrorists are poor, desperate and without opportunities. That is, however, far from true in all cases. Look at the hijackers of 9/11. What is your opinion of those attacks? “Can you be justified in committing terrorist acts if you’re not yourself a victim? Is the idea in the question the idea that what can justify actions is being in a certain kind of life-situation or having a certain kind of intention? I don't agree with that. Think of members of a Western peacekeeping force or an ordinary British police officer enforcing the law. Some soldiers and officers are racist. Sometimes they act from the worst possible motives. But what makes an act right or wrong -- peace-keeping or stopping a rape -- is not the intention with which it is performed, but the consequences it produces. “I am a consequentialist. I judge the rightness of an act by its probable consequences. That’s not the same as saying that the end justifies the means. It is both the end and the means that justify the end. Immanuel Kant says that an act is good or bad in relation to the intention that lies behind it. Kant spoke of the pure will. But if you think about that for a moment, it’s a rather crazy idea. Think, for example, of what you have to agree was the right action on the part of British members of parliament of voting for the establishment of the National Health Service, that great thing. Some of them, you can think, didn’t do so out of good intentions. Some might have been against it, and voted for it because they wanted to be re-elected. No pure good will at all. Were they therefore doing the wrong thing? Of course not. Whether an action is right or not depends on the foreseeable consequences.” Can you justify a terrorist act if the final goal consists of a Taliban-like theocratic dictatorship, which was more or less the case with 9/11? If oppression by Western capitalism is simply replaced by another kind of oppression? “It may well be that some objectives of the 9/11 terrorists cannot be supported. Put that question aside. But one objective had to do with exactly Palestine. It was opposition to the ethnic cleansing of neo-Zionism. That is an objective I support. What was wrong about 9/11 was that the chosen means was greatly irrational. The attacks were monstrously wrong because of the consequences that could be anticipated. The attacks in New York and Washington in fact led to the Iraq war, maybe 80,000 deaths -- and something like that could be anticipated beforehand. That’s why 9/11 was wrong, and why I condemn that terrorism, just as I condemn the London attacks in July last year -- attacks, by the way, for which Blair bears a moral responsibility, a lot more than I do.. The only terrorism I support, whatever this commits me to, is Palestinian terrorism in historic Palestine. It is the only option open to the Palestinians, and I think that it will have justifying consequences in the end.” For the original interview as published in Dutch go to DeMorgen interview. It has been edited by T.H. because it seemed not to convey his views effectively, very likely because of his own mistakes in speaking to Lode Delputte. For another Belgian interview, see Not All Terror Is Reprehensible. HOME to T.H. website front page HOME to Det & Free front page |
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