Can Suicide Bombing Ever Be Justified? March 4
On the radio program I’m listening to and all over the web people are (or at least were a year ago) wringing their hands over the fact that 13% of US muslims said that suicide bombing could sometimes be justified. What a dumb fucking question. Of course suicide bombing can sometimes be justified. In fact I think the low percent answering yes suggests a troubling failures of logic and imagination.
I mean how many people would really feel that Stauffenberg would really have been doing a moral wrong if he had staid in the conference room with the bomb and actually made sure he killed Hitler instead of failing. You might not believe he was morally obligated to do so but surely giving your life even for a 10% greater chance of saving millions is not morally impermissable. Now true if we look at the actual PEW center study we see the question is posed in a slightly more troubling manner. It asks about suicide bombing against civilian targets for the defense of islam. But even if history doesn’t provide us with easy examples where this sort of action was acutally justified it isn’t hard to imagine ones where it would be justified. For instance suppose Hitler was clearly a civilian leader of the country (as our president and secretary of defense are) and the holocaust had been directed against muslims.
Admittedly the results of the survey are in fact somewhat disturbing given that there were a small but non-trivial percent of respondants who said that suicide bombing was ’sometimes’ or even ‘often’ justified as opposed to rarely (but when you are talking 5% and 1% respectively you have to wonder if they are just blowing off steam from a bad day, or just fucking with people. I mean hell what percentage of Australians answered ‘jedi’ for their religion on the census?). However, little of the hand wringing bothers to go beyond saying that some muslims think suicide bombing can be justified as if that was a facially absurd or immoral view.
I’m not going to take a position on whether the survey itself is disturbing or not (though it has been overblown) but let’s drop this stupid pretense that somehow suicide bombing is facially beyond the pale. Our own movies are filled with heroic suicide attacks, even bombings sometimes against targets that would technically qualify as civilian (evil corporate masterminds bankrolling assassinations and murders, drug kingpins who rely on others to implausibly poision children and so forth). The truth is that we find ‘terrorist’s’ suicide bombings so abhorrent because we view their cause as unjust, their means disproportionate and their targets largely innocent. Indeed we are right to do so but we can’t pretend we aren’t making a substantive moral claim by hiding behind a criticism of the means terrorists use. The bombing of the US barracks in Beirut wouldn’t have been ok if the truck was radio controlled instead of driven by a suicide bomber despite obviously being a military target.
You are right – still these imaginary boundaries do help to simplify moral debates to the point at which mass opinion can be directed.
By this I mean campaigns like the anti land mine campaign or the anti chemical weapons campaign. And I guess (although I don’t know) that these things have had positive effects.
Well not being a politician I can afford to merely try and say what is true rather than what will influence people to the right outcomes :-).
Anyway, I agree that these sort of emotionally salient boundaries can be quite useful and important. Even if chemical weapons do lie on a continuum with conventional weapons creating the psychological barrier to the use of chemical weapons can be very important. By adopting an agreement to consider the use of chemical weapons to be beyond the pale we considerably reduce the harms of war even if there are some individual circumstances where chemical weapons could have been used to end that particular war with a net lower amount of suffering, i.e., the precedential value can overwhelm the current beneit.
Indeed, it is the importance of these sorts of psychologically salient barriers which is the reason I am worried by the campaign against cluster bombs. By allowing this boundary to creep to a place that doesn’t coincide with an emotional distinction risks losing the gains we have made against nukes, chemical weapons and land mines.
However, I don’t think this argument flies for terrorism. For starters, unlike our repugnance for chemical weapons, rejecting suicide bombing out of hand as never justified brings us little benefit. Only terrorists our countries so far outside of the reach of these sorts of norms are ever likely to use it so the gain is minimal. However, the real problem is that this sort of verbal slight of hand discourages people from addressing the real issues of unnecessary and stupid violence. By focusing on civilian targets and suicide bombings we both risk criminalizing future justified resistance efforts and worse letting non-suicide bombings against military targets by terrorists slip through as un-condemned.