Philosophical Ambiguities in Ostensibly Unambiguous Times: the Moral Evaluation of Terrorism

The title of my lecture, "Philosophical Ambiguities in Ostensibly Unambiguous Times: The Moral Evaluation of Terrorism," is meant to signal, among other things, a certain apprehension I feel about addressing this subject in the aftermath of September 11. I can imagine some in the audience becoming impatient with what they are about to hear, impatient, that is, with philosophical reflection on this particular topic at this particular time. Terrorism, it might be said, calls for unequivocal condemnation rather than philosophical speculation, logic splitting or argument parsing. And that kind of objection implicitly raises questions about the proper disposition for ethical judgment on matters of grave importance and urgency. Should that disposition evidence analytic distance, circumspection, dispassion and abstraction or should it reflect deeply engaged passionate, unequivocal commitment and expression—in the case of the disposition toward terrorism, unqualified righteous indignation? Some in the audience, I suspect, would opt for the latter with respect to terrorism-passionately expressed righteous indignation. If so, I ask especially for their patience since my own considered view is that for the purposes of moral judgment we need moral inquiry, and for moral inquiry we need at least some kind of dialectical relation between the particular judgments of passionately