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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 8/4/2021, SPi
The Meaning of Terrorism

Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved.
The Meaning of
Terrorism
C. A. J. COADY
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
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© C. A. J. Coady 2021
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First Edition published in 2021
Impression: 1
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You must not circulate this work in any other form
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
For Samuel and Rosa Coady in the hope that their future lies in a world in
which the values of peace and justice are at last genuinely respected.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Shaping a Concept of Terrorist Acts: A Clarifying Proposal 10
2. Further Objections: The Tactical Definition Too Broad?
Too Narrow? 33
3. Terrorism and Its Claims to “Distinctive Significance” 54
4. Combatants, Non-Combatants, and the Question of Innocence 81
5. Justifying Terrorism: Four Attempts 110
6. Justifying Terrorism: Three More Attempts 129
7. Counter-Terrorism and Its Ethical Hazards 149
8. Religion, War, and Terrorism 176
References 207
Index 217
Acknowledgments
Philosophers writing on and often discussing together urgent issues related

to war and terrorism form a relatively large, if internationally dispersed,
community of concern. My thinking has profited greatly from both personal
and non-personal interaction with many of its members. Unreliable mem-
ory and space limitation do not permit acknowledgment of all those in the
community to whose stimulation in person or in print I owe intellectual
debts in the matter of discussing terrorism, so what follows is a necessarily
select list (in both the honorific and the choice senses). The References will
indicate other influences.
Such a list should begin with Michael Walzer, of course, whose influence
is pervasive in philosophical discussions and beyond them, and whose visit
to the University of Melbourne for a workshop I had the pleasure of hosting;
Henry Shue, a long-standing friend whom I met back to the 1960s in
Oxford, and with whom I began exchanges on war-related ethics in the
mid-1980s when involved with him in a project on nuclear weapons at the
(then) University of Maryland Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy

(we have had many intensive and helpful discussions of morality and
political violence since, and I later enlisted him in a project on armed
humanitarian intervention at the University of Melbourne); Robert
Fullinwider, David Luban, and Judith Lichtenberg, also colleagues at the
Maryland Institute as well as visitors to the University of Melbourne in the
1990s; my colleagues at the University of Melbourne over many years—Igor
Primoratz, of course, along with Andrew Alexandra, Sagar Sanyal, Ned
Dobos, and Sagar Sanyal, were invaluable; very much has also been learned
in person and in print from Jeff McMahan, Cecile Fabre, Helen Frowe,
David Rodin, Tony Coates, Steven Lee, Christopher Finlay, Seumas Miller,
John Langan S.J., Seth Lazar, Virginia Held, Stephen Nathanson, Cheyney
Ryan, Larry May, and others from that community mentioned above. Kieran
McInerney gave me valuable research assistance and feedback on the book.
Corrections to, and developments of, my thinking on this topic have fol-
lowed from helpful and challenging comments from audiences at papers and
lectures given over the years on the topic. Locales for some of those
audiences have been: University of Melbourne, Australian Catholic
x 
University, University of Sydney, University of Adelaide, University

of Oxford, University of Glasgow, University of Warwick, University of
Bradford, University of Bonn, University of Leipzig, University of
Bielefeld, Mt. Holyoke College, MA, University of Arizona, Georgia State
University, Hiroshima Peace Institute, Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy,
Oxford-Australia-China Summer School on Political Philosophy in Suzhou,
Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and Nanjing University.
My thanks to those institutions and to the Australian Research Council for
an ARC Grant on “Contemporary Terrorism: Ethical and Conceptual
Perspectives,” and also for supporting me for work in this area and others
for five years as an ARC Senior Research Fellow.
I should also acknowledge various permissions to use copyrighted material
in epigraphs in the book and for the painting displayed on its cover:
The painting “Civilised” by New Zealand artist, A. Lois White, repro-
duced courtesy of Sue Disbrowe and other members of the family of
the artist.
Extract from Aileen Kelly, “Aftershock: 1. The city, burning,” repro-
duced courtesy of the Kelly family.
Extract from Algerian Chronicles by Albert Camus, edited and with an
introduction by Alice Kaplan, translated by Arthur Goldhammer,
Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,

Copyright © 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Extract from Bruce Dawe, “Travelogue,” reproduced courtesy of the
estate of Bruce Dawe.
Extract from John Lahr, column “Questions for John Lahr,” courtesy of
Lahr and The New Yorker.
Extract from The American Heretic’s Dictionary, courtesy of author
Chaz Bufe.
The Earth quakes, the earth

shakes the child. For us
it was bombs. We huddled in shelter.
The earth shook, the air
howled and flamed.
The city burned.
Aileen Kelly, “Aftershock: 1. The city, burning”
Introduction
As witnessed by the arrival and continued presence of the “war on terror,” the
threat of terrorism has been particularly prominent in public consciousness
and in political rhetoric and action during the early years of the twenty-first
century. For the relatively comfortable, economically advanced countries of
what is (somewhat curiously) called “the West,” this attention owes much to
the attacks of September 11, 2001 on New York and Washington, DC. These
attacks, and their aftermaths, even resonated in many less affluent countries
where terrorist attacks were associated more with national disintegration and
civil wars. The 9/11 attacks killed just over 3,000 people and resulted in
military retaliations in Afghanistan and Iraq that killed vastly more thou-
sands and had political and military effects, many of them dire, that continue
still. The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 had the effect of displacing
this apprehension from the foreground of attention in those more affluent
countries, though the hordes of damaged and displaced victims of day-to-day
terrorist acts by state and sub-state agents in parts of the Middle East and
Africa suffered much less of a shift in focus, finding in the pandemic just one
more grave anxiety to besiege them.
The pandemic has indeed been a calamity on a dreadful scale throughout
the world, with deaths in New York City in the early days of the disease’s
spread, for instance, rapidly coming to outstrip the number killed in the 9/11
attacks and then careering beyond. The shift in perspective was not only
imaginatively understandable, but it also had one salutary aspect in suggest-
ing how the threat of terrorism, or some forms of it, can itself too readily
displace attention from other important though less directly dramatic dan-
gers to civil life from multiple diseases and poverty through to environmen-
tal degradation.
Even so, contemporary terrorism certainly poses not only genuine, con-
tinuing threats to lives and expectations, but also important challenges to
our intellectual comprehension, moral understanding, and capacity to
respond and counter the threats without panic or overreaction or damaging
compromise to moral, legal, and political values. It must be added that
Coady.
2 
terrorist acts understandably arouse a particular sort of apprehension

because they make a special impact on us in exhibiting human intentionality
in gross harming. The virus, by contrast, if we ignore fanciful theories about
Chinese malevolence in somehow creating it, sprang from nothing of the
sort, though its spread may well have been helped by human negligence,
incompetence, or stubborn ignorance. To bring out the significance of the
perception of intention in our reaction to terrorist acts, we might consider
how our attitudes to road fatalities and injuries might be affected by adding
an element of intention. Most of us are rightly careful about our driving
because of the real risk of accidental harms on the road, but our caution and
sense of danger would be vastly greater if it was known that there was even a
small percentage of drivers out there who were not merely irresponsibly
negligent, but bent upon killing other drivers.
Philosophy and Terrorism
Although philosophers have eventually devoted a great deal of attention to

terrorism, especially, though not exclusively, since 9/11, there was very little
to consult of philosophical material directly dealing with it when I first came
to concentrate on the topic in the early 1980s. Michael Walzer, whose
Harvard seminar I had attended in 1978, had a brief, stimulating chapter

(of nine pages) in his important book Just and Unjust Wars published the
year before, but he was one of the very few philosophers to address this
question around that time.¹ This is particularly surprising given that there
had been plenty of public focus on terrorist acts in Northern Ireland and in
England throughout the 1970s, as well as on others, including the 1972
Munich Olympic killings of eleven Jewish athletes and a German policeman.
There had also been numerous spectacular hijackings of civilian airplanes in
the 1970s, many of them politically motivated, and a number of them
involving killings or injuries.
Initially, my own stimulus to write on the topic came partly from this
surprising dearth of philosophical treatments and partly from a startling
exchange of views when I was running an Interdisciplinary Programme on
Problems of Peace and Conflict at the University of Melbourne in the late
¹ Carl Wellman and Martin Hughes were notable for doing so, and I discuss some of their
views in this book. See Carl Wellman, “On Terrorism Itself,” Journal of Value Inquiry, vol. 13,
no. 4 (1979); Martin Hughes, “Terrorism and National Security,” Philosophy, vol. 57 (1982).
   3
1970s to early 1980s. At a committee meeting with colleagues in the program

something came up about terrorism, and several of my friends from other
disciplines, notably English, Politics, and History, objected with puzzlement
and a certain degree of scorn to my proposed definition of terrorist acts, and
even more so to the idea of using moral philosophy in the discussion of such
acts. No doubt my early attempt at definition needed refinement, but their
reactions showed two things that had already begun to trouble me. The first
was a fuzziness about what terrorism or terrorist acts could be, a fuzziness
that was a reflection of a state of confusion in the public debate at large about
what was actually being discussed, condemned, excused, or even justified in
talk about terrorism and terrorist acts. This confusion, which is still rampant
today, meant that people were often at cross-purposes in discussions of
terrorism with regard to its moral status, significance, and need for counter-
measures. The second was their scorn about the prospects for philosophical
clarification of the concept and for bringing moral considerations to bear
upon the phenomenon of terrorism, especially moral considerations
informed by philosophical reflection. When this was not cynicism about
philosophical pretensions or politics generally, it seemed a dim reflection of
those political theories and practical policies, known as political realism,
which apparently deny or strongly downplay a role for morality in matters
of the deployment of political violence and much else in politics, insisting
instead on the idea of national interest as the sole or primary relevant

normative consideration.² These things helped prompt my writing the
paper “The Morality of Terrorism,” published in Philosophy in 1985, and
later republished in various places.
In the following years, I have written and spoken frequently on the subject
of terrorism and sought to meet some of the objections to my views and to
heed what other philosophers and theorists have had to say about the subject
in its various aspects. Revising, developing, and integrating my position on
the matter has now produced this book. I have called it The Meaning of
Terrorism partly because I have tried to fashion a concept of terrorism that
reflects to an important extent a semantic core in reports, arguments, and
responses to terrorist acts that will be useful in clearing up the confusions
mentioned above and, moreover, in connecting moral judgment about such
acts with philosophical theory and, to a degree, with what Sidgwick called
“common-sense morality.” But I also have attempted to address questions of
² I have discussed political realism at some length in C. A. J. Coady, Messy Morality: The
Challenge of Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
4 
the meaning of terrorism, in a sense broader than that of conceptual

analysis, semantics, or even fruitful conceptual tidiness. This is the sense
in which we use the word “meaning” to scrutinize the significance of
activities, policies, connections, institutions, work, and even, at the limit,
life itself. This sense of “meaning” applies to a concern for a focus on bad
things as well as good. In such scrutiny, we are involved both in description
and in normative examination, just as, for instance, in discussing the
meaning of work, we need not only an account of what work (in its manifold
forms) is, but also what it could and should be, and why that matters. By
contrast with a concept like work (assuming that work properly understood
can be considered a good thing), an idea like racism would require in an
exploration of its meaning not only clarification of what it was, but also of
the moral status of its effects on those subject to its operation, effects that
might range from the subtle to the gross, and apart from direct racist acts,
such an exploration would attend to the normative dimensions of the
entrenchment of racist attitudes in social and political institutions.
The Meaning of Terrorism is then a title to indicate a voyage into the
territory of those various dimensions of the idea of meaning. By contrast
with the earlier philosophical neglect of the topic, the amount of ink spilled
on aspects of terrorism, terrorists, and terrorist acts over the past forty years
by philosophers and indeed theorists from many other disciplines and
beyond academia is enormous, and I make no pretense of having heeded

all of it. Nor indeed have I dealt with all the relevant philosophical literature,
though I have concentrated upon a number of prominent authors, and
I have tried to utilize ideas, in both a critical and appreciative spirit, from
selected non-philosophical sources, such as political theory, history, law,
journalism, and even theology.
A Brief Outline of Themes in the Book’s Chapters
Chapter 1 is concerned with bringing some clarity to the widespread con-

ceptual confusion around what terms like “terrorist,” “terrorist act,” and
“terrorism” mean. Without being too rigid about definition, it is important
to operate with some agreed definitional clarity in the area. I defend the
value of such a definitional enterprise and then provide what I call a tactical
definition of a terrorist act that aims to capture a central core involved in
talk about terrorism and opens discussion of terrorist acts to cogent
moral assessment. My definition of a terrorist act is: “A political act,
       ’  5
ordinarily committed or inspired by an organized group, in which violence

is intentionally directed at non-combatants (or ‘innocents’ in a suitable
sense) or their significant property, in order to cause them serious harm.”
The rest of the chapter discusses advantages of the definition and criticizes a
number of objections to it.
In the rest of Chapter 1, I discuss what I see as conspicuous advantages of
the definition, particularly that it treats terrorism as a specific means toward
political goals and hence available to any sort of agent, including states, not
merely to insurgents or other sub-state agents. It also leaves it open whether
revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries, or other groups can employ polit-
ical violence, whether justified or not, without using terrorist tactics. I then
proffer six clarifications and defenses of the expanded definition’s key terms:
the normative status of the tactical definition with respect to moral neutral-
ity or commitment; the implications of the reference to “serious harm” in it;
whether threats or plans should have been included; the discussion of the
phrase “ordinarily committed or inspired by an organized group” and the
issue of the “lone wolf” terrorist; the scope of the term “political”; and
whether, in philosophical terminology, the object of the intention in the
definition should be read as opaque or transparent, i.e., to what degree is
the determination that an act is terrorist decided by the agent’s belief about
the status of their victim or the objective facts about that status?
In Chapter 2, a number of objections to the definition are discussed that

criticize it either for being too narrow or too broad. The narrowness criti-
cisms object that (a) there are terrorist acts that target combatants, (b) there
are terrorist acts that do not involve a political motive, e.g., certain criminal
or religious acts, and (c) certain non-intentional violence afflicting non-
combatants, basically some of those covered by the phrase “collateral dam-
age,” should be encompassed by the definition. The “too broad” category of
objections argues that (a) the tactical definition should be restricted by the
inclusion of an ingredient of intentionally provoking fear, and sometimes
add that the inducement of fear should be directed at others than those
attacked, (b) the definition’s extending to states the possibility of committing
terrorist acts is mistaken, (c) the inclusion of non-combatant property in the
definition is mistaken, and (d) my approach simply defines terrorist acts as
murder and loses what is distinctive of such acts. These objections are
criticized and rejected for the most part, though some elicit concessional
comments about their possible ancillary benefits in relation to the preferred
tactical definition.
6 
Chapter 3 addresses four philosophical attempts to show, mostly without

dependence on a definitional account of terrorist acts, that terrorist attacks
have a special moral significance. In doing so, in their very different ways,
these philosophers articulate a concern about terrorism that is widely held
amongst non-specialists. The philosophers who address the idea of special
significance most directly are Samuel Scheffler, Jeremy Waldron, and Lionel
McPherson. Waldron does not use the phrase “special moral significance,”
but the idea of such is pretty clearly at work in his discussion. The fourth is
Karen Jones, who also does not use the language of “special significance,”
but her discussion of “basal security,” the disruption of which “makes a
really efficient” terrorist campaign work, seems to function in the same line
of territory as marking some particularly distinctive feature of terrorism in
addition to its being a tactic distinguished by its commitment to attacking
non-combatants.³ The claim she makes is worth addressing in this context.
I argue that these various attempts fail to make the strong case that they
promise, and that the failure is instructive for the understanding of terrorism
and for policies to deal with it.
Chapter 4 tackles the difficult issues surrounding the concept of comba-
tant/non-combatant, and the related notions of guilt/innocence and the
connection of these to the soldier/civilian distinction. The investigation is
partly conceptual, but it also inevitably raises moral questions and their
significance, since the tactical definition’s reliance upon such concepts

relates immediately to the moral assessments enshrined in the just war
principle of discrimination which prohibits the direction of lethal violence
upon non-combatants, and reflects a wider moral principle that prohibits
violence against the innocent. Whether one or both of these principles
should be rejected, modified, or allow of exceptions are further questions
that are addressed in Chapters 5 and 6. The fact that they need to be so
addressed is why my tactical definition is in a sense morally neutral, though
it points toward the immorality of terrorist acts. The chapter requires
extended discussion of contemporary debates within the complex just war
tradition, particularly between those loosely styled “traditionalist” and “revi-
sionist.” I offer a judgment on the debate, and discuss its relation to my
account of the nature of terrorist acts.
³ Karen Jones, “Trust and Terror,” in Moral Psychology: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory,
edited by Peggy DesAutels and Margaret Urban Walker (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield
Publishers, 2004).
       ’  7
Chapters 5 and 6 provide an extensive discussion of seven philosophical

positions that attempt to justify terrorist acts in certain circumstances. Each
one, in different ways, reflects less formal and less carefully articulated views
that are proclaimed not only by active terrorists but also many members of
the general public throughout the world, especially when the acts purporting
to be justified are committed by their own people or others with whom they
sympathize. In Chapter 5, four categories of attempted justification are
examined: utilitarian/consequentialist arguments that may reject the prin-
ciple of discrimination outright; the argument from self-defense; the tit-for-
tat argument; and the argument from the need for a fighting chance. In
Chapter 6, three more categories are scrutinized: the argument from collec-
tive responsibility; the argument from redistributive justice; and the argu-
ment from supreme emergency. All seven of these attempted justifications
raise a more general and very challenging issue about the difficulties of
moral philosophizing in the face of absolute moral prohibitions.
Chapter 7 discusses some of the problems posed by contemporary terror-
ism for counter-terrorism measures. The discussion is primarily focused on
reactions of states to sub-state terrorism broadly understood. There is an
initial discussion of issues to do with whether, and if so when, terrorists
should be treated as combatants or criminals, which raises the relations
between military and non-military forms of counter-terrorism. Problems
with military responses connected with the inflammatory slogan “the war on
terror,” including those responses entitled “targeted killing,” are also dis-
cussed. Thereafter, the chapter deals mostly with non-military responses
and their moral and political hazards. These are examined under the three
categories of: (1) domestic and to some extent international legal and
regulatory measures, especially those introduced specifically to deal with
terrorism; (2) diplomatic measures, both internal and external; (3) measures
to remove or deal with the grievance. Under (1), the difficulties connected
with legal definitions of terrorism, and the strong tendencies of legislation to
promote abuses of power and damage to civil liberties, are explored with the
aid of many examples, and the difficulties of the preventive imperative in
legal contexts is analyzed; under (2) and (3) the path of political diplomacy
that takes account of grievances, genuine or purported, is supported, but
obstacles to its success in practice are discussed, including issues of concep-
tual confusion and problems to do with bad faith.
Chapter 8 is concerned with common views, amounting to something like
presuppositions, affirming links between religion and terrorist acts. One
such view is that religion itself has an inherent, distinctive, possibly unique
8 
tendency to promote violent acts and hence also terrorist acts; another is
that, whatever may be the case about such a general tendency, many past
and present wars and terrorist acts were in fact wholly caused by specific
religious commitments; yet another is that whatever the full story about
causes may be, religion inevitably promotes particularly bad features of war
and terrorism, such as their ferocity and duration. These views and some
important difficulties with them are analyzed and critically assessed, and it is
argued that the common views oversimplify and often exaggerate the
importance of religious elements in violent conflicts. As a result of this,
not only are positive aspects of many religious traditions of condemning
wrongful resort to violence neglected, but the focus on religion also often
leads to ignoring the political and non-religious ideologies that drive so
much war and terrorism. The chapter examines claims and arguments by a
range of theorists, both those in favor of the strong causal connections
between religion and political violence and those against. Interestingly,
religious and non-religious people can be found on both sides of the debate.
As a general point about my definition of terrorist acts and the moral
discussion that follows it, I should note here that like many others who write
about war and terrorism, such as, to name only two prominent philosoph-
ical figures, Jeff McMahan and Cecile Fabre, I rely upon the important role
of intention in discussing the morality of many acts, and relatedly, to some
extent, upon what is called the doctrine of double effect (DDE). I say “to
some extent” partly because it does not explicitly figure heavily in my text,
but also because, as I discuss briefly in Chapter 2 and have in more detail
elsewhere, I have reservations about the actual and possible abuses of the
DDE in, for example, some of the recourses to it in the practice and theory of
“collateral damage.”⁴ It is, however, important to acknowledge that there is
considerable controversy in contemporary philosophy about both the DDE
and connected distinctions, such as that between doing and allowing. Some
of the critiques of the DDE and related matters even extend more surpris-
ingly (to me, at least) to the very role of intention at all in assessing acts and
their moral permissibility. These critiques have been prominent in some of
the philosophers who write on terrorism and war, but a full discussion
examining this complex of issues is too large a project for my purposes in
this book. I would, however, strongly recommend Jeff McMahan’s paper on
“Intention, Permissibility, Terrorism, and War” (Philosophical Perspectives,
⁴ See C. A. J. Coady, “Collateral Damage,” The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, edited by

Hugh LaFollette (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, revised 2019).
       ’  9
23, 2009) as a thorough account of the debate and a strong defense of the
significance of intention in the assessment of permissible acts, and also of the
suitability of some version of the DDE to the discussion of terrorism and
war.⁵ Intention may not be all that need concern us in the moral and legal
assessment of human acts—their permissibility, condemnation, praisewor-
thiness, or desirability—but it remains crucially important to that task, and
the philosophical exploration of terrorist acts is imperiled by its neglect or
diminishment.
⁵ Jeff McMahan, “Intention, Permissibility, Terrorism, and War,” Philosophical Perspectives,

vol. 23, no. 1 (2009).
1
Shaping a Concept of Terrorist Acts
A Clarifying Proposal
TERRORIST, n. One who uses violence in a manner contrary to

the interests of US based multinational corporations.
The American Heretic’s Dictionary¹
At the height of the Cold War (and beyond), admitting to having been a
member of the Communist Party was very likely to disqualify an immigrant
from legally entering the United States. This barrier was much debated, and
another question that more recently continued on application forms for a
non-immigrant visa to the US asked: “Do you seek to enter the United States
to engage in export control violations, subversive or terrorist activities or any
unlawful purpose?”, to which a visitor bent on subversion, etc. is unlikely
to answer “Yes.” From the point of view of subversion or terrorism, mem-
bership of al-Qaeda or ISIS is likely to be more pertinent today than

membership of the Communist Party, though even more unlikely to be
admitted. In any case, many people complained about these sorts of ques-
tions for various reasons, but at least some of the questions were relatively
clear in their own terms, especially the first: membership or non-membership
of the Communist Party was a pretty straightforward category. At the
height of the Cold War much vaguer terms were of course in currency,
such as “fellow-traveler,” “communist sympathizer,” “pinko,” and “neo-
communist,” and the vagueness of these categories could have pernicious
consequences. But the visa questions were not vague in quite these ways.
Today, terrorism has replaced communism as (in the phrasing of Marx
and Engels) “the specter” that is haunting much of the world and we have a
new cold, and in some parts of the world distinctly hot, war on terror. But
what terrorism is can be much more opaque than the parallel question about
communism, particularly in some legal and quasi-legal formulations.
¹ Chaz Bufe, The American Heretic’s Dictionary: Revised and Expanded (Tucson, AZ: Sharp
Press, 2016).
Coady.
    ? 11
Consider, for instance, the question I had to answer in 2012 on my appli-

cation for a visa to the UK. It formed part of the UK Border Protection
Questionnaire for obtaining a UK visa: It said:
Have you ever, by any means or medium, expressed views that justify or
glorify terrorist violence or that encourage or that may encourage others to
terrorist acts or other serious criminal acts?
I answered “No” in all sincerity, but I wondered what they meant by

“terrorist violence,” not to mention “may encourage,” because I was sure
that many of my philosophical colleagues from various Western countries
could not answer the justification question in the negative as honestly as
I thought I could, given my own understanding of “terrorist violence.” This
is partly because some of them understand the term “terrorist” differently,
but even some who think of terrorism in the same way that I do might
struggle to answer “No” honestly. Nor could I have answered honestly had
I accepted some other understandings of the term.² In Chapter 7 I will
address some of the conceptual difficulties of legal definitions and prohibi-
tions of terrorist acts and related matters. In Chapters 5 and 6, I will also
address some of the problems in attempted justifications of terrorist acts.
Those I will consider are advanced by academics, mostly philosophers, but
they embody in different ways justifications that are not only advanced by
other academics but that are also common in more everyday discourse.
Why Bother with a Definition?
As the quotation from the visa application form suggests, and as consulta-
tion of the terrorism literature—learned, popular, and historical—reveals,
politicians, philosophers, political theorists, and lawyers have offered and
still offer a bewildering variety of definitions of terrorism or terrorist acts;
and much of this disarray afflicts the understanding of the word and its
cognates in non-specialist speech and discussion. For instance, the UK
Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1989 defines a terror-
ist act as: “the use of violence for political ends, and includes any use of
² As for the “may encourage” clause, that is simply preposterous since all manner of
otherwise harmless or positively healthy views can be taken as encouragement to bad behavior;
for example, publication of statistics about the economic prosperity of one country may
encourage illegal migration from another.
12      
violence for the purpose of putting the public or any section of the public in
fear,”³ whereas the US State Department defines it at one point as “pre-
meditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant
targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.”⁴ The UK definition
makes no distinction between the type of agents who may commit terrorist
acts, whereas the US definition restricts agents to subnational or clandestine
groups, and the UK statement places no restriction on the type of targets
against which the acts may be directed, whereas the US definition restricts
the targets to non-combatants. These differences are amongst those that are
of the first importance in practice and theory and their significance will be
discussed in what follows. At this point, we should just note that the UK
approach would allow for states to commit terrorist acts, whereas the US
definition does not. Both emphasize political motivation, but purposely
creating fear is involved in the first but not the second.
There are many other confusions amongst legal and political and popular
understandings of terrorism and terrorist acts; indeed, Walter Laqueur has
claimed convincingly that there are about one hundred such definitions in
the terrorist literature, so I won’t attempt to sort out all this confusion bit by
bit.⁵ I shall, however, try to provide a relatively clear definition that does two
things. It will aim to capture something central about terrorism that most
people seem to have in mind when they talk about the topic, and it should
contribute to the possibilities of sane and coherent thinking about the

morality of terrorism and also the moral issues involved in responding to
the threat or threats of terrorism. There is inevitably a degree of stipulation
about any such approach since not only does “terrorism” share with most
political concepts a messy shape, but its use in common discourse is also
more than usually loaded with rhetorical and polemical baggage. This is
evident in the way repressive governments of various types rush to label the
critics or protestors against their policies “terrorists,” as can be seen in, for
just one instance, the Egyptian government’s arrest of eight people they
accused, amongst other things, of joining a terrorist group because of their
merely committing such acts as playing a song on a car video fiercely
satirizing the Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. One of the eight,
Abdel Shady Habash, a twenty-four-year-old film-maker, died two years
³ Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1989, Section 20 (1).

⁴ Title 22 Chapter 38 U.S. Code § 2656f, (d) (2) “Annual Country Reports on Terrorism.”
⁵ Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 5.
    ? 13
later in prison after never having been brought to trial. The song was written
by an exiled Egyptian dissident to whom most of those arrested had little
connection.⁶ An awareness of such distorting effects of political manipula-
tion and exploitation should motivate a search for more clarity about what a
claim about terrorist activity should really mean, since we are inevitably
made to pay a hefty conceptual and moral cost for such exploitation of the
concept’s fuzziness.
Even so, suspicion of stipulation and awareness of the messiness of
ordinary and sophisticated talk of terrorism has moved quite a few theorists
to shun definition altogether. Virginia Held, Russell Hardin, Samuel
Scheffler, and Jeremy Waldron are just four who, in different ways, try to
avoid defining terrorism.⁷ Such reactions are understandable, and I have
sympathy with the desire to avoid definition-mongering and the search for
excessively sharp boundaries to discussion. Badgering people about defini-
tion can be tiresome and even counter-productive, as illustrated by an
exchange in John Updike’s novel Couples when the victim of such badgering
responds to it by demanding: “Define ‘define’!”⁸ Nonetheless, the opponents
of definition have their own problems, since those who work with no
definitional constraints can elide important distinctions and offer conclu-
sions prone to ambiguity that can promote unfortunate policy and mislead-
ing moral judgments. Virginia Held’s argument for the permissibility of
terrorist acts in some circumstances as just distribution rests in part, as I will

later argue, on an unwitting conflation of two distinct categories of violence
under the one heading of “terrorist.”⁹ Held’s argument will be analyzed
more fully in Chapter 6. What I would take from the critics’ skepticism
about definition is that any definition of terrorism should be understood as a
stipulation that produces certain benefits for social, political, and even legal
discussion, captures something central to what is contained in common
usage, and remains flexible about some variations from the definition. Of the
more plausible of these variations, it should be able to give explanations for
⁶ For a report of these events see Ruth Michaelson, “Egyptian Film-Maker Who Worked on
Video Mocking President Dies in Jail,” The Guardian (May 3, 2020). https://www.theguardian.
com/world/2020/may/02/egyptian-filmmaker-who-mocked-president-dies-in-cairo-jail.
⁷ See Virginia Held, How Terrorism Is Wrong: Morality and Political Violence (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009); Russell Hardin, “Civil Liberties in the Era of Mass Terrorism,”
Journal of Ethics, vol. 8, no. 1 (2004); Samuel Scheffler, “Is Terrorism Morally Distinctive?”,
Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 14, no. 1 (2006); Jeremy Waldron, “Terrorism and the Uses
of Terror,” The Journal of Ethics, vol. 8, no. 1 (2004).
⁸ John Updike, Couples (New York: Knopf, 1968).
⁹ Virginia Held, “Terrorism and War,” The Journal of Ethics, vol. 8, no. 1 (2004).
14      
their appeal and arguments against their being considered as central. Indeed,
perhaps the best way to think of my proposed definition is that it gives
something like what G. E. L. Owen once called, in reference to Aristotle’s
procedures, the “focal meaning” of the term.¹⁰ Owen takes Aristotle’s exam-
ples of the contrasts between uses of “healthy” in the phrases “healthy
substance” (or, as might be more everyday, “healthy individual”), “healthy
diet,” and “healthy complexion” to indicate a significant difference between
mere semantic puns that involve uses of the same word that have different
definitions and are related solely by the common word, and uses where the
definitions are different but have some relation to each other. Without
exploring Owen’s concept in detail, I take from him the idea that the use
of some term can be defined in a way that is central in significance, but more
or less closely related to other uses and their definitions. So “terrorist acts”
will be analyzed as a concept having what Wittgenstein called “family
resemblance” characteristics, but with a definition that insists on capturing
a central or core set of features while allowing that only some of those will be
present in other examples or ranges of the concept’s use, and that other
features absent from the core cases may be present in those other
instances.¹¹ The further removed from the focal meaning a use and its
definition becomes, the less value it has for illuminating discussion. Some
uses will have little or no direct relation to the core at all other than the use of
a common word, though they may have some relation to one of the outlier
concepts that have some link to the core. An example of this remoteness is
Carl Wellman’s definition to be discussed later in this chapter, in which
what I argue to be core features of a terrorist act, such as its violence and its
political orientation, are ignored; the idea of violence is replaced by a broad
reference to coercion, while the political dimension doesn’t figure at all.
There is a reference to the creation of fear which connects Wellman’s
definition with some other more plausible definitions in the conceptual
space of what I will call tactical definitions, though not, as it happens, with
the tactical definition I shall defend.
¹⁰ G. E. L. Owen, “Logic and Metaphysics in Some Earlier Works of Aristotle,” in Aristotle

and Plato in the Mid-Fourth Century, edited by I. Düring and G. E. L. Owen (Göteburg: Elander
Boktryckeri Aktiebolag, 1960). For the complexities in Owen’s interpretation of Aristotle on
focal meaning see Gail Fine, “Owen’s Progress: Logic, Science, and Dialectic—Collected Papers
in Greek Philosophy by G. E. L. Owen, Edited by M. Nussbaum,” The Philosophical Review, vol.
97, no. 3 (1988).
¹¹ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953).
    ? 15
A further point about the need for some definitional clarity is that debates
around the topic of terrorism very often display a degree of intellectual and
political myopia and a lack of self-awareness that can come close to hypoc-
risy. Denunciation of the other’s awful acts of terrorism cohabit comfortably
with ignorance or even praise of one’s own behavior, even when that
behavior significantly matches features of the other’s acts. Sometimes this
myopia is promoted by a fuzzy grasp of what one means by terrorism and
this feeds into the general human tendency to give oneself the benefit of
the doubt denied to others. This tendency works at both the individual
and the collective or state level. So we condemn a stranger’s resort to violence
where we fail to acknowledge our own or regard our own resort as a legitimate
use of “force.”
Reactions to killings by our “enemies” involved in Islamic fundamentalist
militancy sometimes show this myopia dramatically with the use of the word
“terrorism” and its cognates. Consider, for instance, the dreadful killing of a
British soldier, Lee Rigby, on the streets of London on May 22, 2013 by two
British Muslims who attacked him in response, they said, to British troops
killing Muslims in Afghanistan. This was immediately declared a terrorist
act by British news media, even though the victim was a soldier who had
served in Afghanistan and was acting as an army recruiter at the time of his
death. This puts the act into the context of the war on terror campaign being
acted out around the globe and in which British and other Allied troops have
killed enemy soldiers and many innocent civilians as well. As dramatic
illustration of the double standard, the Obama drone campaign in
Pakistan actually treated “any military-aged male in a strike zone” as a
combatant for the purpose of drone attacks.¹² If Rigby’s killing was a
terrorist act, why not these other acts by “our” side? As the comedian
Michael Moore darkly remarked: “I am outraged that we can’t kill people
in other countries without them trying to kill us!”¹³ Similarly, we tend to be
outraged by foreigners spying on us but ignore, condone, or praise our own
“intelligence services” doing the very same to foreigners. Perhaps we can in
certain circumstances be right about the asymmetry, but we need to argue
this in terms of the similarities and differences between what they do and
what we do. The example of violence is close to the question of terrorism,
¹² Joe Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and
Will,” New York Times 29 (2012), 5.
¹³ Michael Moore, Twitter Post (May 22, 2013, 11:14pm). https://twitter.com/mmflint/sta
tus/337451498369851393?lang=en.
16      
but, as I shall argue, terrorism is a distinctive form of violence, and if we

want to avoid the trap of hypocrisy and the dangers to which it can give rise,
we need to be clear about what distinctive form of violence terrorism is.
These issues to do with hypocrisy and political manipulation in the use of
terrorism and related terms can give rise to a rejection of the concept of
terrorism altogether as a meaningless item in a vocabulary of obfuscation. Its
residual reality may reside solely in intentional political manipulation or in
some vaguer, unconscious collective need to shroud a perceived enemy in
the darkness that contrasts with the opposite light we enjoy. Such a rejection
goes beyond philosophical concerns about the difficulties of definition,
though it may be allied to them. It can be found powerfully articulated in
the investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald’s campaign against the way the
discourse of terrorism is generally conducted in the United States. In a
number of different online articles, Greenwald has argued that government
and media characterizations of violent events show a determination to
represent as terrorist only and all attacks by foreigners against Americans
(and sometimes Allies). Any parallel attacks by Americans (or Allies) cannot
merit the title “terrorist.” He instances as one case in point the striking
reluctance at the time by US commentators to call terrorist the Charleston
shootings of nine black Christian worshippers by Dylann Roof in June
2015.¹⁴ By contrast, any serious violence by a Muslim often immediately
attracts the term “terrorist,” even if no real political motive can be found.
I shall have more to say about Greenwald’s claims after I have developed my
definition of a terrorist act, since the phenomenon he describes is best seen
as a very extreme version of what I have labeled a “political status” definition
in competition with my own “tactical” definition.
Focusing on Terrorist Acts
I shall begin with a discussion of the idea of “a terrorist act” because

launching straight into defining “terrorism” or “terrorist” has certain dis-
advantages. In particular, starting that way tends to prejudge questions such
as: is terrorism an ideology or a specific philosophy? The “ism” ending may
suggest a coherent body of belief constituting terrorism, whereas, as we shall
see, this is very dubious. We shouldn’t proceed by trying independently to
¹⁴ Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept (June 19, 2015). https://theintercept.com/2015/06/19/

refusal-call-charleston-shootings-terrorism-showsmeaningless-propaganda-term.
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identify terrorists or terrorism and then determine what are terrorist acts by
seeing what those people do or what that ideology licenses, but instead
proceed the other way around. As the Bible says: “Ye shall know them by
their fruits.” (Matthew 7:16). In spite of what some psychological studies of
terrorism claim, terrorists are seldom weirdly different types of people who
can be somehow identified by their terrorist personalities. There was an
academic vogue for this sort of thing some years ago, but more recently
psychological studies have debunked the stereotype of a distinctive and
pathological “terrorist personality.” As one professor of psychology, Clark
R. McCauley, put it:
A common suggestion is that there must be something wrong with terror-

ists. Terrorists must be crazy, or suicidal, or psychopaths without moral
feelings or feelings for others. Thirty years ago this suggestion was taken
very seriously, but thirty years of research has found psychopathology and
personality disorder no more likely among terrorists than among non-
terrorists from the same background. Interviews with current and former
terrorists find few with any disorder found in the American Psychiatric
Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Comparisons of terrorists
with non-terrorists brought up in the same neighbourhoods find psycho-
pathology rates similar and low in both groups.¹⁵
Terrorists are people who do certain distinctive things and those things are
distinctive because of what they are rather than because they are done by
certain people identified by aberrant personality or by group membership,
or because they flow only from certain shared ideologies.
At a minimum, as already suggested, it would seem that a terrorist act is a
certain sort of violent act, and if we are going to talk of terrorists and
terrorist groups, they should be defined by their orientation to deliver that
certain form of violence. In addition, terrorist acts are violent acts that are
regarded by most people who use the expression “terrorist” as being of a
particularly reprehensible nature, though I don’t think that this feature
should be part of the definition. It is merely worth noting at this juncture.
This starting point may seem very obvious, and indeed it is intended to be
so, but it is indicative of some of the difficulties in reaching agreement on
starting points concerning terrorism that some theorists don’t want to
¹⁵ Clark R. McCauley, “The Psychology of Terrorism,” Essay for the Social Science Research
Council, http://essays.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/mccauley.htm, accessed 6/12/2014.
18      
include any reference to violence in their definition of terrorism. Robert

Goodin, for instance, defines terrorist acts as any acts that are performed
“with the intention of frightening people for political advantage.”¹⁶ In terms
of a definition that seeks to capture key or focal elements in the admittedly
messy concept of terrorism, an approach that excludes violence from the
definition is, I think, close to perverse. Goodin’s approach would group
together as equally terrorist both the action of a concerned climate scientist
delivering a factual speech which they rightly hope will frighten their
audience sufficiently to moderate their contributions to climate destruction
and the bombing of a busload of schoolchildren by a political activist who
wants to bring about a change in military policy. My own definition of
terrorism is more restricted and would count only the second as a terrorist
act.¹⁷ Something akin to Goodin’s approach was earlier anticipated by Carl
Wellman in one of the very first modern philosophical discussions of
terrorism. Wellman defined terrorist acts as “the use or attempted use of
terror as a means of coercion,” whether violent or non-violent, and he gives
several examples that I find quite unconvincing, for instance threatening to
fail “any student who hands in his paper after the due date.”¹⁸ Goodin’s
definition at least keeps the political orientation of my tactical definition (an
earlier version of which he cites), but in other respects it is far remote from
my focal emphasis. Both Wellman and Goodin include the fear motivation
which, as we shall see, other tactical definitions unlike mine include, but
Wellman makes no reference to the political motivation and so is even more
remote from the focal core. It should be said that Goodin’s style of definition
reflects in certain respects some other non-academic public declarations
about terrorism. The 1987 “Geneva Declaration on Terrorism,” for instance,
is commendable in placing a focus upon state terrorism (in this respect
being narrower in emphasis than Goodin), but spreads its understanding of
terrorism far wider than the category of what would normally be understood
as violent acts. Thus, its item 10 of a list of manifested acts of state terrorism
includes: “the abrogation of civil rights, civil liberties, constitutional protec-
tions and the rule of law under the pretext of alleged counter-terrorism.”¹⁹
¹⁶ Robert Goodin, What’s Wrong with Terrorism? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 156.
¹⁷ For my initial account and defense of my version of a tactical definition and its moral
implications see C. A. J. Coady, “The Morality of Terrorism,” in Morality and Political Violence
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). See also C. A. J. Coady,
“Defining Terrorism,” in Terrorism: The Philosophical Issues, edited by Igor Primoratz
(London: Palgrave, 2004).
¹⁸ Carl Wellman, “On Terrorism Itself,” Journal of Value Inquiry, vol. 13, no. 4 (1979), 252.
¹⁹ For the Declaration, see UN General Assembly Doc. A/42/307, May 29, 1987, Annex.
   19
Earlier the declaration commits itself to the dubious concept of structural

violence that I have criticized elsewhere, so probably the framers of the
Declaration think such legal enactments are instances of violence.²⁰ But
however morally repellent such abrogations may be, and I regard them as
highly repellent in most circumstances, many of them can come into
existence without actual violence, though of course they may give rise to
violence in the implementation of it or in resistance to it. Several of the
Declaration’s other condemnations include within the scope of terrorist acts
those that can only be regarded as violent because of a very wide and
confusing concept of violence, or more charitably because they may lead
to some acts of unjustified violence. Item 2, for instance, treats as terrorist
“the introduction or transportation of nuclear weapons by a state into or
through the territory or territorial waters of other states or into international
waters.” Such introduction is indeed normally dangerous, and partakes of
the moral condemnation that should encompass the policy of nuclear
deterrence, the immorality of which I, and others, have argued elsewhere,
but such transportation need not itself involve any terrorist or even violent
act.²¹ Possibly there is an implicit threat of a terrorist act, namely the massive
intentional destruction of innocent lives, and that raises a question to be
discussed later concerning whether a threat to perpetrate a terrorist act is
itself a terrorist act. But in any case, the transportation itself may, admittedly
on rare occasions, be quite harmless, even praiseworthy, as when it is being

done in order to disable the nuclear weapons. But it is time to come
explicitly to my proposed definition.
My Tactical Definition
I define a terrorist act as:
A political act, ordinarily committed or inspired by an organized group, in

which violence is intentionally directed at non-combatants (or “innocents”
in a suitable sense) or their significant property in order to cause them
serious harm.
²⁰ C. A. J. Coady, “The Idea of Violence,” in Morality and Political Violence (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), ch. 2.
²¹ For my most developed critique of nuclear deterrence see C. A. J. Coady, “Escaping from
the Bomb: Immoral Deterrence and the Problem of Extrication,” in Nuclear Deterrence and
Moral Restraint, edited by Henry Shue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
20      
The term “terrorism” can then be defined as “the tactic or policy of engaging
in terrorist acts,” and a terrorist is one who carries out such acts. Let us call
this a “tactical” definition. There is some further scope for the application of
these terms to threatened, planned, or attempted but unsuccessful terrorist
acts, and I shall discuss this later in the chapter.
The definition of “non-combatants” or indeed “innocents” or “civilians”
is a complex matter that I will treat more thoroughly in Chapter 4. But
briefly here, let me indicate that there are two strands to the understanding
of the idea covered by these terms in discussion of war and violent political
conflict. One is external and one internal. The external refers principally to
role and the internal to individual moral condition. The external strand for
which the term non-combatant or civilian is most appropriate demarcates
those people who are not in the armed forces or groups prosecuting hosti-
lities or not involved in directly supporting the violent activities of those who
are. The internal strand puts a focus on the guilt or innocence of people who
have little or no moral responsibility for any purported wrongdoing that
might serve to legitimize the resort to political violence against the supposed
wrongdoers. For many purposes the two strands connect sufficiently to
mesh with our concern to provide a working definition of terrorist acts
that dispels confusions and opens up the possibilities for sensible moral
judgment on such acts. With this preliminary understanding, I will use non-
combatant and innocent as roughly interchangeable, while postponing until

Chapter 4 a closer discussion of the complex philosophical issues lurking in
the background bushes.²² This style of definition I call a tactical definition
because it concentrates not upon anti-state violence in general, or even
politically motivated anti-state violence in general, but upon the specific
political tactic of targeting non-combatants (or, if you like, innocents,
though more on this later).
I think that this targeting of people who don’t deserve to be targeted is
what people are commonly getting at when they speak of terrorism as
“indiscriminate” or “random,” but I will avoid these terms because they
can strongly suggest uncontrolled or haphazard resorts to violence, whereas
there is at least a case to be made that terrorism is governed by a certain
rationality, since terrorist attacks have a variety of aims, some of which,
the immediate objects, often succeed, even if the ultimate aims often fail.
I will have more to say on this later. Michael Walzer is one eminent
²² One could use “civilian,” suitably understood, instead of either “non-combatant” or

“innocent,” though such a suitable understanding of the term raises further problems.
   21
theorist in the area who uses “random,” not only because terrorist acts target
non-combatants but also to indicate that the terrorists choose which non-
combatants to target willy-nilly as part of their campaign to spread extensive
fear.²³ So he is not denying rational choices altogether to terrorists, but
emphasizing that they don’t care which non-combatants they attack for
creating fear and for their further purposes. This is probably true of some,
perhaps many, terrorist attacks but clearly not of all. The rape and killing of
four Catholic women missionaries (three nuns and a lay missionary) in El
Salvador in 1980 by the right-wing military government’s disguised agents
was palpably an act of terrorism by the tactical definition, but the victims
were carefully selected for their non-violent witness to human rights abuses
and their standing with the oppressed peasantry. Selection of civilian targets
whose loss will be particularly damaging to the morale of the wider popu-
lation is a clear candidate for the description “terrorist,” whether the perpe-
trators are state or sub-state agents.
There may be another reason why the expression “random” appeals to
theorists attempting to define terrorist acts. That reason is a focus, less upon
the motive and outlook of the terrorist, and more upon the way in which the
population to which the victims belong will usually view the act and others
that are likely to follow. They will often think of such acts as unpredictable
intrusions into arenas of life that are normally far removed from violence,
arenas such as coffee shops, homes, supermarkets, and suburban streets.

When a suicide bomber impacts such arenas, the explosion will seem
random: “why here?”; “why these children?”. Yet this understandable reac-
tion should not mean that the definition of terrorist acts must include a
reference to a necessary intention on the terrorist’s part to choose targets at
random, as the example of the nuns in El Salvador has shown. Even the
psychological effect of randomness may be mitigated or even disappear in
the experience of repeated terrorist acts, as for the civilian populations of
British, German, and Japanese cities under repeated terror bombing by their
²³ Walzer’s definition of a terrorist act is a tactical one close to mine, though he imports not
only randomness, but also the creation of fear, as essential to the definition or understanding of
terrorism. His definition of terrorist act is: “the random killing of innocent people, in the hope of
creating pervasive fear.” Michael Walzer, “Terrorism and Just War,” Philosophia, vol. 34, (2006),
3. Earlier in his influential Just and Unjust Wars, he states: “Randomness is the crucial feature of
terrorist activity.” Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical
Illustrations, 4th edition (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 197. Since he obviously thinks that
targeting innocent people is also crucial, he must be conflating here the innocence of the targets
and the supposedly random method of selecting them.
22      
enemies. (Similar issues will arise with the idea of terrorist acts as unpre-
dictable in the discussion of Karen Jones’ “basal security” in Chapter 3.)
I said that an acceptable definition would have to “capture something
central about terrorism that most people seem to have in mind when they
talk about the topic,” and my definition not only matches one important
sense of the way “indiscriminate” is commonly used to indicate a defining
feature of terrorist acts, but also reflects what is at work in so many excuses
or justifications for terrorist acts offered by their perpetrators. So, we find
Osama bin Laden defending the 9/11 massacres by claiming that no
Americans could be regarded as innocent of the wrongs that America, the
nation, was inflicting on Muslims throughout the world. As he put it: “the
entire America is responsible for the atrocities perpetrated against Muslims.
The entire America because they elect the Congress.”²⁴ Disregarding bin
Laden’s confused understanding of American democratic politics, we can
see that he wants to rebut the charge of terrorism by rejecting any claim for
the innocence of any of those intentionally killed in the 9/11 attacks.
Whatever else ordinary people think about terrorist acts, a vast majority of
them seem to think of them as attacks upon the innocent, or those who have
done nothing to warrant attack. This is what they, inchoately perhaps, think
terrorist acts are, and of course they usually condemn them morally because
of it. As Jeff McMahan has put it recently in discussing intention in the
understanding of terrorism: “What is important for our purposes is that

virtually everyone agrees that terrorism involves intended harm to innocents
and most people have seen that feature as an essential part of the explanation
of why terrorism is almost always wrong.”²⁵ Of course, it is true that terrorist
acts are generally the object of moral condemnation, but my definition does
not explicitly embody this moral rejection, though it points the way to a
certain endorsement of it—an endorsement that I personally accept, as will
later become clear. The moral question will receive detailed separate treat-
ment later, though the discussion here and in Chapter 2 will inevitably have
moral overtones and invoke moral issues.
In addition to satisfying the condition of some fidelity to a central core in
common usage of the term, my definition has some other significant advan-
tages which I’ll now sketch before turning to numerous objections and
²⁴ Interview between Hamid Mir and Osama bin Laden, November 9, 2001, at http://www.
dawn.com/2001/11/10/top1.htm. Fuller text of bin Laden’s comments will be analyzed in
Chapter 4.
²⁵ Jeff McMahan, “Intention, Permissibility, Terrorism, and War,” Philosophical Perspectives,
vol. 23, no. 1 (2009), 360.
     23
difficulties that my style of tactical definition faces. In looking to these

advantages, I am seeking to give an account of the point of my definition.
Of course, part of the point is, as already indicated, that it captures some-
thing that virtually all users of the term are getting at, but for many concepts,
particularly political ones, it is also important that one’s analysis of them
shows the further point of having the specific concept defined.²⁶ Here, the
advantages are partly moral, partly in a broad sense political.
Advantages of This Tactical Definition
First, the tactical definition does not make all revolutionary or insurgent
violence count as terrorism. It seems plausible to think that, amongst the
many types of acts available to them, revolutionaries can use terrorist acts or
they can avoid them, and we should clearly distinguish between those who
use violence in a way that avoids attacking innocent or uninvolved people
and those that don’t. If there is room to describe wars as just or unjust, then
there can presumably be just or unjust revolutions, and those with a just
cause can be criticized for using terrorist methods and those whose cause is
unjust can be given credit for avoiding such methods.
Second, it doesn’t make the imputation of terrorism turn on differences
between the status of the agents of terrorist tactics. Many definitions of

terrorism are what I call “political status” definitions in that they insist that
terrorism is something that can only be attributed to non-state actors. This
would make it impossible to talk coherently of “state terrorism” which is
surely undesirable. It is natural and, I believe, morally important to utilize
the vocabulary of terrorism to refer to the city bombings of World War II,
or, more recently, the Syrian government’s systematic destruction of the
homes and lives of their own citizens who were taking no part in the armed
uprising against the government.²⁷ Even Winston Churchill, after the
²⁶ The idea that in addition to defining a concept’s use we may often need to explore its point
or utility has been discussed by Sally Haslanger in connection with the concepts of race and of
gender in her “Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?”, Nous,
vol. 34, no. 1 (2000).
²⁷ As is common in such cases, the Syrian government promiscuously referred from the
beginning to all the insurgent violence against it as “terrorist,” which is not to say that there may
not have been some terrorist acts committed by insurgent forces, especially when the uprising
developed into a complex and widespread civil war. Indeed, some of the dominant insurgent
groups, notably Da’ish (or to give it its preferred grandiose name, “Islamic State”), standardly
used terrorist tactics as well as conventional war techniques.
24      
destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers, referred to the city bombings of

World War II as “acts of terror” and belatedly called for restricting attacks to
“military objectives” instead of “wanton destruction,” and his predecessor as
Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had earlier denounced proposals for
such bombing as “mere terrorism” and “blackguardly.”²⁸
There can, moreover, be forms of state terrorism different in important
respects from those examples mentioned above. Aside from state attacks
upon civilian/non-combatant populations of other states, and state attacks
upon their own innocent civilian populations, there can be attacks by sub-
state agents in one state whose efforts are sponsored in various ways by the
authorities of another state. I will discuss this form of terrorism in Chapter 7
in connection with problems about responding to terrorism. Of course, it is
possible in theory that there could be forms of political status definitions
that restricted the application of “terrorist act” to state agents, and then the
problem would be that the means employed and the targets selected would
have striking similarities with those used by sub-state actors, so that a “sauce
for the goose is sauce for the gander” objection would apply in reverse. I say
“in theory” because I don’t think this sort of political status definition or
understanding is used explicitly by, for example, supporters or apologists for
revolutionary violence, though there may be a temptation toward it.
Another advantage of the definition is that it links the phenomenon of
terrorism to the useful moral tools of just war theory, since terrorist tactics
violate the principle of discrimination or distinction as usually understood.
This, as already noted, is one reason why people sometimes think of
terrorism as “indiscriminate violence.” This is acceptable if it means not
discriminating in favor of non-combatants but not if it means irrational
behavior or even a total disregard for all morality. One notable terrorism
expert, Paul Wilkinson, for instance, claims that “what fundamentally dis-
tinguishes terrorism from other forms of organised violence is not simply its
severity but its features of amorality and antinomianism.” Terrorists are, he
says, “implicitly prepared to sacrifice all moral and humanitarian considera-
tions for the sake of some political end.”²⁹ But terrorists frequently offer
some rationale for what they do and defend their actions using moral
arguments, even if we may have good reasons for rejecting either or both.
²⁸ For Churchill’s remark (in a letter to Sir Charles Portal) see Noble Frankland and Charles
Webster, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany 1939–1945, vol. 3 (London: Her Majesty’s
Stationery Office, 1961), 112. For Chamberlain’s comment see J. F. C. Fuller, The Conduct of
War 1989–1961 (London: Eyre Methuen, 1972), 280.
²⁹ Paul Wilkinson, Political Terrorism (London: Macmillan, 1974), 16–17.
 25
Often, for instance, they see themselves or the group they identify with as
having suffered grievous moral wrongs to which their acts of terror are a
response.
The linkage with just war theory is not meant to canonize that theory
(which is better called a tradition rather than a theory since there are plenty
of contested, divergent elements within it), but it has the advantage that the
tradition is widely respected, at least in theory, in Western military acade-
mies and training, and has played a significant part in the formulation of the
legal regulation of warfare in the UN conventions and other declarations at
the basis of humanitarian law and international military law. This is not to
claim that the tenets of just war theory are uncontentious. Recently there has
been a great deal of philosophical work criticizing, revising, and rejecting
aspects of the theory, but most of this is itself a testimony to the intellectual
vitality of the tradition. In Chapters 4 and 5, we will examine some of these
criticisms.
Clarifications
I will turn to the major objections to the tactical definition shortly, but it may
be as well to offer some further clarifications and explore two alternative
conceptual approaches, reliance upon which, either implicitly or explicitly,

underlies many of the objections. The first clarification concerns the nor-
mative status of the definition. Many theorists are concerned that the
definition should be morally neutral, while others are equally insistent that
it should be explicitly moral. What lies behind both approaches, in spite of
their opposition, is the insight that the common discourse about terrorism
invariably has pejorative import. The neutralists react by treating the pejo-
rative feature as something that may well show a political bias and begs
an important question about the possible justification of terrorist acts; the
moralists insist that the ordinary discourse correctly concentrates on
the loathsome nature of acts that are invariably criminalized by very diverse
societies.³⁰ But it is one thing to acknowledge the normative force of
the term “terrorism” in ordinary discourse, and another to build moral
³⁰ For advocacy of the neutralist approach see Robert Young, “Political Terrorism as a
Weapon of the Politically Powerless,” in Terrorism, edited by Igor Primoratz (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). For a good statement of the drive toward a moral definition see
Alex J. Bellamy, Fighting Terror: Ethical Dilemmas (London: Zed Books, 2008), 31. Bellamy says:
“It (‘terrorism’) is a label one attaches to particular acts of political violence to delegitimize
26      
condemnation into the definition. My definition does not make terrorist acts
immoral by definition. Whether or not they are immoral turns upon
whether we accept the principle of discrimination or some similar principle
that rules out attacks upon non-combatants. Given the widespread appeal of
the principle, however, and the widespread revulsion from the broader
notion of intentionally harming the innocent, the definition helps explain
why terrorism is generally believed to be immoral. Even so, it leaves room
for those who reject the principle or do not fully accept it to argue, as we
shall see later, that terrorism can be morally justified.
The second clarification is that the reference in the definition to “serious”
harm is intended to capture the fact that most people would not classify the
deliberate infliction of small harms upon non-combatants by minor acts of
violence as terrorist acts. If enemy soldiers forcibly removed civilians from a
bridge, thereby causing minor injuries, in order to make way for the passage
of their tanks, I doubt that this should be called terrorist. This is a point of
more than terminological interest, since if such a removal constitutes a
terrorist act, then a complete moral condemnation, or even a strong pre-
sumption in favor of one, is endangered since we may readily envisage
circumstances in which such acts of what might be called “minor terrorism”
could be morally justified. For instance, if the troops are fighting a just war,
the removal might be justified in the pursuit of just objectives, and even if
they are unjust troops, then the removal might be justified as far better than
other options, such as driving the tanks over them. In earlier versions of my
tactical definition I had not included the qualification “severe” and therefore
had resort to a separate category of “minor terrorism.” That is a possible
maneuver but I think it less confusing to proceed as I now do. My reference
to “significant property” has a similar function since it is intended to counter
the objection that my proposal is wrong to include a reference to damage to
property, of which more below.
A third clarification concerns the role of threats. Several people have
objected to me that threats to inflict violence upon non-combatants should
count as terrorist as well as the actual infliction. I am in two minds about
this.³¹ I suspect that there is some linguistic warrant for including threats in
them. This is a useful starting point for building a moral definition.” In fact, however, he goes on
to provide a definition based on mine which, as I argue above, is not straightforwardly “moral.”
³¹ Indeed, I find in reviewing what I have written over the years that my two minds are
displayed in sometimes endorsing the inclusion and sometimes rejecting it! For the rejection see
C. A. J. Coady, “Defining Terrorism,” in Terrorism: The Philosophical Issues, edited by Igor
Primoratz (London: Palgrave, 2004) and for acceptance C. A. J. Coady, Morality and Political
 27
the definition in that many people would treat the proclamation of a serious
intent to inflict violent acts on non-combatants as itself a terrorist act.
Nonetheless, X is not normally to be identified with the threat to do X,
and correctly calling something a terrorist threat shows only that it is a
threat made by a terrorist or that it is a threat the projected content of which
is a terrorist act. Similarly, a threat to murder someone is not itself an act of
murder. On the other hand, it might be argued that a sufficiently alarming
threat to torture someone is itself a form of torture, and here the argument
and our intuitions are influenced by the fact that some forms of the sort of
distress caused by torture can already be aroused by the threat of it.
For my tactical definition, in fact, a good deal turns on whether a threat
can be a form of violence, and this in its turn depends on how one defines
violence. I have elsewhere offered a restrictive definition of violence (in
contrast to expansive definitions such as “structural violence”) and would
resist the idea that any form of harming or even deliberate harming counts
as violence, but I allow that there is room for a category of psychological
violence where threats or intimidations have a forceful and immediate
harmful effect upon the recipient.³² Where threats of terrorist acts (in the
more obvious sense) have this sort of effect, they are candidates for classi-
fication as terrorist acts.
Somewhat similar questions can be raised about planning and attempts.
Again, the parallel with “murder” seems instructive since a threat, plan, or
attempt directed at a murder is not a murder, and since many terrorist acts
are a sort of murder (on some plausible definitions of murder), then we
should expect that plans, threats, and attempts directed to a terrorist act as
defined earlier would not themselves be terrorist acts. Nor can plans or
attempts be seen as themselves inflicting psychological harm in a fashion
that would count them as violent acts, except where a failed attempt at
terrorist act A involves the successful perpetration of another terrorist act
B. It may be that someone who threatens, plans, or attempts unsuccessfully
to carry out a terrorist act is commonly thought of as a “terrorist”; indeed,
there may be reasons for the laws against terrorism to consider them so and
Violence (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). My argument here for
limited inclusion now seems to tilt the balance. But perhaps, like other “great souls,” I should
simply disdain this inconsistency. As Ralph Waldo Emerson so wisely put it: “A foolish
consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and
divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-
Reliance (1841).
³² C. A. J. Coady, Morality and Political Violence, ch. 2.
28      
include such terms as “terrorism” and “terrorist” within their legal proscrip-
tions of such threats, plans, or attempts, but it still makes sense, and seems a
more accurate description of what was done, to say that such a person has
threatened, planned, or attempted a terrorist act, but not succeeded in
carrying it out. In any case, perhaps this is an instance where for much of
our discussion it doesn’t matter too much whether we stretch or restrict the
definition of “terrorism” or “terrorist” for certain contexts as long as we
understand what is involved in those contexts. So, I think it best not to
include threats, planning, or attempts in my definition, but feel relatively
unscathed if others disagree. Threats can then fall slightly outside the focal
meaning into the penumbra of meanings close to the focal area.
Another interesting phenomenon that falls within this penumbra and has
been somewhat more in evidence in recent times is that of hoax “terrorist”
acts that are meant not as bad jokes but as often successful attempts to alarm
or intimidate immediate targets and perhaps wider audiences. The sending
of sinister-looking letter or parcel “bombs” that mimic more or less closely
genuinely lethal weapons is the classic case. One of the more extreme cases
occurred on October 24, 2018 when clumsily constructed pipe bombs, some
apparently containing real explosive material, were posted to a number of
prominent Americans somewhat on the political left, such as Hillary
Clinton, Barack Obama, and George Soros. There was apparently very little
chance of these actually being detonated by the recipients opening them, and
indeed some other earlier incidents in this category contained substances
that only looked dangerous.³³ These “hoaxes” were pretty certainly meant to
cause a degree of distress to the recipients, but for most of them it was
probably short-lived, and certainly vastly less serious than the impact of
actual well-constructed bombs or poisoned letters. These sorts of examples
should be distinguished from other instances of posted missives that have
contained materials that were poisonous to touch and were no form of hoax
at all. The anthrax-filled letters posted to two Democratic Senators and
several news organizations in the USA in September 2001 are cases in
point. They killed five people and injured others, and were palpably terrorist
acts.³⁴
³³ See William K. Rashbaum, “Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and CNN Offices Are Sent
Pipe Bombs,” The New York Times (October 28, 2018).
³⁴ See Amerithrax Investigative Summary, The United States Department of Justice
(February 19, 2010). https://www.justice.gov/archive/amerithrax/docs/amx-investigative-sum
mary.pdf.
 29
A fourth clarification is of the phrase in the definition: “ordinarily com-

mitted or inspired by an organized group.” The first point is that “inspired”
has been added to my formulations in earlier publications lest “committed
by” suggests that the whole group or its leadership must commit the act or
directly authorize or sponsor the act; sometimes, it will be the group that
promotes, endorses, or positively sponsors the act as its own, even if it is
carried out by an individual or a small group of members or sympathizers.
But in other contexts the “organized group” may not even itself be aware of
the act in advance, yet it may be their writings or other messages that have
intentionally motivated those who commit the act: if al-Qaeda or ISIS calls
for terrorist acts to be committed by its supporters throughout the world,
then when someone unknown to the leadership carries out such an act in its
name, that may be enough to satisfy the definition. I say “may be” since we
need to take account of some varieties of what are often called “lone wolf”
attacks. These are not merely acts by individuals, but, as the lone wolf
metaphor suggests, they are acts carried out in isolation from the pack.
This isolation can take several forms, but the most interesting from the point
of view of our definition is that in which the individual is not only uncon-
nected organizationally but also relatively adrift ideologically and politically.
Consider the hostage event in Sydney, Australia in December 2014, in
which a lone individual invaded a café in the center of Sydney and held
seventeen people hostage with a gun while he displayed an Islamic flag and
made some hostages read aloud to camera various semi-coherent messages
about the Middle East. After a shot was fired inside the café, police stormed
the café and killed the gunman, though two of the hostages were killed. This
episode caused some media confusion about whether to call the episode
terrorist or not, partly because the lone perpetrator, Man Haron Monis, did
not approximate to the usual picture of an Islamist terrorist. He was not a
disaffected youth, but a weird, probably deranged middle-aged man with a
criminal record who was facing charges of being an accessory to the murder
of his former wife and multiple charges of sexual assault. His previous public
activities denouncing Western interventions in the Middle East were mostly
viewed by authorities as publicity-seeking stunts, and as a refugee from Iran
he was a Shiite, and hence an unlikely adherent to ISIS, though he had
recently declared himself a convert to Sunni Islam. He apparently meant to
display the ISIS flag, but brought the wrong Muslim flag to the café. All this
strongly tends to show how remote his act was from being committed by an
organized group, and it is even dubiously inspired by one. In this respect, it
is also noteworthy that for some time afterwards no extremist Islamic group
30      
claimed his act for their cause. On the other hand, the hostages were
innocent people and the death of one of them fits part of the tactical
definition (the other death was accidentally caused by police). Even so, his
strange personality makes one wonder both about any connection to the
ISIS cause and the centrality of any political motivation to his acts. Indeed,
so erratic was his behavior that it has been seriously alleged that he had
previously approached Australian security organizations offering to act as an
informer. Of course, some of the palpable terrorists more fully committed
politically to organizations like ISIS or al-Qaeda may well be as mentally
disturbed as Monis, and as obsessed with self-promotion (as indeed may be
some members of national military forces that commit terrorist acts), and
the depth of their religious or ideological knowledge is often also very
shallow. So, Monis and some other “lone wolf” perpetrators may be said
to commit terrorist acts on the periphery of the conceptual range I am
defining with the tactical definition, and I allow room for this with the
adverb “ordinarily.”
A fifth clarification concerns the scope of the term “political” in the
definition. The slogan “the personal is the political” was fashionable in the
1960s and 1970s principally to mark the importance of having political
concerns about areas of “private” or personal life that had been regarded
as off-limits to state intervention. It was a typical slogan of “second-wave”
feminism (though there is much debate about who originated the expres-
sion) expressing concerns about domestic violence against women and other
aspects of male oppression of women and the often-unacknowledged soci-
etal structural support for it. It was also sometimes understood as a call to
collective action rather than merely individual (“personal”) responses. There
was undoubted value in such appeals, and there continues to be a need to
promote public awareness and political action against such things as domes-
tic violence. But two important points need to be made about the slogan.
The first is that the very slogan has to distinguish between the personal and
the political in order to make its point, so that there is already some
implausibility in any wholesale reduction of the personal sphere into the
political. What the slogan aims to do is to mobilize support for people to get
the power of the government and its agencies and laws to deal with abuses
that have hitherto been considered beyond its concern: the point being that
matters of grave injustice and injury should be a concern of government
(and its agencies, such as police) in areas previously thought not to involve
such injustice. That said, however, there is every reason in the history, for
example, of twentieth-century totalitarian governments to insist that there
 31
should be areas of citizens’ activities and strivings that remain at a distance

from state control and surveillance. The fight to remove the state’s punitive
powers over such “offenses” as adultery, homosexual acts, adverse political
commentary, and disturbing acts of artistic freedom has required a separa-
tion of politics (in one important sense) from areas of personal freedom. The
sense of politics that I want to invoke in connection with terrorism is
precisely that to do broadly with governmental power, either sought or
entrenched.
A final clarification concerns the reading that should be given to the
intention specified in it. Though an act must be intended to harm non-
combatants in order to count as terrorist, there may be disputes about
whether those harmed are non-combatants, and part of this we shall explore
in Chapter 4. So it may appear that whether some acts are terrorist (and their
perpetrators, terrorists) depends on what the agents believe. In philosophical
jargon, this is the question whether in such sentences as “The ISIS operatives
intended to kill innocent people in that attack” the context governed by the
verb “intended” is to read as opaque or transparent. Less technically, does
terrorist status turn on objective facts about the nature of the target or on the
attackers’ subjective beliefs? Where an attacker mistakenly believes their
targets to be somehow combatants, does this mean they are not a terrorist?
(Though this is not the same question as whether the attack is justified or
excusable, even if there are some connections between the two questions.)
Here, as elsewhere in discussion of intention, the nature of the mistake is
important. I would hold that if the mistake is factual, then the attack is not
an act of terrorism, but if it is conceptual, then the attack is. If a soldier
shoots an innocent civilian who has been forcibly dressed in an enemy
uniform and shoved into the line of fire as a decoy, the soldier’s action
should not be called terrorist; but someone who shoots the enemy’s babies
because they regard all the enemy as collectively guilty is palpably a terrorist.
In the former case, the agent’s action involved an ordinary, understandable
(if tragic) factual mistake; in the latter case, the agent (if sincere) is concep-
tually confused, and the confusion should not be allowed to infect our
characterization of the type of action. In both cases, there is a false belief
but its character and origin are different. Another way of putting it is that
there should be a bias in favor of the objective characterization of the
victim’s status in determining whether the agent intended to kill a combat-
ant or non-combatant, though there will be exceptions for such “factual”
mistakes such as the example of the soldier and the forcibly disguised
victim mentioned above. There will of course be gray areas in the application
32      
of this factual–conceptual distinction, but it provides sufficient guidance for

clarifying the tactical definition, and explaining why we sometimes seem to
be using a subjective criterion and at other times an objective one. It also
leaves room for reasonable discussion of whether certain acts can be
regarded as terrorist or not, depending on the arguments for determining
what the status of the victims actually was. This is relevant to the “Too
Narrow” objection (a) considered in Chapter 2.
These clarifications deal with some uncertainties or indeed objections that
a reader might well feel or that have been raised by critics. In Chapter 2,
I will consider further objections that can mostly be grouped under two
headings. Both are objections of scope: the first claims that the definition is
too narrow and the second that it is too broad.
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»Niin, se on varsin mahdollista», vakuutti Mount. »Ikävä, että
lainkaan jouduimme eroon heistä.» Eikä Margaret aavistanut, että
hän kiristeli hampaitaan vastatessaan niin.
»Kuinkahan kauan meidän on oltava täällä? Mitä arvelette?»

»Oltava?
Täällä?»
»Niin.» Margaretin heikossa äänessä oli järjetön, epäloogillinen,

odottamaton, todellista riemua uhkuva soinnahdus (oliko se
mahdollista), kun hän lausui sanat: »Täällä, täällä autiolla saarella.»
Salaisesti nuori Mount oli vimmoissaan. »Hän on niellyt sen. Hän

on kaivannut sitä. Siksipä hän on sen saanut. Kymmenentuhatta
kirousta, että minut on raahattu tänne yksin kestämään alkuvaivat!»
Tytölle hän virkkoi: »Jospa Jumala soisi minun arvata, kuinka

kauaksi meidän on — meidän on jäätävä tänne! Mutta mistäpä sen
tietäisin?»
»Niin, ette kaiketikaan. Ette tietysti tiedä, missä olemme. Eikö

purrestakaan näkynyt mitään merkkiä?»
»Ei vähääkään, neiti Verity» (kolkosti).
»No niin. Sellaista sattuu», sanoi äkkiarvaamatta merimiehen tytär.
»Otaksuttavasti», lisäsi hän pian, tähyillen merelle, »otaksuttavasti

on nyt ainoana toivonamme, että meidät huomataan jostakin laivasta
ja meidät noudetaan sinne. Melkein ainahan niin käy, eikö totta?
Verrattain pian. Laivoja kai kulkee tämän saaren ohitse, jos se kerran
on siksi lähellä laivaväylää, että sen rannalla on kärsitty haaksirikko?
Muita laivoja menee ohitsemme, vai mitä?»
»Hyvä Jumala, niin! Ja —» Parahiksi hän malttoi mielensä eikä
sanonut erään tunnetun lentoaseman nimeä. »Varmastikin saapuu
läheisyyteemme piakkoin joku vene tai — tai joku sellainen», koetti
hän lohduttaa tyttöä. Margaret oli niin tyyni, ettei hän olisi uskonut
sitä mahdollisesti tuonnottain »Berkeleyssä» vietetyn illan jälkeen.
»Siihen saakka», virkkoi tyttö, »siihen saakka olemme täällä».
»Nähtävästi», myönsi Mount hienosti.
»Entä mitä meidän on teidän mielestänne paras tehdä?»
»Tehdä?»
Mount kumartui ottamaan raskaan puukappaleen, joka oli

vierähtänyt hänen nuotiostaan. Hän teki sen saadakseen
miettimisaikaa ja piilottaakseen kasvonsa, mutta se antoikin hänelle
ajatuksen.
»Voisin alkaa vuoleksia paria haarukkaa, joilla syömme kalojamme

ensi kerralla», lausui hän — hyvillään siitä, että oli keksinyt jotakin
askartelua käsilleen. Toinen niistä sujahti ensin hänen
housuntaskuunsa, sitten hänen vyönsä lokeroihin.
»Veitseni —»
»Oi! Minulta», selitti Margaret, joka oli sen unohtanut, »se jäi
putouksen partaalle —»
Mount ponnahti pystyyn kävellen kalliolle hyvin ison koiran

liikkumista muistuttavaan, säyseän sievään tapaansa.
Harmissaan Margaret ajatteli, että mies olisi voinut kuunnella
häntä loppuun saakka ja vasta sitten mennä noutamaan
kallisarvoista veistään. Mutta samalla hän toivoi, ettei se olisi häneltä
unohtunut.
Mount toi veitsen, otti puupalasen ja istuutui jälleen kävelleen

veistelemään. Hänen katseensa oli kiintynyt työhön, mutta hänen
äänessään oli Margaretista hieman luonnottomalta tuntuva
soinnahdus, kun hän sanoi: »Olipa onni, ettei veitsi jäänyt minulta
purteen ja että muistin ottaa tulitikkuja ja muutamia muita esineitä.
Teidän hytissänne oli joku tavaralipas tai jotakin sellaista, ja se
sysättiin veneeseenne. Vein sen pieneen luolaanne. Oliko teillä
auttavan mukavaa viime yönä?»
»Mukavaa? oli kaiketi. Nukuin nimittäin liian sikeästi tietääkseni

siitä mitään. Minulla on täytynyt olla mukavaa, eikö olekin? Saanko
jäädä sinne?»
»Jäädä sinne, neiti Verity?»
»Tarkoitin kysyä, saanko pitää sitä luolaa omanani,

makuuhuoneenani?»
Hän oli niellyt sen. Hän oli niellyt koko ilveilyn, ihan kuten vanha
Lloyd-vekkuli oli arvellut. Ja hän, Mount, joka oli vanhukselle
väittänyt, ettei hän uskonut kykenevänsä suoriutumaan siitä, oli nyt
mukana siinä auttamassa ilveilyn jatkuvaa kehittämistä.
»Tietysti. Olkaa te suojaisimmassa paikassa, neiti Verity — kunnes

tapahtuu jotakin.»
»Niin.»
Haaksirikkoisen tytön valtasi tuskallinen tunne. »Suojaisessa»
paikassa oli nyt vain kallioholvi hänen päänsä päällä, hiekkaa hänen
allaan ja ympärillä tutkimatonta seutua!
IV
Hän ajatteli Hill-katua.
Omaa asuntoaan — sen kimmoisia vuoteita! Sen pehmeitä,

nauhareunaisia peitehuopia, paksuja, haahkanuntuvilla täytettyjä
patjoja! Sen kaksinkertaisia ikkunoita ja niiden paksuja verhoja, jotka
estivät Lontoon talven henkäykset tuntumasta.
Kaukana Lontoossa vallitsi kaduilla kostea ja sumuinen kylmyys,

muuttaen ihmiset väriseviksi, märiksi vaatemytyiksi. Tälläkin hetkellä
tarjoili kadunkulmassa värjöttävä, mustahattuinen kukkienmyyjätär
kaupaksi orjantappuroita ja misteleitä sekä Etelä-Ranskasta
karkoitettuja kukkia — neilikoita ja ensimmäisiä mimosia. Raskaasti
liikkuvien moottoriomnibussien seinät olivat täynnä myymälöiden
komeita joulumyynti-ilmoituksia.
Kaikki se oli hirveän kaukana! Tuntui samanlaiselta kuin jonkun

toisen taivaankappaleen ajatteleminen… täällä, tässä lämpöisessä
päivänpaisteessa, näissä virkistävissä, mutta leudoissa
tuulahduksissa.
V
Mutta Lontoon ajatteleminen johti jälleen hänen mieleensä, kuka hän
oli.
Hän rypisti hieman otsaansa totuttuun ylimielisen tyytymättömään

tapaansa ja loi ikävystyneen, raukean katseen haaksirikkotoveriinsa.
Vastahakoisesti hän myönsi: »No niin, jos se on mukavin paikka, niin
minun kaiketi lienee paras olla siellä —»
»Hyvä», virkkoi Mount, pakottaen kasvonsa pysymään vakavina.

Sillä vaikka hän olikin vimmaisen harmistunut herra Lloydiin,
tunkeutui tilanteen julma leikillisyys kuitenkin hänen
huumorintajuntaansa. Koska hänen ilmeisesti oli oltava leikin
ohjaajana tunti tai pari, saattoi hän yhtä hyvin näytellä osaansa
kunnollisesti.
»Juuri niin, neiti Verity, sen luolan on niin sanoaksemme oltava

teidän huoneenne. Tämän poukaman, jossa on nuotio ja vettä, tulee
olla yhteinen arkihuoneemme. Minun lienee hoidettava tulta niin, että
se pysyy vireillä yölläkin. Se on nykyhetken tärkein tehtävä; tuli on
säilytettävä kytemässä.»
»Tietysti. Sen minäkin tiesin. Ja kohdakkoin te tietenkin laitatte

ison keon sytyttääksemme loimuavan merkkivalkean —»
»Mitä —»
»Loimuavan merkkivalkean, luonnollisesti. Kiinnittääksemme

itseemme ohi menevien alusten huomion.»
»Niin — tietysti», vastasi Mount veisteltyään sekunnin ajan

uutterasti puupalastaan. Mitä hyvänsä, kunhan vain ei olisi pakko
pohtia asioita — ennen kuin vanhus saapuisi ja selittäisi, mitä
alettaisiin pohtia.
»Oikeastaan voisimme nyt jo alkaa yhdessä koota lisää

polttopuita.»
Margaret nousi pystyyn, silmäili ympärilleen ja näytti tosiaankin

olevan valmis keräämään risuja.
Mount huomautti: »Tässä poukamassa on vain hyvin vähän

poltettavaa. Pienillä oksilla ja sirpaleilla ei voida pitää vireillä
kovinkaan komeata roihua. Täällä oli ainoastaan kaksi isoa kapulaa,
ja ne paloivat aamiaisen aikana. Nyt arvelen, että minun olisi paras
lähteä luotanne.»
»Lähteä luotani.»
»Ei pitkäksi aikaa, enkä loittone etäälle, sen lupaan. En voi mennä
kauas», sanoi nuori mies, taaskin salaa kiristellen hampaitaan.
»Minun olisi parasta kavuta tuonne kalliolle — hm — tarkastamaan,
onko siellä polttopuita, ja yleensä silmäilemään ympärillemme.»
Mielessään hän päätti mennä Lloydia vastaan, kun tämä vanha

vintiö saapuisi, ja puhua hänelle suunsa puhtaaksi, ennen kuin ukko
menisi lemmon kiusallisen, mutta harhaanjohdetun tyttösukulaisensa
luokse.
»Minä tulen mukaanne, herra Mount.»
»Ette saa tulla. Emme saa molemmat lähteä —»
»Miksi emme?»'
»Koska» (kirkas ajatus) »jonkun on jäätävä nuotiota valvomaan.
Jollette pahastu, neiti Verity, on teidän pysyttävä täällä. Ja», lisäsi
hän hyvin huolissaan, »älkää poistuko tästä poukamasta muualle
kuin tuonne oikeanpuoliseen!» Sillä vanha ilkimys oli joku aika sitten
määrännyt tytölle tämän liikkuma-alan. »Luvatkaa, ettette poistu
näiltä rantakaistaleilta, ennen kuin tulen takaisin! Lupaattehan sen?»
»Lupaan», vakuutti Margaret, ja hänen äänensä oli samanlainen

kuin lapsen, joka kunniasanallaan sitoutuu pysymään puutarhaportin
sisäpuolella.
»Hän on ihan lapsi», mietti nuori mies vimmoissaan astellessaan

kaihon juurella olevien kivilohkareiden sekaan rinteen loivimmalle
kohdalle. »Mutta hitto soikoon, jos minut on tehty
lapsenhoitajaksi…»
Katseleva Margaret näki paitaan ja housuihin puetun kookkaan

miehen keveästi kiipeävän kivi järkäleiden ja matalien pensaiden
välitse ja kallion laella tummana kuvastuvan sinistä taivasta vasten.
Sitten mies katosi näkyvistä.
»Hän ei edes heiluttanut kättään», ajatteli Margaret. »Vähätpä

siitä!
On varsin mukavaa olla taaskin yksin… Mitäs nyt teen?»
V luku
Edenin toinen puoli

I
Margaretin päässä pyöri muistoja kaikesta siitä, mitä hän oli kuullut
tai lukenut »autioille saarille joutuneista ihmisistä».
Nämä ihmiset tuntuivat yhtä mittaa puuhaavan jotakin. He

rakensivat.
Muokkasivat viljelyksiä. Valmistivat jousia ja nuolia. Kalastivat.
Kokosivat syötäviä hedelmiä. Pyydystivät lintuja ja pieniä kauriita.
Muokkasivat taljoja auringon paisteessa. Heti he alkoivat. Heti he
alkoivat kehittää omaa kulttuuriaan villissä ympäristössään.
Liikakulttuurin turmelema, ultrauudenaikainen Margaret alkoi vasta

nyt tajuta, kuinka ihailtavan työteliäitä, keinokkaita, kuinka eteviä ne
haaksirikkoiset olivat olleet.
»Minunkin pitäisi tehdä jotakin —»
Lapsuusaikanaan hänet oli varsin usein jätetty yksin rannalle. Nyt

hän kävi jälleen käsiksi senaikaisiin lapsenhommiinsa.
Ensin oli etsittävä litteä kivi — sitten kaivettava hiekkaan kuoppa

aamiaisen ainoiden tähteiden, vähäisten kalanruotojen hautaamista
varten. Sekin oli kauan sitten menneiltä ajoilta jäänyt muisto; hänen
äitinsä oli opettanut hänelle, kuinka tavattoman ajattelematonta oli
viskellä voileipien käärepapereita maahan rumentamaan kaunista
ympäristöä.
Nyt hän hautasi jätteet yhtä huolellisesti kuin olisi ollut

kahdentoista ikäinen; hän taputti hiekan tasaiseksi kuopan
kohdalle… perin vähäpätöinen yksityiskohta — mutta sekin tuntui
kuuluvan siihen vakavaan tilanteeseen, johon hän nyt (kuten hän
luuli) oli joutunut. Otettu laivaan kuin vastoin tahtoaan pestattu
merimies! Haaksirikkoutunut! Jätetty autiolle rannalle! Ilman muita
vaatteita kuin nämä oudot tamineet hänen yllään olleen hataran
leningin verhona! Yksin, seuranaan vain yksi ainoa henkilö! Ilman
pienintäkään vihiä, miten muiden oli käynyt! Tietämättä, mistä saisi
seuraavan aterian! Melkein ilman suojaa, johon päänsä kallistaisi! —
Mutta eniten kummastutti häntä se tavaton seikka, että vaikka hänen
olisi pitänyt olla huumautunut surkean tilansa aiheuttamasta
sielunhädästä — vaikka hänen olisi pitänyt tuntea kuolemantuskaa,
hän — mikä ihme! — ei sitä tuntenut.
Aurinko paahtoi yhä lämpimämmin. Hänen hiuksiaan liehuttava

tuuli valoi häneen uutta elämänhalua.
Se oli uskomatonta, mutta hänet valtasi voimakkaana tunne: »En

koskaan ole onneton tällä saarella!»
II
Mutta jos kohta hänen ei tarvinnut tulla onnettomaksi, sai hän pian
tuntea olonsa koko laiha epämukavaksi.
Vain aamun alkuhetkinä innostutti häntä uutuuden viehätys, ja hän

hyöri yksinäisellä rantakaistaleella, uurastaen kuin mehiläiset
ensimmäisenä aurinkoisena päivänä. Hän oli aina liikkeessä,
kyyristeli, keräsi risuja, aaltojen ajamia oksia, kaikenlaisia
puupalasia. Hän kasasi ne sen punertavan kivilohkareen viereen,
jolle nuori Mount oli laskenut keskeneräisen haarukantekeleensä,
kooten niitä kokonaisen läjän.
Ylpeänä tämä tyttö, joka yhdeksään vuoteen ei ohut pannut rikkaa
ristiin, katseli nyt kättensä työtä! Kohdakkoin hän keräisi myöskin
kasan meriruohoa liekkien vaimentamista varten. Välillä hän lisäsi
puita litteiden, savuttaneiden liesikivien välissä palavaan tuleen ja
kyykötteli, lämmitellen käsiään sen hivelevässä hehkussa. Hyvillä
mielin ja huvitettuna hän ajatteli, kuinka nuori mies palatessaan
hämmästyisi!
Vihdoin Mount palasi; siitä oli merkkinä se, että kallion rinnettä
alaspäin liukui nykäyksittäin kaksi oksaa, jotka näyttivät liikkuvan
»itsestään». Niitä raahaava mies oli melkein kokonaan lehvien
peitossa. Kahisevan, huojuvan taakkansa alla hän ponnisteli
eteenpäin kivien välitse kuumassa auringonpaisteessa. Päästyään
tasaiselle maalle hän kiskoi oksia pitkin hietikkoa.
Puolenkymmenen askeleen päässä nuotiosta hän pudotti

taakkansa maahan, oikaisihe, murahti ja pyyhkäisi kyynärvarrellaan
hiestä kimaltelevaa otsaansa.
Margaret, josta ruumiillinen työ oli niin kovin outoa, ei kyennyt

ajattelemaan muuta kuin omia saavutuksiaan. Ylpeänä hän kutsui
toista katsomaan ja osoitti vähäisiä risukasojaan. Häntä kummastutti,
että hiestynyt ja hengästynyt Mount loi niihin vain nopean vilkaisun.
»Sepä hyvä! Olettepa koonnut aikamoisen läjän!»
(Tuo nuori mies esiintyisi kohteliaasti ankaran maanjäristyksenkin

aikana.)
»Mutta pelkäänpä, ymmärrättehän, ettei noilla päästäisi kovin

pitkälle yöllä —»
»Eikö?»
(Vaikka Margaret oli raatanut tuntikausia!). »Niin luulen… Minun
on noudettava lisää tällaisia oksia», sanoi Mount. »Kiskoin niitä irti
niin paljon kuin jaksoin.»
»Mistä?»
»Tuolla on jonkunlainen lehto noin parinsadan metrin päässä

kallion laella.»
»Sitten minä tietysti tulen avuksenne», ehdotti tyttö aloittelijain

innokkaaseen tapaan, »kiskomaan niitä tänne alas».
Se olisi tietenkin hyvä, tuumi Mount; siihen kuluisi aika, eikä hänen
tarvitsisi lörpötellä tytölle… Pyyhkäisten uudelleen otsaansa hän
silmäili epäillen tytön hentoa, liian nopeasti kasvanutta vartaloa. »En
tiedä, jaksatteko te, neiti Verity.»
»Jaksanko? Miksi ihmeessä en jaksaisi?»
Miksi tosiaan piti tämän miehen pitää häntä houkkiona —

heikkona, velttona, taakkana? Kuvitteliko Mount, ettei hän pystynyt
mihinkään autiolla saarella? Margaretin sydämen sisimmässä kuiski
kauan uinunut vaisto: »Sinun on noustava tilanteen tasalle…
käyttäydyttävä hyvin sekä vaikeuksissa että vaaroissa. Olet
merimiehen tytär.»
Hän katsahti nuoren miehen kasvoihin. Ne olivat hieman

punehtuneet, ja pisamat näkyivät nyt selvästi.
Nyt Margaret pani merkille, että hän oli huolestuneempi kuin

ennen.
Hän kysyi nopeasti: »Onko tapahtunut jotakin? Jotakin
pahempaa?»
»Ei, ei mitään… Sehän juuri — ei kerrassaan mitään, neiti Verity.»
»Minusta tuntuu, että olette hyvin kiusaantunut.»
»Se on varsin luonnollista, eikö olekin?»
»Kyllä, tietysti. Mutta siinä ei ole kaikki. Luullakseni —»
»Mitä?»
»Luullakseni te toivoisitte hartaasti, että haaksirikossa olisi

joutunut kanssanne rannalle setäni tai Wallace tahi joku merimies,
kuka hyvänsä muu, mutta en minä. Niin, ettekö toivoisi?»
»No —»
»Niin juuri. Niin toivotte. Vain sentähden, että olen tyttö», jatkoi
Margaret, silmäillen häntä vihaisesti, mutta ei kärtyisesti kuten
aikaisemmin. »Arvelette, etten kelpaa kerrassaan mihinkään täällä
autiolla saarella. Luulette, etten pysty tekemään mitään?
Otaksutteko, etten milloinkaan auttanut isääni virittämään nuotiota?
Mutta minäpä tiedän aika paljon näistä seikoista. Meidän on koottava
valtavan iso kasa polttopuita.
Lähdetään!»
III
Edenistä häädetty Eva oli otaksuttavasti ensimmäinen nainen, joka
totteli naisia kannustavaa kiihoitinta — vaihtelunhalua. Aatami,
ensimmäinen vanhoillinen, lienee pahoilla mielin silmäillyt taakseen,
viehättävään laiskojen puutarhaan, jossa työt tekivät itse itsensä —
siihen paikkaan, jonka hän oli aina tuntenut. Mutta saattaa kuvitella,
minkälaisin silmin Eva kiihkeän uteliaana katseli Edenin ulkopuolelle!
Samoin Margaret ollessaan ensimmäistä iltapäiväänsä saarella.
Olisipa perin hupaista todistaa tälle tuskaisen huolestuneelle

miehelle, että hän kykenisi auttamaan työssä, että hänkin kykenisi
osaltaan suoriutumaan pulmista. Hän nautti kavutessaan ensi kerran
kalliolle, punaisten kivijärkäleiden ohitse, harmaiden möhkäleiden ja
pensaiden sekaan ja taaskin pois sieltä. Yhä ylemmäksi — kunnes
he näkivät lehdon ja sen takana olevat kivet ja harmaat kalliot, jotka
auringonpaisteessa hohtivat melkein helmenvalkoisilta niin kauaksi
kuin Margaret erotti saartaan… Ponnistellen eteenpäin kiskomalla
pensaita hän haisteli tuoksua, joka oli jäänyt hänen kämmeneensä,
kun hän oli tarttunut erääseen kasviin (joka oli yhtä iso kuin huvilan
portilla kasvava marunapensas).
»Mikä kasvi tämä on?… Täällä tuoksuaa niin suloiselta kaikki, mitä
poljetaan jalkojen alle! Parempaa — paljoa parempaa kuin Après la
Pluie… Mutta tässä on niin tuttu tuoksu. Muistuttaa, jostakin, mitä
olen maistanut. Mikä se on… miksi sitä nimitetään, herra Mount?»
Nuori Mount valitti, ettei hän juuri tuntenut kasvien nimiä. Hän oli
ollut lausumaisillaan sanan »vermouth», mutta eihän »vermouth» ole
troopillinen kasvi, eikä hän saanut antaa tuolle lemmon tytölle aihetta
esittää lisää kiusallisia kysymyksiä. Niinpä hän joudutti askeliaan —
ja läähättäen, hengittäen keuhkojensa sellaisilla osilla, joiden ei ollut
tarvinnut toimia pitkiin aikoihin, Margaret kiipesi jälessä, vetäen
sieraimiinsa auringon lämmittämän, aromaattisen, hänen polviinsa
takertuvan tiheikön tuoksun.
»Tästä varmaankin johtuu, että saaren sisäosista puhaltava tuuli

tuoksuaa — niin suloiselta.»
»Niin kai», myönsi Mount.
Tuskastunut nuori mies välitti vähät siitä, mille mikin lemusi. Hän
oli vimmaisen harmissaan ja kärsimätön, ja hänen oli pidettävä se
salassa.
Kuinka pitkäksi ajaksi aikoi se vanha veitikka jättää hänet tänne

tuon lemmon tytön seuraksi, joka uskoi, että he kaksi olivat viimeinen
Robinson Crusoe-pari — ja joka oli pidettävä siinä uskossa?
Hän oli antanut sanansa… Empimättä hän oli antanut sanansa

vanhalle
Lloydille… Ja tämänaamuisessa kirjeessä Lloyd-vanhus oli lausunut:
»Uskon M:n Teidän huostaanne siihen saakka, kunnes palaan.

Aika on epävarma. Pitäkää kaikki salassa, kuten on sovittu!»
»Kuten on sovittu»… Vanhan vintiön mielilauseita. Mountin oli

sopeuduttava siihen — sallittava vierellään rinnettä myöten kipuavan
tyttösen kuvitella — niin, kaikkea, mitä kuvitteli. Hän ei voisi jättää
tyttöä tunniksikaan — vaikkapa he kahdessa tunnissa
ennättäisivätkin perin mieluisten ihmisten pariin.
Täällä he nyt olivat, hyljättyinä omin voimin ponnistelemaan

saadakseen ravintoa ja lämpöä, yhtä varmasti kuin olisivat maailman
toisella äärellä.
»Niinpä niin», mietti Margaret, hilliten toistaiseksi raivoaan. »Antaa
mennä vain!»… Ja kun Mount ja hän saapuivat kallion laella olevalle,
rosoiselle, luonnon luomalla pengermälle ja siellä kasvavaan
eukalyptus-, rautatammi- ja öljypuulehtoon, syventyi edellinen
osaansa ja huudahti vakuuttavasti pahoittelevansa, ettei hänen
veitsensä ollut hieman vankempi ja että sen terän katkeaminen olisi
tuhoisa onnettomuus.
»Luonnollisesti», jupisi Margaret tosissaan. »Ainoa vehje, jolla

voimme perata kalojamme ja vuoleksia mitään!»
»Aion kiivetä tuonne», ilmoitti Mount, mitaten katseellaan, kuinka

korkealla oli seuraava oksa, jonka hän mieli katkaista. »Nakerran
sitä puoliväliin saakka ja käyn sitten riippumaan siihen, joten painoni
murtaa sen. Jos suvaitsette vain siirtyä syrjään, neiti Verity —»
Neiti Verity astui nopeasti sivulle pensaikkoon ja jäi katsomaan

miehen puuhia.
IV
Niin, ihastuneena hän katseli, kun nuori mies kiipesi lähimpään

eukalyptuspuuhun, saavutti oksan, heilautti pitkän jalkansa sille,
siirtyi mukavampaan asentoon ja alkoi vuolla veitsellään. Mies huojui
ja ponnisteli. Räsähdys! … Lisää kahinaa ja räiskettä, ja lehväinen
oksa katkesi. Pudotessaan se kiskaisi rungosta pitkän kaistaleen
kuorta, jättäen valkean jäljen. Mount tipahti selälleen pensaikkoon.
Noustuaan pystyyn hän ravisti itseään ja nyökäytti hieman päätään.
Huomaamattaan murahtaen hän kiersi oksan lopullisesti irti
rungosta, vetäisi sen erilleen ja viskasi sen syrjään.
»Hän on hyvin vahva», mietti tarkkaileva Margaret.
Koska hän ei ollut vuosikausiin luonut kehenkään mieheen muuta

kuin pikaisen, raukean, näkemättömän silmäyksen, ansainnee
kenties mainita, minkälaisen vaikutuksen häneen teki tämä olento,
joka (myöhemmin niin loisteliaana vierassaleissa) nyt liikkui niin
päättävänä, hiestyneenä, hengittäen syvään, ponnistellen puun
kimpussa, mutta selviytyen siitä yhtä hyvin kuin Margaret voimiaan
jännittäen selviytyi syvälle juurtuneesta voikukasta…
*****
Kun Eva ensi kerran näki Aatamin otsa hiessä kamppailevan

luonnonvoimia vastaan, näytti mies hänestä silloin mahdollisesti
paremmin katsomisen arvoiselta kuin vetelehtiessään paratiisin
puutarhassa hänen vierellään.
Komeiden nuorten miesten näkeminen ei kyllä ollut Margaretille

mikään uutuus. Eikö hän ollut elänyt sellaisten olentojen
ympäröimänä? Mutta kuinka paljon hän oli kiinnittänyt huomiota
siihen, millaisilta oikeastaan näyttivät nuo henkivartijat, jotka panivat
autoja käyntiin, kantoivat päällystakkeja, aukoivat ovia, tarjoilivat
hänelle ohjelmia? Hänen päähänsä ei ollut kertaakaan pälkähtänyt
arvostelevasti katsella näiden huomaavan kohteliaiden nuorukaisten
pituutta, liikkeitä ja eleitä. »En ole koskaan pannut merkille, miltä
miehet näyttävät», oli hän tunnustanut Cynthia Oddleyn
huudahdettua: »Miehet ovat niin kamalannäköisiä!»
*****
Onko se katsantotapa leviämässä? Tytöt sanovat: »Ei ole väliä,
miltä sulhanen näyttää, vai onko?» (Olen itse kuullut tyttöjen
lausuvan tällaisen enteellisen huomautuksen.) »Kunhan vain
»morsian on kaunis». Hyvin nuoret tytöt mieltyvät hauskannäköisiin
koulutovereihinsa. Kouluaikoina se on varsin luonnollista — mutta
onko se hyvä merkki, että he toisen vuosikymmenensä lopulla ja
kolmannen alussa eivät pidä miehiä katsomisen arvoisina (kuten
Margaret ei pitänyt)? Kaikkien kauneusihanteiden kiinnittäminen
ainoastaan naiskauneuteen on yksipuolista. Jotkut tytöt kannattavat
sitä. Heistä miehet muuttuvat yhä vähäarvoisemmiksi. Jo nyt miehet
ovat heistä äärettömän paljon mitättömämpiä kuin näyte-ikkunat,
joihin on levitetty houkuttelema kankaita ja viehkeän pehmeitä
turkiksia. Pian miehet ovat muutamien tyttöjen silmissä pelkkiä
kiinteitä, pitkulaisia ainemöhkäleitä, jotka vaativat niin ja niin suuren
tilan ja pimittävät niin ja niin paljon auringonpaistetta. Miehet, jotka
eivät jaksa käsittää tyttöjen näennäisen mielenkiinnon somien,
alituisten väreiden takana piilevää, tympeän syvää
välinpitämättömyyttä! Se ei ole hyvä merkki! Kenen on vika?
Osaksi ovat kenties syynä miesten jokapäiväiset puvut, jotka

tekevät heidät niin epäselvän himmeiksi: tasoittavat muodot,
mullanvärit, painostava harmaa, ukkospilvensininen, joita he
mielellään käyttävät… Se on myöskin kostoa muuttumattomasta
mustasta ja valkeasta asusta, joka kärsii tappion naisten
uljastelevien, moniväristen iltapukujen rinnalla (sillä
rakkausasioissakin tahtovat naiset loistaa)… Osaksi lienee vikana
se, etteivät naiset näe miehiä edullisimmalta puolelta, silloin kun
nämä ovat reippaassa liikkeessä, kyllin usein muualla kuin leikki- ja
urheilukentillä. Ne ovat miesten tenhovoiman ja arvon viimeiset
suojapaikat. Siitä naisten »joukkueille» osoittama ihailu. Siitä
»lukuisat hyvin puetut naiset katsojien joukossa», kuten
kilpailuselostuksissa mainitaan.
Margaretin koko ajan tarkkaillessa nuorta Mountia hänessä heräsi

kokonaan uusi kunnioituksentunne miehen voimaa kohtaan. Mutta
vain alitajuisesti hän silloin näki, kuinka miellyttävä Mount oli
karkeassa asussaan ja kuinka paljoa nuoremman näköinen hän nyt
oli, koska hänen tukkansa oli pörröllään, hänen vaaleaihoiset
poskensa olivat punehtuneet ja hänen kasvoillaan oli sekä aivoja
että ruumista askarruttavassa työssä olevan miehen ilme. Tietoisesti
hän vain ajatteli, että Mount oli väkevä, nopea, kätevä ja osasi hyvin
suoriutua näistä ulkoilmapuuhista. Odottaessaan hän vain ihmetteli,
mitä hän olisi tehnyt, jos hän olisi joutunut tänne ihan yksin ilman
tätä miestä.
Kammottava ajatus… Vaistomaisesti hän sen pakotuksesta astui

askeleen työskentelevään mieheen päin.
Pian Mount kääntyi, luoden silmäyksen aurinkoiseen,

hyvätuoksuiseen maisemaan. »Se riittää. Meidän ei ole viisasta olla
kovin kauan poissa nuotioltamme. Nyt kuljetamme nämä sinne alas.
Jos nyt haluatte tarttua kiinni tähän —»
Tottelevaisesti Margaret kävi käsiksi oksaan. He ponnistelivat

rinnettä alaspäin, kiskoen ratisevia oksia, jotka silloin tällöin
takertuivat kivien teräviin särmiin. Tuontuostakin heidän jalkansa
luiskahtelivat, kun sattui vähäisiä maanvieremiä. Rinnettä myöten he
raahasivat raskaat taakkansa nuotiopoukamalle — Mount ja lemmon
tyttö.
Rantakaistaleelle saavuttuaan he heittivät kantamuksensa

maahan, kohensivat tulta ja palasivat kalliolle. Kaksi, kolme kertaa
he tekivät saman retken, ja joka kerralla he kävivät yhä
harvasanaisemmiksi. Mountilla oli yllin kyllin ajateltavaa. Margaret
taas sai pinnistää voimiaan estääkseen nuoren miehen
huomaamasta, että vaikka hän olikin aloittanut iltapäiväisen
uurastuksen järkähtämättömän päättävänä, hänen sisunsa alkoi
pettää…
VI
Ennen kuin tuomitsette tyttöä ankarasti, ajatelkaa, millaista hänen

elämänsä viime vuosina oli ollut, kuinka heikot ja veltot hänen liian
nopeasti kasvaneen, liian vähän harjoitellun, joutilaan ruumiinsa
lihakset olivat. Ainoa hänen tuntemansa ruumiillinen puuha oli ollut
tanssi, eikä tämä puuha kysynyt tanssilihaksia. Hänen jalkansa
heltyivät, ja hän väsyi; hänen selkänsä tuntui katkeavan. Hän kapusi
kalliolle ja raahasi sieltä oksia, jotka kävivät yhä painavammiksi, ja
viimeisen hakumatkan jälkeen tuntuivat hänen raajansakin liian
raskailta nosteltaviksi ja liian epävarmoilta hänen hallittavikseen.
Hänen sydämensä jyskytti. Hänen kasvoillaan virtasi hiki. Hän puri

hammasta jaksaakseen olla ähkymättä…
Ei ollut kovin kauan siitä, kun oli tilattu auto viemään neiti Verityä
hotellista saman bulevardin varrella, vain kivenheiton päässä
olevaan muotiliikkeeseen, odottamaan kaksi tuntia ja sitten viemään
hänet takaisin. Mutta hervoton neiti Verity, jonka oma se Rolls-auto
oli ja joka valitsi hattuja tukuttain puhumattakaan hinnasta, oli
myöhäisempi kehitysmuoto kuin tanakka pieni Margaret, joka oli
kaivanut sokeriherne-penkkien ojia sussexilaisessa puutarhassa. Me
kasvamme juuristamme. Palaudumme alkuumme. Hämmästyttävän
nopeasti alkoi Margaret Verity saada takaisin perityn, terveen,
reippaan rohkeutensa ja sitkeytensä.
Niinpä hän hammasta purren kiskoi oksaansa rinnettä myöten.

Hän raahasi sen kasalle saakka ja vasta sitten sen pudotti. Mutta
hän pudotti sen niin äkkiä, että nuori Mount, joka parhaillaan nosti
omaa oksaansa läjälle, pyörähti kiivaasti ympäri.
Tyrmistyneenä hän huudahti: »Hyvä Jumala! Tehän olette ihan

nääntynyt… Voi! —»
VI luku
Tekoveli
Tyttö piti päänsä uljaasti pystyssä vastatessaan, ettei häntä mikään

vaivannut ja että hän hieman levähdettyään jaksaisi alkaa uudelleen.

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The Meaning of Terrorism Cecil

Anthony John Coady

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The meaning of life: a reader Fourth Edition Cahn

The Meaning of Terrorism

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Philosophers writing on and often discussing together urgent issues related

(then) University of Maryland Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy

University, University of Sydney, University of Adelaide, University

Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,

The Earth quakes, the earth

terrorist acts understandably arouse a particular sort of apprehension

Philosophy and Terrorism

Although philosophers have eventually devoted a great deal of attention to

Harvard seminar I had attended in 1978, had a brief, stimulating chapter

   3

1970s to early 1980s. At a committee meeting with colleagues in the program

instead on the idea of national interest as the sole or primary relevant

the meaning of terrorism, in a sense broader than that of conceptual

beyond academia is enormous, and I make no pretense of having heeded

A Brief Outline of Themes in the Book’s Chapters

Chapter 1 is concerned with bringing some clarity to the widespread con-

       ’  5

ordinarily committed or inspired by an organized group, in which violence

In Chapter 2, a number of objections to the deﬁnition are discussed that

Chapter 3 addresses four philosophical attempts to show, mostly without

signiﬁcance, since the tactical deﬁnition’s reliance upon such concepts

       ’  7

Chapters 5 and 6 provide an extensive discussion of seven philosophical

⁴ See C. A. J. Coady, “Collateral Damage,” The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, edited by

       ’  9

⁵ Jeff McMahan, “Intention, Permissibility, Terrorism, and War,” Philosophical Perspectives,

TERRORIST, n. One who uses violence in a manner contrary to

bership of al-Qaeda or ISIS is likely to be more pertinent today than

    ? 11

Consider, for instance, the question I had to answer in 2012 on my appli-

I answered “No” in all sincerity, but I wondered what they meant by

Why Bother with a Deﬁnition?

12      

contribute to the possibilities of sane and coherent thinking about the

³ Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1989, Section 20 (1).

    ? 13

terrorist acts in some circumstances as just distribution rests in part, as I will

14      

¹⁰ G. E. L. Owen, “Logic and Metaphysics in Some Earlier Works of Aristotle,” in Aristotle

    ? 15

16      

but, as I shall argue, terrorism is a distinctive form of violence, and if we

Focusing on Terrorist Acts

I shall begin with a discussion of the idea of “a terrorist act” because

¹⁴ Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept (June 19, 2015). https://theintercept.com/2015/06/19/

    17

A common suggestion is that there must be something wrong with terror-

18      

include any reference to violence in their deﬁnition of terrorism. Robert

Earlier the declaration commits itself to the dubious concept of structural

on rare occasions, be quite harmless, even praiseworthy, as when it is being