What Makes the Martyr (Im)Moral?

Abstract

The question in this essay is: what may justify the act of the modern martyr as moral, or what denies the morality of suicide terrorism? Here ‘the modern martyr’ is considered to be the suicide terrorist, who represents a new form of martyrdom, ‘predatory martyrdom’ (Barlow H, Dead for good: martyrdom and the rise of the suicide bomber. Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, 2007). In the first part of this essay a non-pejorative definition of ‘suicide terrorism’ is given. In the second part of the essay the views on terrorism by three moral and social philosophers are discussed: Michael Walzer, Igor Primoratz and Marcel Hénaff. All three argue in distinct ways that suicide terrorism is almost always highly immoral because terrorism is killing innocents, which is a violation of one of the most fundamental humanitarian principles. It is argued that neither a purely ethical, secular treatment of suicide terrorism nor a political condemnation holds, because one misses the special ‘nature’ of suicide terrorism. The point in criticizing Walzer’s, Primoratz’s and Hénaff’s views on suicide terrorism is not to defend or justify suicide terrorism, the point is that before we can determine the immoral nature of terrorism, one has to acknowledge that because terrorism ultimately is a religious phenomenon, as American historian Faisal Devji has brought forward, it distracts itself from ethics: suicide terrorism is a religious action and as such transgresses ‘normal’ ethical views. In the last part of this essay it is indicated that before one can decide whether suicide terrorism is immoral, one has to delve deeper into the question in what ways terrorism is a form of bad religion.KeywordsInnocent PeopleSuicide BomberSacrificial RitualSupreme EmergencySuicide TerrorismThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.