Abstract

This dissertation attempts to dissolve the often made claim that 'one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter' by providing an explication of 'terrorism' that can be heuristically useful to the social scientist concerned to make empirical generalizations about the subject as well as to the philosopher concerned to evaluate occurrences of terrorism from the moral point of view. In chapter one I provide historical background for this attempt by discussing two historical struggles of groups that have been called terrorists, the Irish Republican Army and the Irgun Zvai Leumi. In chapter two I explicate terrorism as a closely related family of terms which can be identified by reference to a full-featured form of terrorism which I call 'proto-typical terrorism'. In chapter three I first argue that the features of proto-typical terrorism make terrorism prima facie wrong. I then present general criteria than can be used to morally evaluate particular occurrences of terrorism and show how a contractarian would apply these criteria to the questions 'What protections are due to the innocent?' and 'When does a group of persons have a right to a nation state?'