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Also, I do not think terrorism can be defined in terms of the use of coercion or force, even violence, to influence a community. The IRS uses coercion, or the threat of it, and while I really do not like the IRS, I do not think it enforces a policy of terrorism. The fact that terrorism cannot be characterized merely in terms of coercion, force, or violence is dramatically underestimated. A person can be coerced, as I am every year by the IRS, or a person can be forced directly, as many others are by the IRS, or a person can be done violence, in an effort to stop her from doing violence to innocent others, without that person being terrorized. Terrorism, I believe, involves coercion, force, or violence that achieves its ends, or is designed to achieve its ends, by eliciting a degree or kind of fear that undermines a person's ability to reason clearly, for her to decide and to act as an autonomous person. If, as a bank teller, I am threatened at gunpoint by a robber demanding that I give her all of the money in the bank or she will shoot me, I might be coerced, even frightened, but still decide for perfectly good, calm reasons that I should simply hand over the money. Terrorism, since it involves terror, is a policy that is prepared to influence without recourse to any form of reason. One thing we should recognize in this insight is that, except in the cases of flat-out lunatics, most people are prepared to resort to such means only when they believe that all hope of appeal to good reason has run out, or worse yet, when their claims on good reason are not even heard, are not even candidates for moral consideration.

A related word of caution is in order. It is wrong to assume that if a terrorist manner of response involves a wholesale denial of appeal to reason, then acts of terrorism are senseless, utterly pointless, and have no reason behind them. This is a natural reaction to the events if 9/11. But it certainly fails to describe those events. While the terrorists who flew those planes stepped beyond appealing to reason, their actions were not without purpose or meaning. It is blindness simply to conclude, merely by virtue of their murderous acts, that these men were insane lunatics acting beyond the boundaries of comprehension. They did not choose Disneyland or a professional baseball game. They chose dramatic symbols of United States military and economic might.

And as for achieving their goals, I think they did achieve one--for we are paying attention now in a way in which we were not before.

Must terrorism involve violence? Because terrorism means to influence by unseating rational means of engagement through terror, it is certainly possible that it be achieved without the use of any force or violence at all but just by a threat of force or violence that is adequate to get the job done. This leaves open the possibility that some policy of terrorism could be morally justified if its moral goal is sufficiently laudatory and the total harm done minimal.

Here is another feature of terrorism that, it seems to me, is not fully acknowledged. Terrorism is designed primarily to elicit terror in the community at large. The terror is not necessarily intended for those members of the community who are the direct recipients of terrorism's force or violence. In fact, terrorists might have no concern at all whether or not the direct targets of violence experience any terror. The terrorists might assume that the targets will all be killed, or that the targets are unable to have sufficient understanding to be truly terrorized, as in the case of very young children or infants.

Furthermore, the role of intention matters. Terrorism is designed to influence the wider community by means of eliciting terror. The terror elicited is not understood by the terrorist merely as a side-effect--expected or unexpected--of the means of influence; it is the means of influence. Hence, a community haggard and terrorized during wartime by the military battle waging all around it is not thereby a target of enemy terrorism--not if the community's terror is not the enemy's intended means of influence. Of course, there is ample room for duplicity in wartime. Certainly it is possible for a military campaign to incorporate terrorist tactics by including initiatives that have little or no strategic military worth but are designed to weaken the resolve of a community.

Many have attempted to define terrorism in terms of the distinction in just-war theory between combatants and noncombatants. Regardless of the suitability of this distinction, it turns, I think, on a more fundamental moral notion, that of innocence. It is this notion, and not that between combatants and noncombatants, that is a core feature of terrorism. Innocence is a concept that, in this discussion, is bound to arise suspicions. But careful though we need to be in applying the term, I think that terrorism targets its use of force or violence (or just the pertinent threats) at the innocent members of a population--the most extreme cases are children. Or if it does not target the innocent, then it makes no effort at all even to minimize harm to the innocent. Even in a case in which all members of a community are guilty of some infraction and none are innocent, the terrorist is prepared to target innocent elements of those allegedly guilty persons.

Let me offer an example of what I mean by an innocent person, or even an innocent element of a person. Regrettably, I am not an innocent person; I promise. I have sinned. I have done moral wrong. Put it as you like. But I might be innocent with respect to some real or imagined moral wrong done to you. Hence, if in anger you punch me on the street corner, seeking to strike out at anyone as a result of having been morally wronged by someone, it will not do for you to learn that I am guilty of something, even something that merits my being socked in the nose. If you strike me and I am innocent with respect to any wrong done to you, then in the relevant sense you have struck back at the innocent. The same applies even if I have morally wronged you, but in a way having nothing to do with the manner of your harm to me. Suppose I cheat you of money that you deserve. To engage me as a guilty person, you need to address me and the wrong I have done to you, by seeing to it that I suffer financially, or at least by getting your money back, perhaps taking me to court. The key is that you need to address directly the wrong that I have done to you. But if, instead, you have the neighborhood kids dump tons of laxative into my drinking water until I become ill, or cut the brake lines on my car, then you have addressed a feature of my personage that is entirely disengaged from any wrong done to you. You have directed harm at a feature of me that is innocent with respect to the alleged wrong that I have done you. (This sort of distinction is, I think, behind the moral justification for why punishments such as torture are cruel and unusual. In more mundane contexts, it is also behind the idea of fighting dirty.)