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The one who has to suffer this impact of this force has no choice except to endure this
misery. Such an act of violence thus represents a deed that runs counter to the victim‘s
inclinations and wellbeing.[20] This aspect is especially in the foreground of terrorist action,
as terrorism does not forebear to risk the lives and physical wellbeing of innocent people
who are not the least related to the violence and force used against them.
In the abstract, violence can be defined as the forceful encroachment upon the sphere of
one individual‘s legitimate development of his free will. This makes it to conceive why the
question of right and wrong is determined from the perspective of the victim who has to
sustain a restraining and debilitating effect on his organism and thus its free self-
development. This direct idea of violence comprises a clear relation between a perpetrator
and a victim, with the perpetrator directly inflicting damage on the victim. This damage
primarily violates the victim‘s organism or its free self-determination.
Physical force finds its most profound manifestation in armed conflict and war. Criminal
violence certainly comes closest to it. Nevertheless, terrorist violence—not only because of
the self-awareness of the terrorist that he is ―at war,‖ but also because of the extent of
damage inflicted by terrorist actions—should be categorized as war-like violence. It is,
therefore, for this part of the investigation, reasonable to define terrorist violence as a form
of crime or as an act similar to war.
Normatively speaking, injustice is the confinement of one‘s development of freedom without
the existence of an external necessity. In this philosophical sense, external necessity can
only be thought as a morally justifiable reason simply because in a possible moral and
ethical framework of actions where the application of violence and force comes into play,
just by rational conclusion, only actions are conceivable in which force appears either
together with (moral) injustice, with (moral) justice or—as sanctioning and punishing
power—in connection with positive, statutory national or international law.
If we leave aside the latter point insofar as terrorism positions itself extra legem anyway,
what is left for closer examination is the question if terrorist violence can be morally
justified at all and, under what conditions and criteria, if any, it can claim morality and
moral legitimacy.
Force and (Political) Justice
Let me emphasize again: Injustice emerges when the development of the freedom of an
individual or group of individuals is being constrained by another or others, without the
existence of a morally justifiable necessity. The borderline at which right passes over into
wrong exactly marks the line of demarcation at which we encounter the normative idea of
justice. From the viewpoint of a merely rational deduction, the notion of (individual, social,
political, intrastate, interstate …) justice becomes the normative, cardinal aspect of ethics,
transforming into ―the inevitable criterion for any claim that wishes to correspond with the
idea of morality.‖[21]
The category of justice, therefore, embodies the only parameter that can be reconciled with
the rights of the subject, the predominance of the individual including his claim for self-
determination, and also with the guiding image of modern philosophy and ethics, freedom.
A violation of the guiding principle of ethics, justice—practically, the commitment of
injustice—must, therefore, stem from exaggerated egotism, an over-emphasized affirmation
of one‘s own will, which negates the sphere of right of another individual, in the sense of not
taking into account the legitimate development of another‘s free will.
According to this depiction, which introduces right and wrong as moral categories and
relates them to ―man as man,‖ we are being offered a perspective which, bare of any

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statutory or societal superstructure, allows us to approach the subject matter in a culture-
invariant and truly universal way.
It is precisely on this level that we can easily define human rights: Everybody has the right
of not being constrained in the development of his or her own free will (the affirmation of
his body and life). Nobody has the right to hamper others in the development of their
freedom. The freedom of any one person finds its natural limit at the point where it
constrains the freedom of any other person. These normative principles of justice find their
most succinct formulation in Immanuel Kant‘s definition of (moral) right:
―The whole of conditions under which the voluntary actions of any one person can be
harmonized in reality with the voluntary actions of every other person, according to the
universal law of freedom.‖[22]
This moral-philosophical fixing of the cardinal ethical gauge also establishes the borderline
up to which an individual (a community, a society, a state …) may carry on with its
development of freedom without negating the legitimate self-determination of another
individual entity. Simultaneously, the actions are being defined which, in transgression of
this borderline, have to be designated as unjust and morally illegitimate and whose
rejection and warding off can be morally justified.
In almost everything they do, humans find themselves in a social, political and societal
framework of interaction. Thus every ethically relevant decision stands in an interactive
context, and pertains to an external result that is invariably linked to the weal and woe of
other human beings or a community in the narrower or wider sense of the word. Although
the result of a deed—in the case of an unjust act the suffering of injustice—is of importance,
we must nevertheless accept that it is primarily the incentive and motivation, the intrinsic
meaning of an action, that decides the ethical value of an action and determines the right
and wrong inherent in it.
At this level of abstraction we can easily grasp that a violent act can only be morally
justified when it bears a reactive character, in the sense of the warding off of a positive act
of injustice in the normative meaning described above. A mere rational deliberation a priori
gives proof that the warding off of such an action—very much in contrast to this action
itself—may claim moral legitimacy. This rational law is: ―Causa causae est causa
effectus.‖[23] This principle tells us nothing else than whatever the one who is exposed to
injustice undertakes to ward off injustice and to re-establish just conditions, the one who
commits the unjust act must ascribe to himself. What happens to him as a result has been
triggered by his act of injustice and would otherwise not take place.
It is exactly within this ethical pattern of the relation between right and wrong where
terrorism finds itself for the terrorist always tries to legitimize his use of violence as
inevitably necessary to alter the unjust social or political conditions as he perceives them.
As shown above, a course of conduct provoked by an aggressor in reaction to an assault in
order to protect oneself has to be considered as being legitimate, inasmuch as this course of
action would not have taken place without the positive act of aggression. It is for this
reason that the defense and warding off must bear different moral quality than the
aggression itself because it is exactly following from it. Consequently, a major feature of the
legitimate application of physical force must have to be seen in the factor of inevitability and
unavoidability. In this context, however, there is a danger that the amount of physical force
necessary to ward off the aggression may be exaggerated. Therefore, the moral legitimacy
of the use of force is closely linked to another ethical principle, the principle of
proportionality.