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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.

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Short of a more or less direct relation between perpetrator and victim, the principle of
appropriate and proportionate usage of means is at the core of moral and ethical
consideration when it comes to the legitimization of forceful actions.
The Ethical Illegitimacy of Terrorist Violence
It is not only that the terrorist disregards the inevitable principle of the immediacy of
perpetrator-victim relation, and the issues of inevitability and unavoidability, as well as the
proportionality of means, but he bases his actions upon a pattern of causal rectification that
can never be ethically justified, and thus has to be classified as morally illegitimate. To
finally clarify the conditions of factual or presumed injustice against which forceful means
might be used—and why terrorist violence never meets these criteria and thus embodies
moral wrong in every case—makes it inevitable to analyze the sphere of wrong and injustice
in greater detail.
When it comes to decisions relevant to human actions, man finds himself always in a
dilemma in the sense of conflicting interests, which can be resolved only by a consideration
of interests according to ethical principles. Related to the question of an order of priority
between possible goods and values that have a bearing on a morally relevant decision, it is
Franz Böckle who introduces a helpful differentiation by distinguishing the principle of
―Fundamentality‖ from the principle of ―Dignity.‖[24] The principle of fundamentality, on the
one hand, favors that good which is a necessary precondition for the realization of another
one. The principle of dignity, on the other hand, structures the values according to their
meaningfulness, and brings the fundamental goods in a moral and ethical context of
meaningful priorities. Goods are physical entities existing independently of our individual
intentions and are given to us as indispensable factors for our responsible actions. These
factors include our physical integrity, mental or physical property, in addition, also
institutional dimensions of life, such as matrimony, family, and state. Values, in contrast,
are certain stereotyped attitudes or virtues, which can only be considered real inasmuch as
they are qualities of human volition for example the subjective understanding of justice,
faith, or solidarity. Consequently, whenever a morally relevant deed is demanded, the
acting individual finds himself in a situation of choice. He has to choose between values and
goods that are in a permanent constellation of competition among each other. The human
being, thus, finds himself always in a dilemma as to which option he should choose in the
constantly conflicting set of alternatives. Viewed negatively, an ethical choice inevitably
means to choose the lesser of two evils.
These helpful considerations can now, through the insights of Wolfgang Kersting, be placed
into the context of the philosophy of international relations, within which terrorism is acting.
Kersting introduces a distinction between programmatic and transcendental rights (claims
for freedom). Transcendental rights—following Kant‘s definition of ‗transcendental‘ as being
the condition of experience at all—are immediate human rights such as the right to live and
enjoy physical integrity, which are the conditions necessary for the possibility to experience
other rights and freedoms anyway. Beside these transcendental primary rights, we find then
the programmatic rights. These are, so to say, secondary rights, such as political self-
determination, democratic living conditions, just distribution of goods etc.[25] It is precisely
here, where terrorism does not take these rights into account (or intentionally or
unintentionally disregards these normative principles), that terrorism becomes devoid of
any serious ethics. Terrorism does not hesitate to set secondary rights, such as political
self-determination, or the implementation of a desired political or social order, absolute—at
the cost of ignoring and neglecting primary (transcendental) rights. In doing so terrorism
not only turns the logical principle of the predominance of transcendental rights upside
down, it also negates the predominant fundamental right to live, as this plays no role in
terrorist rationales—neither in the sense of being a physical cause or motive to reflect its
own maxim.