Militerrorism on the Morality of Combating Terror with Terror

This reprint of "Militerrorism", a chapter from Kelly's recently published Conscientious Objections (Mellen, 1994) seeks to show that, among all of the trendy empirical studies of terrorism, there are enduring questions of an ethical and theological nature that bear upon the question of how best to proceed in the fight against the use of terror. It points to the ethical contradiction of using state-sponsored violence and terror to fight violence and terror. It aims to make people more willing to take seriously an ethical framework which defends a morality of "perfect means", an ethic that requires, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., that "the means must be as pure as the ends." Critical Questions Series