AFTER THE TERROR Rev Ed

AFTER THE TERROR, expanded and revised edition Ted Honderich Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004. viii, 198pp, $19.95 paper (ISBN 0-7735-2734-6)In aftermath of terrorist attacks on 11 September and American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, academics, commentators, and journalists have been lining up to have their say about United States' place in world, moral implications of terrorism, and other related issues. Few of resulting books have been worth very much; most will end up gathering dust in used book stores, propping up wonky table legs, or as eccentric sources for future historians.Of all these works, by far most bracing, provocative, and controversial was philosopher Ted Honderich's essay After Terror, which has now been reissued in an expanded and revised edition. When it was first published in September 2002, Honderich's book drew considerable, indeed vituperative, criticism from Conrad Black's newspapers in Canada and United Kingdom, largely because of Honderich's attitude towards Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The criticisms of After Terror, and a sustained campaign by pro-Israel groups, intimidated Oxfam into refusing Honderich's offer of £5,000 in royalties from book, and this in turn provoked further controversy in British press.In fact, furor that greeted Honderich's carefully written book had little to do with arguments he presented and more to do with imperatives of newspaper business, fevered politics of last three years, and immense difficulty of commenting on Middle Eastern affairs without drawing passionate criticism from one quarter or another. The fact is that as a work of moral philosophy engaging with questions of day and written for lay reader, book is a model of clarity, rigour, and incisiveness. One may disagree with its conclusions-indeed, Honderich occasionally invites reader to do so-but not with intelligence and spirit with which it is written.Honderich's premise, which is painstakingly and convincingly presented, is that modern man should live according to principle of humanity: what we need to do morally is to try and save people from bad lives (53). To be good, we should adopt whatever course will probably, after rational contemplation, be most likely to rescue others from early deaths, disease, poverty, and so on. In particular, we should transfer means to well-being, means to great goods, from better-off to while ensuring that better-off do not become badly-off themselves (73). So far, so good. He then goes further: if to do this is morally right, then our failure to do so is morally wrong. When we omit to try and save others from starvation, disease, rapine...and emptiness, by, say, going on an expensive holiday rather than donating to charity, the conclusion that we do wrong is grim and seemingly unavoidable (82).As a set of moral principles, established at far greater length than can be repeated here, Honderich's argument is rigorous and persuasive, although, as he admits, it makes for uncomfortable reading. He brandishes some arresting statistics to point out consequences of our wrongs of exploitation and omission: average lifetimes in Malawi and Mozambique compared with west, maldistribution of wealth within United States and Britain, and so on. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.