Abstract Most people believe that there is something particularly morally repugnant about terrorism. A number of philosophers have attempted to defend this widely held view by offering accounts of precisely what it is about terrorism that makes it morally distinctive. In this paper I raise some doubts about the accounts that have been defended by others, focusing in particular on Samuel Scheffler’s view. In light of the doubts that I raise about existing accounts, I suggest what must be done in order to arrive at an adequate account, and offer an outline of a view that seems to me promising. On the view that I suggest, terrorist acts reveal something of distinctive moral significance about the agents who perpetrate them, even if they are not in themselves morally worse than otherwise similar acts.
Brian Berkey (Mon,) studied this question.