Interpreting the Problem Through Real-World Scenarios

In normative ethics, every moral action involves three major components: the act itself (including its motivation), the agent (the actor), and their consequences (Stewart 2009). From my personal view, altering any part of this structure may drastically shift our ethical judgements. Yet this very feature of ethical dilemmas or thought experiments is precisely what constitutes their crucial value—they reveal the diverse predicaments agents face in normative contexts and the corresponding complexity of actions. 

Thus, I find it necessary to first delineate the primary scenarios that are implied by the problem, much like ethicists who tweak specific elements of the trolley problem or overhaul certain aspects its the context to expose its inherent philosophical tensions while preserving its core structure (Sandel, n.d.). This groundwork will help mitigate any oversimplification of the issue and deepen our understanding of the ethical issues involved.

In examining the prompt, it is clear that the subject is unconstrained, inviting the following classification of perpetrators of violence against civilians: if an individual commits the act, we might assess their moral accountability for their consequences.

But there are other cases of interest we must also consider: if the agent is an armed group (the usual suspect), should we apply "moral agency" and "moral responsibility" more cautiously? Likewise, if a modern sovereign state’s military perpetrates the violence, how might normative theories accommodate such cases?

In fact, normative ethical frameworks alone might be insufficient in addressing such exceptions. In that case, might we engage meta-ethical perspectives—or even hybridize them with normative analysis? What constitutes "evil"? Does evaluating the "evil" of attacking civilians depend on the perpetrator’s identity (e.g., could we bracket whether the agent is a state, group, or individual and still assess the act’s inherent evil)?

Naturally, this discussion requires us to reevaluate the concept of terrorism itself. Is "terrorism" synonymous with abstract "evil"? Must the term terrorism invariably entangle ideology and politics?

Finally, is the concept of "correct" in this question framed within normative standards or internal logic?

Thought Experiments: The ABCs of "Terrorism"

The term "terrorism" was originally coined during the French Revolution, when the Jacobin government, in "the most dangerous moment of the revolution," invoked the terror cimbricus (state of emergency) used by the Roman Republic when threatened by Germanic tribes to implement a "Reign of Terror" (Nunberg 2001). The chaos and bloodshed caused by Robespierre also imbued the term "terrorist" with negative connotations that still hold today (Nunberg 2001). Although this historical background suggests that the origin of terrorism lies solely within tyrannical governments, its contemporary usage diverges from this limitation significantly. Now, the concept of terrorism generally brings to mind nortorious figures such as Osama bin Laden, ISIS, the IRA, or even the KKK, none of which represent existing sovereign state governments. However, the public's primary perception of these terrorist organizations or individuals—using terrorist attacks as their means—leads us to the modern definition of "terrorism": achieving political or ideological goals through violence targeting non-combatants (United States 2010). Within this seemingly concise definition, I believe that the following key points can determine the direction of my answer.

First, we should be clear that for terrorism, "political or ideological goals" are the ultimate objectives of all actions, while "violence targeting non-combatants," or more precisely, deliberate attacks on non-combatants, serve as the means to achieve these ends. At this point, we should note that the description of violent acts in the given proposition does not fully correspond to that in the definition of terrorism. The proposition of "when civilians are the main target" serves as a necessary condition encompassing both "deliberate attacks on non-combatants" and "attacks on non-combatants that were not originally intended." In other words, the proposition could also refer to real-world scenarios beyond the defined "terrorism". 

For example, if Country X invades Country Y, and under the constraints of international conventions and laws of war, Country X's military generally maintains good discipline, with attacks on Country Y's civilians never being part of Country X's war plans. However, if some of Country Y's military personnel disguise themselves as civilians and attack Country X's soldiers in guerrilla warfare, forcing Country X's soldiers to take up arms in necessary self-defense, this will result in some innocent Country Y civilians being mistaken for guerrillas and attacked. In this case, the actions of Country X's soldiers already fit the proposition's description ("when civilians are the main target, there is no need to consider the cause"), but is this truly terrorism? Does it conform to the definition of terrorism given earlier? I believe not.

Let us return to the earlier classification of the two scenarios for the proposition of "civilians [being] the main target": one necessary condition for determining terrorism is that the perpetrators employ attacks on non-combatants as a deliberate and predetermined means to achieve political objectives. In the above scenario, Country X's soldiers' self-defense is neither proactive nor intentional. While their attacks do result in non-combatants becoming the primary targets, these attacks are not a necessary means for Country X to achieve its objective to conduct an invasion—the accidental harm to civilians is merely an unforeseen incident during Country X's military implementation of a peaceful occupation. Synthesizing the above discussion, it is not difficult to see that, under a precise definition of "terrorism," the result obtained by specifying the scenario described in the proposition is not necessarily classified as "terrorism."

However, readers may also notice that the description of the victims in the proposition does not use the exact wording as in the actual definition of terrorism, and argue that I have temporarily equated the "civilians" in the proposition with "non-combatants" in the analysis. In fact, from the Peninsular War during the Napoleonic era (where Spanish civilians resisted the French army) to the Afghan War of this century, countless historical examples show us that civilians are not always non-combatants. If civilians in Country Y in the above scenario were no longer neutral but instead took up arms to actively resist Country X's military, then even if Country X's military deliberately attacked Country Y's armed civilians, we could no longer use "terrorism" (based on the limitation of "non-combatants") to describe the actions of Country X's military.

Meta-ethical Critique: "Evil"

The form "A is B" can serve as both an ontological reasoning step and a synthetic proposition. "It's evil" appears to belong to this type of proposition that reveals properties not contained in the literal meaning of the subject. However, unlike descriptive propositions such as "the flower is blue," this synthetic proposition in question is normative. Perhaps it is not so simple.

In my view, to honestly answer the question at hand, it is crucial first to examine the nature of the concept of "evil" and attempt to identify its sufficient conditions. Specifically, discussing the nature of "evil" falls within the realm of "moral semantics" in metaethics (i.e., "what is the meaning of moral language and judgments?") (Singer 2025).

Of course, a review of the history of metaethical research readily reveals that moral semantic statements occupy an ambiguous zone between normativity and descriptiveness (or instead, the debate over whether normativity can be subsumed under descriptiveness continues). For cognitivists such as 19th-century Jeremy Bentham or 20th-century Richard Boyd, sentences modified by normative predicates possess truth values and meet the necessary conditions for propositions (i.e., they can be judged as true or false). In contrast, philosophers collectively referred to as "non-cognitivists," such as A. J. Ayer (who argued that moral sentences express emotions rather than describe objective properties) and Simon Blackburn (who maintained that, before specific moral contexts, moral claims linguistically resemble factual claims and can appropriately be called "true" or "false"), have questioned the feasibility of reducing normativity to descriptiveness from various angles.

In my view, any subject modified by a predicate without a specific context itself functions as a superset encompassing all possible concrete instances—or as a common predicate shared by many concrete instances—within the sentence. This means that, in the specific sentence in question, "evil" represents the commonality of all possible cases characterized by the property of "inflicting violence primarily targeting civilians."

References

Nunberg, Geoffrey. 2001. “Head Games / It All Started with Robespierre / ‘Terrorism’: The History of a Very Frightening Word.” SFGate, October 28. https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/head-games-it-all-started-with-robespierre-2865759.php.

Sandel, Michael J. n.d. “Justice.” Harvard Justice. Accessed July 21, 2025. https://justiceharvard.org/justicecourse/.

Singer, Peter. 2025. “Ethics.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last modified July 11, 2025. https://www.britannica.com/topic/ethics-philosophy.

Stewart, Noel. 2009. Ethics: An Introduction to Moral Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity.

United States. 2010. United States Code, 2010 Edition. Title 22—Foreign Relations and Intercourse, Chapter 38—Department of State, §2656f—Annual Country Reports on Terrorism. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Publishing Office. Accessed July 21, 2025. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2010-title22/html/USCODE- 2010-title22-chap38-sec2656f.htm.