Not really the heart of the article, but I think it deserves some thought anyways. When deciding if someones actions are "rational," from whose perspective are we deciding this? Everything anyone does is rational according to their current state of mind. Otherwise they wouldn't do it. That doesn't mean I would think what they did was rational. But who gets to judge?

Its similar to when economists try to say that people's decisions are not always rational, but it is only because the economists model is too simple to model human behavior. It's irrational according to the economic model but rational according to the person's own point of view.

Hence, at least from the perspective of the suicide-bomber, all suicide bombers actions are "rational."

QED

Good question: what does rational even mean? Weber used the word "rationalization" to refer to the process whereby business developed its own logics of efficiency. Instead of designing business processes to allow people to maximize their personal satisfaction while meeting their subsistence needs, "rationalization" meant organizing business to maximize profits: in essence to make business efficient not at accomplishing some external purpose but for its own sake, on its own terms.

Kant understood rationality to mean doing things that you could will that everyone would do.

It seems like surely terrorism is the Weberian rationalization of warfare, but Saletan wants to create a shocking effect by implying that it is rational on quasi-Kantian terms (that we too would do it if we were in the terrorists shoes). The fact that his point seems valid on this second basis (that we would do the same thing if we were trying to fight to US) only indicates how un-Kantian our own thinking about society has become - how Weberian we are "at heart," which is, I think, rightfully shocking.

hookom:

Kant understood rationality to mean doing things that you could will that everyone would do.

Define everyone here. This is the flaw with Kant (I always preferred Hume), everyone is utterly relative. For instance suicide bombing by the Japanese (Kamikazes) was an easy sell in Japan during WWII, but not to the Germans (there were several suicide type weapons and tactics proposed by Nazi Germany at the end, one based on a piloted V1 “buzzbomb”). To the Germans and most Western nations suicide bombing was not rational. The argument could be made that it was rational in the eyes of the Japanese. The tricky question is: Is the acceptance of suicide bombing by the Japanese and modern day terorrists due to “doing things that you could will that everyone would do” or due to a society that lends itself better to the exploitation of its pool of naïve young males?

"Rational" has always meant for me an understanding of cause and effect.

The issue here is not whether terrorism is "rational" but whether it is morally justifiable.

Saletan implies morality is a cultural phenomenon in much the same way that you have, which means if you can see that terrorism is the rationalization of warfare for certain combatants, then people have to make a decision based on potentially relativistic values not to do it, just as you imply above. The fact that people sometimes do do things that are not rational, and do them en masse, is not an argument that Kantian reason doesn't work as a principle of morality.

I don't know if this is how Kant would put it, but a person cannot will that everyone would kill themselves, because this would mean the destruction of the possibility of willing altogether. (To answer your initial question: you don't need "everyone," really, because you can see that it's true in your own case.) This is where you get the "kingdom of ends" that all people must be treated as "ends in themselves" since all treatment originates in the will and must uphold its source in order not to undermine itself. But this seems strange to apply ever in the context of war, after all, why should I object to my taking my own life in a war-context if I do not object to taking another's life in that context? The answer would have to be that all just war is self defense in the face of immanent peril. Self-defensive killing is universalizable. But self-defense is cast aside by suicide bombers, obviously, for tactical reasons.

I think probably Saletan's contribution here, whether or not he intends it (it looks like he does), is to show a sense in which America bears a certain responsibility for the development of terrorism because we were the ones who started the technological rationalization of warfare which created the conditions under which terrorism became the only viable military/technological response. The only way to prevent being annihilated by massive atomic force like Japan was is to de-centralize your response away from government control, away from national territory, away from uniforms, away from an identifiable enemy located at some point in the distance, and become, as a soldier, one more citizen with a backpack in a bus terminal. It's sick. But, as Saletan implies, if we were faced with the massive military power of the US and we felt this was persecutory, what other military/technological solution is available? The answer is that there are other logics, including Kantian universal reason, Gandhian non-violence etc. which might serve as an avenue for responding, but what right have we the US who first developed the ability to literally annihilate the Earth itself as a tactical tool of warfare to demand that our enemies forgo the development of heinously destructive military-technological resources? What Kantian grounds are there for the development of such technology as we have? And if there is no going back from this point, what will the advent of terrorism as a technology of warfare bring? The end to war anticipated when nuclear weapons were first developed? If we want to eliminate terrorism, which is a tactic -- not something you can go to war with -- what can we do to change the way war is carried out in order to make terrorism a poor tactic? We cannot now threaten terrorists with military violence. We cannot "invade" them. So what? We require a non-military solution, it seems. But what would that look like? How much would it cost?

It seems that many others have answered this point more philosophically than myself but I felt I'd throw in my two cents as well (perhaps this is not a rational idea ;)

This leaves no real meaning of "rational". Under the law, or so it seems, EED defenses seem to rely on the idea that what was done under extreme emotional duress is not rational, similarly under the influence (though this is not treated as kindly because the party under the influence most likely put himself in that position). So at least in a pragmatic sense this definition of rational is too broad, if we mean to use it for any semantic value, we must give it more meaning than that.

Furthermore, this definition neglects the idea of mental illness and psychosis, and it is arguably true that under current definitions of mental illness all of the suicide bombers are mentally ill (now whether I agree with this definition is more complicated, but it is arguable). As someone once put it "Suicide is an event when the body can no longer cope with the emotions it faces". Sounds like a perfect candidate for irrational behavior if irrational is to mean anything.

In any event, if you define rational the way you are implicitly defining it (anything that a human does), there is no meaning of rational and the term is useless. However, if we allow for the condition that under different circumstances, emotional or in this case prior religious convictions, political associations and circumstances, or familial ties, the task would be unthinkable, I believe we have found a reasonable definition of rational, and in this case it seems obvious that the suicide bomber's techniques are not rational.

And of course, I mourn with those who lose family members to these irrational deeds, and I mourn for the bombers who could have otherwise, in other circumstances, perhaps we would have to go so far as another world, have continued to be valuable people (value by their humanity alone if nothing else) in their culture and society.

So terrorism is justified by the US inventing nukes, because it *has* to be the US's fault somehow.

That no one is especially fearful of the US actually using them has no bearing... because it just *has* to be the US's fault somehow, even when the terrorism is occurring in conflicts where we're not especially involved.

IMHO your argument says more about yourself than objective reality.

Suicide bombs are cheap and effective. You lose one guy, and you'd probably lose more than that if you did anything else. They are the weapon of the weak, who can't afford anything else.

But them being weak doesn't make them moral, nor does it make the other side villains (or good guys for that matter).

Imposing ones will on another whether by military or economic means is still a form of tyrany. We consider economic domination more civilized and rational, but in the end all forms of opression lead to resistance and are a form of violence. What does it cost to change hearts and minds? Whose mind needs to change? Ghandi, clearly had and demonstrated the solution. However, it takes far more courage and sacrifice to go the way of Ghandi. Ghandi knew this and discouraged many from joining his movement who did not share the deep level of commitment that it must take to practice the way of non violent resistance.