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by shadowgovt
2170 days ago
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The man mailed bombs to people who had never even met him. In a civil (intra-state) context, that's murder. By US law, I'm pretty sure there is no context in which it isn't murder (the weapon of choice precludes self-defense, since it's an unreliable delivery mechanism for targeted lethal force; there were thankfully no deaths in American Airlines Flight 444, but it indicates why a "justified killing" defense is nonsense in this context). He's not a nation-state so it's not an act of war. If he acted to change a nation's policy by his own volition via violence perpetrated on the unsuspecting, it's terrorism. It's also an ineffective way to change policy. If my actions can cause random strangers to mail bombs to me? Well, hell, that's in the same risk radius as "I could walk out my front door and get hit by a truck." I can influence strangers, but I ultimately can't control the actions of strangers. And a stable society can't condone lone-wolf assassination or mass killing of unrelated individuals, so it will always interpret the Unabomber's strategy as antisocial and route around it. Hypothetically, enough people using the same strategy could destabilize the society to the point it cannot defend its people and it loses legitimacy and cohesion. But that's just a "might makes right" argument, and is philosophically uninteresting (and, worth noting, could be used by the "technologists" against people like the Unabomber, so it sheds no light on moral correctness whatsoever). |
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