Ted Honderichs concept of Terrorism for Humanity Essay

Ted Honderich’s concept of “Terrorism for Humanity”

In this essay I will discuss Ted Honderich’s concept of “Terrorism for Humanity”. I will discuss his principles behind the concept and its application on the world we live in. I will discuss what makes a life good and what makes a life bad. Could it be said that we, the citizens of the first world, could be justified targets of a terrorist attack by those worse off than us. That if Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel is justifiable and if the same can be said for the September 11th attacks on America.
Honderich argues that there are good lives and bad lives. A bad life is a life that exists without one or more of the great goods. These great goods are “1) a decent length of life, 2) a quality of life owed to such materials means as fillings for teeth, 3) freedom and power, 4) respect and self respect, including what is lacked by workers paid hardly anything for the profitable stuff they produce but afraid to form a union, 5) relationships both personal and as members of small and larger groups and 6) a culture or way of living, including the tradition of a people and a language, and knowledge in place of ignorance”(Honderich, Ted, After the Terror Extended, Revised Edition, Edinburgh University Press, 2003, p. 52).
A decent length of life is a life which has an “average lifetime of seventy eight years” (Honderich, Ted. P.6) and is enjoyed in countries such as the United States, Canada, and most western European countries. The populations of countries such as Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Sierra Leone “have different lengths of life, averaging about forty years” (Honderich, Ted. p.6). These people can be said to have half lives. These are just living years and not the years we live that we are healthy in, free from illness. Those years would be on average seventy two years in the United States, Canada and Western Europe and in the set of countries with Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Sierra Leone, the...