Suicide bombers disturb us, in more ways than one. And this disturbance is reflected in the kinds of explanation some people grasp at, as they try to understand how others can come to do such horrifying things. It's a commonplace to say that they must have acted out of terrible despair, or crushing poverty. How else could one explain the horror of their acts? Certainly someone at the BBC seems to have been gripped by this line of thought in putting together the report of the recent Tel-Aviv bombing, which focused hard on the mourning relatives of the bomber while keeping his victims and their relatives firmly offstage. And this focus on the pity of it all from the bomber's perspective fits well with a general feeling about these acts widely shared amongst bien-pensants of various political stripes: it's all so terrible that we must explain it in terms of a response to terrible things which have happened to the bombers themselves. 'Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return' just has to be the only story in town.
These explanations are generally used in such a way as to excuse what the suicide bomber does. The thought seems to be that we can't unreservedly condemn those who act out of such motivations: so dreadful must be the poverty or despair that drive these terrible acts that we can't simply dismiss the bombers as vicious murderers of the innocent. From this position it's a fairly easy slide to thinking that what they do isn't, after all, entirely terrible - that the desperation out of which they act to some extent purifies and legitimizes what they do. And if we sympathize anyway with the political cause for which the suicide bomber acts, then all the more are we likely to think that what he or she did is, if not justified exactly, to be condoned.
One obvious response to this kind of explanation is that the evidence doesn’t support it. Suicide bombers are often not poor at all; are better educated than average; are often moved by religion or romantic thoughts of heroism, and the praise they'll get from their families and peers. (In the case of women bombers, the motivations may be still more complex, ideologically tangled, and far removed from impoverished desperation.) If these empirical claims are true, then the account of suicide bombing in terms of despair and poverty will have to be abandoned in favour of less sympathetic explanations. But there's an implication which needs to be examined before we leave the poverty-and-despair approach to suicide-murder. It's the implication that if the bombers were impoverished and despairing, then this would indeed explain, and to some extent excuse, their actions. It's that implication I want to question. So for the purposes of the rest of this post, I will just assume that most suicide bombers are indeed impoverished or despairing or both, and try to see what follows from that view.
Do we then have a plausible explanation of suicide bombing, and does it to some extent excuse it? If we take poverty first, one problem immediately arises: all over the world there are impoverished people, many of them highly politicized; but only a very few engage in suicide bombing. This alone is enough to show that impoverishment isn't a sufficient condition for suicide bombing. And though I am assuming for the sake of the argument that most suicide bombers are impoverished, nonetheless even on this restricted assumption it can't be ignored that there are some who notably are not, such as the respectable middle-class Saajid Badat, a wannabe suicide bomber from Gloucester, or the all-too-successful British suicide bombers Asif Hanif and Omar Sharif, who blew up a bar in Tel Aviv in 2003. So being impoverished isn't a necessary condition for becoming a suicide bomber either. At best, then, poverty is a contributory factor. But given the appallingly widespread prevalence of poverty, and the relatively narrow occurrence of suicide bombing, citing poverty as a contributory factor doesn't explain very much. We still need to know why a few poor people, though not most, respond to their poverty by killing themselves as a way of killing and maiming other innocents. And since most poor people would think it appallingly wrong to blow others to pieces alongside themselves, it's hard to see how the poverty of suicide bombers could excuse what they do.
Exactly the same form of argument is available in reply to the explanation of suicide bombing in terms of despair. Many people live in despair, for political or personal reasons; a small number of them escape their misery by killing themselves. Very few indeed of these suicides take innocent others with them. So the appeal to despair has little explanatory force. It's implausible to suppose that the suicide bombers in Gaza or Iraq have more cause to despair than the many people who suffered under apartheid in South Africa, but no cases of suicide bombing occurred in the struggle against apartheid. Those who feel that the despair of the bomber to some extent excuses what he does, are likely to do so because they already sympathise with his cause: very few people want to excuse the final murderous spasms of the Nazi regime because of the despair rightly felt by those Nazis who could see that their cause was doomed. But we need to acknowledge that inexcusable things can be done even in pursuit of good causes (the argument about the fire-bombing of Dresden depends on exactly that thought), and the rightness of the cause (if it is indeed right) doesn't disinfect the vileness of the means.
Poverty and despair are terrible things, with which we rightly sympathise and which we should strive to alleviate, but they don't explain suicide bombing. Other forms of explanation need to be appealed to, most obviously ideological and cultural specificities of the suicide bombers' milieux (and there are interesting reasons why such explanations aren't usually mobilised as excuses). It's a lack of moral and cultural imagination that leads some to suppose that the suicide bomber must be driven by poverty or desperation; they fail to realise how powerful other motivators can be, though history alone should remind them how ready men and women can be to give up their lives, and for how wide a range of causes.
However, there is one other form of the poverty explanation to be considered; it is sometimes put forward not merely as an excuse but as a full-blown justification. This version says that the suicide bomber, like other terrorists, does what she does because, being poor, she has no other way of achieving her political aims. Her rich adversaries have air forces and smart bombs and all the military paraphernalia of the affluent nation-state: she only has her life, and her Semtex, to achieve her goals.
Again, there is considerable evidence to suggest that this claim is false. There are many ways of pursuing their political goals open to Palestinian and Iraqi suicide bombers (and their controllers) apart from the murderous route which they decide to take. But again, on the supposition that this There-Is-No-Alternative claim is true, does it explain, and does it condone? I think perhaps it might explain, if it were true. Even if it were false, it might still explain, so long as it was believed to be true by the suicide bomber: if he genuinely believes that nothing but suicide and murder will advance the cause to which he is committed, perhaps that explains his readiness to kill the innocent along with himself. (I don't know how many people share this kind of belief about their political causes without taking similar actions, but clearly that will be relevant to the explanatory power of the claim.)
But will the belief excuse him? Only on two conditions: firstly, we'd have to think his cause is just (the dictator's belief that he can only secure his political aims by killing his opponents doesn't at all excuse his murderous actions). And secondly, we'd have to think that what matters, morally speaking, about actions is whether they produce the best consequences. Those who think that suicide bombers are justified, or at least excused, by the fact that, hideous though their killings are, they're the only way for poor people to achieve justice, have bought into a broadly consequentialist view of morality. There's a lot to be said for consequentialism, though there's a lot to be said against it, too. But people who accept this justification of suicide bombing (or terrorism more generally) may find themselves pressed by consistency to sign up to a justification of torture, since a similar logic is available there. There are good reasons for not wanting any of us to go down that road.
Explanations of suicide bombing in terms of poverty or despair, or the lack of any other way of achieving political goals, seem to be empirically false - many, maybe most, suicide bombers are neither appallingly poor nor desperate nor unable to access other forms of political progress. But, so I've argued, even if none of that were true, poverty and despair would still be weak and unsatisfactory explanations and excuses for this particularly horrible form of murder. (Eve Garrard)