What About Suicide Bombers? A Terse Response to a Terse Objection

By: Marc Champagne

On September 11, 2010, after presenting selected technical aspects of a Randian ethic at a prominent academic conference, I was confronted with the following objection, somewhat belligerent in tone: “But what about suicide bombers?” What about them? Despite the objection’s contextual timeliness, my initial reaction was to question its topical relevance. So I politely requested that the criticism be further unpacked. My interlocutor duly obliged, and I eventually gleaned that murder-suicide (say, in the name of some otherworldly posit) was being adduced as a supposed counterexample to the rational egoist account of values I had just expounded.

I don’t recall my exact response, only that I was dissatisfied with it afterwards. The audience member clearly thought he had unearthed a powerful criticism, and the objection, though crude, had the rhetorical merit of brevity. Such an intuitively attractive “sound bite,” I later thought, deserves to be answered in kind.

The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 11, no. 2 (Issue 22, December 2011): 233–36.