Harms arising from hysterical overreaction are harms of terrorism.
Only if you consider the hysterical overreaction inevitable.
The first wave of airplane hijackings and general terrorism in the West (in recent times) was in 1970s, driven mostly by Palestinians and radical-left groups. Strangely enough, it did not lead to no-fly lists, considering nail clippers to be dangerous weapons, and having to dump your water before going into the airport lounge to buy more...
Generally speaking, if you have some control over whether reaction X to event Y will take place, you can’t say that harms/benefits of X are harms/benefits of Y.
Sure. So let’s go back to the earlier question: When people say “more people die from having trees fall on them than from terrorism[1], so you shouldn’t be bothered by terrorism any more than you are by falling trees”, is that a reasonable argument or does it fail to engage with less-obvious harms caused by terrorism?
[1] I have not in fact checked whether this is true. It will certainly be true with all sorts of things in place of “falling trees” that most of us are mostly not very scared of.
I think the answer depends on what sort of botherment we’re looking at. If someone feels visceral fear of violent death when they think about terrorism, it’s really only actual deaths in terrorist attacks that are relevant, and the fact that they’re rare compared with is good reason not to be so afraid. If they’re arguing for (alleged) anti-terrorist measures like the TSA, then again it obviously doesn’t make sense for them to say “we need to overreact to terrorism, because terrorism is bad on account of overreaction”. I think these probably are what those “more people are killed by their own toothpaste[2] than by terrorism” memes are aiming at, so I agree that sarahconstantin’s version of NatashaRostova’s argument doesn’t seem like it works well.
[2] I have not checked whether this is true, and it probably isn’t. See [1] above.
But it’s not all wrong. I will gladly agree that most of what the TSA does seems to be security theatre, but it would be quite surprising if literally everything we do in the name of preventing and obstructing terrorism were completely useless. So the right point of comparison is either with the harm terrorists would be doing if we didn’t do anything to stop them, or with the harm they are actually doing plus that of whatever measures we could be adopting that would be equally effective with less impact on civil liberties, waiting times, not having our genitalia groped by security agents, etc. Unfortunately, I’ve no idea how to estimate either of those with any accuracy.
If they’re arguing for (alleged) anti-terrorist measures like the TSA
I think this is the main context in which the question of whether you should or should not be afraid of terrorists arises. Relatively few people (in the West) are personally afraid of terrorists to the extent of significantly changing their behaviour—with the likely exception of the situations when terrorism becomes widespread, see e.g. The Troubles. But a lot of people do make the argument that one should present one’s underwear for examination on demand because otherwise the terrorists win/kill us all/conquer the world/think of the children/etc. As a timely example, didn’t the UK just pass the Snoopers’ Chapter?
So the right point of comparison
It’s a different question. We started with asking, basically, to what degree should you be afraid of terrorism, but here you are asking how much resources should society allocate to fighting/preventing terrorism.
I’m not sure it is. I think there’s always a how-much-resources subtext. People stressing how scary and dangerous terrorism is are (I think) usually doing so to justify expending resources, or trampling on civil liberties, or something of the kind. People stressing how little harm it actually does are (I think) usually doing so in opposition to that, implicitly or explicitly saying “this is not the sort of threat that justifies the huge expense and inconvenience and indignity of airport security theatre”.
In which case, the relevant question is not “how much harm does terrorism do?” but something more like “what would the tradeoffs be if we did more or less of this allegedly-anti-terrorist stuff?”.
Only if you consider the hysterical overreaction inevitable.
The first wave of airplane hijackings and general terrorism in the West (in recent times) was in 1970s, driven mostly by Palestinians and radical-left groups. Strangely enough, it did not lead to no-fly lists, considering nail clippers to be dangerous weapons, and having to dump your water before going into the airport lounge to buy more...
Generally speaking, if you have some control over whether reaction X to event Y will take place, you can’t say that harms/benefits of X are harms/benefits of Y.
Sure. So let’s go back to the earlier question: When people say “more people die from having trees fall on them than from terrorism[1], so you shouldn’t be bothered by terrorism any more than you are by falling trees”, is that a reasonable argument or does it fail to engage with less-obvious harms caused by terrorism?
[1] I have not in fact checked whether this is true. It will certainly be true with all sorts of things in place of “falling trees” that most of us are mostly not very scared of.
I think the answer depends on what sort of botherment we’re looking at. If someone feels visceral fear of violent death when they think about terrorism, it’s really only actual deaths in terrorist attacks that are relevant, and the fact that they’re rare compared with is good reason not to be so afraid. If they’re arguing for (alleged) anti-terrorist measures like the TSA, then again it obviously doesn’t make sense for them to say “we need to overreact to terrorism, because terrorism is bad on account of overreaction”. I think these probably are what those “more people are killed by their own toothpaste[2] than by terrorism” memes are aiming at, so I agree that sarahconstantin’s version of NatashaRostova’s argument doesn’t seem like it works well.
[2] I have not checked whether this is true, and it probably isn’t. See [1] above.
But it’s not all wrong. I will gladly agree that most of what the TSA does seems to be security theatre, but it would be quite surprising if literally everything we do in the name of preventing and obstructing terrorism were completely useless. So the right point of comparison is either with the harm terrorists would be doing if we didn’t do anything to stop them, or with the harm they are actually doing plus that of whatever measures we could be adopting that would be equally effective with less impact on civil liberties, waiting times, not having our genitalia groped by security agents, etc. Unfortunately, I’ve no idea how to estimate either of those with any accuracy.
I think this is the main context in which the question of whether you should or should not be afraid of terrorists arises. Relatively few people (in the West) are personally afraid of terrorists to the extent of significantly changing their behaviour—with the likely exception of the situations when terrorism becomes widespread, see e.g. The Troubles. But a lot of people do make the argument that one should present one’s underwear for examination on demand because otherwise the terrorists win/kill us all/conquer the world/think of the children/etc. As a timely example, didn’t the UK just pass the Snoopers’ Chapter?
It’s a different question. We started with asking, basically, to what degree should you be afraid of terrorism, but here you are asking how much resources should society allocate to fighting/preventing terrorism.
I’m not sure it is. I think there’s always a how-much-resources subtext. People stressing how scary and dangerous terrorism is are (I think) usually doing so to justify expending resources, or trampling on civil liberties, or something of the kind. People stressing how little harm it actually does are (I think) usually doing so in opposition to that, implicitly or explicitly saying “this is not the sort of threat that justifies the huge expense and inconvenience and indignity of airport security theatre”.
In which case, the relevant question is not “how much harm does terrorism do?” but something more like “what would the tradeoffs be if we did more or less of this allegedly-anti-terrorist stuff?”.