Comparing the Socio-Political Ethics of Fighting Terrorism With Extreme Self-Defense in USA

Abstract

In this study the authors adopted a post-positivist research design philosophy to explore the likelihood that Americans would support extreme self-defense policies like torture, reducing human rights or banning Muslims to fight against global terrorism, especially after 9/11 and in light of the Trump conservative government. The authors grounded their research questions into the literature to form hypotheses in a correlational design strategy which they tested using nonparametric statistics. They collected opinions from 3213 Americans during 2016-2017 about applying extreme self-defense tactics to combat global terrorism and how these opinions contrasted between those holding a conservative versus liberal or other individualistic socio-political ideology. The surprising results were that American citizens did not unanimously endorse banning Muslims (only 30% supported the policy and 6% were undecided) but the majority (51%) of participants sanctioned torture as a self-defense to combat global terrorism.