The Morality of Bomb Making

"So," I say, "I've been told what your role was." 

Her eyelids flutter. She reaches down and begins to rock the stroller. "You think you know?" she asks. 

"Yes," I say. "You were the West Coast bomb maker." 

There is a long pause. She glances down at her grandson. He begins to spit up. She reaches down, wipes off his chin, and takes him into her arms, gently guiding a bottle between his lips. 

"Look," she finally says. "I felt I had a responsibility to make the design safe after the Townhouse." The bomb design, she means. "I didn't want any more people to die."

Burrough, Bryan. Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence. New York: Penguin Press, 2015, 2.

This struck me as a fairly risible statement about the creation of a product whose sole business is destruction and mayhem. But then I thought about an article I read recently about human violence and the woman's thinking started to make some sense. The basic thesis of the article is that individuals commit acts of violence and destruction out of a sense of moral obligation and an effort to regulate social relationships. Here the bomb maker justifies her participation in violence with an appeal to morality. Sure, she's going to bomb first, but she's doing it to make people safe. 

In the end, it's probably the case that statements like this arise due to mankind's congenital predilection to do violence while simultaneously desiring to be thought lovely.