I was thinking about Dorner earlier, and it occurred to me that he’s definitely not the first guy to go on a silly rampage to “highlight an issue” and push his message into the media. Brevik and the Unabomber both had extensive manifestos, for example, that millions have read. And I don’t think you can argue that the rampages were ineffective in terms of getting people to read their manifestos.
This then made me think about terrorism, and how many respectable people (or I should really say respected people actually) have argued that certain terrorist groups are in fact freedom fighters (or whatever), and the killings of innocents are a legitimate tactic for drawing attention to the cause (e.g. South Africa, Ireland, Palestine).
I’m not aware though, that any respected philosophers have advocated going on killing sprees as a last resort to get world changing ideas the attention they deserve. Yet such an argument certainly could be made. Yet there are big gaps in my knowledge, hence this question.
And yes, I did mean to put this in great questions. I am not advocating this position, I am just interested to see if any philosophers have, for example, said that if Kant couldn’t have got “Critique of Pure Reason” published then he would have been ethically justified in going on a killing spree so that it was immortalised in court records, or something (sorry, bad example, but you know what I mean).