“What Should We Do about ISIS?”: Religion, Terrorism, and Facts That Matter Available to Purchase

Political theory may sometimes be justifiably regarded as fact-defective, not because of the arguments it makes but because of the topics it focuses on. In short, a topic is fact-defective when it is erroneously presented as a fitting intellectual response to real-world events. To illustrate this, the article examines several articles published in the Critique in 2015 and 2016 and argues that two of the topics covered here are fact-defective: the ethics of US military intervention against ISIS and the compatibility of religion with liberal democracy. Both topics can be rightly regarded as fact-defective in light of the US government’s history of providing support to Salafist terrorist groups.