Bloomsbury Citizen Killings: Liberalism, State Policy and Moral Risk

Citizen Killings: Liberalism, State Policy and Moral Risk offers a ground breaking systematic approach to formulating ethical public policy on all forms of 'citizen killings, which include killing in self-defence, abortion, infanticide, assisted suicide, euthanasia and killings carried out by private military contractors and so-called foreign fighters. Where most approaches to these issues begin with the assumptions of some or other general approach to ethics, Deane-Peter Baker argues that life-or-death policy decisions of this kind should be driven first and foremost by a recognition of the key limitations that a commitment to political liberalism places on the state, particularly the requirement to respect citizens right to life and the principle of liberal neutrality. Where these principles come into tension Baker shows that they can in some cases be defused by way of a reasonableness test, and in other cases addressed through the application of what he calls the risk of harm principle. The book also explores the question of what measures citizens and other states might legitimately take in response to states that fail to implement morally appropriate policies regarding citizen killings. Review Baker's work presents a real challenge…. It's an important challenge for the rest of us, too… ― Notre Dame Philosophical Review About the Author Deane-Peter Baker is a Lecturer and Strategic Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Australia where he is the Director of the Applied Ethics Programme directed at the Cadets and Midshipmen of the Australian Defence Force Academy. He is author Just Warriors, Inc. (2010), co-editor of Private Military Companies: Ethics, Policies and Civil-Military Relations (Routledge, 2008) and has also written for the BBC's Focus on Africa magazine.