There is a natural right to life, but this right is conditional. Other people may have a right to kill me if I threaten their lives; and a citizen bystander could even have a moral duty to kill me in such circumstances. If soldiers and police officers justifiably kill with greater frequency, is that simply because they are more commonly present when a natural right (or duty) to kill applies? Or is it because they possess, by virtue of their roles, special rights and duties? In Shooting to Kill, Seumas Miller argues for the latter: the collective ends of police forces and armies generate additional, institutional rights and duties to kill. For example, given that police forces have an institutional aim of ensuring public order, officers may sometimes justifiably kill an escaping offender in order to “enforce the law” (126), even when the offender no longer poses an immediate threat. Soldiers, for their part, may sometimes “justifiably put the lives of innocent citizens at considerable risk” (185) to achieve their institutional aim of winning wars. Miller defends these and other interesting conclusions with the seriousness and analytical precision that they deserve.
In the first three chapters, Miller draws on his research in ethics and social ontology to clarify his central concepts of “joint action” and “collective goods,” and defend his “fault-based internalist suspendable rights theory” of the natural right to kill in self-defence, which is presupposed by the institutional theory developed in the remainder of the book. He then turns, in Chapters Four through Nine, to a detailed analysis of the rights and duties of soldiers and police officers in various contexts (e.g., humanitarian armed intervention, assassination, drone strikes, police response to mass shootings), before concluding with a chapter on “human-out-of-the-loop weapons” which, according to Miller, “morally ought not to be used” (283). While he makes some use of trolley-style thought experiments, his arguments are normally developed with careful attention to real-life scenarios, ranging from lesser known cases of shootings by police in his home country of Australia, to the widely discussed targeted killing of Osama bin Laden.
Miller casts his theory as an attempt to strike a middle ground between individualist reductionist (or “revisionist”) and collectivist (or “traditionalist”) approaches to police and military ethics (286). Against individualists, Miller holds that there is not only individual but also collective responsibility, deriving from one’s institutional role. Against collectivists, Miller holds that it is the individual, and not some collective entity, who possesses (a share of) collective responsibility for joint actions carried out in the line of duty. A sense of the subtlety permitted by this approach can be gleaned from Miller’s conclusions concerning the 2005 killing, by London police, of Jean-Charles de Menezes, a man wrongly suspected of being a suicide bomber. The team of police officers involved in the killing of this innocent man “were not collectively morally responsible for killing Menezes” (156). However, several members of the team were collectively morally responsible (although “not morally culpable”) “for failing to ensure that an innocent person was not killed”; and while each of these members was “partially responsible jointly with the others … none were fully morally responsible” (156). The argument leading to these conclusions is characteristically careful and persuasive, even if the practical payoff of these elaborate exercises in moral accounting could sometimes be clearer.
In general, though, Shooting to Kill delivers admirably clear judgements on urgent and difficult questions: this is philosophy for the real world, even if (or, indeed, especially because) so-called ‘realists’ would resist many of Miller’s conclusions. The commitment to a framework of natural rights enables Miller to justify challenges to state sovereignty and authority, not only in cases of genocide (e.g., Rwanda in the 1990s), but also when governments fail to guarantee basic subsistence rights (e.g., apartheid South Africa). In connection with the latter, Miller grants that assassination may perhaps correctly be described as terrorism, but bites the bullet and allows that terrorism may therefore sometimes be morally permissible (207).
In other respects, Miller’s theory is more conservative. It takes for granted the current international order of sovereign states, including those well-ordered liberal democratic states to which his account is intended to apply. This is Miller’s contextualism (176). He presents his argument as a “normative exercise that needs to be anchored in appropriate institutional description” (7), but questions remain about the attitude that contextualists must take toward actual circumstances. For instance, as a matter of fact, the lines between police and military forces have blurred in recent years, as soldiers carry out peacekeeping missions, and police forces militarize in response to terror. For Miller, such blurring is “cause for concern” (120), and should presumably be resisted. Why, though, does contextualism permit us to oppose the real-world blurring of institutional roles, yet not the inherited international order of sovereign states? While Miller notes in passing that institutional rights and duties might be different if this order were replaced by a “world government” (176), we do not learn what contextualism has to say about that prospect. Moreover, in the book’s only mention of pacifism, Miller casually sets it aside (243) without argument, presumably because it is too unrealistic to be taken seriously within contextualist applied ethics.
Ethical ideals must somehow fit the real world, but some readers will doubt that a commitment to natural rights could be consistent with the “Moral Justification for Killing Innocent Civilians” (192). For reasons of space, Miller decides not to pursue questions about the foundations of natural rights (16). This is understandable, considering how much important ground he covers in this excellent book. Yet, if we must choose between being contextualists and pacifists, we will need to know more about the natural rights Miller assumes.
