Sitting Ducks?

One of my favourite blogs for IR geeks recently ran a post about a report from the Brookings Institution (pdf) about assassination as a means of foreign policy. I haven't read the entire 44 pages from the folks at the BI, so I'm going to consider this strictly in terms of what the Duck has to say about it. Be it resolved that a liberal state can legitimately assassinate individuals without due process?

Of course, assassination isn't a practice one generally associates with liberalism. Even the most vehement market liberals need some kind of harm principle to make inalienable rights like private property stick, and murder is usually considered harm with good reason. On the other hand, consider this little thought experiment: John Stuart Mill is driving down the street and sees little old Pol Pot jaywalking up ahead. Does/should Mill stop? Heck no! I think liberals can justify assassination/murder on the grounds of the categorical imperative, but they must be very careful in deploying it. The categorical imperative (at least the better half, if you ask me), for those who Kant remember, states "act only on that maxim that you would will to become a universal law." In other words, unless you would accept everyone behaving the way you are, what you're doing is wrong.

The tricky part is in formulating the maxim. In the example above, if Mill were following the maxim of "run over all old Asian men", he'd have to pull a u-turn and make roadkill out of the Dali Llama. If the maxim were "run over evil people", it would just beg the question of what's evil, and even it's "only run over those whose decisions caused thousands of deaths", there would be precious few two-term presidents in the States in addition to a doozy of an epistemological problem. So, the maxim of "runover anybody whose role in implementing genocide is indisputable, and don't cause any collateral damage while doing it" will at least serve as a first approximation.

A second, more technical problem is to make sure that everybody else knows what the maxim is. Of course, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and others are likely to claim a similar right. Not only must you make sure that your maxim is one that fits the situation at hand, you have to make sure it's one you'll be able to live with in the future - even when it might be applied to you.

A third problem is that you might let the cat out of the bag and give everybody license to start killing people with their own maxims, with which you might disagree. The world has seen people who wanted to kill all the rich, and if we can choose our maxims, what's to stop them from choosing theirs (besides our threatening them, which gets us nowhere)?

So I s'pose my answer is a very thin yes, that state-sanctioned assassination can be legitimate, but I disagree with the Duck's justification that "...someone has to have the job of playing cop in the international system." It's more complicated than that, as it should be.