Rethinking the Moral Responsibilities Pertaining to the Use of Lethal Force by Police and Combatants

Abstract

Seumas Miller’s book Shooting to Kill: The Ethics of Police and Military Use of Lethal Force concerns the moral rules applicable to the use of lethal force over three domains: individuals (personal self-defense), police, and combatants. Throughout his book, Miller compares and contrasts “the use of lethal force by ordinary citizens, police officers and military personnel” (2). This review has five sections. In section 2, I discuss some preliminary matters, and offer brief discussions of three of the book’s chapters. In section 3, I offer some praise for Miller’s teleological, institutional approach and for his “collective end theory” of “joint action.” In section 4, I offer two criticisms. The first is that Miller does not properly address the likely objection from a strong, contemporary alternative approach known as the “individualist reductionists” or the “revisionists” approach (3). Another way to state this criticism is that Miller does not properly support his claim that a state’s police force and military have separate institutional goals generating moral norms that “further specify” the moral norms applicable on the individual level (15). In this book, I found the “why” question unanswered. Why, for Miller, do the institutional goals that attach to each of these domains generate moral duties that have the moral authority to further specify the moral norms applicable between individuals in a noninstitutional framework? The second criticism is related to the first. It is that the procedure by which institutional goals generate moral norms that further specify the moral norms found in a state of nature, as Miller ∗Steve Viner is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Middlebury College, Middlebury VT, USA. Email: sviner@middlebury. edu Criminal Justice Ethics, 2018 Vol. 37, No. 3, 262–274, https://doi.org/10.1080/0731129X.2018.1546863