This thesis examines the key moral principles that should govern decision-making by police and military when using lethal force. To this end, it provides an ethical analysis of the following question: Under what circumstances, if any, is it morally justified for the agents of state-sanctioned security institutions to use lethal force, in particular the police and the military? Recent literature in this area suggests that modern conflicts involve new and unique features that render conventional ways of thinking about the ethics (...) of armed conflict, and the use of lethal force, as inadequate or redundant. In particular, there is an increased concern with the moral difficulties created by “non-standard” cases. This is where the police or military are obliged to operate outside their conventional contexts. In such non-standard cases, on what moral basis can (or should) state actors – especially the police and military – use lethal force? One approach argues that there is nothing morally exceptional about the use of lethal force by police or military. This says the only available moral justification for using lethal force is killing in self-defence or defence of others. In contrast, I use an institutional approach to develop a moral framework for the state’s morally exceptional use of lethal force. The institutional approach is concerned with the ends (telos) or purpose of a social institution. It says that the moral purpose of a social institution alters the moral responsibilities of its agents; what is referred to as role morality. My analysis demonstrates that there is an important moral distinction between justified killing in self-defence and state-sanctioned uses of lethal force. My claim is that police and military uses of lethal force are not morally justified in the same way as the average person’s use of lethal force (i.e. self-defence or defence of others). Instead, I argue that the state-sanctioned institutional role of police and military give these state actors special moral duties, and therefore exceptional moral justification, for using lethal force. I argue that the institutional end of the police is the preservation of public safety. This includes using lethal force where it is necessary to protect life and prevent serious injury to jurisdictional inhabitants. In contrast, a morally responsible state uses military force to defend the “common good.” That is, when it is necessary to defend the peaceful functioning of a state from armed threats or other forms of political violence. I then conclude that non-standard cases require the addition of jus ad vim (or the just use of military force short-of-war) as a hybrid element to the moral framework for the state-sanctioned use of lethal force. This provides a better way of applying ethics to the use of military force when defending the common good against serious threats in non-standard cases. This is because jus ad vim complements the conventional military paradigm by permitting the use of military capabilities to defend the common good. But, at the same time, it inhibits the move towards the more destructive levels of violence characteristic of conventional warfighting. (shrink)

After giving a brief account of human rights, the paper investigates five contemporary attacks on them. All of the attacks come from two contemporary proponents of the cost-benefit state, attorney Cass Sunstein and philosopher Larry Laudan. These attacks may be called, respectively, the rationality, objectivity, permission, voluntariness, and comparativism claims. Laudan's and Sunstein's rationality claim (RC) ist that only policy decisions passing cost-benefit tests are rational. Their objectivity presupposition (OP) is that only acute, deterministic threats to life are objective. Sunstein’s (...) permission claim (PC) is that regulators are merely permitted, 3 not required, to take distributive and human rights concerns into account. Sunstein’s 3 voluntariness claim (VC) is that the consent of potential victims is not relevant to government regulations about risks and benefits. Laudan’s comparativism claim 3 (CC) is that there are no rules of thumb, no precomparative norms like human rights, for assessing theory choice in policy science. The paper analyzes each of these claims, shows how they undercut human rights, and argues that each of them errs. (shrink)

n his account of the state of exception, Agamben repeatedly relies upon what Hegel would have called emWesenslogik/em or #39;transcendental thinking#39;. Because of this reliance, the state of exception appears in Agamben#39;s account as the hidden ground of modern liberal democracies. When conceived as such a ground, it appears to be a condition of possibility that inexorably persists in the modern state. Moreover, within the state of exception all juridical order is suspended, leaving no normative or juridical criteria on the (...) basis of which to decide what the structure of any emergent political order should look like. This means that from the state of exception we can just as easily land in a totalitarian as we can in a liberal democratic or democratic socialist state. Without such criteria - lacking due to the total suspension characterizing the state of exception - Agamben#39;s own alignment with Benjaminian revolutionary messianism over Schmittian authoritarianism is arbitrary, and he leaves us with no basis for making any such decision ourselves. Drawing upon Hegel#39;s dialectic of freedom and his critique of transcendental thought, this paper argues that within the state of exception there is an implicit logic that points the way out of it. Furthermore, it does so in such a way that the state of exception is neither annexed by the structure of a predetermined juridical order along the lines proposed by Schmitt on the one hand nor posited it as a transcendental structure underlying or always preceding modern liberal democracies on the other. This alternative is overlooked by Agamben precisely because of his own insistence upon conceiving of the state of exception in a transcendent way. (shrink)