The ethics of policing currently neglects to provide a framework for analysing the morality of deliberate inactions to prevent harm, even though these are often adopted tactically by police as a means of preventing greater harms. In this paper we argue (a) that police have special moral obligations to prevent harm, grounded both in a contractarian account of police legitimacy and in the interpersonal morality of associations and (b) that police are morally culpable for failures to fulfil these special obligations (...) when these are neither proportionate nor necessary to the prevention of greater crime-related harms. Our claims have implications both for the morality of policing and for its regulation and governance under human rights legislation, which we argue should be reformed so as to recognise police culpability not only for inflictions of harm, but also for failures to prevent it. (shrink)

Research Articles Lloyd P. Gerson, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.

This paper attempts to offer a group-based approach to reparations for slavery. I argue that by appealing to a group-based approach to reparations, one can avoid some of the significant problems associated with attempting to justify reparations on an individual level. I argue that, properly formulated, a group-based approach can avoid problems of identification, the non-identity problem, as well as misgivings about appealing to the notion that groups can have a moral standing that is not merely the aggregation of the (...) moral standing of the individual group members. In order to show that a group-based approach is a viable solution to these issues, I appeal to Larry May’s account of groups. (shrink)

Global warming is a very complex collective harm. While various models have been proposed to assign moral responsibility in such cases, global warming presents an additional problem. The complexity of the climate system gives rise to ineliminable indeterminacy, which makes it impossible to determine the extent to which any particular emissions contribute to this collective harm. This indeterminacy poses an obstacle to assigning moral responsibility to individuals. To overcome this obstacle, I propose adopting a supervaluationist approach. This approach has several (...) benefits. Among other things, it supplies a framework for assigning moral responsibility that handles indeterminacy that commonly arises when dealing with complex, global collective-harm scenarios. (shrink)

The introduction of Autonomous Military Systems (AMS) onto contemporary battlefields raises concerns that they will bring with them the possibility of a techno-responsibility gap, leaving insecurity about how to attribute responsibility in scenarios involving these systems. In this work I approach this problem in the domain of applied ethics with foundational conceptual work on autonomy and responsibility. I argue that concerns over the use of AMS can be assuaged by recognising the richly interrelated context in which these systems will most (...) likely be deployed. This will allow us to move beyond the solely individualist understandings of responsibility at work in most treatments of these cases, toward one that includes collective responsibility. This allows us to attribute collective responsibility to the collectives of which the AMS form a part, and to account for the distribution of burdens that follows from this attribution. I argue that this expansion of our responsibility practices will close at least some otherwise intractable techno-responsibility gaps. (shrink)

Some argue that if an agent intentionally participates in collective wrongdoing, that agent bears responsibility for contributing actions performed by other members of the agent’s collective. Some of these intention-state theorists distribute co-responsibility to group members by appeal to participatory intentions alone, while others require participants to instantiate additional beliefs or perform additional actions. I argue that prominent intention-state theories of co-responsibility fail to provide a compelling rationale for why participation in collective wrongdoing merits responsibility not only for one’s own (...) actions but the contributing actions of others as well. I propose that authorization agreements provide us with a suitable rationale. Authorization may be expressly given, as when one person signs a document authorizing another to advance her aims. Or, authorization may be tacitly or implicitly given by participating in and sufficiently contributing to a common plan. If a person authorizes an agent to act, it is right to blame the authorizer for what the agent does on the authorizer’s behalf. An authorization theory justifies the distribution of co-responsibility by appeal to the morally transformative power of agreement, thereby providing a compelling rationale for why a person may be to blame for contributing actions performed by other agents. (shrink)