A New Ethical Foundation for Policing

Abstract

A New Ethical Foundation for Policing offers a novel account of “the police,” what citizens can expect them to do, and how they ought to do it. By arguing from first principles about the value of political association, the dissertation concludes that just policing must support our ability to live together. Specifically, I argue that “the police” ought to be a public bureaucracy that directs state resources to resolve interpersonal disputes of public concern. This conception achieves two purposes. First, it narrows the variety of public issues to which police must respond. And second, it positions police contact as the beginning of problem resolution rather than a last resort. My project’s first chapter, “Re: Defining the Police,” argues for the philosophical study of the police and offers a provisional normative account of the police developed in later chapters. The second chapter, “The Case for (and Against) Police Abolition,” responds to the abolitionist challenge by arguing that historical injustice mandates radical re-envisioning of the police rather than the institution’s total dissolution. In the third chapter, “Association and the Ethical Foundations of Policing,” I describe the purposes and challenges of collective political life and argue that policing can support people in managing those challenges. In chapter four, “Justifications of Police Violence,” I argue that, for policing to secure its just ends, officers can only rightly use violence to defend others. In chapter five, “Who’s Afraid of the Dark,” I further limit officers’ right to violence to show due regard for those most vulnerable to state abuse. Through the dissertation’s analysis, I develop the first wholly normative account of just policing in multiracial democratic settings.