War, Policing and Killing (original) (raw)

Both war and policing involve the use of force. While force in war is more often than not lethal, in policing it usually falls short of killing. It is not surprising therefore that there should be a vast body of work by (broadly) Western scholars on the ethics of war most of which focuses on killing therein, whereas there is very little philosophical work by similar scholars on the ethics of policing in general, and police killing in particular. This is a regrettable state of affairs, not least because police violence, and in particular lethal violence, is a fact of daily life in most parts of the world – as attested by a growing and rich ethnographic literature which, though empirical in the main, nevertheless grasps with ordinary people’s ethical stand on police killings. In this paper, my brief is to scrutinise some divergences and convergences between the ethics of war on the one hand, and the ethics of policing in particular. I focus on killing, and argue that those acts are governed by the same moral norms, whether they are committed by combatants against other combatants, or by police officers against criminals (and vice versa).