🎉   Please check out our new website over at books-etc.com.

Seller
Your price
£127.50
Out of Stock

Shooting to Kill

The Ethics of Police and Military Use of Lethal Force

By (author) Seumas Miller
Format: Hardback
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc, New York, United States
Published: 8th Dec 2016
Dimensions: w 163mm h 242mm d 22mm
Weight: 570g
ISBN-10: 0190626135
ISBN-13: 9780190626136
Barcode No: 9780190626136
Trade or Institutional customer? Contact us about large order quotes.
Synopsis
Terrorism, the use of military force in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and the fatal police shootings of unarmed persons have all contributed to renewed interest in the ethics of police and military use of lethal force and its moral justification. In this book, philosopher Seumas Miller analyzes the various moral justifications and moral responsibilities involved in the use of lethal force by police and military combatants, relying on a distinctive normative teleological account of institutional roles. His conception constitutes a novel alternative to prevailing reductive individualist and collectivist accounts. As Miller argues, police and military uses of lethal force are morally justified in part by recourse to fundamental natural moral rights and obligations, especially the right to personal self-defense and the moral obligation to defend the lives of innocent others. Yet the moral justification for police and military use of lethal force is to some extent role-specific. Both police officers and military combatants evidently have an institutionally-based moral duty to put themselves in harm's way to protect others. Under some circumstances, however, police have an institutionally based moral duty to use lethal force to uphold the law; and military combatants have an institutionally based moral duty to use lethal force to win wars. Two key notions in play are joint action and the natural right to self-defense. Miller uses a relational individualist theory of joint actions to construct the notion of multi-layered structures of joint action in order to explicate organizational action. He also provides a novel theory of justifiable killing in self-defense. Over the course of his book, Miller covers a variety of urgent topics, such as police shootings of armed offenders, police shooting of suicide-bombers, targeted killing, autonomous weapons, humanitarian armed intervention, and civilian immunity.

New & Used

Seller Information Condition Price
-New
Out of Stock

What Reviewers Are Saying

Submit your review
Newspapers & Magazines
Miller is engaging the revisionists [theories of the use of lethal force] and putting forth a substantial alternative [theory] at a high levelhis institutional approach speaks to those people and their experiences who are (or may be) engaged in using lethal force in law enforcement and war.I also find Miller's "collective end theory" (CET) of joint action to be excellent He has an excellent approach to joint action that accounts for individual moral responsibility. * Steve Viner, Criminal Justice Ethics * While many contemporary philosophers have addressed permissible uses of force, Seumas Miller's Shooting to Kill is unique in developing a unified theory regarding the permissible use of deadly force in private, law enforcement, and military contexts. Miller builds on previously published work in the field of collective responsibility to articulate a sophisticated theory of permissible violence taking into account differences in institutional contexts. The
theory is philosophically intricate and yet practical enough to make a difference to concrete cases. It is a true achievement. * Michael Skerker, Professor of Ethics, US Naval Academy *