Police Use of Lethal Force and Suicide Bombers

Abstract

Abstract In this chapter the morality of the use of lethal force by police against a suicide bomber in a well-ordered jurisdiction in a liberal democratic state is analyzed. Such operations involve a team of police officers with different roles, such as surveillance officers and firearms officers. So the question arises as to who is morally responsible for any mistakes leading to loss of innocent life (e.g., the Menezes killing by London police in 2005). Three key theoretical claims are: (1) collective moral responsibility is a species of relational individual moral responsibility; namely, joint moral responsibility; (2) police scenarios of this kind involve chains of institutional and moral responsibility; (3) an individual participant in a morally required joint action (omission) scenario that fails is not morally culpable if she or he did all that could be reasonably be expected but might share in the collective responsibility.