| Cases of excessive force by police have captured the public's attention in the United States in recent years. In response, significant thought has been devoted to the issue of police use of force by scholars representing a variety of disciplines, including history, jurisprudence, sociology, criminology, and philosophy. Notably absent from this public discussion, however, is the voice of Christian social ethics. To be sure, this omission may be attributable to the fact that the question of the use of force by law enforcement officers has been a lacuna in the literature of Christian social ethics itself. Yet, this is curious given that questions about violence and killing have occupied Christian ethicists and theologians for centuries. Therefore, this dissertation seeks to demonstrate that Christian social ethics can make a contribution to the question of the role of the police in society, especially with regard to their use of force. Following the methodological example provided for Catholic social ethics by the Vatican II document, Gaudium et Spes, which called for the church to read the signs of the times and to bring principles of moral theology to bear on concrete moral issues, the dissertation brings the insights of the historical, jurisprudential, and philosophical literature into conversation with the long and rich tradition of Christian ethical reflection on violence known as the just war tradition. Indeed, a particular understanding of the just war tradition, a strict constructionist account that emphasizes a presumption against harm, provides a coherent, reasoned framework for understanding and evaluating police use of force. The result is an approach that helps direct policing itself, in that it threads the concerns and criteria of many different perspectives and disciplines surveyed as signs of the times together, while filling a relative lacuna in Christian social ethics which has conducted little substantial or consistent reflection on policing and the use of force. |
