Research Seminar: Ethics and Undercover Policing, Speaker Christopher Nathan

Both in public discourse and in theory, across political divides, there is a tendency to think about seriously intrusive and harmful police practices in one of two ways: either as cases of moral 'dirty hands', or in the consequentialist language of the ends justifying (or failing to justify) the means. Neither of these frameworks captures an important intuition about police harms, which is that it is possible for people to make themselves liable, ethically speaking, to suffer such harms, in the appropriate contexts. I draw upon recent developments in the ethics of war and self-defence in order to develop the idea of liability in undercover policing, and set out a conception of proportionality for such actions.