Happiness and Human Flourishing in Police Work

Police officers are expected to interact with civilians, and especially vulnerable populations, in a way that respects their innate human dignity. To motivate this fundamental ideal of policing, training in police ethics often introduces aspiring police officers to the various paradigmatic theories and concepts of philosophical ethics and applies them to case studies and examples from practice. In this course, we will do something a little different. We will adopt a larger understanding of ethics as the exploration of what it means to live a good human life – both as an agent of the state and as a private citizen. The course combines readings in philosophy, theology, literature and autobiography with religious texts from a variety of cultures in order to provide robust ideas about what others have considered essential to a good life. From these ideas, we will construct our own account of what we think will make our lives most worth living.