Structurally I don't see a fundamental difference between what we may reasonably expect of police and doctors - though obviously the fact that doctors are generally pursuing life-saving activities and police may be engaged in life-threatening activities may lead to differences in how we construe the moral limits to their roles.

As a matter of ethics - our broader social life needs to be constrained by law and other devices - resolving at the societal level matters that should not be left for individual ethical negotiation. What is important - in the end - is that we are enabled to flourish in ways that acknowledge our dignity.

I remember Stanley Benn remarking that one needed to be a certain age to engage with problems in political philosophy - I think he had in mind a certain breadth of understanding and experience - and so my political interests developed more slowly than the others.

From time to time I have wished to do more work in philosophy of religion, but the demands and challenges have been such that it needed more work than I had time for. I sneaked a chapter into my book on loyalty that touched on some issues in the area. Maybe in the future I will try responding to Philip Kitcher's excellent critique: Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism - it gets closer to me than much of what is produced in the field.

What we have to ask is this: what can we morally expect of and allow to people whom we deploy to fulfill this or that social role :police officer, school teacher, physician? This may sometimes lead to difficult social decisions - e.g. should police be permitted to illegally import drugs as part of a sting operation? In the end, I think "common - that is, critical - morality" should determine the limits of the police role.

Police have both extra constraints and extra permissions - on the one hand, they can't dodge involvement in social disorder as the rest of us can and they may be required to conduct themselves privately in a way that does not undermine their public authority; on the other hand, they have permission to engage in deceptions, invasions of privacy and uses of force that are forbidden to the rest of us. But this does not put them beyond common morality.

The roles evolve over time: juries once made determinations about law; nowadays, they are supposedly limited to making factual determinations. A good move? All along, however, we will, be employing and refining "established" values in new contexts, with the possibility of restructuring them in some way.