ABSTRACT

When faced with terrorist threats, it is sometimes suggested that governments should reduce the civil liberties of their citizens with the aim of promoting security. This chapter examines whether such practices are permissible. While cautioning against a simplistic idea of how we should trade-off liberty for security, it claims that such trade-offs may sometimes legitimately be made. However, the burdens of making such a trade-off often fall disproportionately on certain minority groups, particularly when they are profiled by law enforcement personnel, and so the practice appears to violate an “egalitarian norm” which says that the costs of providing a public good like security should be shared roughly equally. While it is shown that there is no reason in principle to always uphold the egalitarian norm, various contingent reasons suggest that we should often avoid violating it in practice.