This paper argues that the moral status of coercive institutions cannot be adequately assessed by asking how coercion is used. Instead, the relevant question is whether coercion is constitutive of the institution's ordinary functioning. The paper introduces a fundamental distinction between instrumental coercion — where coercion is a dispensable means to independently justified ends — and constitutive coercion — where the standing possibility of imposing non-refusable harm is a condition of the practice's operation. Where coercion is constitutive, familiar justificatory standards such as proportionality and necessity lose their grip. Drawing on the concept of normative addressability, I argue that moral justification presupposes that those subject to coercion remain capable of refusing, contesting, or exiting without catastrophic loss. Where refusal predictably entails agency collapse, justification collapses into command. Contemporary policing is analyzed as a paradigmatic case of constitutive coercion. The defining feature of policing is not that it sometimes uses force, but that its ordinary functioning depends on the permanent availability of non-refusable harm. This structural feature cannot be remedied by training, oversight, community policing, or incremental reform — all of which preserve the constitutive role of coercive threat. The paper concludes that policing, as an institutional role, exceeds the limits of moral justification independently of the character or intentions of individual officers. Abolition follows not from ideology but from the conceptual structure of justification itself. This work contributes to debates in political philosophy, philosophy of law, and critical police studies by offering a structural account of why certain institutions cannot be morally reformed — only replaced.
Tommaso Biagi (Sun,) studied this question.