Description
Book SynopsisEthics for Disaster shows how individual and government preparation and response to hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, wildfires, pandemics, and other disasters are ethical matters. Confronting the social inequalities revealed by these disasters, we must also acknowledge how the complete lack of preparation for climate change and pandemics has shifted these threats from old-fashioned isolated disasters into constant modern risks.
This second edition presents four new chapters about disaster-as-risk, focusing on climate change; more intense confrontation by the elements of earth, air, fire and water; the COVID-19 pandemic; and innocent victims and refugees. Now more than ever, we need good and just moral principles to guide us through the disruptive crises ahead. Where standard ethical frameworks and government action fail to address new issues and guide just choices, humanism and humanitarianism become vital for deciding what we owe innocent victims and climate refugees.
Combining moral philosophy, political theory, public policy, and environmental science, Ethics for Disaster presents new ways to think about changes in the world we all share.
Table of ContentsPreface to the Second Edition and Acknowledgements
Preface to the Paperback Edition
Preface to the First Edition and Acknowledgements
Book Introduction and Overview of parts and chapters
Part I: Ethics
- Disaster Planning: Is Saving the Greatest Number Best?
- Lifeboat Ethics and Disaster: Should We Blow Up the Fat Man?
- Virtues for Disaster: Mitch Rapp and Ernest Shackleton
Part II: Politics
- The Social Contract: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Art Spiegelman
- Public Policy: Snakes on a Plane, Fire in the Pentagon, and Disaster Rights
- The Disadvantaged and Disaster: Hurricane Katrina
Part III: The New Disaster-as-Risk World
- Climate Change: Understanding the basics, including economics.
- Earth, Air, Fire, and Water: The elements of disaster
- COVID-19 and Minorities: How the worse-off fare worst
- Innocent victims and refugees: Moral and Practical questions
Conclusion: A Code of Ethics for Disaster, its Implications, and the Global Water Crisis
Postscript to 2nd edition
Postscript to the 1st edition
Select Bibliography
Index
About the Author
