Disasters: Core Concepts and Ethical Theories

This Open Access Book is the first to examine disasters from a multidisciplinary perspective. Justification of actions in the face of disasters requires recourse both to conceptual analysis and ethical traditions. Part 1 of the book contains chapters on how disasters are conceptualized in different academic disciplines relevant to disasters. Part 2 has chapters on how ethical issues that arise in relation to disasters can be addressed from a number of fundamental normative approaches in moral and political philosophy. This book sets the stage for more focused normative debates given that no one book can be completely comprehensive. Providing analysis of core concepts, and with real-world relevance, this book should be of interest to disaster scholars and researchers, those working in ethics and political philosophy, as well as policy makers, humanitarian actors and intergovernmental organizations..

This book is open access, with free and unlimited access thanks to COST, an EU-funded Horizon 2020 programme

1. Conceptualizing and assessing disasters: An introduction.- 2. Conceptualizations of disasters in philosophy.- 3. Christian theology and disasters: Where is God in all this?.- 4. Disasters and responsibility. Normative issues for law following disasters.- 5. The ethical content of the economic analysis of disasters: Price gouging and post-disaster recovery.- 6. Political Science perspectives.- 7. You can't go home again - on the conceptualisation of disasters in ancient Greek tragedy.- 8. Conceptualizing Disasters from a Gender Perspective.- 10. Disaster consequentialism.- 11. Disasters, vulnerability and human rights.- 12. Capabilities, ethics and disasters.- 14. Virtue ethics and disasters.- 15. Kantian virtue ethics approaches.- 16. The loss of deontology on the road to apathy: Examples of homelessness and IVF now, with disaster to follow.- Afterword.- Bibliography of selected titles.- Index: Subject and/or Name.