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This introduction explains the rationale behind the volume at hand against the backdrop of the existing state of the art in research related to disasters and disaster bioethics. The volume offers an overview of how disasters are conceptualized in different academic disciplines relevant to disaster bioethics (Part I), and addresses normative issues that arise in responding to disasters from the perspective of a number of fundamental normative approaches in moral and political philosophy (Part II). Part I aims at identifying and exploring the dominant approaches to basic concepts and categorization criteria of disasters in different academic disciplines, including Philosophy, Theology, Law, Economics, Public Health, Literature Studies, Political Science, and Gender Studies. The eight chapters in Part I provide an introduction to conceptual research in disasters and aim to stimulate further work. It thereby contributes to enhanced awareness and recognition of the real-world importance of basic concepts and disaster criteria. Part II provides a broad range of normative perspectives (Consequentialism, Virtue Ethics, Kantian virtue ethics, Capabilities approach, Deontology, Human Rights and Communitarianism). These chapters are offered as a starting point, not a final conclusion on the topic of disaster ethics. Ethical justification for actions taken in the face of disasters needs recourse to normative traditions and this book aims at setting the stage for more focused normative debates.

This chapter provides an overview of how disasters have been conceived of in philosophy, starting with Plato, with focus on the analytic tradition. Philosophers have been surprisingly little concerned with disasters. Some works where philosophers, and some non-philosophers, explicitly define disasters are surveyed and discussed. Works by philosophers who have discussed philosophical issues pertaining to disasters and disaster-like situations without offering much discussion of the definition of the term are also treated. Those have mainly been ethicists, normative as well as applied, and political philosophers dealing with the Hobbesian tradition’s problems of state authority and exceptions. The use of imagined disasters in philosophical thought experiments, typically in ethics, is also discussed. The chapter concludes by offering tentative suggestions of some possible future developments in disaster philosophizing. Among them are that we might expect philosophers to devote increased attention to empirical work, for instance from behavioural science, and increased exploration of the intersection between disaster philosophizing and environmental ethics.

This chapter examines ways that disasters have led to reflection within Christian theology. Mention will be made of other religious traditions, but because of the volume of material available, the focus will be on biblical accounts of disasters, God’s role in them, and discussions about how believers can and should respond to them. First, the chapter will examine accounts where God is stated to have sent disasters as a judgement for human sin. This will require a broad overview of some central theological positions. Then, the chapter will examine historical and contemporary claims that disasters can be blamed on human sin. This will lead to a review of theodicy, theological arguments developed to justify why God could allow evil and suffering, which could include disasters. Then some popular reactions to disasters that blame particular sins will be critiqued. In contrast, the Bible calls for responses that include practical help for those impacted by disasters. A full response must go further, including empathy for those hurt and working to overcome injustice when that has been a contributing factor. The final theological perspective is the belief that God works with believers to bring good out of bad situations, in spite of how bad the disaster can be. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how theological reflection can bring hope in the midst of disasters.

Major disasters are windows to societies’ deepest, darkest secrets. Moments, which allow us to sneak a peek at the categories according to which, we distribute wealth or justice and organize society as such. Law has come to play a vital role in this regard. In this chapter, I argue that (legal) conflicts after disaster are inevitable, as we have collectively changed our perception of what a disaster is. The modern disaster is anything but in its constitution; it is a deeply political, moral and cultural phenomenon. Accordingly, it is also legal. Furthermore, three overall features characterize the legal cases that arise out of disasters. They all deal with serious losses, complex causalities and tricky normative distinctions. While the first two play to the strengths of the legal order, the third is what make these cases controversial. Thus, in the process of solving the legal facts presented, courts face a number of questions of a non-legal nature. In order to perform its main function (to solve the conflict at hand) law is forced to engage with the most central questions we are confronted with in an Anthropocene world: which processes are driven by natural forces and which by culture, who is a citizen, and what belongs to sphere of scientific uncertainty or misconduct?

Economics, generally, is a discipline in which relatively little attention is devoted to language and terminology. As such, economists have not really attempted to define the concept of disasters very carefully, nor have they evaluated the ethics that are behind the economic analysis of disasters. Given this absence, we believe that a better understanding of the ways in which the discipline approaches the topic of disasters and its ethics is gained not by examining the multitude of definitions in the discipline, but by examining specific examples of topics that are contested within the economic literature on disasters and their ethical content. Outlining the main arguments and methodological approaches that economists use to think about these topics will, we hope, better clarify the general approach that economists use when embarking on disciplinary research on the topic of disasters. As such, we choose to focus on two topics: price gouging, and post-disaster economic recovery. The first is a topic that is explicitly ethically challenging from an economic perspective; the second involves many implicit ethical decisions that are almost never made explicit.

Government institutions play an important role in guiding disaster preparedness, mitigation, and recovery. In turn, political scientists have devoted considerable attention to the study of hazards and disasters, including the impact of disasters on election outcomes, the capacity of disasters to help set the crowded government agenda, the various organizational strategies used by emergency management agencies, as well as scores of other related topics. The following chapter considers three areas of political science research examining the intersection of politics, policy, and disaster. It specifically considers the literatures on policy change, myopic voting and reactive decision making, and organizational behavior. This review also considers the literature on disaster resilience, a topic that overlaps various subfields within the discipline. In addition to assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each area of research, this chapter highlights a number of potentially fruitful areas of future research.

The ancient Greek tragedy represents one of the earliest and most dramatic ways of dealing with the phenomenon of disaster in literature. This ancient literary form will be used as a kind of template in the search for recurrent forms of moral attitudes and behaviour that seem to follow almost universally in the wake of war and armed conflicts. First, the focus will be on war veterans’ experiences and narratives of going home again, i.e. of returning from combat back to a life called ‘normal’. These are experiences that render both the victorious and the defeated representatives of such conflicts extremely vulnerable and susceptible to harm, as dramatically displayed in Sophocles’ tragedy . Second, Euripides’ plays , will be made use of. In these plays, unvarnished versions of the horrors women and children are subjected to as a consequence of war are dramatically displayed. To demonstrate the moral timelessness and didactic potentials of these ancient representations, the fate of war veterans, women and children in the wake of modern wars and armed conflicts will then be displayed through Bryan Doerries’ narrative, , of exposing US war veterans to Sophocles play , and through the narratives of 50 Syrian women, all refugees living in Aman, Jordan because of the civil war in Syria, of staging Euripides’ play .

This chapter focuses on how disasters are conceptualized from a gender perspective and will explore concepts such as violence and death against the backdrop of gender inequalities. It will critically examine the conceptualization of a disaster in terms of humanitarian response and execution of policies that aim to protect individuals in disaster situations and mediate the risks that emerge during certain contexts, such as refugee or internally displaced camps. Finally, it will be concluded that disasters, as conceptualised from a gender perspective, still need a more all-encompassing theoretical framework to account for the lived experiences of individuals in terms of their gender identity in societies during times of disasters.

The objectives and operational norms of public health are explicitly and strongly based on bio-ethical principles, involving many dilemmas. To a great extent, these principles remain the same when dealing with public health in humanitarian action (PHHA), but their application may involve even more excruciatingly difficult decisions and dilemmas. This chapter reflects on what those principles and dilemmas are, and how they have changed over time. It describes how the global health situation has changed dramatically over the last decades, and what implications that has for health in emergency situations. It also addresses the changing nature of disasters, including more protracted emergencies involving long term displacement, fragile contexts as well as the effect on the capacity of health systems as they are under increasing pressure and attack. Finally, it notes some of the major improvements in humanitarian response, including development of widely accepted guidelines and coordination mechanisms, and how this has contributed to improvements in saving lives and preventing morbidity.

In this chapter I will give an interpretation of the role consequentialist ethics can have in disaster settings. I will argue that consequentialist ethics is most appropriate when decisions are taken that affect not single individuals but larger numbers of people. This is frequently the case in political decision making, especially when powerful states act in the domain of international relations, but also in disaster settings. I will focus on the latter settings and argue that in those contexts consequentialism is most adequate as a moral theory. I will also contend that different situational settings require different ethics. The moral relevance of these situational settings is primarily dependent on the number of people affected by morally relevant decisions. The formulation of my position will be preceded by a brief review of the historical development of consequentialism, primarily related to disaster settings. In order to make my arguments as vivid as possible I will use four vignettes. In two of them consequentialist ethics is appropriate, while in the other two deontology is a more reasonable moral theory. In the former two we deal with large numbers of people in disaster settings; in the latter two with “regular” settings that do not affect the lives of many individuals.