Special Issue: The Ethics of Crisis Management

Guest Editors

Per Sandin (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm)

Martin Peterson (University of Cambridge)

Rationale

The topic of crisis management is becoming increasingly important worldwide, in particular in the light of events such as the 2004 tsunami in South East Asia, the 9/11 attacks, the London Transport bombings, corporate crises like the Enron or WorldCom scandals, medical crises like bird flu and SARS, foot-and-mouth disease and BSE. In several jurisdictions, specialised government authorities for crisis management have been established, and there are a number of academic and non-academic training programmes for crisis managers.

All crises involve ethical issues. Comparatively seldom, however, are these questions given the philosophical attention that they warrant.

Therefore, we now invite fresh thinking about ethical and other normative issues related to crisis management. We understand ‘crisis management’ quite broadly, including management at the political level, in business, the military, and so on.

Approaches may be applied or theoretical. They may take a global perspective or address issues within one region or culture or other sphere of life. They may address pure theory or draw on empirical findings.

Scope

Papers are called for offering fresh philosophical treatment of ethical and other normative issues related to crisis management, broadly construed, for instance

o  Triage and allocation of medical and other resources in disasters
o  Moral responsibility in crisis management – government, corporate, military
o  Crisis managers’ virtues
o  Crises and rights
o  Normative differences between everyday management and management in crises
o  The professional responsibility of the manager in crises
o  Different types of management in crises
o  Economic crises – moral issues in finance crisis management

The list is purely illustrative.

Contributions

Contributors are asked to send paper proposals with abstracts. In case the proposal is provisionally accepted, the contributor will be asked to submit a full paper draft for peer-review.

Proposed contributions will be welcome in the form of

o  Papers (3,000-7,000 words)
o  Short opinion pieces (500-2,000 words)

Proposals for literature reviews and critical review essays will also be considered.

Timetable

Proposals with abstracts      Due by Friday 14 December 2007

Provisional acceptances       Notified by Friday 11 January 2008

Drafts for refereeing              Due by Friday 11 April

Referee reports                    Friday 13 June

Final drafts                          Due by Friday 8 August

Publication                          Autumn/Winter 2008


Please send proposals, papers and abstracts and any enquiries to:

Dr Per Sandin
Email: sandin@infra.kth.se
Phone: +46 8 790 9548

Submissions should be sent by email attachment (Word or RTF format). Please provide a separate brief resume of the author(s) and full address for correspondence including phone, fax and email.

For full author guidelines for paper layout and referencing click here

Guest Editors

Dr Per Sandin

Per Sandin is a post-doctoral researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. His current research concerns the ethics of disasters and crisis management and is funded by the Swedish Emergency Management Agency. He has written on applied ethics, the philosophy of risk and the precautionary principle, and philosophical method. Among his recent publications are ‘Collective Military Virtues’ (forthcoming in Journal of Military Ethics) and ‘Common Sense Precaution and

Varieties of the Precautionary Principle’ (Tim Lewens (ed) Risk: Philosophical Perspectives Routledge 2007).
 

Dr Martin Peterson
Martin Peterson received his PhD in philosophy from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 2003. He is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. He is also director of studies in philosophy at St Edmund's College. His main interests are the philosophy of risk, ethics, and decision theory. He has published about 25 articles in peer-reviewed journals, and he is currently working on ethical aspects of the distribution of pandemic bird flu vaccine, and well as on a student introduction to decision theory to be published in 2009.