Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide

✍ Scribed by Claudia Card

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 351
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In this new contribution to philosophical ethics, Claudia Card revisits the theory of evil developed in her earlier book The Atrocity Paradigm (2002), and expands it to consider collectively perpetrated and collectively suffered atrocities. Redefining evil as a secular concept and focusing on the inexcusability – rather than the culpability – of atrocities, Card examines the tension between responding to evils and preserving humanitarian values. This stimulating and often provocative book contends that understanding the evils in terrorism, torture and genocide enables us to recognise similar evils in everyday life: daily life under oppressive regimes and in racist environments; violence against women, including in the home; violence and executions in prisons; hate crimes; and violence against animals. Card analyses torture, terrorism and genocide in the light of recent atrocities, considering whether there can be moral justifications for terrorism and torture, and providing conceptual tools to distinguish genocide from non-genocidal mass slaughter.

✦ Table of Contents

Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Preface and acknowledgements
Acronyms and abbreviations
PART I: The concept of evil
Chapter 1 Inexcusable wrongs
1. The Atrocity Paradigm
2. Demythologizing evil: Arendt, Milgram, and Zimbardo
3. Overview of revisions
4. Moral excuses
5. Ordinary evils
6. Institutional evil: the case of the death penalty
Chapter 2 Between good and evil
1. Kant’s theses on radical evil
2. Kant’s moral excluded middle
3. Evils vs. lesser wrongs
4. Two ways to lack unity in the will
5. Gray zones
6. Diabolical evil revisited
Chapter 3 Complicity in structural evils
1. Collectively perpetrated evils
2. Institutions and social structure
3. Oppression
4. Structural groups
5. Complicity in evil practices
Chapter 4 To whom (or to what) can evils be done?
1. Contexts and problematic cases
2. Harm and well-being
3. What makes harm intolerable?
4. Degradation and the capacity approach to harm
5. Trees as victims
6. The “lives” of ecosystems, species, and Gaia
7. Harm to human groups
8. Concluding questions
PART II: Terrorism, torture, genocide
Chapter 5 Counterterrorism
1. Hobbesian and Kantian approaches
2. International rules of war vs. subjective improvisations of terrorism
3. The military model of counterterrorism
4. An analogy with private counterterrorisms
5. Justice for the unjust
Chapter 6 Low-profile terrorism
1. Two models of terrorism
2. War on terrorism and the group target model
3. Rape terrorism
4. Beyond the two models
5. How terrorism works
Chapter 7 Conscientious torture?
1. The revived torture debates
2. The misnamed “one-off” case
3. Dershowitz, the ticking bomb, and torture warrants
4. The failures of excuses for conscientious torture
Chapter 8 Ordinary torture
1. The experience of Jean Améry
2. The UN definition
3. Applying the UN definition to the “clean” techniques
4. Five kinds of ordinary, mostly civilian, torture
5. What Bentham’s definition misses
Chapter 9 Genocide is social death
1. Prologue
2. The concept of genocide and philosophical reflection on genocide
3. The murder of groups
4. The UN definition of “genocide”
5. The specific evil of genocide
Chapter 10 Genocide by forced impregnation
1. A paradox
2. The Brana plan for ethnic cleansing
3. How can expulsion and mass rape aimed at expulsion be genocidal?
4. “In whole or in part”
5. Hate crimes and assimilations
6. The “logical glitch”
7. Sperm as a biological weapon
Bibliography
Films referred to
Websites for international documents
Index