Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture,

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.

Claudia Card is Emma Goldman Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of The Atrocity Paradigm: A theory of Evil (2002), The Unnatural Lottery (1996), Lesbian Choices (1995), and more than 100 articles and reviews. She has edited several books, including The Cambridge companion to Simone de Beauvoir (Cambridge, 2003).

Preface and acknowledgements	p. xi
List of acronyms and abbreviations	p. xviii
The concept of evil	p. 1
Inexecusable wrongs	p. 3
The Atrocity Paradigm	p. 5
Demythologizing evil: Arendt, Milgram, and Zimbardo	p. 10
Overview of revisions	p. 16
Moral excuses	p. 18
Ordinary evils	p. 24
Institutional evil: the case of the death penalty	p. 27
Between good and evil	p. 36
Kant's theses on radical evil	p. 37
Kant's moral excluded middle	p. 40
Evil vs. lesser wrongs	p. 46
Two ways to lack unity in the will	p. 50
Grazy zones	p. 56
Diabolical evil revisited	p. 57
Complicity in structural evils	p. 62
Collectively perpetrated evils	p. 62
Institutions and social structure	p. 68
Oppression	p. 71
Structural groups	p. 76
Complicity in evil practices	p. 82
To whom (or to what) can evils be done?	p. 88
Contexts and problematic cases	p. 88
Harm and well-being	p. 95
What makes harm intolerable?	p. 100
Degradation and the capacity approach to harm	p. 103
Trees as victims	p. 106
The ôlivesö of ecosystems, species, and Gia	p. 110
Harm to human groups	p. 114
Concluding questions	p. 117
Terrorism, torture, genocide	p. 121
Counterterrorism	p. 123
Hobbesian and Kantian approaches	p. 125
International rules of war vs. subjective improvisations of terrorism	p. 136
The military model of counterrorism	p. 138
An analogy with private counterrorisms	p. 141
Justice for the input	p. 145
Low-profile terrorism	p. 149
Two models of terrorism	p. 151
War on terrorism and the group target model	p. 157
Rape terrorism	p. 159
Beyond the two models	p. 162
How terrorism works	p. 166
Conscientious torture?	p. 173
The revived torture debates	p. 176
The misnamed ôone-offö case	p. 183
Dershowitz, the ticking bomb, and torture warrants	p. 186
The failures of excuses for conscientious torture	p. 193
Ordinary torture	p. 205
The experience of Jean Améry	p. 208
The UN definition	p. 210
Applying the UN definition to the ôcleanö techniques	p. 213
Five kinds of ordinary, mostly civilian, torture	p. 224
What Bentham's definition misses	p. 234
Genocide is social death	p. 237
Prologue	p. 237
The concept of genocide and philosophical reflection on genocide	p. 241
The murder of groups	p. 246
The UN definition of ôgenocideö	p. 255
The specific evil of genocide	p. 261
Genocide by forced impregnation	p. 267
A paradox	p. 267
The Brana plan for ethnic cleansing	p. 268
How can expulsion and mass rape aimed at expulsion be genocidal?	p. 272
ôIn whole or in partö	p. 276
Hate crimes and assimilations	p. 280
The ôlogical glitchö	p. 283
Sperm as a biological weapon	p. 287
Bibliography	p. 294
List of films referred to	p. 312
List of websites for international documents	p. 314
Index	p. 316
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

FREE SHIPPING

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials