Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide - Hardcover

Card, Claudia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521899613 ISBN 13: 9780521899611

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2010

Synopsis

In this 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.

About this title

About the Author

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).

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521899613
• ISBN 13: 9780521899611
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 350