Ebola’s Message: Public Health and Medicine in the Twenty-First Century
edited by Nicholas G. Evans, Tara C. Smith, and Maimuna S. Majumder
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press (2016)
- Reviewed in Nature 537 (2016), pp. 484-485
- Honorable Mention, 2017 PROSE Awards, Nursing and Allied Health category
The 2013-2015 outbreak of the Ebola virus disease (EVD) was a public health disaster: 28,575 infections and 11,313 deaths (as of October 2015), devastating the countries of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone; a slow and mismanaged international response; and sensationalistic media coverage, seized upon by politicians to justify wrongheaded policy. And yet there were also promising developments that may improve future responses to infectious disease epidemics: the UN Security Council’s first involvement in a public health event; a series of promising clinical treatments and vaccines for EVD; and recognition of the need for a global public health system to deal with epidemics that cross national borders. This volume offers a range of perspectives on these and other lessons learned, with essays on the science, politics, and ethics of the Ebola outbreak.
The contributors discuss topics including the virology and management of EVD in both rich and poor nations; the spread of the disease (with an essay by a leader of Médecins Sans Frontières); racist perceptions of West Africa; mainstream and social media responses to Ebola; and the ethical issue of whether to run clinical trials of experimental treatments during an outbreak.
The Routledge Handbook of Ethics and War
edited by Fritz Allhoff, Nicholas G. Evans, and Adam Henschke
London: Routledge (2013)
- Winner of Outstanding Academic Titles by Choice, 2014
This new Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of contemporary extensions and alternatives to the just war tradition in the field of the ethics of war.
The modern history of just war has typically assumed the primacy of four particular elements: jus ad bellum, jus in bello, the state actor, and the solider. This book will put these four elements under close scrutiny, and will explore how they fare given the following challenges:
- What role do the traditional elements of jus ad bellum and jus in bello—and the constituent principles that follow from this distinction—play in modern warfare? Do they adequately account for a normative theory of war?
- What is the role of the state in warfare? Is it or should it be the primary actor in just war theory?
- Can a just war be understood simply as a response to territorial aggression between state actors, or should other actions be accommodated under legitimate recourse to armed conflict?
- Is the idea of combatant qua state-employed soldier a valid ethical characterization of actors in modern warfare?
- What role does the technological backdrop of modern warfare play in understanding and realizing just war theories?
Over the course of three key sections, the contributors examine these challenges to the just war tradition in a way that invigorates existing discussions and generates new debate on topical and prospective issues in just war theory.
This book will be of great interest to students of just war theory, war and ethics, peace and conflict studies, philosophy and security studies.