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TopEmergency Ethics
The first volume of the series on Emergency Ethics is edited by A.M. Viens and Michael J. Selgelid and includes 25 journal articles and book chapters which are organised in five parts: Part I, The Nature and Significance of Emergency; Part II, Ethical Issues in Emergency; Part III, Ethical Issues in Emergency Public Policy and Law; Part IV, War, Terrorism and Supreme Emergencies; Part V, Public Health and Humanitarian Emergencies. Contributions explore the nature and significance of emergencies, normative implications and a range of perspectives on the ethics of emergency response.
The volume opens with a deeply philosophical and political debate, which is well worth patient consideration in relation to IT innovation, as we will show. Carl Schmitt’s famous statement ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’ sets the scene, referencing his classic book Political Theology: Four chapters on the concept of Sovereignty, first published in 1922. Schmitt couples the concept of sovereignty with that of exception. According to him, exceptions require decisions to be made outside of the law, because:
The exception, which is not codified in the existing legal order, can at best be characterized as a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state, … it cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to a preformed law (Schmitt, 1985, p. 61).
For Schmitt, only the sovereign, defined as ‘he who stands outside the normally valid legal system’, can declare an exception: ‘He decides whether there is an extreme emergency as well as what must be done to eliminate it’ (p. 7). An influential but also controversial figure in emergency ethics scholarship whose work underpinned the spread of National Socialism in Germany, Schmitt sets off one of the key debates that runs through the whole series.