It's a presupposition of a very common way of thinking about contextsensitivity in language that the semantic contribution made by a bit of context-sensitive vocabulary is sensitive only to features of the speaker's situation at the time of utterance. I argue that this is false, and that we need a theory of context-dependence that allows for content to depend not just on the features of the utterance's origin, but also on features of its destination. There are cases in which a (...) single utterance semantically conveys different propositions to different members of its audience, which force us to say that what a sentence conveys depends not just on the context in which it is uttered, but also on the context in which it is received. (shrink)

In this paper, I take up the task of further examining the ticking bomb argument in favor of the use of torture. In doing so, I will focus on some recent scholarship regarding ticking bomb methodology introduced by Fritz Allhoff. I will then propose a set of ticking bomb variations which, I believe, call into question some of Allhoff's conclusions. My goal is to show that ticking bomb methodology is misguided in its attempt to justify torture insofar as its proponents (...) seem to ignore certain nonconsequentialist factors that are latent in the various types of uncertainty in real-world ticking bomb cases. Once this fact is recognized, I claim, the normative claims about torture that follow can be denied by appealing to it. I then argue that, even if we grant a certain level of uncertainty within the ticking bomb argument, torture is not justified. Rather, the implementation of torture, even if it yields positive results, is nothing more than a case of moral luck. In other words, the supposed "success" of torture in the ticking bomb cases lies entirely outside the agent's control. Thus, if the outcome of the use of torture is in no way controlled by the agent, then the agent's actions cannot be justified by appealing to that outcome. (shrink)

I argue against the Doctrine of Double Effect’s explanation of the moral difference between terror bombing and strategic bombing. I show that the standard thought-experiment of Terror Bomber and Strategic Bomber which dominates this debate is underdetermined in three crucial respects: (1) the non-psychological worlds of Terror Bomber and Strategic Bomber; (2) the psychologies of Terror Bomber and Strategic Bomber; and (3) the structure of the thought-experiment, especially in relation to its similarity with the Trolley Problem. (1) If the two (...) worlds are not identical, then it may be these differences between the two worlds and not the Doctrine of Double Effect to explain the moral difference; (2a) if Terror Bomber and Strategic Bomber have the same causal beliefs, then why does Terror Bomber set out to kill the children? It may then be this unwarranted and immoral choice and not the Doctrine of Double Effect that explains the moral difference; (2b) if the two have different causal beliefs, then we can’t rule out the counterfactual that, had Strategic Bomber had the same beliefs as Terror Bomber, she would have also acted as Terror Bomber did. Finally, (3) the Strategic Bomber scenario could also be constructed so as to be structurally equivalent to the Fat Man scenario in the Trolley Problem: but then the Doctrine of Double Effect would give different answers to two symmetrical cases. (shrink)

Torture is like slavery (and unlike murder and genocide) in that it is not inconceivable that torture might be justifiable. But the circumstances that would make it tolerable are unrealistic in philosophically interesting ways. It is unrealistic to think we can predict when torture will be effective and containable; unwarranted to suppose that humane alternatives are impossible; disastrous to remove motivations to create alternatives; unacceptable to be satisfied with available evidence regarding suspects’ identity, knowledge of critical detail, ability to recall (...) it, or reasons for not providing it. Most importantly, the costs of even successful interrogational torture would negate the gains sought. Or so this essay argues. (shrink)

Physicist Percy Bridgman has been taken by Heather Douglas to be an exemplar defender of an untenable value-free ideal for science. This picture is complicated by a detailed study of Bridgman's philosophical views of the relation between science and society. The normative autonomy of science, a version of the value-free ideal, is defended. This restriction on the provenance of permissible values in science is given a basis in Bridgman's broader philosophical commitments, most importantly, his view that science is primarily an (...) individual commitment to a set of epistemic norms and values. Considerations of external moral or social values are not, on this view, intrinsic to scientific practice, though they have a broader pragmatic significance. What Bridgman takes as the proper relation between science and society is shown through analysis of his many writings on the topic and consideration of his rarely remarked upon involvement in the most problematic example of "Big Science" of his day: the atomic bomb. A reevaluation of Bridgman's views provides a unique characterization of what is at stake in the values in science debate: the normative autonomy of science. (shrink)

In Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture, Fritz Allhoff demonstrates the weakness of the case against torture; while allowing that torture constitutes a moral wrong, he nevertheless argues that, in exceptional cases, it represents the ...

ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the view that, in so far as they involve the deliberate targeting of innocent people, neither terrorism nor area bombing is ever morally permissible. Four attempts to justify this view are considered, all of which are based on the intuition that deliberately killing innocent people is wrong. By means of a detailed examination of the introduction of area bombing by Britain in 1940–41, it is argued that in certain circumstances there are other equally powerful (...) and accessible intuitions which support the opposite view. It is further argued that only moral theories which provide for the weighing of competing moral intuitions are capable of avoiding this kind of impasse and the biased selection of intuitions that this form of absolutism involves. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss Richard Rorty’s views on intercultural hermeneutics as presented in his essay “Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens” and in his correspondence with the Indian philosopher Anindita Niyogi Balslev. In doing so, I focus primarily on Rorty’s presumption that instead of providing an “authentic” picture of another culture, the goal of intercultural studies or hermeneutics should be to look if there is anything “of use” that a given culture offers and that is not offered by ours.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.4 (2000) 59-82 [Access article in PDF] Bombing and the Symptom Traumatic Earliness and the Nuclear Uncanny Paul K. Saint-Amour Many used the Japanese word bukimi, meaning weird, ghastly, or unearthly, to describe Hiroshima's uneasy combination of continued good fortune and expectation of catastrophe. People remembered saying to one another, "Will it be tomorrow or the day after tomorrow?" One man described how, each night he was on (...) air-raid watch, "I trembled with fear.... I would think, "Tonight it will be Hiroshima." These "premonitions" were partly attempts at psychic preparation, partly a form of "imagining the worst" as a magical way of warding off disaster. —Robert J. Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1967) Robert J. Lifton's pathbreaking work on the survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima focuses on the psychological aftermath of the bomb, but opens with a brief and surprising section called "Anticipation." Given the instantaneous and unprecedented devastation caused by the first atomic bomb, the anticipation of so singular an experience is just as difficult to imagine as its subsequent assimilation. In fact, the unassimilable nature of traumatic violence would seem to depend in some way upon the impossibility of its anticipation, as Lifton implies: "Neither past experience nor immediate perceptions—the two sources of prior imagination—could encompass what was about to occur." Yet Lifton also records an expectant, premonitory atmosphere in Hiroshima during the weeks before the bombing, a compound of past experience and immediate perceptions that, while inadequate to "encompass" the eventual experience of the bomb, cannot simply be dismissed as speculation that found an accidental correlate in the nuclear event. While no one in Hiroshima knew ahead of time what would occur on August 6, 1945, many had noted the city's eerie exemption from conventional bombardment and speculated as to the reasons for it. During the summer of 1945, a series of rumors circulated in Hiroshima, rumors attributing the sparing of the city, variously, to its modest military and industrial significance; to the presence of prominent foreigners there, possibly including President Truman's mother; to important American prisoners-of-war supposedly held in the city; to the number of its citizens who had emigrated to the US; to the presence of large numbers of American spies living among its citizens; to its physical appeal in the eyes of Americans who had saved the city as a site for their postwar occupation villas; and, most wishfully, to the wartime grace of a cartographic error: "We thought that perhaps the city of Hiroshima was not on the American maps" [Lifton 15-17]. 1 Other inhabitants [End Page 59] of the city feared that Hiroshima appeared all too prominently on US maps, but had been set aside for "something unusually big"—perhaps the inundation of the city by floodwaters that could be released by the bombing of a massive upstream dam. Still others spoke of a "special bomb" [PWRS 220-22; Lifton 17]. All these rumors responded to citizens' impression that their city had been in some way singled out, and the term bukimi—also meaning "ominous" or "uncanny"—spoke to the suspended question of whether Hiroshima and its inhabitants had been singled out for preservation or for annihilation.The survivors who recollected their anticipatory bukimi years after the bombing may have retrospectively amplified their memories of weird expectation, perhaps as a way of attempting to master an incommensurable and singular event by installing it within a narrative of causality, continuity, even prophecy. Nonetheless, the bukimi experienced by inhabitants of Hiroshima should not be understood as pure retrospection, nor as groundless hunch, since it arose from a series of empirical observations later revealed to have a single and coherent origin in US military strategy. By the summer of 1945, most Japanese cities whose size and military-industrial importance were similar to Hiroshima's had already been bombed with incendiaries: those who lived in Hiroshima had watched waves of American bombers fly past on their way to other targets, while the dozen or so bombs that had fallen accidentally on... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bombs and Roses: The Writing of Anxiety in Henry Green’s CaughtLyndsey Stonebridge (bio)(The firemen saw each other’s faces. They saw the water below a dirty yellow towards the fire; the wharves on that far side low and black, those on the bank they were leaving a pretty rose.... They sat very still, beneath the immensity. For, against it, warehouses, small towers, puny steeples seemed alive with sparks from the (...) mile high pandemonium of flame reflected in the quaking sky. This fan, a roaring red gold, pulsed rose at the outside edge, the perimeter round which the heavens, set with stars before fading into utter blackness, were for a space a trembling green.)—Henry Green, CaughtWar, she thought, is sex.—Henry Green, CaughtRoses are not generally thought to be objects of anxiety. They are objects of desire, or better, objects that arrest desire by their invitation to aesthetic contemplation, but only for the phobic could a rose be said to be an occasion for dread. Writing during World War II, the British writer Henry Green (“a trembling green”) suggests otherwise. In this description of the London Blitz from his 1943 novel, Caught, everything comes up roses. 1 First among literary clichés, roses lend themselves to this kind of figurative estrangement (by virtue of which, in literature, a rose is in fact only very rarely a rose), and Green is by no means the only British writer in World War II to note that the fire and the rose are one. 2 In Caught, however, Green’s roses wreath desire and dread together so tightly that the psychoanalytic cliché—war is sex—snaps back into the tautology that Freud perhaps always intended.The idea that war could be sex was, of course, the scandal of Freud’s theory of the traumatic neurosis during World War I. As is well known, only a desexualized version of psychoanalysis was admitted into the field hospitals and the officer’s convalescent homes that sprang up in upper-class houses all over Britain. One of these was Green’s childhood home, which, he later said, like many of the overprivileged, opened up its doors to the wounded and traumatized in a calculated act of class preservation. 3 One does not have to [End Page 25] think too hard to appreciate why, for some at least, it was preferable to see these torn and shocked bodies as seized by a dreadful—but after all perfectly understandable—fear in the face of war, rather than gripped with a less comprehensible anxiety that carried with it a dangerous and potentially lethal sexual charge.The temptation to unsex trauma theory is still with us today. It is not quite that something has been occluded in contemporary debate and that this something is sexuality. It is more accurate to say that, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the agon of sexuality—and particularly of the drives—is right at the heart of trauma, and that this, especially in the recent alliance of psychoanalysis and history, causes a certain awkwardness. One of the strengths of contemporary trauma theory lies in its articulation of a nuanced and subtle historicity, read through both psychoanalysis and literature, which allows the humanities to reconnect with historical violence, without (supposedly) falling into the pitfalls of a naive historicism [see Caruth]. The awkwardness comes because sexual antagonism is both clearly historical (the violence is well documented) and structurally necessary to psychoanalytic theories of trauma. The two, the historical and the psychic, are clearly not analogues, but they remain stubbornly and infuriatingly intertwined. 4Faced with this theoretical tangle, two options present themselves. The first is to privilege historical trauma over sexual trauma. Psychoanalysis, hence, provides an account of the multiple difficulties of historical representation while escaping the age-old accusation of sexual determination. War, thus, is not (only) sex. For all its hermeneutic power, this new historiography runs the risk of producing a trauma theory without, paradoxically, a psychoanalysis (an Orphics without Eurydice). The second is to insist on the structural necessity of sexuality and, in particular, of sexual difference, not as the ahistorical referent that lurks beyond representation but, as Slavoj Zizek has... (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to re-evaluate the manner in which the Ticking Bomb Scenario (TBS), a thought experiment in philosophical enquiry, has been used in the discussion of the justifiability or otherwise of forward-looking interrogational torture (FLIT). The paper argues that criticisms commonly raised against the thought experiment are often inappropriate or irrelevant. A great many criticisms misunderstand the way in which thought experiments in general, and the TBS in particular, are supposed to work in philosophical (and for (...) that matter scientific) inquiry. The paper is not about the acceptability or otherwise of FLIT per se but rather an attempt to show that thought experiments such as the TBS are useful analytic tools and ought not to be rejected due to their inappropriate use by those engaged in the justifiability or otherwise of FLIT. By rescuing the TBS from its erroneous use the paper seeks to show its proper worth as part of an argumentative device in uncovering conflicting moral intuitions in our search for ethical truths. (shrink)

The failure to locate a unifying psychological profile of suicide bombers should prompt moves to a more extended and interdisciplinary front, availing itself of insights from disciplines such as sociology, philosophy and history of ideas, as well as from psychology. This paper aims in that direction by exploring ‘traditional’ versus ‘western liberal’ conceptions of the self, with special emphasis on their possible pathologies; and by integrating those pathologies with insights from Durkheimian suicidology. It is hypothesised that suicide bombers in the (...) West are typically callow, malleable young men targeted by terror merchants, and that their suicide missions are, first and foremost, acts of deluded self-enhancement, which need to be understood against the backdrop of the western liberal conception of the self. Finally, some implications for moral education are suggested. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a revival of interest in Michael Walzer's doctrine of ‘supreme emergency’. Simply put, the doctrine holds that, when a state confronts an opponent who threatens annihilation, it can be morally legitimate to violate one of the cardinal rules of the war convention – the principle of non-combatant immunity. Walzer cites the case of Britain's decision to bomb German cities in 1940 as a case in point. Although the theory of supreme emergency has been scrutinised, the historical (...) case that Walzer refers to has not been looked at in depth. This article seeks to remedy this problem by asking whether the principle actors involved in the decision to bomb German cities understood themselves to be in a supreme emergency. It argues that the British leadership never openly admitted that they were in fact targeting German civilians, and that the principle reason for this was a widespread belief that the British and American publics would not support such a campaign. As a result, throughout the war, the British government publicly maintained the fiction that the devastation of German cities was a collateral product of attacks on its industrial infrastructure. This, in turn, suggests that liberal societies – even those facing imminent destruction – do not tend to support a relaxing of the rules of non-combatant immunity, suggesting that the prohibition on deliberately killing non-combatants may be more embedded than has hitherto been thought. (shrink)

Following Zizek's insight that the blockbuster can constitute the ideal terrain for mapping out the ideological and political dilemmas of our conjuncture, this piece takes a Zizekian look awry at two recent depictions of revolutionary crowds/movements in "The Dark Knight Rises" and "Argo". Viewed through the genealogical lens of representations of the “people” in philosophy and literature, what we find in both films is a (distorted, dispersed) staging not only of our own time and situation, a strange figuration of capital (...) and an ultimately justified revolutionary struggle over the city (or, surplus). (shrink)

As U.S. correctional populations have rocketed upward since the 1970s, researchers have quite properly focused attention on prisons and prisoners. Yet examinations of the U.S. punishment record must look beyond prison gates, as criminal justice sanctions also trigger a range of formal and informal collateral consequences. For those so punished, employment restrictions and other collateral sanctions complicate and confound efforts to assume the rights and duties of citizenship.I here suggest two broad approaches for scaling back some of the deleterious effects (...) of punishment without compromising public safety. The first approach involves reducing the scope and number of collateral sanctions imposed automatically with a felony conviction. The second approach involves creating fewer records in the first place by redirecting low_level offenses away from the criminal justice system. (shrink)

This essay traces the recent history of 3D satellite animation from its military origins to its visibility in the civic sphere. Specifically, technologies unveiled in 2004 as Google Earth first received widespread public visibility in the television coverage of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The essay first maps the political economy of the “military-media-geotech” complex, focusing mainly on the coverage of the Iraq War as an nexus of interests. Second, the essay analyzes the aesthetic uses of 3D satellite animation (...) on the news during this period, including how these imaging practices meshed with existing discourses such as the clean war, the weaponization of the civic gaze, and others. The essay concludes with thoughts regarding what these practices mean for the efficacy of the deliberative citizen, public life, and the meaning of war. (shrink)

As world leaders strengthen their nuclear arsenals, and fears of global nuclear proliferation increase, social studies teachers must be prepared to help learners investigate the devastating consequences on human life and property associated with their use. This manuscript presents an ethnological study of six atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Participants completed a qualitative questionnaire describing their experiences during World War II, and making recommendations to U.S. social studies teachers when teaching about the dropping of (...) the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Data was analyzed to identify patterns and themes, and two categories emerged related to our research question. Findings suggest participants support U.S. teachers imparting global perspectives that speak directly to the destructive power of the atomic bomb and its impact on humans and the environment for years to come. This includes a movement away from using the social studies curriculum to point fingers of historic blame in the use of atomic weapons, and towards empowering learners to become agents of change in actualizing a nuclear free and peaceful world. We discuss the implications of this study's findings in social studies and global education. (shrink)

This timely and passionate book is the first to address itself to Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz’s controversial arguments for the limited use of interrogational torture and its legalisation. Argues that the respectability Dershowitz's arguments confer on the view that torture is a legitimate weapon in the war on terror needs urgently to be countered Takes on the advocates of torture on their own utilitarian grounds Timely and passionately written, in an accessible, jargon-free style Forms part of the provocative and (...) timely _Blackwell Public Philosophy_ series. (shrink)

The general consensus among philosophers is that the use of torture is never justified. In Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture, Fritz Allhoff demonstrates the weakness of the case against torture; while allowing that torture constitutes a moral wrong, he nevertheless argues that, in exceptional cases, it represents the lesser of two evils. Allhoff does not take this position lightly. He begins by examining the way terrorism challenges traditional norms, discussing the morality of various practices of torture, and critically exploring the (...) infamous ticking time-bomb scenario. After carefully considering these issues from a purely philosophical perspective, he turns to the empirical ramifications of his arguments, addressing criticisms of torture and analyzing the impact its adoption could have on democracy, institutional structures, and foreign policy. The crucial questions of how to justly authorize torture and how to set limits on its use make up the final section of this timely, provocative, and carefully argued book. (shrink)

This timely and passionate book is the first to address itself to Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz’s controversial arguments for the limited use of interrogational torture and its legalisation. Argues that the respectability Dershowitz's arguments confer on the view that torture is a legitimate weapon in the war on terror needs urgently to be countered Takes on the advocates of torture on their own utilitarian grounds Timely and passionately written, in an accessible, jargon-free style Forms part of the provocative and (...) timely _Blackwell Public Philosophy_ series. (shrink)

The so-called ticking bomb is invoked by philosophers and lawyers trying to justify, on behalf of their political masters, the use of torture in extremis. I show that the scenario is spurious; and that the likely consequences of the use of interrogational torture in such cases are disastrous. Finally, I test the argument against a real case.

Since the late nineteenth century, physics has been puzzled by the time-asymmetry of thermodynamic phenomena in the light of the apparent T-symmetry of the underlying laws of mechanics. However, a compelling solution to this puzzle has proved elusive. In part, I argue, this can be attributed to a failure to distinguish two conceptions of the problem. According to one, the main focus of our attention is a time-asymmetric lawlike generalisation. According to the other, it is a particular fact about the (...) early universe. This paper aims (i) to distinguish these two different conceptions of the time-asymmetric explanandum in thermodynamics; (ii) to argue in favour of the latter; and (iii) to show that whichever we choose, our rational expectations about the thermodynamic behaviour of the future must depend on what we know about the past: contrary to the common view, statistical arguments alone do not give us good reason to expect that entropy will always continue to increase. (shrink)

I argue against the Doctrine of Double Effect’s explanation of the moral difference between terror bombing and strategic bombing. I show that the standard thought-experiment of terror bombing and strategic bombing which dominates this debate is underdetermined with regards to the agents’ psychologies: (a) if Terror Bomber and Strategic Bomber have the same causal beliefs, then why does Terror Bomber set out to kill the children? It may then be this unwarranted and immoral choice and not the Doctrine of Double (...) Effect that explains the moral difference; (b) if the two have different causal beliefs, then we can’t rule out the counterfactual that, had Strategic Bomber had the same beliefs as Terror Bomber, she would have also acted as Terror Bomber did. (shrink)

This article uses the ‘Ticking Bomb Scenario’ as a starting point for a broader discussion of what I term the ‘liberal narrative of speed’, the argument within liberal thought that the accelerating pace of events in the world requires a transition of authority from slow-moving, democratic legislative bodies, to energetic, efficient and unitary executives. However, this article argues that the source of this transfer of power is not because of any structural misfit between democracy and acceleration . Instead, through an (...) investigation of the ontology of speed I argue that speed produces not a functional threat to democratic politics, but an existential one. Acceleration unsettles stable political identities, and produces a time of uncertainty, in which people are wary of engaging in democratic debate and compromise, preferring instead the certainty of unitary executive leadership. In this regards the anti-democratic tendency of acceleration is to be located in the way in which it inculcates a sense of ressentiment against a future that is contingent and uncertainty. (shrink)

This paper covers the home-made bombing used at the 2013 Boston Marathon annual races even though we knew before the trial began that the verdict will have to be 'guilty' because the people of Boston demanded that verdict and received the first lap of the verdict on 8 April 2015. Neither beautiful technical rulings nor breaches of prosecution disclosure rules nor metadata queries nor tampered evidence would have held sway at this trial.

Although standard ethical views categorize intentional torture as morally wrong, the ticking time bomb scenario is frequently offered as a legitimate counter-example that justifies the use of torture. In this scenario, a bomb has been placed in a city by a terrorist, and the only way to defuse the bomb in time is to torture a terrorist in custody for information. TTB scenarios appeal to a utilitarian “greater good” justification, yet critics maintain that the utilitarian structure depends on a questionable (...) set of hidden assumptions. Three experiments were conducted to investigate endorsement of torture when these hidden assumptions were violated. In Experiment 1, results indicated that endorsement varied as a function of the success likelihood of torture and its alternatives. In Experiment 2, people found torture to be more acceptable, less wrong, and more obligatory when the suspect in custody was described as a “terrorist” than when he was described simply as an individual, and when he was described as culpable as opposed to innocent. These results are more consistent with retributive justice than utilitarian “greater good” concerns. The results of Experiment 3 indicated that utilitarian decision profiles were not associated with lower levels of empathic concern but were instead associated with personal distress and the ability to transpose oneself into a fictitious character's experience. Across the three experiments, deontologists were more likely to reject torture than utilitarians. (shrink)

Biotech Time-Bomb is a probing analysis of the orgins, transformations, and prospects of the Western mentality behind genetic engineering and similar strategies for manipulating the basic elements of life. It is the first media ecology critique of the control paradigm now dominant in developed socities, and a clarion call for a cross-cultural dialogue. Beyond demonstrating how the side-effects of new technologies usually turn out to be their main effects, the book also highlights alternative perspectives from other cultures and urges renewed (...) attention to the inexhaustible resourcefulness of life itself. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to demonstrate that the recent anti-Ticking Bomb argument offered by Bufacchi and Arrigo is unsuccessful. To adequately refute the Ticking Bomb strategy, I claim, requires carefully addressing both policy questions and questions involving exceptional conduct.

I make two arguments in this paper. First, I argue briefly that the ticking time bomb case is unrealistic and as such is liable to mislead us badly on the ground. Second, after conceding that the conditions of the ticking time bomb case might someday be realized, I argue that it may in fact be morally permissible to torture a terrorist in this case on the grounds of self-defense. My reason for making this argument is that rejecting torture in even (...) the ticking time bomb case risks discrediting objections to torture in other, more realistic cases. Yet the principle established by the ticking time bomb case is of extremely limited application. Given the extreme improbability that the conditions of this case could ever be realized, public authorities who sanction torturing someone should have to bear a heavy burden of proof that this decision was justified on the grounds of self-defense. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Dershowitz's Argument and the Ticking Bomb Who Tortures? Effectiveness and Time Knowledge and Necessity The Ticking Bomb Scenario: Conclusion.

Consensus among human rights groups and churches in recent years about cluster bombs has culminated in the Convention on Cluster Munitions. While there is apparent agreement that cluster bombs ought to be illegal, no substantive ethical treatment of this issue exists. In statements, references are typically made to the danger cluster munitions pose to civilians; it is alleged that these weapons are inherently immoral, and appeal is given only implicitly or in a cursory fashion to traditional just war reasoning. Taking (...) its cue from Jesuit moral theologian John C. Ford's influential article appearing in 1944 on `The Morality of Obliteration Bombing', and drawing on the more recent work of Oliver O'Donovan on `immoral weapons', this essay offers a critical moral assessment of cluster bombs and their use through attention to the principles of discrimination, proportionality, and the framework of double effect reasoning. (shrink)

Matthew Lavine’s The First Atomic Age is intended as a corrective to what has by now become a familiar story of postwar US nuclear culture. The popular enthusiasm for and fear of all things nuclear, as described in such works as Paul Boyer’s By the Bomb’s Early Light , was not in fact a new development but rather a repeat of a phenomenon that first manifested half a century earlier. Working with newspapers, magazines, trade journals, advertisements, product labels, pulp fiction, (...) poetry, and scientific biography, Lavine unequivocally demonstrates the ubiquity of references to both X-rays and radiation in popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century. This, he argues, constitutes the “First Atomic Age”.Lavine divides the book into three long chapters according to how much the public might reasonably know about radiation and radioactivity. In the first period, the era of discovery, the lack of con .. (shrink)