Ethics for Disaster addresses the moral aspects of hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, plane crashes, Avian Flu pandemics, and other disasters. Naomi Zack explores how these catastrophes illuminate the existing inequalities in society. There is normal life, and disaster interrupts it. What are disasters?A disaster is a destructive event with mass human casualties that overwhelmsnormal ability to respond. Usually, disasters have been short in duration andafter response to them, it is possible for both those directly affected andonlookers, including electronic onlookers, to return to normal life.Not all destructive of disturbing events are disasters. For example, during therecent Global Citizen Concert, tropical storm Ophelia occurred, featuring theFugees. The Great lawn in central park was ruined when 30,000 trampledover sodden earth. There was warning by the Central Park Conservatory butit was ignored. 1 mil $ in damage but loss of use of 12 acre common space formonths to resod it. A loss of a highly valued public space and environmentdestruction, but not a disaster. On the other side, destructive events thatexceed possible response, such as nuclear war, would not be disasters, butcatastrophes.Has disaster always been embedded in normal life as a whole? Until recently,disaster has not been embedded in normal life. It is, for us who live in richcountries, something that happens rarely or else far away.How does disaster differ from risk? We live with risk, as in auto and planaccidents but until climate change and COVID-19, we have not had to livewith disasters. With climate change and COVID-19, our existential conditionhas changed. Accelerating disasters are now embedded in our lives as risks.What roles does the government play in this? Can and should we prepare fordisasters?As a general collective entity with more power than other groups orinstitutions in society, government has the reach and resources to respond todisasters most effectively. It has the authority and power and can get theresources to prepare for disasters. What aspects of disaster go beyond facts, and into the ethics of disaster (whatdoes that mean?) - provide a brief overview of the subject of disaster ethics andthen speak to examples of recent disasters with the benefit of ethical hindsight.Ethics is about preserving human life and wellbeing. Ethics is crucial todisaster b/c human life and wellbeing are at stake, esp the most vulnerableamong us—very young and old, minorities who have less resources, and thepoor. Morgues in the Bronx, e.g., Hispanic Latino Americans and NativeAmericans hardest hit. Elderly people constituted the most casualties. Theimportance of ethics is related to the social construction of disaster. A disaster innature or in the middle of the ocean does not garner broad concern. Phil Jean-Jacques Rousseau introduced this idea, although not by that name, in hisreaction to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. He did not blame God or railagainst nature but blamed the inhabitants who had built 7 stories high andthen rushed into those buildings to greedily retrieve their possessions after theearthquake.E.L. Quarantelli, 20 th c. sociologist took Rousseau’s insights further inanalyzing how the effects of a disaster are part of a disaster. If mental illnessincreases during a disaster or is caused by it, that is part of the disaster. Thesetbacks in K-12 and higher education learning during COVID-19 were partof that disaster.Disasters hit us where they find us but we can prepare for them in twoways—avoid them or mitigate them. Forest fires are an example. More andmore dwellings are on the urban-rural boundary. Avoidance is not to buildthere at all, while mitigation is to construct flame proof dwellings. In coastalareas---avoidance is not build there and mitigation is to build houses on stilts.In both cases, rebuilding in the same places after fires and floods is enabled byinsurance companies who finance it and governments who do not pass morestringent zoning laws.Preparation is a moral obligation based generally on theories of morality,which place a supreme value on human life and wellbeing—utilitarianism orsave the greatest number, deontology or fulfill obligations, and virtue ethics,here the ethics of prudence in preparation and courage in response.During COVID-19>Lack of preparation – no PPE, no research on effect oflockdowns on education, no effective anti-virals. Saved by technology of RNAvaccines that had been researched for decades. Katalin Karikó and DrewWeissman Hungarian-born Dr. Kariko had taken hits to her career for her decades-long research, her life’s work, leading to the vaccine technology. Wonnobel prize in Physiology and Medicine in 2023.This was inadvertent preparation.People do not like to prepare but seem to prefer crisis management ormismanagement. But every dollar in preparation saves 7$ in response andrecovery. The public likes to prepare even less than gov’t officials.Individuals should prepare b/c response teams may not get to them for awhile. First aid kits, chargers, generators, food, water, needed medicines.The lack of preparation results in tragedy in the classic sense described byAristotle—chaos and destruction that results from settled character traits thatare actually vices—imprudence, cowardice, lack of concern for human life.The reluctance to prepare is most starkly evident in the prevailing interest ofpetroleum extractors, refiners and consumers in the face of climate change.Climate change has eroded the line between disaster and risk making disasternormal as part of ordinary life, as risk once was.But always, we want to kick the can down the road, concerning preparationand mitigation. When teenage Swedish activist Greta Thunberg addressed aClimate summit at the UN in 2019, members of the audience were looking toyouth for answers. The ills of climate change will be increasing problems foryoung people. Thunberg’s response to this was famously, “How Dare You!?”and morally she was right on a factual basis. The problems from notaddressing climate change have been inflicted by older generations onyounger ones and it is an insult to ask them for ideas when these problemsshould have been resolved by the older generations. We have left them nochoice, but it is unfair, if not unjust. When will academic philosophers accept disaster as a legitimate subject?Philosophers have flocked to discussion of the ethics of AI and the doomsdayscenarios for that would be more than disasters—catastrophes. They have alsodiscussed the ethics of war and theories of just wars. But normal physicalweather-related disasters have been left to environmental ethics anddiscussions of public policy, as has climate change and pandemics. So in asense, philosophers do consider disaster a legitimate subject from a multi-disciplinary perspective. But it is not a stand alone subject within philosophyand it is not likely to become that short of catastrophes. Of course, by then itmight be too late. Still in the meantime, philosophers such as myself canintervene from time to time, plying the analyses of our trade in ways that canreach out across disciplines.