Disaster Management: An Ethical Review and Approach

There has been a great deal of research devoted to the general topic of disaster response. Not surprisingly, the bulk of this research has been conducted by researchers in the fields of emergency medicine, emergency response, and public policy. While a great deal of useful clinical and applied knowledge has been obtained from these studies, this paper is focused more narrowly on the ethics of disaster response. We suggest that principles of business ethics are similar in nature to those that should be used in response to the occurrence of disasters and propose a model of ethics that transcends business and professional ethics so that any disaster manager could rely upon these principles to make good, defensible moral judgments in the management of a disaster