ABSTRACT
Ethics and crisis management covers a number of different areas. Primarily they can be divided into: A) ethical challenges inherent in managing crises (managing risks and value conflicts); B) ethical and unethical behavior by individuals and organizations in crises; and C) accountability processes related to crisis management. Governments have a responsibility to prepare for and respond to crises in a timely, effective, and just way. This is the same fundamental challenge that governments face in any governance situation, but the threat, urgency, and uncertainty of managing these situations are increased. Along with the accentuated scarcity of resources in crises, this makes the management challenges for governments formidable. The stakes of governance, some have argued, are also greater in crises than in normal situations of governance. Several ethical aspects of crisis management have been explored with regard to humanitarian interventions, financial crises, foreign policy crises, and armed conflicts. There are also crises where ethical transgressions are the cause of the crisis and governments need to respond. These ethical crises include political scandals, race riots, and mismanagement of large-scale disaster relief. The way political decision-makers and administrators deal with the abundance of value conflicts that crises present tend to be the basis for the public's judgment of whether a crisis was managed well or not. Often this assessment is done through postcrisis inquiries and commissions that are fodder for much political finger-pointing and efforts to avoid accountability.
