ABSTRACT
Ever since the disaster took place there has been a great deal of soul-searching as well as a flood of "blame rhetoric" in newspapers and magazines: charges and countercharges, the Americans blaming the Indians and the Indians blaming the Americans; the company blaming the government and the government blaming the company, groups with vested interests and ideologies blaming other groups with vested interests and ideologies, and so on. The moral problem posed by Bhopal presents a challenge of some urgency because the accident is a typical example of a new kind of catastrophe due to high technology that Charles Perrow calls normal accidents. Perrow's important book on the subject brings up a whole set of issues that need to be addressed by moral philosophers. Let begin inquiry into the concept of moral responsibility by comparing and contrasting normal accidents like Bhopal with two other sorts of disaster: first, humanly initiated calamities, and, second, natural disasters.
