On Complicity and Compromise

Chiara Lepora trained as a medical practitioner at the Universities of Pavia and Lisbon and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, she has worked with MSF in various capacities across Africa and the Middle East. An interactive tutorial that she wrote underpins the e-learning software used by the World Health Organisation and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees for clinical management of rape in humanitarian emergencies. After a 2008-2010 mid-career Fellowship in Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, Lepora taught Global Health Affairs at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies of the University of Denver for a year before returning to MSF. She currently works with Médecins sans Frontiéres / Doctors Without Borders as Programme Manager responsible for operations across the Middle East.Bob Goodin is political philosopher with appointments in both the Department of Government at the University of Essex and the School of Philosophy at Australian National University. He is founding editor of The Journal of Political Philosophy, coeditor of the British Journal of Political Science and General Editor of the eleven-volume Oxford Handbooks of Political Science. A Fellow of the British Academy, he has given the Dewey Lecture at the University of Chicago Law School, the Edmund Burke Lecture at Trinity College, Dublin, and the Lee Lecture at All Souls College, Oxford. His coauthored book Discretionary Time (CUP 2008) won the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research. He was Senior Research Fellow in Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health during 2009-2010.

On Complicity and Compromise is the product of an innovative collaboration between a philosophical theory (in the person of Robert E. Goodin) and humanitarian practice (represented by Chiara Lepora, a doctor and a programme director for Medecins sans Frontieres). Opening with a dialogue between the two authors in which they talk through the demands and methods of their respective fields, the book then unfolds a meticulous and illuminating analysis of difficult terrain in practical ethics ... This book is essential reading not only for philosophers who will find in it a rich, original and revealing contribution to ethics and political theory, but also for practitioners. Its marriage of theory and practice is path-breaking. Chrisopher Finlay, University of Birmingham Their [the author's] book is a pleasure to read and well worth ones time. Eamon Aloyo, Global Governance

• 1. Introduction: A Messy Moral Landscape ; 2. Compromise as a Template ; 3. Complicity and Its Conceptual Cousins ; 4. Grading Engagement with Wrongdoing: Dimensions of Difference ; 5. Responsibility for Complicity: A Minimum Threshold ; 6. Assessing Complicit Actions: A General Framework ; 7. Organizational Complicity: Rwandan Refugee Camps ; 8. Individual Complicity: The Tortured Patient ; 9. Conclusion: Complicity is as Complicity Does ; Index