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Urban Bioterrorism Attack: You Pick the Living

This scenario is made up of two parts. Bioterrorism

Please write your answer for Part A before you answer Part B and when you comment, please break up your answer into Part A and Part B.

PART A:

You are the head of a public health clinic in the urban core. An hour ago a toxic biological agent was seeded across the city by a low-flying crop-duster airplane.

The bio-agent is fast-acting and severely incapacitates in 90 minutes and kills in three hours. Everyone in the city is infected. Most are already dying in the streets as they choke to breathe in their mission to find help. 

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Living by the Knife: Cutting the Line on Killing

Sog MXV72 Mini X-Ray VisionYou, your spouse, and your young child are walking on an empty street at night.

You turn a corner.

A man stops you and points a gun at your spouse’s head.

His finger is squeezing the trigger.

You have this folding knife in your pocket.

The blade is less than three inches long; with one quick movement you have practiced before, you can pull the knife from your jacket pocket and flick the blade into performance with your thumb and embed it in his throat faster than he can finish pulling the trigger.

If you decide to pull the knife, the only option is to kill the man.

Threats and wounding will only result in the death of your spouse and child.

Do you pull the knife or not?

If yes, why? If not, why not?

Where do you cut the line on killing?

Does it begin and end with a life in the balance?

What if the same person with the gun had instead completely soaked your house in gasoline and was in the process of striking a match to engulf your home in flames?

Is that enough of a threat to health and home to claw the threat into red with that knife in your pocket?

If yes, why? If not, why not?

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Should Hate Speech Be Free?

I have always been of the mind that all speech should be free. One should always feel free to express the worst in us, out loud, in public, where the speech can be tested against community standards and either be excoriated or accepted.
There are two events, recently published in The New York Times, that force me to wonder if there is a reason why some expressions should never be made public.
The first example concerns the murder trial of Ronell Wilson — who allegedly shot two undercover detectives in the back of the head — when he was arrested, handwritten scraps of a Rap song were found in his pocket describing the killings before they happened.

Hate Speech

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Embryo Eugenics: Proactive Natural Selection

As medicine begins to move forward faster than our shared ability to comprehend the implications and dangers of science moderating morality, we are left alone to fend for our private values precisely as they are being publicly challenged by the preferences and prejudices a brave new round of Eugenics embodying the embryo stage of reproduction in a new movement I call “Proactive Natural Selection.”

Brand New World

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The Last Selfless Act

What was the last selfless act you committed and you are still the only one who knows you made something, or someone, better?