It is morally justified to purge, (annihilate) a city with a level 4 infection outbreak.

Introduction: This is a debate that pertains to moral principles. Moral principles dictate how we ought to act in situations regarding the rights and wellbeing of our fellow humans. Practicality may be a consideration in morality, but the task of ethics is not to tell us the most efficient way of doing things. It would be a strange moral position indeed to suggest that it is more moral to dig with a shovel than one’s hands because it is more practical. Thus, for this debate we should favor the course of action that achieves a satisfactory result with the fewest moral problems even it is somewhat more costly or difficult. I believe that my solution will be both more morally acceptable and more practical. I will make a few points about my opponent’s exposition prior to his arguments: O1: The disease Pro references are not as dangerous and incurable as presented. Smallpox, one example, has been almost eradicated by vaccination [1] Researchers at Boston University have developed a drug that completely protects monkeys from Ebola [2]. While these diseases are dangerous, modern medicine allows us to effectively deal with them. Biosafety levels refer to how much caution must be exercised in using something in a laboratory, not to its dangerousness to populations. Pro’s case is also plagiarized in part from Wikipedia [3]. O2: Thermobaric weapons will not work as effectively has he believes. The damage radius of such weapons is about 500 square meters [4]. To purge a 200 km by 200 km area would require around 80,000 of these devices. The cost of these weapons is around $10,000 to $15,000 per unit [5], putting the cost of such an operation at around 800 million dollars (conservatively) plus the cost of operating aircraft. Due to blast overlap and imperfect targeting, it would probably require more bombs than the bare minimum. The total cost of the operation would run into the billions of dollars. The economic value of the people and property destroyed would also be lost. I can propose a much cheaper and more humane solution. O3: Mass slaughter of people would have massive international repercussions. Eradicating an area of this size would kill millions of people. No nation could undertake such an action without massive international repercussions. It is questionable whether the military would even comply with an order to annihilate so many innocent people who are not even wartime enemies. Possible responses to this could include tax boycotts, embargos, cessation of alliances, or even rebellion or foreign invasion. Proposal: The alternative to this option that I propose is quarantine. It is much cheaper to set up a barrier around the area and prevent people from leaving than it is to destroy the entire area. The quarantine barriers would primarily focus on cutting off major areas of transportation, and a no-fly zone could be imposed over the area. The cost of this project cannot conceivably be anywhere near that of the prolonged bombing of a large area. People who wished to leave and passed medical examination would be permitted to leave, so no one needs to unnecessarily die. This method is somewhat fallible, but in cases when people escape there will be only minor outbreaks elsewhere and they can be contained quickly because of the high alert brought on by the quarantine. This method also allows for attempts to treat the disease by physicians and scientists venturing into the area with hazmat suits and other equipment, potentially saving thousands or millions of lives. In the quarantined area, several public health measures would be implemented. These would include administering vaccines and other treatments to people (both infected and uninfected), distributing breathing filters if the disease is transmitted by aerosol, distributing bottled water if the water supply is contaminated, wiping out populations of animals that transmit the disease, keeping people at home through curfews, and educating people about methods of disease prevention. These measures would greatly reduce and potentially stop the spread of the disease even within the infected area. CA1: Multiplication Complex It is well understood how diseases can spread. Quarantine prevents a disease from spreading outside a given area. Thus, only the people in the area could be infected. It is not given that 100% of them will be infected or that 100% of the infected will die. Pro’s method assures that everyone will be killed (if it doesn’t kill everyone, it will not have worked). None of the diseases cited by Pro have the potential to cause a national outbreak in a developed country due to advanced and organized methods of disease control and modern public health measures. All the areas around the quarantine zone would be on high alter and probably would prevent people from entering. Most of the diseases cited by Pro have limited infectiousness because they have short latency periods and kill their hosts very quickly, Ebola being a noted example of this [6]. CA2: The Black Death It is very unlikely that another outbreak like the Black Death could occur. No attempt whatsoever was made at stopping the disease and people in the Middle Ages lived in squalor. Many attempts to combat the disease actually increased its spread [7]. These people did not even understand the germ theory of disease. Modern medicine makes combating these outbreaks much more feasible through methods such as the quarantine I proposed. It is not necessary to kill everyone who may possibly be infected and destroy all property to stop such a disease. Note that since the revolutions in medicine in the beginning of the 20th Century, there have been no such major outbreaks in developed countries. This point was also plagiarized from Wikipedia [8]. C1: Utilitarianism of Lives The method proposed by Pro assures that everyone in the area designated to be purged will be killed. Using the quarantine method, the number of people killed is equal to the population times the infection rate of the disease times the lethality of the disease. If we assume a very dangerous disease like Ebola [9] with both figures at around 50%, Pro’s method will result in four times as many deaths as mine. It is unlikely that people will escape from a quarantined area and outbreaks resulted from escaped people could be contained quickly. My method also allows scientists to attempt to treat the disease, potentially saving even more lives. C2: Natural Rights My position is superior to Pro’s on utilitarian grounds, but if we consider any form of natural rights my solution becomes even stronger. If we believe that people have a right to life, we should not kill them just because they have a dangerous disease. We certainly must not kill people who we only suspect are infected! Pro’s position is totally incompatible with any respect for human rights. He could argue that the situation is too desperate to consider individual rights, but that is clearly not the case when solutions that do not require rights violations are available. I will not detail an extensive natural rights position because as long as we consider not killing people superior to killing them when all else is equal, this point stands. This assumption is difficult to contest when debating morality. Conclusion: Pro suggests an expensive and inefficient plan that requires us to slaughter millions of innocent people and is based on the assumption that our ability to combat disease has not advanced since the Middle Ages. Modern technology allows us to contain disease and fight it using the many advances in public health that have emerged over the last century. We do not need to resort to such a barbaric method of solving public health problems when more advanced and humane methods are available. My method of fighting dangerous outbreaks employs all the knowledge of modern science in a way that is effective and human. Sources: http://tinyurl.com...