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

Introduction: I’m slightly peeved that my opponent has completely dropped the format of the debate because it makes it difficult to comprehend and respond to in an organized way. Technically he has forfeited the entire debate according to his own rule, which is that dropped arguments are conceded. I’ll just try to go through his mess of a case and find a rebuttal to ever specific argument. O1: Pro barely responds to this point. He concedes that some of the diseases he mentioned have been eradicated and his only objection is that the Ebola drug has only been tested on monkeys, but it was used on a human [1] successfully as a last result. He continues to pretend that these diseases are magical blights that annihilate all life, but we are talking about real diseases. Throughout the debate he continues to assume that these diseases are unstoppable because of a laboratory safety classification. Real pathogens, even the most dangerous, aren’t transmitted so easily and don’t kill all their victims. Even the most dangerous strike so quickly that their host is stricken before it has the opportunity to spread the disease much. All of this was argued and cited in Round Two and disregarded by Pro [2][3][4]. O2: The only rebuttal Pro has is that his method must be more cost effective because mine will fail. This is based on his false assumption that Level Four Biohazards are unstoppable and incurable diseases. He’s just making bare assertions here and has no response to that fact that I argued it was enormously expensive. There is no effective way to burn an area larger than the state of Rhode Island (this is the burn radius Pro recommends in Round Two). O3: Pro cites other US atrocities and notes that such things have been done before. However, eradicating a domestic city would elicit a much stronger response than dropping herbicide on a foreign country. This attack would kill US citizens in numbers orders of magnitude above the death toll of Hiroshima (which was carried out before the implications of WMDs were fully understood). Even if this were somehow carried out, it would be regarded as the greatest crime in the history of humanity. Defense of Proposal: Con has very little to say to my proposal beyond the fact that it arbitrarily wouldn’t work because the diseases are magic and cannot be stopped. Modern methods of disease control do in fact work. He doesn’t actually challenge any of these methods; he just says the disease would escape because it would. Well, if the quarantine were carried out properly it wouldn’t and even if it did efforts to contain it would be made immediately. All of the public health measures I suggested were not responded to. CA1: Multiplication Complex Con just asserts that quarantine doesn’t work. If you surround an area and stop people from leaving by force of arms with a modern mechanized army, that is an effective way to contain them. Physical barriers, helicopter patrols, and heightened security in other area would all help. It is implausible to assume that if a city were quarantined in this manner, people would escape and infect others. Consider also that the diseases are extremely debilitating to their hosts and kill them quickly [5]. Escaping under these conditions would be neigh impossible. CA2: The Black Death Dropped. Because of advances in technology, it is virtually impossible for another outbreak like this. Pro cities the Spanish Flu, but this outbreak occurred in 1918, before the methods I suggested were discovered [6]. Influenza is not even a Level 4 Biohazard, the problem was poor public health measures and not infectiousness [7]. C1: Utilitarianism of Lives Pro can’t really respond to this point because he simply does not grasp the point that if Ebola reaches a city of 100,000 people, not all 100,000 die. The worst case scenario would be about 25,000 deaths, assuming the disease is permitted to spread uninhibitedly. Pro again assumes we’re debating magicitis, which kills everyone who thinks about it, when we are talking about real diseases. Anyway, if even one person survives the disease my method has saved more lives because Pro will kill everyone. He assumes the disease will spread and infect the entire nation, but I’ll extend my arguments from above that when real diseases are countered by real techniques this simply doesn’t happen. C2: Natural Rights Dropped. If we think people have a right to life my position is automatically more moral than Pro’s. It is more utilitarian anyway. C3: Discourse Ethics Pro will have a chance to respond to this argument, so I don’t feel it is unfair to bring in another point, especially because he has dropped many of my others. Since Pro doesn’t want to talk to me about epidemiology at all, arguing based on utilitarianism is no fun anymore. Instead, I’ll point out that his resolution asks us what is morally justified. I will present an argument for a discourse ethic that renders it immoral to take the life of one person. When we debate with someone, we make certain assumptions through the act of argument. One such assumption is that our opponent’s consent in the matter is relevant. Thus, we cannot argue for the use of coercive force without self-contraction, at most we can ask that people do the things we ask for voluntarily. Pro cannot argue that people should be killed without contradicting his implicit assumption that consent is relevant. His entire case is self-contradictory and logically incoherent, so it totally fails as a moral statement. The sentence “A person should be murdered” is incapable of being true by tautology, and Pro calls for the murder of millions. If this argument stands, I have won the debate automatically. I didn’t want to take this approach because I wanted to talk about disease rather than challenge Pro’s teleological approach. However, he hasn’t discussed disease in any relevant way and still doesn’t even understand what biohazard levels mean. Conclusion: Pro’s response was totally vacuous. He simply does not get epidemiology. Real diseases are not as potent as he thinks and there are public health measures. We can eliminate vectors, implement medical technology, control population movement to prevent the dispersion of the disease, and do everything else I recommended last round. Does anyone seriously think that if you take an epidemiology class the first thing you will learn is the most effective way to slaughter people to prevent the spread of disease? Pro doesn’t even understand his own resolution. He says it isn’t about ethics (despite the fact that the resolution says it is) and then that he’s arguing from teleology, which he doesn’t bother to justify. Pro’s whole argument is just an unorganized mess of assertions without no moral arguments or references to real science, which makes it hard to even debate. Sources: http://www.debate.org...