Consider the following scenario: you are a UNICEF aid worker running a vaccination campaign in certain remote villages in the 3rd world. The new vaccine being used protects against the ultra-deadly Ebola virus, of which there is a major outbreak nearby. Children are especially vulnerable to this horrible virus. You and your team enter a small village and offer to provide the vaccine free of charge, explaining (truthfully) that the children of the village will very likely die terrible deaths soon if they don’t get the vaccine. But the village elders and most of the parents don’t believe you; they mistakenly think this “vaccination campaign” is an evil conspiracy and that UNICEF wants to jab their children with needles in order to make them ill. You try to persuade them of your good intentions, but fail. They refuse to let your team vaccinate the children. As it happens, UNICEF has permission from the national government to use threats of force in order to vaccinate the children, and your team includes armed soldiers who, upon your order, will threaten to shoot the parents unless they allow the children to be vaccinated. It has become clear that the parents won’t agree to the vaccinations unless they are threatened in this way. (You won’t actually order the killing, just the threat. You know [somehow] that the threat will be effective.) Do you give the order to the soldiers to make the threat? Or do you respect the parents’ wishes, and leave the children unvaccinated? Explain your answer in detail, along the way making reference to the ideas of Singer or O’Neill.
Consider the following scenario: you are a UNICEF aid worker running a vaccination campaign in certain remote villages in the 3rd world. The new vaccine being used protects against the ultra-deadly Ebola virus, of which there is a major outbreak nearby. Children are especially vulnerable to this horrible virus. You and your team enter a small village and offer to provide the vaccine free of charge, explaining (truthfully) that the children of the village will very likely die terrible deaths soon if they don’t get the vaccine. But the village elders and most of the parents don’t believe you; they mistakenly think this “vaccination campaign” is an evil conspiracy and that UNICEF wants to jab their children with needles in order to make them ill. You try to persuade them of your good intentions, but fail. They refuse to let your team vaccinate the children. As it happens, UNICEF has permission from the national government to use threats of force in order to vaccinate the children, and your team includes armed soldiers who, upon your order, will threaten to shoot the parents unless they allow the children to be vaccinated. It has become clear that the parents won’t agree to the vaccinations unless they are threatened in this way. (You won’t actually order the killing, just the threat. You know [somehow] that the threat will be effective.) Do you give the order to the soldiers to make the threat? Or do you respect the parents’ wishes, and leave the children unvaccinated? Explain your answer in detail, along the way making reference to the ideas of Singer or O’Neill.
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