If you had an option to receive one billion dollars, but a stranger to you would have to die, would you accept it?

Well, if the stranger would be murdered by a hired hit man of the person offering me the 1 billion dollars, then I would likely decline. Yes, it is a stranger to me, but what if somebody else were offered the money and the random stranger were a family member of mine. I would truly hope that another person would have a equal amount of sense and lack of ignorance to decline this horrendous offer.It is easy to accept such a tempting offer as long as you place a blank spot on the face of a real person.

But what if the generous but heinous rich person offering the money had shown a picture of the innocent person to be murdered (having no idea about his/her impending doom)? What if the person were an established father of four? A sweet, elderly lady?

A young child from another country? Would you still be able to accept? Would anyone?

I would hope not, but of course I know better. There are likely many individuals out there who certainly would take the money and run with it. The list on possible scenarios can go on and on: What if the person were a serial killer, or a person with an incurable tumor, or a person of advanced age with no living relatives?

The point is that it is simply not our time and place to make such a grand decision ourselves over another person’s life, no matter what the circumstances. We cannot take their fate into our own hands, not for a perceived good reason (to spare them suffering, in case they are ill) and especially not for a maliciously selfish reason like supreme personal monetary profit that extends into billions of dollars. Sure, millions of strangers die around us every day and we may not even realize it let alone be touched by the individual deaths of what were once human beings, persons among us making a difference in our world, one by one.

However, unless we attribute a face and personal story to each of these individuals, their individual significance may forever be lost since as an individualistic society we tend to not care about the people around us that have no meaning to us personally. Yet, don’t we all occasionally cry when we see a sad movie of a person losing a loved one? Can’t we somehow all relate to certain aspects of other people’s lives at some point?

We are after all not very different from each other and should realize that we are not invincible or unaffected by negative random events. We often think that tragedies we witness on the news do not and cannot affect us personally. We think that victimization or illness could never happen to us.

Yet, we are just as human as the persons who endured the tragedy and could therefore just as likely suffer a similar occurrence. Therefore, if I decided to take the money in exchange for the death of a random person somewhere in the world, I could not help but wonder, if somewhere there were another person offered a similar amount of money for the death of another random person (who could be a friend, colleague, or family member of mine). No, I would not accept.

Only if the person who would die is something who was very old and sick and actually WANTED to die. And then I would take the money and help give life to someone else, such as a child in need of cancer treatment, or a teenager needing a new kidney or liver. In fact, I wouldn't even keep any of the money.

I would use it to make as many people's lives better as I possibly could.

Honestly, probably. So long as it was a stranger. That is, I understand, incredibly cold, but think about all of the good you could do with a billion dollars.

If you used your billion dollars to save even TWO lives, you would have changed the world for the better. If you used your billion dollars to cure a disease, help those who have suffered from a natural disaster, or worked to prevent gang violence, the one dead could potentially save thousands or even hundreds of thousands. I understand that for that one stranger, and those who love them, it would never feel like a fair trade.

But let's face it: life isn't fair, nature is brutal, and no one is guaranteed tomorrow. That person would become an unwilling casualty for the greater good, but think about how many in this world already have gone down that path: soldiers sacrificed in war, people left for dead so a quarantine could save others, wounded people in mass casualties being left to die so the doctors could work on those more likely to survive, and on and on. Now, would I spend all one billion on society?

Well, no. I probably wouldn't. I would help my family, travel, and be comfortable.

But I would use the bulk of the money for good. I think I could live with that. Maybe that makes me just callous and crazy, but I think I would do it.

Frankly, we are taking lives for our lifestyles as they are now. In the U.S. , we use up a hugely disproportionate amount of the world's resources. We could share our water and save lives, but we don't.

We could stop using so much oil, and people would stop dying in the fight for it, but we don't. We even cost lives when we buy diamonds, which are sometimes mined after the local people have been enslaved or murdered (stopblooddiamonds.org/). We've all killed for much less than a billion dollars.

Sounds like the premise to a film ;-) Its simple - no. Im not going to be responsible for someones death, no amount of money make it ok.

I don't think I could live with the fact that I had taken someone else's life. That stranger would be someone's mother, father, or child. A life is not worth one billion dollars.No, I could not bring myself to accept it.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.