Reference no: EM132604085

Throughout history, humankind has caused the extinction of numerous ecological systems and species. These extinction events have resulted from both direct and indirect human activities, and the frequency of extinction events is now occurring at an alarming rate. Most extinctions likely were the inadvertent consequence of some anthropogenic impact on the landscape, but some of these may have been predicted.

For centuries, the smallpox virus was one of the worst scourges of humankind. It killed more people over the world than any other infectious disease, particularly in non-immune populations such as Native Americans. The World Health Organization's (WHO) campaign against smallpox, launched in 1967, was highly successful, and resulted in WHO's formal declaration of the eradication of this disease by 1979. The WHO is currently considering destroying the two remaining stocks of smallpox virus, located in two high security laboratories in the USA and Russia.

While there may be compelling reasons to do so, the purposeful eradication of entire biological systems or species from the face of this Earth has never been proposed before and presents an ethical dilemma:

Do we have the right to deliberately and directly cause the extinction of an ecosystem, a community, or a species? If yes, under what circumstances? And, if not, why?