Duplicate this page before you start, and write your answers into your own copy.

For three lessons you have asked what makes an action right. Today the question changes shape: not what you should do, but what you owe because of something you happen to know.

🤐 1. Would you tell?

Five cards. In each one you know something that somebody else does not. Decide quickly, and write before anyone speaks.

✍️ Write here, on your own. For each card: do you tell? Yes or no, who you tell, and your reason in a few words.

You know that… Tell? Who, and why
1. Your friend told you, in confidence, that they are thinking of dropping one of their subjects. Their parents ask you how they are getting on.
2. You saw a photo of next week's maths test on a classmate's phone. They have not offered it to you, and you have not looked at it properly.
3. Your neighbour works at a restaurant you both eat at. She mentions that it failed its last hygiene inspection and the owner is keeping quiet about it.
4. You work for a company whose app is designed to be hard to stop using, and you have seen the internal research showing it works on teenagers.
5. You are a scientist. You have worked out how to make a dangerous virus spread far more easily between people. Nobody else knows how.

✍️ Write here, on your own.

  1. At which card did your answer change, and what changed it? If it never changed, say what kept it the same.

  2. Three things could be doing the work: how many people are affected, how bad the harm would be, and how certain you are. Which mattered most to you? Rank the three.

  3. Card 1 is the only one where somebody asked you to keep quiet. Does a promise change what you owe, or only how it feels?

🧬 2. The fifth card is real

H5N1 is a flu virus found mostly in birds. It kills a high proportion of the people who catch it, but it has not spread easily from person to person, and some experts argued it never could.

In 2011 two teams set out to find whether it could. Ron Fouchier at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, and Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Tokyo, each produced a modified H5N1 virus that spread through the air between ferrets, the animal used to model flu in humans. Kawaoka submitted his paper to Nature in August 2011. Fouchier submitted his to Science.

Then the argument started, and it was not about whether the work was true. It was about whether the methods should be printed.

December 2011 The US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity recommends that both papers be published without the details of how the work was done, out of concern that the methods could be misused. The US government accepts the advice, and the two journals hold the papers.
February 2012 The World Health Organization convenes a meeting. Most of those present, many of them flu scientists, say the papers should be published in full.
30 March 2012 The board reverses itself. It votes unanimously for full publication of Kawaoka's paper, and 12 to 6 for Fouchier's.
2 May 2012 Nature publishes Kawaoka's paper.
June 2012 Science publishes Fouchier's paper, after the Dutch government, which had been using export-control law to block it, allows him to submit the revised manuscript.

Robert Roos, "NSABB Reverses Recommendation on H5N1 Studies," CIDRAP News, 30 March 2012.

Ron A. M. Fouchier et al., "Airborne Transmission of Influenza A/H5N1 Virus between Ferrets," Science 336, no. 6088 (2012): 1534–41.

The two sides both had arguments, and neither was silly.