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.