Attempts to answer this question face complications on several fronts.
This is the question faced by all three of Pears's men: Is it better to act, risking dirty and even bloody hands, or better to refuse evil by nonparticipation?
But in a society where no one even agrees on the share of the Shiite majority, or who really wields power, this is the question facing Bahrain and so many other countries: Is it possible to reveal, let alone agree on, the truth?
This is the question facing the growing community of academic and commercial researchers exploring the potential of synthetic biology.
This is the question facing architect Zaha Hadid, whose Al Wakrah is the most famous of the stadiums rising out of the desert for the 2022 World Cup.
Some version of this national question faces everyone in the modern, developed world: it asks how far any nation state can choose and defend its preferred way of life from the impact of globalisation.
As TR Reid writes, "The question facing Americans this fall is: what should be the ethical basis of America's health-care system?" (Reid's new book, The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care, surveys the leading universal health care systems in such countries as Canada, Great Britain, Japan, France and New Zealand and finds lessons for the US).
There is obviously the question facing Scotland.
That's the question facing Peggy.
That, in essence, was the question facing Charles Kao in 1966.
