Resolved: It is moral to kill one innocent person to save the lives of more innocent people.

Because killing an innocent person is unacceptable in a moral society, I negate the resolution. I define morally permissible as "conforming with the standards of morality" and innocent as "one who has committed no wrong." "More innocent" is defined as a quantitative measure (i.e. one person or six people). The term "more" is not used in the function of qualitatively measuring innocence. As the resolution uses the terms "morally permissible", my value is morality, defined as "conformity to the rules of right conduct." This value is achieved by protecting the right to life, a basic human right. Infringing upon another's right to life is inherently immoral. I offer one observation; that one example in which the resolution is proven false is sufficient to warrant a negative vote. To clarify, let us suppose the resolution were "Resolved: That fruits are sweet." By bringing up the example of a lemon, a sour fruit, the resolution is disproved. Recognizing and upholding this as a standard for debate is extremely important because the resolution is a statement of permission; if we say that it is permissible to kill one innocent person to save the lives of more innocent people, we do not know exactly what scenario the resolution presents. Therefore, it must be presupposed that all scenarios are encompassed by the resolution. The resolution must be a statement of universal truth. Pre-empt: My opponent will probably provide a counterexample, claiming that they do not have to prove the resolution true in all instances. They will cite an alternative analogy like "Resolved: That sports are beneficial." They might say that sports are generally good for physical, mental, and community health, and thus the resolution should be affirmed. They might argue that they should not have the burden of proving the merits of sports for every individual, claiming that it is abusive to expect them to uphold such a statement as applicable to disabled or diseased individuals. However, the flaw of such an argument lies in the nature of this resolution; an individual may be presented with the choice of killing one innocent person to save more innocent people but once (if even that) in their entire life. The infrequency of any scenario presented by the resolution in real life means that that individual must be sure that his/her action is moral in all scenarios in order for him/her to act accordingly. Contention 1: Honorable intent does not make killing an innocent person a morally permissible action. The resolution uses the phrase "to save". "Infinitives – such as "to save" are better used to describe "potential, hypothetical, or future events" (Frodesen & Eyring 297)". Therefore, the resolution solely establishes the intent of saving many innocent people. It in no way makes any guarantee that more innocent people actually will be saved. In fact, the only concrete the resolution asks us if it is morally permissible to kill one innocent person with the intent of saving the lives of many innocent people. The affirmative supports the arbitrary abrogation of the natural right to life without complete knowledge of the terminal result of the action. Contention 2: Our duty not to kill outweighs our duty to save A transplant surgeon, whom we shall call Dr. David Eisenbergersteinhoff, has five patients in dire need of new organs. Unfortunately, all five have a very rare blood type. By chance, David notices that he has one healthy patient with that very blood type. Now, he must decide if it is morally permissible to kill that patient to save the lives of the other five. Acting morally, David must allow his other five patients to die. This is because, as Judith Thomson explains, "We must accept that our ‘negative duties', such as the duty to refrain from killing, are more stringent than our ‘positive duties', such as the duty to save lives." In other words, killing one person is worse than not saving ten people. If, in numerical terms, 0 is the state of inaction, the magnitude of the vector extending into negative space is far larger than that extending into positive space. We can further explore this concept of negative versus positive duties. Our duty not to rob banks is weighed more heavily than our duty to capture bank robbers. This is because not-doing an action is inherently an act of passivity; if the individual had not been placed in that scenario, a negative action would have been committed regardless. Returning to the example of David the transplant surgeon, let us suppose that David had not had the one healthy patient with the same blood type as the diseased five. That one healthy patient was always and will always be the patient of Dr. John Smith. The result is that the five sick patients at David's practice will die; it is the status quo. David, by killing the healthy patient to save the other five, acts against the status quo by committing a negative action. No rational person would believe that David should kill the healthy patient, and so the resolution is disproven by the fact that negative duties (not killing) outweigh positive ones (saving).