Making Euthanasia Illegal is Selfish

IntroductionThough I have agreed to refrain from rebuttals, there is one technical point that I feel needs to be cleared up. I feel justified in responding to this because it is something used by Pro to frame the debate. Pro makes the following statement:"In order for my opponent to win this debate, he must prove that making euthanasia illegal does in fact acknowledge the needs of EVERYONE. Since selfishness acknowledges only the needs of the self, my opponent must prove that making euthanasia illegal does not ignore the needs and values of others."My objection is that Pro cannot wait until R2 to set what he thinks my burden of proof/line of argument must be. In R1, he established: "Con must prove that the illegalization of euthanasia is not selfish." Though it is certainly the case that a potential line of argument could center around how a ban accounts for everyone's needs, I clearly established in R1 that my line of argument would be that advocating a ban on euthanasia is not inherently "selfish". As I noted in R1:"I will be arguing that, though banning euthanasia may conceivably be selfish, it is not necessarily so for all actors."Consequently, I reject his framing of Con's BOP, and will construct my argument as clearly stated in the first round.Contextuality and Value HeterogeneityIn this debate, we're confronted with a question of whether advocating for a ban on euthanasia can be categorically regarded as selfish; however, whether a case can be affirmed as selfish is entirely contingent on the context in which the case occurs, because the motives, desires, and interests of individuals are not inherently homogeneous. AnCaps and socialists, for example, have vastly different political agendas and values, which means that the kinds of interests each would pursue differ. It is true that individuals often share fundamental interests, such as seeking food, shelter, and a mate, but the case of euthanasia does not appear to fit within the realm of these basics. It is within the realm of what we may call "higher-order value judgments", and can be classified with things like debates over abortion, drug use, and gay marriage. A perhaps oversimplified way of looking at it is to say that the basics can be conceived of as survival values, while the latter can be conceived of as ideological values.Consider, for example, two people: a libertarian and a socialist. Suppose that they happen upon a magic welfare machine equipped with two buttons. One button causes all welfare to cease and never return--the goal of the libertarian. The other button causes welfare to expand, covering the needs of all in a perfectly-organized redistribution of wealth--the goal of the socialist. Clearly, it is selfish of each to pursue his ideological agenda, especially where it is easy enough to maximize personal utility at the push of a button. However, the contexts of each sort of selfishness differ: for the libertarian, ending welfare is selfish, and perpetuating it is unselfish. For the socialist, the opposite is true.Take this analogy, and apply its mechanics to euthanasia. Depending on the agent and his interests, different courses of action could be classified as selfish or unselfish. For a politician getting paid to pass anti-euthanasia legislation against the effects of which he is politically insulated, we can say that pushing a ban on euthanasia is selfish. For a terminally-ill patient who has the de facto option between euthanasia and months of suffering before being taken by the disease, it is clear, assuming that the patient's self-interest lies in euthanasia, that advocating such a ban would be unselfish. If the patient values the emotional condition of his family more than the eradication of his own pain, it may very well be considered "unselfish" by Pro's definition by virtue of taking others' needs and values into account. Similar value analyses may be conducted for each group of individuals (e.g. "patients", "doctors", "family members"), and even for particular individuals within a group (e.g. Karen Ann Quinlan [vegetative state aside], Dr. Gregory House, Julia Quinlan). Recall my earlier point that individual values aren't homogeneous, even within particular social groups, which means doing 1,000,000 calculations for different patients, doctors, and family members could yield a plurality of results. Consequently, it would be naive to claim that all cases of wanting to ban abortion are selfish.ConclusionI think my beginning argument is sufficient to negate, as it clearly demonstrates that, though advocating a ban on euthanasia may conceivably be selfish, things like context, heterogeneity of values, and unaccounted-for agential differences provide a strong basis for arguing that it is not necessarily so.