Making Euthanasia Illegal is Selfish

BOPFirst, the warrant he gives for Con's BOP completely ignores the argument I made in R2: my case demonstrates that the quality of selfishness or unselfishness is not an essential quality of banning euthanasia. Consider the difference between essential and nonessential properties. Say we have an apple, and we're asked to make an identity claim about what makes an apple an apple. Some of its essential properties, i.e. its identity properties, include being of the species M. domestica, the pomaceous fruit of the apple tree, and so on. If a thing does not fit into these categories, it is not an apple. One of its nonessential properties, however, is color. An apple can be red, green, yellow, and some other colors I'm forgetting about--what's important is that color isn't essential to something's being an apple.Consequently, we can tie the BOP argument into my offensive case, because Pro's framing of the BOP presupposes that "selfishness" or "unselfishness" is an inherent and essential property of the action, whereas my case is predicated upon placing a challenge to this presupposition. In other words, he frames the debate under the assumption that selfishness is an essential property of banning euthanasia. I'm arguing that it's nonessential to the identity of the action. As this ties directly into my case about contextuality and value heterogeneity, I shall address the relevant arguments below. For convenience, I'll follow my opponent's formatting.RebuttalsRebuttal 1First, I would like to point out that Pro offers a weird, outlandish mathematical definition of "homogeneous" dealing with differential equations. To clear up any possible confusion, I've pulled the definition I'm using from dictionary.com:"of the same kind or nature; essentially alike"Personally, I think Pro understands my argument just fine, but I want neither him nor voters operating on a false definition.Second, I never said that individuals cannot ever have common values. I even provided examples of cases where this is possible, such as in the search for food and shelter. It's also true that some people share the same views on whether euthanasia should be banned; however, this has no bearing on my claim to value heterogeneity, because A) I'm not measuring solely at the level of whether people think it ought to be banned, and B) even on that level, ideological and philosophical heterogeneity is visibly present. Going down to deeper levels, and examining individual motives, interests, value considerations, etc., this heterogeneity becomes even more obvious. Contextual examination of each individual's advocacy can tell vastly different stories, even if they are comrades in a particular ideology or in one side of the debate over euthanasia.In fact, examining the same individual on different levels can also tell different stories. With regard to the potential interests of every person on the planet, one might call the action selfish because the total possible interests of 7 billion other individuals aren't accouned for. In the context of a dying man and his family, we might classify the same action as unselfish because of the man's concern for his family outweighs his desire for the alleviation of his personal pain. Pro offers us no justification for excluding contexts which prove inconvenient to his case, and instead cherry picks a particular way of examining the action which causes the action to appear in a certain way.The context/heterogeneity argument gives you two clear dimensions for negation. On the one hand, differences between individuals--even individuals within the same group--fail to justify Pro's absolutist commitment to proving the advocacy in question to categorically be selfish or unselfish. On the other hand, evaluations of selfishness are inconsistent even when examining the same individual, as different scales of observation appear to yield different results. As noted in my discussion of the BOP, the action could conceivably appear selfish, depending on the method of observation employed; however, it is not necessarily the case that the action is inherently selfish or unselfish. As I pointed out, Pro has to presuppose that selfishness/unselfishness is an essential property of the action to force me to commit to proving the false extreme opposite his own.Rebuttal 2Pro misconstrues my argument here, and resigns himself to toying around with conceptions of "fundamental interest" and "fundamental ideological value". My intent, however, wasn't to talk about normative value structures: it was to highlight value heterogeneity. Pro goes on to talk about the importance of freedom of choice to democratic societies, and basically commits himself to some political argument. I could probably make the argument that some people believe, out of empathy for others or a utilitarian desire to bring about "the greatest good", that exercising power over people's decisions is acceptable, so long as the agent exercising power is doing so for the sake of the interests (or for the sake of the expected maximization of utility) of the individuals over whom power is being exercised.It doesn't really matter whether I make this counterargument, though because his rebuttal here fails to even affirm that pushing for a ban on euthanasia is inherently selfish (or even to prove that selfishness or unselfishness is an essential property of the action in question).Rebuttal 3I never said that ideological values weren't particularly selfish, which means that the alleged tensions between that statement and my claim that selfish motives exist in ideological agendas is nonexistent. Yet again, Pro is guilty of trapping me into false binaries. What I argued is that whether a case can be affirmed as "selfish" is contingent on the context of the case, because of the heterogeneity in motives, values, etc. I discussed earlier.Simply put: Pro wants you to think that I'm saying "Ideological values aren't selfish and they are selfish", which would indeed be contradictory. What I'm actually saying is "Selfishness isn't inherent/essential, but things can conceivably be selfish".Rebuttal 4Mainly, he runs back into the scale problem. Though he's willing to admit the action of the patient to be unselfish with respect to his immediate circumstances, he calls it selfish for failing to account for the interests of the other 7 billion people on the planet (or 300 million, if he prefers to keep the debate isolated to the United States). Just look back to my previous analysis here, which basically points out that he's relying on a single context to make his argument true, while ignoring other contexts, like the immediate surroundings/circumstances of the patient, within which Pro admits his actions would, "in a sense", be unselfish. This is why I make explicit that the action can be conceived of as selfish depending on the scale of observation and upon the particular circumstances of an individual--in total, the context of the action. If he doesn't like the patient example, we can replace it with an authoritarian who thinks that he's protecting the interests (even if he is erring in the way he considers their interests) of his people by banning euthanasia. The hypothetical we use doesn't matter, because any hypothetical will just represent a different dimension of the same argument.ConclusionMore or less, Pro tries to force mutual commitment to two absolutes--either total selfishness, or total unselfishness. However, I've clearly demonstrated several things, including: A) that selfishness/unselfishness isn't an essential property B) that different contexts yield different evaluations of the action, C) the absolutes and binaries to which Pro tries to force us to conform are illegitimate, giving way to a fuzzier logic where the "selfish/unselfish" value of the action in question isn't decided on an "all-or-nothing" basis.In short: Pro can't claim victory by telling one story about the action while ignoring all the rest.