Adolescents ought to have the right to make autonomous medical choices.

Going to start by responding to his case before going over my own.Starting on the observations. I meet them all:I meet observation one because I outline specific policy options. My plan outlines exactly how we go about giving adolescents the autonomous medical rights to have intersex changes performed on themselves via their own decision and not the decision of others. I'm showing you that we can.I meet observation two because the plan includes all adolescents. whether or they actually want to have an intersex operation. The plan gives this right to all adolescents.And his third observation is just saying that if I'm winning off of the plan that's sufficient to win via the affirmative burden.Then onto his case. He's arguing for justice over morality that if something is unjust, then it makes it immoral as well. First, prefer morality over justice because our conceptions of what is just and unjust are predicated around what is good and bad. WIthout this internal justification of what's good and bad guiding our conceptions of justice, there'd be no reason why anything was just or anything was injust. Morality must come first for any claim of justice to make sense. Second, prefer morality because because morality provides the internal warrant for why things are just. If I were to ask why something was just or unjust, the answer would rely on violating this or not following this rule of justice is bad, a claim that relies on a moral justification.Third, even if you don't buy those reasons to prefer morality to justice, the claim that what is immoral is unjust equates the two of them to be equal. By his own argument, justice and morality become the same, meaning that the whole value debate becomes irrelevant. Then the rest of his case kind of culminates into the singular argument that people who aren't rational and can't make rational decisions ought not have autonomous rights. Adolescents can't make these rational medical decisions because of brain functionality, therefore we shouldn't give them this right. This makes the negative case pretty simple: if I can show that they can make these decisions, then the negative case goes away and I meet his framework of deserving of rights.So, source spam time. Here's all the studies that show that adolescents can make rational decisions. Sloninat '07[1]: "empirical research on cognitive development and medical decisions supports Piagetian theory that around age fifteen children have the same decision-making capabilities as an adult ... In a well-known 1982 study ... They took a test group of 96 subjects ... The subjects' responses to questions were evaluated and scored by a panel of twenty experts on four standards of competency: evidence of choice, reasonable outcome, rational reasons, and understanding. The results indicated that fourteen-year-olds demonstrated a competency equal to that of eighteen and twenty-oneyear- olds ... the older adolescents ... were able to list a greater number of benefits and risks of the medical treatments and were able to anticipate the consequences of treatment in more abstract manner ... Comparisons of adolescent and adult decision-making with regard to risky behaviors ... have demonstrated that adolescents and adults are equally able to identify possible consequences of risky behavior. In addition, adolescents and adults assess the consequences similarly; they estimate similar probabilities or likelihoods of consequences." And, Will '06[2] continues: "studies suggest that older adolescents are no less ... competent to provide consent than adults. Lois Weithom and Susan Campbell specifically compared the decisionmaking capabilities of variously aged minors and young adults. They found that minors aged fourteen and older "demonstrate a level of competency equivalent to that of adults."' These results support earlier work performed by Jean Piaget which suggested that individuals enter the "formal operational stage" during adolescence, and thereafter "possess the cognitive capability to reason, understand, appreciate, and articulate decisions comparable to young adults." Then, Derrington '09[3]: "Weithorn and Campbell tested specific components of competency, showing that adolescents ≥ 14 years of age did not differ from young adults in their ability to understand diagnostic and treatment information, rationally consider alternatives, and make reasonable choices. Developmental analyses indicate that by age 11 children begin to understand the physiologic basis of disease, and children as young as 8-10 years may be capable of an “adult” understanding of death as universal, unalterable, and permanent. With support from legal cases and professional societies this body of work has resulted in general agreement that we ought to obtain informed consent from adolescents with “appropriate decisional capacity”, usually those ≥ 14 years, and that we should seek the assent of younger children along with informed permission of their parents." Prefer these studies because:a) On sheer number. I have far more evidence showing that adolescents have no difference to adults in their decision making than he has showing that they don't.b) On relevency to the resolution. His evidence just talks about how the brain isn't fully developed until 25 so adolescents don't have a fully developed brain yet but my evidence shows that even with that being true, adolescents still are making rational decisions. My evidence is far more specific to the actual topic at hand, thus has the best chance of being true in the case of this specific debate.c) On substance. Making sweeping generalizations about the brain capacity of adolescents misunderstand the maturity required relevent to decision making. Only by looking at empirical tests of adolescents decision-making capabilities can we come to some sort of accurate conclusion. Steinberg '13[4]: "The importance of maintaining a distinction between cognitive and psychosocial maturity in discussions of the legal status of adolescents is supported by other research that has examined age differences in each of these domains. Studies that have examined basic information processing skills and logical reasoning, for instance, find no appreciable differences between adolescents who are at least 15 and adults; any gains that take place in these domains during adolescence occur very early in the adolescent decade, and improvements after this age are very small ... When it comes to decisions that permit more deliberative, reasoned decision-making, where emotional and social influences on judgment are minimized or can be mitigated, and where there are consultants who can provide objective information about the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action, adolescents are likely to be just as capable of mature decision-making as adults, at least by the time they are 15 or so. In contrast, the literature on age differences in psychosocial characteristics such as impulsivity, sensation-seeking, future orientation, and susceptibility to peer pressure shows continued development well beyond middle adolescence and even into young adulthood ... Consistent with this, and in contrast to the pattern of age differences seen in the information-processing, logical reasoning, and informed consent literatures, studies of age differences in the sorts of risky behavior likely to be influenced by the psychosocial factors listed above—such as reckless driving, binge drinking, crime, and spontaneous unprotected sex—indicate that risky behavior is significantly more common during late adolescence and early adulthood than after ... In other words, adolescents may demonstrate adult-like levels of maturity in some respects by the time they reach 15, but in other respects they show continued immaturity well beyond this point in development. Taken together, these bodies of neurobiological and behavioral research indicate that it is not prudent to make sweeping statements about the relative maturity of adolescents and adults, because the answer to the question of whether adolescents are as mature as adults depends on the aspects of maturity under consideration ... In essence, the skills and abilities necessary to make an informed decision about a medical procedure are likely in place several years before the capacities necessary to regulate one’s behavior under conditions of emotional arousal or coercive pressure from peers." But, even if he's winning that the lack of brain development means that they can't make good decisions, this doesn't matter in terms of giving adolescents the right to make these decisions. We still give the right to make these decisions to adults who make horrible decisions. The justification for why adolescents don't deserve equal treatment isn't there. Baldwin '13[5]: "[A]lthough rights to speech, procreation and the like are justified for adults in terms of their capacity for rational choice, the extension of these rights to minors has never been explained on grounds assuming the same capacity for choice ... the only constitutionally tolerable justification for denying children rights would be that children lack full capacity for individual choice ... This argument relies on children making seemingly immature decisions and adults finding these children lack capacity; however, if adults made the same decisions, they would merely be considered bad decisions and adults would still be viewed as capable." Sources in comments as agreed upon.