Oregon's Death By Dignity Law.

Still definitions.I maintain that this act legalises physician-led euthanasia, for two reasons. This is because of the nature of the act means that the doctor gives the patient the means to kill themelf. The distinguishment between suicide and euthanasia is irrelevant, though, as the contentions remain the same.The Horror of the 5%As my opponent constructed a case where Matthew wanted to commit suicide, we must look at his life very carefully. What would Matthew rather do? Would he rather be dead, or continue living painlessly, and with full autonomy? It is blatant that he would rather continue living without pain. As the work by Kobler-Ross showed, people can live without pain with ease in our modern society: thus, the law in place is a lazy solution. Instead, we can help Matthew continue living freely and autonomously: what my opponent puts simply is taking an emotional case, and capitalising on it: using matthew as a means to her end of convincing people with rhetoric, not facts. But here are the facts: 5% of people will die. Only 5% of people can be not saved (though my source, who is more respected and unbias states that all can be saved from death) will die, and can die without pain thanks to modern technology, without having to give them the means to die. This means 95% can be saved, but will die, due to the initiation from this law. My opponent is pleading to allow this extreme minority of 5% to die quickler, not less painfully. I am pleading that we allow the 95% to live freely and not die. I could similarly provide an emotional case like Matthew's, but where someone is pronounced terminally ill, yet the doctors were wrong, and the person comes out alive and brilliant. John Matzke was diagnosed with 18 months to live[1]. He could have, and wanted to, die. However, the law was not on his side: euthanasia was not legal. So he tried to fight for his life instead. After the fight, he fought the disease into remission. If he killed himself, then this could never have happened. Assisted suicide would have been this person's worst decision. And this is but one case of the 95%. The death by dignity law is unintelligent, irrational, and cold-hearted.Death with "Dignity" is an unreasonable choice for those 5%Again, I'd like to reaffirm this. We know there is a better solution for those with euthanasia: Kobler-Ross' work shows us that we can give great quality of life, free of pain, to all with terminal illnesses. We also know many recover from terminal illnesses. Finally, we know that people would choose life over death. My opponent did not refer to my thief analogy, so I will refer to it again: a rational, uncoerced man knows stealing is wrong. Similarly, a rational, uncoerced mind knows that life is better than death. Only pain leads us to make irrational decisions - something we all know well - and the fear of living with pain is what troubles us. However, without pain, people have always decided to pick life. Again, referring back to On Death and Dying (by Kobler-Ross): "Those in my care, when free [of pain], accept their time will come, and wait for it, not hasten it."[3] The only reason these people wish to die is the pain, which we can manage. My opponent has given no examples of any cases where the pain is uncontrollable: even the case of Matthew, with skin cancer, has simple and powerful control mechanisms to the pain to make it "minimal"[2], and patients have reported to "forget the pain entirely"[3]. Thus, the death with dignity is unreasonable for 5%, and unreasonable for 95%. However, we must finally state that hard cases make bad laws: the exception or two to the rule will open floodgates. Further, Kantian ethics remains the strongest answer to the Oregon question. We should not make exceptions for this law, simply because of the connotations of making exceptions. We cannot make laws based on exceptional cases. Hard cases make bad laws. I wish to make a very long quotation to explain this idea. I usually just rewrite the statement, but I am low on characters, so... "issue hangs on the "rarity principle." We all see the need for a law against murder. But do we need a law for a bad act that happens at one millionth the rate of murder? Probably not. Legality should offer only a blurry reflection of morality, not its mirror image. Whereas morals delineate complex fractal lines, laws should follow smooth contours free of singularities. As the saying goes, "Hard cases make bad laws." This is not a weakness of the law but a strength: that's how it can be both universal and enforceable. TBS theorists will agree but say: "Look, 1,000,000/1,000,000 = 1, so an action likely to cause one million deaths at one millionth the rate of murder matches the expected harm of murder, and hence merits its own law; ergo, legalize torture. QED." A three-word refutation: Break the law. No one's yet suggested a new speed limit sign: "55 — Unless You're Taking Your Dying Uncle To The Hospital." Speed up if you must, and pay the price later. Tucking exceptions into law is courting the same trouble as overfitting a machine learning classifier, ie, loss of generalizing power and diminished appeal to universality."[4]The feeling of a pinprick...This argument went untouched. Maybe the audience can interpret a response better than I can, but I cannot see a response, so I cannot discuss this myself.ConclusionTo conclude, I shall end with a quotation by Bentham, a Utilitarian, as my opponent ended with Kant. "The question is...can [humans] suffer?" This is the important issue, and Bentham recognised this. Pain, not death, is what is important. Why? Because pain clouds judgement. By removing this pain, we address the problem. Oregon's law does not address the problem, it only ignores it: it hides it under the carpet. The problem is that these people are in pain, and it affects their judgement. We need to solve the problem of these people being in pain. People who aren't in pain don't want t die: it is irrational to kill them with this knowledge. Let us do the right thing, and ease their suffering, not just kill them off. Thank you.1 - http://discovermagazine.com...;2 - http://www.cancercenter.com...3 - On Death and Dying4 - http://www.cs.princeton.edu...