Why our plan achieves fairness

We on the opposition are slightly confused about what the proposition means by “merit.” If they mean we should give people organs based on the decisions they’ve made in life (have they played sports, how much vegetables they ate, how much they drank) we think that not only is this completely arbitrary/difficult to measure, but also unfair—we will argue later that we should give according to necessity, that it is just to give to the people who need the most. But let’s examine their merit point anyway. A. Young sports player vs. Old Addict We think this is an incredibly simplistic approach to a complex problem. There are plenty of young alcohol abusers (refer to cited BBC article) who have ravaged their livers at an early age, and old people who are experiencing liver failure simply because they have used their livers for a long time.1 So we don’t agree with the fictional dichotomy that the proposition presents us. But even in this case, we think that if the old addict is closer to death and more diseased than the young sports player, we should give the old addict the liver, because chances are the young sports player can wait for a new liver. We need to give to the people who are most in need, and if both are in equal need, the one who got on the transplant list first. We think it’s ageist and discriminatory to give the liver to the young sporty boy. B. Blame the Alcoholic We are indignant about this argument because we don’t think placing blame is so simple as the proposition would have you believe. Firstly on the point that alcoholics aren’t born with “bad genes” and they are purely to blame. This is just not scientifically true. We the opposition don’t like the term “bad genes” but we do think that scientific evidence shows us that a sizeable number of people are born with strong genetic predispositions to alcoholism. According to the kind researchers at the University of Kent, “Genetic effects from the aldehyde dehydrogenase gene localised on human chromosome 12 have been shown to have a major effect on the development of alcoholism in Far Eastern populations” 2 . Also, some people may have just been born with weak livers, which was damaged with light degrees of alcoholism, which again may be attributable to luck. While the proposition tries to preempt our argument saying that drinking is a personal choice and not the government’s fault, we think that to an extent the government does share a responsibility if it fails to educate children about alcohol properly and leaves children in negligent families to copy the behavior of their parents, namely binge-drinking. And even if it isn’t the government’s fault, again, we think people are sufficiently punished for the choices they made when they suffer (and they do suffer) from liver diseases; the question is whether we will help them overcome the disease rather than let them pay with their lives for these mistakes. We also think the government, with the modern concept of a welfare state, tries its best to help people when they make bad decisions. C. “A Waste of Liver” The proposition frames its case arguing that the alcoholic, who made bad choices, is stealing the liver from the healthy sports player who had bad luck. We showed you in the previous argument that the alcoholic is not always an alcoholic because of bad decisions, but also because of genetic predispositions and bad luck (meeting irresponsible parents, etc). But we also think that other people with liver diseases aren’t complete victims of bad luck either, which makes it difficult for us to call them completely faultless in comparison to alcoholics. Let’s have a look at other causes of liver disease. One, there is obesity, which causes Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease and other forms of Hepatitis. In these cases, of course, the government didn’t force people to live with unhealthy diets either, and the disease was a consequence of bad habits; bad habits that the people knew very well would bring consequences. Two, unprotected sex, use of unclean needles, lack of sanitation and sharing of bodily fluids can all be causes of Hepatitis, according to the NHS 3 . So we don’t think we are necessarily stealing a liver from these people. We make bad decisions in life, all of us do, and sometimes they translate into diseases. No scientific device in the world can measure who is to blame to what extent for his or her disease, since a lot of these bad habits can be mixed and contribute to different extents. There are a constellation of complex reasons associated with liver diseases—bear in mind, also, that scientists can never pin down a single “cause” for liver disease, but use the word “correlation,” because that’s really all it is, a correlation—nobody can prove that alcoholism is what solely and directly caused liver disease, only that there is a correlation between drinking and suffering from liver disease. We think the best idea is to save the person who is on verge of dying, and then look for a liver for the person who has a chance of living a little longer. Thus our model based on need. 1.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/8159813.stm 2.http://kar.kent.ac.uk/16825. 3.http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Hepatitis/Pages/Introduction.aspx