Living Organ Donors Should Be Allowed to be Compensated

You said "[my opponent] continues to insist the difference is minor, though I pointed out from his own statistics that a recipient has more than double the survival rate from receiving a live organ than one from a body". Maybe my math is a little rusty but I didn't think a 97.9% survival rate was "...more than double..." that of a 94.5% survival rate. You seem to be confusing a case of half the death rate with double the survival rate. Suppose you have two cubes. Cube A has 1 green side and 5 red sides while cube B has 2 green sides and 4 red sides. While the number of red and green sides add up to 100% of the sides of the cube, saying that cube A has half as many green sides is NOT the same as saying that it therefore has twice as many red sides. I noticed this error in round 3, but figured it was just an honest mistake and let it go. However, my opponent seems to be deliberately misrepresenting statistics to back his argument as he repeatedly brings it up to try and slander the credibility of cadaver transplants. The fact that it is poor conduct aside, I believe that resorting to such petty tactics just demonstrates how weak your argument is better than any opposition ever could. I reaffirm that while 97.9% is the preferable survival rate, 94.5% is still impressive, and if it means people aren't exploited as a result I'd say the 3.2% difference is a small price to pay. My opponent then go on to say that I completely ignored his claim that allowing the poor to sell off their organs is no different to allowing them to sell their labour in high-risk occupations. Apparently he decided to skip the third-last paragraph of my response to the last round. I'll say it again here and if it still doesn't take then we'll just have to hope that third time's a charm in the closing round. 85% of Iranian paid organ donors regretted their decision to sell their kidney. You were the one that brought up the Iranian paid kidney donor scheme as a shining success story; why won't you then acknowledge the fact that around 6 out of 7 Iranians who participated regretted their decision? When we're assessing the effect on donors, one would have thought that the opinion of the actual donors themselves would bear some significance. Fire fighters and policemen etc should absolutely be making more money than they do in my opinion also. However, I'd hardly consider what they do make to be comparable to a one time $1,200 pay off for an organ sale that will negatively impact on you for the rest of your life. Furthermore, far from regretting their choice of occupation, firefighters score second highest on job satisfaction from all jobs in the United States, according to surveys conducted by the National Science Foundation for over 30 years [1]. Extremely poor comparison on your part. One thing I've noticed frequently from my opponent in this debate is building up strawman arguments over and over and then knocking them down with something unrelated rather than actually responding to my points. I just hope anyone reading this debate fairly is picking that up too and considering it when voting. The current example is asserting that I'm arguing that the poor are like problem gamblers in that they are in their situation because of over-indulging in income and then calling it ridiculous and pointing out the obvious fact that lacking money has a negative effect on health. In fact, what I was comparing was the ethical similarity in unfairly tempting people who are unable to exercise sound judgment at a particular time into making a decision they will regret (at least, 85% of the time). I'll spell it out a little further: A client in an institution for recovering gambling addicts is there precisely because they're unable to make sound judgments with respect to gambling. Therefore, placing a poker machine (for the sake of clarity, the odds of making money off a poker machine are deceptively stacked against you) in the lounge of such an institution is unfairly tempting people into making a decision they'll regret. The same is true of offering a bunch of money to people who are desperate for money. It will cause them to make a decision that they will likely regret, at least 85% of the time. That really needs to be emphasized by the way. We aren't talking about a majority of the general public, or a majority of bio-ethicists, though they would probably agree too. We are talking about 6 out of 7 of the very people that my opponent is arguing will be better off actually regretting the decision! As well as that, most of them even think the practice of organ selling should be illegal themselves! Just keep that in mind when my opponent goes on another spiel about how the poor suffer from the inequalities of capitalism and that he's just looking out for their best interest - 6 out of 7 of them would disagree with him, and they should really be the final arbiters here. My opponent then says "To me, there is no worse a moral or ethical abomination than standing in the way of saving lives. If there is a less evil option that will get the job done, then let's do it." Well, in fact I've mentioned three of them which my opponent refutes by deliberately misrepresenting statistics or simply ignoring them, as he did with my point about the NHS waiting lists needing reform. He then goes on to say "I can find no logic nor reasoning at all to the notion that giving a poor person an opportunity to have a better life while at the same time helping an ill person to have a new chance at life is so evil that it is worth letting the sick just die." I have to ask myself, as should any readers, is this actually the case that my opponent really thinks he's arguing against? That he's just looking out for the poor as well as those in need of organ transplants and that the WHO, the Transplantation Society, Organs Watch, as well as every government around the world (apart from one totalitarian regime) and myself are all holding the directly opposite opinion that, as my opponent put it again, "...giving a poor person an opportunity to have a better life while at the same time helping an ill person to have a new chance at life is so evil that it is worth letting the sick just die." ? What a distorted view of reality! His last two paragraphs aren't even worth addressing. There's more of the same emotional appeal and caricaturing of my position, as well as another misrepresentation of statistics to falsely assert that living organ donor recipients have double the survival rate of cadaver organ donor recipients. I approached this debate trying to be civil, but was greeted with lies, deception, and strawman after strawman. My opponent rattles on about how terrible it is that the poor suffer, yet he refuses to acknowledge the implications of the very case study that he himself presented, that the poor will in fact be worse off if what he's suggesting is implemented. He has shown no evidence that would suggest the poor would benefit from his proposal at all, yet he feels justified in making an emotional appeal about their dire situation in the real world, hoping that it will help his argument. Just look at his most recent round again. All he does is emphasize a statistic that doesn't exist, falsely assert that I failed to address his points when we have my rebuttal in print above, and appeal to the readers' sympathy for the poor. I affirm that the facts are on my side, and that my opponent realizes this, devastating as it is to him, and resorts to cheap shots to try and stay in the game. I also want to point out that his repeated claims throughout the debate that it is the donors that have to cover medical expenses is also false. It is the recipient's insurance that covers it [2]. References: [1] http://firechief.com... [2] http://surgery.about.com...