Governments should only test drugs for safety, not effectiveness, before approving them for public

Thanks t CDB for this debate. I will address some of the opening issues and then move into presenting my case. I shall reserve rebuttals for next round.HOUSEKEEPING1. Larz is not unbiased in the sense that he has a vested interest in ensuring the success of Edeb8's entries. The resolution is certainly skewed, and I will be discussing this more with Larz later. However, I am unsure why Con felt the need to address this point, or rather, to not address this point since Con said nothing about the substance of my objection. Ultimately, this was just something I wanted to make clear before the debate began; it is not an argument inside the debate, and so if we wish to discuss this further, it should be in the comments, not the text of the round.2. Conduct may go to Con; however, I will stand by my definition. We need to know what the actor of the resolution is, and therefore it required defining. Con raises no other objections to my definition except to say that it is against the rules, so presumably he finds it an okay definition in itself. Please refer back to my definition of government as the definition of government within the round. Even if you believe it is in violation of the rule, we still need to be able to interpret the topic, which includes a need to understand what the actor is.PRO's CASEThe resolution is questioning what "governments should" do. This raises questions about the legitimate scope of government: is drug effectiveness testing something that should fall under government purview, for example. It is my contention that such testing is not something that a government should do because it is outside of a just governments legitimate scope of authority.To understand a governments boundaries, we first need to lay down the framework in an understanding of human dignity. I will show an important link between autonomy and human dignity that links the concept of freedom to our self-worth. According to G.W.F. Hegel, autonomy separates us from all other things. A table cannot be blamed for a moral failing because it cannot choose to do something wrong. A human, on the other hand, is morally relevant insofar as we have this autonomy. This moral worth grants every person an inherent dignity that should be respected. "At the heart of [human dignity] is a twofold intuition about human beings: namely, that all, just by being human, are of equal dignity and worth, no matter where they are situated in society, and that the primary source of this worth is a power of moral choice within them, a power that consists in the ability to plan a life in accordance with one's own evaluation of ends." [1] From this analysis, we can conclude that it is a human's rational autonomy that gives rise to human dignity. Autonomy is the brightline that separates personhood from other conditions, and that marks out human beings as worthy of moral consideration. "The idea here is that a human being, as a rational agent endowed with self-awareness, free will, and the possibility of formulating a plan of life, has an inherent dignity and cannot properly be treated as a mere thing, or used against his will as an instrument or resource in the way an inanimate object might be. In line with this, Nozick also describes individual human beings as self-owners. The thesis of self-ownership, a notion that goes back in political philosophy at least to John Locke, is just the claim that individuals own themselves--their bodies, talents and abilities, labor, and by extension the fruits or products of their exercise of their talents, abilities and labor." [2]The moral force that is human dignity thus constrains government action and sets limits on what a government should be able to do. It must respect self-ownership, or it has overstepped its bounds. And what are those bounds? "Since the protection of individual rights is the only proper purpose of a government, it is the only proper subject of legislation: all laws must be based on individual rights and aimed at their protection. All laws must be objective (and objectively justifiable): men must know clearly, and in advance of taking an action, what the law forbids them to do (and why), what constitutes a crime and what penalty they will incur if they commit it." [3] Individual rights stemming from self-ownership puts severe limitations on the type of government that can be constructed. "The only sort of state that can be morally justified is what Nozick calls a minimal state or ‘night-watchman’ state, a government which protects individuals, via police and military forces, from force...and administers courts of law, but does nothing else. In particular, such a state cannot regulate what citizens eat, drink, or smoke (since this would interfere with their right to use their self-owned bodies as they see fit), cannot control what they publish or read (since this would interfere with their right to use the property they've acquired with their self-owned labor--e.g. printing presses and paper), cannot administer mandatory social insurance schemes...(since this would interfere with citizens’ rights to use the fruits of their labor as they desire, in that some citizens might decide that they would rather put their money into...private retirement plans), and cannot regulate economic life in general via wage laws and the like.” [2]The connection to the resolution from here on out is very simple. The government cannot interfere in economic life, including the manufacture, sale, and use of drugs. I can prevent direct harm (for example, it can prevent you from unwittingly taking something that will kill you), but it cannot protect your from indirect harm or harm that you choose to bring upon you. The government should therefore test for safety but it should not test for effectiveness, which could hinder a companies' ability to sell products, allows the government to meddle in the pharmaceutical industry (e.g. setting arbitrary levels for what constitutes effectiveness), and interferes with a person's right to spend their money on any product of their choosing--including one that is potentially ineffective. This may go against the grain of accepted logic, but it is a conclusion that stems from a logical premise. As long as companies acknowledge that their products were not tested for their efficacy, only for their safety, there is no need for government to take any further action. And surely, corporations could make money from running drug testing services, thereby giving people the same effectiveness testing without expanding the role of government unduly. Thus, effectiveness testing is not exclusive to the Con world.So, the resolution was fundamentally asking what a government should, and should be empowered, to do. I have demonstrated that it is beyond a government's legitimate authority (as restrained by the thesis of self-ownership) to test for anything but safety. The resolution is affirmed.SOURCES1 - http://tibormachan.rationalreview.com...2 - http://www.iep.utm.edu...3 - http://aynrandlexicon.com...Over to Con...