BeIR/webis-touche2020 huggingface dataset:
The loss of funding would destabilise and radicalise Palestine.

Palestine is very dependent on foreign aid, the PNA is dependent on aid for 50% of its budget and per head the Palestinians are the biggest recipients of aid in the world.[1] The loss of funding would therefore destabilise both the Palestinian National Authority and Palestinian society as a whole. 140,000 PNA jobs are dependent upon the income from western funding, and these workers in turn help support more than a third of the Palestinian population.[2] Cutting funding could lead to the collapse of any government system and cause great suffering among the people who would lose their chief source of income has gone. Both these things are likely to radicalise the Palestinian people further and make peace less likely. [1] Levy, Judith, ‘Palestinian economy dangerously dependent on foreign aid’, The Washington Times Communities, 27 May 2011, http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/israel-online/2011/m... [2] “Palestinians ‘face financial crisis’.” BBC News. 21/02/2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4732090.stm
Drugs will undermine the central philosophy of sport

Sport is also about the spectacle for spectators. Sport has become a branch of the entertainment business and the public demands “higher, faster, stronger” from athletes. If drug-use allows world records to be continually broken, and makes American Football players bigger and more exciting to watch, why deny the public what they want, especially if the athletes want to give it to them? The criterion that athletes should only be applying their ‘natural abilities’ runs into trouble. The highly advanced training technologies, health programs, sports drinks, use of such things as caffeine pills, and other energy boosters seem to defeat the notion that athletes are currently applying only their 'natural abilities'. Performance enhancing drugs would not go too far beyond the current circumstances for athletes.
Permitting the use of performace enhancers would have a coercive effect on athletes who would otherwise avoid drug use

There is no such thing as a forced decision. Everyone has complete control over their own body and their own decisions. Everyone has an absolute right to possession of one’s own body. If you own your body then you can choose what to do with it, and any exchange, such as money to an employer in exchange for use of your body (labour) is justified, because it was a voluntary exchange and you still possess yourself.  If you choose to take drugs, you have not been forced into it no matter the peer pressure you may be under or that other having taken the drugs may make you uncompetitive.
Protecting the health of athletes

Sport is dangerous. Today’s athletes decide to endanger their lives by participating in sports all the time. They decide to participate in sports with the informed decision that they might get hurt as it is part of the sport. Performance enhancing drugs are no different. In the USA every year there are nearly 300,000 sports-related traumatic brain injuries (TBIs). Athletes involved in sports such as football, hockey and boxing are at significant risk of TBI due to the high level of contact inherent in these sports. Head injuries are also extremely common in sports such as cycling, baseball, basketball and skateboarding. Many head injuries acquired, playing these sports, lead to permanent brain damage or worse. Yet we do not impose a law to ban athletes from participating in those sports. We trust their assessment of risk (1).   All about Traumatic Brain Injuries: http://www.allabouttbi.com/sports-related-traumatic-brain-injury/, accessed 05/15/2011
Protecting young and vulnerable athletes

The temptation of youth to try illegal substances is not just a problem in sports. In all environments you will have age restrictions. To say that we should uphold the ban for the sake of children is as if we would advocate a ban of alcohol for everyone, because some teenagers like to socialize with adults who are legally able to drink alcohol. There is always going to be an age restriction and it is the duty of institutions, trainers and athletes to uphold it, so that later in life as adults, athletes can make an informed decision.
Athletes should be free to take risks when training and competing

Freedom of choice: If athletes wish to take drugs in search of improved performances, let them do so. They harm nobody but themselves and should be treated as adults, capable of making rational decisions upon the basis of widely-available information. Even if there are adverse health effects in the long-term, this is also true of tobacco, alcohol and boxing, which remain legal. We allow world class athletes to train for 23 hours a week (on average), adjust their diets and endanger themselves by pushing the boundaries of their body. We let them do it, because it is what they chose which is best for them. According to the NFL Player Association the average life expectancy of an NFL player is 58 years of age (1). Thus already we allow athletes to endanger their lives, give them the choice of a lifestyle. Why not also extend this moral precedent to drugs?   Judd Bissiotto, 15 Surprising facts about world athletes, http://strengthplanet.com/other/15-surprising-facts-about-world-class-athletes.htm, accessed 05/18/2011
There is no distinction between "natural" and synthetic methods of performance enhancement

The natural/unnatural distinction is untenable. Already athletes use all sorts of dietary supplements, exercises, equipment, clothing, training regimes, medical treatments, etc. to enhance their performance. There is nothing ‘natural’ about taking vitamin pills, wearing whole-body Lycra suits, having surgery on ligaments, spending every day in a gym pumping weights or running in shoes with spikes on the bottom. Diet, medicine, technology, and even just coaching already give an artificial advantage to those athletes who can afford the best of all these aids. Since there is no clear way to distinguish from legitimate and illegitimate artificial aids to performance, they should all be allowed. So taking these drugs is no more unnatural than what happens today.   A practical example of an unnatural aid is the Speedo worn in 2008 at the Beijing Olympics. FINA, the world governing body of swimming was concerned about the extraordinary statistics in Beijing where swimmers wearing the Speedo LZR Racer swimsuit won 90 per cent of all available medals and broke 23 world records. Since Speedo launched the suit in 2008, 108 world records have fallen (until February 2009) (1).   Simon Hart, Swimwear giant Speedo hit back at 'unfair advantage' claims, 02/19/2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/swimming/4699498/Swimwear-giant-Speedo-hit-back-at-unfair-advantage-claims.html,accessed 15/05/2011
Controlling, rather than ignoring, performance enhancing substances will improve competitive standards in sport

The use of performance enhancing drugs is based on advances in science. When new drugs and therapies are found, athletes turn to them and as a result are much of the time ahead of the anti-doping organizations, which need to develop methods of athlete testing whenever a new drug that is meant to be untraceable is created. In 2008 it was a big shock when Riccardo Ricco (a cyclist) was caught using the performance-enhancing drug Mircera, which had been considered undetectable for a number of years. The fact is that a ban of performance enhancing drugs enables mainly athletes from wealthy countries and teams that can afford the newest technology to go undetected, whilst others are disadvantaged (1). So because it gives an unfair advantage to the wealthy one who can pay for the undetectable drugs, we should legalize it.   Millard Baker, Riccardo Ricco Tests Positive for Undetectable New Drug Mircera at 2008 Tour de France, 07/18/2008, http://steroidreport.com/2008/07/18/riccardo-ricco-and-mircera-pegylated-epo/, accessed 05/20/2011
Improving safety standards in sport

It does not take a lot for chemists to produce performance enhancing drugs, the Scientific American reports: “Rogue scientists start with testosterone or its commercially available analogues and then make minor structural modifications to yield similarly active derivatives.” The underground chemists make no effort to test their creations for effectiveness or safety, of course. Production of a simple new steroid compound would require "lab equipment costing maybe $50,000 to $100,000,". Depending on the number of chemical reactions needed for synthesis, "some of them could be made in a week or two. Others might take six months to a year."(1) As a result of legalizing performance-enhancing drugs a backstreet industry can become regulated as a result there will be much more control and testing to ensure the health and safety of the athletes who take the drugs.    Steven Ashley, Doping by Design, Scientific American 01/12/2004, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=doping-by-design, accessed 05/19/2011
Drugs will undermine the central philosophy of sport

The show and the celebration of human physical achievement is what makes sport enjoyable to the public. The reason people enjoy sport is because it is a demonstration of what other fellow human beings can achieve and what humans can achieve collectively, as a species. A spectacle is designed to amaze. It doesn’t need to be human achievement to be amazing (no one would call monster truck driving a sport). So, when humans start taking drugs to improve performance, it is no longer a sport, it is a spectacle, because there is no human physical achievement, but instead a chemical achievement.   It also becomes a celebration not of human physical achievement, but of human intellectual achievement, of who can design the best drugs. Even with fancy running shoes, we are still celebrating human achievement, which will not happen once you take it to the extreme of allowing drug use. This doesn’t benefit athletes in the long run. Athletes won’t be celebrated but scientists will!
Permitting the use of performace enhancers would have a coercive effect on athletes who would otherwise avoid drug use

Once some people choose to use drugs to enhance their performance, other athletes have their freedom of choice infringed upon: if they want to succeed they have to take drugs too. Athletes are very driven individuals, who would go to great lengths to achieve their goals. The chance of a gold medal in two years’ time may out-weigh the risks of serious health problems for the rest of their life. We should protect athletes from themselves and not allow anyone to take performance-enhancing drugs. An example of the pressure is cycling. The American Scientific magazine explains: “Game theory highlights why it is rational for professional cyclists to dope: the drugs are extremely effective as well as difficult or impossible to detect; the payoffs for success are high; and as more riders use them, a “clean” rider may become so noncompetitive that he or she risks being cut from the team.” (1)   Michael Shermer, The Dopping Dillema, 03/31/2008, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-doping-dilemma accessed 05/15/2011
Protecting the health of athletes

Laws should in general protect people from making uninformed decisions. Due to the potential severe consequences the ban has to be upheld. An analogy with the seatbelt can be used: the government forces people to use them, because of the possibility of severe injury in case we do not use it.    The use of performance-enhancing drugs is the opposite – use can lead to severe health problems.   Thus, if all people are treated as equals under law, then the law should equally protect athletes as the law does other would- be drug users. Equality before law also means athletes can’t be exempt from the moral standards we have for others. Firstly due to value of life and secondly because many times athletes themselves are not aware of the severe consequences of performance enhancing drugs.   BBC Drugs and Sports (GCSE Bitesize):  http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/pe/performance/1_performance_drugsinsport_rev1.shtml , accessed 05/15/2011
Protecting young and vulnerable athletes

Even if performance-enhancing drugs were only legalized for adults, the definition of this varies from country to country, something which would be problematic for sports that are global. Teenage athletes train alongside adult ones and share the same coaches, so many would succumb to the temptation and pressures to use drugs, if these were widely available and effectively endorsed by legalization. Not only are such young athletes unable to make a fully rational, informed choice about drug-taking, the health impacts upon growing bodies would be even worse than for adult users. It would also send a positive message about drug culture in general, making the use of “recreational drugs” with all their accompanying evils more widespread.
Athletes should be free to take risks when training and competing

Simple analogy: If a person were to kill himself for the sake of entertaining the crowd, this act would still be considered illegal by the government and efforts to hinder and discourage it would be created. An appropriate example is the one of dangers of alcohol and tobacco, which were not known until after they had become normalized in society. Once the dangers were known, the public were so used to it, that they wouldn’t condone a ban by the State. If alcohol were introduced tomorrow it would be banned, as shown by the attitude towards narcotics and steroid use has shown. Governments have tried to reduce sales by having high levels of tax on tobacco and alcohol anyway. Moreover many states are restricting choice in tobacco and alcohol by introducing limited bans, such as on smoking in public places. The proposition cannot use the fact that tobacco and alcohol are legal as a defense of the use of drugs. This should be seen as an equally detrimental act and thus illegal.
There is no distinction between "natural" and synthetic methods of performance enhancement

It is true that it is difficult to decide where to draw the line between legitimate and illegitimate performance enhancement. However we should continue to draw a line nonetheless. This line should be drawn at protecting athletes from harmful drugs and preserving the spirit of fair play and unaided competition between human beings in their peak of natural fitness. The special diet and sport training equipment, which may seem very hard and exeptional, have been designed based on serious scientific research proved and tested to fit with long-term training of athletes. Hard practice to achieve the best performance with help of these professional methods is completely a different from taking steroids and growth hormones for immediate result.
When done properly, religious slaughter is as good as any other

Much of the research which suggests that religious slaughter causes pain is flawed. To show that the method is necessarily painful, you would have to watch a trained person with perfect equipment. However, many studies into slaughter have observed religious slaughter done in a way which doesn’t meet the religious requirements, and so doesn’t tell us anything about the real world. For example, one study of shechita done in New Zealand used a knife which was half the length required by Jewish law, making it more likely to tear the wound and cause pain.[1] These are not trivial details – they materially affect the humaneness of the process. As well as this, campaigners often conflate different types of slaughter in ways that are not scientifically accurate. Different animals – horses, cattle, sheep, poultry, rabbits etc. – and even different breeds of animals react differently to both the slaughter and the stunning. Before we can assess the applicability of a study we need to know what kind of animal was being used, the length and sharpness of the knife, the precise location of the cut and other details. The available evidence only shows the unsurprising result that religious slaughter causes pain if done badly, just like any other kind of slaughter. It is sensible to argue for better regulation, but a ban is not supportable. [1] Regenstein, Joe M., ‘Expert Opinion on Considerations When Evaluating All Types of Slaughter: Mechanical, Electrical, Gas and Religious Slaughter’, Cornell University, 23 May 2011, http://www.kosjerslachten.nl/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Preliminary-Report-Regenstein-2305111.pdf
Attacking religious practices makes religious groups uncomfortable

Banning religious slaughter will be perceived by religious people as a direct attack on their faith. Historically, religious minorities have been susceptible to persecution, and these groups tend to remain quite sensitive. Often, people seeking to discriminate against a group will jump on the bandwagon of legitimate criticism and turn it into persecution. Religious slaughter has been used in this way in the recent past: a proposed ban in the Netherlands received much support from anti-Muslim groups.[1] This sort of persecution makes minorities less likely to integrate into society and compare values with us, which is exactly what we would like to encourage. Appearances matter greatly in politics. All too often, the media focuses not on what is actually happening but on how people and politicians are talking about it. When a senior British politician was reported as having called a police officer a “pleb,” the result was outrage over perceived elitism in the government.[2] If a ban on religious slaughter were to be imposed, it is virtually guaranteed that someone or other would make insensitive comments, and this is how the ban would then be reported, as in the example from the Netherlands. This ban would play into the hands of those seeking to stir hysteria and outrage. Whilst the principle may be correct, the government cannot appear to be siding with such people. [1] ‘Dutch MPs effectively ban ritual slaughter of animals’, BBC News, 28 June 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13947163 [2] Robinson, Nick, ‘Andrew Mitchell resigns over police comments row’, BBC News, 20 October 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-19922026
Slaughter without stunning is painful for the animal

The evidence as to the amount of pain an animal feels is by no means clear. Many of the studies showing the animals suffer have been criticized for not carrying out the slaughter in the way prescribed by religious law. Moreover, other studies claim that cutting the throat in this way stops blood flow to the brain so rapidly that it has the same effect as a stun. Despite all the evidence that religious slaughter does cause pain, the opposition to this remains scientifically credible, and so we can’t base a government policy on one or the other.
Animal welfare is a legitimate political aim

Doing something democratically doesn’t make it right or fair. No matter how much you care about animal rights, you have no right to force other people to do the same. The fact that you disagree with them doesn’t make them wrong. We generally accept that the state may control what people do in order to protect society. This proposed ban goes beyond that remit, as religious slaughter of animals does not cause harm to other people. That being the case, it is unjust to stop them.
The rights of humans are more important than the rights of animals

Although we want to protect freedom of religion, it is not as fundamental as other rights. When two rights clash, we have to decide which should take precedence – for example, your freedom of action is limited by my right not to be punched in the face. Further, we will normally resolve clashes so as to first stop physical harm, followed by emotional or other harm. Freedom of religion, though important, comes further down the list. In this case, the more “fundamental” of the rights in play is the right of the animal to be protected from unnecessary pain. It is more closely linked to reducing suffering, which an appropriate goal for society. So in this particular case, we should put the animals first.
Most stunning methods are not reliable

Stunning is only unreliable when done badly. All of the objections listed represent cases where best practice was not being followed. It is important to implement stunning properly, but there are plenty of stunning methods which, when carried out properly and carefully, have been shown to be fully effective. Religious slaughterhouses are not immune to failures either, with the most common reported problem being an insufficiently sharp knife. The same report cited by opposition condemns the religious slaughter of animals and says “when shechita is performed on chickens in Britain, only about half the birds have both their carotid arteries completely severed by the cut” allowing brain activity to continue for up to 349 seconds.[1] Requiring stunning will improve the base line of welfare we are working towards, and we can then start to worry about ensuring compliance [1] Stevenson, Peter, ‘Animal Welfare Problems in UK Slaughterhouses’, Compassion in World Farming Trust, July 2001, http://www.ciwf.org.uk/includes/documents/cm_docs/2008/a/animal_welfare_problems_in_uk_slaughterhouses_2001.pdf, p.19, 21
The problem is not a significant one

The animal welfare movement can tackle whichever problems it wants to. It is absurd for opponents of the movement to try and tell us what our agenda must be, or that we shouldn’t regard this as significant. Moreover, if we kept asking, “why are we spending our time on this,” we would never get anything done at all. It makes sense to pick achievable targets, and a ban on religious slaughter is achievable partly because of the relatively limited nature of the problem. We can exploit the momentum this gives our movement to make further progress on other issues.
Slaughter without stunning is painful for the animal

Slaughter without stunning is painful for the animal. All slaughter methods which do not involve stunning work by bleeding the animal so that it suffers brain-death. This is normally done by cutting the neck. Depending on the species of animal, it can survive for anything between 20 seconds and 2 minutes after this. Although animals can’t tell us if they are in pain, the best metrics we have – brain activity, eye movement and making sounds – indicate that the animals are in pain during this period.[1] Rendering the animal unconscious stops it feeling pain immediately. When we have two methods of killing the animal available, it is inhumane to use the more painful one. It follows that we should require stunning. [1] Federation of Veterinarians of Europe, ‘Slaughter of animals without prior stunning’, FVE Position Paper, FVE/02/104, 2002, http://www.fve.org/news/position_papers/animal_welfare/fve_02_104_slaughter_prior_stunning.pdf
Animal welfare is a legitimate political aim

It is important for animal rights to be represented in political discourse. The animal rights movement has many supporters. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has 3 million members worldwide.[1] In the UK, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) are both in the 15 wealthiest charities.[2] The point of democracy is that people decide collectively how they want their state to run. In one poll in the UK, 45% of people backed a ban on shechita.[3] Democracy requires that we take this seriously, and if the animal rights movement wins the debate then we should implement a ban. [1] ‘Membership Services’, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, accessed 30 May 2013, http://www.peta.org/donate/membership-services/ [2] Rogers, Simon, ‘Britain's top 1,000 charities ranked by donations. Who raises the most money?’, guardian.co.uk, 24 April 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/apr/24/top-1000-charities-donations-britain [3] Rocker, Simon, ‘Forty five per cent of Britons ready to ban Shechita’, TheJC.com, 27 March 2013, http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/103895/forty-five-cent-britons-ready-ban-shechita