Why our plan achieves efficiency

We have three points of refutation against the proposition’s argument for efficiency. Government responsibility and Utilitarianism We think the proposition’s idea of government responsibility is rather simplistic. We don’t think the primary definition of a government boils down to “a social construct designed to achieve the biggest possible good/happiness/utility.” This can be an entire new debate, but we think that social contract theorists such as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke agree that the primary government responsibility is to protect the lives of its people—the government is given sovereignty specifically with the purpose of ensuring that the people can live in relative peace, enjoying property rights. The issue of providing happiness and utility is completely different from those basic responsibilities. People did not come up with governments with the expectation that they would provide happiness or even utility. So we don’t think a government is upholding its primary responsibility to fairly protect the lives of its people when it designates, according to random criteria (as we will prove later), who is to live or who is to die. But even if we agree with this rather spurious concept of government, we definitely don’t think that denying alcoholics and ex-alcoholics who may be on their way to recovery but damaged their livers already a second chance is the best way to maximize utility. The proposition makes an unsubstantiated assumption when they say they can save two people instead of one people when we give a liver to a non-alcoholic. In cases of diseases such as hep-b which have a high rate of reinfection, the survival rates post-surgery can be lower than the equivalent for alcoholics, and many alcoholics successfully recover to live healthy lives—we will elaborate on this point further on later, of how in purely counting lives saved the proposition does not win this debate. But finally we also think that utilitarianism is a cruel principle to apply when we make decisions about human lives. We don’t think we should be doing moral calculus adding up years or making prophesies about chances of survival when a dying man is in desperately in need of help—which is why we want to stick with the form of government which truly cares about the needs of its people by giving to those who need it most, based on a waitlist. All lives are equal, and we think we should not be discriminating based on past mistakes, age or any other criteria such situations. Chances of a Successful Transplant/Danger of Relapse The argument that alcoholics are prone to other diseases, and therefore should be denied transplants are fallacious for several reasons. Firstly, just because alcoholics have a heightened chance to get other diseases, it doesn’t mean all alcoholics have all the listed diseases. In many cases alcoholics get successful transplants. Secondly, according to that logic obese people or people with other non-alcohol related complications should all be denied transplants as well, because they have low chances for successful transplants. Obesity, which can be another cause of liver failure (as will be elaborated later on), also causes other complications such as cancer, heart failure, and high blood pressure 1 But thirdly, if we’re looking at purely the chance of survival post-surgery, we should be denying liver transplants to people suffering from other non-alcohol related liver diseases such as chronic HBV infection which very often re-infects the newly transplanted organ.2 The idea that transferring livers to alcoholics shall fail was largely unsubstantiated by the proposition and fails to take into other factors that can contribute to liver disease. The proposition would also have you believe that alcoholics will relapse—please read the source that the proposition kindly provided for us, which says that “Thirty-eight percent of the patients consumed any alcohol after transplantation” We think it’s unfair that the proposition says, based on this evidence, that all alcoholics will probably relapse—the sixty-two percent obviously succeeded in refraining from drinking again, and nowhere does it say that the thirty-eight percent drank to the extent they damaged their new livers again. This is what we actually gather from the BBC: “Mr Forsythe said the chances of a patient returning to dangerous levels of drinking following surgery were low. Around 15-20% of patients do drink following surgery, but only about 2% of these do so at levels which could damage their new liver” 3. So, it’s evidently unfair and outrageous to give up on 98 percent because of the 2 percent, and we are optimistic we can help the 2 percent as well with post-surgery procedures. We would also like to draw your attention to the proposition’s stunning analysis in their final argument: “We consider a significant influence of addiction to alcohol. To deal with it there are certain programs, such as Anonymous Alcoholics, which have proven to be pretty successful ones. So, even if a person has become addicted to alcohol, he could still cure from this addiction and prevent the liver disease from happening.” Precisely that is why we believe that if these people can so successfully cure addiction before they get liver disease, they can also cure addiction after the trauma and shock of a transplant as well. In other words, addiction is curable; it is not a fault that just cannot be undone. Social message Public advertisement campaigns exist for sending social messages—it is not necessary to give up on all the alcoholics just because we want to send out a good message. We also don’t think this will be a strong deterrent, since we don’t think people generally think, “OK, if I ruin the liver I have by becoming an alcoholic, I can just get a new one, so I’ll just go ahead and drink one more get it.” People rarely think about their chances of getting liver transplants before they become alcoholics, so in reality not giving livers to alcoholics does not send a proper message deterring potential alcoholics. 1http://stanfordhospital.org/clinicsmedServices/COE/surgicalServices/generalSurgery/bariatricsurgery/bariatricSurgeryObesityHealthEffects.html 2http://www.cpmc.org/advanced/liver/patients/topics/transplant.html 3http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3064167.stm