Euthanasia Should be Legal in Medical Practice

Thanks to Con for his kind words! This was, indeed, a good debate, and I sincerely hope that Con continues to be an active contributor to DDO, given his exceptional debating skill :) == AFF CASE == A1) Right to Death Con insists that because no legal document advocates a right to death, we do not have a right to death. This ignores the crux of my argument, which is that we have a right to death *by extension* of our right to life. I have shown that having a right to life logically translates to a right to death, so by admitting this existence of the right to life, Con also concedes the existence of the right to death. The only time Con attempts to attack my actual justification for this is when he asserts that life cannot be regarded as property right. Firstly, drawing the analogy to property rights was not the central point of my justification; my main point was that living is a right, and with every right comes the right not to exercise it (i. e. die). And secondly, all Con really says to contest the notion of life being a property right is "life is of utmost importance", and that does not refute the analogy at all-- it simply indicates that life is the most important property right, which I readily accept. A2) Constitutionality Con asserts that any interpretation of the Constitution which supports euthanasia is incorrect, but he never supports this at all. I have shown a viable way for us to justify the right to death from the Constitutional right to life, and Con has not successfully shown my justification to be invalid. And let's not forget that the Constitution can't really be treated as an absolute authority on the matter, anyways, since the resolution is not specific to the United States. A3) Declaration of Independence Con corrects me by saying that the Declaration of Independence has ambiguous legal status; but this, too, is far from the amount of authority it would need to have to be used in the way that Con is using it (i. e. DoI says X, therefore we should accept X). And anyways, it is irrelevant because Con concedes that he got the wordings wrong. There is a significant difference between Con's misquote and the actual wordings of the DoI-- one obligates us to continue living, and the other affords us the right to death via the logic from my constructive. The DoI only specifies the latter. A4) Supreme Court Con shifts the focus of his argument, claiming that he meant to say something about how legalizing euthanasia with the laws already in place against it would be inconvenient. This argument is even less sound than the original! Inconvenience is not a reason for keeping outdated restrictions on rights. .. going through the process of freeing all the slaves after the Civil War was also inconvenient, but that didn't stop us. While keeping euthanasia banned is not as gross of a rights violation, it is the same concept nonetheless. A5) Natural process of Death Con simply dodges this rebuttal and repeats his original argument. My rebuttal still holds. If Con wants to claim that violating the 'natural process of death' is bad (thus making euthanasia bad), then he must also concede that using medicine to extend someone's life and effectively 'cheat death' is also bad, which is completely illogical because literally all of Con's case is based on the supposed sanctity of life. == NEG CASE == Unfortunately, I forgot about this debate for a while, and as of now, I have 3 minutes to finish this debate. Needless to say, that is not nearly enough, and I will have to skip this portion. I would just like to end off by pointing out that Con has yet to refute my reasoning supporting our natural right to death, and he has not shown any substantial harms that come from allowing us to exercise that right. The resolution is affirmed.