Parli: This House values life over liberty.

1A) Pro attacks my points as if she has not read the rest of my rebuttal before answering. First, she again simply asserts that one must be alive to make any decision. She says, "In order for one to determine what their ultimate value is, they would have to be alive - thus life is the ultimate value. " Simply stating that one must be alive to make decisions does not immediately constitute life being the ultimate value. I show in my arguments in '4. ' in my last post that liberty is necessary in order to be living. Pro even gives evidence toward this in her own case, with Sartre's Paradox of Freedom. She states, "Freedom [liberty] is something we all have and that we can never be free from. " Later in her rebuttal she also says that she would argue that even infants have liberty, which is something I did not say. This shows that Pro agrees that even under her own definition of life, life is not present without liberty, and through her logic of the Paradox of Freedom, where she says freedom is something we can NEVER be free from, this absolute says that Pro thinks we are free even in death. Through this and through my own arguments, I show that liberty supersedes, pervades, and succeeds life. 1B) Pro's own narrow point of view and refusal to answer arguments about religion seems, as she puts it, "lame. " I made this argument simply to consider all possibilities of beliefs about death. I believe religious people would agree that an "afterlife" is still life because they believe they have eternal life. Those who are religious believe that life isn't just "merely life itself" and take a deeper connotation from the word, so I wanted to include it to be considerate of all possibilities because there are people who truly believe there is a heaven and souls, and to them it further proves that liberty supersedes any definition of life. 1C) Pro states that "in order to be free you must exist" to try to prove that death isn't freedom, when in that very same point I prove that death is freedom, as she herself paraphrases it, "death is freedom in the sense that [it] can offer freedom from totalitarian control, a life of oppression, or something else equally devastating. " That is simply an assertion again and is the same thing as saying in order to have liberty you must be alive. Pro then goes on to add to her previous point about how she doesn't believe in souls and an afterlife, which has nothing to do with what I am arguing here, and again she asserts that one must have life to have liberty. The 'do not resuscitate' clause is another good example of the liberties people posses even as they are dying, and the fact that it is THEIR DECISION whether to live or die gives them more liberty even if they would not rather have life, and shows that liberty is more ultimate than life. That liberty not just ought to be, but IS valued more highly than life in this case. Remember) Pro automatically assumes and even says, "If one does not choose suicide, then we must assume that they prefer life. " What Pro fails to consider is that a person in such dire conditions may not possess the means to commit suicide. I never said that if one prefers death that they would commit suicide, nor did I specify in any way the mode by which one in this kind of situation would die. Pro's argument falls. And again as Pro asserts that one must be alive to carry out values, we can look to my argument '4. ' in that I say "we cease to have liberty when our ideas can no longer pervade society, which through technology is becoming increasingly hard to do. " Pro also says that "without being alive, you could not choose death. " This is a quite obvious and irrelevant argument to make. If someone is already dead, either they have already taken the liberty of choosing suicide, or they have died in some other way. Pro's next assertion, "If you do not choose death, you choose life" has already been disproven by my saying that some do not have the means to commit suicide. Whether these means are physical or mental are of no object and I hope Pro will realize that one still possesses liberty under a diminished mental state, especially when they are in a situation of control because oftentimes no attention is paid to mental issues. 2) We are getting into a definition debate here, so that will simply come down to who the voters believe more, if the voting system is at all fair. One in such a philosophical position as Pro's would not be expected to shoot down a philosophical definition of a word to adopt a literal one. Pro concedes that "liberty is a trait paramount to the pursuit of happiness" which by my definition possessing liberty is living and being truly alive. The Jews and the slaves who did not try to escape were existing only in their fear and thus were not exercising their liberty, just as you choose not to exercise your liberty to go into the white house and steal documents. Which brings me to my point about it being patriotic to take your liberties and use them. 3) You do have this liberty, to steal documents from the white house, whether you choose to accept it or not. After you choose to exercise this liberty you may have to deal with the consequences, but it may have brought greater purpose to, perhaps, protecting the white house's documents, which will give greater security to the posterity of our government and America as a whole because the government will be more easily preserved should something bad happen, because those documents would be more protected. For this reason, liberty should be valued over life. Taking liberties, in this example, leads to the preservation of the liberties the government guarantees us as well as our established laws and the status quo. This is a much greater and nobler cause than one person's life. 4) I understand the Pro's explanation here. I am glad that we are debating this point. Pro here calls another form of liberty a contradiction to liberty. The fact that "one must MAKE THE CHOICE of suicide" supports my claim again that liberty is valued over life. When one takes the liberty to choose to end their life, they are putting into practice an ultimate liberty. Basically what I am saying is that taking one's own life is the highest liberty one can take. Therefore in this case liberty is valued over life because in taking this liberty, one no longer has a life, by Pro's definition of life. Here, I would like the Pro to expound upon how infants have liberty. Also, my argument was that we cease to have liberty AFTER our ideas cease, not before they have even started to develop in our brains, so in this way Pro's point about infants' ideas falls. In her assertion, "Right here she concedes that liberty cannot exist without life" the Pro fails to explain herself and I find myself at a loss trying to figure how this proves that I am conceding anything, but the Pro also quotes another part of my argument "Only when we are fully self-aware are we truly living" which in itself refutes the argument she attempts to make by pulling my words out of the full context. And then here again do we come into the competing definitions, which I will leave to my point '2)'. In conclusion, I have already proved in many ways that liberty is of greater value than life, so this point falls. Even so, I answer the second part of it thusly: Because you have liberty before you are living, which the Pro did not try to disprove and even, as I say in '1)' in this round, agrees with me, liberty obviously supersedes life from my definition. In all of these ways I have negated the resolution, and Con wins.