VP: Sanctity of Life - VC: Social Contract... posted by Josh Nadal
“The right to human life.
This is an absolute, irrevocable, and nonderogable right that should
enjoy the most preferred position in the hierarchy of human rights
values.” These are the words of
Professor Kim, a senior research scholar at Columbia University. It is because I hold this to be true that I
stand firmly…
Resolved:
That the restriction of economic liberty for the sake of the general welfare is
justified in the field of agriculture.
1.
Restriction
“to confine or keep within limits, as of space,
action, choice, or quantity.” – Random House Webster’s College Dictionary
2.
Justify
“1 To prove or show to be just, or conformable to law, right, justice, propriety or duty;” – Noah Webster’s 1812 American Dictionary of the English Language
3.
Agriculture
“the science, art, or practice of cultivating the soil, producing crops, and raising livestock and in varying degrees the preparation and marketing of the resulting products” – Miriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary
Value Premise Definition: According to the American
Heritage Dictionary, “life” is defined as “The physical, mental, and spiritual
experiences that constitute existence.”
Value Premise Justification: Life should be the first
thing we value, for without life nothing else matters. Without life, no other values or rights can
be enjoyed. In short, if you lose your
life, then the most splendid rhetoric in advocacy of some other right is
absolutely meaningless.
Criteria: The criterion that we will
use to uphold life is the social contract.
Criteria Definition: The social contract that
Locke gave us is based on the idea that we give up certain liberties for the
protection of others. I, for example,
give up my right to walk up to a random person and hit them, so that I am
protected from others doing that to me.
Criteria Justification: By using the social
contract, life will be upheld because the social contract does not allow for a
person’s right to life to be violated.
Thesis: The affirmative holds that a restriction of economic liberty is
justified if it upholds the sanctity of life.
So
with this in mind we can understand that the affirmative’s burden in this round
is to show that restricting economic liberty is justified if it upholds the
sanctity of life. If I do this, I win
the round.
Designative Issues
Contentions
Before
we get into anything else, let’s take an overview
of the value of life. There are three
reasons why life should be valued first and foremost. First, life has only
two degrees: alive, and dead. Unlike
the Princess Bride would have you believe, there is no such thing as being
“mostly dead, partly alive!” Since it has
only two degrees then, that means that any encroachment, any sacrifice, of the
value of life is a complete sacrifice of someone’s life.
Second, if your life is lost just
once, that is it, everything is over.
You don’t get many second chances at death. So life is absolute and thus if it is lost just once, it is
irretrievable.
Third, all other values presuppose
that life has been upheld. For if life
has not been upheld, but lost, then no other rights can be enjoyed. Professor Kim, a senior research scholar at
Columbia University said, “The loss of life cancels [out] all other human
rights.” Or you can look at it this
way: if you, the judge, lose your life, then you cannot enjoy your dinner
tonight, Disneyland, or even freedom itself.
Because of this, life must be the first thing that we value.
Now
lets look at a couple of ways this applies
to the field of agriculture. The first is that the United States has
banned or restricted many, many pesticides.
The Environmental Protection Agency said on February 21, 2001, “Before a
company can sell or distribute any pesticide in the United States of America,
EPA must review studies on the pesticide to determine that it will not pose
unreasonable risks to human health . . . EPA sets limits on how much of a pesticide
may be used on food . . . and how much can remain on the food you buy.” A second
application is known as the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point, or
HACCP, pronounced “hassip.” According
to the FDA, a couple of HACCP’s principles are, to “Analyze hazards. . . . The hazard could be biological, such as a
microbe; chemical, such as a toxin; or physical, such as ground glass or metal
fragments.” And to “Identify critical control points. These are points in a food's production—from its raw state
through processing and shipping to consumption by the consumer—at which the
potential hazard can be controlled or eliminated.” Why have these things been done?
To protect life – because the value of life has been deemed more
important than that of economic liberty.
Again, this is right, for human life has much greater value than the
ability to use a certain kind or amount of pesticide, or to use unsafe food
preparation processes.
In
conclusion (exposition), we have
looked at whether or not a restriction of economic liberty is justified for the
sake of life. We saw, first, that while
economic freedom has many degrees, and thus can be partially restricted without
impacting the whole; life has only two degrees, and thus if restricted in any
way is completely sacrificed. Second,
we have seen that while you can have second chances at economic freedom; life,
once gone, is irretrievable. In
addition to all this, we also saw that all values rest on the presupposition
that life has been upheld first. As
such, when it comes to choosing one over the other we must choose life. We see that by restricting these economic
liberties, the United States has rightly upheld this value of life. Life is sacred and we should not throw it
away for mere economic freedoms.