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Winning Position: Affirmative Position
To move forward and advance as a society, you must do your part. To do your part, you must be healthy and able to do so. By partaking in activities that voluntarily lower your quality of health, i.e. smoking, taking illicit drugs, etc., you are detrimenting the advancement of society and should be required to pay more in taxes for such behavior. This would require mandatory health check-ups either annually or semi-annually, but the cost can easily be made up by the taxing. Estimated costs yearly from smoking alone average in the $300 billion range; and upwards of $200 billion for obesity-related health issues. We spend less on keeping the unhealthy alive(because either they voluntarily get healthier or pay the tax) and will definitively see more people paying attention to their health, which benefits society as a whole. Yay or nay?
Winning Position: What is life worth?
What is the value of a human life, in your own opinion? Is our life special in a way that makes it superior to other species'? Are all human lives valued equally? If not, when do they begin to differ, and what purpose should one's life being more "valuable" than another's serve?
Winning Position: Each scenario is different.
4
Each scenario is different.
(This is a scenario I came up with that I don't believe I've seen in another form elsewhere; if I'm wrong, please direct me as I'm sure it's more coherent than mine) Let's say you set a glass of water on a table at the top of a flight of stairs in a duplex you're renting with some other college students. It's very close to the edge of the table, but you don't notice. You inform a roommate that lives upstairs that they're running late for work; so naturally, they rush to get ready. Upon reaching the steps, the vibrations from your roommates' hurried stepping causes the glass of water to fall, in turn causing them to slip and fall down the stairs; unfortunately, to their death. This incident, which we'll call A) no intention of leaving the glass by the edge, is labelled an accident. Are you responsible for you roommates' death in this scenario?Now, let's say you intentionally set the glass as close to the edge of the table as you could, with one of two possibilities being your motivation; B) as a misguided prank to make your roommate slip and stumble down the stairs, or C) with the intention of them falling to their deaths.Do either of these intentions change the fact that it was a mere accident, caused by your roommate rushing to get to work? Should either B) or C) be labelled manslaughter, or even murder? I have pondered multiple additions and intentions to this scenario, but for the sake of simplicity I'll leave it with these three for now. Feel free to add your own hypothetical stipulations in your response that I may reply to.
Winning Position: No.
Let's say a man walks up to another, much older man(who is in, at least, his late 70s). The younger man then tells the older man that he will be dead by midnight that night. The older man panics, goes home, and locks all of his doors and fastens all of his windows. As midnight approaches, the elder gradually gets more and more stressed until finally, he has a heart attack and dies precisely at midnight. Is the young man a murderer, and should he be responsible for the elder's death?