That selling human organs should be legal

Judge: admin    TOP JUDGE
Win awarded to: Blackflag
Reasoning:
Pro copied and pasted arguments. I ignored them. Con was right to say that pro had the BOP. This is what we in my part of the world call a "model" debate, because pro needs to show a model for why something should be done. Only in a judgement debate (where you're discussing the merits of some belief) does the neg sometimes, in quite rare circumstances, have some burden as well.

When pro did make their case, it was shallow and under-analyzed. For example, pro asserted people would die without organs. I wanted pro to talk me through why people might not have their organs and why their deaths are so terrible. Governments need to help their people? Why, and what's the impact of that?

I felt the con response was clever. Con focused on the sale of human organs as opposed to merely the transfer. This really focused both their case overall and their analysis. Con's arguments flowed well and easily met everything pro put forward. I would have liked a little bit more analysis here too - specifically, about why various impacts were bad. What's wrong with giving organs only to the rich, for example? Both sides did accept, however, that helping lots of people was a good thing, so I had con winning on that.

Pro did push the black market point a lot harder though. Both sides conceded there would be more organs available under pro's model. This could have been exploited much more. What kind of a person would be shady enough to trade in illegal organs? What kind of a person would be desperate enough to meet sell their organs illegally, often travelling to other countries to do so? These are the kinds of questions pro should ask themselves.

So the issue was fewer organs to the multitude, or more organs to the few. Based on the weight of analysis in this debate, I felt like having more organs in the hands of a few was a greater harm in itself. Pro didn't capitalize on his opportunities in this topic unfortunately, and failed to give his analysis the depth it required to build the more compelling evidence in the end.

Feedback:
Both sides made good arguments. I think in your heads you guys had the right idea, but not everything came out the way it should have. Specifically, work on explaining the harms and/or benefits of all of your impacts.

Pro shouldn't plagiarize. Con shouldn't forfeit.

CX added nothing to this debate. Neither side really used the CX effectively to ask poignant questions.

For pro specifically, every model debate will be the same. What's the problem, what's the solution, how does the solution fix the problem, and then describe some other benefit of the solution. That's an instant, perfect set up for every model debate that I can assure you works every time. In this debate, your structure was rather confused.

For con, I felt pushing a government alternative as several of your points suggest would have been more legitimate than bringing up the black market. Black market is a super-risky line to run here. You don't even need to make it a counter model. Just much as you have with the black market in this debate, assume that government support for organ donations exists. If pro challenges you on that, it's just a waste of characters since most good judges will recognize that as onus-pushing (and besides you can then argue that governments should do so even if they don't).

As usual, message me any questions or feedback! :)

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4 users rated this judgement as constructive

Judge: whiteflame    TOP JUDGE
Win awarded to: Blackflag
Reasoning:
I disregarded the first round, at the request of both debaters.

The second round solely features not a summary of the arguments from R1, but a series of assertions without much in the way of warrants and no evidence. Many of these arguments could and should have been bolstered, but they lack the basic analysis necessary to make them potent. The most that's done here is on black market organs, and there's a lot of assumptions made here too, especially with regards to its impacts on quality and quantity. These aren't hard to support – the black market doesn't have many licensed doctors, nor are they accountable to any regulatory agency. Those arguments could and should have appeared in this debate, but they remain conspicuously absent.

Con's arguments are far from perfect, though. I can't make heads or tails of Contentions 1 and 3. The first one seems to just advocate for the waiting list existing, and therefore regulation. A legal market would, presumably, be regulated. He says there was a supply problem, but if anything, this seems to support Pro's argument, since the capitalist system is likely to produce more organs from more people. All of the faults of lack of supply in the previous system seem, to me, to be enhanced in status quo. I can see where you're going with the number of donations being reduced, but the total number of organs going down is a bit of a stretch. The third just doesn't make sense to me. It's not pharmacies, or corporations, that would necessarily have control over these organs and their usage. I'm not even really sure how corporations would be involved here beyond private hospitals purchasing organs, which may or may not be problematic.

The most important contention is Contention 2, and which focuses on classism. Pro could have made a number of good responses to this (rich people get bumped up on waiting lists in status quo, for example), but really all I get is that it's a problem already in black markets. But as Con rightly states, having access to the pool of legal organs is inherently better than having access to the best of the black market organs, and as such the rich widen the gap more substantially.

I buy Pro's argument that it also affords the poor a route to getting some extra cash, but this at least makes me question whether there's a classist divide there as well. Con even tells me that there's discrimination occurring here, he just doesn't give me the full explanation that only the poor would be pressured into giving up their organs in order to barely get by.

It seems to me that the classism issue is never conquered by Pro, and without any warranted, obvious benefit to his case, I vote Con.

Feedback:
Both debaters need to spend more time relating their arguments to the topic at hand. Pro obviously should not have plagiarized, and needs to make an effort not to plagiarize from other debates in particular. There are parts of the world in which such a system exists as you guys are discussing, and yet I didn't see any reference to those. Nor did I see any arguments with regards to what a market like this does to the black market beyond a reduction in their business – why wouldn't the black market just utilize the legal system to make more money? Stories of being kidnapped and waking up in a bathtub of ice with a kidney missing may sound unreasonable today, but there's some reason to believe that that situation changes when there's a huge new market for it. Pro never said anything about how this system would be regulated, so this could have been a big point for Con.

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4 users rated this judgement as constructive

Judge: Blackflag
Win awarded to: Blackflag2 users rated this judgement as a vote bomb

Judge: Pinkie    TOP JUDGE
Win awarded to: Blackflag

Judge: bsh1
Win awarded to: Blackflag