A small group of Tufts students met in Goddard Chapel last night to watch "Grapple in the Chapel" - a debate pitting members of the Tufts Debate Society against members of the Cambridge University Debate Team from Cambridge, England.
The event was organized and sponsored by the Debate Society and presided over by Assistant Director of Student Activities Ed Cabellon.
Two groups of four sat on opposite sides of the chapel and came up one at a time to make their arguments. Each debater had seven minutes to speak, plus a 30 second grace period, should their arguments go over the time limit. Members of the opposing debate team had the option to stand up to make a point, but the speaker is allowed to ask them politely to sit back down and wait until he or she finished speaking.
Debaters encouraged members of the audience to ask them questions or make points of their own for later debate.
Tufts students freshmen Anna Gollub and Nate Grubman, sophomore Corey Miller, and junior John Valentine were split into teams with the Cambridge students and told to debate the topic: "Resolved: This house would choose death!"
Arguments focused primarily around the quality of life versus the sanctity of life, most specifically targeting the principles involved in voluntary euthanasia for terminally ill people.
Gollub and Miller, along with two Cambridge debaters, acted as the proponents for euthanasia. They argued that the right to life also gives the person the right to choose death, and if the person cannot commit suicide by him or herself the person can have the government do it.
"When the harms of suffering outweigh the harms of death, then euthanasia should be used," Gollub said. "Sometimes the benefits of a dignified death are greater than a continued existence."
Gollub brought up a case of a terminally ill man named "Mason," who was constantly suffering but would live for a long time before he would die of natural causes. "Mason" was suffering constantly and, Gollub said, this would be a situation where the harms of suffering would outweigh the harms of death because death would ease this man's suffering.
Miller said that there is also the difficulty of having a government-run system of euthanasia that works efficiently, since a few countries - including the Netherlands - had a system and either repealed it or are debating that it should be stopped completely.
"It is definitely possible to create a system that works much more efficiently [than the ones that failed in other countries] ... Rejecting the plan just because it has yet to succeed is not a good idea because it does not mean that it will never work," Miller said.
The proponent side compared a euthanasia system to the death penalty in the United States. Although no one person can deny that the American system does lead to some innocent people dying, the proponents argued, the death penalty is still constitutional because the right to have fair justice is so important that we accept some people may fall through the cracks.
Grubman and Valentine, along with two Cambridge students, acted as the opponent to the use of euthanasia on terminally ill patients who cannot kill themselves. They said that it should still be up to the terminally ill person to choose when to die. They also said that government-instituted euthanasia for terminally ill patients would lead to many people dying would wanted to stay alive.
The opposing side argued against comparing euthanasia to the death penalty, and the team members asked the proponents and the audience if it was worth killing 100 people who did not want to die in order to protect the right of one person who wanted to die to be able to do it.
After both sides completed their arguments, the audience voted for the proponent side to receive the winner's title.
