Video transcript
CT - Coaching secondary debating - 15. Example of first affirmative

[intro music]

ELINOR STEPHENSON: Hi, I'm Ellie, and what I'm going to be doing here is just doing a real demonstrated first affirmative speech to show you what some of the tips that I gave you in the previous video look like in practice. So, while you're watching this, keep an eye out for some of the things that I said to do. See how well I'm doing them, and maybe think about how you might be able to incorporate them into your own first affirmative speeches.

Cool. So, I'm going to be doing my first affirmative speech on the topic 'That we should allow people to opt into experimental medical trials.' So, here it goes. Being terminally ill or struggling with an incurable illness is made far worse by the lack of control and by the lack of hope.

People have to live and suffer with the knowledge of the inevitability of their death, with the knowledge that their suffering will not end, that there is no cure, that there is nothing that they personally can do to challenge the suffering that they're in or to stop that process of decline.

An onsite affirmative, we say if there's a chance to give these people a choice, to give these people a chance to stop suffering, we should take it. That is something that they are principally owed, and it's something that could lead to enormous medical benefit, and that's why we believe that people should be able to opt in to experimental medical trials if they wish.

I'm going to do 3 things in this first affirmative speech. The first thing I'll do is do some setup that explains how we think this system would work. Secondly, I'm going to explain why people can consent to experimental medical trials, and indeed, have a right to make that choice, and the third thing I'm going to do is provide a practical point about how this brings benefits to medical development.

So, firstly, on setup, a few things that I want to note here. The first thing is just to define experimental medical trials. Now, quite obviously, we think that experimental trials are meaningfully different from clinical medical trials, and we think that could be in 2 main ways. The first thing is, we think that this probably occurs at an earlier stage of development.

So, there has been a bit less testing done of these kind of drugs. Maybe there hasn't been a live animal trial. Maybe they're not entirely sure about some aspects of it. So, we admit, there's a little bit more risk involved. But crucially, this is occurring at an earlier stage. The second thing I would note is, we think that probably a lot of the time, these experimental trials are occurring in 2 instances.

The first thing is if something is relatively urgent. So, you're responding to a new epidemic. You're responding to a new illness, and so there's a relatively fast process of development, and then the second circumstance where we think experimental trials would likely take place is with diseases that are very difficult to cure, where it's a bit of a long shot.

There hasn't necessarily been a lot of funding or research going into that disease because it's relatively niche, relatively rare, and there hasn't been that much progress on it. So, that's what we think experimental trials look like. The second thing is just to explain what our model is.

We, obviously, want people to have informed consent, which means that we think the people who would be able to opt in to experimental medical trials would necessarily be adults with sufficient medical capacity to do so, certified by their doctor. This would, of course, be voluntary, and we think that companies would have to abide by the regular set of medical ethics that companies have to abide by when they run trials.

So, they would have to give people a really clear statement of what the medicine does, of its potential risks, and they would have to supervise the way that people take that medicine. Make sure that they are taking it on time and recording side effects. Finally, we would ensure that any side effects or problems that occur are managed by the people who are doing the medical trial.

I hope all of that setup is clear. Now, I'm going to go into why people can consent, and indeed, should have the choice to opt in to these trials, and firstly, I just want to note the importance of this point because this point is, firstly, responsive preemptively to what negative team might say, in that it explains why this is a legitimate choice for people to make.

But it is additionally an active principled benefit because we're telling you not just that this is not coercive, but that this is a moral thing to allow people to choose, that this choice means a lot to people, and we should let them have it. So, why, generally, do we believe that people should have the right to make choices about their body?

Well, firstly, we think that people know and understand their circumstances, in a way which is really important. They uniquely know what it feels like to be them, and that means that they can navigate it and make choices about it, far better than anyone else can, and certainly, far better than the government can, given the government is a huge and, certainly, fairly unfeeling institution.

The second thing to say is that people also know their values, which is to say that they know how much risk that they're OK with. They know what matters to them. For example, they know if they would do anything for a couple more weeks with their family. They know their pain tolerance. All of those things mean that they are best placed to make important and high stakes medical decisions.

The final thing to say, though, is that particularly when people are at the final stages of their lives, these kinds of decisions mean a lot to them. It means a lot to people to know that their legacy is in their control, that they can leave a mark on the world that they will be remembered for because so much else is out of their control because they're suffering with a terrible disease.

And so that's why we think that choice and being able to make choices about your body specifically is a hugely important principle. But note how important that principle is also, specifically, to this topic because the people that we're talking about in this debate are people who very likely are suffering from terrible diseases. They may be going to die imminently, or they may have a fairly long road of extreme suffering ahead.

But in either instance, they have lost control of their body in a really important way, and we think that is those people who care a lot about being able to make choices about their body. This is a way that they can regain control. This is also a way that they can feel that they are at least doing something about the condition that has ruined their life.

If you are someone who is, for example, suffering from late stage multiple sclerosis, the very least that the government ought to be able to give you is the knowledge that, perhaps, you will trial a medicine that helps future sufferers of MS, that helps to accumulate medical knowledge that will make other people's lives better, and I guess an analogy that might help here is just that at the end of people's lives, we give them a huge amount of choice over things like advanced care directives, over things like wills.

Because we believe that even if we personally disagree with their decisions, even if we think their decisions about pain and suffering are wrong, we believe that they should be able to make them because it just makes people's quality of life in those particularly sensitive and particularly important periods of their life so, so much better and so, so much-- it makes them feel emotionally far better about that really difficult time.

The final thing I want to do is just give a few reasons why this is very unlikely to be coercive. Obviously, this is preemptive responsive materials to the negative. The first thing to say is that we would note that given the situation that the majority of people who would opt into this are at the ends of their lives, or are very ill, just for the reason that those are the people with the relevant conditions who would want to take this medicine, and those are the people who would be most likely to accept the risks.

We think that they have pretty limited costs. They're not giving up that much. They probably don't have that much life left over, and they're already in significant pain. But secondly, we would note that we have pretty strong legal mechanisms to ensure that companies are compliant with ethics requirements. Those are already honed on things like clinical trials.

And thirdly, clearly, these people have a lot of support from people like doctors and their families. That means that they cannot be pressured into things they do not want to do. So, that proves that this is a really important choice that people can make. What I'm going to do now is explain why this benefits the medical sphere. Two things here, the first thing we would say is that this results in people-- in far more urgent or quicker medical development.

At the moment, we would say that clinical trials are an incredibly long process. There are heaps and heaps of steps in developing drugs, and that's fine for some medications, where you have just got lots of time to develop. You can sink some money in. But there are instances where it is important to accelerate that process to save lives. That looks like things like developing vaccines that stop literally millions of people from potentially dying.

And so we would say that if you can cut that process short, if you can skip a few steps, and if some people are quite nobly want to give up their health, potentially risk that, to result in quicker medical development, that is a trade off we would make. Because we think getting access to quicker drugs is quite literally something that can save people's lives, can stop people from being disabled by things like long COVID. That is a hugely large benefit in terms of speed.

But the second thing to say is that this increases the volume of medical development really substantially because it reduces the cost, in terms of time and also just expense of the testing process. That means it's easier to test drugs and to get them approved. It's easier to, perhaps, even accidentally discover potential medical benefits of drugs, and that means that more people can get life saving or life improving treatment that they deserve.

The final thing I would note on medical benefits is that this allows us to treat rarer diseases, where otherwise there is not a huge amount of funding or support for testing those drugs because the people who are suffering from those diseases can opt into experimental trials that help to seek solutions.

That is something which doesn't necessarily help that many people. But we think it's hugely morally important because those people deserve drugs that they otherwise would not have the kind of buy in and resources to get access to.

At the end of this speech, you should know that people should be able to make choices about their body at the end of their life when they are suffering, and regardless of that, this brings huge benefits to many, many people who currently are in pain, who are currently ill. I'm so incredibly proud to affirm.