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-The standard is util. My framework defines ought as util – two warrants: |
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-1. The free dictionary defines ought as used to indicate desirability |
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-http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ought |
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-2. Ought implies an ends based calculus. Harris : |
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-But this notion of “ought” is an artificial and needlessly confusing way to think about moral choice. In fact, it seems to be another dismal product of Abrahamic religion—which, strangely enough, now constrains the thinking of even atheists. If this notion of “ought” means anything we can possibly care about, it must translate into a concern about the actual or potential experience of conscious beings (either in this life or in some other). For instance, to say that we ought to treat children with kindness seems identical to saying that everyone will tend to be better off if we do. The person who claims that he does not want to be better off is either wrong about what he does, in fact, want (i.e., he doesn’t know what he’s missing), or he is lying, or he is not making sense. The person who insists that he is committed to treating children with kindness for the reasons that have nothing to do with anyone’s well-being is also not making sense. It is worth noting in this context that the God of Abraham never told us to treat children with kindness, but He did tell us to kill them for talking back to us (Exodus 21:15, Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18–21, Mark 7:9–13, and Matthew 15:4–7). And yet everyone finds this “moral” imperative perfectly insane. Which is to say that no one—not even fundamentalists Christians and orthodox Jews—can so fully ignore the link between morality and human well-being. |
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-Prefer: |
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-1. Turn ground: ends based frameworks give us the best turn ground because you can link and impact turn my offense. Other frameworks like deont make link turns to the contention pointless as simply proving you don’t violate doesn’t meet your burden, while simply proving your opponent violates too just generates permissibility. Saying that I can turn these theories through permissibility misses the point because that just gives me impact turn ground but not true link turns, making them always comparatively less fair than my framework. denying one side link or impact turn ground that ethical theories creates unequal burdens for each side making the debate intrinsically skewed. |
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-2. Weighing ground: Util lets us weigh the probability a scenario, its risk, scope, severity, etc. and we can even weigh between these standards. We can still run side constraints but they are compared to other impacts while other frameworks prevent weighing by making them absolute. Weighing ground is key to fairness because otherwise I lose the ability to win under their standard since if their standard evaluates black and white burdens then I have to win 100 terminal defense on any of their offense before I can even begin to start linking under their standard. |
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-3. Topic lit - most articles are written through the lens of util since they’re crafted for policymakers and the general public to understand who take consequences to be important, not philosophy majors. Topic lit is key to fairness and education because it’s where we get our arguments and determines how we engage in the res. |
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-Also, util is substantively true: |
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-1. Psychological evidence proves we don’t identify with our future selves. Continuous personal identity doesn’t exist. |
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-Alisa Opar (articles editor at Audubon magazine; cites Hal Hershfield, an assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business; and Emily Pronin, a psychologist at Princeton) “Why We Procrastinate” Nautilus January 2014 |
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-“The British philosopher Derek Parfit espoused a severely reductionist view of personal identity in his seminal book, Reasons and Persons: It does not exist, at least not in the way we usually consider it. We humans, Parfit argued, are not a consistent identity moving through time, but a chain of successive selves, each tangentially linked to, and yet distinct from, the previous and subsequent ones. The boy who begins to smoke despite knowing that he may suffer from the habit decades later should not be judged harshly: “This boy does not identify with his future self,” Parfit wrote. “His attitude towards this future self is in some ways like his attitude to other people.” Parfit’s view was controversial even among philosophers. But psychologists are beginning to understand that it may accurately describe our attitudes towards our own decision-making: It turns out that we see our future selves as strangers. Though we will inevitably share their fates, the people we will become in a decade, quarter century, or more, are unknown to us. This impedes our ability to make good choices on their—which of course is our own—behalf. That bright, shiny New Year’s resolution? If you feel perfectly justified in breaking it, it may be because it feels like it was a promise someone else made. “It’s kind of a weird notion,” says Hal Hershfield, an assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “On a psychological and emotional level we really consider that future self as if it’s another person.” Using MRI, Hershfield and colleagues studied brain activity changes when people imagine their future and consider their present. They homed in on two areas of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, which are more active when a subject thinks about themselves himself than when they he thinks of someone else. They found these same areas were more strongly activated when subjects thought of themselves today, than of themselves in the future. Their future self “felt” like somebody else. In fact, their neural activity when they described themselves in a decade was similar to that when they described Matt Damon or Natalie Portman. And subjects whose brain activity changed the most when they spoke about their future selves were the least likely to favor large long-term financial gains over small immediate ones. Emily Pronin, a psychologist at Princeton, has come to similar conclusions in her research. In a 2008 study, Pronin and her team told college students that they were taking part in an experiment on disgust that required drinking a concoction made of ketchup and soy sauce. The more they, their future selves, or other students consumed, they were told, the greater the benefit to science. Students who were told they’d have to down the distasteful quaff that day committed to consuming two tablespoons. But those that were committing their future selves (the following semester) or other students to participate agreed to guzzle an average of half a cup. We think of our future selves, says Pronin, like we think of others: in the third person. The disconnect between our present and time-shifted selves has real implications for how we make decisions. We might choose to procrastinate, and let some other version of our self deal with problems or chores. Or, as in the case of Parfit’s smoking boy, we can focus on that version of our self that derives pleasure, and ignore the one that pays the price. But if procrastination or irresponsibility can derive from a poor connection to your future self, strengthening this connection may prove to be an effective remedy. This is exactly the tactic that some researchers are taking. Anne Wilson, a psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, has manipulated people’s perception of time by presenting participants with timelines scaled to make an upcoming event, such as a paper due date, seem either very close or far off. “Using a longer timeline makes people feel more connected to their future selves,” says Wilson. That, in turn, spurred students to finish their assignment earlier, saving their end-of-semester self the stress of banging it out at the last minute. We think of our future selves, says Pronin, like we think of others: in the third person. Hershfield has taken a more high-tech approach. Inspired by the use of images to spur charitable donations, he and colleagues took subjects into a virtual reality room and asked them to look into a mirror. The subjects saw either their current self, or a digitally aged image of themselves (see the figure, Digital Old Age). When they exited the room, they were asked how they’d spend $1,000. Those exposed to the aged photo said they’d put twice as much into a retirement account as those who saw themselves unaged. This might be important news for parts of the finance industry. Insurance giant Allianz is funding a pilot project in the midwest in which Hershfield’s team will show state employees their aged faces when they make pension allocations. Merrill Edge, the online discount unit of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has taken this approach online, with a service called Face Retirement. Each decade-jumping image is accompanied by startling cost-of-living projections and suggestions to invest in your golden years. Hershfield is currently investigating whether morphed images can help people lose weight. Of course, the way we treat our future self is not necessarily negative: Since we think of our future self as someone else, our own decision making reflects how we treat other people. Where Parfit’s smoking boy endangers the health of his future self with nary a thought, others might act differently. “The thing is, we make sacrifices for people all the time,” says Hershfield. “In relationships, in marriages.” The silver lining of our dissociation from our future self, then, is that it is another reason to practice being good to others. One of them might be you.” |
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-This means util is the only coherent moral theory. |
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-A. Since a there is not continuous persons, distribution of goods among people is irrelevant, so we just maximize benefits among people. |
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-B. It is impossible to violate a constraint since identity is in constant flux. Anything such as a promise a made a year ago is no long my promise, etc. |
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-2. Public policy necessitates tradeoffs—that means util. |
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-Gary Woller BYU Prof., “An Overview by Gary Woller”, A Forum on the Role of Environmental Ethics, June 1997, pg. 10 |
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-“Moreover, virtually all public policies entail some redistribution of economic or political resources, such that one group's gains must come at another group's ex- pense. Consequently, public policies in a democracy must be justified to the public, and especially to those who pay the costs of those policies. Such but justification cannot simply be assumed a priori by invoking some higher-order moral principle. Appeals to a priori moral principles, such as environmental preservation, also often fail to acknowledge that public policies inevitably entail trade-offs among competing values. Thus since policymakers cannot justify inherent value conflicts to the public in any philosophical sense, and since public policies inherently imply winners and losers, the policymakers' duty is to the public interest requires them to demonstrate that the redistributive effects and value trade-offs implied by their polices are somehow to the overall advantage of society. At the same time, deontologically based ethical systems have severe practical limitations as a basis for public policy. At best, Also, a priori moral principles provide only general guidance to ethical dilemmas in public affairs and do not themselves suggest appropriate public policies, and at worst, they create a regimen of regulatory unreasonableness while failing to adequately address the problem or actually making it worse.” |
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-A. Takes out util indicts—governments already use it in the squo, so calc indicts are empirically denied. |
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-B. Any theory based in constraints is useless. Government action inevitably violates some principle, so util is most plausible. |
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-C. Util is comparatively better to any other ethical theory—non-consequentialist theories paralyze government action which is always worse than a risk of not being able to use util. |
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-1-off |
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-Challenges to revenge porn laws indicate that un-hindering free speech would be detrimental for reducing the incidence of revenge porn |
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-Harrison 15 Anne Harrison, Student Writer for The Journal of Gender, Race and Justice, “Revenge Porn: Protected by the Constitution?” University of Iowa: The Journal of Gender, Race and Justice, Volume 18, 2015, https://jgrj.law.uiowa.edu/article/revenge-porn-protected-constitution JW |
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-Legal scholars differ in how to handle revenge porn. Some find that criminalization is not necessary given that victims can already pursue civil suits. Others find that criminalization will serve as a better deterrence than civil action. As advocates push for laws prohibiting the distribution of nude photographs, a legal gray area has emerged based on the dueling freedom of expression contained in the first amendment and the substantive right to privacy. Several states have passed laws criminalizing the nonconsensual posting of nude photographs, including New Jersey penalizing the act as a felony and California making it a misdemeanor to distribute images taken with the understanding that they would remain private. Some of these laws have been challenged on the ground that they unconstitutionally restrict freedom of speech. For example, ACLU filed a federal lawsuit against Arizona’s law, which made it illegal “to intentionally disclose, display, distribute, publish, advertise or offer a photograph, videotape, film or digital recording of another person in a state of nudity or engaged in specific sexual activities if the person knows or should have known that the depicted person has not consented to the disclosure.” Because the anti-revenge-porn criminal statutes at issue are content-based speech restrictions, the State has the burden of showing they meet strict scrutiny. While content-based speech restrictions are presumptively invalid, legal scholars argue that the Supreme Court has held “where matters of purely private significance are at issue, First Amendment protections are less rigorous.” One scholar on the subject posited that such laws are likely to be upheld because the specific nude pictures involved “have nothing to do with public commentary about society.” There is some support for the notion that the laws will be upheld as cyber-stalking laws have not been found to violate the First Amendment. Other scholars believe that anti-revenge porn statutes are criminalizing protected expression. They maintain that the “First Amendment is not a guardian of taste.” In its lawsuit against the state of Arizona, the ACLU argues that the Constitution protects speech even when that speech is offense or emotionally distressing. The ACLU goes on to state that the Arizona law is overbroad in that it applies equally to private photographs and images that are “truly newsworthy, artistic, and historical images.” |
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-First Amendment protections extend to revenge porn |
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-Larkin 14 Paul J. Larkin Jr., Senior Legal Research Fellow, The Heritage Foundation, “Revenge Porn, State Law, and Free Speech,” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, Oct. 1, 2014 JW |
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-The Internet serves as a forum for publication or exchange of ideas, expression, or images. Parties who post images on the Internet will claim an entitlement to the same First Amendment protection that the owner of a bookstore or a movie theater receives.152 They will argue that the government cannot criminalize as legally “obscene” simple depictions of nudity,153 nor can the government prohibit the publication of “indecent” photographs on the Internet.154 State tort law permitting recovery for the online posting of nude photographs raises the same First Amendment issues because an award of damages also can have the same censorious or deterrent effect.155 The result, a defendant will argue, is that revenge porn is constitutionally protected speech despite its offensive character.156 The Free Speech Clause has proved to be a formidable barrier to attempts to use the tort or criminal laws to prevent disclosure of offensive communications, on the Internet or elsewhere.157 A victim or a prosecutor would face a well-fortified barricade. As explained below, however, they can break through that barricade in some instances.158 A. First Amendment Precedent Defendants likely would rely heavily on several Supreme Court rulings that the government cannot hold someone liable for the publication of true information. For example, in Florida Star v. B.J.F., the Court held that the First Amendment protects a newspaper for publishing the name of a rape victim that the paper lawfully acquired from a police report placed in the department’s pressroom.159 In Bartnicki v. Vopper, the Court held that the First Amendment protects the right of a newspaper to publish the transcript of a wiretap in which the newspaper had played no role even though the wiretap itself was illegal.160 Defendants in revenge porn cases would maintain that cases such as Florida Star and Bartnicki disallow a state from imposing civil or criminal liability on the publication of truthful information regardless of the nature or strength of the privacy interest that the state seeks to protect. Defendants also would rely on Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 161 which involved the publication of offensive material depicting the plaintiff as part of a parody. Falwell, a well-known minister and public figure, sued Hustler magazine over a liquor advertisement that parodied him. The ad, which “clearly played on the sexual double entendre of the general subject of ‘first times,’” referred to the first time that Falwell allegedly sampled a particular liquor, but also implied that Falwell had engaged in a drunken incestuous relationship with his mother in an outhouse.162 Falwell sued, claiming that he was the victim of defamation, an invasion of his privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress due to the way in which he was portrayed in the ad. At the end of trial, the district court granted Hustler a directed verdict on Falwell’s privacy claim, and the jury rejected his claim of defamation but returned a verdict in his favor on his emotional distress claim.163 After the district court and court of appeals upheld the verdict on that ground, Hustler sought review in the Supreme Court. As the Court saw it, the case presented “a novel question involving First Amendment limitations upon a State’s authority to protect its citizens from the intentional infliction of emotional distress.”164 The question was “whether a public figure may recover damages for emotional harm caused by the publication of an ad parody offensive to him, and doubtless gross and repugnant in the eyes of most.”165 The Court answered, “No.” |
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-The chance for revenge porn is extraordinarily high given the amount of sexting on campus |
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-Reid 14 Samantha Reid, reporter at USA Today, “Study says 70 of students have sexted, so how do they feel about revenge porn?” USA Today, May 15, 2014, http://college.usatoday.com/2014/05/15/study-says-70-of-students-have-sexted-so-how-do-they-feel-about-revenge-porn/ JW |
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-College students are a key demographic affected by these laws –– according to a study published by the Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, nearly 70 of college students admit to having sent or received sexually suggestive text messages. Apps like Snapchat, make it easier than ever for students to share nude or partially nude images. While students are willing to admit to sexting in anonymous studies, very few are willing to speak on the topic openly for fear of embarrassment or hurting potential career prospects –– the same results as when photos are leaked. “Revenge porn is not talked about openly,” says Nickie Hackenbrack, a senior at University of Tennessee. “Because of the anonymity of the Internet and students’ trust of those around us we have the impression that it could never happen to us.” Several schools have held events this past semester to attempt to bolster student awareness. Dowling College in Oakdale, N.Y., Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colo. and Beloit College in Beloit, Wis. all held events that focused on revenge porn. Hackenbrack is part of “Sexual Empowerment and Awareness at Tennessee,” better known on campus as SEAT. The group puts on “Sex Week” at UT, and the organizers hope to focus on revenge porn at this year’s event. “We hope the event brings to light the pervasiveness of technology, even when it comes to sexuality,” Hackenbrack says. “To address this issue head on, we hope to put together a panel from legal and ethical perspectives to talk about the current state of revenge porn legislation.” Events like “Sex Week” strive to open up a greater dialogue about intimacy and respect among college students. Sending nude photos is a pervasive practice, but conversation about it is often taboo. “For college students this is part of contemporary sexual expression and relationships,” says Danielle Citron, a law professor at University of Maryland who specializes in cybercrime. “We want to encourage private sexual expression… but there’s got to be a sense of confidentiality.” Julie Bogen, a senior at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., agrees that sexual expression is hindered without laws in place to protect individual privacy. “The existence of revenge porn creates a twisted paranoia surrounding experimentation and trusting your partner,” Bogen says. “Who would trust anyone or try anything new… when if the relationship ends poorly, their private moments could end up as public domain?” Without laws that pertain specifically to this type of crime, victims are left with few options for recourse when that privacy is violated–– civil suits are one route, but for the young people that this issue most commonly affects that too can be problematic. |
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-Revenge porn is the manifestation of a violent patriarchy |
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-Dermody 14 Meagan Dermody, Managing Editor at CT, “Jennifer Lawrence, privacy and the patriarchy,” The independent student press at Virginia Commonwealth University, September 7, 2014, http://www.commonwealthtimes.org/2014/09/07/jennifer-lawrence-privacy-and-the-patriarchy/ JW |
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-The leak falls somewhere between degradation and physical violence; though the violation those involved have experienced was not physical in nature, losing control over sexual images can mean losing control of a piece of your personhood. Woman becomes passive body, cut to discrete and consumable pieces without consent — the photo no longer represents a person sharing an intimate part of a complex and valuable self, but an object to be fantasized about, criticized, and consumed. It doesn’t stop there. Users of the website 4chan attempted to manipulate female users into sharing nude photographs of themselves — in solidarity, they claimed. By painting it as a movement for solidarity, they belied (however ineffectively) their true intentions. The attempt to access sexually explicit images of other women is in fact a manifestation of the will to objectify, an act of patriarchal punishment with a beguiling false attitude. It follows that the leak of these photographs and the demand for more represent a greater initiative to consume the female body as passive sex object — a large-scale manifestation of patriarchal violence, meant to reify women on a grand scale and degrade their consent by stripping them of their control over their image and intimate selves. |
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-2-off |
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-International law banned hate speech |
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-Matsuda 89 Mari J. Matsuda (Associate Professor of Law, University of Hawaii, the William S. Richardson School of Law), "Public Response to Racist Speech: Considering the Victim's Story," Michigan Law Review, 1989 |
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-The international community has chosen to outlaw racist hate propaganda. Article 4 of the International Convention on the Elimi- nation of All Forms of Racial Discrimination states: Article 4 States Parties condemn all propaganda and all organizations which are based on ideas or theories of superiority of one race or group of per- sons of one colour or ethnic origin, or which attempt to justify or pro- mote racial hatred and discrimination in any form, and undertake to adopt immediate and positive measures designed to eradicate all incite- ment to, or acts of, such discrimination and, to this end, with due regard to the principles embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the rights expressly set forth in article 5 of this Convention, inter alia: (a) Shall declare as an offence punishable by law all dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred, incitement to racial discrimi- nation, as well as all acts of violence or incitement to such acts against any race or group of persons of another colour or ethnic origin, and also the provision of any assistance to racist activities, including the financing thereof; (b) Shall declare illegal and prohibit organizations, and also organ- ized and all other propaganda activities, which promote and incite racial discrimination, and shall recognize participation in such organization or activities as an offence punishable by law; and (c) Shall not permit public authorities or public institutions, national or local, to promote or incite racial discrimination.105 Under this treaty, states are required to criminalize racial hate messages. Prohibiting dissemination of ideas of racial superiority or hatred is not easily reconciled with American concepts of free speech. The Convention recognizes this conflict. Article 4 acknowledges the need for "due regard" for rights protected by the Universal Declara- tion of Human Rights and by article 5 of the Convention - including the rights of freedom of speech, association, and conscience. Recognizing these conflicting values, and nonetheless concluding that the right to freedom from racist hate propaganda deserves affirm- ative recognition, represents the evolving international view. An American lawyer, trained in a tradition of liberal thought, would read article 4 and conclude immediately that it is unworkable. Acts of vio- lence, and perhaps imminent incitement to violence are properly pro- hibited, but the control of ideas is doomed to failure. This position was voiced continually in the debates'06 preceding adoption of the Convention, leading to the view that article 4 is both controversial and troublesome. 107 To those who struggled through early international attempts'08 to deal with racist propaganda, the competing values had a sense of ur- gency. 09 The imagery of both book burnings and swastikas was clear in their minds. 10 Hitler had banned ideas. He had also murdered six million Jews in the culmination of a campaign that had as a major theme the idea of racial superiority. While the causes of fascism are complex,11 the knowledge that anti-Semitic hate propaganda and the rise of Nazism were clearly connected guided development of the emerging international law on incitement to racial hatred. In 1959 and 1960, the United Nations faced an "outburst of anti- Semitic incidents in several parts of the world.""'2 The movement to implement the human rights goals of the United Nations Charter and of the Universal Declaration gained momentum as member states sought effective means of eliminating discrimination. |
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-Hate speech is permissible under the first amendment despite the exceptions |
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-Volokh 15 Eugene Volokh, Law Professor at UCLA, “No, there’s no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment,” The Washington Post, May 7, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/07/no-theres-no-hate-speech-exception-to-the-first-amendment/?utm_term=.9e1ed85e9262 JW |
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-I keep hearing about a supposed “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment, or statements such as, “This isn’t free speech, it’s hate speech,” or “When does free speech stop and hate speech begin?” But there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. Hateful ideas (whatever exactly that might mean) are just as protected under the First Amendment as other ideas. One is as free to condemn Islam — or Muslims, or Jews, or blacks, or whites, or illegal aliens, or native-born citizens — as one is to condemn capitalism or Socialism or Democrats or Republicans. To be sure, there are some kinds of speech that are unprotected by the First Amendment. But those narrow exceptions have nothing to do with “hate speech” in any conventionally used sense of the term. For instance, there is an exception for “fighting words” — face-to-face personal insults addressed to a specific person, of the sort that are likely to start an immediate fight. But this exception isn’t limited to racial or religious insults, nor does it cover all racially or religiously offensive statements. Indeed, when the City of St. Paul tried to specifically punish bigoted fighting words, the Supreme Court held that this selective prohibition was unconstitutional (R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992)), even though a broad ban on all fighting words would indeed be permissible. |
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-Compliance with ILaw is key to preventing global disaster- US compliance with ILaw shapes global ILaw compliance |
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-IEER 02 Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy. Rule of Power or Rule of Law? An Assessment of U.S. Policies and Actions Regarding Security-Related Treaties. May 2002. http://www.ieer.org/reports/treaties/execsumm.pdf |
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-The evolution of international law since World War II is largely a response to the demands of states and individuals living within a global society with a deeply integrated world economy. In this global society, the repercussions of the actions of states, non-state actors, and individuals are not confined within borders, whether we look to greenhouse gas accumulations, nuclear testing, the danger of accidental nuclear war, or the vast massacres of civilians that have taken place over the course of the last hundred years and still continue. Multilateral agreements increasingly have been a primary instrument employed by states to meet extremely serious challenges of this kind, for several reasons. They clearly and publicly embody a set of universally applicable expectations, including prohibited and required practices and policies. In other words, they articulate global norms, such as the protection of human rights and the prohibitions of genocide and use of weapons of mass destruction. They establish predictability and accountability in addressing a given issue. States are able to accumulate expertise and confidence by participating in the structured system offered by a treaty. However, influential U.S. policymakers are resistant to the idea of a treaty-based international legal system because they fear infringement on U.S. sovereignty and they claim to lack confidence in compliance and enforcement mechanisms. This approach has dangerous practical implications for international cooperation and compliance with norms. U.S. treaty partners do not enter into treaties expecting that they are only political commitments by the United States that can be overridden based on U.S. interests. When a powerful and influential state like the United States is seen to treat its legal obligations as a matter of convenience or of national interest alone, other states will see this as a justification to relax or withdraw from their own commitments. If the United States wants to require another state to live up to its treaty obligations, it may find that the state has followed the U.S. example and opted out of compliance. |
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-US adherence to international law concerning hate speech is key to credibility in international human rights |
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-Cohen 15 Tanya Cohen, "It’s Time To Bring The Hammer Down On Hate Speech In The U.S." Thought Catalog, |
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-Recent scandals involving right-wing hatemongers like Phil Robertson, Donald Sterling, Bill Maher, and the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity have brought to light one of America’s biggest embarrassments: the fact that America remains the only country in the world without any legal protections against hate speech. In any other country, people like Phil Robertson and Donald Sterling would have been taken before a Human Rights Commission and subsequently fined and/or imprisoned and/or stripped of their right to public comment for making comments that incite hatred and violence against vulnerable minorities. But, in the US, such people are allowed to freely incite hatred and violence against vulnerable minorities with impunity, as the US lacks any legal protections against any forms of hate speech – even the most vile and extreme forms of hate speech remain completely legal in the so-called “land of the free”. Not only is this a violation of the most basic and fundamental human rights principles, but it’s also an explicit violation of legally-binding international human rights conventions. For many decades, human rights groups around the world – from Amnesty International to Human Rights First to the United Nations Human Rights Council – have told the United States that it needs to pass and enforce strong legal protections against hate speech in accordance with its international human rights obligations. As of 2015, the US is the only country in the world where hate speech remains completely legal. This is, in fact, a flagrant violation of international human rights law. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) both mandate that all countries outlaw hate speech, including “propaganda for war” and the dissemination of any “ideas based on racial superiority or hatred”. The ICCPR and ICERD are both legally-binding international human rights conventions, and all nations are required to uphold them in the fullest. By failing to prosecute hate speech, the US is explicitly and flippantly violating international human rights law. No other country would be allowed to get away with this, so why would the US? The United Nations has stated many times that international law has absolute authority. This is quite simply not optional. The US is required to outlaw hate speech. No other country would be able to get away with blatantly ignoring international human rights standards, so why should the US be able to? The US is every bit as required to follow international human rights law as the rest of the world is. |
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-Improving human rights and preventing violations helps billions materially facing oppression across the globe. |
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-CFR 13 - Council on Foreign Relations: June 19, 2013 (“The Global Human Rights Regime” From the multimedia Global Governance Monitor of the International Institutions and Global Governance program Available at http://www.cfr.org/human-rights/global-human-rights-regime/p27450#p1 |
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-Although the concept of human rights is abstract, how it is applied has a direct and enormous impact on daily life worldwide. Millions have suffered crimes against humanity. Millions more toil in bonded labor. In the last decade alone, authoritarian rule has denied civil and political liberties to billions. The idea of human rights has a long history, but only in the past century has the international community sought to galvanize a regime to promote and guard them. Particularly, since the United Nations (UN) was established in 1945, world leaders have cooperated to codify human rights in a universally recognized regime of treaties, institutions, and norms. An elaborate global system is being developed. Governments are striving to promote human rights domestically and abroad, and are partnering with multilateral institutions to do so. A particularly dynamic and decentralized network of civil-society actors is also involved in the effort. Together, these players have achieved marked success, though the institutionalization and implementation of different rights is progressing at varying rates. Response to mass atrocities has seen the greatest progress, even if enforcement remains inconsistent. The imperative to provide people with adequate public health care is strongly embedded across the globe, and substantial resources have been devoted to the challenge. The right to freedom from slavery and forced labor has also been integrated into international and national institutions, and has benefited from high-profile pressure to combat forced labor. Finally, the steady accumulation of human-rights-related conventions has encouraged most states to do more to implement binding legislation in their constitutions and statutes. |