Tournament: x | Round: 1 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
F2
Util fw
I affirm
I value morality because ought implies moral obligation
The government’s moral obligation is to implement laws that favor the wellbeing of its citizens rather than those that do not.
Policy makers evaluate the effects of actions by conducting a cost-benefit analysis. The action that results in the most good possible is the one acted upon.
Gary Woller: Gary Woller Professor at Birgham Young University. “Policy Currents.” A Forum on the Role of Environmental Ethics. “An Overview by Gary Woller.” 1997.
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 expense. Consequently, public policies in a democracy must be justified to the public, and especially to those who pay the costs of those policies. Such 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 to the public interest are required 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, 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. For example, a moral obligation to preserve the environment by no means implies the best way, or any way for that matter, to do so, just as there is no a priori reason to believe that any policy that claims to preserve the environment will actually do so. Any number of policies might work, and others, although seemingly consistent with the moral principle, will fail utterly. That deontological principles are an inadequate basis for environmental policy is evident in the rather significant irony that most forms of deontologically based environmental laws and regulations tend to be implemented in a very utilitarian manner by street-level enforcement officials. Moreover, ignoring the relevant costs and benefits of environmental policy and their attendant incentive structures can, as alluded to above, actually work at cross purposes to environmental preservation. (There exists an extensive literature on this aspect of regulatory enforcement and the often perverse outcomes of regulatory policy. See, for example, Ackerman, 1981; Bartrip and Fenn, 1983; Hawkins, 1983, 1984; Hawkins and Thomas, 1984.) Even the most die-hard preservationist/deontologist would, I believe, be troubled by this outcome. The above points are perhaps best expressed by Richard Flathman, The number of values typically involved in public policy decisions, the broad categories which must be employed and above all, the scope and complexity of the consequences to be anticipated militate against reasoning so conclusively that they generates an imperative to institute a specific policy. It is seldom the case that only one policy will meet the criteria of the public interest (1958, p. 12). It therefore follows that in a democracy, policymakers have an ethical duty to establish a plausible link between policy alternatives and the problems they address, and the public must be reasonably assured that a policy will actually do something about an existing problem; this requires the means-end language and methodology of utilitarianism ethics. Good intentions, lofty rhetoric, and moral piety are an insufficient though perhaps at times a necessary, basis for public policy in a democracy.

Thus the standard is maximizing expected societal wellbeing

Weighing:
We value the lives of the future not just lives of the present, increasing production of subsistence will help us with hunger in the future.
 Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798
Malthus
I think I may fairly make two postulata. First, That food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state. These two laws, ever since we have had any knowledge of mankind, appear to have been fixed laws of our nature, and, as we have not hitherto seen any alteration in them, we have no right to conclude that they will ever cease to be what they now are, without an immediate act of power in that Being who first arranged the system of the universe, and for the advantage of his creatures, still executes, according to fixed laws, all its various operations. I do not know that any writer has supposed that on this earth man will ultimately be able to live without food. But Mr Godwin has conjectured that the passion between the sexes may in time be extinguished. As, however, he calls this part of his work a deviation into the land of conjecture, I will not dwell longer upon it at present than to say that the best arguments for the perfectibility of man are drawn from a contemplation of the great progress that he has already made from the savage state and the difficulty of saying where he is to stop. But towards the extinction of the passion between the sexes, no progress whatever has hitherto been made. It appears to exist in as much force at present as it did two thousand or four thousand years ago. There are individual exceptions now as there always have been. But, as these exceptions do not appear to increase in number, it would surely be a very unphilosophical mode of arguing to infer, merely from the existence of an exception, that the exception would, in time, become the rule, and the rule the exception. Assuming then my postulata as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second. By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal. This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind.

This is proved with statistical evidence by MSU
http://msutoday.msu.edu/feature/2016/a-better-nourished-tomorrow/
The world’s population is growing by about 200,000 people every day. That's tens of millions of people every year. To feed them, food production will need to increase by about 70 percent annually by 2050. Michigan State University researcher Brad Day is working to create tools and technologies that will feed the world’s growing population by unlocking the secrets of plants to learn how they fend off diseases and survive in extreme conditions.

C1:: Intellectual Gain
Allowing for mental filtration through restricting constitutionally protected speech deceases intellectual gain from colleges and universities.

 Lukianoff and Haidt 1
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley professor of ethical leadership at the NYU-Stern School of Business), "The Coddling of the American Mind", The Atlantic, 09/2015, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
As Burns defines it, mental filtering is “picking out a negative detail in any situation and dwelling on it exclusively, thus perceiving that the whole situation is negative.” Leahy, Holland, and McGinn refer to this as “negative filtering,” which they define as “focusing almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom noticing the positives.” When applied to campus life, mental filtering allows for simpleminded demonization. Students and faculty members in large numbers modeled this cognitive distortion during 2014’s “disinvitation season.” That’s is the time of year—usually early spring—when commencement speakers are announced and when students and professors demand that some of those speakers be disinvited because of things they have said or done. According to data compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, since 2000, at least 240 campaigns have been launched at U.S. universities to prevent public figures from appearing at campus events; most of them have occurred since 2009. Consider two of the most prominent disinvitation targets of 2014: former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the International Monetary Fund’s managing director, Christine Lagarde. Rice was the first black female secretary of state; Lagarde was the first woman to become finance minister of a G8 country and the first female head of the IMF. Both speakers could have been seen as highly successful role models for female students, and Rice for minority students as well. But the critics, in effect, discounted any possibility of something positive coming from those speeches. Members of an academic community should of course be free to raise questions about Rice’s role in the Iraq War or to look skeptically at the IMF’s policies. But should dislike of part of a person’s record disqualify her altogether from sharing her perspectives? If campus culture conveys the idea that visitors must be pure, with résumés that never offend generally left-leaning campus sensibilities, then higher education will have taken a further step toward intellectual homogeneity and the creation of an environment in which students rarely encounter diverse viewpoints. And universities will have reinforced the belief that it’s okay to filter out the positive. If students graduate believing that they can learn nothing from people they dislike or from those with whom they disagree, we will have done them a great intellectual disservice. 

C2:: Political Growth
Restricting constitutionally protected speech damages students outside the campus and decreases political growth.

Lukianoff and Haidt 2
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley professor of ethical leadership at the NYU-Stern School of Business), "The Coddling of the American Mind", The Atlantic, 09/2015, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

Attempts to shield students from words, ideas, and people that might cause them emotional discomfort are bad for the students. They are bad for the workplace, which will be mired in unending litigation if student expectations of safety are carried forward. And they are bad for American democracy, which is already paralyzed by worsening partisanship. When the ideas, values, and speech of the other side are seen not just as wrong but as willfully aggressive toward innocent victims, it is hard to imagine the kind of mutual respect, negotiation, and compromise that are needed to make politics a positive-sum game. Rather than trying to protect students from words and ideas that they will inevitably encounter, colleges should do all they can to equip students to thrive in a world full of words and ideas that they cannot control. One of the great truths taught by Buddhism (and Stoicism, Hinduism, and many other traditions) is that you can never achieve happiness by making the world conform to your desires. But you can master your desires and habits of thought. This, of course, is the goal of cognitive behavioral therapy. With this in mind, here are some steps that might help reverse the tide of bad thinking on campus. The biggest single step in the right direction does not involve faculty or university administrators, but rather the federal government, which should release universities from their fear of unreasonable investigation and sanctions by the Department of Education. Congress should define peer-on-peer harassment according to the Supreme Court’s definition in the 1999 case Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education. The Davis standard holds that a single comment or thoughtless remark by a student does not equal harassment; harassment requires a pattern of objectively offensive behavior by one student that interferes with another student’s access to education. Establishing the Davis standard would help eliminate universities’ impulse to police their students’ speech so carefully. Universities themselves should try to raise consciousness about the need to balance freedom of speech with the need to make all students feel welcome. Talking openly about such conflicting but important values is just the sort of challenging exercise that any diverse but tolerant community must learn to do. Restrictive speech codes should be abandoned. Universities should also officially and strongly discourage trigger warnings. They should endorse the American Association of University Professors’ report on these warnings, which notes, “The presumption that students need to be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual.” Professors should be free to use trigger warnings if they choose to do so, but by explicitly discouraging the practice, universities would help fortify the faculty against student requests for such warnings.

Politics and technology exist together and grow together. Tsekeris 07
“TECHNOLOGY AS POLITICS” Tsekeris, Charalambos 07 graduated from Brunel University (2000) and earned his doctoral degree in Sociology from Athens Panteion University (2006). He is a member of the Greek scientific group Intellectum and a researcher on the complex relationships between technoscience, culture and politics.

Technology is a highly contentious concept. Of course, theorizing technology and its complex relationship with democratic politics is not an easy riddle. For instance, as Andrew Feenberg (1999: 11-12) critically observes, although constructivist sociology has interpreted particular technologies in new ways, the central modern questions are hardly addressed today in terms of the general problematic of technology. Nevertheless, the various intellectual efforts of theoretically representing the technological project could be approximately categorized into three main perspectives: technology as an evaluating subject, technology as an evaluated object, technology as a text. Arguably, it is possible to champion a fourth perspective over the above, suggesting a critical discursive conception of technology (that is, technology as a critical discourse) and, therefore, a generative interplay between epistemology, ontology, and ethics (knowledge, reality, and critique). This strongly signifies the constant co-emergence and co-evolution of technology and politics, the uninterrupted mutual shaping between things and ideas, nature and society, machines and transformative democratic action. To paraphrase Karl Marx, both human and non-human beings make their own history, in a reciprocal way.
IMPACTS:

Underview: Oppression
Free speech the most important tool in the fight against oppression.
ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), “Hate Speech on Campus,” 2016.  
Many universities, under pressure to respond to the concerns of those who are the objects of hate, have adopted codes or policies prohibiting speech that offends any group based on race, gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. That's the wrong response, well-meaning or not. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects speech no matter how offensive its content. Speech codes adopted by government-financed state colleges and universities amount to government censorship, in violation of the Constitution. And the ACLU believes that all campuses should adhere to First Amendment principles because academic freedom is a bedrock of education in a free society. How much we value the right of free speech is put to its severest test when the speaker is someone we disagree with most. Speech that deeply offends our morality or is hostile to our way of life warrants the same constitutional protection as other speech because the right of free speech is indivisible: When one of us is denied free speech this right, all of us are denied. Since its founding in 1920, the ACLU has fought for the free expression of all ideas, popular or unpopular. That's the constitutional mandate. Where bigoted racist, sexist and homophobic speech is concerned, the ACLU believes that more speech—not less—is the best revenge. This is particularly true at universities, whose mission is to facilitate learning through open debate and study, and to enlighten. Speech codes are not the way to go on campuses, where all views are entitled to be heard, explored, supported or refuted. Besides, when hate is out in the open, people can see the problem. Then they can organize effectively to counter bad attitudes, and possibly change them, and forge solidarity against the forces of intolerance. College administrators may find speech codes attractive as a quick fix, but as one critic put it: "Verbal purity is not social change." Codes that punishing bigoted speech treats only the symptom: The problem itself is bigotry. The ACLU believes that instead of opting for gestures that only appear to cure the disease, universities have to do the hard work of recruitment to increase faculty and student diversity; counseling to raise awareness about bigotry and its history, and changing curricula to institutionalize more inclusive approaches to all subject matter.