Changes for page Harvard Westlake Gross Neg

Last modified by Administrator on 2017/08/29 03:36

From version < 114.1 >

edited by Matthew Gross
on 2016/12/17 19:14

To version < 115.1 >

edited by Matthew Gross
on 2016/12/17 19:14

< >

Change comment: There is no comment for this version

Raw
Rendered

Summary

Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
- Caselist.RoundClass[17]
- Caselist.CitesClass[17]

Details

Caselist.RoundClass[17]

EntryDate

@@ -1,1
          +1,1 @@
--2016-12-17 19:14:36.257
++2016-12-17 19:14:36.0

Caselist.CitesClass[17]

Cites

@@ -1,0
          +1,113 @@
++1
++Standpoint epistemology is the best starting point for moral decisions – other methods exclude some viewpoints, which makes true analysis of reality impossible.  Mills
++* - Dominant narratives shape what’s counted as “real ethics”, so the standpoint of the oppressed is more likely correct – better starting point
++**Edited for ableist language
++Charles Mills, “Ideal Theory” as Ideology, 2005.  NS
++
++The crucial common claim—whether couched in terms of ideology and fetishism, or androcentrism, or white normativity—is that all theorizing, both moral and nonmoral, takes place in an intellectual realm dominated by concepts, assumptions, norms, values, and framing perspectives that reflect the experience and group interests of the privileged group (whether the bourgeoisie, or men, or whites). So a simple empiricism will not work as a cognitive strategy; one has to be self-conscious about the concepts that “spontaneously” occur to one, since many of these concepts will not arise naturally but as the result of social structures and hegemonic ideational patterns. In particular, it will often be the case that dominant concepts will obscure certain crucial realities, blocking them from sight, or naturalizing them, while on the other hand, concepts necessary for accurately mapping these realities will be absent. Whether in terms of concepts of the self, or of humans in general, or in the cartography of the social, it will be necessary to scrutinize the dominant conceptual tools and the way the boundaries are drawn. This is, of course, the burden of standpoint theory—that certain realities tend to be more visible from the perspective of the subordinated than the privileged (Harding 2003). The thesis can be put in a strong and implausible form, but weaker versions do have considerable plausibility, as illustrated by the simple fact that for the most part the crucial conceptual innovation necessary to map nonideal realities has not come from the dominant group. In its ignoring of oppression, ideal theory also ignores the consequences of oppression. If societies are not oppressive, or if in modeling them we can abstract away from oppression and assume moral cognizers of roughly equal skill, then the paradigmatic moral agent can be featureless. No theory is required about the particular group-based obstacles that may block the vision of a particular group. By contrast, nonideal theory recognizes that people will typically be cognitively affected by their social location, so that on both the macro and the more local level, the descriptive concepts arrived at may be misleading. Think of the original challenge Marxist models of capitalism posed to liberalism’s social ontology: the claim that to focus on relations of aparently equal exchange, free and fair, among equal individuals was illusory, since at the level of the relations of production, the real ontology of worker and capitalist manifested a deep structure of constraint that limited proletarian freedom. Think of the innovation of using patriarchy to force people to recognize, and condemn as political and oppressive, rather than natural, apolitical, and unproblematic, male domination of women. Think of the recent resurrection of the concept of white supremacy to map the reality of a white domination that has continued in more subtle forms past the ending of de jure segregation. These are all global, high-level concepts, undeniable abstractions. But they map accurately (at least arguably) crucial realities that differentiate the statuses of the human beings within the systems they describe; so while they abstract, they do not idealize. Or consider conceptual innovation at the more local level: the challenge to the traditional way the public/private distinction was drawn, the concept of sexual harassment. In the first case, a seemingly neutral and innocuous conceptual divide turned out, once it was viewed from the perspective of gender subordination, as contributing to the reproduction of the gender system by its relegation of “women’s issues” to a seemingly apolitical and naturalized space. In the case of sexual harassment, a familiar reality—a staple of cartoons in men’s magazines for years (bosses chasing secretaries around the desk and so on)—was reconceptualized as negative (not something funny, but something morally wrong) and a contributor to making the workplace hostile for women. These realizations, these recognitions, did not spontaneously crystallize out of nowhere; they required conceptual labor, a different map of social reality, a valorization of the distinctive experience of women. As a result of having these concepts as visual aids, we can now see better: our perceptions are no longer ignorant blinded to realities to which we were previously obtuse. In some sense, an ideal observer should have been able to see them—yet they did not, as shown by the nonappearance of these realities in male-dominated philosophical literature.
++
++That necessitates non-ideal theory – we need to recognize current oppressive power structures that obstruct the realization of ideal principles. And, ideal theory destroys the practical application of ethics. Mills 9
++Mills, C. W. (2009), Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 47: 161–184
++
++Now how can this ideal ideal—a society not merely without a past history of racism but without races themselves—serve to adjudicate the merits of competing policies aimed at correcting for a long history of white supremacy manifest in Native American expropriation, African slavery, residential and educational segregation, large differentials in income and huge differentials in wealth, nonwhite underrepresentation in high-prestige occupations and overrepresentation in the prison system, contested national narratives and cultural representations, widespread white evasion and bad faith on issues of their racial privilege, and a corresponding hostile white backlash against (what remains of) those mild corrective measures already implemented? Obviously, it cannot. As Thomas Nagel concedes: “Ideal theory enables you to say when a society is unjust, because it falls short of the ideal. But it does not tell you what to do if, as is almost always the case, you find yourself in an unjust society, and want to correct that injustice” (2003a, 82). Ideal theory represents an unattainable target that would require us to roll back the clock and start over.  So in a sense it is an ideal with little or no practical worth. What is required is the nonideal (rectificatory) ideal that starts from the reality of these injustices and then seeks some fair means of correcting for them, recognizing that in most cases the original prediscrimination situation (even if it can be intelligibly characterized and stipulated) cannot be restored. Trying to rectify systemic black disadvantage through affirmative action is not the equivalent of not discriminating against blacks, especially when there are no blacks to be discriminated against. Far from being indispensable to the elaboration of nonideal theory, ideal theory would have been revealed to be largely useless for it. But the situation is worse than that. As the example just given illustrates, it is not merely a matter of an ideal with problems of operationalization and relevance, but of an ideal likely to lend itself more readily to retrograde political agendas. If the ideal ideal rather than the rectificatory ideal is to guide us, then a world without races and any kind of distinctiondrawing by race may seem to be an attractive goal. One takes the ideal to be colorblind nondiscrimination, as appropriate for a society beginning from the state of nature, and then—completely ignoring the nonideal history that has given whites a systemic illicit advantage over people of color—conflates together as “discrimination” all attempts to draw racial distinctions for public policy goals, no matter what their motivation, on the grounds that this perpetuates race and invidious differential treatment by race. In the magisterial judgment of Chief Justice John Roberts in the June 2007 Supreme Court decision on the Seattle and Louisville cases where schools were using race as a factor to maintain diversity, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,”6 a statement achieving the remarkable feat of depicting not merely as true, but as tautologically true, the equating of Jim Crow segregation and the attempt to remedy Jim Crow tion! What is ideally called for under ideal circumstances is not, or at least is not necessarily, what is ideally called for under nonideal circumstances. Claiming that all we need to do is to cease (what is here characterized as) discrimination ignores the differential advantages and privileges that have accumulated in the white population because of the past history of discrimination. So the defense in terms of ideal theory is doubly problematic. In the first place, ideal theory was never supposed to be an end in itself, but a means to improving our handling of nonideal matters, and the fact that Rawls and his disciples and commentators have for the most part stayed in the realm of the ideal represents an evasion of the imperative of dealing with what were supposed to be the really pressing issues. And in the second place, it is questionable in any case how useful the ideal ideal in the Rawlsian sense is or ever would have been in assisting this task. So it is not merely that ideal theory has not come to the aid of those dealing with nonideal injustice but that it was unlikely to have been of much help when and if it ever did arrive.
++
++Implications:
++
++A.  Only non-ideal theory is motivating: groups who have historically been excluded from ideal ethics can’t be compelled to participate in such a system.  That’s a prerequisite to ethics – if people can’t adopt a theory, it has no use.
++
++B.  Non-ideal philosophical discussion is most educationally valuable since it’s always excluded from academia, so it’s a unique insight we should explore.
++
++
++Thus, the standard is resisting oppression
++
++Prefer my framework
++
++1) Attempting to abstract away from social realities is repugnant and eliminates the possibility of a concrete solution to oppression. Curry 14
++
++Curry, Tommy J. Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy, Texas A and M University “The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century.”  Victory Briefs, January/February 2015.  CC
++
++Despite the pronouncement of debate as an activity and intellectual exercise pointing to the real world consequences of dialogue, thinking, and (personal) politics when addressing issues of racism, sexism, economic disparity, global conflicts, and death, many of the discussions concerning these ongoing challenges to humanity are fixed to a paradigm which sees the adjudication of material disparities and sociological realities as the conquest of one ideal theory over the other. In “Ideal Theory as Ideology,” Charles Mills outlines the problem contemporary theoretical-performance styles in policy debate and value-weighing in Lincoln-Douglass are confronted with in their attempts to get at the concrete problems in our societies. At the outset, Mills concedes that “ideal theory applies to moral theory as a whole (at least to normative ethics as against metaethics); since ethics deals by definition with normative/prescriptive/evaluative issues, it is set against factual/descriptive issues.” At the most general level, the conceptual chasm between what emerges as actual problems in the world (e.g.: racism, sexism, poverty, disease, etc.) and how we frame such problems theoretically—the assumptions and shared ideologies we depend upon for our problems to be heard and accepted as a worthy “problem” by an audience—is the most obvious call for an anti-ethical paradigm, since such a paradigm insists on the actual as the basis of what can be considered normatively. Mills, however, describes this chasm as a problem of an ideal-as-descriptive model which argues that for any actual-empirical-observable social phenomenon (P), an ideal of (P) is necessarily a representation of that phenomenon. In the idealization of a social phenomenon (P), one “necessarily has to abstract away from certain features” of (P) that is observed before abstraction occurs. ¶ This gap between what is actual (in the world), and what is represented by theories and politics of debaters proposed in rounds threatens any real discussions about the concrete nature of oppression and the racist economic structures which necessitate tangible policies and reorienting changes in our value orientations. As Mills states: “What distinguishes ideal theory is the reliance on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual,” so what we are seeking to resolve on the basis of “thought” is in fact incomplete, incorrect, or ultimately irrelevant to the actual problems which our “theories” seek to address. Our attempts to situate social disparity cannot simply appeal to the ontologization of social phenomenon—meaning we cannot suggest that the various complexities of social problems (which are constantly emerging and undisclosed beyond the effects we observe) are totalizable by any one set of theories within an ideological frame be it our most cherished notions of Afro-pessimism, feminism, Marxism, or the like. At best, theoretical endorsements make us aware of sets of actions to address ever developing problems in our empirical world, but even this awareness does not command us to only do X, but rather do X and the other ideas which compliment the material conditions addressed by the action X. As a whole, debate (policy and LD) neglects the need to do X in order to remedy our cast-away-ness among our ideological tendencies and politics. How then do we pull ourselves from this seeming ir-recoverability of thought in general and in our endorsement of socially actualizable values like that of the living wage? It is my position that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s thinking about the need for a living wage was a unique, and remains an underappreciated, resource in our attempts to impose value reorientation (be it through critique or normative gestures) upon the actual world. In other words, King aims to reformulate the values which deny the legitimacy of the living wage, and those values predicated on the flawed views of the worker, Blacks, and the colonized (dignity, justice, fairness, rights, etc.) used to currently justify the living wages in under our contemporary moral parameters.
++
++2) It’s uniquely key in education – judges have an obligation to reject oppressive ideologies.  Trifonas 03
++
++Trifonas, Peter. PEDAGOGIES OF DIFFERENCE: RETHINKING EDUCATION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE. New York, London. 2003.
++
++Domination and subordination, I imply that they are relations of power. In an educational context, the exercise of power is accomplished in interactions (i.e., in a social organization), manifesting itself as acts of exclusion, marginalization, silencing, and so forth. Thus, paying attention to how power operates along axes of gender, race, class, and ability (that is, recognizing that social differences are not given, but are accomplished in and through educational settings) is a step toward educational equity. What does the above discussion mean in the educational context? It means that in the interactions of teachers with students in the classroom, or in other contexts, attention needs to be directed toward how dominant and subordinate relations (be they based on race, gender, class, or ability) permeate these contexts and intersect in complicated ways to produce inequality and marginalization. The frequently used and well-meaning phrase, “I treat everyone the same, ” often used by teachers and administrators to indicate their lack of bias in a diverse educational setting, in fact masks unequal power relations. Similarly, educational policies that assume that people are the same or equal may serve to entrench existing inequality precisely because people enter into the educational process with different and unequal experiences. These attempts, well meaning though they may be, tend to render inequality invisible, and thus work against equity in education. In her exploration of white privilege in higher education in the United States, Frances Rains (1998), an aboriginal-Japanese American woman, states emphatically that these benign acts are disempowering for the minority person because they erase his or her racial identity. The denial of racism in this case is in fact a form of racism. Thus, in moving toward equity in education that allows us to address multiple and intersecting axes of difference and inequality, I recommend that we try to think and act “against the grain” in developing educational policies and handling various kinds of pedagogical situations. 5 To work against the grain is to recognize that education is not neutral; it is contested. Mohanty puts it as such: … Education represents both a struggle for meaning and a struggle over power relations. It is a central terrain where power and politics operate out of the lived culture of individuals and groups situated in asymmetrical social and political positions. (Mohanty 1990:184) We need to develop a critical awareness of the power dynamics operative in institutional relations-and of the fact that people participate in institutions as unequal subjects. Working against the grain is to take a proactive approach to understanding and acting upon institutional relations, whether in the classroom, in other interactions with students, or in policy development. Rather than overlooking the embeddedness of gender, race, class, ability, and other forms of inequality that shape our interactions, working against the grain makes explicit the political nature of education and how power operates to privilege, silence, and marginalize individuals who are differently located in the educational process. In her exploration of feminist pedagogy, Linda Briskin (1990) makes a clear distinction between nonsexist and antisexist education critical to our understanding here. She asserts that nonsexism is an approach that attempts to neutralize sexual inequality by pretending that gender can be made irrelevant in the classroom. Thus, for instance, merely asserting that male and female students should have equal time to speak-and indeed giving them equal time-cannot adequately rectify the endemic problem of sexism in the classroom. One of Briskin's students reported that in her political science tutorials that when the male students spoke, everyone paid attention. When a female student spoke, however, the class acted as if no one was speaking (13). Neutrality is an attempt to conceal the unequal distribution of power. An against the grain approach would acknowledge explicitly that we are all gendered, racialized, and differently constructed subjects who do not participate in interactional relations as equals. This goes beyond formulating sexism, racism, abilism, and class privilege in individualist terms and treating them as if they were personal attitudes. Terry Wolverton (1983) discovered the difference between nonracism and antiracism in her consciousness-raising attempt: I had confused the act of trying to appear not to be racist with actively working to eliminate racism. Trying to appear not racist had made me deny my racism, and therefore exclude the possibility of change. (191) Being against the grain means seeing inequality as systemic and interpersonal (rather than individual), and combatting oppression as a collective responsibility, not just as a personal attribute (so that somehow a person can cleanse herself or himself of sexism, racism, abilism, or class bias). It is to pay attention to oppression as an interactional property that can be altered (see Manners 1998). Roger Simon (1993) suggests, in his development of a philosophical basis for teaching against the grain, which shares many commonalities in how I think about an integrative approach to equity in education, that teaching against the grain is fundamentally a moral practice. By this he does not mean that teachers simply fulfill the mandate and guidelines of school authorities. He believes that teachers must expose the partial and imperfect nature of existing knowledge, which is constructed on the basis of asymmetrical power relations (for instance, who has the power to speak and whose voices are suppressed?). It is the responsibility of the teacher or educator to show how dominant forms of knowledge and ways of knowing constrict human capacities. In exposing the power relations integral to the knowledge construction process, the educator, by extension, must treat teaching and learning as a mutual and collaborative act between teachers and students. What may this ideal look like in practice? Marilyn Cochran-Smith (1991) also explores the notion of teaching against the grain in her research on how teachers and students worked together in a preservice program in the Philadelphia area. Borrowing from Gramsci's formulation that action is everyone's responsibility, she asserts that teaching is fundamentally a political activity. In practical terms, she outlines what it may mean to teach against the grain in an actual teaching and learning situation. Her succinct articulation is worth quoting at length: To teach against the grain, teachers have to understand and work both within and around the culture of teaching and the politics of schooling at their particular schools and within their larger school system and communities. They cannot simply announce better ways of doing things, as outsiders are likely to do. They have to teach differently without judging the ways other teach or dismissing the ideas others espouse…. They are not at liberty to publicly announce brilliant but excoriating critiques of their colleagues and the bureaucracies in which they labor. Their ultimate commitment is to the school lives and futures of the children with whom they live and work. Without condescension or defensiveness, they have to work with parents and other teachers on different ways of seeing and measuring development, connecting and dividing knowledge, and knowing about teaching and schooling. They have to be astute observers of individual learners with the ability to pose and explore questions that transcend cultural attribution, institutional habit, and the alleged certainty of outside experts. They have to see beyond and through the conventional labels and practices that sustain the status quo by raising unanswerable and often uncomfortable questions. Perhaps most importantly, teachers who work against the grain must name and wrestle with their own doubts, must fend off the fatigue of reform and depend on the strength of their individual and collaborative convictions that their work ultimately makes a difference in the fabric of social responsibility. (Cochran-Smith 1991:284-85) For me, to be against the grain is therefore to recognize that the routinized courses of action and interactions in all educational contexts are imbued with unequal distribution of power that produce and reinforce various forms of marginalization and exclusion. Thus, a commitment to redress these power relations (i.e., equity in education) involves interventions and actions that may appear “counter-intuitive.” 6 Undoing inequality and achieving equity in education is a risky and uncomfortable act because we need to disrupt the ways things are “normally” done. This involves a serious (and frequently threatening) effort to interrogate our privilege as well as our powerlessness. It obliges us to examine our own privilege relative though it may be, to move out of our internalized positions as victims, to take control over our lives, and to take responsibilities for change. It requires us to question what we take for granted, and a commitment to a vision of society built on reflection, reform, mutuality, and respect in theory and in practice. Teaching and learning against the grain is not easy, comfortable, or safe. It is protracted, difficult, uncomfortable, painful, and risky. It involves struggles with our colleagues, our students, as well as struggles within ourselves against our internalized beliefs and normalized behaviors. In other words, it is a lifelong challenge. However, as Simon (1993) puts it, teaching against the grain is also a project of hope. We engage in it with the knowledge and conviction that we are in a long-term collaborative project with like-minded people whose goal is to make the world a better place for us and for our children.
++CP
++A: Public universities and colleges should either create policies, or reform their current policies on sexual harassment, to set strict harassment guidelines for in classroom behavior for teachers that prohibits speech that creates a hostile learning environment. They should also implement guidelines prohibiting student-to-student content that creates an hostile learning environment due to the sexual nature of the speech. These regulations will be enforced consistent with Title IX and VII of the Civil Rights Act. Dower 12 J.d
++Dower, Benjamin. Assistant Attorney General at Texas Attorney General "Scylla of Sexual Harassment and the Charybdis of Free Speech: How Public Universities Can Craft Policies to Avoid Liability, The." Rev. Litig. 31 (2012): 703.
++Sexual Harassment Policy for University Students¶ Students are prohibited from committing sexual harassment.¶ Sexual harassment for students is defined as:¶ (1) Words of a sexual nature directed at the person of the¶ addressee that, by their very utterance, inflict injury, provoke¶ resentment in the addressee, and tend to incite an immediate breach¶ of the peace. Breach of the peace, as contemplated by this provision,¶ is defined as public disorder that involves the outbreak of physical¶ violence.¶ (2) Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors,¶ and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature when¶ (a) submission to such conduct is made either¶ explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individual's¶ academic or employment status; or¶ (b) submission to or rejection of such conduct by an¶ individual is used as the basis for employment or academic¶ decision affecting such individual.¶ (3) Conduct of a sexual nature that is so severe and¶ pervasive-viewed both objectively and from the perspective of the¶ recipient of the remarks and considering the totality of the¶ circumstances-as to create a hostile learning environment.¶ Sexual Harassment Policy for University Employees¶ University employees are prohibited from committing sexual harassment.¶ Sexual harassment for university employees is defined as:¶ (1) Words of a sexual nature directed at the person of the addressee that, by their very utterance, inflict injury, provoke resentment in the addressee, and tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. Breach of the peace, as contemplated by this provision, *746 is defined as public disorder that involves the outbreak of physical violence.¶ (2) Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature when¶ (a) submission to such conduct is made either explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individual’s academic or employment status; or¶ (b) submission to or rejection of such conduct by an individual is used as the basis for employment or academic decision affecting such individual.¶ ¶ (3) Conduct of a sexual nature that is so severe or pervasive~-~-viewed both objectively and from the perspective of the recipient of the remarks and considering the totality of the circumstances~-~-as to create a hostile learning environment.¶ ¶ Possible Addition¶ ¶ A university employee accused of sexual harassment stemming from speech conducted in the classroom may raise, as a defense, that his or her classroom expression was reasonably related to a legitimate pedagogical interest. If the employee is able to show by a preponderance of the evidence that his or her classroom expression was reasonably related to a legitimate pedagogical interest, the committee shall weigh the value of that interest against the harm of the alleged harassment in determining both guilt and punishment.¶
++
++The counterplan resolves a grey area within harassment law – right now professor speech gets protected under the first amendment. The counterplan shifts the precedent to take a stance against harassment. Marcus 08
++Kenneth L  Marcus Lillie and Nathan Ackerman Chair in Equality and Justice in America, Baruch College¶ School of Public Affairs. "Higher Education, Harassment, and First Amendment Opportunism." Wm. and Mary Bill Rts. J. 16 (2007): 1025.
++These incidents highlight a puzzling phenomenon in contemporary constitutional¶ culture. The puzzle has been the relatively recent appearance and eager¶ acceptance, especially in higher education, of First Amendment or academic¶ freedom arguments in areas which had long been beyond their reach. For at least¶ the "first fifteen years of its development," the law of harassment had been wellunderstood¶ to regulate a sphere of constitutionally unprotected, proscribable¶ conduct, even when it incidentally included the use of words.2' Yet in recent years¶ free-speech arguments have become a favorite topic-changing device for defenders¶ of all forms of harassment, 22 especially in post-secondary education where many are¶ especially sensitized to issues of free speech and academic freedom. The tendency¶ to construct harassing conduct as speech has important ramifications since the¶ appearance of the First Amendment, with its powerful array of standards and¶ presumptions, augurs ill for any area of regulation which is brought within its¶ shifting boundaries. As Frederick Schauer put it, "Once the First Amendment shows¶ up, much of the game is over., 23 And indeed, arguably, the game may now be over¶ for harassment law, which is to say, free speech issues may have obtained too much traction in this area to be dismissed out of hand. On the other hand, it remains at¶ best unclear as to whether the First Amendment is even salient as to this area of law.¶ The appearance of the First Amendment in this area was likely hastened by¶ overreaching on the part of civil rights advocates who, during the 1980s and 1990s,¶ introduced campus speech codes which could not help but raise First Amendment¶ attention.24 For many years, this conflict played itself out in a series of arguments¶ about campus speech codes, which were devised to protect various groups from¶ expressions which might be considered offensive or "hateful."' While these codes¶ drew some support from academic commentators, 26 the courts generally found them¶ to violate the First Amendment and other commentators agreed.27 Interestingly, few institutions have withdrawn speech or harassment codes unless threatened with the¶ risk of litigation or faced with adverse judicial decisions, and many apparently¶ remain on the books.28¶ At the same time, however, most universities have also promulgated antidiscrimination¶ and harassment policies pursuant to the requirements of various¶ federal civil rights statutes (especially Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 196429 and¶ Title IX3¶ " of the Education Amendments Act).3¶ ' Unlike hate speech codes,¶ harassment regulations (such as the federal regulations or public universities'¶ implementing policies) are not directly aimed at speech, although the harassing¶ conduct they regulate may include words.32 Given the prominence of speech¶ interests to the academic setting, however, free speech claims are now regularly¶ raised in response to various allegations of harassment; this is nowhere more true¶ than with respect to allegations of anti-Semitic harassment. Indeed, Justice Kennedy¶ once remarked in dissent that federal education harassment law is "circumscribed by the First Amendment,"33 and federal regulatory policy has assumed this to be so¶ for over a decade. 34 Nevertheless, there is reason to question the validity of this¶ assumption and the salience of free speech to the regulation of education harassment.¶ To the extent that harassment regulation encompasses some speech activities by¶ state actors on the basis of content, the most difficult constitutional question may be¶ whether First Amendment doctrine even applies to such questions or whether they¶ lay outside of the boundaries of First Amendment coverage. 35 This Article will¶ argue that the salience of the First Amendment to questions of academic harassment¶ is at best unsettled; that efforts to apply First Amendment doctrine to harassment¶ law may be seen as a form of what Frederick Schauer has described as "First¶ Amendment opportunism; ' 36 and that such efforts to extend the boundaries of the¶ First Amendment are ultimately unresolvable on the basis of constitutional doctrine¶ alone. Special attention is given to the recently resurgent problem of campus antiSemitism¶ because harassment allegations under this rubric have been subjected to¶ frequent, intense challenge as of late.37z
++
++DA Shell
++Harassment cases persist because of a lack of clarity in requirements – a commitment to accountability is key. Saha 8/22
++
++MADHUMITA SAHA The writer is an academic-turned journalist. She taught history at Drexel University and New York University before joining WION. Mon, 22 Aug 2016 http://www.dnaindia.com/world/column-academia-s-feet-of-clay-sexual-misconduct-and-gender-discrimination-in-schools-2247826
++
++
++In the present context, Tyann Sorrell ’s recourse to legal action seems an obvious choice. But the legal history of sexual harassment shows that the road to public protest had been tough and long. Professor Carrie N. Baker shows in her book, The Women’s Movement against Sexual Harassment, how characterizations of sexual behaviour in workplaces have evolved from being considered a moral problem of a working woman, to a social problem of male lust and seduction, and eventually in the 1970s, such acts came to be interpreted as acts of violence against women and a violation of women’s civil rights.¶ In response to public awakening to the issue, the judges ruled in the William v. Saxbe federal court case of 1976 that sexual harassment is a form of illegal sex discrimination under Title VII. Before this verdict, the US courts were of the opinion that sexual harassment was merely disharmony in a personal relationship, the result of personal urges of individuals, and not part of company policy.¶ We trust in numbers: quantifying sexual harassment in the campus¶ ¶ American universities with the most reports of rape, 2014¶ University campuses are particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment of various types. Different sorts of authorities - formal, informal, achieved as well as ascribed- are exercised over students, assistant professors, and administrative assistants. According to the federal campus safety data, nearly 100 US colleges and universities had at least 10 reports of rape on their main campuses in 2014, with Brown University and the University of Connecticut tied for the highest annual total of 43 each.¶ Recently, Association of American Universities (AAU) conducted a Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct among 150,000 students at 27 schools, including most of the Ivy League. Of the female undergraduate student respondents, 23.1 per cent informed the surveyors that they have experienced sexual misconduct due to physical force, threats of physical force, or incapacitation.¶ 2¶ Per cent of college students reporting sexual assault, 2015¶ One of the most disturbing revelations of the survey indicates that overall rates of reporting to campus officials and law enforcement were rather low.¶ Depending on the specific type of sexual harassment, only five per cent to 28 per cent of respondents claim to have reported their experience of sexual harassment to the appropriate authorities. According to the AAU Climate Survey, the most common reason for not reporting incidents of sexual assault and sexual misconduct was that it was not considered serious enough. Among other reasons, students cited they were “embarrassed, ashamed or that it would be too emotionally difficult,” and because they “did not think anything would be done about it.”¶ Taking it from here to a safer future¶ There is nothing peculiar about sexual harassment and misconduct in the US educational institutions. Embedded in the similar kind of power structure, I am sure, such acts of sexual transgression is common enough occurrence in any university under the sun. So, let’s not point a finger and try to make a case of western sexual promiscuity out of it; we are all living in fragile glass houses.¶ On 14 December 2015, Smriti Irani, the former human resource and development minister of India reported, that as per University Grants Commission (UGC), there have been 295 cases of sexual harassment against women during 2014-15 in various institutes of higher learning in India.¶ As various scholars and activists working on sexual misconduct have already pointed out, we have to be aware that even when a sexual assault has not taken place, a person can experience sexual harassment; a hostile, offensive and intimidating atmosphere - created in academic spaces - does count as sex harassment too.¶ Women belonging to minority groups of different race, caste, and religion are more vulnerable. As are people belonging to the third gender.¶ While acknowledging that women are more vulnerable to sexual conduct, we also need to come up with regulations that look into the harassment suffered by other genders too. Recently, the UGC has taken the right step towards this direction when it introduced the first gender neutral regulation on sexual harassment in India. Under this regulation, both male students and students of the third gender in universities can lodge complaints against sexual harassment faced by them.¶ Tyann Sorrell 's case, and similar other cases reported from academic institutions, should be used to create greater awareness. Sexual harassment is indeed ubiquitous; such heinous crime is not solely committed by blacks, poor and the uneducated, as is widely perceived. Power is deeply entrenched in such actions and, thus, the perpetrators often come from the most privileged section of our societies.
++
++Successful lawsuits force school accountability to fight harassment. Silbaugh 15
++
++Silbaugh, Katharine Law Alumni Scholar¶ BA magna cum laude, Amherst College¶ JD with high honors and Order of the Coif, University of Chicago¶ . "Reactive to Proactive: Title IX's Unrealized Capacity to Prevent Campus Sexual Assault." BUL Rev. 95 (2015): 1049.
++
++In March of 2013, President Obama signed a re-authorization of the¶ Violence Against Women Act.97 Within the re-authorization were amendments¶ to the Clery Act, which requires educational institutions to disclose statistics¶ about the number of sexual assaults on campus in an annual report that must be¶ distributed to students and prospective students, engaging market pressures to¶ press universities into addressing sexual assault.98 The amendments to the¶ Clery Act (entitled the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act, or SaVE¶ Act)99 strengthen reporting requirements and go beyond DOE’s¶ “recommendation” that colleges educate staff and students to require¶ educational institutions to educate staff and students about campus sexual assault, including statements that sexual assault is prohibited, definitions of¶ sexual assault and consent, bystander tools, and awareness programs for new¶ students.100 The Clery Act is enforced by the DOE primarily through fines, but¶ it is not a part of Title IX. While the focus of the Clery Act remains the¶ accurate reporting of crimes, it will serve as a limited and defined mechanism¶ for getting colleges to introduce education and prevention strategies to¶ students. However, the Clery Act, unlike Title IX, does not mandate equality in¶ the provision of education; a school can check off requirements under the new¶ Clery Amendments without evaluating their efficacy or revising them toward¶ the particular goal of equal educational opportunity. Title IX has a far greater¶ capacity to address sexual assault prevention because colleges could be¶ compelled to take whatever reasonable steps can be shown to reduce assaults,¶ or combination of steps as research about efficacy continues to develop. The¶ DOE has the ability to develop a far more comprehensive approach to assault¶ prevention under Title IX than the specific prescriptions the Clery¶ Amendments mandate.¶ Does the Gebser framework constrain Title IX from doing prevention work?¶ Not for the DOE. To the contrary, the DOE has effectively used Title IX to¶ change campus culture more broadly already. Consider Title IX as the rest of¶ the world has: as sports law. Title IX applied pressure on institutions to offer¶ equality in programming and in the educational experience. Differences in¶ interest in participation couldn’t be offered as an excuse for noncompliance¶ with Title IX: if there was not a culture of sports for girls and women, schools¶ needed to create that culture to ensure equality.101 While it was not smooth¶ sailing throughout, schools largely achieved that cultural shift. This may have¶ been possible because relative to other institutions, schools are good creators¶ of culture. When schools first tried to say that they simply found the world as¶ is, with girls not wanting to participate in sports at the rate boys did, the DOE¶ pushed back. In response, schools became creative at expanding and¶ cultivating interest in sports among girls and women. The social change around¶ girls in sports resulted in large part from a charge to schools to cultivate that¶ change, taking concrete steps that would have the effect of changing cultural¶ dynamics. The colleges faced cultural resistance to change and allegations that¶ they were going too far in redesigning athletic programs and opportunities,102 much as colleges do today as they deliberate over the right sexual assault¶ prevention measures.103 But they demonstrated a powerful ability to transform¶ the culture and expectations of equality in sports participation.¶ Title IX operates primarily as a spending clause regulation overseen by the¶ DOE. The DOE should not have felt constrained by the doctrine developed to¶ address the individual cause of action. If poor reaction in response to an actual,¶ individual sexual assault can give rise to an individual cause of action, why¶ can’t high rates of sexual assault in a school’s population amount to sex¶ discrimination for purposes of DOE enforcement? If higher rates of assault¶ overall result when a school fails to take evidence-based steps to reduce the¶ overall rate of sexual assault, why wouldn’t the DOE nudge schools to be¶ proactive? What if schools have concrete tools at their disposal to reduce the¶ overall rate of assault? Isn’t that within the DOE’s enforcement purview?¶ Consider, by comparison, the legislative approach to school bullying. In the¶ past decade, nearly every state has passed laws addressing the obligations of a¶ school system to address incidents of bullying and to prevent bullying.104¶ While those statutes are aimed at both prevention and post-incident¶ intervention, the most recent and best-regarded statutes focus substantial¶ energy on requiring schools to deliver evidence-based bullying prevention¶ programming in an effort to reduce the amount of bullying within each¶ school.105 Prevention and culture change are at the core of these legal¶ interventions.106 Ideally, they would be at the core of the DOE’s approach to¶ Title IX’s guarantee of equal access to education on college campuses. Perhaps we are seeing the beginning of this exact reform: the DOE is¶ investigating schools, and, in turn, schools have stepped up their evaluations of¶ their own processes. If so, I would hope the next step will be a DOE guidance¶ on prevention measures, because to date, they’ve drawn colleges far into the¶ weeds on responses without adequately directing them toward prevention.
++
++AFF causes a snowball effect that makes first amendment defenses impossible to beat. Schauer 04
++Schauer, Frederick David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law. "The boundaries of the First Amendment: A preliminary exploration of constitutional salience." Harvard Law Review (2004): 1765-1809.
++In addition to the properties of First Amendment claims that may¶ make them less likely to appear legally frivolous, the First Amend-¶ ment's magnetism may assist in ensuring that those claims will not¶ arise in isolation. There will often be multiple lawyers, multiple liti-¶ gants, and multiple public actors who perceive the virtues of the same¶ opportunistic strategy at roughly the same time, or who even may be¶ in active coordination with each other - as with the multiple chal-¶ lenges to the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, the proliferation of First¶ Amendment rhetoric surrounding legal arguments regarding computer¶ source code, and the panoply of parallel claims about First Amend-¶ ment limitations on copyright. When this is the case, the multiplicity¶ of individually tenuous claims may produce a cascade effect160 such¶ that the claims no longer appear tenuous. The combination of, say,¶ four scarcely plausible but simultaneous court challenges and twenty¶ scarcely plausible public claims of a First Amendment problem could make all these individually implausible claims seem more credible¶ than they actually are.161 From the standpoint of an interest group¶ seeking to achieve change and to mobilize public support or the sup-¶ port of other interest groups,162 winning is better than losing publicly,¶ but losing publicly is perhaps still preferable to being ignored.¶ Once the claim or argument achieves a critical mass of plausibility,¶ the game may be over. Even if individual courts reject the claim, the¶ multiplicity of now-plausible claims may give the issue what is re-¶ ferred to in inside-the-Beltway political jargon as "traction" and in¶ newsroom jargon as "legs." Interestingly, this phenomenon sometimes¶ survives even authoritative rejection of the claim. With respect to the¶ argument that hostile-environment sexual harassment enforcement has¶ serious First Amendment implications, for example, neither the Su-¶ preme Court's rejection of this argument in dicta in R.A. V v. City of¶ St. Paul163 nor the Court's silent dismissal of the same claim in Harris¶ v. Forklift Systems, Inc.164 has slowed the momentum of those who¶ would wage serious First Amendment battle against hostile-¶ environment sexual harassment law.'65 Similarly, decades of judicial¶ rejection of the argument that copyright law must be substantially re-¶ stricted by the commands of the First Amendment have scarcely dis-¶ couraged those who urge otherwise; and in some respects the Supreme¶ Court's recent decision in Eldred v. Ashcroftl66 can be considered not a¶ defeat, but rather one further step toward the entry of copyright into¶ the domain of the First Amendment: the Supreme Court did grant cer-¶ tiorari, in part to determine "whether ... the extension of existing and¶ future copyrights violates the First Amendment;"'67 and the seven-¶ Justice majority, as well as Justice Breyer in dissent,'68 acknowledged¶ that the First Amendment was not totally irrelevant.
++
++
++
++Sexual harassment in the classroom is a result of patriarchal violence that invades academia. Sexual harassment represents an oppressive use of power by professors and kills the participation and success of the harassed. Benson and Thomson
++
++Benson, Donna J., and Gregg E. Thomson. "Sexual harassment on a university campus: The confluence of authority relations, sexual interest and gender stratification." Social problems 29.3 (1982): 236-251.
++
++It is precisely this widespread confluence of authority relations, sexual interest and gender¶ stratification which defines the problem of sexual harassment. There is, in other words, a nexus¶ of power and sexualprerogative often enjoyed by men with formal authority over women. Men¶ in such positions can engage in (or "get away with") overt sexual behaviors that would be rebuffed¶ or avoided were the relationship not one of superior and subordinate. They can also discharge selectively the power and rewards of their positions as a means to obligate women sexualy (Blau,¶ 1964).¶ As well as reward and punish women directly, men can manipulate and obscure their sexual in-¶ tentions toward female subordinates. Women learn that the "official" attention of a male¶ superior is often but a vehicle through which he can "press his pursuits" (Goffman, 1977). In¶ turn, what is often mistakenly perceived by men as an unfounded distrust or suspicion of motives¶ has its basis in previous experience with male "helpfulness." Therefore, as Thorne5 suggests, there¶ is an intrinsic ambiguity between the formal definition of the male superior/female subordinate¶ relationship and a sexual one, in which the gender of the woman can be made salient at the in-¶ itiative of the man.¶ Male Authority and Sexual Interest on the University Campus¶ At major universities, student access to individual instructors can be a scarce resource. Faculty¶ members serve as gatekeepers to the professions, yet an institutional priority on research severely¶ constrains the time and energy that they devote to instruction and interaction with under-¶ graduates (Blau, 1973). Moreover, though students are supposedly evaluated according to merit,¶ the teacher's role permits a wide latitude in the degree of interaction and helpfulness granted to¶ individual students. An instructor enjoys considerable discretionary power to provide or¶ withhold academic rewards (grades, recommendations) and related resources (help, psychological¶ support).6¶ As in the workplace, it is usually men who exercise this discretionary power over female univer-¶ sity students. While women now comprise more than half of all college students,¶ faculty-especially within higher ranks and at major universities-are overwhelmingly male.¶ About 95 percent of university full professors are men (Patterson and Engelberg, 1978). Nor-¶ mative requirements for career advancement at competitive universities are based on traditional,¶ male life-cycle patterns and work schedules that are not convenient to many women (Hochschild,¶ 1975).¶ In the past, it has been difficult for women to successfully enter any prestigious and male-¶ dominated - hence, "non-traditional" - field (Epstein, 1970). Social psychological analyses (Med-¶ nick et. al., 1975) have identified some of the barriers still faced by college women seeking such¶ careers. Yet a recent compendium of student responses to a University of California ad-¶ ministrative query about sex discrimination on campus is replete with testimony from male¶ students that female students' sexuality now gives them an unfair advantage in this competition¶ (University of California, Berkeley, 1977). While women allude to numerous sexist remarks and¶ behaviors by faculty which derogate the abilities of women as a group, the male respondents¶ claim that individual women profit from their sexual attributes because male instructors go out of¶ their way to be "extra friendly" and helpful to them. According to the male perception, then, the¶ latitude permitted in the faculty-student relationship works - at the initiative of either instructor¶ or student - to the advantage of attractive women.¶ Some sociologists of higher education view faculty-student sexual exchanges only as women at-¶ tempting to use their sexuality to compensate for a lack of academic accomplishment:¶ Innumerable girls have found that a pretty face and a tight sweater were an adequate substitute for diligence and cleverness when dealing with a male teacher. Some, having been frustrated in efforts to get¶ by on this basis, have pushed matters further and ended up in bed-though not necessarily with an A¶ (Jencks and Riesman, 1968:427n).¶ Similarly, Singer's (1964:148) empirical study of the relationship between personal attrac-¶ tiveness and university grades relies on unsupported conjecture about female manipulativeness to¶ conclude that ". . . the poor college professor is . . . enticed by the female students ... as he goes¶ about his academic and personal responsibilities." In both studies we find the unquestioned¶ assumption that women (unfairly) capitalize on their sexuality in an otherwise meritocratic and¶ asexual relationship.7¶ Our analysis of sexual harassment as the nexus of power and sexual prerogative implies that,¶ from the woman's perspective, the situation is more complex and decidedly less sanguine. Rather¶ than having a unilateral "sex advantage," female students face the possibility that male instruc-¶ tors may manipulate sexual interest and authority in ways which ultimately undermine the posi-¶ tion of women in academia. Because women can no longer be openly denied access to educational¶ and professional training legally, sexual harassment may remain an especially critical factor of¶ more covert discrimination.
++
++
++Case
++Overview:
++1. Even if they win all their f/w arguments that just means we should evaluate the testimony of experts about free speech and college campuses, not people detached from it. Their experts are qualified to speak to moral absolutes like ‘thou shalt not kill or lie’ but not complicated questions of applied ethics. Matters of public policy require nuanced understanding of the issue at hand that experts in virtue don’t have access to.
++
++2. Their f/w only proves that testimony is one piece of evidence when making a decision. But, we should still look for counter-evidence that affirms or denies experts. Hold them to an incredibly high threshold for how extreme their epistemic positions is. Sliwa 12
++
++** Sliwa agrees with testimony, and is summarizing a counter argument
++Paulina Sliwa writes: Sliwa, Paulina College Fellows and Staff, Sidney Sussex College “In Defense of Moral Testimony” Philosophical Studies, 2012.  NS
++
++Suppose I go to the doctor, whom I take to be reliable and trustworthy, to ask him what to take for my headache.  Thee doctor tells me that my headache could be cured by taking a generous spoonful of cyanide. Now, even if prior to his testimony, I regarded the doctor as reliable and trustworthy, I would be epistemically irrational (and most likely dead) if I simply believed what was said to me.  That’s because even reliable testimony is in general just one piece of evidence that I have. In this case, I have other evidence about headaches and the likely effects of cyanide. What I need to do is to weigh the evidence from testimony against all the other non-testimonial evidence that I have.  That requires critical reflection about the testimony itself. Even in cases in which a speaker’s testimony is the only evidence I have about some question, epistemic rationality may still require me to think about the plausibility of what I have been told.  After all, even someone who’s usually reliable and trustworthy can be tired or drugged or joking on that particular occasion. Asking “What makes you think so?” is an easy way to check whether the speaker has really thought the problem through, whether she really has got your question right and to rule out that she’s not just trying to get rid of us, or joking or drunk.  That’s why we often don’t just simply believe as we’re told without any further questions and that’s why scenarios in which the agent doesn’t do so may seem intuitively odd.13
++
++
++
++3. Their model of debate is wrong – they assume the resolution is a question of merely figuring out the right answer – as if we just need a calculator to decide what the right thing to do is. We will win that debate is about process as well as content and we should debate about the reasons why things are right or wrong.
++
++A) Best education – moral actions requires moral understanding Hills 09
++
++Alison Hills, Moral Testimony and Moral Epistemology, Ethics, Vol. 120, No. 1 (October 2009), University of Chicago Press, pp. 94-127.  NS
++
++So far I have argued that moral understanding is essential to good character. But I think that it also has a role to play in important kinds of moral action. There is a well-known distinction between doing the right action and acting well or performing morally worthy actions. Your action is morally worthy only if it is a right action performed for the right reasons, and I will argue that moral understanding is crucial to certain kinds of morally worthy action.  There is a connection between having a good character and per forming morally worthy action: virtue can reasonably be regarded as a disposition to perform morally worthy actions. But you can perform morally worthy actions without being virtuous, because you do the right thing for the right reasons, though you do not habitually do so, and you are not disposed to do so in other circumstances. And you can have the virtues without performing a morally worthy action on an occasion when you uncharacteristically fail to respond to moral reasons. The best known examples illustrating the difference between right action and morally worthy action involve different types of motivation.  Kant famously drew a distinction between two shopkeepers. One gives the right change to his customers only for the sake of his reputation. He is not really acting well: he is doing what is morally right but only because it is in his interests to do so.  Whereas the shopkeeper who gives the right change because doing so is fair, in order to treat his customers with respect, is acting well, and his action has moral worth.  But I will argue that your beliefs and the ground of those beliefs are also crucial to acting rightly for the right reasons. Just as virtue had motivational and cognitive components, morally worthy action does too.  It is widely accepted that in order to act well, it is not sufficient that you do the right thing, because you (correctly) think it is morally right and you want to do the right thing, as an example from Nomy Arpaly illustrates. The Extremist?  Ron is an extremist, believing that killing a person is not generally immoral but that killing a fellow Jew is a grave sin. Ron would like to kill Tamara, but he refrains from doing so because he wants to do the right thing, and he believes the right thing to do is to refrain from killing Jews.33 Ron does the right thing but not for the right reasons: it is right not to kill Tamara, but not because she is a Jew; instead it is right not to kill her because she is a person. Notice that Ron is well motivated: he sincerely wants to do what is morally right. In that respect, Ron is very different from Kant's shopkeeper who does the right thing from selfishness. But in another regard his fault is similar, he is doing the right action, but his action is not morally worthy.  Arpaly suggests two explanations of why Ron's action is not morally worthy. First, it is merely accidental that he did the right thing in this case: "Just as, in the case of the prudent grocer, it is fortunate that the prudent action also happens to be the moral one, in Ron's case it is fortunate that favoring Jews in a certain way ... is moral."34 Second, Ron's reasons for action have nothing to do with the right-making features of his action.35
++
++B) Moral dialogue requires justification for beliefs – they make debate about ethics pointless Hills 09
++
++Alison Hills, Moral Testimony and Moral Epistemology, Ethics, Vol. 120, No. 1 (October 2009), University of Chicago Press, pp. 94-127.  NS
++
++The requirement to be able to justify yourself involves at least being able to say what you take yourself to be doing and why you thought doing so was a good idea. You might say: I had to help those people who were strangers to me because they were very badly injured, whereas my friend's injuries were only minor.  Giving a justification involves giving the reasons why what you did was right. If you do not understand why your action was right, you are in a very awkward position. Suppose your reliable friend has told you not to cheat your customers because doing so is unfair. You believe her, but on your own behalf, you cannot really see anything wrong with enriching your share holders at your customers' expense. There is a perfectly good sense in which you know why cheating your customers is wrong: you know that it is unfair. And yet you yourself have not grasped the connection between the wrongness of the action and the reasons why it is wrong. So you say to your customers what you were told, citing the unfairness of giving the wrong change as a justification for your action, but you cannot give an explanation in your own words, and you cannot reassure customers that under slightly different circumstances, you would treat them well (since you yourself are not able to work out what you would have moral reason to do in those circumstances). Without moral understanding, your ability to participate in the exchange of reasons is necessarily limited. So moral understanding is important in part because being in a position to justify yourself to others is morally important.
++
++C) Pure application of testimony leads to worse results; tough decisions require reasons - Nickel 01
++
++Philip Nickel, Moral Testimony and Its Authority, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Vol. 4, No. 3, Cultivating Emotions (Sep., 2001), pp. 253-266, Springer.  NS
++
++
++The first point is that even in contexts where I am considering some moral claim C that is not immediately relevant to action, the Recognition Requirement is not neutral toward the claim if C is related to other claims bearing immediately on action.  My understanding of other claims which are relevant to action is better when I believe and understand C than when I believe C without understanding it.  My failure to grasp what counts as a justification of the claim will have consequences in areas that are potentially relevant to my actions or the actions of those around me. It is impossible fully to understand a moral claim in one context without being capable of applying it in many other contexts, that is, without being aware of its conditions of application and the potential justifications for it. Even if I am not a potential murderer, if I do not understand why I should not kill Smith, then I will not be capable of responding morally to other possible situations in which related justificatory concerns are at issue. Suppose Smith is threatening my life, and I am in a position to kill him in self defense. If I am not in some sense responsive to the grounds which support not killing Smith in the general case, then I will not be able to see the ways in which killing in self-defense is different. My failure to understand why I should not kill in general will undermine my reasoning when I am in a position to kill Smith in self-defense. This is why many beliefs gained from moral dependence (including past tense beliefs, e.g., "Socrates should have fled prison") are deficient: such aims, if relied on without independent justification, are not fully understood, and are not capable of having their proper general action-guiding force.  They are not appropriately linked up with the epistemic framework that enables one to be responsive to moral reasons.  Insofar as such beliefs contain some insight, it is not an insight that can have any effect on the way the agent thinks about other more pressing matters. Insofar as their justificatory basis bears a similarity to that in some other domain, it is not a similarity which can bring better understanding for other claims.  For this reason, the Recognition Requirement is not indifferent to moral dependence, even when the claim relied upon does not directly concern the actions of the dependent person. There are few moral claims which have a negligible relationship to action, and whose justificatory basis can therefore be ignored. Such a formulation represents the first of the two points I want to make in elaborating the claim that requirements of understanding limit moral dependence. The Recognition Requirement has broad implications for moral belief.
++
++
++
++
++
++Framework
++1. Aff’s framework assumes we can engage with the views of moral authorities but some people are structurally excluded. This assumes black hope! Outweighs since I account for material conditions without abstracting from realities. My arguments are epistemic questions about peoples’ ability to access the ethical system he advocates so it’s a prior question.
++
++2. Begs question of level of generality ~-~- moral authorities best suited at creating general theories for us to follow, i.e. we must help the poor or reject oppression, not specific things like "give poor people

EntryDate

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+2016-12-17 19:14:39.554

Judge

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+Matt Marr

Opponent

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+Mission San Jose AS

ParentRound

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+17

Round

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+2

Team

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+Harvard Westlake Gross Neg

Title

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+College Prep R2 NC

Tournament

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+College Prep

Changes for page Harvard Westlake Gross Neg

Summary

Details

Quick Links

Schools