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  • Caselist.CitesClass[7]
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Caselist.CitesClass[7]

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Caselist.CitesClass[8]

Cites

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	1	+====The Aff views humanity as something sacred and worthy of value. They see it as more valuable than any non-human animal. They limit QI because of the affects it has on humans but forget that non humans are altogether excluded from court and the CJS. They are only solving for human animals. The normative principle of saying humans matter has an implicit understanding that non-human animals are worth less. It still oppresses the non-human. This is not a link of omission because the idea of giving value to true humanity is an implicit exclusion of the non-human animal body. Reasons why it’s a link of omission are uniqueness arguments for me since people don’t understand that when we say these things we are being exclusionary.====
	2	+Bell and Russell 2K^^ ^^
	3	+For this reason, the various movements against oppression need to be aware of and
	4	+AND
	5	+Russell, Bell, and Fawcett, 2000), anthropocentrism passes unchallenged. 1
	6	+
	7	+
	8	+====The state and notions of sovereignty creates a split a split between humanity and nature. Smith 11^^ ^^ ====
	9	+This contest is political because human dominion over the Earth is not, as so many assume, just a theological idea(l) justified by biblical exegesis or a secular ideology unquestioningly assumed by (supposedly self-critical) Western philosophical systems. It is also should be understood both in Bruno Latour’s (1993; 2004, 239) "broader metaphysical sense," as the explicit (but never fully achievable) modernist division of the world into two realms—the human and the nonhuman, subjects and objects, evaluatively driven politics and the supposedly apolitical, value-free, natural sciences, and so on—and constitutionally in the narrower political sense: the modern principle of national sovereignty, for example, presumes ecological sovereignty over a specific territory (Kuehls 1996). Ecologically speaking, competing claims to territorial sovereignty, such as those concerning an Arctic seabed now increasingly bereft of its protective ice cap, are all about which state gets to decide how and when these "natural resources" are exploited. Of course, states may also employ ecological rhetoric in staking their claims to be responsible stewards of nature. But making such decisions, even if they occasionally involve distinguishing between natural resources and nature reserves, is the defining mark of ecological sovereignty, and these decisions are premised on, and expressions of, the modernist metaphysical distinction between the decisionistic politics associated with (at least some) "properly human subjects " and the objectification of nonhuman nature as a resource. The modern constitution and its overseer, the principle of ecological sovereignty, exemplify what Agamben (2004) refers to as the "anthropological machine"—the historically variable but constantly recurring manufacture of metaphysical distinctions to separate and elevate the properly human from the less-than-fully-human and the natural world. Contesting ecological sovereignty requires that we trace connections between such metaphysical distinctions and political decisions. It requires (to employ a somewhat hackneyed phrase) yet another Copernican revolution—a decentering, weakening, and overturning of the idea/ideology of human exceptionalism. We might say that any critique of political sovereignty failing to attend to these metaphysical distinctions will be ecologically blind, whereas any ecological critique of humanist metaphysics in political isolation will be empty. For example, past environmental critiques of human dominion and debates about the merits of Earthly stewardship (White 1967; Black 1970; Passmore 1974) may have been vital catalysts for the emergence of radical ecology, but they rarely of sovereignty intact, then we automatically and continually give shelter to the notion of ecological sovereignty, and all talk of changed ecological relations is ultimately hollow. Of course, few ecologists are going to protest if a sovereign nation decides to set aside an area as a nature reserve! But the point is that this decision, which divides and rules the world for ostensibly different purposes, is plausible only if the overarching authority to make (and adapt and reverse) such all-encompassing decisions is already presumed. It presumes human dominion and assumes that the natural world is already, before any decision is even made, fundamentally a human resource. This is, after all, both the contemporary condition that nature is being reserved (and yet not released) from, and the original condition of that mythic prepolitical "state of nature" (epitomized in Locke’s work) where a presumptive ecological sovereignty serves as the foundational premise for an emergent political sovereignty (see chapter 3). How paradoxical, then, that the decision to (p)reserve some aspects of ecology, to maintain it in what is deemed to be its natural state, has today associated with (at least some) "properly human subjects " and the objectification of nonhuman nature as a resource. Either way, one might say, everywhere sovereignty declares nature free, it is already in chains. And metaphysically, ecologically, and politically speaking, the claims and chains of sovereignty are all encompassing: they encircle the world. In this sense, sovereignty is an antiecological and not, as its accompanying rhetoric and its modern environmental proponents (see chapter 7) sometimes suggest, a potentially ecological principle—at least if we understand ecology as something more than, and irreducible to, a human resource, and this is radical ecology’s (but certainly not only radical ecology’s) understanding. Another way of putting this, and one that fits with the analysis of sovereignty provided by thinkers as politically diverse as Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben, is to say that the nature reserve is the exception that decisively proves the rule—in the sense of both making tangible the dominant ideological norm a resource, freed from human domination, only by being already and always included within the remit of human domination. And according to Agamben (2004, 37), this troubling figure of exclusion/inclusion, this "zone of indeterminacy," typifies the operation of both sovereignty and the anthropological machine.
	10	+
	11	+
	12	+====Their extinction claims require a defense of the intrinsic value of human survival as separated from other forms of life. This involves the image of distinctly good human life contrasted to the banal useless existence of the genes. This makes the aff’s political subjectivity an affect of a species-contingent survival paradigm which abandons bare life.====
	13	+**KOCHI and ORDAN 2K8** ~~tarik and noam, queen’s university and bar llan university, "an argument for the global suicide of humanity", vol 7. no. 4., bourderlands e-journal~~
	14	+If only some of our genes but not our species has survived, maybe the
	15	+AND
	16	+, no matter how hard we try to forget, suppress or repress it
	17	+
	18	+And, a human centered appraoch is epistemically suspect. Alternative forms of knowledge production are key, which makes the alternative a pre-requisite. Das 14
	19	+Parallax describes the apparent change in the direction of a moving object caused by alteration in the observer's position. In the graphic work of M.C. Escher, human faculties are similarly deceived and an impossible reality made plausible. While not strictly a scientific theorem, anthropocentrism, the assessment of reality through an exclusively human perspective, is deeply embedded in science and culture. Improving knowledge requires abandoning anthropocentricity or, at least, acknowledging its existence. Anthropocentrism's limits derive from the physical constraints of human cognition and specific psychological attitudes. Being human entails specific faculties, intrinsic attitudes, values and belief systems that shape enquiry and understanding. The human mind has evolved a specific physical structure and bio-chemistry that shapes thought processes. The human cognitive system determines our reasoning and therefore our knowledge. Language, logic, mathematics, abstract thought, cultural beliefs, history and memories create a specific human frame of reference, which may restrict what we can know or understand. There may be other forms of life and intelligence. The ocean has revealed creatures that live from chemo-synthesis in ecosystems around deep-sea hydrothermal vents, without access to sunlight. Life forms based on materials other than carbon may also be feasible. An entirely radical set of cognitive frameworks and alternative knowledge cannot be discounted. Like a train that can only run on tracks that determine direction and destination, human knowledge may ultimately be constrained by what evolution has made us. Knowledge was originally driven by the need to master the natural environment to meet basic biological needs—survival and genetic propagation. It was also needed to deal with the unknown and forces beyond human control. Superstition, religion, science and other belief systems evolved to meets these human needs. In the eighteenth century, medieval systems of aristocratic and religious authority were supplanted by a new model of scientific method, rational discourse, personal liberty and individual responsibility. But this did not change the basic underlying drivers. Knowledge is also influenced by human factors—fear and greed, ambition, submission and tribal collusion, altruism and jealousy, as well as complex power relationships and inter-personal group dynamics. Behavioural science illustrates the inherent biases in human thought. Announcing a boycott of certain "luxury" scientific journals, 2013 Nobel laureate Dr. Randy Schekman argued that to preserve their pre-eminence they acted like "fashion designers who create limited-edition handbags or suits…knowing scarcity stokes demand". He argued that science is being distorted by perverse incentives whereby scientists who publish in important journals with a high "impact factor" can expect promotion, pay rises and professional accolades. Understanding operates within these biological and attitudinal constraints. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: "every philosophy hides a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding place, every word is a mask". Understanding of fundamental issues remains limited. The cosmological nature and origins of the universe are contested. The physical source and nature of matter and energy are debated. The origins and evolution of biological life remain unresolved. Resistance to new ideas frequently restricts the development of knowledge. The history of science is a succession of controversies—a non geo-centric universe, continental drift, theory of evolution, quantum mechanics and climate change. Science, paradoxically, seems to also have inbuilt limits. Like an inexhaustible Russian doll, quantum physics is an endless succession of seemingly infinitely divisible particles. Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle posits that human knowledge about the world is always incomplete, uncertain and highly contingent. Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems of mathematical logic establish inherent limitations of all but the most trivial axiomatic systems of arithmetic. Experimental methodology and testing is flawed. Model predictions are often unsatisfactory. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb observed: "You can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations … there is no such thing as a controlled experiment." Challenging anthropocentrism does not mean abandoning science or rational thought. It does not mean reversion to primitive religious dogma, messianic phantasms or obscure mysticism. Transcending anthropocentricity may allow new frames of reference expanding the boundary of human knowledge. It may allow human beings to think more clearly, consider different perspectives and encourage possibilities outside the normal range of experience and thought. It may also allow a greater understanding of our existential place within nature and in the order of things. As William Shakespeare's Hamlet cautioned a friend: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy". But fundamental biology may not allow the required change of reference framework. While periodically humbled by the universe, human beings remain enamoured, for the most part, with the proposition that they are the apogee of development. But as Mark Twain observed in Letters from Earth: "He took a pride in man; man was his finest invention; man was his pet, after the housefly." Writing in The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, the late English author Douglas Adams speculated that the earth was a powerful computer and human beings were its biological components designed by hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings to answer the ultimate questions about the universe and life. To date, science has not produced a conclusive refutation of this whimsical proposition. Whether or not we can go beyond anthropocentrism, it is a reminder of our limits. As Martin Rees, Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, at Cambridge and Astronomer Royal, noted: "Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae."
	20	+Anthroprocentrism is the root cause of all war and oppression; several warrants Best 7
	21	+While a welcome advance over the anthropocentric conceit that only humans shape human actions, the environmental determinism approach typically fails to emphasize the crucial role that animals play in human history, as well as how the human exploitation of animals is a key cause of hierarchy, social conflict, and environmental breakdown. A core thesis of what I call “animal standpoint theory” is that animals have been key driving and shaping forces of human thought, psychology, moral and social life, and history overall. More specifically, animal standpoint theory argues that the oppression of human over human has deep roots in the oppression of human over animal. In this context, Charles Patterson’s recent book, The Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, articulates the animal standpoint in a powerful form with revolutionary implications. The main argument of Eternal Treblinka is that the human domination of animals, such as it emerged some ten thousand years ago with the rise of agricultural society, was the first hierarchical domination and laid the groundwork for patriarchy, slavery, warfare, genocide, and other systems of violence and power. A key implication of Patterson’s theory is that human liberation is implausible if disconnected from animal liberation, and thus humanism ~-~- a speciesist philosophy that constructs a hierarchal relationship privileging superior humans over inferior animals and reduces animals to resources for human use ~-~- collapses under the weight of its logical contradictions. Patterson lays out his complex holistic argument in three parts. In Part I, he demonstrates that animal exploitation and speciesism have direct and profound connections to slavery, colonialism, racism, and anti-Semitism. In Part II, he shows how these connections exist not only in the realm of ideology – as conceptual systems of justifying and underpinning domination and hierarchy – but also in systems of technology, such that the tools and techniques humans devised for the rationalized mass confinement and slaughter of animals were mobilized against human groups for the same ends. Finally, in the fascinating interviews and narratives of Part III, Patterson describes how personal experience with German Nazism prompted Jewish to take antithetical paths: whereas most retreated to an insular identity and dogmatic emphasis on the singularity of Nazi evil and its tragic experience, others recognized the profound similarities between how Nazis treated their human captives and how humanity as a whole treats other animals, an epiphany that led them to adopt vegetarianism, to become advocates for the animals, and develop a far broader and more inclusive ethic informed by universal compassion for all suffering and oppressed beings. The Origins of Hierarchy "As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other" –Pythagoras It is little understood that the first form of oppression, domination, and hierarchy involves human domination over animals. Patterson’s thesis stands in bold contrast to the Marxist theory that the domination over nature is fundamental to the domination over other humans. It differs as well from the social ecology position of Murray Bookchin that domination over humans brings about alienation from the natural world, provokes hierarchical mindsets and institutions, and is the root of the long-standing western goal to “dominate” nature. In the case of Marxists, anarchists, and so many others, theorists typically don’t even mention human domination of animals, let alone assign it causal primacy or significance. In Patterson’s model, however, the human subjugation of animals is the first form of hierarchy and it paves the way for all other systems of domination such as include patriarchy, racism, colonialism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. As he puts it, “the exploitation of animals was the model and inspiration for the atrocities people committed against each other, slavery and the Holocaust being but two of the more dramatic examples.” Hierarchy emerged with the rise of agricultural society some ten thousand years ago. In the shift from nomadic hunting and gathering bands to settled agricultural practices, humans began to establish their dominance over animals through “domestication.” In animal domestication (often a euphemism disguising coercion and cruelty), humans began to exploit animals for purposes such as obtaining food, milk, clothing, plowing, and transportation. As they gained increasing control over the lives and labor power of animals, humans bred them for desired traits and controlled them in various ways, such as castrating males to make them more docile. To conquer, enslave, and claim animals as their own property, humans developed numerous technologies, such as pens, cages, collars, ropes, chains, and branding irons. The domination of animals paved the way for the domination of humans. The sexual subjugation of women, Patterson suggests, was modeled after the domestication of animals, such that men began to control women’s reproductive capacity, to enforce repressive sexual norms, and to rape them as they forced breeding in their animals. Not coincidentally, Patterson argues, slavery emerged in the same region of the Middle East that spawned agriculture, and, in fact, developed as an extension of animal domestication practices. In areas like Sumer, slaves were managed like livestock, and males were castrated and forced to work along with females. In the fifteenth century, when Europeans began the colonization of Africa and Spain introduced the first international slave markets, the metaphors, models, and technologies used to exploit animal slaves were applied with equal cruelty and force to human slaves. Stealing Africans from their native environment and homeland, breaking up families who scream in anguish, wrapping chains around slaves’ bodies, shipping them in cramped quarters across continents for weeks or months with no regard for their needs or suffering, branding their skin with a hot iron to mark them as property, auctioning them as servants, breeding them for service and labor, exploiting them for profit, beating them in rages of hatred and anger, and killing them in vast numbers – all these horrors and countless others inflicted on black slaves were developed and perfected centuries earlier through animal exploitation. As the domestication of animals developed in agricultural society, humans lost the intimate connections they once had with animals. By the time of Aristotle, certainly, and with the bigoted assistance of medieval theologians such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, western humanity had developed an explicitly hierarchical worldview – that came to be known as the “Great Chain of Being” – used to position humans as the end to which all other beings were mere means. Patterson underscores the crucial point that the domination of human over human and its exercise through slavery, warfare, and genocide typically begins with the denigration of victims. But the means and methods of dehumanization are derivative, for speciesism provided the conceptual paradigm that encouraged, sustained, and justified western brutality toward other peoples. “Throughout the history of our ascent to dominance as the master species,” Patterson writes, “our victimization of animals has served as the model and foundation for our victimization of each other. The study of human history reveals the pattern: first, humans exploit and slaughter animals; then, they treat other people like animals and do the same to them.” Whether the conquerors are European imperialists, American colonialists, or German Nazis, western aggressors engaged in wordplay before swordplay, vilifying their victims – Africans, Native Americans, Filipinos, Japanese, Vietnamese, Iraqis, and other unfortunates – with opprobrious terms such as “rats,” “pigs,” “swine,” “monkeys,” “beasts,” and “filthy animals.” Once perceived as brute beasts or sub-humans occupying a lower evolutionary rung than white westerners, subjugated peoples were treated accordingly; once characterized as animals, they could be hunted down like animals. The first exiles from the moral community, animals provided a convenient discard bin for oppressors to dispose the oppressed. The connections are clear: “For a civilization built on the exploitation and slaughter of animals, the `lower’ and more degraded the human victims are, the easier it is to kill them.” Thus, colonialism, as Patterson describes, was a “natural extension of human supremacy over the animal kingdom.” For just as humans had subdued animals with their superior intelligence and technologies, so many Europeans believed that the white race had proven its superiority by bringing the “lower races” under its command. There are important parallels between speciesism and sexism and racism in the elevation of white male rationality to the touchstone of moral worth. The arguments European colonialists used to legitimate exploiting Africans – that they were less than human and inferior to white Europeans in ability to reason – are the very same justifications humans use to trap, hunt, confine, and kill animals. Once western norms of rationality were defined as the essence of humanity and social normality, by first using non-human animals as the measure of alterity, it was a short step to begin viewing odd, different, exotic, and eccentric peoples and types as non- or sub-human. Thus, the same criterion created to exclude animals from humans was also used to ostracize blacks, women, and numerous other groups from “humanity.” The oppression of blacks, women, and animals alike was grounded in an argument that biological inferiority predestined them for servitude. In the major strain of western thought, alleged rational beings (i.e., elite, white, western males) pronounce that the Other (i.e., women, people of color, animals) is deficient in rationality in ways crucial to their nature and status, and therefore are deemed and treated as inferior, subhuman, or nonhuman. Whereas the racist mindset creates a hierarchy of superior/inferior on the basis of skin color, and the sexist mentality splits men and women into greater and lower classes of beings, the speciesist outlook demeans and objectifies animals by dichotomizing the biological continuum into the antipodes of humans and animals. As racism stems from a hateful white supremacism, and sexism is the product of a bigoted male supremacism, so speciesism stems from and informs a violent human supremacism ~-~- namely, the arrogant belief that humans have a natural or God-given right to use animals for any purpose they devise or, more generously, within the moral boundaries of welfarism and stewardship, which however was Judaic moral baggage official Christianity left behind.
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	23	+The alternative is to reject the anthroprocentrism of the AFF and endorse the voluntary global suicide of humanity. – that solves. Kochi and Ordan 8
	24	+For some, guided by the pressure of moral conscience or by a practice of harm minimisation, the appropriate response to historical and contemporary environmental destruction is that of action guided by abstention. For example, one way of reacting to mundane, everyday complicity is the attempt to abstain or opt-out of certain aspects of modern, industrial society: to not eat non-human animals, to invest ethically, to buy organic produce, to not use cars and buses, to live in an environmentally conscious commune. Ranging from small personal decisions to the establishment of parallel economies (think of organic and fair trade products as an attempt to set up a quasi-parallel economy), a typical modern form of action is that of a refusal to be complicit in human practices that are violent and destructive. Again, however, at a practical level, to what extent are such acts of nonparticipation rendered banal by their complicity in other actions? In a grand register of violence and harm the individual who abstains from eating non-human animals but still uses the bus or an airplane or electricity has only opted out of some harm causing practices and remains fully complicit with others. One response, however, which bypasses the problem of complicity and the banality of action is to take the non-participation solution to its most extreme level. In this instance, the only way to truly be non-complicit in the violence of the human heritage would be to opt-out altogether. Here, then, the modern discourse of reflection, responsibility and action runs to its logical conclusion – the global suicide of humanity – as a free-willed and ‘final solution’. While we are not interested in the discussion of the ‘method’ of the global suicide of humanity per se, one method that would be the least violent is that of humans choosing to no longer reproduce. 10 The case at point here is that the global suicide of humanity would be a moral act; it would take humanity out of the equation of life on this earth and remake the calculation for the benefit of everything nonhuman. While suicide in certain forms of religious thinking is normally condemned as something which is selfish and inflicts harm upon loved ones, the global suicide of humanity would be the highest act of altruism. That is, global suicide would involve the taking of responsibility for the destructive actions of the human species. By eradicating ourselves we end the long process of inflicting harm upon other species and offer a human-free world. If there is a form of divine intelligence then surely the human act of global suicide will be seen for what it is: a profound moral gesture aimed at redeeming humanity. Such an act is an offer of sacrifice to pay for past wrongs that would usher in a new future. Through the death of our species we will give the gift of life to others. It should be noted nonetheless that our proposal for the global suicide of humanity is based upon the notion that such a radical action needs to be voluntary and not forced. In this sense, and given the likelihood of such an action not being agreed upon, it operates as a thought experiment which may help humans to radically rethink what it means to participate in modern, moral life within the natural world. In other words, whether or not the act of global suicide takes place might well be irrelevant. What is more important is the form of critical reflection that an individual needs to go through before coming to the conclusion that the global suicide of humanity is an action that would be worthwhile. The point then of a thought experiment that considers the argument for the global suicide of humanity is the attempt to outline an anti-humanist, or non-human-centric ethics. Such an ethics attempts to take into account both sides of the human heritage: the capacity to carry out violence and inflict harm and the capacity to use moral reflection and creative social organisation to minimise violence and harm. Through the idea of global suicide such an ethics reintroduces a central question to the heart of moral reflection: To what extent is the value of the continuation of human life worth the total harm inflicted upon the life of all others? Regardless of whether an individual finds the idea of global suicide abhorrent or ridiculous, this question remains valid and relevant and will not go away, no matter how hard we try to forget, suppress or repress it

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Judge

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	1	+all

Opponent

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	1	+all

ParentRound

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	1	+4

Round

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	1	+1

Team

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	1	+Palo Alto Neg

Title

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	1	+Nov dec anthro

Tournament

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	1	+doesnt matter