Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.RoundClass[7]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[6]

Details

Caselist.RoundClass[7]

EntryDate

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1		-2016-09-25 14:17:00.647
	1	+2016-09-25 14:17:00.0

Caselist.CitesClass[6]

Cites

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	1	+The resolution is a question of whether the environment is intrinsically valuable or instrumentally valuable. Thus, the sufficient aff burden is to prove the environment is intrinsically valuable, while the neg burden is to prove the environment is instrumentally valuable.
	2	+prefer:
	3	+1. Text
	4	+2. Reciprocity
	5	+3. Limits
	6	+Only limited topics protect participants from research overload which materially affects our lives outside of round. Harris 13 Scott Harris (Director of Debate at U Kansas, 2006 National Debate Coach of the Year, Vice President of the American Forensic Association, 2nd speaker at the NDT in 1981). “This ballot.” 5 April 2013. CEDA Forums. http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=4762.0;attach=1655I understand that there has been some criticism of Northwestern’s strategy in this debate round. This criticism is premised on the idea that they ran framework instead of engaging Emporia’s argument about home and the Wiz. I think this criticism is unfair. Northwestern’s framework argument did engage Emporia’s argument. Emporia said that you should vote for the team that performatively and methodologically made debate a home. Northwestern’s argument directly clashed with that contention. My problem in this debate was with aspects of the execution of the argument rather than with the strategy itself. It has always made me angry in debates when people have treated topicality as if it were a less important argument than other arguments in debate. Topicality is a real argument. It is a researched strategy. It is an argument that challenges many affirmatives. The fact that other arguments could be run in a debate or are run in a debate does not make topicality somehow a less important argument. In reality, for many of you that go on to law school you will spend much of your life running topicality arguments because you will find that words in the law matter. The rest of us will experience the ways that word choices matter in contracts, in leases, in writing laws and in many aspects of our lives. Kansas ran an affirmative a few years ago about how the location of a comma in a law led a couple of districts to misinterpret the law into allowing individuals to be incarcerated in jail for two days without having any formal charges filed against them. For those individuals the location of the comma in the law had major consequences. Debates about words are not insignificant. Debates about what kinds of arguments we should or should not be making in debates are not insignificant either. The limits debate is an argument that has real pragmatic consequences. I found myself earlier this year judging Harvard’s eco-pedagogy aff and thought to myself—I could stay up tonight and put a strategy together on eco-pedagogy, but then I thought to myself—why should I have to? Yes, I could put together a strategy against any random argument somebody makes employing an energy metaphor but the reality is there are only so many nights to stay up all night researching. I would like to actually spend time playing catch with my children occasionally or maybe even read a book or go to a movie or spend some time with my wife. A world where there are an infinite number of affirmatives is a world where the demand to have a specific strategy and not run framework is a world that says this community doesn’t care whether its participants have a life or do well in school or spend time with their families. I know there is a new call abounding for interpreting this NDT as a mandate for broader more diverse topics. The reality is that will create more work to prepare for the teams that choose to debate the topic but will have little to no effect on the teams that refuse to debate the topic. Broader topics that do not require positive government action or are bidirectional will not make teams that won’t debate the topic choose to debate the topic. I think that is a con job. I am not opposed to broader topics necessarily. I tend to like the way high school topics are written more than the way college topics are written. I just think people who take the meaning of the outcome of this NDT as proof that we need to make it so people get to talk about anything they want to talk about without having to debate against Topicality or framework arguments are interested in constructing a world that might make debate an unending nightmare and not a very good home in which to live. Limits, to me, are a real impact because I feel their impact in my everyday existence.
	7	+4. Phil Ed
	8	+Impacts:
	9	+a) analytics
	10	+b) Philosophical education is key to developing any coherent judgment and understanding the world. Russell1 The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The person man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to becomes definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find, as we saw in our opening chapters, that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarges our thoughts and frees them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect. Apart from its utility in showing unsuspected possibilities, philosophy has a value ~-~- perhaps its chief value ~-~- through the greatness of the objects which it contemplates, and the freedom from narrow and personal aims resulting from this contemplation. The life of the instinctive person is shut up within the circle of his private interests: family and friends may be included, but the outer world is not regarded except as it may help or hinder what comes within the circle of instinctive wishes. In such a life there is something feverish and confined, in comparison with which the philosophic life is calm and free. The private world of instinctive interests is a small one, set in the midst of a great and powerful world which must, sooner or later, lay our private world in ruins. Unless we can so enlarge our interests as to include the whole outer world, we remain like a garrison in a beleagured fortress, knowing that the enemy prevents escape and that ultimate surrender is inevitable. In such a life there is no peace, but a constant strife between the insistence of desire and the powerlessness of will. In one way or another, if our life is to be great and free, we must escape this prison and this strife.
	11	+Contention 1: Action Theory
	12	+a) analytic
	13	+b) analytic
	14	+
	15	+Contention 2- Self Ownership:
	16	+Self ownership is a constraint on any moral theory. Any claim of moral responsibility or rectifying what is due rest upon a claim of entitlement. Butler
	17	+(PRECARIOUS LIFE THE POWERS OF MOURNING AND VIOLENCE / JUDITH BUTLER DD)
	18	+“At the same time, essential to many political movements is the claim of bodily integrity and self-determination. It is important to claim that our bodies are in a sense our own and that we are entitled to claim rights of autonomy over our bodies. This assertion is as true for lesbian and gay rights claims to sexual freedom as it is for transsexual and transgender claims to self-determination, as it is to intersex claims to be free of coerced medical and psychiatric interventions. It is as true for all claims to be free from racist attacks, physical and verbal, as it is for feminism's claim to reproductive freedom, and as it surely is for those whose bodies labor under duress, economic and political, under conditions of colonization and occupation. It is difficult, if not impossible, to make these claims without recourse to autonomy. I am not suggesting that we cease to make these claims. We have to, we must. I also do not wish to imply that we have to make these claims reluctantly or strategically. Defined within the broadest possible compass, they are part of any normative aspiration of a movement that seeks to maximize the protection and the freedoms of sexual and gender minorities, of women, and of racial and ethnic minorities, especially as they cut across all the other categories.” (26)
	19	+
	20	+
	21	+Willing the treatment of the environment as non-intrinsic is incompatible with willing self ownership. The institution of property is such that it provides one with the ability to employ usable things fully to achieve one’s purposes, so the destruction of property involves a contradiction in willing. Ataner1
	22	+We can also make our point with a series of questions: If “freedom requires that you be able to have usable things fully at your disposal, to use as you see fit, and so to decide which purposes to pursue with them”,131 then is not the destruction of usable things in contradiction with the requirements of freedom? How are you supposed to pursue any further purposes if you have made it your purpose to destroy the things within which you pursue your purposes? Clearly, given the Kantain perspective on the meaning of property, the (permanent) destruction of finite, non-renewable natural resources, such as land, is incoherent: one simply cannot invoke the right of property, or the freedoms that it is supposed to enable, to justify destroying such resources. Similarly, suppose Hegel is right to say that property permits the suppression of the “pure subjectivity of personality”, or that in possessing property I become “an actual will”, or that property “gives my will existence”, such that “not until he has property does the person exist as reason”. In that case, wouldn’t the destruction of property result in a failed actualization of the will? Suppose, again, we have a land-owner who wishes to poison his lands, rendering them unfit for future use: is such a person actualizing his will freely and effectively, or is he undercutting his own (future) ability to act freely and effectively? I maintain that, for both Kant and Hegel, the destruction of property holdings, especially of finite depletable resources, is fundamentally incompatible with the core rationale of property as a freedom-maximizing institution. Put differently, the destructive, dissipating or non-sustainable use of finite, depletable natural resources, especially land, constitutes a transgression of freedom because such use is radically inconsistent with the conditions under which alone “the greatest use of freedom” is possible. That is, Kant’s core tenet regarding the necessity of property acquisition as a function of our extended freedom in the world dictates that the character of usable things as usable, as means fit for the realization of human purposes, must be maintained in perpetuity.
	23	+All rights claims rest upon the presumption that we are entitled to autonomy over our own bodies.
	24	+
	25	+Contention 3- Anthropocentrism: A constraint on any ethical theory is that it An must account for an understanding that humans cannot be the only source of ethical value. This means that we should understand the intrinsic value of the environment around us in order to reject epistemically flawed human-centered ethical systems. Caldicott 95 (J. Baird Callicott, Presbyterian College, Intrinsic Value in Nature: a Metaethical Analysis http://ejap.louisiana.edu/EJAP/1995.spring/callicott.1995.spring.html 1/14))
	26	+11 Nothing, claims Norton, if we take human interests to be sufficiently broad and long (Norton 1991). Nature serves us in more ways than as a pool of raw materials and a dump for wastes. It provides priceless ecological services, many of which we imperfectly understand. And, undefiled, nature is a source of aesthetic gratification and religious inspiration. When the interests of future generations (as well as of present persons) in the ecological services and psycho-spiritual resources afforded people by nature are taken into account, respect for human beings (or for human interests) is quite enough to support nature protection, Norton argues. Thus anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric environmental ethics "converge"; that is, both prescribe the same personal practices and public policies (Norton 1991). 12 But do they? The most pressing environmental concern of the waning twentieth century is the erosion of nature's biological diversity. Edward O. Wilson estimates that the current rate of anthropogenic species extinction is 1000"background" rate (Wilson 1988). Several episodes of abrupt, mass species extinction occurred previously in the biography of Planet Earth. But none are believed to be attributable to an organism run amuck ~-~- certainly not to an organism capable of moral choice. Is the current tide of species extinction inconsistent with human interests, however wide and long we make them out to be? 13 David Ehrenfeld, for one, doubts it. Probably endangered species ~-~- such as the Bengal tiger and African elephant ~-~- that conservation biologists call "charismatic megafauna" would be sadly missed by future generations of Homo sapiens if the present generation allowed them to become extinct. And for just that reason there is a good chance that many such species will survive the holocaust. But, as Ehrenfeld points out, the brunt of the human assault on nature is borne by species that are not charismatic. In fact, most are insects, creatures more usually feared and loathed than admired by human beings. Nor is it likely that most of the species at risk of imminent extinction will prove to be raw material for useful products ~-~- such as medicines, fuels, fibers, foods, or feeds. Moreover, as Ehrenfeld notes, "the species whose members are the fewest in number, the rarest, the most narrowly distributed ~-~- in short, the ones most likely to become extinct ~-~- are obviously the ones least likely to be... ecologically influential; by no stretch of the imagination can we make them out to be vital cogs in the ecological machine" (1988: 215). The aforementioned Devil's Hole pupfish is a case in point. If it goes extinct the biosphere will be poorer, but will function not one iota less serviceably. 14 Norton's stretching of human interests, however, goes beyond goods, services, and the charismatic megafauna (and flora, such as the giant sequioa and Douglas fir) that excite popular natural aesthetic sensibilities. Those people who have what Aldo Leopold called "a refined taste in natural objects" may "value the wonder, excitement, and challenge presented to the human mind of so many species arising from a few dozen elements of the periodic table," as Ehrenfeld puts it (Leopold 1953: 149; Ehrenfeld 1988: 215). We might call that the "scientific" or "epistemological" utility of other species. Beyond even that, Norton finds a "moral value" in noncharismatic species. But it is a curious sort of moral value similar to the moral value that Immanuel Kant, notoriously, found in refraining from cruelty to animals. According to Norton Thoreau... believed that his careful observation of other species helped him to live a better life. I believe this also. So there are at least two people, and perhaps many others, who believe that species have value as a moral resource to humans, as a chance for humans to form, re-form, and improve their own value systems (Norton 1988: 201). 15 Let us grant the truth of Norton's "convergence hypothesis." All species severally and biodiversity globally can be embraced by an anthropocentric environmental ethic.
	27	+Contention 4: The existence of instrumental value in nature collapses to intrinsic value. Elliot (Robert Elliot*, Instrumental Value in Nature as a Basis for the Intrinsic Value of Nature as a Whole, http://hettingern.people.cofc.edu/Environmental_Studies_695_Environmental_Philosophy/Elliott_Instrumental_value_basis_for_intrinsic_value.pdf)
	28	+There is a style of argument for holism in environmental ethics that proceeds via the claim that nature as a whole has intrinsic value, or at least more than merely instrumental value, because nature gives rise to individual organisms that have intrinsic value. Perhaps the best known use of this style of argument is in the work of Holmes Rolston, III, where it is exemplified in his notion of projective nature, which has a special, noninstrumental value—systemic value, akin to intrinsic value.1 The idea is that nature has systemic value, which is more than merely instrumental value, in virtue of the fact that (projective) nature gives rise to organisms that have intrinsic value. The idea is particularly interesting because it provides one basis for the view that nature as a whole is suffused with value that is more than merely instrumental. Such value, associated with nature as a whole, adds to the value associated with the multitude of individual entities of intrinsic value that it contains, thereby strengthening value-based arguments for the preservation and protection of nature.
	29	+He continues
	30	+Rolston’s inference is valid and it does provide a basis for the striking view that nature as a whole is suffused with intrinsic value. Here it is argued that all things that have instrumental value could have intrinsic value partly or indeed solely in virtue of their instrumental value.5 This is a formal claim. It is a claim about what the concept of intrinsic value formally or conceptually permits. Establishing the truth of the formal claim secures the conceptual space for Rolston’s position and it’s starker variant. The related substantive claim, that things do in fact have intrinsic value in virtue of having instrumental value, is considered subsequently.6
	31	+K Underview:
	32	+First, treating the environment as a means to an end is anthropocentric logic, which spills over to other forms of oppression. Deckha 103
	33	+While the intersection of race and gender is often acknowledged in understanding the etiology of justificatory narratives for war, the presence of species distinctions and the importance of the subhuman are less appreciated. Yet, the race (and gender) thinking that animates Razack’s argument in normalizing violence for detainees (and others) is also centrally sustained by the subhuman figure. As Charles Patterson notes with respect to multiple forms of exploitation: Throughout the history of our ascent to dominance as the master species, 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 animas and do the same to them. Patterson emphasizes how the human/animal hierarchy and our ideas about animals and animality are foundational for intra-human hierarchies and the violence they promote. The routine violence against beings designated subhuman serves as both a justification and blueprint for violence against humans. For example, in discussing the specific dynamics of the Nazi camps, Patterson further notes how techniques to make the killing of detainees resemble the slaughter of animals were deliberately implemented in order to make the killing seem more palatable and benign. That the detainees were made naked and kept crowded in the gas chambers facilitated their animalization and, in turn, their death at the hands of other humans who were already culturally familiar and comfortable with killing animals in this way. Returning to Razack’s exposition of race thinking in contemporary camps, one can see how subhuman thinking is foundational to race thinking. One of her primary arguments is that race thinking, which she defines as “the denial of a common bond of humanity between people of European descent and those who are not”, is “a defining feature of the world order” today as in the past. In other words, it is the “species thinking” that helps to create the racial demarcation. As Razack notes with respect to the specific logic infusing the camps, they “are not simply contemporary excesses born of the west’s current quest for security, but instead represent a more ominous, permanent arrangement of who is and is not a part of the human community”. Once placed outside the “human” zone by race thinking, the detainees may be handled lawlessly and thus with violence that is legitimated at all times. Racialization is not enough and does not complete their Othering experience. Rather, they must be dehumanized for the larger public to accept the violence against them and the increasing “culture of exception” which sustains these human bodily exclusions. Although nonhumans are not the focus of Razack’s work, the centrality of the subhuman to the logic of the camps and racial and sexual violence contained therein is also clearly illustrated in her specific examples. In the course of her analysis, to determine the import of race thinking in enabling violence, Razack quotes a newspaper story that describes the background mentality of Private Lynndie England, the white female soldier made notorious by images of her holding onto imprisoned and naked Iraqi men with a leash around their necks. The story itself quotes a resident from England’s hometown who says the following about the sensibilities of individuals from their town: To the country boys here, if you’re a different nationality, a different race, you’re sub-human. That’s the way that girls like Lynndie England are raised. Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different from shooting a turkey. Every season here you’re hunting something. Over there they’re hunting Iraqis. Razack extracts this quote to illustrate how “race overdetermined what went on”, but it may also be observed that species “overdetermined what went on”. Race has a formative function, to be sure, but it works in conjunction with species difference to enable the violence at Abu Ghraib and other camps. Dehumanization promotes racialization, which further entrenches both identities. It is an intertwined logic of race, sex, culture and species that lays the foundation for the violence.
	34	+
	35	+Second, If action theory must start with conferring value on objects as ends in themselves, principles must be revised to account for anything that is arguably holding intrinsic value to be granted intrinsic worth- the alternative requires and allows rampant ableism and anthropocentrism. Caldicott 3 (J. Baird Callicott, Presbyterian College, Intrinsic Value in Nature: a Metaethical Analysis http://ejap.louisiana.edu/EJAP/1995.spring/callicott.1995.spring.html 1/14))
	36	+43 Because, Kant seems to assumes, only rational beings are capable of self-valuing. Certainly, only rational beings are capable of transcending the limitations of their subjectivity, of realizing that others value themselves as one values oneself ~-~- to wit, intrinsically. And only rational beings are autonomous, capable of deriving moral laws from the supreme practical principle, imposing those laws on themselves, and freely choosing to obey. Only rational beings, in other words, are legislators in the kingdom of ends. 44 To possess "objective" intrinsic value then, according to Kant, seems to requires that a being be capable of (1) valuing itself as an end in itself and (2) realizing that other beings value themselves in the same way. 45 But is the second qualification morally defensible? So what if a being that values itself intrinsically is not capable of realizing that others value themselves in the same way? Why shouldn't it also be an end for everyone who is able to transcend the limitations of subjectivity ~-~- because it is an end for itself? In effect, Kant requires that a being be able to requite respect in order to qualify for receiving it. That amounts to a reciprocity criterion for moral considerability: Only moral agents can be moral patients. 46 And that exposes Kant's anthropocentrism (ratiocentrism) to the Argument from Marginal Cases (See Regan 1979). If we suppose that rationality is itself an observable ability of certain beings ~-~- not an Enlightenment equivalent of the Medieval imago dei, possessed by all human beings irrespective of capacity ~-~- then we must admit that all human beings are not rational beings. And if not, they are, by Kant's clear reckoning "things" not "persons" and, therefore, "have only relative worth as means" (Kant 1950: 318). Kant's ethic would therefore seem to countenance painful medical experiments on prerational human infants, hunting nonrational human imbeciles for sport, and making dog food out of postrational elderly human beings, among other wicked and depraved things. One way to avoid such untoward consequences of Kant's ethical theory is simply to eliminate the reciprocity criterion for moral considerability and value intrinsically all beings that are arguably ends in themselves.
	37	+
	38	+Underview: Analytic

EntryDate

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	1	+2016-09-25 14:17:02.327

Judge

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	1	+Terrence Lonam

Opponent

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	1	+Millrun AJ

ParentRound

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	1	+7

Round

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	1	+5

Team

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	1	+Strake Jesuit Chen Aff

Title

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	1	+SO - Nailbomb AC

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	1	+Valley