Tournament: Newark | Round: 3 | Opponent: Harrison RP | Judge: Wesley Hu
AC
First, Prefer a pluralist account of morality:
- Monistic theories fail to account for specific situations and relationships- we should reject absolute duties in favor of prima facie duties tailored to specific situaitons.
DESAULNIERS 1 Angela Desaulniers, “Rossian Moral Pluralism: A (Partial) Defense”, Georgia State Department of Philosophy, Masters Thesis, 2006, pp. 3-16 DDA
In developing his moral theory, Ross aimed at finding a way to ground our
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knowledge has increased, we may find something new and need to reevaluate.
2. Only pluralistic duties takes into account all moral features of action and weighs the conflicting prima facie duties relevant to an action to determine rightness.
HINE 1 Kristen A. Hine, Professor at the Towson University Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Ph.D. in Philosophy from University of Massachusetts at Amherst, with a specialization in Applied Ethics (Biomedical Ethics and Business Ethics), “What is the Outcome of Applying Principlism?”, DDA
Ross’s view is sometimes characterized as a version of pluralism. According to such views, the rightness of an action is a matter of a plurality of moral features of the action, none of which are reducible to, or able to be explained in terms of, one particular feature. These views can be contrasted with monist accounts under which of rightness. On these views, rightness of an action is determined by one property of the action, such as being the action that maximizes utility. Ross’s pluralism manifests itself through his use of what he refers to as prima facie duties. These duties are to be differentiated from actual duties, or what he calls a duty proper. Ross explains the distinction as follows: I suggest “prima facie duty” or “conditional duty” as a brief way of referring to the characteristic (quite distinct from that of being a duty proper) which an act has, in virtue of being of a certain kind (e.g. the keeping of a promise), of being an act which would be a duty proper if it were not at the same time of another kind which is morally significant 9, p. 19. The idea here is that actions have several qualities or characteristics. Being a prima facie duty is one characteristic that an action has, and it has this characteristic because of the kind of action it is: being the keeping of a promise, being just, and so on. These are characteristics that “tend” to make the actions right (or wrong). And, whether an action really is right, whether an action is one’s duty proper, is determined by the entire nature of the action, not just one characteristic of the action. In some cases there is one prima facie duty; in other cases, there are several prima facie duties. So, for example, if I make a promise to a student to meet her for lunch, and there are no other morally salient features at play in this situation (there are no other prima facie duties), then my actual duty (duty proper) is to keep my promise. However, if on the way to my meeting with my student I see that someone is in need of assistance, a second morally salient feature has emerged. There is a conflict of prima facie duties. In this revised scenario, my actual duty is the action with the greatest balance of prima facie rightness over prima facie wrongness. According to Ross, Every act, therefore, viewed in some aspect, will be prima facie right, and viewed in others, prima facie wrong, and right acts can be distinguished from wrong acts only as being those which, of all those possible for the agent in those circumstances, have the greatest balance of prima facie rightness, in those respects in which they are prima facie right, over prima facie wrongness, in those respects in which they are prima facie wrong…For the estimation of the comparative stringency of these prima facie obligations no general rules can, so far as I can see, be laid down 9, p. 41. Ross’s view is, of course, not simple, since there is no unifying principle. Ross, however, is not bothered by this, as “…it is more important that our theory fit the facts than it be simple, and the account we have given above corresponds (it seems to me) better than either of the simpler theories with what we really think…” 9, p. 19. While Ross’s view is interesting and insightful, and deserves far more attention that I can allow here, due to space constraints I will have to limit my comments to those above. These comments are meant to explain and elaborate on Beauchamp and Childress’s principlism uses of prima facie duties. Given that this notion is central to Ross’s theory of right action, we have some reason to believe that principlism is likewise a theory of right action. Finally, the regular appearance of terms such as ‘duty,’ ‘obligation,’ ‘morally required’ and ‘wrong’ further support this interpretation of the view. For example, in their discussion of the appropriate application of principlism, Gordon et al. say the following, “He claimed that when it is clear that a patient will die soon, the physician’s duty is to alleviate the patient’s suffering: this means that it can sometimes be wrong to keep a patient alive for as long as possible and at all costs” 2, p. 2. Beauchamp and Childress, likewise, frequently talk of duties and obligations. They say, “Our framework encompasses several types of moral norms, including principles, rules, obligations, and rights…principles and rules establish rights as well as obligations…” 1, p. 13. And in his earlier discussion of the now well-known four cases, Beauchamp says, “My view is that it is morally required—not merely morally permitted—to overrule the parental refusal of treatment” 4, p. 271. In light of all of this evidence, it appears to be the case that philosophers working on theories in biomedical ethics believe that their theories provide decision procedures, which when properly applied, identify one’s moral obligation. They are, in other words, action-guiding criteria for the rightness of action.
And contractualism is a pluralistic theory- taking into account consequences, and intrinsic value of humans as well.
ASHFORD AND MULGAN Elizabeth Ashford and Tim Mulgan “Contractualism” 2007. SEP
In contractualism, individuals are motivated both by self-regard and by respect for others. Since each person is partly motivated by concern for her own interests, contractualism can ground consequentialist reasons. Part of what we owe others is to promote their interests. Contractualism can therefore accommodate important consequentialist aspects of the structure of moral thought. Unlike utilitarianism, however, the account of value underlying contractualism does not claim that there is only one rational attitude to have towards value. So contractualism can accommodate consequentialist aspects without being a completely consequentialist theory. (This represents an advantage of contractualism over naïve versions of Kantian ethics, which reject all consequentialist reasons and thus make it very difficult to explain why the consequences of our actions have any moral significance at all.) In contrast to an outcome ethics (such as utilitarianism), what is foundational for contractualism is not minimising what is undesirable, but considering what principles no-one could reasonably reject. Moral principles are grounded in the idea of living with others on terms of mutual respect. This means that as well as accommodating some consequentialist aspects, contractualism can also accommodate certain deontological intuitions: commonsense prohibitions against treating persons in certain ways even in circumstances in which the aggregate value of the consequences of doing so is very great. Which prohibitions are justified? This question “is best answered by considering what principles licensing others to take our lives could be reasonably rejected” (Scanlon 1998, p. 85). Among these principles might be ones that involve “accepting a certain view of the reasons one has: that the positive value of saving others does not justify killing someone” (Scanlon 1998, p. 84).
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Moral theories must be able to explain why we care about right and wrong.
SCANLON 2K T.M. Scanlon, “What We Owe to Each Other”, 2000, DDA
A satisfactory moral theory needs to explain the reason-giving and motivating force of judgments of right and wrong. This is commonly referred to as the problem of explaining moral motivation. I will continue to use this familiar label, but I want to stress at the outset that it is misleading in two important respects. First, it suggests that the problem in question is one of understanding how people are motivated rather than of understanding the reasons they have. As explained in Chapter 1, I hold that the question of reasons is primary and that once the relevant reasons are understood there is no separate problem of motivation. Second, the term “moral motivation” suggests a problem about motivation, or reasons, for action: a problem of understanding a special form of motivation, or a special kind of reason, that is triggered when one decides that it would be wrong not to do some- thing, and can move one, even in the face of strong countervailing considerations, to do it. As I will argue below, this formulation seems to me to be overly narrow. But, taking the problem in this form for the moment, I want to examine some of the questions it raises and some of the problems involved in answering them. The task of explaining how the fact that an action would be wrong provides a reason not to do it can be seen, first, as a task of self-understanding: we want to understand the reasons we are responding to when we are moved by moral considerations. But there seems to be more at stake than mere interpretation of the reasons we take ourselves to have. Even from the point of view of those of us who already care about right and wrong, a mere portrait of what it is we care about may seem to give us less than what we want: what we want to know is not merely what we care about when we care about right and wrong but why this is something we must care about. This concern is magnified when we turn to consider others: it seems that an adequate account of the morality of right and wrong should explain not merely what those who care about it are moved by but also why its importance is something that everyone has strong reason to recognize. This might be put by saying that what the question “Why be moral?” calls for is not mere self-understanding but justification: an account of why we and others have compelling reason to be moral. But ‘justification’ is a misleading term for what is needed here. It is misleading to say that what those of us who already care about right and wrong are looking for in our own case is a justification, because this suggests that we think we should abandon our concern with right and wrong unless some additional ground for it can be provided. It is also misleading to say that we are looking for a way of justifying the morality of right and wrong to someone who does not care about it—an “amoralist”—because this suggests that what we are looking for is an argument that begins from something to which such a person must be already committed and shows that anyone who accepts this starting point must recognize the authority of the morality of right and wrong. I myself doubt whether such a justification can always be provided. What we can provide, and what seems to me sufficient to answer our reasonable concerns, is a fuller explanation of the reasons for action that moral conclusions supply. In giving this explanation, however, we must address the problem of the moral “must”—the seeming necessity of moral demands—in two slightly different forms. The fact that an action would be wrong constitutes sufficient reason not to do it (almost?) no matter what other considerations there might be in its favor. If there are circumstances in which an agent could have sufficient reason to do something that he or she knew to be wrong, these are at best very rare. But if right and wrong always or even almost always take precedence over other values, this is something that requires explanation. How can it make sense, if we recognize values other than right and wrong and take them seriously, to claim that reasons of this one kind have priority over all the rest? I will refer to this as the problem of the priority of right and wrong over other values. This is the first way in which moral reasons seem to have a special force that needs to be explained. The second concerns our attitude toward people who are not moved by considerations of right and wrong. Failure to see the reason-giving force of such considerations strikes us as a particularly serious fault. This failure is not, in my view, a case of irrationality. (It could be called this only in the overextended sense in which it is irrational to fail to respond to any strong reason.) Nonetheless, failing to be moved by the fact that an action would be wrong seems quite different from merely being deaf to the appeal of reasons of some other kind, such as failing to see the value of art or literature, say, or the value of great works of nature. It strikes us as a more serious and important kind of fault. This is not just a difference in moral importance. It is no doubt trivially true that moral failings are more serious, from a moral point of view, than nonmoral failings. But it also seems true, in a more general sense which requires explanation, that there is a difference between a lack of concern with considerations of right and wrong and a failure to respond to reasons of other kinds, and that the former is a more serious failing in this more general sense, one with particularly grave implications. I will refer to the problem of explaining this difference as the problem of explaining the special importance of considerations of right and wrong. The problem of priority is a problem of explaining how considerations of right and wrong can play a certain role in the thinking of an agent. The problem of importance concerns the significance, for a third party, of the fact that an agent does or does not give moral considerations this role. Taken together, these two problems capture much of the concern that I mentioned above in discussing the idea of the moral “must.” I do not believe that an adequate answer to either of them needs to take the form of a justification of morality, but they are two related features of our notions of right and wrong that any adequate account of moral motivation must explain.
Contractualism gives the best account for moral motivation.
SCANLON 2 T.M. Scanlon, “What We Owe to Each Other”, 2000, DDA
Contractualism offers such an account. It holds that an act is wrong if its performance under the circumstances would be disallowed by any set of principles for the general regulation of behavior that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced general agreement.8 I will defer discussion of the normative content of this account until later chapters. It should at least be clear, however, that it overlaps to a significant degree with Mill’s definition of wrongness while not coinciding with it exactly. If we all have good reason to want acts of a certain kind not to be performed, then it is likely that any principles allowing such acts could be reasonably rejected, hence that they will be wrong. But it does not follow that this will be so in every case in which a greater balance of happiness would result from such acts’ being punished. According to contractualism, thinking about right and wrong is in one respect like thinking about the civil and criminal law: it involves thinking about how there is reason to want people in general to go about deciding what to do. But thinking about right and wrong differs from thinking about law in a number of crucial ways. One of these is that the reasons that guide us in thinking about what the law should be are commonly very different from the “sanction” that moves us to obey it (whether this is fear of punishment or a sense of obligation). In the case of the morality of right and wrong, however, these two kinds of reasons flow from the same more general reason: the reason we have to live with others on terms that they could not reasonably reject insofar as they also are motivated by this ideal. Because we have this reason we have reason to attend to the question of which actions are right and which wrong, that is, to try to determine what would be allowed by principles that others could not reasonably reject, and we also have reason to govern our practical thought and our conduct in the ways that these principles require. This account of moral motivation has much in common with another idea mentioned by Mill. In the chapter of Utilitarianism devoted to moral motivation Mill does not appeal directly to the substantive value of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” but invokes instead what he calls “the social feelings of mankind; the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures.”9 The ideal to which contractualism appeals—that of being able to justify your actions to others on grounds that they could not reasonably reject—is very similar to Mill’s idea of “unity.” One important difference, however, is that Mill takes himself to be describing a sentiment—a natural feature of human psychology—which explains how the motivation to act in accordance with utilitarianism could arise on some basis other than social conditioning. By contrast, on the account I am offering there is no need to appeal to a special psychological element to explain how a person could be moved to avoid an action by the thought that any principle allowing it would be one that others could reasonably reject. This is adequately explained by the fact that people have reason to want to act in ways that could be justified to others, together with the fact that when a rational person recognizes something as a reason we do not need a further explanation of how he or she could be moved to act on it.
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Universality dictates that individuals give others’ moral reasons equal weight in their moral reasoning.
SCANLON 4 T.M. Scanlon, “What We Owe to Each Other”, 2000, DDA
Different people can have different reasons for action, because of differences in their circumstances, their interests, and their intentions. People can also disagree about reasons, and I have been defending the view that people can be mistaken about their reasons for action—not just mistaken about what will promote their ends, but mistaken in having those ends to begin with. Attempts to claim this kind of objectivity for judgments about reasons are sometimes viewed with suspicion, on the ground that they are driven by a desire to claim the authority to criticize others and to tell them what to do. I therefore want to say something here about the diverse reasons we have for caring about what reasons other people have and about what reasons they take themselves to have. What should be said first is that there is fundamentally no question of why we should be concerned with the reasons that other people have. We must be so concerned, insofar as we take ourselves to have any reasons at all, since any judgment about our own reasons entails claims about the reasons that others have or would have in certain circumstances. I have already made this point in passing in discussing our reasons for resisting the idea that all reasons have subjective conditions, but it is important enough to merit fuller discussion. Suppose Jane looks out her window after a snowstorm and sees her neighbor shoveling his driveway. The snow is heavy. He is already panting, and he still has a long way to go. Jane sees that he could use help, and she takes this as a reason to get her shovel and go out. Even though she may not make them explicit to herself at the time, there are certain features of her neighbor’s situation and her own in virtue of which she takes this consideration to be a reason. Perhaps she thinks that she has a reason to help only because she cares about her neighbor, or only because she would enjoy helping, or only because she expects to need his help in the future and wants to make it harder for him to refuse. On the other hand, she may be a strict moralist who thinks that she has a reason to provide such help whether she feels like it or not. Leaving this question open, let G be the set of factors, whatever they may be, in virtue of which Jane takes herself to have reason to help her neighbor. Since she accepts the judgment that, given G, she has reason to help her neighbor, Jane is also committed to the view that anyone else who stands in the relation described by G to someone in need of help has reason to provide it. This is an instance of what I will call the universality of reason judgments. This is not a moral principle; Jane may be moved by moral considerations or she may not.62 It is not even a substantive claim about the considerations that count as reasons, since the contents of G have been left entirely open. In particular, the universality of reason judgments is not something that should be a matter of controversy between those who hold, and those who deny, that all our reasons, or certain of them, have subjective conditions. Even if all reasons are based on desires, the universality of reason judgments still holds that if I have a reason to do something because it will satisfy my desire, then anyone else who has that same desire (and whose situation is like mine in other relevant respects) also has this reason. The universality of reason judgments is a formal consequence of the fact that taking something to be a reason for acting is not a mere pro-attitude toward some action, but rather a judgment that takes certain considerations as sufficient grounds for its conclusion. Whenever we make judgments about our own reasons, we are committed to claims about the reasons that other people have, or would have under certain circumstances. We thus have wholly self-regarding reasons for having views about the correctness or incorrectness of the judgments people make about the reasons they have, since these judgments imply conclusions about the reasons we have. So situations can arise in which, if their judgments about their reasons for action are correct, our judgments about our own reasons must be mistaken. In order for such conflicts to be real, both parties must be making judgments about the same thing: for example, about whether certain considerations do in fact count in favor of a given attitude for a person in a certain situation. This means that they must be talking about the same attitude and that they must be employing similar sets of evaluative categories.
Thus the criterion is consistency with contractual obligation, which means an action is moral if it can be reasonably rejected . In the context of this resolution we msut look towards whether students would reasonably reject having their constiuaonly protected free speech be restricted by public collegs and univerisites.
ASHFORD AND Mulgan explain what constitutes a “reasonable rejection”.
Elizabeth Ashford and Tim Mulgan “Contractualism” 2007. SEP
In order to reasonably reject a principle, I must have some objection to it
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vol. 48, issue. 2, article 5, Winter 1973.
Analytic
analytic
Fourth- Students are hurt more when prilvdeges are prioritized over their rights to free speech
Hinkle 15 Barton Hinkle (Senior editorial writer and a columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch), "The Death of Free Speech on College Campuses", reason.com, 3/18/2015, reason.com/archives/2015/03/18/the-death-of-free-speech-on-college-camp
A. The second reason for protecting students from thoughts and ideas they find upsetting is to spare their tender feelings. But this effort is self-defeating. Even if it were possible to measure emotional pain, and to decide at what point such pain should (pardon the term) trigger the censor’s veto, it is not possible to protect everyone’s feelings the way we can protect everyone’s rights. A regime that protects everyone’s free-speech rights can allow both the gay-rights advocate and the Christian fundamentalist to speak her mind. But a regime concerned with protecting people’s feelings inevitably will hurt either the fundamentalist’s feelings (by allowing only the gay-rights advocate to speak) or the advocate’s feelings (by allowing only the fundamentalist to speak). Unless, of course, it hurts both of their feelings by letting neither of them speak. No matter what, though, it allows the censors to dismiss some people’s claims for consideration as less worthy. (You sometimes get the sense that’s exactly what the campus censors want.) What’s more, any regime that “privileges” feelings over rights inevitably will ignore the very real emotional pain experienced by another important group: those who cherish individual liberty and abhor censorship of any kind. There are still a few of them left – even on the modern American campus.
And, Requiring people to conform to norms of political correctness on campus functions to exclude people even though the purpose is to promote inclusivity.
Hinkle 15 Barton Hinkle (Senior editorial writer and a columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch), "The Death of Free Speech on College Campuses", reason.com, 3/18/2015, reason.com/archives/2015/03/18/the-death-of-free-speech-on-college-camp
A. You can imagine how well that went over. The campus LGBT group, Allied in Pride, responded that YAF’s “refusal to use preferred gender pronouns should be considered an act of violence.” The comment calls to mind the Social Justice Kittens calendar, which features adorable kittens saying things such as “this conversation doesn’t make me feel safe” and “you are jeopardizing my well-being with your violent refusal to agree.” Episodes such as these – along with the increasing demand for “trigger warnings,” the campaigns to stamp out “microaggressions,” and so forth – neatly illustrate the snake-swallowing-its-own-tail nature of political correctness. Its support for diversity produces demands for conformity. Its insistence on inclusivity requires it to exclude those who, say, swell with pride at the sight of Old Glory. Its efforts to make the classroom a “safe space” have made classes unsafe for those whose views deviate from the campus norm. It deploys macro-aggression – coercion and compulsion – to punish such non-aggressive acts as the peaceful withholding of consent. The campaign against hate speech – or merely offensive speech, or just any speech the listener disagrees with – rests on a couple of different rationales. The first is that hateful speech can lead to hateful acts: Racial epithets might lead to lynching, for example. But there is no real empirical evidence to support that claim. Indeed, on today’s campus any violence is more likely to be directed at the offending speaker, rather than at his intended target. (E.g, when an anti-abortion protester showed up a few days ago at the University of Oregon, he didn’t change any minds, but students did snatch his poster and tear it up. “This is not part of your First Amendment right,” they said.)
Next- restriction of free speech has racial undertones and has helped perpetuate racism in the past.
Zimmerman 16 Jonathan Zimmerman (professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania), "Racism Was Served by Silence. Justice Requires Free Speech for All." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 12/13/2016, www.chronicle.com/article/Racism-Was-Served-by-Silence/238667
In 1905, when W.E.B. Du Bois and 28 others met at Niagara Falls, Ontario — because hotels on the American side wouldn’t serve blacks — they demanded not just equal access to public facilities and the ballot box but also freedom of speech. And when Du Bois helped launch the NAACP, four years after that, he insisted that African-Americans could never gain civil rights so long as they were prevented from speaking their minds. After World War II, Du Bois was indicted for failing to register as a member of an antinuclear organization that the government deemed "subversive." Although he was acquitted, he continued to campaign for the freedom of others who were persecuted or muzzled during the Cold War. "It is clear still today that freedom of speech and of thinking can be attacked in the United States without the intellectual and moral leaders of this land raising a hand or saying a word in protest or defense," he wrote in 1952. "Than this fateful silence there is on earth no greater menace to present civilization." The NAACP was listed as a subversive organization in several states, too, which helps explain why Jeff Sessions thought it was Communist-inspired. Therefore members had to either keep their affiliation hidden — in violation of the law — or register with the government, which subjected them to still further harassment. And when students at South Carolina State College for Negroes protested the interrogation of NAACP members on campus, the students were investigated themselves. In short, if you didn’t have freedom of speech, you couldn’t counter any other injustice. That’s a lesson that some of today’s student activists — and some college administrators — seem to have forgotten. Although courts have consistently found campus speech codes unconstitutional, hundreds of colleges continue to discipline students for saying the wrong thing. Faculty members, too, have come under fire. During the wave of protests that swept campuses last fall, students at Duke University called for the dismissal of professors who "perpetuate hate speech that threatens the safety of students of color." At Emory University, students demanded "repercussions or sanctions for racist actions performed by professors." Let me be clear: If students think a faculty member is racist, they have every right to say so. But nobody has a right to limit someone else’s speech, via institutional prohibitions or star chambers or anything else. That’s precisely what white America tried to do to the NAACP and other African-Americans. We insult their memories when we silence one another in the name of racial justice, which will never be served by the restriction of free speech.
