1ac - agonism 1nc - habeus viscus k test case theory 2nr - k 2ar - hagglund impact turn to k substance
Apple Valley
1
Opponent: Lexington KL | Judge: Bennett Eckert
1ac - pvc plan 1nc - court clog da oversight cp 2nr - both 2ar - advantage 1 link turn on da
Apple Valley
6
Opponent: WDM Valley CR | Judge: Rick Brundage
1ac - pvc v1 1nc - abolish police cp culture da 2nr - both 2ar - case link turns on both
Grapevine
2
Opponent: CPS ZD | Judge: Dylan Cavanaugh
1AC- this aff 1NC- ecopess 1AR- case and K 2NR- K RFD- case outweighs perm
Grapevine
2
Opponent: CPS ZD | Judge: Dylan Cavanaugh
1AC- this aff 1NC- ecopess 1AR- case and K 2NR- K RFD- case outweighs perm
Greenhill
1
Opponent: Apple Valley KA | Judge: Megan Nubel
same aff went for theory in 1AR and collapsed to it in the 2AR RFD was aff on theory
Greenhill
1
Opponent: Apple Valley KA | Judge: Megan Nubel
same aff went for theory in 1AR and collapsed to it in the 2AR RFD was aff on theory
Greenhill
3
Opponent: Dulles AW | Judge: Hunter Harwood
Armenia aff and theory Judge voted neg on K
Greenhill
Doubles
Opponent: Peninsula JL | Judge: Felix Tan, John Scoggin, Adam Torson
1ac - butler 1nc - plan flaw util nc states cp politics da 1ar - both new shells presumption 2nr - politics da states cp util fw 2ar - cx checks shell and presumption
HW RR
6
Opponent: Harvard Westlake CE | Judge: Singh, Flores
1ac - agonism v2 1nc - cap k case 2nr - cap k 2ar - cap good
Harvard Westlake
Octas
Opponent: La Canada AZ | Judge: Eckert, Drodza, OKrent
1ac - israel 1nc - t any courts cp endowments da extinction first nc case 2nr - endowments da extinction first nc 2ar - test case theory 2-1 for alex eckert voted on test case
Harvard Westlake RR
4
Opponent: Lynbrook HW | Judge: timmons and torson
1ac - util 1nc - wilderson k title ix da 2nr - both 2ar - cede the political
Harvard Westlake RR
2
Opponent: Lynbrook VV | Judge: Scoggin, Randall
1ac - patriotic correctness 1nc - mouths shut k 2nr - k 2ar - substance
Kandi King RR
1
Opponent: Harrison RP | Judge: Fife, Paramo
1ac - kant 1nc - deont K race K 2nr - both 2ar - same
Kandi King RR
3
Opponent: Harvard Westlake IP | Judge: Sharma, Gravely
1ac - israel v2 1nc - cap k econ DA inherency press 2nr - cap k and fairness bad 2ar - alt agent fiat theory
Kandi King RR
2
Opponent: Success Academy SC | Judge: Sims, Koshak
1ac - util v2 1nc - endowments da safe spaces da expenditures da politics da case turns 2nr - safe spaces da case turns 2ar - same as 2nr
South Texas NSDA Quals
3
Opponent: Idk | Judge: Bram I cant spell their last name sorry
1ac - kant 1nc - cap good da util fw anthro k 2nr - everything 2ar - kant fw
South Texas NSDA Quals
1
Opponent: Kempner | Judge: David Slaughter
1ac - lay util 1nc - 2 contentions (contention 1 was crime contention 2 was a living wage cp) 2nr - everything 2ar - everything
Strake RR
2
Opponent: Cedar Park MG | Judge: Wright, Paramo
1ac - agonism 1nc - borderlands k 2nr - k 2ar - substance
TFA
6
Opponent: Kinkaid VL | Judge: Jacob Koshak
1ac - butler disclosure 1nc - k 2nr - k 2ar - substance
TFA
1
Opponent: Flower Mound LA | Judge: idk
1ac - immigration plan 1nc - race K econ da case 2nr - everything 2ar - case outweighs turns on both econ and race
TOC
1
Opponent: Lexington KB | Judge: Mark Gorthey
1ac - intrinsic meaning 1nc - empiricism is racist K burden structure theory determinism trigger case 2nr - everything
TOC
3
Opponent: Valley TF | Judge: Martin Sigalow
1AC - util v3 1nc - contracts NC "Must spec when we stop calculating under util" case 1ar - cx checks metatheory an everything 2nr - cx checks and contracts NC 2ar - turns to NC
UH
3
Opponent: Kinkaid JY | Judge: Parker Kelly
AC- agonism 1N - util hate speech DA title IX DA 2N - util title IX 2A - concedes util FW and goes for second advantage as util offense link turns on hate speech da and defense on title IX
UH
Semis
Opponent: Cedar Park MG | Judge: gandra, lin, gamble
1ac - agonism v3 1nc - borderlands k plagiarism pic 2nr - k 2ar - substance
UT
1
Opponent: Village AP | Judge: V Mambapoor
1ac - pvc plan 1nc - police scapegoat k crime da 2nr - both
UT
Doubles
Opponent: Cy-Woods CJ | Judge: Drew Burd
1ac - distinction 1nc - kant nc spikes need full warrants theory 2nr - kant 2ar - turns to kant
UT
Octas
Opponent: Earl Warren NO | Judge: Panel
1ac - pvc v2 k underview 1nc - wilderson k 2nr - wilderson 2ar - pappas barma first adv
1AC- this aff 1NC- a performance K 1AR- the DA and a perm Judge voted on the perm
Valley
Doubles
Opponent: Mountain View DZ | Judge: Panel
3-0 Neg on EM Risk of Util DA
Valley
5
Opponent: Millburn AJ | Judge: Terrence Lonam
1ac - value 1nc - culpability nc caputi k 2nr - caputi k and a new aprioris bad theory argument 2ar - TT 4th contention and burden
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
Entry
Date
0- Note
Tournament: Any | Round: 1 | Opponent: Any | Judge: Any 1 - Generic Theory/T 2 - Generic K's 3 - Generic substance like impact turns SO - September October ND - November December JF - January February MA - March April
11/29/16
1 - Disclose
Tournament: TFA | Round: 6 | Opponent: Kinkaid VL | Judge: Jacob Koshak Interpretation: Debaters must disclose all positions broken at the 2017 TFA state tournament on the NDCA wiki at least an hour after they are broken. Violation: You have disclosed nothing on this topic. Screenshots in the doc. Net Benefits:
Accessibility- Disclosure levels the playing field since everyone knows what everyone else is running. Saying this helps big schools is bullshit since they already know what you are running through scouting. Bietz 10 Bietz, Mike (Mike Bietz is a former President of the National Debate Coaches Association and is the current debate coach at Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles.) “The Case for Public Case Disclosure.” May 2010. As I outlined above, big teams already get many, many more flows than the smaller teams just because they have more debaters, more judges and more coaches. Open disclosure gives everyone access to the same information. Additionally, it helps the “little guy” even more because for many of these debaters, the option of going to a lot of tournaments isn’t available. Open case disclosure gives them the ability to see what other teams are running prior to showing up to the tournament. Thus, there is an added benefit of equalizing not only information at a tournament, but also equalizing (to some degree) the playing-field for people who do not have the resources to travel as much. 2. Clash fairness and ed voter drop debater copeting interps
3/10/17
1 - Possible Interps List
Tournament: Tournament | Round: Quads | Opponent: Opponent | Judge: Judge Here's some interps I might read
Spec status of CP in NC itself 2. Prioritize K vs T in NC itself 3. NIBs Bad 4. Conditional PICs bad 5. PICs Bad (in spec context usually) 6. Must have advocacy text 7. Disclosure theory 8. the negative must have one stable advocacy in which they outline all conpro speech restrictions and defend those restrictions unconditionally 9. for any DA the neg reads about a type of conpro speech, they must disclose a cite indicating this is indeed conpro speech before the TOC 10. the negative cannot brea k new PICs at TOC- they need to be on the wiki before hand
the aff burden is to prove that words have no intrinsic harm and the negative burden is to prove that words have intrinsic harms. 12. The negative cannot read a PIC unless their solvency advocate advocates the exact text of the PIC. 13. Neg counterplans cannot defend getting rid of restrictions on constitutionally protected speech that is currently restricted. 14. The negative must concede to the aff's paradigm choice in terms of how the judge should evaluate the debate. Obviously the interps will be more nuanced than this, but this is the general idea.
4/30/17
1AC - Util - v3
Tournament: TOC | Round: 3 | Opponent: Valley TF | Judge: Martin Sigalow 1AC Framework Ethics is divided between ideal and non-ideal theory. Ideal theory ask what justice demands in a perfect world while non-ideal theory ask what justice demands in a world that is already unjust. Prefer non-ideal theory as a meta-ethical starting point:
Social Reality- ideal theory ignores social realities, which in turn contradicts ideals. Normative ideals aren’t created separately from the social norms that govern us because those influence what we can count as an ideal in the first place. MILLS : Charles W. Mills, “Ideal Theory” as Ideology, 2005 “I suggest that this spontaneous reaction, far from being philosophically naïve or jejune, is in fact the correct one. If we start from what is presumably the uncontroversial premise that the ultimate point of ethics is to guide our actions and make ourselves better people and the world a better place, then the framework above will not only be unhelpful, but will in certain respects be deeply antithetical to the proper goal of theoretical ethics as an enterprise. In modeling humans, human capacities, human interaction, human institutions, and human society on ideal-as-idealized-models, in never exploring how deeply different this is from ideal-as-descriptive-models, we are abstracting away from realities crucial to our comprehension of the actual workings of injustice in human interactions and social institutions, and thereby guaranteeing that the ideal-as-idealized-model will never be achieved.” (170)
2. Standpoint Epistemology: Ideal theory strips away questions of particularities and isolates a universal feature of agents. This normalizes a single experience and epistemically skews ethical theorizing. MILLS 2: Charles W. Mills, “Ideal Theory” as Ideology, 2005 “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.” (175)
Thus, the standard is resisting material inequalities. Non-ideal theory necessitates consequentialism since instead of following rules that assume an already equal playing field, we take steps to correct the material injustice. Prefer additionally-
States have no act-omission distinction which means they are responsible for the state of affairs they bring about, so constraint based theories collapse to consequentialism. Sunstein and Vermule 05 (Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermuele, “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life-Life Tradeoffs,” Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper No. 85 (March 2005), p. 17.) In our view, both the argument from causation and the argument from intention go wrong by overlooking the distinctive features of government as a moral agent. Whatever the general status of the act-omission distinction as a matter of moral philosophy,38 the distinction is least impressive when applied to government.39 The most fundamental point is that unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice between or among possible policies for regulating third parties. The distinction between acts and omissions may not be intelligible in this context, and even if it is, the distinction does not make a morally relevant difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do anything, or refusing to act.40 Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized private action—for example, private killing—becomes obscure when the government formally forbids private action, but chooses a set of policy instruments that do not adequately or fully discourage it. If there is no act-omission distinction, then government is fully complicit with any harm it allows, so decisions are moral if they minimize harm. All means based and side constraint theories collapse because two violations require aggregation.
2. Only naturalism is epistemically accessible Papinaeu 11 David Papineau, “Naturalism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2007 Moore took this argument to show that moral facts comprise a distinct species of non-natural fact. However, any such non-naturalist view of morality faces immediate difficulties, deriving ultimately from the kind of causal closure thesis discussed above. If all physical effects are due to a limited range of natural causes, and if moral facts lie outside this range, then it follow that moral facts can never make any difference to what happens in the physical world (Harman, 1986). At first sight this may seem tolerable (perhaps moral facts indeed don't have any physical effects). But it has very awkward epistemological consequences. For Beirne ngs like us, knowledge of the spatiotemporal world is mediated by physical processes involving our sense organs and cognitive systems. If moral facts cannot influence the physical world, then it is hard to see how we can have any knowledge of them. Experience is epistemic – it is how we empirically ground our existence. Pain is universally bad and pleasure is universally good. Nagel ‘86. Thomas “The View From Nowhere”, 1986 I shall defend the unsurprising claim that sensory pleasure is good and pain bad, no matter who’s they are. The point of the exercise is to see how the pressures of objectification operate in a simple case. Physical pleasure and pain do not usually depend on activities or desires which themselves raise questions of justification and value. They are just is a sensory experiences in relation to which we are fairly passive, but toward which we feel involuntary desire or aversion. Almost everyone takes the avoidance of his own pain and the promotion of his own pleasure as subjective reasons for action in a fairly simple way; they are not back up by any further reasons. On the other hand if someone pursues pain or avoids pleasure, either it as a means to some end or it is backed up by dark reasons like guilt or sexual masochism. What sort of general value, if any, ought to be assigned to pleasure and pain when we consider these facts from an objective standpoint? What kind of judgment can we reasonably make about these things when we view them in abstraction from who we are? We can begin by asking why there is no plausibility in the zero position, that pleasure and pain have no value of any kind that can be objectively recognized. That would mean that I have no reason to take aspirin for a severe headache, however I may in fact be motivated; and that looking at it from outside, you couldn't even say that someone had a reason not to put his hand on a hot stove, just because of the pain… Without some positive reason to think there is nothing in itself good or bad about having an experience you intensely like or dislike, we can't seriously regard the common impression to the contrary as a collective illusion. Such things are at least good or bad for us, if anything is. What seems to be going on here is that we cannot from an objective standpoint withhold a certain kind of endorsement of the most direct and immediate subjective value judgments we make concerning the contents of our own consciousness. We regard ourselves as too close to those things to be mistaken in our immediate, nonideological evaluative impressions. No objective view we can attain could possibly overrule our subjective authority in such cases. There can be no reason to reject the appearances here. 3. Aggregation through looking at consequences is key to valuing the objective end of all rational beings. Cummiskey 90 David Cummiskey (professor of philosophy at Bates College, Ph.D., M.A., University of Michigan; B.A., Washington College). “Kantian Consequentialism.” 1990. http://www.bates.edu/Prebuilt/kantian.pdf Now, according to Kant, the formula of the end-in-itself generates both negative and positive duties (GMM, p. 430; MEJ, p. 221; DV, pp. 448-51). In the negative sense we treat persons as ends when we do not interfere with their pursuit of their (legitimate) ends. In the positive sense we treat persons as ends when we endeavor to help them realize their (legitimate) ends. Kant describes the positive interpretation of the second formulation of the categorical imperative as a duty to make others’ ends my own. Since, it one wills an end, one wills the necessary means (GMM, p. 417), it follows that the positive interpretation requires that we do those acts which are necessary to further the permissible ends of others. Since Kant also maintains that “to be happy is necessarily the desire of every rational but finite being” (CPR, p. 25; GMM, p. 415), we have a positive duty to promote the happiness of others. Thus, in addition to any constraints on action which Kant’s principle might generate, it also provides a rationale for a moral goal that we are obligated to pursue (GMM, pp. 398, 423, 430; DV, pp. 384-387). Since Kant’s principle generates both positive and negative duties, and since there are many situations which involve, at least, prima facie conflicts of these duties, we need a rationale for giving priority to one duty rather than the other. Of course, according to Kant, there cannot be unresolvable conflicts of duty. The concept of duty involves the objective practical necessity of an action and since two conflicting actions cannot both be necessary, a conflict of duties is conceptually impossible. Kant, however, does not grant that “grounds of obligation” can conflict, even if obligations cannot. He is thus left with the priority problem at this level. Kant argues that in cases of conflict “the stronger ground of obligation prevails” (MEJ, p. 224). Although such a response is intuitively plausible, without an account of how one ground of obligation can be stronger than another, it does not provide any practical guidance.
4. Moral substitutability is true and only consequentialism explains it. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong ’92 Dartmouth College Philosophical Perspectives, 6, Ethics, AN ARGUMENT FOR CONSEQUENTIALISM Since general substitutability works for other kinds of reasons for action, we would need a strong argument to deny that it holds also for moral reasons. If moral reasons obeyed different principles, it would be hard to understand why moral reasons are also called 'reasons' and how moral reasons interact with other reasons when they apply to the same action. Nonetheless, this extension has been denied, so we have to look at moral reasons carefully. I have a moral reason to feed my child tonight, both because I promised my wife to do so, and also because of my special relation to my child along with the fact that she will go hungry if I don't feed her. I can't feed my child tonight without going home soon, and going home soon will enable me to feed her tonight. Therefore, there is a moral reason for me to go home soon. It need not be imprudent or ugly or sacrilegious or illegal for me not to feed her, but the requirements of morality give me a moral reason to feed her. This argument assumes a special case of substitutability: (MS) If there is a moral reason for A to do X, and if A cannot do X without doing Y, and if doing Y will enable A to do X, then there is a moral reason for A to do Y. I will call this 'the principle of moral substitutability', or just 'moral substitutability'. He continues: Of course, there are many other versions of deontology. I cannot discuss them all. Nonetheless, these examples suggest that it is the very nature of deontological reasons that makes deontological theories unable to explain moral substitutability. This comes out clearly if we start from the other side and ask which properties create the moral reasons that are derived by moral substitutability. What gives me a moral reason to start the mower is the consequences of starting the mower. Specifically, it has the consequence that I can am able to mow the grass. This reason cannot derive from the same property as my moral reason to mow the lawn unless what gives me a moral reason to mow the lawn is its consequences. Thus, any non-consequentialist moral theory will have to posit two distinct kinds of moral reasons: one for starting the mower and another for mowing the grass. Once these kinds of reasons are separated, we need to understand the connection between them. But this connection cannot be explained by the substantive principles of the theory. That is why all deontological theories must lack the explanatory coherence which is a general test of adequacy for all theories. I conclude that no deontological theory can adequately explain moral substitutability. He continues: All other moral reasons are non-consequential. Thus, a moral reason to do an act is non-consequential if and only if the reason depends even partly on some property that the act has independently of its consequences. For example, an act can be a lie regardless of what happens as a result of the lie (since some lies are not believed), and some moral theories claim that that property of being a lie provides a moral reason not to tell a lie regardless of the consequences of this lie. Similarly, the fact that an act fulfills a promise is often seen as a moral reason to do the act, even though the act has that property of fulfilling a promise independently of its consequences. All such moral reasons are non-consequential. In order to avoid so many negations, I will also call them 'deontological'. This distinction would not make sense if we did not restrict the notion of consequences. If I promise to mow the lawn, then one consequence of my mowing might seem to be that my promise is fulfilled. One way to avoid this problem is to specify that the consequences of an act must be distinct from the act itself. My act of fulfilling my promise and my act of mowing are not distinct, because they are done by the same bodily movements.10 Thus, my fulfilling my promise is not a consequence of my mowing. A consequence of an act need not be later in time than the act, since causation can be simultaneous, but the consequence must at least be different from the act. Even with this clarification, it is still hard to classify some moral reasons as consequential or deontological,11 but I will stick to examples that are clear. In accordance with this distinction between kinds of moral reasons, I can now distinguish different kinds of moral theories. I will say that a moral theory is consequentialist if and only if it implies that all basic moral reasons are consequential. A moral theory is then non-consequentialists or deontological if it includes any basic moral reasons which are not consequential. 5. Against Deontology So defined, the class of deontological moral theories is very large and diverse. This makes it hard to say anything in general about it. Nonetheless, I will argue that no deontological moral theory can explain why moral substitutability holds. My argument applies to all deontological theories because it depends only on what is common to them all, namely, the claim that some basic moral reasons are not consequential. Some deontological theories allow very many weighty moral reasons that are consequential, and these theories might be able to explain why moral substitutability holds for some of their moral reasons: the consequential ones. But even these theories cannot explain why moral substitutability holds for all moral reasons, including the non-consequential reasons that make the theory deontological. The failure of deontological moral theories to explain moral substitutability in the very cases that make them deontological is a reason to reject all deontological moral theories. I cannot discuss every deontological moral theory, so I will discuss only a few paradigm examples and show why they cannot explain moral substitut- ability. After this, I will argue that similar problems are bound to arise for all other deontological theories by their very nature. The simplest deontological theory is the pluralistic intuitionism of Prichard and Ross. Ross writes that, when someone promises to do something, 'This we consider obligatory in its own nature, just because it is a fulfillment of a promise, and not because of its consequences.'12 Such deontologists claim in effect that, if I promise to mow the grass, there is a moral reason for me to mow the grass, and this moral reason is constituted by the fact that mowing the grass fulfills my promise. This reason exists regardless of the consequences of mowing the grass, even though it might be overridden by certain bad consequences. However, if this is why I have a moral reason to mow the grass, then, even if I cannot mow the grass without starting my mower, and starting the mower would enable me to mow the grass, it still would not follow that I have any moral reason to start my mower, since I did not promise to start my mower, and starting my mower does not fulfill my promise. Thus, a moral theory cannot explain moral substitutability if it claims that properties like this provide moral reasons.
5. Inequality creates flawed epistemic conclusions, meaning you cannot fairly test their ethical claims without rectifying it first. Medina 11 Medina, J. (2011). Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance: Counter-Memory, Epistemic Friction, and Guerrilla Pluralism. Foucault Studies, 1(12), 9–35 Foucault invites us to pay attention to the past and ongoing epistemic battles among competing power/knowledge frameworks that try to control a given field. Different fields—or domains of discursive interaction—contain particular discursive regimes with their particular ways of producing knowledge. In the battle among power/ knowledge frameworks, some come on top and become dominant while others are displaced and become subjugated. Foucault’s methodology offers a way of exploiting that vibrant plurality of epistemic perspectives which always contains some bodies of experiences and memories that are erased or hidden in the hegemonic mainstream frameworks that become hegemonic after prevailing in sustained epistemic battles. What Foucault calls subjugated knowledges3 are forms of experiencing and remembering that are pushed to the margins and rendered unqualified and unworthy of epistemic respect by prevailing and hegemonic discourses. Subjugated knowledges remain invisible to mainstream perspectives; they have a precarious subterranean existence that renders them unnoticed by most people and impossible to detect by those whose perspective has already internalized certain epistemic exclusions. And with the invisibility of subjugated knowledges, certain possibilities for resistance and subversion go unnoticed. The critical and emancipatory potential of Foucaultian genealogy resides in challenging established practices of remembering and forgetting by excavating subjugated bodies of experiences and memories, bringing to the fore the perspectives that culturally hegemonic practices have foreclosed. The critical task of the scholar and the activist is to resurrect subjugated knowledges—that is, to revive hidden or forgotten bodies of experiences and memories—and to help produce insurrections of subjugated knowledges.4 In order to be critical and to have transformative effects, genealogical investigations should aim at these insurrections, which are critical interventions that disrupt and interrogate epistemic hegemonies and mainstream perspectives (e.g. official histories, standard interpretations, ossified exclusionary meanings, etc). Such insurrections involve the difficult labor of mobilizing scattered, marginalized publics and of tapping into the critical potential of their dejected experiences and memories. An epistemic insurrection requires a collaborative relation between genealogical scholars/activists and the subjects whose experiences and memories have been subjugated: those subjects by themselves may not be able to destabilize the epistemic status quo until they are given a voice at the epistemic table (i.e. in the production of knowledge), that is, until room is made for their marginalized perspective to exert resistance, until past epistemic battles are reopened and established frameworks become open to contestation. Plan I defend the resolution as a general principle- I will defend all constitutionally protected speech should be restricted, so all the neg has to do is read evidence that says some speech is conpro to get their DA link. Contention 1: Restrictions 1) The idea that the authority figures become the arbiter of acceptable speech causes a crack down on dissent and kills minority views from even being heard in the first place. Fisher 17 (Anthony L. Fisher, associate editor at Reason.com, where his beats include criminal justice, civil liberties, free speech, and foreign affairs. He is also a sports and culture columnist at The Week.). “The free speech problem on campus is real. It will ultimately hurt dissidents”. Vox, Jan 2, 2017. http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/13/13931524/free-speech-pen-america-campus-censorship It’s already happening. Just ask the Palestinian activists whose boycott campaigns against Israel have has been deemed hate speech by a number of public universities, and whose future political activities could be endangered by an act of Congress. Just this month, the Senate unanimously passed the "Anti-Semitism Awareness Act,” which directs the Department of Education to use the bill's contents as a guideline when adjudicating complaints of anti-Semitism on campus. Among the speech-chilling components of the bill, the political (and subjective) act of judging Israel by an "unfair double standard" could be considered hate speech. To cite other examples of unintended consequences of the crackdown on “offensive” speech, a black student at the University of Michigan was punished for calling another student “white trash,” and conservative law students at Georgetown claimed they were “traumatized” when an email critical of deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia landed in their inboxes. The PEN America report also notes the Foundation for Individual Rights’ analysis of hundreds of campuses with “severely restrictive” speech codes. While a number of these campuses don't aggressively enforce their speech codes, the rules remain on the books; more than a dozen such codes have been overturned in the courts. What’s even more concerning is the increasingly popular notion that some ideas, such as opposition to abortion, should simply be “non-platformed" — that is, deemed unworthy of even being heard on campus. Although the trend of denying contentious speakers such as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice or refugee turned Dutch politician and critic of Islam Ayaan Hirsi Ali public platforms by "disinviting" them from campus is disconcerting, it is not censorship. However, a pro-choice group physically blocking the display of a pro-life group on the campus of the University of Georgia is a form of censorship. As is the case of University of California Santa Barbara professor Mireille Miller-Young, who assaulted a young woman holding a pro-life placard including graphic imagery in a "free speech" zone on campus and stole her sign. When the young woman objected to the theft of her property, Miller-Young replied, "I may be a thief, but you're a terrorist." Like it or not, almost half of all Americans consider themselves pro-life. Banning their perspective from campus won't win over converts, and it’s both immoral and counterproductive to declare completely legitimate political perspectives beyond the pale. Think of antiwar protests or demonstrations in support of integration when both causes were broadly unpopular, and then try to consider a majority on campus declaring their school a "safe space" from such "offensive" expressions of free speech. 2) Empirics flow aff- speech codes on college campuses were policy failures. Friedersdorf 15, 12-10-2015, "The Lessons of Bygone Free-Speech Fights," Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/what-student-activists-can-learn-from-bygone-free-speech-fights/419178/ He was writing after the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, and Stanford implemented speech codes targeted at racist and sexist speech. These were efforts to respond to increasing diversity on campuses, where a number of students spewed racist and sexist speech that most everyone in this room would condemn. But those speech codes were policy failures. There is no evidence that hate speech or bigotry decreased on any campus that adopted them. At Michigan, the speech code was analyzed by Marcia Pally, a professor of multicultural studies, who found that “black students were accused of racist speech in almost 20 cases. Students were punished only twice under the code’s anti-racist provisions, both times for speech by or on behalf of blacks.” Outweighs: A. Probability – it’s empirically verified, outweighs analytics since that’s what actually happens in the real world. B. Turns arguments about minority speech restrictions in the status quo—free speech isn’t exclusionary, only restrictions. The ability to for minorities to speak freely is restricted in the squo because anti-racist policies are used against the same groups themselves. 3) Even if free speech might not be the perfect solution, it is comparatively better to any other alternative—restrictions just make the problem worse. Kenan Malik 12 (Indian-born English writer, lecturer and broadcaster, trained in neurobiology and the history of science.). “Why Hate Speech Should Not Be Banned”. Pandemonium, 2012. https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/why-hate-speech-should-not-be-banned/ And in practice, you cannot reduce or eliminate bigotry simply by banning it. You simply lets the sentiments fester underground. As Milton once put it, to keep out ‘evil doctrine’ by licensing is ‘like the exploit of that gallant man who thought to pound up the crows by shutting his Park-gate’. Take Britain. In 1965, Britain prohibited incitement to racial hatred as part of its Race Relations Act. The following decade was probably the most racist in British history. It was the decade of ‘Paki-bashing’, when racist thugs would seek out Asians to beat up. It was a decade of firebombings, stabbings, and murders. In the early 1980s, I was organizing street patrols in East London to protect Asian families from racist attacks. Nor were thugs the only problem. Racism was woven into the fabric of public institutions. The police, immigration officials – all were openly racist. In the twenty years between 1969 and 1989, no fewer than thirty-seven blacks and Asians were killed in police custody – almost one every six months. The same number again died in prisons or in hospital custody. When in 1982, cadets at the national police academy were asked to write essays about immigrants, one wrote, ‘Wogs, nignogs and Pakis come into Britain take up our homes, our jobs and our resources and contribute relatively less to our once glorious country. They are, by nature, unintelligent. And can’t at all be educated sufficiently to live in a civilised society of the Western world’. Another wrote that ‘all blacks are pains and should be ejected from society’. So much for incitement laws helping create a more tolerant society. Today, Britain is a very different place. Racism has not disappeared, nor have racist attacks, but the open, vicious, visceral bigotry that disfigured the Britain when I was growing up has largely ebbed away. It has done so not because of laws banning racial hatred but because of broader social changes and because minorities themselves stood up to the bigotry and fought back. 4) Censoring speech makes it more attractive – psychological studies prove. Mattimore 15: PATRICK MATTIMORE member of the Society of Professional Journalists and has written commentaries for a variety of publications, daily newspapers, professional magazines, and weeklies. His areas of expertise are law, psychology, and education. He taught high school psychology for many years in the US, and was an adjunct professor of law in the Temple University/Tsinghua University LLM program in Beijing, where he also taught psychology at a private college. “Guest commentary: If you want to make something more desired, make sure it gets censored” December 10, 2015. http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2015/12/10/guest-commentary-if-you-want-to-make-something-more-desired-make-sure-it-gets-censored/ What makes government censorship of the press and resultant self-censorship by media itself even more baffling, is that psychological science suggests that it doesn’t work. If you want to make an idea, or nearly anything, more valuable to someone, make it less available by censoring it. For example, more than 40 years ago, when University of North Carolina students learned that a speech opposing coed dorms on campus would be banned, psychologists reported that the students became more opposed to the idea of coed dorms. Without ever hearing the speech, students became more sympathetic to its argument. Advertisers have long been aware of the power of prohibitory admonitions to promote products, enticing consumers by advising them to not taste the forbidden fruit. Before advertisers for Charmin bathroom tissue exhorted customers: “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin,” it’s likely no one ever had. By ordering stories covered up, the government ensures that those stories will be accorded more importance than they warrant. By limiting individuals’ access to information, that information becomes more attractive. Psychologist Robert Cialdini calls this the principle of scarcity. We want those things that are hard to get even though there is logically no more reason to want a scarce item than a plentiful one.
Contention 2: Counterspeech Free speech, even if it’s not perfect, solves these harms better: 1) Empirics prove it promotes inclusion needed for movements- this also responds to silencing turns since even if those targeted cannot speak up, the community can. Calleros 95 Calleros, Charles R. “Paternalism, Counterspeech, and Campus Hate-Speech Codes: A Reply to Delgado and Yun” (Professor of Law, Arizona State University). HeinOnline. Arizona State Law Journal. 1995 However, campus communities that have creatively used this approach can attest to the surprising power of counterspeech. Examples of counterspeech to hateful racist and homophobic speech at Arizona State and Stanford Universities are especially illustrative.61 In an incident that attracted national attention, the campus community at Arizona State University ("A.S.U.") constructively and constitutionally responded to a racist poster displayed on the outside of the speaker's dormitory door in February 1991. Entitled "WORK APPLICATION," it contained a number of ostensibly employment-related questions that advanced hostile and demeaning racial stereotypes of African-Americans and Mexican-Americans. Carla Washington, one of a group of African- American women who found the poster, used her own speech to persuade a resident of the offending room voluntarily to take the poster down and allow her to photocopy it. After sending a copy of the poster to the campus newspaper along with an opinion letter deploring its racist stereotypes, she demanded action from the director of her residence hall. The director organized an immediate meeting of the dormitory residents to discuss the issues. In this meeting, I explained why the poster was protected by the First Amendment, and the women who found the poster eloquently described their pain and fears. One of the women, Nichet Smith, voiced her fear that all nonminorities on campus shared the hostile stereotypes expressed in the poster. Dozens of residents expressed their support and gave assurances that they did not share the hostile stereotypes, but they conceded that even the most tolerant among them knew little about the cultures of others and would 62 benefit greatly from multicultural education. The need for multicultural education to combat intercultural ignorance and stereotyping became the theme of a press conference and public rally organized by the student African-American Coalition leader, Rossie Turman, who opted for highly visible counterspeech despite demands from some students and staff to discipline the owner of the offending poster. The result was a series of opinion letters in the campus newspaper discussing the problem of racism, numerous workshops on race relations and free speech, and overwhelming approval in the Faculty Senate of a measure to add a course on American cultural diversity to the undergraduate breadth 63 requirement. The four women who initially confronted the racist poster were empowered by the meeting at the dormitory residence and later received awards from the local chapter of the NAACP for their activism.64 Rossie Turman was rewarded for his leadership skills two years later by becoming the first African-American elected President of Associated Students of A.S.U.,65 a student body that numbered approximately 40,000 students, only 66 2.3 percent of them African-American. Although Delgado and Yun are quite right that the African-American students should never have been burdened with the need to respond to such hateful speech, Hentoff is correct that the responses just described helped them develop a sense of self-reliance and constructive activism. Moreover, the students' counterspeech inspired a community response that lightened the students' burden and provided them with a sense of community support and empowerment. Indeed, the students received assistance from faculty and administrators, who helped organize meetings, wrote opinion letters, spoke before the Faculty Senate, or joined the students in issuing public statements at the press conference and public rally.67 Perhaps most important, campus administrators wisely refrained from disciplining the owners of the poster, thus directing public attention to the issue of racism and ensuring broad community support in denouncing the racist poster. Many members of the campus and surrounding communities might have leapt to the racist speaker's defense had the state attempted to discipline the speaker and thus had created a First Amendment issue. Instead, they remained united with the offended students because the glare of the public spotlight remained sharply focused on the racist incident without the distraction of cries of state censorship. Although the counterspeech was not aimed primarily at influencing the hearts and minds of the residents of the offending dormitory room, its vigor in fact caught the residents by surprise. 68 It prompted at least three of them to apologize publicly and to display curiosity about a civil rights movement that they were too young to have witnessed first hand. 69 This effective use of education and counterspeech is not an isolated instance at A.S.U., but has been repeated on several occasions, albeit on smaller scales.7° One year after the counterspeech at A.S.U., Stanford University responded similarly to homophobic speech. In that case, a first-year law student sought to attract disciplinary proceedings and thus gain First Amendment martyrdom by shouting hateful homophobic statements about a dormitory staff member. The dean of students stated that the speaker was not subject to discipline under Stanford's code of conduct but called on the university community to speak out on the issue, triggering an avalanche of counterspeech. Students, staff, faculty, and administrators expressed their opinions in letters to the campus newspaper, in comments on a poster board at the law school, in a published petition signed by 400 members of the law school community disassociating the law school from the speaker's epithets, and in a letter written by several law students reporting the incident to a prospective employer of the offending student.71 The purveyor of hate speech indeed had made a point about the power of speech, just not the one he had intended. He had welcomed disciplinary sanctions as a form of empowerment, but the Stanford community was alert enough to catch his verbal hardball and throw it back with ten times the force. Thus, the argument that counterspeech is preferable to state suppression of offensive speech is stronger and more fully supported by experience than is conceded by Delgado and Yun. In both of the cases described above, the targets of hateful speech were supported by a community united against bigotry. The community avoided splitting into factions because the universities eliminated the issue of censorship by quickly announcing that the hateful speakers were protected from disciplinary retaliation. Indeed, the counterspeech against the bigotry was so powerful in each case that it underscored the need for top administrators to develop standards for, and some limitations on, their participation in such partisan speech. 72 Of course, the community action in these cases was effective and empowering precisely because a community against bigotry existed. At A.S.U. and Stanford, as at most universities, the overwhelming majority of students, faculty, and staff are persons of tolerance and good will who deplore at least the clearest forms of bigotry and are ready to speak out Of course, the community action in these cases was effective and empowering precisely because a community against bigotry existed. At A.S.U. and Stanford, as at most universities, the overwhelming majority of students, faculty, and staff are persons of tolerance and good will who deplore at least the clearest forms of bigotry and are ready to speak out against intolerance when it is isolated as an issue rather than diluted in muddied waters along with concerns of censorship. Just as the nonviolent demonstrations of Martin Luther King, Jr., depended partly for their success on the consciences of the national and international audiences monitoring the fire hoses and attack dogs on their television sets and in the print media,73 the empowerment of the targets of hateful speech rests partly in the hands of members of the campus community who sympathize with them. One can hope that the counterspeech and educational measures used with success at A.S.U. and Stanford stand a good chance of preserving an atmosphere of civility in intellectual inquiry at any campus community in which compassionate, open minds predominate. On the other hand, counterspeech by the targets of hate speech could be less empowering on a campus in which the majority of students, faculty, and staff approve of hostile epithets directed toward members of minority groups. One hopes that such campuses are exceedingly rare; although hostile racial stereotyping among college students in the United States increased during the last decade, those students who harbored significant hostilities (as contrasted with more pervasive but less openly hostile, subconscious racism) still represented a modest fraction of all students.74 Moreover, even in a pervasively hostile atmosphere, counterspeech might still be more effective than broad restrictions on speech. 2) Censorship prevents survival strategies and it requires using injurious speech in its own critique, meaning that the aff is key to personal liberation. Butler 97 “Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performativity” by Judith Butler 1997 “Neither view can account for the restaging and resignifying of offensive utterance, deployments of linguistic power that seek at once to expose and counter the offensive exercise of speech. I will consider these at greater length in the chapters to come, but consider for a moment how often such terms are subject to resignification. Such a redoubling of injurious speech takes place not only in rap music and in various forms of political parody and satire, but in the political and social critique of such speech, where "mentioning" those very terms is crucial to the arguments at hand, and even in the legal arguments that make the call for censorship, in which the rhetoric that is deplored is invariably proliferated within the context of legal speech. Paradoxically, the explicit legal and political arguments that seek to tie such speech to certain contexts fail to note that even in their own discourse, such speech has become citational, breaking with the prior contexts of its utterance and acquiring new contexts for which it was not intended. The critical and legal discourse on hate speech is itself a restaging of the performance of hate speech. 3) The attempt to close political space is always imperfect and engenders resistance – censoring speech doesn’t change minds but redirects them – that threatens institutions and leaves supporters less prepared to defend their gains. Resistance to abortion proves. Bonnie Honig 93, Nancy Duke Lewis Professor in the departments of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown, 4-15-1993, "Political Theory And The Displacement Of Politics," Cornell University Press. When a woman’s right to choose was first recognized in 1973 by a very different Court in Roe v. Wade, many citizens celebrated the Court‘s decision as the end of a battle. Those opposed to the decision, however, vowed to roll back Roe v. Wade and. nineteen years later, they have had great success.6 The battle is being refought in the Court and in the state houses. Those who thought it was won in 1973 were surprised by this sequence of events. Many assumed that, once juridically recognized, the right to abort a pregnancy would never be returned to the space of political contest. In the past two decades they went on to fight other battles, doing relatively little to mobilize citizens and communities to protect and stabilize this new right, leaving pro-life organizations relatively free to repoliticize and redefine the issues. In response to the juridical settlement of a woman's right to choose, pro-lifers focused on the fetus and the family and on the relations of obligation and responsibility that tie women to them. Soon abortion became known as baby killing. pro-choice became antifamily, and pregnant single women became icons of danger whose wanton, (literally) unregulated sexuality threatens the safety and the identity of the American family. These identities and identifications are not stable. But in the absence of resistance to them, they could be stabilized. That realization has energized pro-choice citizens into action in the last few years. and the sites of the battle are proliferating. ¶ These observations are by no means meant to imply that it would be better not to entrench a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy—that is a different debate, one that turns on considerations of political strategy and equal justice. My point is that there is a lesson to be learned from the experience of those who misread Roe as the end of a battle and later found themselves ill equipped and unprepared to stabilize and secure their still unstable rights when they were repoliticized and contested by their opponents. In their mistaken belief that the agon had been successfully shut down by law, pro-choice citizens ceded the agon to their opponents and found, years later, that the terms of the contest had shifted against them. Disempowered by their belief that the law had settled the issue without remainder, they failed to engage the concerns of moderate citizens who harbored doubts about the morality of abortion, leaving them and their doubts to be mobilized and radicalized by those who had no doubts about the practice‘s immorality and who were determined to see it outlawed again.7 ¶ To affirm the perpetuity of contest is not to celebrate a world without points of stabilization; it is to affirm the reality of perpetual contest. even within an ordered setting, and to identify the affirmative dimensions of contestation. It is to see that the always imperfect closure of political space tends to engender remainders and that, if those remainders are not engaged, they may return to haunt and destabilize the very closures that deny their existence.
Long theory underview
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2 - K Underview
Tournament: UT | Round: Octas | Opponent: Earl Warren NO | Judge: Panel Unfairness denies effective dialogue on kritikal issues which turns your impacts. Galloway 7 Ryan Galloway, Samford Comm prof, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28, 2007 Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair opportunity to voice their position. Anything that fails to allow participants to have their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing. The affirmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements. While affirmative teams have recently resisted affirming the topic, in fact, the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its central point of departure. Setting the affirmative reciprocally sets the negative. The negative crafts approaches to the topic consistent with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and critical arguments premised on the arguments that the topic allows for the affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced argumentative table. When one side takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers. However, it also undermines the respect due to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the other, it fundamentally denies the personhood of the other participant (Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes this respect as a fundamental component. A desire to be fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect, a demand to be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally months upon months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced. Affirmative cases that suspend basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular negative strategies. Unprepared, one side comes to the argumentative table unable to meaningfully participate in a dialogue. They are unable to “understand what ‘went on…’” and are left to the whims of time and power (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). Engagement with the state is key to critical interrogation—otherwise we become spectators with no hope for change. Connolly 08 William, Professor of Political Science at John Hopkins, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. “Before turning to possible strategies to promote these objectives, we need to face an objection posed by one segment of the left: "Don't you depend a lot upon the state, when it must be viewed as the enemy?" My response is threefold. First, there is no way to take on global warming without engaging the state in the effort as well as international agencies, and global warming is a key danger of this epoch. Second, it is less the state itself and more its existing subsidies and priorities that are at issue. If you were to oppose both the market and the state you might reduce the democratic left to pure critique, with no presentation of positive possibilities and strategies. But critique is always important and never enough, as the left has begun to rediscover and as the American right has known for forty years. Third, although one must acknowledge the issues of cumbersome state bureaucracy, corporate cronyism, and state corruption, all three increased radically when the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine achieved hegemony, and they will get worse unless eco-egalitarians enter the fray at the interceded levels of micropolitics, microeconomic experiments, and the state. It is unwise to act as if the state must always be what it has become. Challenging the media is critical in this respect, making it become a watchdog of corporations, the state, religious movements, and the multiple imbrications between them. My view, as becomes clear in the next few pages, is that no interim agenda on the left can proceed far without finding expression in state policy, and state policy must draw inspiration from microeconomic experiments initially launched outside its canopy: microeconomic experiments and creative state policies must inform each other. We thus seek to include the state without becoming statist. Those who invest hope in revolutionary overthrow may oppose such a combination. I suspect that revolution, were it to occur, would undermine rather than vitalize democratic culture.29” We need to embrace the state as a heuristic—our argument is not that the state is good but that learning the levers of power is key to confronting it. Zanotti 14 Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Her research and teaching include critical political theory as well as international organizations, UN peacekeeping, democratization and the role of NGOs in post-conflict governance.“Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World” – Alternatives: Global, Local, Political – vol 38(4):p. 288-304,. A little unclear if this is late 2013 or early 2014 – The Stated “Version of Record” is Feb 20, 2014, but was originally published online on December 30th, 2013. Obtained via Sage Database. By questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that focuses on power and subjects’ relational character and the contingent processes of their (trans)formation in the context of agonic relations. Options for resistance to governmental scripts are not limited to ‘‘rejection,’’ ‘‘revolution,’’ or ‘‘dispossession’’ to regain a pristine ‘‘freedom from all constraints’’ or an immanent ideal social order. It is found instead in multifarious and contingent struggles that are constituted within the scripts of governmental rationalities and at the same time exceed and transform them. This approach questions oversimplifications of the complexities of liberal political rationalities and of their interactions with non-liberal political players and nurtures a radical skepticism about identifying universally good or bad actors or abstract solutions to political problems. International power interacts in complex ways with diverse political spaces and within these spaces it is appropriated, hybridized, redescribed, hijacked, and tinkered with. Governmentality as a heuristic focuses on performing complex diagnostics of events. It invites historically situated explorations and careful differentiations rather than overarching demonizations of ‘‘power,’’ romanticizations of the ‘‘rebel’’ or the ‘‘the local.’’ More broadly, theoretical formulations that conceive the subject in non-substantialist terms and focus on processes of subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses, and on hybridization as the terrain for political transformation, open ways for reconsidering political agency beyond the dichotomy of oppression/rebellion. These alternative formulations also foster an ethics of political engagement, to be continuously taken up through plural and uncertain practices, that demand continuous attention to ‘‘what happens’’ instead of fixations on ‘‘what ought to be.’’83 Such ethics of engagement would not await the revolution to come or hope for a pristine ‘‘freedom’’ to be regained. Instead, it would constantly attempt to twist the working of power by playing with whatever cards are available and would require intense processes of reflexivity on the consequences of political choices. To conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault ‘‘my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.’’84 The aff deploys the state to learn scenario planning- even if politics is bad, scenario analysis of politics is pedagogically valuable- it enhances creativity, deconstructs biases and teaches advocacy skills Barma et al 16 – (May 2016, Advance Publication Online on 11/6/15, Naazneen Barma, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Brent Durbin, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Professor of Government at Smith College, Eric Lorber, JD from UPenn and PhD in Political Science from Duke, Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, Rachel Whitlark, PhD in Political Science from GWU, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Project on Managing the Atom and International Security Program within the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, “‘Imagine a World in Which’: Using Scenarios in Political Science,” International Studies Perspectives 17 (2), pp. 1-19, http://www.naazneenbarma.com/uploads/2/9/6/9/29695681/using_scenarios_in_political_science_isp_2015.pdf) What Are Scenarios and Why Use Them in Political Science? Scenario analysis is perceived most commonly as a technique for examining the robustness of strategy. It can immerse decision makers in future states that go beyond conventional extrapolations of current trends, preparing them to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and to protect themselves from adverse exogenous shocks. The global petroleum company Shell, a pioneer of the technique, characterizes scenario analysis as the art of considering “what if” questions about possible future worlds. Scenario analysis is thus typically seen as serving the purposes of corporate planning or as a policy tool to be used in combination with simulations of decision making. Yet scenario analysis is not inherently limited to these uses. This section provides a brief overview of the practice of scenario analysis and the motivations underpinning its uses. It then makes a case for the utility of the technique for political science scholarship and describes how the scenarios deployed at NEFPC were created. The Art of Scenario Analysis We characterize scenario analysis as the art of juxtaposing current trends in unexpected combinations in order to articulate surprising and yet plausible futures, often referred to as “alternative worlds.” Scenarios are thus explicitly not forecasts or projections based on linear extrapolations of contemporary patterns, and they are not hypothesis-based expert predictions. Nor should they be equated with simulations, which are best characterized as functional representations of real institutions or decision-making processes (Asal 2005). Instead, they are depictions of possible future states of the world, offered together with a narrative of the driving causal forces and potential exogenous shocks that could lead to those futures. Good scenarios thus rely on explicit causal propositions that, independent of one another, are plausible—yet, when combined, suggest surprising and sometimes controversial future worlds. For example, few predicted the dramatic fall in oil prices toward the end of 2014. Yet independent driving forces, such as the shale gas revolution in the United States, China’s slowing economic growth, and declining conflict in major Middle Eastern oil producers such as Libya, were all recognized secular trends that—combined with OPEC’s decision not to take concerted action as prices began to decline—came together in an unexpected way. While scenario analysis played a role in war gaming and strategic planning during the Cold War, the real antecedents of the contemporary practice are found in corporate futures studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Raskin et al. 2005). Scenario analysis was essentially initiated at Royal Dutch Shell in 1965, with the realization that the usual forecasting techniques and models were not capturing the rapidly changing environment in which the company operated (Wack 1985; Schwartz 1991). In particular, it had become evident that straight-line extrapolations of past global trends were inadequate for anticipating the evolving business environment. Shell-style scenario planning “helped break the habit, ingrained in most corporate planning, of assuming that the future will look much like the present” (Wilkinson and Kupers 2013, 4). Using scenario thinking, Shell anticipated the possibility of two Arab-induced oil shocks in the 1970s and hence was able to position itself for major disruptions in the global petroleum sector. Building on its corporate roots, scenario analysis has become a standard policymaking tool. For example, the Project on Forward Engagement advocates linking systematic foresight, which it defines as the disciplined analysis of alternative futures, to planning and feedback loops to better equip the United States to meet contemporary governance challenges (Fuerth 2011). Another prominent application of scenario thinking is found in the National Intelligence Council’s series of Global Trends reports, issued every four years to aid policymakers in anticipating and planning for future challenges. These reports present a handful of “alternative worlds” approximately twenty years into the future, carefully constructed on the basis of emerging global trends, risks, and opportunities, and intended to stimulate thinking about geopolitical change and its effects.4 As with corporate scenario analysis, the technique can be used in foreign policymaking for long-range general planning purposes as well as for anticipating and coping with more narrow and immediate challenges. An example of the latter is the German Marshall Fund’s EuroFutures project, which uses four scenarios to map the potential consequences of the Euro-area financial crisis (German Marshall Fund 2013). Several features make scenario analysis particularly useful for policymaking.5 Long-term global trends across a number of different realms—social, technological, environmental, economic, and political—combine in often-unexpected ways to produce unforeseen challenges. Yet the ability of decision makers to imagine, let alone prepare for, discontinuities in the policy realm is constrained by their existing mental models and maps. This limitation is exacerbated by well-known cognitive bias tendencies such as groupthink and confirmation bias (Jervis 1976; Janis 1982; Tetlock 2005). The power of scenarios lies in their ability to help individuals break out of conventional modes of thinking and analysis by introducing unusual combinations of trends and deliberate discontinuities in narratives about the future. Imagining alternative future worlds through a structured analytical process enables policymakers to envision and thereby adapt to something altogether different from the known present. Designing Scenarios for Political Science Inquiry The characteristics of scenario analysis that commend its use to policymakers also make it well suited to helping political scientists generate and develop policy-relevant research programs. Scenarios are essentially textured, plausible, and relevant stories that help us imagine how the future political-economic world could be different from the past in a manner that highlights policy challenges and opportunities. For example, terrorist organizations are a known threat that have captured the attention of the policy community, yet our responses to them tend to be linear and reactive. Scenarios that explore how seemingly unrelated vectors of change—the rise of a new peer competitor in the East that diverts strategic attention, volatile commodity prices that empower and disempower various state and nonstate actors in surprising ways, and the destabilizing effects of climate change or infectious disease pandemics—can be useful for illuminating the nature and limits of the terrorist threat in ways that may be missed by a narrower focus on recognized states and groups. By illuminating the potential strategic significance of specific and yet poorly understood opportunities and threats, scenario analysis helps to identify crucial gaps in our collective understanding of global politicaleconomic trends and dynamics. The notion of “exogeneity”—so prevalent in social science scholarship—applies to models of reality, not to reality itself. Very simply, scenario analysis can throw into sharp relief often-overlooked yet pressing questions in international affairs that demand focused investigation. Scenarios thus offer, in principle, an innovative tool for developing a political science research agenda. In practice, achieving this objective requires careful tailoring of the approach. The specific scenario analysis technique we outline below was designed and refined to provide a structured experiential process for generating problem-based research questions with contemporary international policy relevance.6 The first step in the process of creating the scenario set described here was to identify important causal forces in contemporary global affairs. Consensus was not the goal; on the contrary, some of these causal statements represented competing theories about global change (e.g., a resurgence of the nation-state vs. border-evading globalizing forces). A major principle underpinning the transformation of these causal drivers into possible future worlds was to “simplify, then exaggerate” them, before fleshing out the emerging story with more details.7 Thus, the contours of the future world were drawn first in the scenario, with details about the possible pathways to that point filled in second. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that some of the causal claims that turned into parts of scenarios were exaggerated so much as to be implausible, and that an unavoidable degree of bias or our own form of groupthink went into construction of the scenarios. One of the great strengths of scenario analysis, however, is that the scenario discussions themselves, as described below, lay bare these especially implausible claims and systematic biases.8 An explicit methodological approach underlies the written scenarios themselves as well as the analytical process around them—that of case-centered, structured, focused comparison, intended especially to shed light on new causal mechanisms (George and Bennett 2005). The use of scenarios is similar to counterfactual analysis in that it modifies certain variables in a given situation in order to analyze the resulting effects (Fearon 1991). Whereas counterfactuals are traditionally retrospective in nature and explore events that did not actually occur in the context of known history, our scenarios are deliberately forward-looking and are designed to explore potential futures that could unfold. As such, counterfactual analysis is especially well suited to identifying how individual events might expand or shift the “funnel of choices” available to political actors and thus lead to different historical outcomes (Nye 2005, 68–69), while forward-looking scenario analysis can better illuminate surprising intersections and sociopolitical dynamics without the perceptual constraints imposed by fine-grained historical knowledge. We see scenarios as a complementary resource for exploring these dynamics in international affairs, rather than as a replacement for counterfactual analysis, historical case studies, or other methodological tools. In the scenario process developed for NEFPC, three distinct scenarios are employed, acting as cases for analytical comparison. Each scenario, as detailed below, includes a set of explicit “driving forces” which represent hypotheses about causal mechanisms worth investigating in evolving international affairs. The scenario analysis process itself employs templates (discussed further below) to serve as a graphical representation of a structured, focused investigation and thereby as the research tool for conducting case-centered comparative analysis (George and Bennett 2005). In essence, these templates articulate key observable implications within the alternative worlds of the scenarios and serve as a framework for capturing the data that emerge (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). Finally, this structured, focused comparison serves as the basis for the cross-case session emerging from the scenario analysis that leads directly to the articulation of new research agendas. The scenario process described here has thus been carefully designed to offer some guidance to policy-oriented graduate students who are otherwise left to the relatively unstructured norms by which political science dissertation ideas are typically developed. The initial articulation of a dissertation project is generally an idiosyncratic and personal undertaking (Useem 1997; Rothman 2008), whereby students might choose topics based on their coursework, their own previous policy exposure, or the topics studied by their advisors. Research agendas are thus typically developed by looking for “puzzles” in existing research programs (Kuhn 1996). Doctoral students also, understandably, often choose topics that are particularly amenable to garnering research funding. Conventional grant programs typically base their funding priorities on extrapolations from what has been important in the recent past—leading to, for example, the prevalence of Japan and Soviet studies in the mid-1980s or terrorism studies in the 2000s—in the absence of any alternative method for identifying questions of likely future significance. The scenario approach to generating research ideas is grounded in the belief that these traditional approaches can be complemented by identifying questions likely to be of great empirical importance in the real world, even if these do not appear as puzzles in existing research programs or as clear extrapolations from past events. The scenarios analyzed at NEFPC envision alternative worlds that could develop in the medium (five to seven year) term and are designed to tease out issues scholars and policymakers may encounter in the relatively near future so that they can begin thinking critically about them now. This timeframe offers a period distant enough from the present as to avoid falling into current events analysis, but not so far into the future as to seem like science fiction. In imagining the worlds in which these scenarios might come to pass, participants learn strategies for avoiding failures of creativity and for overturning the assumptions that prevent scholars and analysts from anticipating and understanding the pivotal junctures that arise in international affairs.
Particularism is good—root cause claims ignore specific uses—even if the state is bad generally, look to the specifics. Pappas 16 Gregory Fernando Pappas Texas AandM University “The Pragmatists’ Approach to Injustice”, The Pluralist Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2016. The pragmatists’ approach should be distinguished from nonideal theories whose starting point seems to be the injustices of society at large that have a history and persist through time, where the task of political philosophy is to detect and diagnose the presence of these historical injustices in particular situations of injustice. For example, critical theory today has inherited an approach to social philosophy characteristic of the European tradition that goes back to Rousseau, Marx, Weber, Freud, Marcuse, and others. Accord- ing to Roberto Frega, this tradition takes society to be “intrinsically sick” with a malaise that requires adopting a critical historical stance in order to understand how the systematic sickness affects present social situations. In other words, this approach assumes that¶ a philosophical critique of specific social situations can be accomplished only under the assumption of a broader and full blown critique of soci- ety in its entirety: as a critique of capitalism, of modernity, of western civilization, of rationality itself. The idea of social pathology becomes intelligible only against the background of a philosophy of history or of an anthropology of decline, according to which the distortions of actual social life are but the inevitable consequence of longstanding historical processes. (“Between Pragmatism and Critical Theory” 63)¶ However, this particular approach to injustice is not limited to critical theory. It is present in those Latin American and African American political philosophies that have used and transformed the critical intellectual tools of ¶ critical theory to deal with the problems of injustice in the Americas. For instance, Charles W. Mills claims that the starting point and alternative to the abstractions of ideal theory that masked injustices is to diagnose and rectify a history of an illness—the legacy of white supremacy in our actual society.11 The critical task of revealing this illness is achieved by adopting a historical perspective where the injustices of today are part of a larger historical narrative about the development of modern societies that goes back to how Europeans have progressively dehumanized or subordinated others. Similary, radical feminists as well as Third World scholars, as reaction to the hege- monic Eurocentric paradigms that disguise injustices under the assumption of a universal or objective point of view, have stressed how our knowledge is always situated. This may seem congenial with pragmatism except the locus of the knower and of injustices is often described as power structures located in “global hierarchies” and a “world-system” and not situations.12¶ Pragmatism only questions that we live in History or a “World-System” (as a totality or abstract context) but not that we are in history (lowercase): in a present situation continuous with others where the past weighs heavily in our memories, bodies, habits, structures, and communities. It also does not deny the importance of power structures and seeing the connections be- tween injustices through time, but there is a difference between (a) inquiring into present situations of injustice in order to detect, diagnose, and cure an injustice (a social pathology) across history, and (b) inquiring into the his- tory of a systematic injustice in order to facilitate inquiry into the present unique, context-bound injustice. To capture the legacy of the past on present injustices, we must study history but also seek present evidence of the weight of the past on the present injustice.¶ If injustice is an illness, then the pragmatists’ approach takes as its main focus diagnosing and treating the particular present illness, that is, the particular situation-bound injustice and not a global “social pathology” or some single transhistorical source of injustice. The diagnosis of a particular injustice is not always dependent on adopting a broader critical standpoint of society in its entirety, but even when it is, we must be careful to not forget that such standpoints are useful only for understanding the present evil. The concepts and categories “white supremacy” and “colonialism” can be great tools that can be of planetary significance. One could even argue that they pick out much larger areas of people’s lives and injustices than the categories of class and gender, but in spite of their reach and explanatory theoretical value, they are nothing more than tools to make reference to and ameliorate particular injustices experienced (suffered) in the midst of a particular and unique re- lationship in a situation. No doubt many, but not all, problems of injustice are a consequence of being a member of a group in history, but even in these cases, we cannot a priori assume that injustices are homogeneously equal for all members of that group. Why is this important? The possible pluralism and therefore complexity of a problem of injustice does not always stop at the level of being a member of a historical group or even a member of many groups, as insisted on by intersectional analysis. There may be unique cir- cumstances to particular countries, towns, neighborhoods, institutions, and ultimately situations that we must be open to in a context-sensitive inquiry. If an empirical inquiry is committed to capturing and ameliorating all of the harms in situations of injustice in their raw pretheoretical complexity, then this requires that we try to begin with and return to the concrete, particular, and unique experiences of injustice.¶ Pragmatism agrees with Sally Haslanger’s concern about Charles Mills’s view. She writes: “The goal is not just a theory that is historical (v. ahistori- cal), but is sensitive to historical particularity, i.e., that resists grand causal narratives purporting to give an account of how domination has come about and is perpetuated everywhere and at all times” (1). For “the forces that cause and sustain domination vary tremendously context by context, and there isn’t necessarily a single causal explanation; a theoretical framework that is useful as a basis for political intervention must be highly sensitive to the details of the particular social context” (1).13¶ Although each situation is unique, there are commonalities among the cases that permit inquiry about common causes. We can “formulate tentative general principles from investigation of similar individual cases, and then . . . check the generalizations by applying them to still further cases” (Dewey, Lectures in China 53). But Dewey insists that the focus should be on the indi- vidual case, and was critical of how so many sociopolitical theories are prone to starting and remaining at the level of “sweeping generalizations.” He states that they “fail to focus on the concrete problems which arise in experience, allowing such problems to be buried under their sweeping generalizations” (Lectures in China 53).¶ The lesson pragmatism provides for nonideal theory today is that it must be careful to not reify any injustice as some single historical force for which particular injustice problems are its manifestation or evidence for its exis- tence. Pragmatism welcomes the wisdom and resources of nonideal theories that are historically grounded on actual injustices, but it issues a warning about how they should be understood and implemented. It is, for example, sympathetic to the critical resources found in critical race theory, but with an important qualification. It understands Derrick Bell’s valuable criticism as context-specific to patterns in the practice of American law. Through his inquiry into particular cases and civil rights policies at a particular time and place, Bell learned and proposed certain general principles such as the one of “interest convergence,” that is, “whites will promote racial advantages for blacks only when they also promote white self-interest.”14 But, for pragma- tism, these principles are nothing more than historically grounded tools to use in present problematic situations that call for our analysis, such as deliberation in establishing public policies or making sense of some concrete injustice. The principles are falsifiable and open to revision as we face situation-specific injustices. In testing their adequacy, we need to consider their function in making us see aspects of injustices we would not otherwise appreciate.15
3/18/17
2 - Poetry Ableism K
Tournament: Valley | Round: 2 | Opponent: Dowling Catholic MH | Judge: Abbey Chapman There are two major ableist DA’s to your performance: First, while poetry has a lot of individual value, it is frequently inaccessible to many with learning disabilities. Whether it is a difficulty conceptually pictilizing concert metaphors and ironic disjunction or difficulty with meter and non-standard sentence structure, many learning disabilities make understanding and following poetry extremely difficult. There are ways that poetry can be used as method of personal liberation, even from learning disabilities, however, we should not force students to engage with it, especially as a survival strategy. It is those expectations that drive individuals with learning disabilities out of communities. Philip Schultz a Pulitzer Prize winning poet who struggles with dyslexia.. “Words Failed, Then Saved Me.” Sunday Review, NYTimes. September 3rd 2011. “So this summer’s news that research is increasingly tying dyslexia not just to reading, but also to the way the brain processes spoken language, was no surprise to me. I found many ways around my dyslexia, but I still have trouble transforming words into sounds. I have to memorize and rehearse before reading anything aloud, to avoid embarrassing myself by mispronouncing words. And because learning a foreign language is sheer torture to dyslexics (even though it’s a requirement in many schools), to this day I can’t attend a High Holy Day service at my synagogue without feeling I don’t belong there, because I can’t speak Hebrew and must pretend to read my prayer book. When I did finally learn to read, my teachers didn’t have much to do with it. I was 11, and even my school-appointed tutors had given up on me. My mother read the one thing I would listen to — Blackhawk comics — over and over again, hoping against hope that by some leap of faith or chance I would start to identify letters and then learn to arrange them into words and sentences, and begin the intuitive, often magical, process of turning written language into spoken language. One night, lying in bed as she read to me, I realized that if I was ever going to learn to read I would have to teach myself. The moon glowing outside my window, I remember, seemed especially interested in my predicament, perhaps attempting its own kind of encouragement. Was it a dummy, too? I wondered. If only I could be another boy, a boy my age who could sound out words and read and write like every other kid I knew. I willed myself into being him. I invented a character who could read and write. Starting that night, I’d lie in bed silently imitating the words my mother read, imagining the taste, heft and ring of each sound as if it were coming out of my mouth. I imagined being able to sound out the words by putting the letters together into units of rhythmic sound and the words into sentences that made sense. I imagined the words and their sounds being a kind of key with which I would open an invisible door to a world previously denied me. And suddenly I was reading. I didn’t know then that I was beginning a lifelong love affair with the first-person voice and that I would spend most of my life inventing characters to say all the things I wanted to say. I didn’t know that I was to become a poet, that in many ways the very thing that caused me so much confusion and frustration, my belabored relationship with words, had created in me a deep appreciation of language and its music, that the same mind that prevented me from reading had invented a new way of reading, a method that I now use to teach others how to overcome their own difficulties in order to write fiction and poetry. (It’s perhaps not surprising that many famous writers are said to have struggled with dyslexia, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and W. B. Yeats.) We know now that dyslexia is about so much more than just mixing up letters — that many dyslexics have difficulty with rhythm and meter and word retrieval, that they struggle to recognize voices and sounds. It’s my profound hope that our schools can use findings like these to better teach children who struggle to read, to help them overcome their limitations, and to help them understand that it’s not their fault. We knew so much less when I was a child. Then, all I wanted and needed, when I learned so painstakingly to read and then to write, was to find a way to be less alone. Which is, of course, what spoken and written language is really all about. But poetry should be a matter of passion, not survival.” Second, the linguistic use of body in your own words as opposed to just your cards involves a micro aggressive retrenchment of the holistic delusion which eliminates disabled people from your movement. Thought of the ‘black body’ rarely pulls up a mental picture of a black women in a wheel chair, but a differently colored Vitruvian Man. This also turns the solvency for other liberatory movements. Creamer Deborah Beth CreamerCreamer is the author of Disability and Christian Theology: Embodied Limits and Constructive Possibilities(2009), a book that encourages thought in new ways about categories like ability and disability. Embracing Limits, Queering Embodiment: Creating/Creative Possibilities for Disability Theology. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Vol. 26, No. “Betcher offers us some openings, some possibilities for conversational intersection. Her appeal to flesh, rather than to body, is one such space for conversational intersection. Two important claims are embedded in her argument against body. The first is that the use of body invites, as she writes, “the hallucinatory delusion of wholeness” (108). In other words, body has been taken to be another (disembodied) ideal that no one can attain. The second, related but yet somewhat different, is that we too often take body to be a generic term, leading to what Betcher describes as “naturalization or normalization.” In this way, the term body had been taken as shorthand for “normal body,” requiring a signifier for other kinds of bodies (“disabled body” being one example among many). I would argue that these two errors are interrelated, as we all have neither ideal nor normal bodies, and yet that they must be unpacked or challenged from slightly different perspectives. A corollary here might be found in other areas of feminist discourse where both the ideal woman and the generic woman have had to be deconstructed—the first to show that women were, in fact, human, living, people; the second to highlight ways in which the assumption of a generic type acts to “white”-wash or erase critical differences between and among these human, living, people. I find the lens of disability to be a promising way to challenge both the ideal body and the normal body. Clearly, this is significant for people who already wear the label of disability, as we are often identified as those whose bodies are least normal—and, from this position on the margins, we can first make appar ent and then challenge the assumptions of the center. Yet it is also important to recognize that this is not just a project for or of people “with disabilities.” Here I find Sallie McFague’s proposal of attention epistemology to be helpful: “the kind of knowing that focuses on embodied differences.” Betcher makes a similar claim when she invites us to focus on “that which we know to be true of lives” (108). The illusion of the ideal body and the distortion of the normal body begins to fade away as we begin to see bodies (or flesh) with new levels of complexity, observing that normal only exists in our imaginations, and recognizing ourselves as having limits and “leaky bodies and boundaries.” Once we recognize that limits are unsurprising, we can then begin to move not only to a perspective where we embrace (value, accept, respect) the idea of having limits (as individuals and as communities)—whether or not we claim disability as a label—but can also notice ways in which these limits might embrace us, acting to make and unmake issues of identity, relationality, space, and place. As I have argued more fully elsewhere, a limits perspective has profound implications for theology and ethics, as well as self- and communal understanding. And again, while clearly there is relevance here for and within the discourses of disability theology, it is not hard to recognize the ways in which the embrace of limits can engage other conversations, such as those emerging within postcolonial theory, as they declare danger in binaries and dualisms and seek new ways of under standing and being.” Thus your liberation strategy is inaccessible for those with disabilities and makes debate an unsafe space for them.
11/29/16
3 - Cap Good
Tournament: HW RR | Round: 6 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake CE | Judge: Singh, Flores Turn – the world is rapidly improving by every measure. Cap is the root cause Heath 13 Allister Heath. “The world has never had it so good - thanks partly to capitalism.” The Guardian. 29 Oct 2013 But humanity as a whole is doing better than it ever has: the world is becoming more prosperous, cleaner, increasingly peaceful and healthier. We are living longer, better lives. Virtually all of our existing problems are less bad than at any previous time in history. In How Much Have Global Problems Cost the World, Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg documents how on almost all important metrics, the human condition is improving at a dramatic rate; his thesis is backed up by oodles of other data and research. Take war, the worst possible affliction that can befall a society. It is often wrongly argued that armed conflicts are the handmaiden of capitalism; in reality, they are the worst thing that can happen to a liberal economy, destroying lives, families and capital and triggering state control, militarism and deglobalisation. Tragically, there are still far too many conflicts costing far too many lives but overall we live in extraordinarily peaceful times by historical standards. Genghis Khan’s mad conquests in the 13th century killed 11pc of the global population at the time, making it the worst conflict the world has ever had the misfortune of enduring; the Second World War, which cost more lives than any other, was the sixth worst on that measure, killing 2.6pc of the world’s population. There has been immense progress since then, especially following the end of the Cold War. The Peace Research Institute Oslo calculates that there were fewer battle deaths (including of civilians) in the first decade of the 21st century than at any time since the Second World War. Uppsala University’s Conflict Data Program found 32 active armed conflicts in 2012, a reduction of five compared with the previous year. The bad news is that the number of deaths shot up again last year as a result of the horrendously bloody Syrian conflict. But that outbreak of barbarism shouldn’t detract from the otherwise dramatically improving trend, which is perhaps the single most important fact about the world today. Instead of fighting, we now trade, communicate, travel and invest; while there is still a long way to go in tearing down protectionist barriers, international economic integration is the great driving force of progress. We are also far less likely to die from the side-effects of economic development and the burning of cooking and heating fuels. In 1900, one person in 550 globally would die from air pollution every year, an annual risk of dying of 0.18pc. Today, that risk has fallen to 0.04 pc, or one in 2,500; by 2050, it is expected to have collapsed to 0.02pc, or one in 5,000. Many other kinds of pollution are also in decline, of course, but this shift is the most powerful. In fact, we are living healthier and longer lives all round, thanks primarily to the remarkable progress made by medicine. Average life expectancy at birth in Africa has jumped from 50 years in 2000 to 56 in 2011; for the world as a whole, it has increased from 64 to 70, according to the World Health Organisation. While people in rich countries can now expect to reach 80, the gap is narrowing and emerging economies are catching up; in India, for example, life expectancy has been increasing by 4.5 years per decade since the 1960s. Medical advances have improved life measurably for any given stage of economic development. Childhood mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa remains far too high, but in 2008 it had fallen to just a third of that in Liverpool in 1870, even though real per capita incomes in that part of the world remain just over half that of Liverpudlians in the 19th century. The probability of a newborn dying before their fifth birthday has dropped from a world average of 23pc in the 1950s to 6pc in the current decade. That’s still nothing to be happy about, of course, but the progress has been remarkable. Child mortality is set to fall from 7.7pc in 2000 to 3.1pc in 2050. One reason is better nutrition. The best proxy for that is height: Latin Americans have been growing taller for years, and since the late 20th century so have young people in Asia, with increased prosperity allowing parents to feed their children more and better food. Better sanitation is also helping: deaths caused by a lack of access to clean water have tumbled from 1.5 per 1,000 people in developing countries in 1950 to 0.4 today and are due to halve again by 2050. Education is another area which has seen huge improvement globally. The UK is a scandalous outlier here, with a recent OECD analysis showing that we are the only rich country in which 55 to 65-year-olds are more proficient in literacy and numeracy than 16 to 24-year-olds, a catastrophic regression. But our educational suicide is unique, and emerging markets have seen revolutionary improvements in recent decades, enhancing educational opportunities for hundreds of millions of young people. Progress has been especially strong from around 1970. While 23.6pc of the world’s population remains illiterate, that is down from 70pc in 1900 and is the lowest it has ever been. The costs of illiteracy have fallen steadily from 12.3pc of global GDP at the start of last century and are set to be just 3.8pc by 2050. Gender equality is also improving. In 1900, women made up only 15pc of the global workforce. By 2012, it reached around 40pc and is expected to hit 45pc by mid-century. Even climate change may have had a much more balanced effect than is usually understood. One of the contributors to Lomborg’s book, Richard Tol, estimates that global warming has so far been beneficial, on balance, to the world – some countries have lost out, but more have gained – but will turn into a net negative later this century, when costs will increasingly outweigh benefits. Tol’s analysis includes agriculture and forestry, sea levels, energy consumption, health and much else besides. This area is contentious and hard to measure. Predictions are exceptionally difficult; as Lomborg himself has argued elsewhere, so far global warming has been below what almost all models had been predicting. We shall see. The only important metric that is unambiguously deteriorating is biodiversity, which declined by 21pc in the 20th century and is continuing to fall. On balance, however, the world is easily in the best place it’s ever been, despite the financial crisis and the threat of terrorism. Thanks to capitalism, globalisation, technology and a reduced tolerance for violence, humanity has never had it so good. Turn: Attempting to move away from capitalism will cause transitional conflicts that will end in increased domination and unsustainable exploitation. Mark Avrum Gubrud @ the Center for Superconductivity Research, 1997, “Nanotechnology and International Security”, a/online With molecular manufacturing, international trade in both raw materials and finished goods can be replaced by decentralized production for local consumption, using locally available materials. The decline of international trade will undermine a powerful source of common interest. Further, artificial intelligence will displace skilled as well as unskilled labor. A world system based on wage labor, transnational capitalism and global markets will necessarily give way. We imagine that a golden age is possible, but we don’t know how to organize one. As global capitalism retreats, it will leave behind a world dominated by politics, and possibly feudal concentrations of wealth and power. Economic insecurity, and fears for the material and moral future of humankind may lead to the rise of demagogic and intemperate national leaders. With almost two hundred sovereign nations, each struggling to create a new economic and social order, perhaps the most predictable outcome is chaos: shifting alignments, displaced populations, power struggles, ethnic conflicts inflamed by demagogues, class conflicts, land disputes, etc. Small and underdeveloped nations will be more than ever dependent on the major powers for access to technology, and more than ever vulnerable to sophisticated forms of control or subversion, or to outright domination. Competition among the leading technological powers for the political loyalty of clients might imply reversion to some form of nationalistiStc imperialism.
3/18/17
ERROR
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Peninsula JL | Judge: Felix Tan, John Scoggin, Adam Torson ERROR
3/18/17
JF - 1AC - Agonism
Tournament: Strake RR | Round: 2 | Opponent: Cedar Park MG | Judge: Wright, Paramo Part 1: Framework Attempting to understand beings, communities, and ethics as pure will inevitably fail:
There is no possibility of understanding people in and of themselves. All identities are understood through the differentiation of social relations, which are by necessity constantly changing. Butler 92 (Judith Butler. 1992. “Continent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of “Postmodernism” Feminists Theorize the Political) “In a sense, the subject is constituted through an exclusion and differentiation, perhaps a repression, that is subsequently concealed, covered over, by the effect of autonomy. In this sense, autonomy is the logical consequence of a disavowed dependency, which is to say that the autonomous subject can maintain the illusion of its autonomy insofar as it covers over the break out of which it is constituted. This dependency and this break are already social relations, ones which precede and condition the formation of the subject. As a result, this is not a relation in which the subject finds itself, as one of the relations that forms it situation. The subject is constructed through acts of exclusion and differentiation that distinguished the subject from its constitutive outside, a domain of abjected alterity. There is no ontologically intact reflexivity to the subject which is then placed within a cultural context; that cultural context, as it were, is already there as the disarticulated process of that subject’s production, one that is concealed by the frame that would situate a ready-made subject in an external web of cultural relations. We may be tempted to think that to assume the subject in advance is necessary in order to safeguard the agency of the subject. But to claim that the subject is constituted is not to claim that it is determined; on the contrary, the constituted character of the subject is the very precondition of its agency. For what is it that enables a purposive and significant reconfiguration of cultural and political relations, if not a relation that can be turned against itself, reworked, resisted? Do we need to assume theoretically from the start a subject with agency before we can articulate the terms of a significant social and political task of transformation, resistance, radical democratization? If we do not offer in advance the theoretical guarantee of that agent, are we doomed to give up transformation and meaningful political practice? My suggestion is that agency belongs to a way of thinking about persons as instrumental actors who confront an external political field. But if we agree that politics and power exist already at the level at which the subject and its agency are articulated and made possible, then agency can be presumed only at the cost of refusing to inquire into its construction. Consider that “agency” has no formal existence or, if it does, it has no bearing on the question at hand. In a sense, the epistemological model that offers us a pregiven subject or agent is one that refuses to acknowledge that agency is always and only a political prerogative. As such, it seems crucial to question the conditions of its possibility, not to take it for granted as an a priori guarantee. We need instead to ask, what possibilities of mobilization that are produced on the basis of existing configurations of discourse and power? Where are the possibilities of reworking that very matrix of power by which we are constituted, of reconstituting the legacy of that constitution, and of working against each other those processes of regulation at can destabilize existing power regimes? For if the subject is constituted by power, that power does not cease at the moment the subject is constituted, for that subject is never fully constituted, but is subjected and produced time and again. That subject is neither a ground nor a product, but the permanent possibility of a certain resignifying process, one which gets detoured and stalled through other mechanisms of power, but which is power’s own possibility of being reworked. The subject is an accomplishment regulate and produced in advance. And is as such fully political; indeed, perhaps most political at the point in which it is claimed to be prior to politics itself.” Implications: A. Ethics has to start with the self – otherwise it can’t guide action because its principle doesn't have a claim on what I ought to do. But, there is no single stable self. Any attempt to theorize the self would fail to understand the ontological status of the agent. Mills Charles W. Mills, “Ideal Theory” as Ideology, 2005 “An idealized social ontology. Morality theory deals with the normative, but it cannot avoid some characterization of the human beings who make up the society, and whose interactions with one another are its subject. So some overt or tacit social ontology has to be presupposed. An idealized social ontology of the modern type (as against, say, a Platonic or Aristotelian type) will typically assume the abstract and undifferentiated equal atomic individuals of classical liberalism. Thus it will abstract away from relations of structural domination, exploitation, coercion, and oppression, which in reality, of course, will pro- foundly shape the ontology of those same individuals, locating them in superior and inferior positions in social hierarchies of various kinds.” (168) 2. Discrimination is constitutive of any moral theory because it requires one to distinguish between the ethical and anti-ethical. Differentiation becomes a condition for any decision, so justice is found in violence. Hagglund ““THE NECESSITY OF DISCRIMINATION DISJOINING DERRIDA AND LEVINAS” MARTIN HÄGGLUND “Derrida targets precisely this logic of opposition. As he argues in Of Grammatology, metaphysics has always regarded violence as derivative of a primary peace. The possibility of violence can thus be accounted for only in terms of a Fall, that is, in terms of a fatal corruption of a pure origin. By deconstructing this figure of thought, Derrida seeks to elucidate why violence does is not merely an empirical accident that befalls something that precedes it. Rather, violence it stems from an essential impropriety that does not allow anything to be sheltered from death and forgetting. Consequently, Derrida takes issue with what he calls the “ethico-theoretical decision” of metaphysics, which postulates the simple to be before the complex, the pure before the impure, the sincere before the deceitful, and so on. All divergences from the positively valued term are thus explained away as symptoms of “alienation,” and the desirable is conceived as the return to what supposedly has been lost or corrupted. In contrast, Derrida argues that what makes it possible for anything to be at the same time makes it impossible for anything to be in itself. The integrity of any “positive” term is necessarily compromised and threatened by its “other.” Such constitutive alterity answers to an essential corruptibility, which undercuts all ethico-theoretical decisions of how things ought to be in an ideal world.11 A key term here is what Derrida calls “undecidability.” With this term he designates the necessary opening toward the coming of the future. The coming of the future is strictly speaking “undecidable,” since it is a relentless displacement that unsettles any defi nitive assurance or given meaning. One can never know what will have happened. Promises may always be turned into threats, friendships into enmities, fidelities into betrayals, and so on. There is no opposition between undecidability and the making of decisions. On the contrary, Derrida emphasizes that one always acts in relation to what cannot be predicted, that one always is forced to make decisions even though the consequences of these decisions cannot be finally established. Any kind of decision (ethical, or political decision, juridical, and so forth) is more or less violent, but it is nevertheless necessary to make decisions. Once again, I want to stress that violent differentiation by no means should be understood as a Fall, where violence supervenes upon a harmony that precedes it. On the contrary, discrimination has to be regarded as a is constitutive condition. Without divisional marks—which is to say: without segregating borders—there would be nothing at all. In effect, every attempt to organize life in accordance with ethical or political prescriptions will have been marked by a fundamental duplicity. On the one hand, it is necessary to draw boundaries, to demarcate, in order to form any community whatsoever. On the other hand, it is precisely because of these excluding borders that every kind of community is characterized by a more or less palpable instability. What cannot be included opens the threat as well as the chance that the prevalent order may be transformed or subverted. In Specters of Marx, Derrida pursues this argument in terms of an originary “spec- trality.” A salient connotation concerns phantoms and specters as haunting reminders of the victims of historical violence, of those who have been excluded or extinguished from the formation of a society. The notion of spectrality is not, however, exhausted by these ghosts that question the good conscience of a state, a nation, or an ideology. Rather, Derridaʼs aim is to formulate a general “hauntology” (hantologie), in contrast to the traditional “ontology” that thinks being in terms of self-identical presence. What is important about the figure of the specter, then, is that it cannot be fully present: it has no being in itself but marks a relation to what is no longer or not yet. And since time— the disjointure between past and future—is a condition even for the slightest moment, Derrida argues that spectrality is at work in everything that happens. An identity or community can never escape the machinery of exclusion, can never fail to engender ghosts, since it must demarcate itself against a past that cannot be encompassed and a future that cannot be anticipated. Inversely, it will always be threatened by what it can- not integrate in itself—haunted by the negated, the neglected, and the unforeseeable. Thus, a rigorous deconstructive thinking maintains that we are always already in- scribed in an “economy of violence” where we are both excluding and being excluded. No position can be autonomous or absolute but is necessarily bound to other positions that it violates and by which it is violated. The struggle for justice can thus not be a struggle for peace, but only for what I will call “lesser violence.” Derrida himself only uses this term briefly in his essay “Violence and Metaphysics,” but I will seek to develop its significance.The starting point for my argument is that all decisions made in the name of justice are made in view of what is judged to be the lesser violence. If there is always an economy of violence, decisions of justice cannot be a matter of choosing what is nonviolent. To justify something is rather to contend that it is less violent than something else. This does not mean that decisions made in view of lesser violence are actually less violent than the violence they oppose. On the contrary, even the most horrendous acts are justified in view of what is judged to be the lesser violence. For example, justifications of genocide clearly appeal to an argument for lesser violence, since the extinction of the group in question is claimed to be less violent than the dangers it poses to another group. The disquieting point, however, is that all decisions of justice are is implicated in the logic of violence. The desire for lesser violence is never innocent, since it is a desire for violence in one form or another, and here can be no guarantee that it is in the service of perpetrating the better.” (46-48) Impacts: A. Controls the internal link to every other framework because any theory requires us to choose a conception of morality otherwise they are baseless and cannot prescribe an obligation. So, other theories would have to concede exclusion of beliefs as a condition for their normativity in the first place. B. Precedes idealized frameworks. The belief in absolute peace is self-contradictory and justifies absolute violence. Hagglund 2“THE NECESSITY OF DISCRIMINATION DISJOINING DERRIDA AND LEVINAS” MARTIN HÄGGLUND “A possible objection here is that we must strivinge toward an ideal origin or end, an arkhe or telos that would prevail beyond the possibility of violence. Even if every community is haunted by victims of discrimination and forgetting, we should try to reach a state of being that does not exclude anyone, namely, a consummated presence that includes everyone. However, it is precisely with such an “ontological” the thesis that Derridaʼs hauntological thinking takes issue. At several places in Specters of Marx he maintains that a completely present life—which would not be “out of joint,” not haunted by any ghosts—would be nothing but a complete death. Derridaʼs point is not simply that a peaceful state of existence is impossible to realize, as if it were a desirable, albeit unattainable end. Rather, he challenges the very idea that absolute peace is desirable. In a state of being where all violent change is precluded, nothing can ever happen. Absolute peace is thus inseparable from absolute violence, as Derrida argued already in “Violence and Metaphysics.” Anything that would finally put an end to violence (whether the end is a religious salvation, a universal justice, a harmonious intersubjectivity or some other ideal) would end the possibility of life in general. The idea of absolute peace is the idea of eliminating the undecidable future that is the con- dition for anything to happen. Thus, the idea of absolute peace is the idea of absolute violence.” (49) And, democratic agonism is the only thing that can overcome ontological violence:
The only way to resolve the inevitable conflict that comes with pluralism in our agency and ethics is to embrace that it is in fact inevitable. This requires an agonistic commitment, which recognizes that conflict is inevitable, but frames the other as a legitimate opponent instead of an enemy. Mouffe 2k Chantal Mouffe, Professor at the Department of Political Science of the Institute for Advanced Studies. June 2000. “The Democratic Paradox” "A well-functioning democracy calls for a vibrant clash of democratic political positions. If this is missing there is the danger that this democratic confrontation will be replaced by a confrontation among other forms of collective identification, as is the case with identity politics. Too much emphasis on consensus and the refusal of confrontation lead to apathy and disaffection with political participation. Worse still, the result can be the crystallization of collective passions around issues which cannot be managed by the democratic process and an explosion of antagonisms that can tear up the very basis of civility." (104) Thus, the standard is promoting agonistic democracy. To clarify, it’s a question of creating procedural elements that allow discussion, not specific ends. Prefer additionally:
Educational spaces must embrace contestation as a condition for resistance. Any attempt to exclude challenges reaffirms pedagogical imperialism. Rickert 01 Thomas, “"Hands Up, You're Free": Composition in a Post-Oedipal World”, JacOnline Journal “This essay will employ Deleuze's and Zizek's theories to illustrate the limitations of writing pedagogies that rely on modernist strategies of critical distance or political agency. Implicit in such pedagogies is the faith that teaching writing can resist dominant social practices and empower students; however, the notion that we can actually foster resistance through teaching is questionable. As Paul Mann states, "all the forms of opposition have long since revealed themselves as means of advancing it. ... The mere fact that something feels like resistance and still manages to offend a few people (usually not even the right people) hardly makes it effective" (138). In light of Mann's statement, I urge us to take the following position: teaching writing is fully complicitous with dominant social practices, and inducing students to write in accordance with institutional precepts can be as disabling as it is enabling. By disabling, I do not mean that learning certain skills-typically those most associated with current-traditional rhetorics, such as superficial forms of grammatical correctness, basic organization, syntactic clarity, and such-are not useful. Such skills are useful, and they are often those most necessary for tapping the power that writing can wield. In learning such skills, however, we should also ask what students aren’t are not learning. What other forms of writing and thinking are being foreclosed or distorted, forms of writing that have their own, different powers? If one of our goals as teachers of writing is to initiate students into rhetorics of power and resistance, we should also be equally attuned to rhetorics of contestation. Specifically, we must take on the responsibility that comes with the impossibility of knowing the areas of contention and struggle that will be the most important in our students' lives. 2. Double bind – to act morally one must first know what is the right thing to do, which means any moral system has to be derivative of the procedures intrinsic to agonistic conflict: A. If our moral belief changes after an agonistic conflict, then it shows that preserving the relationship based off of openness and disagreement is necessary to identity moral errors. B. If my moral belief remains the same, I have practiced commitment to my belief because defending it assumes values in the belief. C. It’s a no risk issue- they have to justify that something can be uncontestable in order to prove antagonism is good for ethics. 3. Agonism outweighs regardless of the role of the ballot. To make claims about the structure and shape of the activity relies on the initial assumption that debaters have the ability to contest the structure our activity. This entails that higher-level deliberation and contestation about what judges should do or how the ballot should function relies on the initial AC premise. 4. Agonism controls the ability for us to engage in activism to solve oppression. Harrigan 08 Casey, Associate Director of Debate at UGA, Master’s in Communications – Wake Forest U., “A Defense of Switch Side Debate”, Master’s thesis at Wake Forest, Department of Communication, May, pp.43-45 The Relevance Of Argumentation For Advancing Tolerant Politics Cannot Be Underestimated. The willingness to be open to alternative views has a material impact on difference in at least two primary ways. First, the rendering of a certain belief as “off limits” from debate and the prohibition of ideas from the realm of contestation is conceptually indistinct from the physical exclusion of people from societal practices. Unlike racial or gendered concerns, certain groups of people (the religious, minority political parties, etc.) are defined almost exclusively by the arguments that they adhere to. To deem these views unspeakable or irrelevant is to functionally deny whole groups of people access to public deliberation. Second, argument, as individual advocacy, is an expression of belief. It has the potential to persuade members of the public to either support or oppose progressive politics. Belief itself is an accurate indicator of the way individuals will chose to act—with very real implications for openness, diversity and accommodation. Thus, as a precursor to action, argument is an essential starting point for campaigns of tolerance. Argumentative pluralism can be defined as the proper tolerance for the expression of a diversity of ideas (Scriven 1975, p. 694). Contrary to monism, pluralism holds that there are many potential beliefs in the world and that each person has the ability to determine for himself or herself that these beliefs may hold true. Referring back to the opening examples, a pluralist would respect the right for the KKK to hold certain beliefs, even if he or she may find the group offensive. In the argumentative context, pluralism requires that participants to a debate or discussion recognize the right of others to express their beliefs, no matter how objectionable they may be. The key here is expression: although certain beliefs may be more “true” than others in the epistemic sense, each should have equal access (at least initially) to forums of deliberation. It is important to distinguish pluralism from its commonly confused, but only loosely connected, counterpart, relativism. To respect the right of others to hold different beliefs does not require that they are all considered equal. Such tolerance ends at the intellectual level of each individual being able to hold their own belief. Indeed, as Muir writes, “It pluralism implies neither tolerance of actions based on those beliefs nor respecting the content of the beliefs” (288). Thus, while a pluralist may acknowledge the right for the Klan to hold exclusionary views, he or she need not endorse racism or anti-Semitism itself, or the right to exclude itself. Even when limited to such a narrow realm of diversity, argumentative pluralism holds great promise for a politics based on understanding and accommodation that runs contrary to the dominant forces of economic, political, and social exclusion. Pluralism requires that individuals acknowledge opposing beliefs and arguments by forcing an understanding that personal convictions are not universal. Instead of blindly asserting a position as an “objective truth,” advocates tolerate a multiplicity of perspectives, allowing a more panoramic understanding of the issue at hand (Mitchell and Suzuki 2004, p. 10). In doing so, the advocates frequently understand that there are persuasive arguments to be had on both sides of an issue. As a result, instead of advancing a cause through moralistic posturing or appeals to a falsely assumed universality (which, history has shown, frequently become justifications for scape-goating and exclusion), these proponents become purveyors of reasoned arguments that attempt to persuade others through deliberation. A clear example of this occurs in competitive academic debate. Switch-side debating has profound implications for pluralism. Personal convictions are supplemented by conviction in the process of debate. Instead of being personally invested in the truth and general acceptance of a position, debaters use arguments instrumentally, as tools, and as pedagogical devices in the search for larger truths. Beyond simply recognizing that more than one side exists for each issue, switch-side debate advances the larger cause of equality by fostering tolerance and empathy toward difference. Setting aside their own “ego-identification,” students realize that they must listen and understand their opponent’s arguments well enough to become advocates on behalf of them in future debates (Muir 1993, p. 289). Debaters assume the position of their opponents and understand how and why the position is constructed as it is. As a result, they often come to understand that a strong case exists for opinions that they previously disregarded. Recently, advocates of switch side debating have taken the case of the practice a step further, arguing that it, “originates from a civic attitude that serves as a bulwark against fundamentalism of all stripes” (English, Llano, Mitchell, Morrison, Rief and Woods 2007, p. 224). Debating practices that break down exclusive, dogmatic views may be one of the most robust checks against violence in contemporary society. Impact Calc: The framework is not consequentialist, rather, it cares about creating the structures that allow for agonistic deliberation. Mouffe 2 Chantal Mouffe, Professor at the Department of Political Science of the Institute for Advanced Studies. June 2000. “The Democratic Paradox” "Following that line of thought we can realize that what is really at stake in the allegiance to democratic institutions is the constitution of an ensemble of practices that make possible the creation of democratic citizens. This is not a matter of rational justification but of availability of democratic forms of individuality and subjectivity. By privileging rationality, both the deliberative and the aggregative perspectives leave aside a central element which is the crucial role played by passions and affects in securing allegiance to democratic values. This cannot be ignored, and it entails envisaging the question of democratic citizenship in a very different way. The failure of current democratic theory to tackle the question of citizenship is the consequence of their operating with a conception of the subject which sees individuals as prior to society, bearers of natural rights, and either utility maximizing agents or rational subjects. In all cases they are abstracted from social and power relations, language, culture and the whole set of practices that make agency possible. What is precluded in these rationalistic approaches is the very question of what are the conditions of existence of the democratic subject. The view that I want to put forward is that it is not by providing arguments about the rationality embodied in liberal democratic institutions that one can contribute to the creation of democratic citizens. Democratic individuals can only be made possible by multiplying the institutions, the discourses, and the forms of life that foster identification with democratic values. This is why, although agreeing with deliberative democrats about the need for a different understanding of democracy, I see their proposals as counterproductive. To be sure, we need to formulate an alternative to the aggregative model and to the instrumentalist conception of politics that it fosters. It has become clear that by discouraging the active involvement of citizens in the running of the polity and by encouraging the privatization of life, they have not secured the stability that they were announcing. Extreme forms of individualism have become widespread which threaten the very social fabric. On the other side, deprived of the possibility of identifying with valuable conceptions of citizenship, many people are increasingly searching for other forms of collective identification, which can very often put into jeopardy the civic bond that should unite a democratic political association. The growth of various religious, moral and ethnic fundamentalisms is, in my view, the direct consequence of the democratic deficit which characterizes most liberal-democratic societies. To seriously tackle those problems, the only way to envisage democratic citizenship from a different perspective, is one that puts the emphasis on the types of practices and not the forms of argumentation." (95)
Part 2: Advocacy I defend the resolution as a generl principle. Part 3: Contention Censorship on college campuses is being used to stifle democratic thought itself. Sevcenko 16 Catherine Sevcenko, Email Congress about Campus Censorship Today, March 3, 2016, https://www.thefire.org/email-congress-about-campus-censorship-today/ Nevertheless, colleges and universities have stifled political debate on campus on numerous occasions, especially advocacy for a particular candidate, on the mistaken ground that if Students for Insert Candidate’s Name Here is allowed to advocate on campus, the school will lose its tax-exempt status and likely be put out of business. Educational institutions are, understandably, extremely careful not to do anything that might jeopardize their tax-exempt status. The IRS is equally zealous in making sure that institutions who have this benefit adhere to the rules needed to maintain it. So the incentive for schools to take a “better safe than sorry” approach to the regulations is high—even if it means censoring student speech. Thus, affirm: Agonism forces everyone to acknowledge each other’s beliefs as structurally legitimate to have engagement. Mouffe 2 Chantal Mouffe, Professor at the Department of Political Science of the Institute for Advanced Studies. June 2000. “The Democratic Paradox” I submit that this is a crucial insight which undermines the very objective that those who advocate the 'ddiberative' approach present as the aim of democracy: the establishment of a rational consensus on universal principles. They believe that through rational deliberation an impartial standpoint could be reached where decisions would be taken that are equally in the interests of alt.l :! Wittgenstein, on the contrary. suggests another view. If we follow his lead. we should acknowledge and valorize the diversity of ways in which the 'democratic game' can be played, instead of trying to reduce this diversity to a uniform model of citizenship. This would mean fostering a plurality of forms of being a democratic citizen and creating the institutions that would make it possible to follow the democratic rules in a plurality of ways. What Wittgenstein teaches us is that there cannot be one single best, more 'rational' way to obey those rules and that it is precisely such a recognition that is constitutive of a pluralist democracy. 'Following a rule', says Wittgenstein, 'is analogous to obeying an order. We are trained to do so we react to an order in a particular way. But what if one person reacts in one way and another in another to the order and the training? Which one is right?'23 This is indeed a crucial question for democratic theory. And it cannot be resolved, pace the rationalists, by claiming that there is a correct understanding of the rule that every rational person should accept. To be sure, we need to be able to distinguish between 'obeying the rule' and 'going against it'. But space needs to be provided for the many different practices in which obedience to the democratic rules can be inscribed. And this should not be envisaged as a temporary accommodation, as a stage in the process leading to the realization of the rational consensus, but as a constitutive feature of a democratic society. Democratic citizenship can take many diverse forms and such a diversity, far from being a danger for democracy, is in fact its very condition of existence. This will of course, create conflict and it would be a mistake to expect all those different understandings to coexist without dashing. But this struggle will not be one between 'enemies' but among 'adversaries', since all participants will recognize the positions of the others in the contest as legitimate ones. Such an understanding of democratic politics, which is precisely what I call 'agonistic pluralism', is unthinkable within a rationalistic problematic which, by necessity. tcods to erase diversity. A perspective inspired by Wittgenstein. on the contrary, can contribute to its formulation, and this is why his contribution to democratic thinking is invaluable. This means censorship is never justifiable since censorship relies on the assumption that some viewpoint is not legitimate enough to be voiced. Pohlhaus and Wright. Using Wittgenstein Critically: A Political Approach to Philosophy Author(s): Gaile Pohlhaus and John R. Wright Insofar as a plurality of positions can be accommodated within the 'we' through which individuals can lay claim to an intelligible voice, the 'we' and the language games we play are affirmed in their legitimacy. On the other hand, insofar as what 'we say' forecloses in advance the acknowledgment of certain individuals as competent speakers of our language, then 'we' put into question our intelligibility to ourselves. This situation parallels the claim to a private language insofar as our answerability to others would be artificially delimited and our intelligibility to ourselves would be made to seem, in this regard, effortless. Like the individual entertaining the idea of a private lan¬guage, 'we' ignore the grounds of our collective intelligibility to others and to ourselves when we deny our dependence, in raising any sort of claim, on an open-ended public language. We will call this the 'extended private language argument'. Taking the skeptical 'threat' seriously, by this argument, is part of maintaining a commitment to a genuinely open-ended 'we' as a ground to mutual intelligibility, because not doing so would be to set limits, in advance, on who we will regard as a competent speaker. For example, say a group's use of 'justice' involves claiming without irony that "justice was served" in situations involving racial minorities whenever they have been punished more harshly than nonminorities would be for an equivalent crime. Confronted with this group, one might want to say to these people that they are twisting the term to suit their purposes of maintaining a racist social order; yet perhaps when this is pointed out, they persist in claim¬ing that they really are 'doing justice'. If we claim, then, that "they evidently don't know what justice means," one possible response open to them is sim¬ply to say, "perhaps you don't know what it means, but this is what we say . . . " Any demands put to the racist group to use the term consistently can easily be deflected by an obstinate appeal to the 'real meaning' of the term. As invoked in this situation, those who object that "that's not what justice means" can be branded as incompetent speakers with a shrug from a member of the racist group. We are then at a stalemate, at least about our language. The force of the extended private language argument is to show us that in refusing answerability, both non-racists and the racist group are alienated from their intelligibility to themselves through the language in which they try to express themselves. In other words, by saying that they do not have to answer m Censorship is deconstructive and regressive and turns any criticism – blocking the freedom of speech will only guarantee the domination of current prevailing discursive practices. Ward 90 ( David V. Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy at Widener University in Pennsylvania. “Library Trends” Philosophical Issues in Censorship and Intellectual Freedom, Volume 39, Nos 1 and 2. Summer/Fall 1990. Pages 86-87) Second, even if the opinion some wish to censor is largely false, it may contain some portion of truth, a portion denied us if we suppress the speech which contains it. The third reason for allowing free expression is that any opinion “however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, ... will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth” (Mill, 1951, p. 126). Merely believing the truth is not enough, Mill points out, for even a true opinion held without full and rich understanding of its justification is “a prejudice, a belief independent of, and proof against, argument-this is not the way in which truth ought to be held by a rational being. This is not knowing the truth. Truth, thus held, is but one superstition the more, accidentally clinging to the words which enunciate a truth” (p. 127). Fourth, the meaning of a doctrine held without the understanding which arises in the vigorous debate of its truth, “will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience” (p. 149). Censorship, then, is undesirable according to Mill because, whether the ideas censored are true or not, the consequences of suppression are bad. Censorship is wrong because it makes it less likely that truth will be discovered or preserved, and it is wrong because it has destructive consequences for the intellectual character of those who live under it. Deontological arguments in favor of freedom of expression, and of intellectual freedom in general, are based on claims that people are entitled to freely express their thoughts, and to receive the expressions made by others, quite independently of whether the effects of that speech are desirable or not. These entitlements take the form of rights, rights to both free expression and access to the expressions of others. Free speech was written into the constitution explicitly to be a counter-majoritarian right to promote agonistic discourse Redish and Mollen 09 Martin H. Redish, Louis and Harriet Ancel Professor of Law and Public Policy, Northwestern University School of Law, Abby Marie Mollen, B.A. 2001, J.D. 2008, Northwestern University, “UNDERSTANDING POST'S AND MEIKLEJOHN'S MISTAKES: THE CENTRAL ROLE OF ADVERSARY DEMOCRACY IN THE THEORY OF FREE EXPRESSION,” Northwestern University Law Review Vol. 103, No. 3, 2009 JW According to Mansbridge, "the framers of the American Constitution explicitly espoused a philosophy of adversary democracy built on selfinterest,"'2 which shaped the Constitution in several ways. First, by putting certain individual rights beyond the reach of majoritarian enactments, the Bill of Rights actually enshrines and protects conflict. The Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment, for instance, protect religious diversity and the divergent ideas of the "good life" that result from different religious beliefs. The Free Speech Clause likewise protects the liberty of the individual to speak pursuant to her own will, even though her speech conflicts with the existing order and ideas of the "common good" that the majority accepts. The Constitution's countermajoritarian protections, in other words, reject the ideal of widespread societal consensus. To the contrary, out of respect for individual autonomy, they constitutionalize individual interest and the conflict it may produce. Adversarial democracy entails protection of constitutional speech. Also justifies why cooperative conceptions of democracy fail in the context of free speech. Redish and Mollen 09 Martin H. Redish, Louis and Harriet Ancel Professor of Law and Public Policy, Northwestern University School of Law, Abby Marie Mollen, B.A. 2001, J.D. 2008, Northwestern University, “UNDERSTANDING POST'S AND MEIKLEJOHN'S MISTAKES: THE CENTRAL ROLE OF ADVERSARY DEMOCRACY IN THE THEORY OF FREE EXPRESSION,” Northwestern University Law Review Vol. 103, No. 3, 2009 JW Acceptance of the premises of adversary democracy has important implications for the scope of the theory of free expression. Post and Meiklejohn were both correct in positing a symbiotic intersection between democracy and free expression. Recognition of both the normative and empirical superiority of the adversary model of democracy, however, suggests that the First Amendment's domain extends significantly farther than either Post or Meiklejohn's theories would permit. Adversary democracy, it should be recalled, posits that democracy invariably involves an adversarial competition among competing personal, social, or economic interests. Individuals are able to protect their own interests or to achieve their ideological goals by (1) participating in the proc- ess of governing by exercise of the vote, and (2) attempting, through exercise of their expressive powers, to persuade others to accept their positions. The First Amendment, therefore, must protect (1) all speech that facilitates the individual's democratic decisionmaking; (2) all lawful advocacy;3° ' (3) all speech that facilitates the individual's awareness of her self-interest; and (4) all speech that facilitates the individual's ability to maintain and develop her individuality in spite of collective life. Notably, this does not mean that the government is absolutely barred from regulating speech that falls in these four categories. It simply means that it can do so only when the regulation survives strict scrutiny. While the adversary theory of the First Amendment would protect all of the speech that Meiklejohn's and Post's theories would protect, it would also protect much of the expression these theories exclude. As previously noted, both Meiklejohn and Post strained their theories' claims to being democratic in order to exclude certain forms of self-interested speech. Meiklejohn not only violated the core principle of epistemological humility to justify his exclusion of economically self-interested speech from the First Amendment, he also excluded such self-interested speech despite its potential to inform democratic decisionmaking, which he believed to be the sole constitutional purpose for protecting speech in the first place. Post likewise casts off or at least devalues core aspects of democratic autonomy, such as the vote and the information that makes it more informed, despite the fact that doing so concomitantly undermines his theory's ability to secure democratic legitimacy, the value it purportedly protects. Perhaps it is inevitable that cooperative theories of democracy would struggle to articulate a coherent theory of free speech, precisely because of their inherent rejection of the adversary premise and its centrality to core notions of democracy. Based on their theoretical premise that democracy is an exercise of collective self-determination in pursuit of shared objectives, cooperative theories of the First Amendment might always be faced with something of a difficult choice. They could remain true to their First Amendment premises for protecting speech-listener autonomy in Meiklejohn's model, for instance. But to the extent they do so, they might necessarily violate a theoretical premise of the underlying cooperative democratic theory, such as Meiklejohn's premise that self-government should pursue the common good rather than private self-interest. Put differently, cooperative theories of democracy are fundamentally inconsistent with the core principle of epistemological humility that the First Amendment embodies because, either implicitly or explicitly, they reflect predetermined conclusions about how autonomy should be exercised. In this manner, both theories suffer from the oxymoronic concept of externally determined autonomy. Adversary democracy does not suffer from the same problem because it contains no underlying premise as to how or why autonomy should be exercised.3 "' Instead, it commits these choices to the individual. Thus, if an individual wishes to vote and advocate in order to pursue the course of action he thinks is in the best interests of the community or the nation, adversary democracy authorizes him to do so. On the other hand, if an individual wishes to vote and advocate in order to pursue what he thinks is in his own private self-interest, adversary democracy says he may do so. Because adversary democracy is consistent with these process-based autonomy decisions, one employing the adversary theory of the First Amendment is never tempted to exclude speech otherwise logically included within the amendment's scope simply because its speaker is not acting in accordance with some predetermined ideal of political behavior. More importantly, the adversary theory of free expression is preferable to Meiklejohn's and Post's theories because it equally protects all aspects of democratic autonomy, rather than selectively privileging some aspects over others. Assuming that the purpose of a democratic theory of the First Amendment is, indeed, to facilitate democracy, which in turn necessarily implies the notions of epistemological humility and true voter autonomy, such comprehensive protection for all aspects of process-based autonomy is crucial to a theory's success. Unlike Meiklejohn's theory, which categorically excludes speaker autonomy and all forms of individual autonomy, and unlike Post's theory, which systematically underprotects listener autonomy and all forms of individual autonomy that do not facilitate the emergence of a common will, the adversary theory of free expression provides complete protection to democratic autonomy in all its manifestations. Debate and discourse isn’t intrinsically violent—even if it results in violent things the speech in and of itself isn’t harmful. Anderson 6 — Amanda Anderson, Caroline Donovan Professor of English Literature and Department Chair at Johns Hopkins University, Senior Fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, holds a Ph.D. in English from Cornell University, 2006 (“Reply to My Critic(s),” Criticism, Volume 48, Number 2, Spring, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Project MUSE, p. 285-287) Let's first examine the claim that my book is "unwittingly" inviting a resurrection of the "Enlightenment-equals-totalitarianism position." How, one wonders, could a book promoting argument and debate, and promoting reason-giving practices as a kind of common ground that should prevail over assertions of cultural authenticity, somehow come to be seen as a dangerous resurgence of bad Enlightenment? Robbins tells us why: I want "argument on my own terms"—that End Page 285 is, I want to impose reason on people, which is a form of power and oppression. But what can this possibly mean? Arguments stand or fall based on whether they are successful and persuasive, even an argument in favor of argument. It simply is not the case that an argument in favor of the importance of reasoned debate to liberal democracy is tantamount to oppressive power. To assume so is to assume, in the manner of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, that reason is itself violent, inherently, and that it will always mask power and enforce exclusions. But to assume this is to assume the very view of Enlightenment reason that Robbins claims we are "thankfully" well rid of. (I leave to the side the idea that any individual can proclaim that a debate is over, thankfully or not.) But perhaps Robbins will say, "I am not imagining that your argument is directly oppressive, but that what you argue for would be, if it were enforced." Yet my book doesn't imagine or suggest it is enforceable; I simply argue in favor of, I promote, an ethos of argument within a liberal democratic and proceduralist framework. As much as Robbins would like to think so, neither I nor the books I write can be cast as an arm of the police. Robbins wants to imagine a far more direct line of influence from criticism to political reality, however, and this is why it can be such a bad thing to suggest norms of argument. Watch as the gloves come off: Faced with the prospect of submitting to her version of argument—roughly, Habermas's version—and of being thus authorized to disagree only about other, smaller things, some may feel that there will have been an end to argument, or an end to the arguments they find most interesting. With current events in mind, I would be surprised if there were no recourse to the metaphor of a regular army facing a guerilla insurrection, hinting that Anderson wants to force her opponents to dress in uniform, reside in well-demarcated camps and capitals that can be bombed, fight by the rules of states (whether the states themselves abide by these rules or not), and so on—in short, that she wants to get the battle onto a terrain where her side will be assured of having the upper hand. Let's leave to the side the fact that this is a disowned hypothetical criticism. (As in, "Well, okay, yes, those are my gloves, but those are somebody else's hands they will have come off of.") Because far more interesting, actually, is the sudden elevation of stakes. It is a symptom of the sorry state of affairs in our profession that it plays out repeatedly this tragicomic tendency to give a grandiose political meaning to every object it analyzes or confronts. We have evidence of how desperate the situation is when we see it in a critic as thoughtful as Bruce Robbins, where it emerges as the need to allegorize a point about an argument in such a way that it gets cast as the equivalent of war atrocities.
3/18/17
JF - 1AC - Agonism - V2
Tournament: UH | Round: 3 | Opponent: Kinkaid JY | Judge: Parker Kelly Part 1: Framework All concepts, identities, and judgements are constructed in opposition to their negative. There can be no conception of good without bad, friendship without betrayal, promises without promise breaking. Ontological violence is foundational to any ethical or political framework. HÄGGLUND 1 “THE NECESSITY OF DISCRIMINATION DISJOINING DERRIDA AND LEVINAS” MARTIN HÄGGLUND “Derrida targets precisely this logic of opposition. As he argues in Of Grammatology, metaphysics has always regarded violence as derivative of a primary peace. The possibility of violence can thus be accounted for only in terms of a Fall, that is, in terms of a fatal corruption of a pure origin. By deconstructing this figure of thought, Derrida seeks to elucidate why violence does is not merely an empirical accident that befalls something that precedes it. Rather, violence it stems from an essential impropriety that does not allow anything to be sheltered from death and forgetting. Consequently, Derrida takes issue with what he calls the “ethico-theoretical decision” of metaphysics, which postulates the simple to be before the complex, the pure before the impure, the sincere before the deceitful, and so on. All divergences from the positively valued term are thus explained away as symptoms of “alienation,” and the desirable is conceived as the return to what supposedly has been lost or corrupted. In contrast, Derrida argues that what makes it possible for anything to be at the same time makes it impossible for anything to be in itself. The integrity of any “positive” term is necessarily compromised and threatened by its “other.” Such constitutive alterity answers to an essential corruptibility, which undercuts all ethico-theoretical decisions of how things ought to be in an ideal world.11 A key term here is what Derrida calls “undecidability.” With this term he designates the necessary opening toward the coming of the future. The coming of the future is strictly speaking “undecidable,” since it is a relentless displacement that unsettles any defi nitive assurance or given meaning. One can never know what will have happened. Promises may always be turned into threats, friendships into enmities, fidelities into betrayals, and so on. There is no opposition between undecidability and the making of decisions. On the contrary, Derrida emphasizes that one always acts in relation to what cannot be predicted, that one always is forced to make decisions even though the consequences of these decisions cannot be finally established. Any kind of decision (ethical, or political decision, juridical, and so forth) is more or less violent, but it is nevertheless necessary to make decisions. Once again, I want to stress that violent differentiation by no means should be understood as a Fall, where violence supervenes upon a harmony that precedes it. On the contrary, discrimination has to be regarded as a is constitutive condition. Without divisional marks—which is to say: without segregating borders—there would be nothing at all. In effect, every attempt to organize life in accordance with ethical or political prescriptions will have been marked by a fundamental duplicity. On the one hand, it is necessary to draw boundaries, to demarcate, in order to form any community whatsoever. On the other hand, it is precisely because of these excluding borders that every kind of community is characterized by a more or less palpable instability. What cannot be included opens the threat as well as the chance that the prevalent order may be transformed or subverted. In Specters of Marx, Derrida pursues this argument in terms of an originary “spec- trality.” A salient connotation concerns phantoms and specters as haunting reminders of the victims of historical violence, of those who have been excluded or extinguished from the formation of a society. The notion of spectrality is not, however, exhausted by these ghosts that question the good conscience of a state, a nation, or an ideology. Rather, Derridaʼs aim is to formulate a general “hauntology” (hantologie), in contrast to the traditional “ontology” that thinks being in terms of self-identical presence. What is important about the figure of the specter, then, is that it cannot be fully present: it has no being in itself but marks a relation to what is no longer or not yet. And since time— the disjointure between past and future—is a condition even for the slightest moment, Derrida argues that spectrality is at work in everything that happens. An identity or community can never escape the machinery of exclusion, can never fail to engender ghosts, since it must demarcate itself against a past that cannot be encompassed and a future that cannot be anticipated. Inversely, it will always be threatened by what it can- not integrate in itself—haunted by the negated, the neglected, and the unforeseeable. Thus, a rigorous deconstructive thinking maintains that we are always already in- scribed in an “economy of violence” where we are both excluding and being excluded. No position can be autonomous or absolute but is necessarily bound to other positions that it violates and by which it is violated. The struggle for justice can thus not be a struggle for peace, but only for what I will call “lesser violence.” Derrida himself only uses this term briefly in his essay “Violence and Metaphysics,” but I will seek to develop its significance.The starting point for my argument is that all decisions made in the name of justice are made in view of what is judged to be the lesser violence. If there is always an economy of violence, decisions of justice cannot be a matter of choosing what is nonviolent. To justify something is rather to contend that it is less violent than something else. This does not mean that decisions made in view of lesser violence are actually less violent than the violence they oppose. On the contrary, even the most horrendous acts are justified in view of what is judged to be the lesser violence. For example, justifications of genocide clearly appeal to an argument for lesser violence, since the extinction of the group in question is claimed to be less violent than the dangers it poses to another group. The disquieting point, however, is that all decisions of justice are is implicated in the logic of violence. The desire for lesser violence is never innocent, since it is a desire for violence in one form or another, and here can be no guarantee that it is in the service of perpetrating the better.” (46-48) This takes out any ideal theory that tries to unify subjects rather than starting with difference. The logic of opposition is incompatible with universal starting points that do away with violence. HÄGGLUND 2 “THE NECESSITY OF DISCRIMINATION DISJOINING DERRIDA AND LEVINAS” MARTIN HÄGGLUND “A possible objection here is that we must strivinge toward an ideal origin or end, an arkhe or telos that would prevail beyond the possibility of violence. Even if every community is haunted by victims of discrimination and forgetting, we should try to reach a state of being that does not exclude anyone, namely, a consummated presence that includes everyone. However, it is precisely with such an “ontological” the thesis that Derridaʼs hauntological thinking takes issue. At several places in Specters of Marx he maintains that a completely present life—which would not be “out of joint,” not haunted by any ghosts—would be nothing but a complete death. Derridaʼs point is not simply that a peaceful state of existence is impossible to realize, as if it were a desirable, albeit unattainable end. Rather, he challenges the very idea that absolute peace is desirable. In a state of being where all violent change is precluded, nothing can ever happen. Absolute peace is thus inseparable from absolute violence, as Derrida argued already in “Violence and Metaphysics.” Anything that would finally put an end to violence (whether the end is a religious salvation, a universal justice, a harmonious intersubjectivity or some other ideal) would end the possibility of life in general. The idea of absolute peace is the idea of eliminating the undecidable future that is the con- dition for anything to happen. Thus, the idea of absolute peace is the idea of absolute violence.” (49) Framework Implications: A. Controls the internal link to every other framework because any theory requires us to choose a conception of the good otherwise they are baseless and cannot prescribe an obligation. So, other theories would have to concede exclusion of beliefs as a condition for their normativity in the first place. B. Controls the internal link to any judge obligation. The ballot forces the judge to make a decision between who did the better debating, which inherently entails a judgement of discrimination because any decision assumes a paradigm for what better debating entails, which necessarily discriminates between various interpretations. Thus, the meta-ethic is a question of cultural conflict. Prefer additionally- Agency is specifically a question of evolution. The expansion of our brains was an adaptive response to the environment in early primate evolution. This created the conditions for self-reflection. HAVILAND: Haviland, William A. Anthropology: The Human Challenge, 15th Edition. Cengage Learning, 2017. Yuzu. “These changes in sensory organs correspond to changes in the primate brain. An increase in brain size, particularly in the cerebral hemispheres—the areas supporting conscious thought—occurred in the course of primate evolution. In monkeys, apes, and humans, the cerebral hemispheres completely cover the cerebellum, the part of the brain that coordinates muscles and maintains body balance. This development led to the flexibility seen in primate behavior. Instead of relying on reflexes controlled by the cerebellum, primates constantly react to a variety of features in the environment. Messages from the hands and feet, eyes and ears, and from the sensors of balance, movement, heat, touch, and pain are simultaneously relayed to the cerebral cortex. The cortex had to evolve considerably in order to receive, analyze, and coordinate these impressions and transmit the appropriate response back down to the motor nerves. This enlarged, responsive cerebral cortex provides the biological basis for flexible behavior patterns found in all primates, including humans.” (Pg. 64) The evolution of our brains created the conditions for cultural adaptation. No longer did we have to wait generations to prevail environmental pressures. Through culture, we could overcome challenges that were not possible from a purely biology standpoint. HAVILAND 5: Haviland, William A. Anthropology: The Human Challenge, 15th Edition. Cengage Learning, 2017. Yuzu. “In the quest for the origin of modern humans, paleoanthropologist confront mysteries by drawing from scant evidence that can be misleading and contradictory. Some of the mystery stems from the kind of evolutionary change that was set in motion with the appearance of the genus Homo. The earliest proposed members of genus Homo were recently discovered in sediments in Afar, Ethiopia, and date to about 2.8 million years ago (mya) (DiMaggio et al., 2015; Villmoare et al., 2015). The new South African Homo naledi fossils introduced in the previous chapter may date to a similar time range (Berger et al, 2015). Around this time, the brain size of our ancestors began to grow. Simultaneously, these first members of the genus Homo improved their cultural manipulation of the physical world through use of stone tools. Over time, they increasingly relied on cultural adaptation as a rapid and effective way to adjust to the environment. The evolution of the human brain was imperative for human survival and the evolution of human culture. Over the course of the next 2.5 million or so years, increasing brain size and specialization of function permitted the development of language, planning, new technologies, and artistic expression. With the evolution of a brain that made versatile behavior possible, members of the genus Homo became biocultural beings. U.S. biological anthropologist Misia Landau describes the narrative of human evolutionary history as a heroic epic (Landau, 1991). The hero, or evolving human, faces natural challenges that cannot be overcome from a strictly biological standpoint. When endowed with the gift of intelligence, the hero meets these challenges and becomes fully human. In this narrative, cultural capabilities increasingly separate humans from other evolving animals, recent advances in primatology are undercutting this notion of human uniqueness. The mechanics of biological and cultural change differ. Cultural equipment and techniques can develop rapidly with innovations occurring during an individual’s life-time. By contrast, biological change requires many generations because it depends upon heritable traits. When a new type of stone tool appears, paleoanthropologists investigate whether the cultural change corresponds to a major biological change, such as the appearance of a new species. Debate within paleoanthropology often features the relationship between biological and cultural change.” (Pg. 167-168) This implies cultural conflict is inevitable. Since different agents respond to different environments, different and conflicting cultures will arise. For example, different animals biologically evolve to different environments and obviously look different. Traits that would be advantageous in one environment can become disadvantageous in another. In regards to culture, social practices are normalized to adapt to specific and distinct environments, which ensures differing cultures. And, democratic agonism is most consistent with the understanding of inevitable conflict.
The only way to resolve the inevitable conflict that comes with pluralism in our agency and ethics is to embrace that it is in fact inevitable. This requires an agonistic commitment, which recognizes that conflict is inevitable, but frames the other as a legitimate opponent instead of an enemy. Mouffe 2k Chantal Mouffe, Professor at the Department of Political Science of the Institute for Advanced Studies. June 2000. “The Democratic Paradox” "A well-functioning democracy calls for a vibrant clash of democratic political positions. If this is missing there is the danger that this democratic confrontation will be replaced by a confrontation among other forms of collective identification, as is the case with identity politics. Too much emphasis on consensus and the refusal of confrontation lead to apathy and disaffection with political participation. Worse still, the result can be the crystallization of collective passions around issues which cannot be managed by the democratic process and an explosion of antagonisms that can tear up the very basis of civility." (104) Thus, the standard is promoting agonistic democracy.
Prefer additionally:
Double bind – to act morally one must first know what is the right thing to do, which means any moral system has to be derivative of the procedures intrinsic to agonistic conflict: A. If our moral belief changes after an agonistic conflict, then it shows that preserving the relationship based off of openness and disagreement is necessary to identity moral errors. B. If my moral belief remains the same, I have practiced commitment to my belief because defending it assumes values in the belief. C. It’s a no risk issue- they have to justify that something can be uncontestable in order to prove antagonism is good for ethics. 2. Agonism controls the ability for us to engage in activism to solve oppression. Harrigan 08 Casey, Associate Director of Debate at UGA, Master’s in Communications – Wake Forest U., “A Defense of Switch Side Debate”, Master’s thesis at Wake Forest, Department of Communication, May, pp.43-45 The Relevance Of Argumentation For Advancing Tolerant Politics Cannot Be Underestimated. The willingness to be open to alternative views has a material impact on difference in at least two primary ways. First, the rendering of a certain belief as “off limits” from debate and the prohibition of ideas from the realm of contestation is conceptually indistinct from the physical exclusion of people from societal practices. Unlike racial or gendered concerns, certain groups of people (the religious, minority political parties, etc.) are defined almost exclusively by the arguments that they adhere to. To deem these views unspeakable or irrelevant is to functionally deny whole groups of people access to public deliberation. Second, argument, as individual advocacy, is an expression of belief. It has the potential to persuade members of the public to either support or oppose progressive politics. Belief itself is an accurate indicator of the way individuals will chose to act—with very real implications for openness, diversity and accommodation. Thus, as a precursor to action, argument is an essential starting point for campaigns of tolerance. Argumentative pluralism can be defined as the proper tolerance for the expression of a diversity of ideas (Scriven 1975, p. 694). Contrary to monism, pluralism holds that there are many potential beliefs in the world and that each person has the ability to determine for himself or herself that these beliefs may hold true. Referring back to the opening examples, a pluralist would respect the right for the KKK to hold certain beliefs, even if he or she may find the group offensive. In the argumentative context, pluralism requires that participants to a debate or discussion recognize the right of others to express their beliefs, no matter how objectionable they may be. The key here is expression: although certain beliefs may be more “true” than others in the epistemic sense, each should have equal access (at least initially) to forums of deliberation. It is important to distinguish pluralism from its commonly confused, but only loosely connected, counterpart, relativism. To respect the right of others to hold different beliefs does not require that they are all considered equal. Such tolerance ends at the intellectual level of each individual being able to hold their own belief. Indeed, as Muir writes, “It pluralism implies neither tolerance of actions based on those beliefs nor respecting the content of the beliefs” (288). Thus, while a pluralist may acknowledge the right for the Klan to hold exclusionary views, he or she need not endorse racism or anti-Semitism itself, or the right to exclude itself. Even when limited to such a narrow realm of diversity, argumentative pluralism holds great promise for a politics based on understanding and accommodation that runs contrary to the dominant forces of economic, political, and social exclusion. Pluralism requires that individuals acknowledge opposing beliefs and arguments by forcing an understanding that personal convictions are not universal. Instead of blindly asserting a position as an “objective truth,” advocates tolerate a multiplicity of perspectives, allowing a more panoramic understanding of the issue at hand (Mitchell and Suzuki 2004, p. 10). In doing so, the advocates frequently understand that there are persuasive arguments to be had on both sides of an issue. As a result, instead of advancing a cause through moralistic posturing or appeals to a falsely assumed universality (which, history has shown, frequently become justifications for scape-goating and exclusion), these proponents become purveyors of reasoned arguments that attempt to persuade others through deliberation. A clear example of this occurs in competitive academic debate. Switch-side debating has profound implications for pluralism. Personal convictions are supplemented by conviction in the process of debate. Instead of being personally invested in the truth and general acceptance of a position, debaters use arguments instrumentally, as tools, and as pedagogical devices in the search for larger truths. Beyond simply recognizing that more than one side exists for each issue, switch-side debate advances the larger cause of equality by fostering tolerance and empathy toward difference. Setting aside their own “ego-identification,” students realize that they must listen and understand their opponent’s arguments well enough to become advocates on behalf of them in future debates (Muir 1993, p. 289). Debaters assume the position of their opponents and understand how and why the position is constructed as it is. As a result, they often come to understand that a strong case exists for opinions that they previously disregarded. Recently, advocates of switch side debating have taken the case of the practice a step further, arguing that it, “originates from a civic attitude that serves as a bulwark against fundamentalism of all stripes” (English, Llano, Mitchell, Morrison, Rief and Woods 2007, p. 224). Debating practices that break down exclusive, dogmatic views may be one of the most robust checks against violence in contemporary society. Impact Calc:
The framework is not consequentialist, rather, it cares about creating the structures that allow for agonistic deliberation. Mouffe 2 Chantal Mouffe, Professor at the Department of Political Science of the Institute for Advanced Studies. June 2000. “The Democratic Paradox” "Following that line of thought we can realize that what is really at stake in the allegiance to democratic institutions is the constitution of an ensemble of practices that make possible the creation of democratic citizens. This is not a matter of rational justification but of availability of democratic forms of individuality and subjectivity. By privileging rationality, both the deliberative and the aggregative perspectives leave aside a central element which is the crucial role played by passions and affects in securing allegiance to democratic values. This cannot be ignored, and it entails envisaging the question of democratic citizenship in a very different way. The failure of current democratic theory to tackle the question of citizenship is the consequence of their operating with a conception of the subject which sees individuals as prior to society, bearers of natural rights, and either utility maximizing agents or rational subjects. In all cases they are abstracted from social and power relations, language, culture and the whole set of practices that make agency possible. What is precluded in these rationalistic approaches is the very question of what are the conditions of existence of the democratic subject. The view that I want to put forward is that it is not by providing arguments about the rationality embodied in liberal democratic institutions that one can contribute to the creation of democratic citizens. Democratic individuals can only be made possible by multiplying the institutions, the discourses, and the forms of life that foster identification with democratic values. This is why, although agreeing with deliberative democrats about the need for a different understanding of democracy, I see their proposals as counterproductive. To be sure, we need to formulate an alternative to the aggregative model and to the instrumentalist conception of politics that it fosters. It has become clear that by discouraging the active involvement of citizens in the running of the polity and by encouraging the privatization of life, they have not secured the stability that they were announcing. Extreme forms of individualism have become widespread which threaten the very social fabric. On the other side, deprived of the possibility of identifying with valuable conceptions of citizenship, many people are increasingly searching for other forms of collective identification, which can very often put into jeopardy the civic bond that should unite a democratic political association. The growth of various religious, moral and ethnic fundamentalisms is, in my view, the direct consequence of the democratic deficit which characterizes most liberal-democratic societies. To seriously tackle those problems, the only way to envisage democratic citizenship from a different perspective, is one that puts the emphasis on the types of practices and not the forms of argumentation." (95) 2. Arguments about construction of certain identities can never turn the framework- that misses the goal of agonism. Mouffe 3 Chantal Mouffe, Professor at the Department of Political Science of the Institute for Advanced Studies. June 2000. “The Democratic Paradox” A well-functioning democracy calls for a vibrant clash of democratic political positions. If this is missing there is the danger that this democratic confrontation will be replaced by a confrontation among other forms of collective identification, as is the case with identity politics. Too much emphasis on consensus and the refusal of confrontation lead to apathy and disaffection with political participation. Worse still, the result can be the crystallization of collective passions around issues which cannot be managed by the democratic process and an explosion of antagonisms that can tear up the very basis of civility.
Part 2: Advocacy I defend the resolution as a general principle, but will specify further if asked in CX. Part 3: Offense Contention 1: Censorship is Antagonism- Agonism forces everyone to acknowledge each other’s beliefs as structurally legitimate to have engagement. Mouffe 4 Chantal Mouffe, Professor at the Department of Political Science of the Institute for Advanced Studies. June 2000. “The Democratic Paradox” I submit that this is a crucial insight which undermines the very objective that those who advocate the 'ddiberative' approach present as the aim of democracy: the establishment of a rational consensus on universal principles. They believe that through rational deliberation an impartial standpoint could be reached where decisions would be taken that are equally in the interests of alt.l :! Wittgenstein, on the contrary. suggests another view. If we follow his lead. we should acknowledge and valorize the diversity of ways in which the 'democratic game' can be played, instead of trying to reduce this diversity to a uniform model of citizenship. This would mean fostering a plurality of forms of being a democratic citizen and creating the institutions that would make it possible to follow the democratic rules in a plurality of ways. What Wittgenstein teaches us is that there cannot be one single best, more 'rational' way to obey those rules and that it is precisely such a recognition that is constitutive of a pluralist democracy. 'Following a rule', says Wittgenstein, 'is analogous to obeying an order. We are trained to do so we react to an order in a particular way. But what if one person reacts in one way and another in another to the order and the training? Which one is right?'23 This is indeed a crucial question for democratic theory. And it cannot be resolved, pace the rationalists, by claiming that there is a correct understanding of the rule that every rational person should accept. To be sure, we need to be able to distinguish between 'obeying the rule' and 'going against it'. But space needs to be provided for the many different practices in which obedience to the democratic rules can be inscribed. And this should not be envisaged as a temporary accommodation, as a stage in the process leading to the realization of the rational consensus, but as a constitutive feature of a democratic society. Democratic citizenship can take many diverse forms and such a diversity, far from being a danger for democracy, is in fact its very condition of existence. This will of course, create conflict and it would be a mistake to expect all those different understandings to coexist without dashing. But this struggle will not be one between 'enemies' but among 'adversaries', since all participants will recognize the positions of the others in the contest as legitimate ones. Such an understanding of democratic politics, which is precisely what I call 'agonistic pluralism', is unthinkable within a rationalistic problematic which, by necessity. tcods to erase diversity. A perspective inspired by Wittgenstein. on the contrary, can contribute to its formulation, and this is why his contribution to democratic thinking is invaluable. This means censorship is never justifiable since censorship relies on the assumption that some viewpoint is not legitimate enough to be voiced. Pohlhaus and Wright. Using Wittgenstein Critically: A Political Approach to Philosophy Author(s): Gaile Pohlhaus and John R. Wright Insofar as a plurality of positions can be accommodated within the 'we' through which individuals can lay claim to an intelligible voice, the 'we' and the language games we play are affirmed in their legitimacy. On the other hand, insofar as what 'we say' forecloses in advance the acknowledgment of certain individuals as competent speakers of our language, then 'we' put into question our intelligibility to ourselves. This situation parallels the claim to a private language insofar as our answerability to others would be artificially delimited and our intelligibility to ourselves would be made to seem, in this regard, effortless. Like the individual entertaining the idea of a private lan¬guage, 'we' ignore the grounds of our collective intelligibility to others and to ourselves when we deny our dependence, in raising any sort of claim, on an open-ended public language. We will call this the 'extended private language argument'. Taking the skeptical 'threat' seriously, by this argument, is part of maintaining a commitment to a genuinely open-ended 'we' as a ground to mutual intelligibility, because not doing so would be to set limits, in advance, on who we will regard as a competent speaker. For example, say a group's use of 'justice' involves claiming without irony that "justice was served" in situations involving racial minorities whenever they have been punished more harshly than nonminorities would be for an equivalent crime. Confronted with this group, one might want to say to these people that they are twisting the term to suit their purposes of maintaining a racist social order; yet perhaps when this is pointed out, they persist in claim¬ing that they really are 'doing justice'. If we claim, then, that "they evidently don't know what justice means," one possible response open to them is sim¬ply to say, "perhaps you don't know what it means, but this is what we say . . . " Any demands put to the racist group to use the term consistently can easily be deflected by an obstinate appeal to the 'real meaning' of the term. As invoked in this situation, those who object that "that's not what justice means" can be branded as incompetent speakers with a shrug from a member of the racist group. We are then at a stalemate, at least about our language. The force of the extended private language argument is to show us that in refusing answerability, both non-racists and the racist group are alienated from their intelligibility to themselves through the language in which they try to express themselves. In other words, by saying that they do not have to answer m Debate and discourse isn’t intrinsically violent—even if it results in violent things the speech in and of itself isn’t harmful. Anderson 6 — Amanda Anderson, Caroline Donovan Professor of English Literature and Department Chair at Johns Hopkins University, Senior Fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, holds a Ph.D. in English from Cornell University, 2006 (“Reply to My Critic(s),” Criticism, Volume 48, Number 2, Spring, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Project MUSE, p. 285-287) Let's first examine the claim that my book is "unwittingly" inviting a resurrection of the "Enlightenment-equals-totalitarianism position." How, one wonders, could a book promoting argument and debate, and promoting reason-giving practices as a kind of common ground that should prevail over assertions of cultural authenticity, somehow come to be seen as a dangerous resurgence of bad Enlightenment? Robbins tells us why: I want "argument on my own terms"—that End Page 285 is, I want to impose reason on people, which is a form of power and oppression. But what can this possibly mean? Arguments stand or fall based on whether they are successful and persuasive, even an argument in favor of argument. It simply is not the case that an argument in favor of the importance of reasoned debate to liberal democracy is tantamount to oppressive power. To assume so is to assume, in the manner of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, that reason is itself violent, inherently, and that it will always mask power and enforce exclusions. But to assume this is to assume the very view of Enlightenment reason that Robbins claims we are "thankfully" well rid of. (I leave to the side the idea that any individual can proclaim that a debate is over, thankfully or not.) But perhaps Robbins will say, "I am not imagining that your argument is directly oppressive, but that what you argue for would be, if it were enforced." Yet my book doesn't imagine or suggest it is enforceable; I simply argue in favor of, I promote, an ethos of argument within a liberal democratic and proceduralist framework. As much as Robbins would like to think so, neither I nor the books I write can be cast as an arm of the police. Robbins wants to imagine a far more direct line of influence from criticism to political reality, however, and this is why it can be such a bad thing to suggest norms of argument. Watch as the gloves come off: Faced with the prospect of submitting to her version of argument—roughly, Habermas's version—and of being thus authorized to disagree only about other, smaller things, some may feel that there will have been an end to argument, or an end to the arguments they find most interesting. With current events in mind, I would be surprised if there were no recourse to the metaphor of a regular army facing a guerilla insurrection, hinting that Anderson wants to force her opponents to dress in uniform, reside in well-demarcated camps and capitals that can be bombed, fight by the rules of states (whether the states themselves abide by these rules or not), and so on—in short, that she wants to get the battle onto a terrain where her side will be assured of having the upper hand. Let's leave to the side the fact that this is a disowned hypothetical criticism. (As in, "Well, okay, yes, those are my gloves, but those are somebody else's hands they will have come off of.") Because far more interesting, actually, is the sudden elevation of stakes. It is a symptom of the sorry state of affairs in our profession that it plays out repeatedly this tragicomic tendency to give a grandiose political meaning to every object it analyzes or confronts. We have evidence of how desperate the situation is when we see it in a critic as thoughtful as Bruce Robbins, where it emerges as the need to allegorize a point about an argument in such a way that it gets cast as the equivalent of war atrocities.
Contention 2: Temporal Language Injurious speech is specifically conditioned by a history of social normalization. Strategies that account for the damage of the utterance in the moment cannot solve for the violence that precedes and follows the moment. BUTLER: “Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performativity” by Judith Butler 1997 UH-DD As utterances, they work to the extent that they are given in the form of a ritual, that is, repeated in time, and, hence, maintain a sphere of operation that is not restricted to the moment of the utterance itself. The illocutionary speech act performs its deed at the moment of the utterance, and yet to the extent that the moment is ritualized, it is never merely a single moment. The "moment" in ritual is a condensed historicity: it exceeds itself in past and future directions, an effect of prior and future invocations that constitute and escape the instance of utterance.” (Pg. 3)
Implications-
Linguistic Reversibility- injurious speech subjugates agents but paradoxically marks them as socially recognizable within language. This presents a site of linguistic reversibility. Since language is temporal, we can reverse the norms that make injurious speech possible. BUTLER 2: “Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performativity” by Judith Butler 1997 UH-DD “One is not simply fixed by the name that one is called. In being called an injurious name, one is derogated and demeaned. But the name holds out another possibility as well: by being called a named, one is also, paradoxically, given a certain possibility for social existence, initiated into a temporal life of language that exceeds the prior purposes that animate that call. Thus the injurious address may appear to fix or paralyze the one it hails, but it may also produce an unexpected and enabling response. If to be addressed is to be interpellated, then the offensive call runs the risk of inaugurating a subject in speech who comes to use language to counter the offensive call. When the address is injurious, it works its force upon the one it injures. What is this force, and how might we come to understand its faultlines?” (Pg. 2) 2. Censorship is guaranteed failure-- It prevents survival strategies and it requires using injurious speech in its own critique. This ensures recirculation. BUTLER 3: “Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performativity” by Judith Butler 1997 UH-DD “Neither view can account for the restaging and resignifying of offensive utterance, deployments of linguistic power that seek at once to expose and counter the offensive exercise of speech. I will consider these at greater length in the chapters to come, but consider for a moment how often such terms are subject to resignification. Such a redoubling of injurious speech takes place not only in rap music and in various forms of political parody and satire, but in the political and social critique of such speech, where "mentioning" those very terms is crucial to the arguments at hand, and even in the legal arguments that make the call for censorship, in which the rhetoric that is deplored is invariably proliferated within the context of legal speech. Paradoxically, the explicit legal and political arguments that seek to tie such speech to certain contexts fail to note that even in their own discourse, such speech has become citational, breaking with the prior contexts of its utterance and acquiring new contexts for which it was not intended. The critical and legal discourse on hate speech is itself a restaging of the performance of hate speech. Impacts: A. Censorship destroy legitimate forms of resistance and survival methods by closing off the ability to appropriate. So, censorship’s net benefit is non-unique. B. Censorship can’t solve for its own impacts. Using the rhetoric becomes necessary in criticism against the speech. This is particularly true in a legal context that proliferates the utterance in policy. C. This outweighs- directly kills any solvency censorship could have and it turns the link on a long-term basis. The recirculation of speech ensures its survival in language. This is specifically true in the context of censorship critique since it requires deploying the speech in its context. Instead we should appropriate.
Part 4: Underview
Theory Paradigm issues: a) Aff gets 1AR Theory- otherwise the neg can be infinitely abusive and there’s no way to check against this- meta theory also precedes the evaluation of initial theory shells because it determines whether or not I could engage in theory in the first place. b) 1AR theory is drop the debater- the 1ARs too short to be able to rectify abuse and adequately cover substance- you must be punished. c) Competing interps- reasonability assumes competing interps since you need offense defense to evaluate the theory framework debate, which concedes the authority of competing interps.
2. The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best meets their burden under a truth testing paradigm. This requires the AFF to prove the resolution true and the NEG to prove the resolution false. A. Text- To affirm is defined as: “to say that something is true in a confident way” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/affirm and to negate is defined as: “to deny the existence or truth of” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/negate So, the binding standards ascribed in the actions of affirming and negating assume a truth testing model. B. Any property assumes the truth of the property -. Thus any counter-role of the ballot collapses to truth testing. Frege ’03. Frege, Gottlob. “The Thought: A Logical Inquiry” in Logicism and the Philosophy of Language: Selections from Frege and Russell. Broadview Press. March 2003. Pg. 204. “It may nevertheless be thought that we cannot recognize a property of a thing without at the same time realizing the thought that this thing has this property to be true. So with every property of a thing is joined a property of a thought, namely, that of truth. It is also worthy of notice that the sentence “I smell the scent of violets” has just the same content as the sentence “it is true that I smell the scent of violets”.
3/18/17
JF - 1AC - Agonism - V3
Tournament: UH | Round: Semis | Opponent: Cedar Park MG | Judge: gandra, lin, gamble 1AC Part 1 - Biology First, our body is a condensed history of millions of years of mutations, and we continue to be vulnerable to the random laws of genetics. Random mutations create the inevitable conditions for evolution and explain the diversity of life. HAVILAND: Haviland, William A. Anthropology: The Human Challenge claim, 15th Edition. Cengage Learning, 2017. Yuzu. UH-DD “At the level of an individual, genetic traits are transmitted from parent to offspring, enabling a prediction about the chances that any given individual will display some phenotypic characteristic. At the level of a group, the study of genetics takes on additional significance. It reveals how evolutionary processes accounts for the diversity of life on earth. A key concept in genetics is that of the population, or a group of individuals within which breeding takes place. Gene pool refers to all the genetic variants possessed by members of a population. Over generations, the relative proportions of alleles in a population change (biological evolution) according to the varying reproductive success of individuals within that population. In other words, at the level of population genetics, evolution can be defined as changes in allele frequencies in populations. This is also known as microevolution. Four evolutionary forces—mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, and natural selection—create and pattern biological diversity. Mutation: Mutation, the ultimate source of evolutionary change, constantly genetic mutatesions. A random mutation might create a new allele that modifies a protein, making possible a novel biological task. Without the variation brought in through mutations, populations could not change over time in response to changing environments. Mutations may arise whenever copying mistakes are made during cell division. This may involve a change in a single base of a DNA sequence or, at the other extreme, relocation of large segments of DNA, including entire chromosomes. As you read this page, the DNA in each cell of your body is being damaged (Culotta and Koshland, 1994). Fortunately, DNA repair enzymes constantly scan DNA for mistakes, slicing out damaged segments and patching up gaps. Moreover, for sexually reproducing species like humans, the only mutations of any evolutionary consequence are those occurring in sex cells because these cells form future generations. New Mutations arise continuously because no species has perfect DNA repair; thus all species continue to evolve. Environmental factors may increase the rate at which mutations occur (Figure 2.12). These factors include certain dyes, antibiotics, and chemicals used in food preservation. Radiation, whether of industrial or solar origin, represents another important cause of mutations. Even stress can increase mutation rates (Chicurel, 2001) Ultimately, mutations confer versatility at the population level, makeing it possible for an evolving species to adapt more quickly to environmental changes. Remember, however, that mutations occur randomly and thus do not arise out of need for some new adaptation.” (Pg. 41) Implications: A) Universal starting points are wrong. They visualize a universal and theoretical subject, but this ignores that mutation creates the conditions for diversity and an evolving subject. B) Non-ideal starting points that fail to account for evolution are as abstract as ideal theory since they remove themselves from the conditions that construct an embodied subject. Second, our ability to experience the world and how we experience the world is specifically conditioned by evolution. Adaptive pressures refine sensory organs through time. HAVILAND 2: Haviland, William A. Anthropology: The Human Challenge, 15th Edition. Cengage Learning, 2017. Yuzu. UH-DD “Adaptation to arboreal life involved changes in primates’ sensory organs. The sense of smell, vital for the earliest ground-dwelling, nocturnal mammals, enabled them to sniff out their food and detect hidden predators in the dark. But for active tree life during daylight, good vision provides advantages for judging the location of the next branch or tasty morsel. Accordingly, the sense of smell declined in primates over time, while vision became highly developed. Travel through the trees demands judgments concerning depth, direction, distance, and the spatial relationships between objects such as vines or branches. Monkeys, apes, and humans achieved this through binocular stereoscopic color vision (Figure 3.7), the ability to see the world in the three dimensions of height, width, and depth. Binocular vision (in which two eyes sit next to each other on the same plane so that their visual fields overlap) and nerve connections that run from each eye to both sides of the brain confer complete depth perception characteristic of three-dimensional or stereoscopic vision. This arrangement allows nerve cells to integrate the images derived from each eye. Increased brain size in the visual area in primates, and a greater complexity at nerve connections, also contribute to stereoscopic color vision. Visual acuity varies throughout the primate order in terms of both color and spatial perception. Prosimians, most of whom are nocturnal (like the slow loris from the beginning of this chapter), lack color vision. The eyes of lemurs and lorises (but not tarsiers) are capable of reflecting light off the retina, the surface where nerve fibers gather images in the back of the eye, intensifying the limited light in the forest at night. In addition, prosimian vision is binocular without the benefits of stereoscopy. Their eyes look out from either side of their muzzle or snout. Though there is some overlap of visual fields, their nerve fibers do not cross from each eye to both halves of the brain. By contrast, monkeys, apes, and humans possess both color and stereoscopic vision. The ability to distinguish colors allows anthropoid primates to choose ripe red fruits or tender, immature green leaves due to their coloration. This markedly improves their diet compared to most other mammals. In addition to color vision, anthropoid primates possess a unique structure called the fovea centralis, or central pit, in the retina of each eye. Like a camera lens, this feature enables the animal to focus on a particular object for acutely clear perception without sacrificing visual contact with the object’s surroundings.” (Pg. 62-63) Implications: A) Any ethical theory that assumes a human centric starting point is epistemically flawed. Different species adapt to different conditions so species develop distinct sensory organs and experience the world in distinct ways. For example, dolphins have sonar capabilities and some birds use magnetism. B) Accounting for our senses is a constraint on ethical theories since they determine how we act upon obligations. They inevitable influence how I experience and pursue any end.
Part 2 - Culture The evolution of our brains created the conditions for cultural adaptation. No longer did we have to wait generations to prevail environmental pressures. Through culture, we could overcome challenges that were not possible from a purely biology standpoint. HAVILAND 5: Haviland, William A. Anthropology: The Human Challenge, 15th Edition. Cengage Learning, 2017. Yuzu. UH-DD “In the quest for the origin of modern humans, paleoanthropologist confront mysteries by drawing from scant evidence that can be misleading and contradictory. Some of the mystery stems from the kind of evolutionary change that was set in motion with the appearance of the genus Homo. The earliest proposed members of genus Homo were recently discovered in sediments in Afar, Ethiopia, and date to about 2.8 million years ago (mya) (DiMaggio et al., 2015; Villmoare et al., 2015). The new South African Homo naledi fossils introduced in the previous chapter may date to a similar time range (Berger et al, 2015). Around this time, the brain size of our ancestors began to grow. Simultaneously, these first members of the genus Homo improved their cultural manipulation of the physical world through use of stone tools. Over time, they increasingly relied on cultural adaptation as a rapid and effective way to adjust to the environment. The evolution of the human brain was imperative for human survival and the evolution of human culture. Over the course of the next 2.5 million or so years, increasing brain size and specialization of function permitted the development of language, planning, new technologies, and artistic expression. With the evolution of a brain that made versatile behavior possible, members of the genus Homo became biocultural beings. U.S. biological anthropologist Misia Landau describes the narrative of human evolutionary history as a heroic epic (Landau, 1991). The hero, or evolving human, faces natural challenges that cannot be overcome from a strictly biological standpoint. When endowed with the gift of intelligence, the hero meets these challenges and becomes fully human. In this narrative, cultural capabilities increasingly separate humans from other evolving animals, recent advances in primatology are undercutting this notion of human uniqueness. The mechanics of biological and cultural change differ. Cultural equipment and techniques can develop rapidly with innovations occurring during an individual’s life-time. By contrast, biological change requires many generations because it depends upon heritable traits. When a new type of stone tool appears, paleoanthropologists investigate whether the cultural change corresponds to a major biological change, such as the appearance of a new species. Debate within paleoanthropology often features the relationship between biological and cultural change.” (Pg. 167-168) Implications: A. Culture influences our conception of reason and experience. How we act and what we chose to act on is inextricably tied to a cultural conception. For example, willing to go to the store presumes the concept of the store that escapes the independent agency of the individual. B. Cultural conflict is inevitable. Since different agents respond to different environments, different and conflicting cultures will arise. For example, different animals biologically evolve to different environments and obviously look different. Traits that would be advantageous in one environment can become disadvantageous in another. In regards to culture, social practices are normalized to adapt to specific and distinct environments, which ensures differing cultures. C. Universal starting points cannot solve for cultural conflict because they specifically start from the assumption of removing particularities and acknowledging sameness. And, if cultural conflict is inevitable, the goal of intercultural politics is not to eradicate conflict, but to channel conflict in ways productive to intercultural coexistence. This requires an agonistic commitment, which reframes the other as an advisory instead of an enemy. MOUFFE: “The Democratic Paradox” by Chantal Mouffe 2000 UH-DD “Once the theoretical terrain has been delineated in such a way, we can begin formulating an alternative to both the aggregative and the deliberative model, one that I propose to call 'agonistic pluralism'.30 A first distinction is needed in order to clarify the new perspective that I am putting forward, the distinction between 'politics' and 'the political'. By 'the political', I refer to the dimension of antagonism that is inherent in human relations, antagonism that can take many forms and emerge in different types of social relations. 'Politics', on the other side, indicates the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions which seek to establish a certain order and organize human coexistence in conditions that are always potentially conflictual because they are affected by the dimension of 'the political'. I consider that it is only when we acknowledge the dimension of 'the political' and understand that 'politics' consists in domesticating hostility and in trying to defuse the potential antagonism that exists in human relations, that we can pose what I take to be the central question for democratic politics. This question, pace the rationalists, is not how to arrive at a consensus without exclusion, since this would imply the eradication of the political. Politics aims at the creation of unity in a context of conflict and diversity; it is always concerned with the creation of an 'us' by the determination of a 'them'. The novelty of democratic Politics is not the overcoming of this us/them opposition - which is an impossibility - but the different way in which it is established. The crucial issue is to establish this us/them discrimination in a way that is compatible with pluralist democracy. Envisaged from the point of view of 'agonistic pluralism', the aim of democratic politics is to construct the 'them' in such a way that it is no longer perceived as an enemy to be destroyed but as an 'adversary', that is. somebody whose ideas we combat but whose right to defend those ideas we do not put into question. This is the real meaning of liberal-democratic tolerance, which does not entail condoning ideas that we oppose or being indifferent to standpoints that we disagree with but treating those who defend them as legitimate opponents. This category of the 'adversary' does not eliminate antagonism, though, and it should be distinguished from the liberal notion of the competitor with which it is sometimes identified. An adversary is an enemy, but a legitimate enemy, one with whom we have some common ground because we have a shared adhesion to the ethico-political principles of liberal democracy: libeny and equality, but we disagree concerning the meaning and implementation of those principles, and such a disagreement is not one that could be resolved through deliberation and rational discussion. Indeed, given the ineradicable pluralism of value. there is no rational resolution of the conflict, hence its antagonistic dimension. This does not mean. of course, that adversaries can never cease to disagree, but that does not prove that antagonism has been eradicated. To accept the view of the adversary is to undergo a radical change in political identity. It is more a sort of conversion man a process of rational persuasion (in the same way as Thomas Kuhn has argued that adherence to a new scientific paradigm is a conversion). Compromises are, ofcourse, also possible; they are part and parcel of politics; but they should be seen as temporary respites in an ongoing confrontation.” (Pg. 101-102) Thus, the standard is promoting agonistic democracy. Prefer additionally- Using educational spaces as a sites of empowerment places the judge into the role of the authoritarian adjudicator who molds students in accordance to a particular political end. This kills any conception of critical citizenship Rickert Rickert, Thomas. ""Hands Up, You're Free": Composition in a Post-Oedipal World." JacOnline Journal “An example of the connection between violence and pedagogy is implicit in the notion of being "schooled" as it has been conceptualized by Giroux and Peter Mclaren. They explain, "Fundamental to the principles that inform critical pedagogy is the conviction that schooling for self- and social empowerment is ethically prior to questions of epistemology or to a mastery of technical or social skills that are primarily tied to the logic of the marketplace" (153-54). A presumption here is that it is the teacher who knows (best), and this orientation gives the concept of schooling a particular bite: though it presents itself as oppositional to the state and the dominant forms of pedagogy that serve the state and its capitalist interests, it nevertheless reinscribes an authoritarian model that is congruent with any number of oedipalizing pedagogies that "school" the student in proper behavior. As Diane Davis notes, radical, feminist, and liberatory pedagogies "often camouflage pedagogical violence in their move from one mode of 'normalization' to another" and "function within a disciplinary matrix of power, a covert carceral system, that aims to create useful subjects for particular political agendas" (212). Such oedipalizing pedagogies are less effective in practice than what the claims for them assert; indeed, the attempt to "school" students in the manner called for by Giroux and McLaren is complicitous with the malaise of postmodern cynicism. Students will dutifully go through their liberatory motions, producing the proper assignments, but it remains an open question whether they carry an oppositional politics with them. The "critical distance" supposedly created with liberatory pedagogy also opens up a cynical distance toward the writing produced in class.” (299-300) The only solution to this pedagogical imperialism comes in the form of allowing a pedagogy that embraces contestation, which require agonistic commitment. Rickert 2 Rickert, Thomas. ""Hands Up, You're Free": Composition in a Post-Oedipal World." JacOnline Journal “This essay will employ Deleuze's and Zizek's theories to illustrate the limitations of writing pedagogies that rely on modernist strategies of critical distance or political agency. Implicit in such pedagogies is the faith that teaching writing can resist dominant social practices and empower students; however, the notion that we can actually foster resistance through teaching is questionable. As Paul Mann states, "all the forms of opposition have long since revealed themselves as means of advancing it. ... The mere fact that something feels like resistance and still manages to offend a few people (usually not even the right people) hardly makes it effective" (138). In light of Mann's statement, I urge us to take the following position: teaching writing is fully complicitous with dominant social practices, and inducing students to write in accordance with institutional precepts can be as disabling as it is enabling. By disabling, I do not mean that learning certain skills-typically those most associated with current-traditional rhetorics, such as superficial forms of grammatical correctness, basic organization, syntactic clarity, and such-are not useful. Such skills are useful, and they are often those most necessary for tapping the power that writing can wield. In learning such skills, however, we should also ask what students aren’t are not learning. What other forms of writing and thinking are being foreclosed or distorted, forms of writing that have their own, different powers? If one of our goals as teachers of writing is to initiate students into rhetorics of power and resistance, we should also be equally attuned to rhetorics of contestation. Specifically, we must take on the responsibility that comes with the impossibility of knowing the areas of contention and struggle that will be the most important in our students' lives. Pedagogy could reflect this concern in its practices by attending to the idea that each student's life is its own telos, meaning that the individual struggles of each student cannot and should not necessarily mirror our own. Or, to put it another way, students must sooner or later overcome us, even though we may legitimate our sense of service with the idea that we have their best interests in mind. However, we should be suspicious of this presumptive ethic, for, as Mann astutely observes, "nothing is more aggressive than the desire to serve the other” (48) Rickert 1 and 2 Outweigh: A. This is uniquely true in the context of debate because the norms the judge adopts as reflective of their vision towards resistance are only apparent after they have decided the round, which enforce those norms as legitimate upon the student. Impact Calc:
the framework is not consequentialist, rather, it cares about creating the structures that allow for agonistic deliberation. Mouffe 2 Chantal Mouffe, Professor at the Department of Political Science of the Institute for Advanced Studies. June 2000. “The Democratic Paradox” "Following that line of thought we can realize that what is really at stake in the allegiance to democratic institutions is the constitution of an ensemble of practices that make possible the creation of democratic citizens. This is not a matter of rational justification but of availability of democratic forms of individuality and subjectivity. By privileging rationality, both the deliberative and the aggregative perspectives leave aside a central element which is the crucial role played by passions and affects in securing allegiance to democratic values. This cannot be ignored, and it entails envisaging the question of democratic citizenship in a very different way. The failure of current democratic theory to tackle the question of citizenship is the consequence of their operating with a conception of the subject which sees individuals as prior to society, bearers of natural rights, and either utility maximizing agents or rational subjects. In all cases they are abstracted from social and power relations, language, culture and the whole set of practices that make agency possible. What is precluded in these rationalistic approaches is the very question of what are the conditions of existence of the democratic subject. The view that I want to put forward is that it is not by providing arguments about the rationality embodied in liberal democratic institutions that one can contribute to the creation of democratic citizens. Democratic individuals can only be made possible by multiplying the institutions, the discourses, and the forms of life that foster identification with democratic values. This is why, although agreeing with deliberative democrats about the need for a different understanding of democracy, I see their proposals as counterproductive. To be sure, we need to formulate an alternative to the aggregative model and to the instrumentalist conception of politics that it fosters. It has become clear that by discouraging the active involvement of citizens in the running of the polity and by encouraging the privatization of life, they have not secured the stability that they were announcing. Extreme forms of individualism have become widespread which threaten the very social fabric. On the other side, deprived of the possibility of identifying with valuable conceptions of citizenship, many people are increasingly searching for other forms of collective identification, which can very often put into jeopardy the civic bond that should unite a democratic political association. The growth of various religious, moral and ethnic fundamentalisms is, in my view, the direct consequence of the democratic deficit which characterizes most liberal-democratic societies. To seriously tackle those problems, the only way to envisage democratic citizenship from a different perspective, is one that puts the emphasis on the types of practices and not the forms of argumentation." (95) 2. Arguments about construction of certain identities can never turn the framework- that misses the goal of agonism. Mouffe 3 Chantal Mouffe, Professor at the Department of Political Science of the Institute for Advanced Studies. June 2000. “The Democratic Paradox” A well-functioning democracy calls for a vibrant clash of democratic political positions. If this is missing there is the danger that this democratic confrontation will be replaced by a confrontation among other forms of collective identification, as is the case with identity politics. Too much emphasis on consensus and the refusal of confrontation lead to apathy and disaffection with political participation. Worse still, the result can be the crystallization of collective passions around issues which cannot be managed by the democratic process and an explosion of antagonisms that can tear up the very basis of civility.
Part 3: Advocacy I defend the resolution as a general principle, but will specify further if asked in CX. Part 4: Contention Advantage 1 is Cencorship is Antagonism- Agonism forces everyone to acknowledge each other’s beliefs as structurally legitimate to have engagement. Mouffe 4 Chantal Mouffe, Professor at the Department of Political Science of the Institute for Advanced Studies. June 2000. “The Democratic Paradox” I submit that this is a crucial insight which undermines the very objective that those who advocate the 'ddiberative' approach present as the aim of democracy: the establishment of a rational consensus on universal principles. They believe that through rational deliberation an impartial standpoint could be reached where decisions would be taken that are equally in the interests of alt.l :! Wittgenstein, on the contrary. suggests another view. If we follow his lead. we should acknowledge and valorize the diversity of ways in which the 'democratic game' can be played, instead of trying to reduce this diversity to a uniform model of citizenship. This would mean fostering a plurality of forms of being a democratic citizen and creating the institutions that would make it possible to follow the democratic rules in a plurality of ways. What Wittgenstein teaches us is that there cannot be one single best, more 'rational' way to obey those rules and that it is precisely such a recognition that is constitutive of a pluralist democracy. 'Following a rule', says Wittgenstein, 'is analogous to obeying an order. We are trained to do so we react to an order in a particular way. But what if one person reacts in one way and another in another to the order and the training? Which one is right?'23 This is indeed a crucial question for democratic theory. And it cannot be resolved, pace the rationalists, by claiming that there is a correct understanding of the rule that every rational person should accept. To be sure, we need to be able to distinguish between 'obeying the rule' and 'going against it'. But space needs to be provided for the many different practices in which obedience to the democratic rules can be inscribed. And this should not be envisaged as a temporary accommodation, as a stage in the process leading to the realization of the rational consensus, but as a constitutive feature of a democratic society. Democratic citizenship can take many diverse forms and such a diversity, far from being a danger for democracy, is in fact its very condition of existence. This will of course, create conflict and it would be a mistake to expect all those different understandings to coexist without dashing. But this struggle will not be one between 'enemies' but among 'adversaries', since all participants will recognize the positions of the others in the contest as legitimate ones. Such an understanding of democratic politics, which is precisely what I call 'agonistic pluralism', is unthinkable within a rationalistic problematic which, by necessity. tcods to erase diversity. A perspective inspired by Wittgenstein. on the contrary, can contribute to its formulation, and this is why his contribution to democratic thinking is invaluable. This means censorship is never justifiable since censorship relies on the assumption that some viewpoint is not legitimate enough to be voiced. Pohlhaus and Wright. Using Wittgenstein Critically: A Political Approach to Philosophy Author(s): Gaile Pohlhaus and John R. Wright Insofar as a plurality of positions can be accommodated within the 'we' through which individuals can lay claim to an intelligible voice, the 'we' and the language games we play are affirmed in their legitimacy. On the other hand, insofar as what 'we say' forecloses in advance the acknowledgment of certain individuals as competent speakers of our language, then 'we' put into question our intelligibility to ourselves. This situation parallels the claim to a private language insofar as our answerability to others would be artificially delimited and our intelligibility to ourselves would be made to seem, in this regard, effortless. Like the individual entertaining the idea of a private language, 'we' ignore the grounds of our collective intelligibility to others and to ourselves when we deny our dependence, in raising any sort of claim, on an open-ended public language. We will call this the 'extended private language argument'. Taking the skeptical 'threat' seriously, by this argument, is part of maintaining a commitment to a genuinely open-ended 'we' as a ground to mutual intelligibility, because not doing so would be to set limits, in advance, on who we will regard as a competent speaker. For example, say a group's use of 'justice' involves claiming without irony that "justice was served" in situations involving racial minorities whenever they have been punished more harshly than nonminorities would be for an equivalent crime. Confronted with this group, one might want to say to these people that they are twisting the term to suit their purposes of maintaining a racist social order; yet perhaps when this is pointed out, they persist in claiming that they really are 'doing justice'. If we claim, then, that "they evidently don't know what justice means," one possible response open to them is simply to say, "perhaps you don't know what it means, but this is what we say . . . " Any demands put to the racist group to use the term consistently can easily be deflected by an obstinate appeal to the 'real meaning' of the term. As invoked in this situation, those who object that "that's not what justice means" can be branded as incompetent speakers with a shrug from a member of the racist group. We are then at a stalemate, at least about our language. The force of the extended private language argument is to show us that in refusing answerability, both non-racists and the racist group are alienated from their intelligibility to themselves through the language in which they try to express themselves. In other words, by saying that they do not have to answer m Debate and discourse isn’t intrinsically violent—even if it results in violent things the speech in and of itself isn’t harmful. Anderson 6 — Amanda Anderson, Caroline Donovan Professor of English Literature and Department Chair at Johns Hopkins University, Senior Fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, holds a Ph.D. in English from Cornell University, 2006 (“Reply to My Critic(s),” Criticism, Volume 48, Number 2, Spring, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Project MUSE, p. 285-287) Let's first examine the claim that my book is "unwittingly" inviting a resurrection of the "Enlightenment-equals-totalitarianism position." How, one wonders, could a book promoting argument and debate, and promoting reason-giving practices as a kind of common ground that should prevail over assertions of cultural authenticity, somehow come to be seen as a dangerous resurgence of bad Enlightenment? Robbins tells us why: I want "argument on my own terms"—that End Page 285 is, I want to impose reason on people, which is a form of power and oppression. But what can this possibly mean? Arguments stand or fall based on whether they are successful and persuasive, even an argument in favor of argument. It simply is not the case that an argument in favor of the importance of reasoned debate to liberal democracy is tantamount to oppressive power. To assume so is to assume, in the manner of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, that reason is itself violent, inherently, and that it will always mask power and enforce exclusions. But to assume this is to assume the very view of Enlightenment reason that Robbins claims we are "thankfully" well rid of. (I leave to the side the idea that any individual can proclaim that a debate is over, thankfully or not.) But perhaps Robbins will say, "I am not imagining that your argument is directly oppressive, but that what you argue for would be, if it were enforced." Yet my book doesn't imagine or suggest it is enforceable; I simply argue in favor of, I promote, an ethos of argument within a liberal democratic and proceduralist framework. As much as Robbins would like to think so, neither I nor the books I write can be cast as an arm of the police. Robbins wants to imagine a far more direct line of influence from criticism to political reality, however, and this is why it can be such a bad thing to suggest norms of argument. Watch as the gloves come off: Faced with the prospect of submitting to her version of argument—roughly, Habermas's version—and of being thus authorized to disagree only about other, smaller things, some may feel that there will have been an end to argument, or an end to the arguments they find most interesting. With current events in mind, I would be surprised if there were no recourse to the metaphor of a regular army facing a guerilla insurrection, hinting that Anderson wants to force her opponents to dress in uniform, reside in well-demarcated camps and capitals that can be bombed, fight by the rules of states (whether the states themselves abide by these rules or not), and so on—in short, that she wants to get the battle onto a terrain where her side will be assured of having the upper hand. Let's leave to the side the fact that this is a disowned hypothetical criticism. (As in, "Well, okay, yes, those are my gloves, but those are somebody else's hands they will have come off of.") Because far more interesting, actually, is the sudden elevation of stakes. It is a symptom of the sorry state of affairs in our profession that it plays out repeatedly this tragicomic tendency to give a grandiose political meaning to every object it analyzes or confronts. We have evidence of how desperate the situation is when we see it in a critic as thoughtful as Bruce Robbins, where it emerges as the need to allegorize a point about an argument in such a way that it gets cast as the equivalent of war atrocities.
Contention 2: Temporal Language Injurious speech is specifically conditioned by a history of social normalization. Strategies that account for the damage of the utterance in the moment cannot solve for the violence that precedes and follows the moment. BUTLER: “Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performativity” by Judith Butler 1997 UH-DD As utterances, they work to the extent that they are given in the form of a ritual, that is, repeated in time, and, hence, maintain a sphere of operation that is not restricted to the moment of the utterance itself. The illocutionary speech act performs its deed at the moment of the utterance, and yet to the extent that the moment is ritualized, it is never merely a single moment. The "moment" in ritual is a condensed historicity: it exceeds itself in past and future directions, an effect of prior and future invocations that constitute and escape the instance of utterance.” (Pg. 3) Implications-
Linguistic Reversibility- injurious speech subjugates agents but paradoxically marks them as socially recognizable within language. This presents a site of linguistic reversibility. Since language is temporal, we can reverse the norms that make injurious speech possible. BUTLER 2: “Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performativity” by Judith Butler 1997 UH-DD “One is not simply fixed by the name that one is called. In being called an injurious name, one is derogated and demeaned. But the name holds out another possibility as well: by being called a named, one is also, paradoxically, given a certain possibility for social existence, initiated into a temporal life of language that exceeds the prior purposes that animate that call. Thus the injurious address may appear to fix or paralyze the one it hails, but it may also produce an unexpected and enabling response. If to be addressed is to be interpellated, then the offensive call runs the risk of inaugurating a subject in speech who comes to use language to counter the offensive call. When the address is injurious, it works its force upon the one it injures. What is this force, and how might we come to understand its faultlines?” (Pg. 2) 2. Censorship is guaranteed failure-- It prevents survival strategies and it requires using injurious speech in its own critique. This ensures recirculation. BUTLER 3: “Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performativity” by Judith Butler 1997 UH-DD “Neither view can account for the restaging and resignifying of offensive utterance, deployments of linguistic power that seek at once to expose and counter the offensive exercise of speech. I will consider these at greater length in the chapters to come, but consider for a moment how often such terms are subject to resignification. Such a redoubling of injurious speech takes place not only in rap music and in various forms of political parody and satire, but in the political and social critique of such speech, where "mentioning" those very terms is crucial to the arguments at hand, and even in the legal arguments that make the call for censorship, in which the rhetoric that is deplored is invariably proliferated within the context of legal speech. Paradoxically, the explicit legal and political arguments that seek to tie such speech to certain contexts fail to note that even in their own discourse, such speech has become citational, breaking with the prior contexts of its utterance and acquiring new contexts for which it was not intended. The critical and legal discourse on hate speech is itself a restaging of the performance of hate speech. Impacts: A. Censorship destroy legitimate forms of resistance and survival methods by closing off the ability to appropriate. So, censorship’s net benefit is non-unique. B. Censorship can’t solve for its own impacts. Using the rhetoric becomes necessary in criticism against the speech. This is particularly true in a legal context that proliferates the utterance in policy. C. This outweighs- directly kills any solvency censorship could have and it turns the link on a long-term basis. The recirculation of speech ensures its survival in language. This is specifically true in the context of censorship critique since it requires deploying the speech in its context. Instead we should appropriate. Part 4: Underview
Theory Paradigm issues: a) Aff gets 1AR Theory- otherwise the neg can be infinitely abusive and there’s no way to check against this- meta theory also precedes the evaluation of initial theory shells because it determines whether or not I could engage in theory in the first place. b) 1AR theory is drop the debater- the 1ARs too short to be able to rectify abuse and adequately cover substance- you must be punished. c) No neg RVI- the 6 minute 2NR has more than enough time to win both theory and substance and a 6 minute 2NR that can go all in on theory and read me out which prevents theory from being recourse against even truly abusive positions. d) Competing interps- reasonability assumes competing interps since you need offense defense to evaluate the theory framework debate, which concedes the authority of competing interps.
2. The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best meets their burden under a truth testing paradigm. This requires the AFF to prove the resolution true and the NEG to prove the resolution false. A. Text- To affirm is defined as: “to say that something is true in a confident way” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/affirm and to negate is defined as: “to deny the existence or truth of” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/negate So, the binding standards ascribed in the actions of affirming and negating assume a truth testing model. B. Any property assumes the truth of the property -. Thus any counter-role of the ballot collapses to truth testing. Frege ’03. Frege, Gottlob. “The Thought: A Logical Inquiry” in Logicism and the Philosophy of Language: Selections from Frege and Russell. Broadview Press. March 2003. Pg. 204. “It may nevertheless be thought that we cannot recognize a property of a thing without at the same time realizing the thought that this thing has this property to be true. So with every property of a thing is joined a property of a thought, namely, that of truth. It is also worthy of notice that the sentence “I smell the scent of violets” has just the same content as the sentence “it is true that I smell the scent of violets”.
3/18/17
JF - 1AC - Intrinsic Properties
Tournament: TOC | Round: 1 | Opponent: Lexington KB | Judge: Mark Gorthey TOC R1 AC 1AC Framework Reasoning cannot arise from a specific state of affairs, as empirical circumstances are not an accurate grounding for moral truth Hume Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, http://18th.eserver.org/hume-enquiry.html#4 All reasonings may be divided into two kinds, namely, demonstrative reasoning, or that concerning relations of ideas, and moral reasoning, or that concerning matter of fact and existence. That there are no demonstrative arguments in the case seems evident; since it implies no contradiction that the course of nature may change, and that an object, seemingly like those which we have experienced, may be attended with different or contrary effects. May I not clearly and distinctly conceive that a body, falling from the clouds, and which, in all other respects, resembles snow, has yet the taste of salt or feeling of fire? Is there any more intelligible proposition than to affirm, that all the trees will flourish in December and January, and decay in May and June? Now whatever is intelligible, and can be distinctly conceived, implies no contradiction, and can never be proved false by any demonstrative argument or abstract reasoning a priori. If we be, therefore, engaged by arguments to put trust in past experience, and make it the standard of our future judgment, these arguments must be probable only, or such as regard matter of fact and real existence according to the division above mentioned. But that there is no argument of this kind, must appear, if our explication of that species of reasoning be admitted as solid and satisfactory. We have said that all arguments concerning existence are founded on the relation of cause and effect; that our knowledge of that relation is derived entirely from experience; and that all our experimental conclusions proceed upon the supposition that the future will be conformable to the past. To endeavour, therefore, the proof of this last supposition by probable arguments, or arguments regarding existence, must be evidently going in a circle, and taking that for granted, which is the very point in question.
Implications: a) obligations can only be grounded in properties intrinsic to a state of affairs, meaning that morality can never be based on extrinsic understandings of the world, b) even if we can make predictions, that begs the question of why our reasoning would be valid in the first place. Saying prediction works relies on prediction, meaning that it’s logically fallacious The solution is appealing to intrinsic properties- things that explain the possibility of binding standard for adjudicating questions. Boyle and Lavin 10 Matthew and Douglas Lavin. 2010. Goodness and desire. In Desire, Practical Reason, and the Good, ed. Sergio Tenenbaum. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 32-33. “A certain standard of goodness for a thing follows inevitably from its belonging to a kind characterized by a functionally-organized system of powers: this, we suppose, is the crux of Aristotle’s famous “function argument.” If the objection to this is that it illegitimately infers an “ought” from an “is,” we are not sure that we understand the charge. The sort of “saying what a thing is” that is at issue here is: ascribesing to it a certain form, where a form is something that as such which involves directedness toward certain ends. If the question is supposed to be why the thing at issue ought to pursue those ends, we ask: from what standpoint is this question posed? If the thing in question genuinely is a bearer of such-and-such a form, then it is a pursuer of such-and-such ends, and essentially so. It can no more renounce these ends than it can cease to be itself. “ Implication: restrictions on certain forms of speech depend on whether or not they are distinct by some ethical standard. since extrinsic properties are irrelevant, they have to be intrinsically distinct to negate. Independently, reject external factors as a metric for action:
Affairs are also infinite and incomprehensible to humanity, meaning that using them is incoherent, even if we would predict things. Bostrom 09, Nick, Professor of Philosophy – Oxford University, “Infinite Ethics." 2009. “Recent cosmological evidence suggests that the world is probably infinite. Moreover, if the totality of physical existence is indeed infinite, in the kind of way that modern cosmology suggests it is, then it contains an infinite number of galaxies, stars, and planets. If there are an infinite number of planets then there is, with probability one, an infinite number of people. Infinitely many of these people are happy, infinitely many are unhappy. Likewise for other local properties that are plausible candidates for having value, pertaining to person‐states, lives, or entire societies, ecosystems, or civilizations—there are infinitely many democratic states, and infinitely many that are ruled by despots, etc.” Bostrom 2 continues: “Suppose the world contains an infinite number of people and a corresponding infinity of joys and sorrows, preference satisfactions and frustrations, instances of virtue and depravation, and other such local phenomena at least some of which have positive or negative value. More precisely, suppose that there is some finite value ε such that there exists an infinite number of local phenomena (this could be a subset of e.g. persons, experiences, characters, virtuous acts, lives, relationships, civilizations, or ecosystems) each of which has a value ≥ ε and also an infinite number of local phenomena each of which has a value ≤ (‒ ε). Call such a world canonically infinite. Ethical theories that hold that value is aggregative imply that a canonically infinite world contains an infinite quantity of positive value and an infinite quantity of negative value. This gives rise to a peculiar predicament. We can do only a finite amount of good or bad. Yet in cardinal arithmetic, adding or subtracting a finite quantity does not change an infinite quantity. Every possible act of ours therefore has the same net effect on the total amount of good and bad in a canonically infinite world: none whatsoever. Aggregative consequentialist theories are thus threatened by infinitarian paralysis: they seem to imply that if the world is canonically infinite then it is always ethically indifferent what we do. In particular, they would imply that it is ethically indifferent whether we cause another holocaust or prevent one from occurring. If any non‐contradictory normative implication is a reductio ad absurdum, this one is.” 2. Empirical circumstances can never make intrinsic claims- that means desire controls our actions, which is empirically contradictory. Korsgaard“Self-Constitution in the Ethics of Plato and Kant” by Christine M. Korsgaard “Now I’m going to argue that that sort of willing is impossible. The first step is this: : to conceive of yourself as the cause of your actions is to identify with the principle of choice on which you act. A rational will is a self-conscious causality, and a self-conscious causality is aware of itself as a cause. To be aware of yourself as a cause is to identify yourself with something in the scenario that gives rise to the action, and this must be the principle of choice. For instance, suppose you experience a conflict of desire: you have a desire to do both A and B, and they are incompatible. You have some principle that favors A over B, so you exercise this principle, and you choose to do A. In this kind of case, you do not regard yourself as a mere passive spectator to the battle between A and B. Yo regard the choice as yours, as the product of your own activity, because you regard the principle of choice as expressive, or representative, of yourself. You must do so, for the only alternative to identifying with the principle of choice is regarding the principle of choice as some third thing in you, another force on a par with the incentives to do A and to do B, which happened to throw in its weight in favor of A, in a battle at which you were, after all, a mere passive spectator. But then you are not the cause of the action. Self-conscious or rational agency, then, requires identification with the principle of choice on which you act.” (123) Thus, the only way we can justify restricting certain forms of speech is if that speech is intrinsically bad. a) If argument itself is not intrinsic, being able to speak out should be the default response to “bad speech”. Anderson 6 Amanda Anderson, Caroline Donovan Professor of English Literature and Department Chair at Johns Hopkins University, Senior Fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, holds a Ph.D. in English from Cornell University, 2006 (“Reply to My Critic(s),” Criticism, Volume 48, Number 2, Spring, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Project MUSE, p. 289) Probyn's piece is a mixture of affective fallacy, argument by authority, and bald ad hominem. There's a pattern here: preci, that your claim to injury somehow damns your opponent's ideas.sely the tendency to personalize argument and to foreground what Wendy Brown has called "states of injury." Probyn says, for example, that she "felt ostracized by the book's content and style." Ostracized? Argument here is seen as directly harming persons, and this is precisely the state of affairs to which I object. Argument is not injurious to persons. Policies are injurious to persons and institutionalized practices can alienate and exclude. But argument itself is not directly harmful; once one says it is, one is very close to a logic of censorship. The most productive thing to do in an open academic culture (and in societies that aspire to freedom and democracy) when you encounter a book or an argument that you disagree with is to produce a response or a book that states your disagreement. But to assert that the book itself directly harms you is tantamount to saying that you do not believe in argument or in the free exchange of ideas b) If we only care about intrinsic properties, then accounting for physical injury produced by speech cannot precede or occur independent from accounting for linguistic injury. Policies that censor speech based on their physical injury have misdiagnosed the problem. Butler 97 “Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performativity” by Judith Butler 1997 UH-DD "Linguistic survival" implies that a certain kind of surviving takes place in language. Indeed, the discourse on hate speech continually makes such references. To claim that language injures or, to cite the phrase used by Richard Delgado and Mari Matsuda, that "words wound" is to combine linguistic and physical vocabularies. The use of a term such as "wound" suggests that language can act in ways that parallel the infliction of physical pain and injury. Charles R. Lawrence III refers to racist speech as a "verbal assault;' underscoring that the effect of racial invective is "like receiving a slap in the face. The injury is instantaneous'68) Some forms of racial invective also "produce physical symptoms that temporarily disable the victim. . . :· (68) These formulations suggest that linguistic injury acts like physical injury, but the use of the simile suggests that this is, after all, a comparison of unlike things. Consider, though, that the comparison might just as well imply that the two can be compared only metaphorically. Indeed, it appears that there is no language specific to the problem of linguistic injury, which is, as it were, forced to draw its vocabulary from physical injury. In this sense, it appears that the metaphorical connection between physical and linguistic vulnerability is essential to the description of linguistic vulnerability itself.. Thus, the aff burden is to prove that words have no intrinsic harm and the negative burden is to prove that words have intrinsic harms. Prefer independently:
Phil education- every philosophical theory must question the question of meaning in order to derive a principle of action, otherwise it cannot determine whether or not something ascribes an obligation. My interp focuses the debate on questions of meaning is discourse, which are inherently philosophically productive questions. And, phil discussions under whole res are ultimately filtered by questions of speech’s intrinsic meaning, i.e. Kantianism says that because speech is not intrinsically bad the freedom violation outweighs, so whole res doesn’t nonunique phil education, but rather further justifies my interpretation. Phil education is most constitutive of debate since LD is value centered debate meant to engage in philosophy. 2. Reciprocity- debating the topic as a question of policy action would lead to a terrible imbalance in terms of burdens. Either the aff defends a plan, in which case their offense is too specific to be turned or the negative cherry picks specific instances if bad speech to get NC’s and just outweighs the aff with what are essentially topic-justified floating PICs. The burden resolves this dilemma- if we just debate the topic as a question of intrinsic meaning, we have a 1:1 burden where we just read frameworks that prove the statement true or false. 3. Prefer reasonable aff burdens. The judge should evaluate the burden structure debate with the brightline of a) one analytic warrant for why the burden could possibly prove the resolution true or false, regardless of whether it is won and b) whether or not the negative could get turn ground. If I meet these criteria ignore all negative contestation of the burden. a) Fairness- it moots 6 minutes of AC offense since allowing the neg to question the burden undermines the value of the AC because I have to restart in the 1AR – that’s bad for literally any standard; there’s less clash, the aff is screwed in the 1ar, etc. It’s especially bad since the 2NR can just dump on the restart and I have no args to leverage from the AC. Strat is key to forming a coherent ballot story. b) Education- you don’t have to engage and clash with the 1AC. Burden debates aren’t educational since we literally just debate about what we should debate about so it is better to debate under a marginally subpar burden. c) Empirics verify the most recent empirics of late elim rounds show huge neg side bias of 61, meaning that I need constructive flex in defining the resolutional terms. Are Judges Just Guessing? A Statistical Analysis of LD Elimination Round Panels by Steven Adler http://nsdupdate.com/2015/03/30/are-judges-just-guessing-a-statistical-analysis-of-ld-elimination-round-panels-by-steven-adler/ Advocacy I defend the general resolution that in the United States, public colleges and universities ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech. The burden reinterprets what it means to affirm that resolution but if you want to specify a reasonable enforcement mechanism, actor, etc. I will. No link to implementation args cause I’ll defend those – they aren’t relevant to affirming/negating the burden. Contention 1 is Agency In order to establish ethical meaning, we need a conception of what agency is- that’s a precondition to meaning since without knowing what can create obligations, we don’t know what we have relational obligations to. This destroys the ability to find meaning since meaning is a question of what relationally matters to agents, which requires agency in the first place. Only agents are intrinsically valuable; concepts that describe the world, i.e. speech or pleasure, only have value relative to agents. Hill Thomas Hill, Jr. “Self-regarding suicide: A modified Kantian view,” in Autonomy and Self-Respect, Cambridge University Press, 1991, 102-103. The second argument is roughly this: Most valuable things' have value only because valued sic by human beings. Their value is derivative from the fact that they serve our interests and desires. Even pleasure, which we value for its own sake, has only derivative value, that is, value dependent on the contingent fact that human beings want it. Now if valuers confer derivative value on things by their preferences and choices, those valuers must themselves have value. In fact, they must have value independent of, and superior to, the derivative values which they create. The guiding analogy is how we treat ends. We value certain means because they serve intermediate ends, which in turn we value because they contribute to our ultimate ends, that is, what we value for its own sake. The value of the means and the intermediate means is derivative from the value of the ultimate ends; unless we value the ultimate end, the means and intermediate ends would be worthless to us. So, it seems, the source of derivative value must be valuable for its own sake. Since the ultimate source of the value of our contingent ends, such as health, wealth, and even pleasure, is their being valued by human beings, human beings, as valuers, must be valued for their own sakes. To say that speech could have meaning that is non-derivative from humans valuing them is just to say that that object has some objective, non-relational value-making property. These properties are only perceptible through intuition, which begs the question of agency. Hill 2 Thomas Hill, Jr. “Self-regarding suicide: A modified Kantian view,” in Autonomy and Self-Respect, Cambridge University Press, 1991, 102-103. The intrinsic goodness of something, he thought, was is an objective, nonrelational property of the thing, like its texture or color, but not a property perceivable by sense perception or detectable by scientific instruments. In theory at least, a single tree thriving alone in a universe without sentient beings, and even without God, could be intrinsically valuable. Since, according to Moore, our duty is to maximize intrinsic value, his theory could obviously be used to argue that we have reason not to destroy natural environments independently of how they affect human beings and animals. The survival of a forest might have worth beyond its worth to sentient beings. This approach, like the religious one, may appeal to some but is infested with problems. There are, first, the familiar objections to intuitionism, on which the theory depends. Metaphysical and epistemological doubts about nonnatural, intuited properties are hard to suppress, and many have argued that the theory rests on a misunderstanding of the words good, valuable, and the like.6 Second, even if we try to set aside these objections and think in Moore’s terms, it is far from obvious that everyone would agree that the existence of forests, etc., is intrinsically valuable. The test, says Moore, is determined by what we would say when we imagine a universe with just the thing in question, without any effects or accompaniments, and then we ask, “Would its existence be better than its nonexistence?” Be careful, Moore would remind us, not to construe this ques- tion as, “Would you prefer the existence of that universe to its nonexistence?” The question is, “Would its existence have the objective, nonrelational property, intrinsic goodness?” Now even among those who have no worries about whether this really makes sense, we might well get a diversity of answers. Those prone to destroy natural environments will doubtless give one answer, and nature lovers will likely give another. When an issue is as controversial as the one at hand, intuition is a poor arbiter. Contention 2 is Language Any application of words can never be verified because rules are indeterminate, as they require prior knowledge to understand them, which can never be the basis for truth- this proves there is no such a thing as intrinsic interpretation. Kripke “Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language” by Saul A. Kripke Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts 1982 “Normally, when we consider a mathematical rule such as addition, we think of ourselves as guided in our application of it to each new instance. Just this is the difference between someone who computes new values of a function and someone who calls out numbers at random. Given my past intentions regarding the symbol ‘+’, one and only one answer is dictated as the one appropriate to ‘68+57'. On the other hand, although an intelligence tester may suppose that there is only one possible continuation to the sequence 2, 4, 6, 8,…, mathematical and philosophical sophisticates know that an indefinite number of rules (even rules stated in terms of mathematical functions as conventional as ordinary polynomials) are compatible with any such finite initial segment. So if the tester urges me to respond, after 2, 4, 6, 8, . . ., with the unique appropriate next number, the proper response is that no such unique number exists, nor is there any unique (rule determined) infinite sequence that continues the given one. The problem can then be put this way: Did I myself, in the directions for the future that I gave myself regarding plus ‘+’, really differ from the intelligence tester? True, I may not merely stipulate that plus ‘+’ is to be a function instantiated by a finite number of computations. In addition, I may give myself directions for the further computation of plus ‘+', stated in terms of other functions and rules. In turn, I may give myself directions for the further computation of these functions and rules, and so on. Eventually, however, the process must stop, with ‘ultimate’ functions and rules that I have stipulated for myself only by a finite number of examples, just as in the intelligence test. If so, is not my procedure as arbitrary as that of the man who guesses the continuation of the intelligence test? In what sense is my actual computation procedure, following an algorithm that yields ‘125’, more justified by my past instructions than an alternative procedure that would have resulted in ‘5'? Am I not simply following an unjustifiable impulse?" Of course, these problems apply throughout language and are not confined to mathematical examples, though it is with mathematical examples that they can be most smoothly brought out. I think that I have learned the term 'table' in such a way that it will to apply to indefinitely many future items. So I can apply the term to a new situation, say when I enter the Eiffel Tower for the first time and see a table at the base. Can I answer a sceptic who supposes that by `table' in the past I meant tabair, where a 'tabair' is anything that is a table not found at the base of the Eiffel Tower, or a chair found there? Truth and meaning are just arbitrary construction of humans that become socially normalized, meaning intrinsic meaning in language can never exist on it’s own. Parrish 04 Rick “Derrida’s Economy of Violence in Hobbes’ Social Contract” Theory and Event 7:4 2004 Perhaps the single most telling quote from Hobbes on this point comes from The Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (usually known by its Latin name, De Cive), in which he states that "to know truth, is the same thing as to remember that it was made by ourselves by the very usurpation of the words." "For Hobbes truth is a function of logic and language, not of the relation between language and some extralinguistic reality," so the "connections between names and objects are not natural." They are artificially constructed by persons, based on individual psychologies and desires. These individual desires are for Hobbes the only measure of good and bad, because value terms "are ever used with relation to the person that useth them, there being nothing simply and absolutely so, nor any common rule of good and evil to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves." Since "there are no authentical doctrines concerning right and wrong, good and evil," these labels are placed upon things by humans in acts of creation rather than discovered as extrinsic facts. Contention 3 is Wrongful Targeting Violence that befalls or results from speech is all created by social conditions, not the speech itself. Anderson 6 — Amanda Anderson, Caroline Donovan Professor of English Literature and Department Chair at Johns Hopkins University, Senior Fellxsow at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, holds a Ph.D. in English from Cornell University, 2006 (“Reply to My Critic(s),” Criticism, Volume 48, Number 2, Spring, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Project MUSE, p. 285-287) Arguments stand or fall based on whether they are successful and persuasive, even an argument in favor of argument. It simply is not the case that an argument in favor of the importance of reasoned debate to liberal democracy is tantamount to oppressive power. To assume so is to assume, in the manner of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, that reason is itself violent, inherently, and that it will always mask power and enforce exclusions. But to assume this is to assume the very view of Enlightenment reason that Robbins claims we are "thankfully" well rid of. (I leave to the side the idea that any individual can proclaim that a debate is over, thankfully or not.) But perhaps Robbins will say, "I am not imagining that your argument is directly oppressive, but that what you argue for would be, if it were enforced." Yet my book doesn't imagine or suggest it is enforceable; I simply argue in favor of, I promote, an ethos of argument within a liberal democratic and proceduralist framework. As much as Robbins would like to think so, neither I nor the books I write can be cast as an arm of the police. Robbins wants to imagine a far more direct line of influence from criticism to political reality, however, and this is why it can be such a bad thing to suggest norms of argument. Watch as the gloves come off: Faced with the prospect of submitting to her version of argument—roughly, Habermas's version—and of being thus authorized to disagree only about other, smaller things, some may feel that there will have been an end to argument, or an end to the arguments they find most interesting. With current events in mind, I would be surprised if there were no recourse to the metaphor of a regular army facing a guerilla insurrection, hinting that Anderson wants to force her opponents to dress in uniform, reside in well-demarcated camps and capitals that can be bombed, fight by the rules of states (whether the states themselves abide by these rules or not), and so on—in short, that she wants to get the battle onto a terrain where her side will be assured of having the upper hand. Let's leave to the side the fact that this is a disowned hypothetical criticism. (As in, "Well, okay, yes, those are my gloves, but those are somebody else's hands they will have come off of.") Because far more interesting, actually, is the sudden elevation of stakes. It is a symptom of the sorry state of affairs in our profession that it plays out repeatedly this tragicomic tendency to give a grandiose political meaning to every object it analyzes or confronts. We have evidence of how desperate the situation is when we see it in a critic as thoughtful as Bruce Robbins, where it emerges as the need to allegorize a point about an argument in such a way that it gets cast as the equivalent of war atrocities. It is especially ironic in light of the fact that to the extent that I do give examples of the importance of liberal democratic proceduralism, I invoke the disregard of the protocols of international adjudication in the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq; I also speak End Page 286 about concerns with voting transparency. It is hard for me to see how my argument about proceduralism can be associated with the policies of the Bush administration when that administration has exhibited a flagrant disregard of democratic procedure and the rule of law. ROB The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best meets their burden under a truth testing paradigm. This requires the AFF to prove the resolution true and the NEG to prove the resolution false. First, cross-apply Boyle and Lavin about binding features. And, truth testing is key to the features.
Textuality: To affirm is defined as: “to say that something is true in a confident way” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/affirm and to negate is defined as: “to deny the existence or truth of” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/negate So, the binding standards ascribed in the actions of affirming and negating assume a truth testing model. 2. Debate intrinsically implies a clash over a proposition, otherwise it ceases to be a debate. This means each competitor attempts to prove their side of the issue to be true. So, the resolution is not an arbitrary statement, but a proposition up for debate under truth testing. Outweighs: A. We can always opt out of counter role of the ballots and still say we are participating in debate, but we can never opt out of an intrinsic features of debate and remain consistent with the activity so intrinsic features are most binding. B. If they say intrinsic features are not most binding, then this justifies infinite rules since we would base them on features that are arbitrary to the activity. So there is no reason to accept their role of the ballot over the AFF’s or another arbitrary starting point.
4/29/17
JF - 1AC - Israel Criticism
Tournament: Harvard Westlake | Round: Octas | Opponent: La Canada AZ | Judge: Eckert, Drodza, OKrent Framework The role of the ballot is to evaluate the simulated consequences of the affirmative policy vs a competiting neg policy option using a consequentialist standard.
The aff deploys the state to learn scenario planning- even if politics is bad, scenario analysis of politics is pedagogically valuable- it enhances creativity, deconstructs biases and teaches advocacy skills Barma et al 16 May 2016, Advance Publication Online on 11/6/15, Naazneen Barma, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Brent Durbin, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Professor of Government at Smith College, Eric Lorber, JD from UPenn and PhD in Political Science from Duke, Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, Rachel Whitlark, PhD in Political Science from GWU, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Project on Managing the Atom and International Security Program within the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, “‘Imagine a World in Which’: Using Scenarios in Political Science,” International Studies Perspectives 17 (2), pp. 1-19, What Are Scenarios and Why Use Them in Political Science? Scenario analysis is perceived most commonly as a technique for examining the robustness of strategy. It can immerse decision makers in future states that go beyond conventional extrapolations of current trends, preparing them to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and to protect themselves from adverse exogenous shocks. The global petroleum company Shell, a pioneer of the technique, characterizes scenario analysis as the art of considering “what if” questions about possible future worlds. Scenario analysis is thus typically seen as serving the purposes of corporate planning or as a policy tool to be used in combination with simulations of decision making. Yet scenario analysis is not inherently limited to these uses. This section provides a brief overview of the practice of scenario analysis and the motivations underpinning its uses. It then makes a case for the utility of the technique for political science scholarship and describes how the scenarios deployed at NEFPC were created. The Art of Scenario Analysis We characterize scenario analysis as the art of juxtaposing current trends in unexpected combinations in order to articulate surprising and yet plausible futures, often referred to as “alternative worlds.” Scenarios are thus explicitly not forecasts or projections based on linear extrapolations of contemporary patterns, and they are not hypothesis-based expert predictions. Nor should they be equated with simulations, which are best characterized as functional representations of real institutions or decision-making processes (Asal 2005). Instead, they are depictions of possible future states of the world, offered together with a narrative of the driving causal forces and potential exogenous shocks that could lead to those futures. Good scenarios thus rely on explicit causal propositions that, independent of one another, are plausible—yet, when combined, suggest surprising and sometimes controversial future worlds. For example, few predicted the dramatic fall in oil prices toward the end of 2014. Yet independent driving forces, such as the shale gas revolution in the United States, China’s slowing economic growth, and declining conflict in major Middle Eastern oil producers such as Libya, were all recognized secular trends that—combined with OPEC’s decision not to take concerted action as prices began to decline—came together in an unexpected way. While scenario analysis played a role in war gaming and strategic planning during the Cold War, the real antecedents of the contemporary practice are found in corporate futures studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Raskin et al. 2005). Scenario analysis was essentially initiated at Royal Dutch Shell in 1965, with the realization that the usual forecasting techniques and models were not capturing the rapidly changing environment in which the company operated (Wack 1985; Schwartz 1991). In particular, it had become evident that straight-line extrapolations of past global trends were inadequate for anticipating the evolving business environment. Shell-style scenario planning “helped break the habit, ingrained in most corporate planning, of assuming that the future will look much like the present” (Wilkinson and Kupers 2013, 4). Using scenario thinking, Shell anticipated the possibility of two Arab-induced oil shocks in the 1970s and hence was able to position itself for major disruptions in the global petroleum sector. Building on its corporate roots, scenario analysis has become a standard policymaking tool. For example, the Project on Forward Engagement advocates linking systematic foresight, which it defines as the disciplined analysis of alternative futures, to planning and feedback loops to better equip the United States to meet contemporary governance challenges (Fuerth 2011). Another prominent application of scenario thinking is found in the National Intelligence Council’s series of Global Trends reports, issued every four years to aid policymakers in anticipating and planning for future challenges. These reports present a handful of “alternative worlds” approximately twenty years into the future, carefully constructed on the basis of emerging global trends, risks, and opportunities, and intended to stimulate thinking about geopolitical change and its effects.4 As with corporate scenario analysis, the technique can be used in foreign policymaking for long-range general planning purposes as well as for anticipating and coping with more narrow and immediate challenges. An example of the latter is the German Marshall Fund’s EuroFutures project, which uses four scenarios to map the potential consequences of the Euro-area financial crisis (German Marshall Fund 2013). Several features make scenario analysis particularly useful for policymaking.5 Long-term global trends across a number of different realms—social, technological, environmental, economic, and political—combine in often-unexpected ways to produce unforeseen challenges. Yet the ability of decision makers to imagine, let alone prepare for, discontinuities in the policy realm is constrained by their existing mental models and maps. This limitation is exacerbated by well-known cognitive bias tendencies such as groupthink and confirmation bias (Jervis 1976; Janis 1982; Tetlock 2005). The power of scenarios lies in their ability to help individuals break out of conventional modes of thinking and analysis by introducing unusual combinations of trends and deliberate discontinuities in narratives about the future. Imagining alternative future worlds through a structured analytical process enables policymakers to envision and thereby adapt to something altogether different from the known present. Designing Scenarios for Political Science Inquiry The characteristics of scenario analysis that commend its use to policymakers also make it well suited to helping political scientists generate and develop policy-relevant research programs. Scenarios are essentially textured, plausible, and relevant stories that help us imagine how the future political-economic world could be different from the past in a manner that highlights policy challenges and opportunities. For example, terrorist organizations are a known threat that have captured the attention of the policy community, yet our responses to them tend to be linear and reactive. Scenarios that explore how seemingly unrelated vectors of change—the rise of a new peer competitor in the East that diverts strategic attention, volatile commodity prices that empower and disempower various state and nonstate actors in surprising ways, and the destabilizing effects of climate change or infectious disease pandemics—can be useful for illuminating the nature and limits of the terrorist threat in ways that may be missed by a narrower focus on recognized states and groups. By illuminating the potential strategic significance of specific and yet poorly understood opportunities and threats, scenario analysis helps to identify crucial gaps in our collective understanding of global politicaleconomic trends and dynamics. The notion of “exogeneity”—so prevalent in social science scholarship—applies to models of reality, not to reality itself. Very simply, scenario analysis can throw into sharp relief often-overlooked yet pressing questions in international affairs that demand focused investigation. Scenarios thus offer, in principle, an innovative tool for developing a political science research agenda. In practice, achieving this objective requires careful tailoring of the approach. The specific scenario analysis technique we outline below was designed and refined to provide a structured experiential process for generating problem-based research questions with contemporary international policy relevance.6 The first step in the process of creating the scenario set described here was to identify important causal forces in contemporary global affairs. Consensus was not the goal; on the contrary, some of these causal statements represented competing theories about global change (e.g., a resurgence of the nation-state vs. border-evading globalizing forces). A major principle underpinning the transformation of these causal drivers into possible future worlds was to “simplify, then exaggerate” them, before fleshing out the emerging story with more details.7 Thus, the contours of the future world were drawn first in the scenario, with details about the possible pathways to that point filled in second. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that some of the causal claims that turned into parts of scenarios were exaggerated so much as to be implausible, and that an unavoidable degree of bias or our own form of groupthink went into construction of the scenarios. One of the great strengths of scenario analysis, however, is that the scenario discussions themselves, as described below, lay bare these especially implausible claims and systematic biases.8 An explicit methodological approach underlies the written scenarios themselves as well as the analytical process around them—that of case-centered, structured, focused comparison, intended especially to shed light on new causal mechanisms (George and Bennett 2005). The use of scenarios is similar to counterfactual analysis in that it modifies certain variables in a given situation in order to analyze the resulting effects (Fearon 1991). Whereas counterfactuals are traditionally retrospective in nature and explore events that did not actually occur in the context of known history, our scenarios are deliberately forward-looking and are designed to explore potential futures that could unfold. As such, counterfactual analysis is especially well suited to identifying how individual events might expand or shift the “funnel of choices” available to political actors and thus lead to different historical outcomes (Nye 2005, 68–69), while forward-looking scenario analysis can better illuminate surprising intersections and sociopolitical dynamics without the perceptual constraints imposed by fine-grained historical knowledge. We see scenarios as a complementary resource for exploring these dynamics in international affairs, rather than as a replacement for counterfactual analysis, historical case studies, or other methodological tools. In the scenario process developed for NEFPC, three distinct scenarios are employed, acting as cases for analytical comparison. Each scenario, as detailed below, includes a set of explicit “driving forces” which represent hypotheses about causal mechanisms worth investigating in evolving international affairs. The scenario analysis process itself employs templates (discussed further below) to serve as a graphical representation of a structured, focused investigation and thereby as the research tool for conducting case-centered comparative analysis (George and Bennett 2005). In essence, these templates articulate key observable implications within the alternative worlds of the scenarios and serve as a framework for capturing the data that emerge (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). Finally, this structured, focused comparison serves as the basis for the cross-case session emerging from the scenario analysis that leads directly to the articulation of new research agendas. The scenario process described here has thus been carefully designed to offer some guidance to policy-oriented graduate students who are otherwise left to the relatively unstructured norms by which political science dissertation ideas are typically developed. The initial articulation of a dissertation project is generally an idiosyncratic and personal undertaking (Useem 1997; Rothman 2008), whereby students might choose topics based on their coursework, their own previous policy exposure, or the topics studied by their advisors. Research agendas are thus typically developed by looking for “puzzles” in existing research programs (Kuhn 1996). Doctoral students also, understandably, often choose topics that are particularly amenable to garnering research funding. Conventional grant programs typically base their funding priorities on extrapolations from what has been important in the recent past—leading to, for example, the prevalence of Japan and Soviet studies in the mid-1980s or terrorism studies in the 2000s—in the absence of any alternative method for identifying questions of likely future significance. The scenario approach to generating research ideas is grounded in the belief that these traditional approaches can be complemented by identifying questions likely to be of great empirical importance in the real world, even if these do not appear as puzzles in existing research programs or as clear extrapolations from past events. The scenarios analyzed at NEFPC envision alternative worlds that could develop in the medium (five to seven year) term and are designed to tease out issues scholars and policymakers may encounter in the relatively near future so that they can begin thinking critically about them now. This timeframe offers a period distant enough from the present as to avoid falling into current events analysis, but not so far into the future as to seem like science fiction. In imagining the worlds in which these scenarios might come to pass, participants learn strategies for avoiding failures of creativity and for overturning the assumptions that prevent scholars and analysts from anticipating and understanding the pivotal junctures that arise in international affairs. 2. Ideal theory strips away particularities making ethics inaccessible and epistemically skewed Mills 05, Charles, 2005, Ideal Theory” as Ideology, “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.” (175) 3. No act omission distinction for states means means based theories collapse to consequentialism. Sunstein and Vermule 05Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule. The University of Chicago Law School. “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life‐Life Tradeoffs.” JOHN M. OLIN LAW and ECONOMICS WORKING PAPER NO. 239. The Chicago Working Paper Series. March 2005 In our view, both the argument from causation and the argument from intention go wrong by overlooking the distinctive features of government as a moral agent. Whatever the general status of the act-omission distinction as a matter of moral philosophy,38 the distinction is least impressive when applied to government.39 The most fundamental point is that unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice distinction does not make a morally relevant difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do anything, or refusing to act.40 Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized private actionfor example, private killing—becomes obscure when the government formally forbids private action, but chooses a set of policy instruments that do not adequately or fully discourage it. 4. We should focus on particular circumstances which best tackle material violence. Pappas 16, Gregory Fernando, The Pragmatists’ Approach to Injustice”, The Pluralist Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2016 In Experience and Nature, Dewey names the empirical way of doing philosophy the “denotative method” (LW 1:371).18 What Dewey means by “denotation” is simply the phase of an empirical inquiry where we are con- cerned with designating, as free from theoretical presuppositions as possible, the concrete problem (subject matter) for which we can provide different and even competing descriptions and theories. Thus an empirical inquiry about an injustice must begin with a rough and tentative designation of where the injustices from within the broader context of our everyday life and activities are. Once we designate the subject matter, we then engage in the inquiry itself, including diagnosis, possibly even constructing theories and developing concepts. Of course, that is not the end of the inquiry. We must then take the results of that inquiry “as a path pointing and leading back to something in primary experience” (LW 1:17). This looping back is essential, and it neverends as long as there are new experiences of injustice that may require a revi- sion of our theories.Injustices are events suffered by concrete people at a particular time and in a situation. We need to start by pointing out and describing these problematic experiences instead of starting with a theoretical account or diagnosis of them. Dewey is concerned with the consequences of not following the methodological advice to distinguish designation from diagnosis. Definitions, theoretical criteria, and diagnosis can be useful; they have their proper place and function once inquiry is on its way, but if stressed too much at the start of inquiry, they can blind us to aspects of concrete problems that escape our theoretical lenses. We must attempt to pretheoretically designate the subject matter, that is, to “point” in a certain direction, even with a vague or crude description of the problem. But, for philosophers, this task is not easy because, for instance, we are often too prone to interpret the particular problem in a way that verifies our most cherished theories of injustice. One must be careful to designate the subject matter in such a way as not to slant the question in favor of one’s theory or theoretical preconceptions. A philosopher must make an honest effort to designate the injustices based on what is experienced as such because a concrete social problem (e.g., injustice) is independent and neutral with respect to the different possible competing diagnoses or theories about its causes. Otherwise, there is no way to test or adjudicate between competing accounts.¶ That designation precedes diagnosis is true of any inquiry that claims to be empirical. To start with the diagnosis is to not start with the problem. The problem is pretheoretical or preinquiry, not in any mysterious sense but in that it is first suffered by someone in a particular context. Otherwise, the diagnosis about the causes of the problem has nothing to be about, and the inquiry cannot even be initiated. In his Logic, Dewey lays out the pattern of all empirical inquiries (LW 12). All inquiries start with what he calls an “indeterminate situation,” prior even to a “problematic situation.” Here is a sketch of the process:¶ Indeterminate situation → problematic situation → diagnosis: What is the problem? What is the solution? (operations of analysis, ideas, observations, clarification, formulating and testing hypothesis, reasoning, etc.) → final judgment (resolution: determinate situation)¶ To make more clear or vivid the difference of the starting point between Anderson and Dewey, we can use the example (or analogy) of medical prac- tice, one that they both use to make their points.19 The doctor’s startingpoint is the experience of a particular illness of a particular patient, that is, the concrete and unique embodied patient experiencing a disruption or prob- lematic change in his life. “The patient having something the matter with him is antecedent; but being ill (having the experience of illness) is not the same as being an object of knowledge.”20 The problem becomes an object of knowledge once the doctor engages in a certain interaction with the patient, analysis, and testing that leads to a diagnosis. For Dewey, “diagnosis” occurs when the doctor is already engaged in operations of experimental observation in which he is already narrowing the field of relevant evidence, concerned with the correlation between the nature of the problem and possible solu- tions. Dewey explains the process: “A physician . . . is called by a patient. His original material of experience is thereby provided. This experienced object sets the problem of inquiry. . . . He calls upon his store of knowledge to sug- gest ideas that may aid him in reaching a judgment as to the nature of the trouble and its proper treatment.”21¶ Just as with the doctor, empirical inquirers about injustice must return to the concrete problem for testing, and should never forget that their con- ceptual abstractions and general knowledge are just means to ameliorate what is particular, context-bound, and unique. In reaching a diagnosis, the doc- tor, of course, relies on all of his background knowledge about diseases and evidence, but a good doctor never forgets the individuality of the particular problem (patient and illness).¶ The physician in diagnosing a case of disease deals with something in- dividualized. He draws upon a store of general principles of physiology, etc., already at his command. Without this store of conceptual material he is helpless. But he does not attempt to reduce the case to an exact specimen of certain laws of physiology and pathology, or do away with its unique individuality. Rather he uses general statements as aids to direct his observation of the particular case, so as to discover what it is like. They function as intellectual tools or instrumentalities. (LW 4:166)¶ Dewey uses the example of the doctor to emphasize the radical contex- tualism and particularism of his view. The good doctor never forgets that this patient and “this ill is just the specific ill that it is. It never is an exact duplicate of anything else.”22 Similarly, the empirical philosopher in her in- quiry about an injustice brings forth general knowledge or expertise to an inquiry into the causes of an injustice. She relies on sociology and history as well as knowledge of different forms of injustice, but it is all in the service of inquiry about the singularity of each injustice suffered in a situation.¶ The correction or refinement that I am making to Anderson’s character- ization of the pragmatists’ approach is not a minor terminological or scholarly point; it has methodological and practical consequences in how we approach an injustice. The distinction between the diagnosis and the problem (the ill- ness, the injustice) is an important functional distinction that must be kept in inquiry because it keeps us alert to the provisional and hypothetical aspect of any diagnosis. To rectify or improve any diagnosis, we must return to the concrete problem; as with the patient, this may require attending as much as possible to the uniqueness of the problem. This is in the same spirit as Anderson’s preference for an empirical inquiry that tries to “capture all of the expressive harms” in situations of injustice. But this requires that we begin with and return to concrete experiences of injustice and not by starting with a diagnosis of the causes of injustice provided by studies in the social sciences, as in (5) above. For instance, a diagnosis of causes that are due to systematic, structural features of society or the world disregards aspects of the concrete experiences of injustice that are not systematic and structural.¶ Making problematic situations of injustice our explicit methodological commitment as a starting point rather than a diagnosis of the problem is an important and useful imperative for nonideal theories. It functions as a directive to inquirers toward the problem, to locate it, and designate it before venturing into descriptions, diagnosis, analysis, clarifications, hypotheses, and reasoning about the problem. These operations are instrumental to its ame- lioration and must ultimately return (be tested) by the problem that sparked the inquiry. The directive can make inquirers more attentive to the complex ways in which such differences as race, culture, class, or gender intersect in a problem of injustice. Sensitivity to complexity and difference in matters of injustice is not easy; it is a very demanding methodological prescription because it means that no matter how confident we may feel about applying solutions designed to ameliorate systematic evil, our cures should try to address as much as possible the unique circumstances of each injustice. The analogy with medical inquiry and practice is useful in making this point, since the hope is that someday we will improve our tools of inquiry to practice a much more personalized medicine than we do today, that is, provide a diagnosis and a solution specific to each patient.
Plan Resolved: Public colleges and universities ought not restrict constitutionally protected speech that criticizes the State of Israel’s policies. Emmons 16 Alex Emmons, Senate Responds to Trump-Inspired Anti-Semitism By Targeting Students Who Criticize Israel, The Intercept, December 2 2016
A draft of the bill obtained by The Intercept encourages the Department of Education to use the State Department’s broad, widely criticized definition of anti-Semitism when investigating schools. That definition, from a 2010 memo, includes as examples of anti-Semitism “delegitimizing” Israel, “demonizing” Israel, “applying double standards” to Israel, and “focusing on Israel only for peace or human rights investigations.” Critics have pointed out that those are political — not racist — positions, shared by a significant number of Jews, and qualify as protected speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution. According to the draft, the bill does not adopt the definition as a formal legal standard, it only directs the State Department to “take into consideration” the definition when investigating schools for anti-Semitic discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The memo’s definition — which is widely supported by Israeli advocacy groups — was intended for identifying anti-Semitic groups overseas. Even then, it came with caveats. Criticisms of Israel are only examples of possible anti-Semitism “taking into account the overall context,” and the memo concludes: “However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.” Attempts to adopt the definition as a standard for campus censorship have drawn criticism from civil rights groups, free speech advocates, newspapers, hundreds of academics, and even one of the definition’s crafters, who wrote a column last year arguing it should not be applied to campuses. The bill approved by the Senate on Thursday was supported by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Jewish Federations of North America, and the Anti-Defamation League. “The definition will have a severe chilling effect on campuses, and that is the explicit goal of the Israel advocacy organizations who promote it,” said Liz Jackson, an attorney with the group Palestine Legal. “Student activists for Palestinian rights already operate in a repressive environment. If this bill passes, they will face the specter of federal investigation simply for engaging in criticism of the Israeli government’s abusive policies.” Campus activists are being subject to an increasingly broad censorship effort by Israeli-allied groups. Each year, Palestine Legal documents hundreds of instances of obstruction, censorship, or punishment of pro-Palestinian activism at colleges and universities. In December 2015, for example, one student at George Washington University was ordered by campus police to remove a Palestinian flag from her window, and threatened with further disciplinary action. At other campuses, students have been suspended or threatened with expulsion for demonstrating against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. The University of Illinois in 2014 fired a tenure-track professor for tweeting about Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Filing complaints with the Department of Education has been a favored tactic of groups including the Zionist Organization of America and the Brandeis Center, which have written letters to the department alleging that events like demonstrations and film screenings amount to “harassment” or “intimidation,” and create a “hostile environment on the basis of national origin” for Jewish students on campus.
Advantages Advantage 1: Islamophobia Suppression of pro-Palestine movements on campus denies Palestinian students the ability to form solidarity Nadeau and Sears 11 Mary-Jo Nadeau and Alan Sears, Mary-Jo Nadeau teaches at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto-Mississauga. Alan Sears teaches at the Department of Sociology, Ryerson University, Toronto. “This Is What Complicity Looks Like: Palestine and the Silencing Campaign on Campus,” The Bullet, March 5, 2011, http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/475.php JW The silencing campaign is particularly dangerous given the overall political climate, which facilitates the neoliberalization of education. The goal of neoliberalism in post-secondary education is to make the universities serve exclusively economic goals, preparing students for the corporate workplace and creating know-how that can be commercialized. This requires a serious culture shift on campuses. One of the core political projects of neoliberalism on campus has been to roll back the spaces for campus activism and freedom of expression originally won by student militancy in the 1960s and 1970s. The campus silencing campaign against Palestine solidarity aligns in important ways with this neoliberal agenda, shutting down political spaces in the interest of a narrow vocational conception of education. Campus equity movements are particular targets in this broader effort, as they have won a certain limited space for themselves, and often critique the limits of the dominant forms of academic knowledge. The silencing campaign around Palestine solidarity organizing has played a leading role in the attack on freedom of expression on campuses. There are in fact two ideas of academic freedom and campus freedom of expression at stake. The first is the narrow and professional conception of academic freedom, which stresses the right of the professor to conduct free inquiry within his or her own specific realm of expertise and to disseminate the results of that inquiry through publication or teaching. This sense of academic freedom informs the influential “Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure” developed in the U.S. in 1915. The second, and more recent, conception of campus freedom of expression and academic freedom was won through struggles from below by the radical student movement of the 1960s. The freedom struggles of African-Americans galvanized activists, including students who fought for the right to build solidarity campaigns on campuses. This was strongly opposed by university administrations, who sought to keep activist politics safely off campus. Nowhere was this struggle sharper than at the Berkeley campus of University of California. There, the Free Speech Movement fought for political rights on campus, challenging the administration of Clark Kerr who was perhaps the most prominent advocate of the technocratic university serving the needs of corporations and the state. Clark Kerr was, in many ways, the forerunner of the current neoliberal strategy of reorganizing universities to focus more clearly on the service of business and the lean state. In the 1960s, Kerr was actually defeated by a mass, militant student movement. But the technocratic vision that the radical student movement of the 1960s successfully defended against has returned in new and aggressive forms under neoliberalism. And part of this agenda is to politically cleanse campuses, stripping away the political rights students won through militancy in the 1960s. The attack on Palestine solidarity is a leading thrust in the current campaign to roll back campus political expression and to define academic freedom in narrow professional terms. The Iacobucci report at York, discussed below, is an important example of this logic. The gains of campus equity movements since the 1960s pose an important obstacle to the narrow definition of academic freedom. Serious struggles against racism, sexism and heterosexism necessarily raise questions about the nature of knowledge and its supposed objectivity. These movements show the ways fundamental inequalities distort knowledge, often in unrecognized ways. Equity movements therefore challenge the conception of expertise that underlies the narrow definition of academic freedom, arguing that the person who experiences systemic inequality often sees it more clearly than someone in a privileged position. As the case for Israeli policy has become harder to make after five years of the highly effective Palestinian-led global Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, pro-Israel advocacy organizations have sought to shut down their opponents through silencing. In doing so, they are not only attempting yet again to shut down any expression of Palestinian experience, but also to weaken protections for freedom of expression and narrow the conception of academic freedom. This is a serious attack, and one that resonates with the neoliberal restructuring of the universities. Attempts to conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism leads to campaigns by pro-Israel groups that demean and marginalize Muslim-American students Solomon 16 Daniel J. Solomon, “Inflammatory Pro-Israel Posters Pop Up on Campus — Are They Islamophobic?,” Forward, October 26, 2016, http://forward.com/news/national/352698/inflammatory-pro-israel-posters-pop-up-on-campus-are-they-islamophobic/ JW A row over Israel on campus is as predictable as the fall of autumn leaves, and it’s no different this season. Fliers accusing pro-Palestinian students of being anti-Semitic have cropped at numerous colleges in October — including the University of Chicago, Tufts University, Brooklyn College and Berkeley — and have been claimed by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a rightwing organization labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Do you want to show your support for Hamas terrorists whose stated goal whose stated goal is the elimination of the Jewish people and the Jewish state? Join us! Students for Justice in Palestine at Tufts University.” read one flier procured by the Tufts Daily. It also featured a Palestinian militant wrapped in a keffiyeh, or traditional headscarf and toting a machine gun. Other posters included specific callouts to individual faculty and students, accusing them of collaboration with jihadists. According to the anti-Zionist site Electronic Intifada, a flier at San Francisco State University labeled one professor “a leader of the Hamas BDS campaign,” while one at Berkeley said that a professor was a “supporter of Hamas terrorists” and an “Islamophobia alarmist.” Most of the posters featured the slogan #Jewhatred and directed people to the Freedom Center’s Web site. Horowitz’s organization has been termed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has described Horowitz as “a driving force of the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and anti-black movements.” According to Electronic Intifada, the current poster campaign was preceded by a smaller episode last spring at the University of California–Los Angeles, where the group circulated similar fliers. Critics of the posters — both campus administrators and others — have said they create an atmosphere of fear. “This is not an issue of free speech; this is bullying behavior that is unacceptable and will not be tolerated on our campus,” Leslie Wong, the president of San Francisco State, said in a comment run by Electronic Intifada. Joanne Barker, a professor at the university, told the Web site that her school “should be contacting federal and state authorities to investigate this incident as a hate crime.” Recently, some rightwing Israel advocates have adopted more hard-nosed tactics intended to publicly shame and sanction their perceived enemies. Created last year, one such effort, the Canary Mission, has compiled dossiers on hundreds of students and faculty that it sees as anti-Israel or anti-Semitic – often conflating the two. Another new organization, the Amcha Initiative, has an “anti-Semitism tracker” on its Web site that puts calls for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against the Jewish state (BDS) in the same category as Jew-hatred. This also comes on the heels of a controversy at Berkeley, where students and faculty clashed with one another over a course that presented Zionism as a “settler colonialist” movement. Islamophobia empirically leads to hate crimes, fractures communities, and increases national security threats. Foran 16 Clare Foran, Donald Trump and the Rise of Anti-Muslim Violence, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trump-muslims-islamophobia-hate-crime/500840/ A new report from California State University-San Bernardino’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism suggests that political rhetoric may play a role in mitigating or fueling hate crimes. The report shows that anti-Muslim hate crimes in the U.S. rose sharply in 2015 to the highest levels since the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. It also suggests that Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric could have contributed to this backlash against American Muslims. “There’s very compelling evidence that political rhetoric may well play a role in directing behavior in the aftermath of a terrorist attack,” Brian Levin, the author of the report said in an interview. “I don’t think we can dismiss contentions that rhetoric is one of the significant variables that can contribute to hate crimes.” The report from the non-partisan center examined the incidence of hate crimes in the aftermath of two reactions to terrorism from political leaders. First, George W. Bush’s speech following the 9/11 attacks declaring: “Islam is peace” and “the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” and the second, Trump calling for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. after the San Bernardino terror attack. The report found a steep rise in hate crimes following Trump’s remarks and a significant drop in hate crimes after Bush’s speech, relative to the number of hate crimes immediately following the initial terror attacks. A wide array of factors contribute to the incidence of hate crimes. Ignorance and isolation may play a role; most Americans say they do not personally know any Muslims, although those who do report positive views of Muslims in general. The nature of the threat groups of people are perceived to pose can also be a factor; prejudice catalyzed by a terrorist attack, for example, may be particularly likely to inspire hate crimes. Political rhetoric is only one ingredient in that mix, and the many messages in circulation after an attack can make it harder to determine the impact of any one particular reaction from a political leader. Before Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims entering the country, President Obama delivered a speech to the nation on the San Bernardino attack stressing tolerance. Still, the report looked at daily data following terrorist attacks, and found that “a tolerant statement about Muslims by a political leader was accompanied by a sharp decline in hate crime, while a less tolerant announcement was followed by a precipitous increase in both the severity and number of anti-Muslim hate crimes.” It notes that “there have been very few incidents of actual hate crime where Mr. Trump’s name was uttered since his candidacy,” but adds that “the increase of 87.5 in anti-Muslim hate crime in the days directly following his announcement is a troubling development and worthy of concern.” Aside from calling for a ban on Muslims entering the the United States, Trump has said that “Islam hates us,” and accused American Muslims of protecting terrorists. The research does not demonstrate a direct causal link, nor can it rule out the role of other factors. It’s possible that the documented increase reflects an increase in hate-crime reporting due to heightened awareness of Islamophobia, which has become a topic of discussion during the presidential race. Nevertheless, the research does raise the possibility that Islamophobic political rhetoric may have devastating consequences. A Georgetown University report released in May similarly found that threats, intimidation and violence against Muslim Americans have surged over the course of the presidential election. Engy Abdelkader, the author of the report, believes that trend is linked to Trump’s political rise. “Trump has seized on people’s fears and anxieties,” Abdelkader said. “I think that has translated in a number of instances not just to hostility, but acts of violence.” Advantage 2: Civic Engagement Many clubs on college campuses can help create civic engagement for their students. Cress et al 10 Christine M. Cress, PhD, is department chair of educational leadership and policy and professor of postsecondary, adult, and continuing education (PACE) at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, “A Processing Connection: Increasing College Access and Success through Civic Engagement,” 2010, http://www.compact.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/A-Promising-Connection.pdf JW Both historical and contemporary higher education writers and researchers have asserted that the primary goal of higher education is to develop civic-minded citizens with the skills and capacities to lead our communities and nation (e.g., Dewey, 1916; Bowen, 1977; Astin, 1996; Eyler and Giles, 1999; Colby, Ehrlich, Beaumont, and Stephens, 2003; Hurtado, Engberg, and Ponjuan, 2003). Although definitions of civic engagement within higher education vary by institution, program, and individual, there is no doubt that leveraging civic engagement for the mutual benefit of colleges and communities can be an effective strategy for realizing educational, civic, and economic outcomes. Campuses have used a variety of terms to describe their civic engagement activities and the ways these activities link to learning. Some of the most widely used are service-learning, community engagement, community-based research, civic education, community experiences, community-based learning, democratic practice, and philanthropy education, not to mention a variety of co-curricular offerings for students. Regardless of the term used, if part of the purpose of the activity is to educate or enhance students’ understanding of civic life, the work generally can be referred to as civic engagement. The idea that higher education institutions are responsible for nurturing the growth and development of citizenship skills is not new. Historically, many colleges were founded on the principle of facilitating civic leadership knowledge and skills (Rudolph, 1990). The system of community colleges grew out of a commitment to the democratic principles of access and opportunity (Cohen and Brawer, 2003); its leaders were philosophically dedicated to the belief that broad engagement of the diverse community will create a strong educational, social, political, and economic fabric.
Public universities are threatening cuts to funding in response to pro-Palestine divestment strategies. Empirically proven on University of California campuses where organizations that don’t associate with pro-Palestine get funding while others don’t Friedman 15 Nora Barrows-Friedman, staff writer and associate editor at The Electronic Intifada, “UCLA student groups face funding cuts over Israel divestment,” The Electronic Intifada, Dec 7, 2015, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/ucla-student-groups-face-funding-cuts-over-israel-divestment JW The Graduate Students Association at UCLA in California has put stipulations on funding for student groups based on affiliation with Palestinian rights activism. Students and civil rights organizations are concerned that such conditions are the result of overt willingness by University of California’s top officials to exceptionalize free speech rights and threaten punishment against student activists. In mid-October, the president of UCLA’s Graduate Students Association sent an email to a student group that was seeking funding for a diversity caucus event. The association represents thousands of UCLA’s graduate students and provides resources, including funding, to graduate students and organizations. Members pay mandatory fees each academic quarter. The association’s president informed the group that “GSA leadership has a zero engagement/endorsement policy towards Divest from Israel or any related movement/organization” (emphasis in original) and awarded the group $2,000 in funding based on their “zero connection” to a “Divest from Israel” group. UCLA does not have an organization or movement specifically called “Divest from Israel,” but the president was most likely referring to the graduate student workers’ union across the University of California system, UAW Local 2865, which passed a historic divestment resolution one year ago. This condition could also apply to Students for Justice in Palestine as well as graduate student organizations that support the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. In addition to UAW 2865’s successful divestment vote, student governments at seven out of nine University of California undergraduate campuses — including at UCLA in 2014 — have passed resolutions calling for the administration to pull investments from US and international companies profiting from Israel’s violations of Palestinians’ rights. Despite an expensive public relations campaign waged by anti-Palestinian groups, UCLA’s divestment resolution passed by a landslide vote and was supported by more than 30 student organizations. Israeli companies abuse West Bank occupation for their own profit while exploiting and suppressing local Palestinians. Every dollar that the divestment strategy gains translates into increased welfare in Palestine Press 16 Eyal Press, author of “Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times, “When ‘Made in Israel’ Is a Human Rights Abuse,” New York Times, January 26, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/opinion/when-made-in-israel-is-a-human-rights-abuse.html?_r=0 JW From a biblical perspective, this view may be tenable. From a legal and moral perspective, it is not. As documented in a new report by Human Rights Watch, Israel’s occupation has grown into a lucrative business, exploited by companies as part of a system that is unlawful and abusive. Like the settlers, these enterprises receive benefits from the Israeli government — preferential access to land and water, low rents — that make the occupied territories an alluring destination. It is another story for Palestinians, who are routinely denied permits to open their own businesses, cut off from their land and hemmed in by restrictions that, according to the World Bank, cost the Palestinian economy $3.4 billion a year. All of these businesses are operating on illegally occupied land. A significant amount of land, it turns out. There are roughly 1,000 factories in the chain of Israeli-administered “industrial zones” strung across the West Bank. The geographic footprint of these commercial enterprises, together with shopping centers and agricultural projects, exceeds the built-up areas of settler housing. Continue reading the main story Some Israeli officials have argued that Palestinians benefit by working in settlement businesses, producing what one factory owner calls “goods of peace.” But many work in settlements only because Israel’s stifling of the Palestinian economy has deprived them of alternatives. Because the government rarely conducts labor inspections, Palestinian workers often earn less than the Israeli minimum wage. If workers complain, employers sometimes retaliate by fabricating a “security incident” that will deprive Palestinians of their work permits, according to the H.R.W. report. To view goods made under these conditions as no different than products made within Israel requires going blind to such indignities. Unfortunately, that is exactly what new legislation that will soon land on President Obama’s desk would require the United States government to do. Under a provision of a larger piece of legislation, popularly known as the Customs Bill, that has been approved by the House and is expected to soon pass the Senate, American officials will be obligated to treat the settlements as part of Israel in future trade negotiations.
Advantage 3: Spillover Encouraging discourse about foreign policy toward Israel-Palestine is uniquely good because it builds coalitions across all racial groups to inspire new dialogues. The aff spills over to other reform movements Hallward and Shaver 12 Maia Carter Hallward and Patrick Shaver, Associate Professor of Middle East Politics at American university, “‘‘WAR by other Means’’ or Nonviolent Resistance? Examining the Discourses Surrounding Berkeley’s Divestment Bill,” Peace and Change: A Journal of Peace Research, July 2012 JW Finally, proponents and opponents differed in their approaches to power. Opponents of the bill in the Jewish community on and off campus focused their efforts on the power hierarchy, targeting the president of the student government, president of the university, and parents of upcoming high school seniors who may be considering the university in the future. In contrast, supporters of the divestment bill were more focused on the grassroots, on the campus community, on networks within the broader Bay Area, such as the dock workers who later refused to unload an Israeli ship. Supporters of the bill repeatedly emphasized that BDS was one of the small steps they could take owing to their lack of power in the conventional sense, and they reached out to those with positional power or influence (such Nobel Prize Laureate Desmond Tutu) to try to strengthen their cause. By reaching out to a broad coalition of minority groups on campus, seeking to engage Muslims and Jews, Latinos and African-Americans, the supporters of divestment sought to build a force for change in the name of justice. This coalition building across ethnic and other lines of division parallels the strategies used by Berkeley students during the antiapartheid era.93 Other Jewish groups on campus, like Tikvah Students for Israel, joined forces with Evangelical Christians, orthodox Jewish students, and the Berkeley College Republicans in a call for ending divisive debates and ensuring that Jewish students feel safe and not marginalized on campus. These two rival coalitions of students used very different language to discuss the issues at hand and to frame the debate, with supporters emphasizing the human rights abuses of the occupation and the U.S. corporations supplying weapons and opponents focusing on dialogue and ‘‘peace.’’ Regardless, the power of BDS was clearly indicated in the size of the crowds attending and their willingness to endure all night sessions, as well as the extent of involvement of the Israeli consul for the Northwest. On a broader level, the case illustrates the challenges of democratic decision making in terms of the question of representation and authority. What was originally a relatively unremarkable student government decision became the subject of national, even international, attention after the president’s veto and ensuing debates that were opened to the public. While some saw this as an excellent example of democracy in action by expanding the space for discourse and providing in-depth dialogue conducted in a generally civil manner (with a few exceptions), others questioned whether the bill went beyond the scope of the student government’s role, and others wondered about the role of external forces in decision making. Looking at the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict and questions of democratic accountability, the case raises questions regarding how difficult political decisions are made and the role of elected leaders in soliciting (or not) external opinion and the role of that external process on the final decision-making process. A second, related point, involves the extent to which the outcome itself, or the educational process leading to that final decision, has more of an impact on community relations and potential for socio-political change. Although opponents of the divestment bill ultimately ‘‘won’’ since the veto was not overturned, the public discourse and attention received in the process contributed to a momentum that spilled over onto other campuses and other California BDS initiatives. Imagining state solutions is key to getting students into politics and prevent a ceding of power to political elites. Giroux 06, Henry, Sociologist, “The abandoned generation: The urban debate league and the politics of possibility,” 2006 The decline of democratic values and informed citizenship can be seen in research studies done by The Justice Project in 2001 in which a substantial number of teenagers and young people were asked what they thought democracy meant. The answers testified to a growing depoliticization of American life and largely consisted of statements along the following lines: "Nothing," "I don't know," or "My rights, just like, pride, I guess, to some extent, and paying taxes," or "I just think, like, what does it really mean? I know its our, like, our government, but I don't know what it 6 technically is." The transition from being ignorant about democracy to actually sup- porting antidemocratic Tendencies can be seen in a number of youth surveys that have been taken since 2000. For instance, a survey released by the University of California, Berkeley, revealed that 69 percent of students support school prayer and 44 percent of young people aged fifteen to twenty-two support government restric- tions on abortions. A 2004 survey of 112,003 high school students on First Amendment rights showed that one third of students surveyed believed that the First Amendment went too far in the rights it guarantees and 36 percent believed that the press enjoyed too much freedom. This suggests not just a failing of education, but a crisis of citizenship and democracy. One consequence of the decline in democratic values and citizenship literacy is that all levels of government are being hollowed our, their role reduced to dismantling the gains of the welfare state as they increasingly construct policies that criminalize social problems and prioritize penal methods over social investments. When citizenship is reduced to consumerism, it should come as no surprise that people develop an indifference to civic engagement and participation in democratic public life. Unlike some theorists who suggest that politics as critical exchange and social engagement is either dead or in a state of terminal arrest, I believe that the current depressing state of politics points to an urgent challenge: reformulating the crisis of democracy as a fundamental crisis of vision, meaning, education, and political agency. Central to my argument is the assumption that politics is not simply about power, but also, as Cornelius Castoriadis points out, "has to do with political judgments and value choices," meaning that questions of civic education—learning how 8 to become a skilled citizen—afe central to democracy itself. Educators at all levels need to challenge the assumption that politics is dead, or the nature of politics will be determined exclusively by government leaders and experts m the heat of moral frenzy. Educators need to take a more critical position, arguing that knowledge, debate, and dialogue about pressing social problems offer individuals and groups some hope in shaping the conditions that bear down on their lives. Underview Cambridge Dictionary defines any in context of resolution as (Cambridge Dictionary, online dictionary, “Definition of ‘any’,” http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/any/) (used in negative statements and questions) some, or even the smallest amount (of)
Underview was aff felx, reasonability, aff RVI's, and an extempted agent CP's bad pre-emptive interpretation
3/18/17
JF - 1AC - Israel Criticism - V2
Tournament: Kandi King RR | Round: 3 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake IP | Judge: Sharma, Gravely The role of the ballot is to evaluate the simulated consequences of the affirmative policy vs a competing neg policy option to reduce material oppression. The aff deploys the state to learn scenario planning- even if politics is bad, scenario analysis of politics is pedagogically valuable- it enhances creativity, deconstructs biases and teaches advocacy skills Barma et al 16 May 2016, Advance Publication Online on 11/6/15, Naazneen Barma, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Brent Durbin, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Professor of Government at Smith College, Eric Lorber, JD from UPenn and PhD in Political Science from Duke, Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, Rachel Whitlark, PhD in Political Science from GWU, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Project on Managing the Atom and International Security Program within the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, “‘Imagine a World in Which’: Using Scenarios in Political Science,” International Studies Perspectives 17 (2), pp. 1-19, What Are Scenarios and Why Use Them in Political Science? Scenario analysis is perceived most commonly as a technique for examining the robustness of strategy. It can immerse decision makers in future states that go beyond conventional extrapolations of current trends, preparing them to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and to protect themselves from adverse exogenous shocks. The global petroleum company Shell, a pioneer of the technique, characterizes scenario analysis as the art of considering “what if” questions about possible future worlds. Scenario analysis is thus typically seen as serving the purposes of corporate planning or as a policy tool to be used in combination with simulations of decision making. Yet scenario analysis is not inherently limited to these uses. This section provides a brief overview of the practice of scenario analysis and the motivations underpinning its uses. It then makes a case for the utility of the technique for political science scholarship and describes how the scenarios deployed at NEFPC were created. The Art of Scenario Analysis We characterize scenario analysis as the art of juxtaposing current trends in unexpected combinations in order to articulate surprising and yet plausible futures, often referred to as “alternative worlds.” Scenarios are thus explicitly not forecasts or projections based on linear extrapolations of contemporary patterns, and they are not hypothesis-based expert predictions. Nor should they be equated with simulations, which are best characterized as functional representations of real institutions or decision-making processes (Asal 2005). Instead, they are depictions of possible future states of the world, offered together with a narrative of the driving causal forces and potential exogenous shocks that could lead to those futures. Good scenarios thus rely on explicit causal propositions that, independent of one another, are plausible—yet, when combined, suggest surprising and sometimes controversial future worlds. For example, few predicted the dramatic fall in oil prices toward the end of 2014. Yet independent driving forces, such as the shale gas revolution in the United States, China’s slowing economic growth, and declining conflict in major Middle Eastern oil producers such as Libya, were all recognized secular trends that—combined with OPEC’s decision not to take concerted action as prices began to decline—came together in an unexpected way. While scenario analysis played a role in war gaming and strategic planning during the Cold War, the real antecedents of the contemporary practice are found in corporate futures studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Raskin et al. 2005). Scenario analysis was essentially initiated at Royal Dutch Shell in 1965, with the realization that the usual forecasting techniques and models were not capturing the rapidly changing environment in which the company operated (Wack 1985; Schwartz 1991). In particular, it had become evident that straight-line extrapolations of past global trends were inadequate for anticipating the evolving business environment. Shell-style scenario planning “helped break the habit, ingrained in most corporate planning, of assuming that the future will look much like the present” (Wilkinson and Kupers 2013, 4). Using scenario thinking, Shell anticipated the possibility of two Arab-induced oil shocks in the 1970s and hence was able to position itself for major disruptions in the global petroleum sector. Building on its corporate roots, scenario analysis has become a standard policymaking tool. For example, the Project on Forward Engagement advocates linking systematic foresight, which it defines as the disciplined analysis of alternative futures, to planning and feedback loops to better equip the United States to meet contemporary governance challenges (Fuerth 2011). Another prominent application of scenario thinking is found in the National Intelligence Council’s series of Global Trends reports, issued every four years to aid policymakers in anticipating and planning for future challenges. These reports present a handful of “alternative worlds” approximately twenty years into the future, carefully constructed on the basis of emerging global trends, risks, and opportunities, and intended to stimulate thinking about geopolitical change and its effects.4 As with corporate scenario analysis, the technique can be used in foreign policymaking for long-range general planning purposes as well as for anticipating and coping with more narrow and immediate challenges. An example of the latter is the German Marshall Fund’s EuroFutures project, which uses four scenarios to map the potential consequences of the Euro-area financial crisis (German Marshall Fund 2013). Several features make scenario analysis particularly useful for policymaking.5 Long-term global trends across a number of different realms—social, technological, environmental, economic, and political—combine in often-unexpected ways to produce unforeseen challenges. Yet the ability of decision makers to imagine, let alone prepare for, discontinuities in the policy realm is constrained by their existing mental models and maps. This limitation is exacerbated by well-known cognitive bias tendencies such as groupthink and confirmation bias (Jervis 1976; Janis 1982; Tetlock 2005). The power of scenarios lies in their ability to help individuals break out of conventional modes of thinking and analysis by introducing unusual combinations of trends and deliberate discontinuities in narratives about the future. Imagining alternative future worlds through a structured analytical process enables policymakers to envision and thereby adapt to something altogether different from the known present. Designing Scenarios for Political Science Inquiry The characteristics of scenario analysis that commend its use to policymakers also make it well suited to helping political scientists generate and develop policy-relevant research programs. Scenarios are essentially textured, plausible, and relevant stories that help us imagine how the future political-economic world could be different from the past in a manner that highlights policy challenges and opportunities. For example, terrorist organizations are a known threat that have captured the attention of the policy community, yet our responses to them tend to be linear and reactive. Scenarios that explore how seemingly unrelated vectors of change—the rise of a new peer competitor in the East that diverts strategic attention, volatile commodity prices that empower and disempower various state and nonstate actors in surprising ways, and the destabilizing effects of climate change or infectious disease pandemics—can be useful for illuminating the nature and limits of the terrorist threat in ways that may be missed by a narrower focus on recognized states and groups. By illuminating the potential strategic significance of specific and yet poorly understood opportunities and threats, scenario analysis helps to identify crucial gaps in our collective understanding of global politicaleconomic trends and dynamics. The notion of “exogeneity”—so prevalent in social science scholarship—applies to models of reality, not to reality itself. Very simply, scenario analysis can throw into sharp relief often-overlooked yet pressing questions in international affairs that demand focused investigation. Scenarios thus offer, in principle, an innovative tool for developing a political science research agenda. In practice, achieving this objective requires careful tailoring of the approach. The specific scenario analysis technique we outline below was designed and refined to provide a structured experiential process for generating problem-based research questions with contemporary international policy relevance.6 The first step in the process of creating the scenario set described here was to identify important causal forces in contemporary global affairs. Consensus was not the goal; on the contrary, some of these causal statements represented competing theories about global change (e.g., a resurgence of the nation-state vs. border-evading globalizing forces). A major principle underpinning the transformation of these causal drivers into possible future worlds was to “simplify, then exaggerate” them, before fleshing out the emerging story with more details.7 Thus, the contours of the future world were drawn first in the scenario, with details about the possible pathways to that point filled in second. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that some of the causal claims that turned into parts of scenarios were exaggerated so much as to be implausible, and that an unavoidable degree of bias or our own form of groupthink went into construction of the scenarios. One of the great strengths of scenario analysis, however, is that the scenario discussions themselves, as described below, lay bare these especially implausible claims and systematic biases.8 An explicit methodological approach underlies the written scenarios themselves as well as the analytical process around them—that of case-centered, structured, focused comparison, intended especially to shed light on new causal mechanisms (George and Bennett 2005). The use of scenarios is similar to counterfactual analysis in that it modifies certain variables in a given situation in order to analyze the resulting effects (Fearon 1991). Whereas counterfactuals are traditionally retrospective in nature and explore events that did not actually occur in the context of known history, our scenarios are deliberately forward-looking and are designed to explore potential futures that could unfold. As such, counterfactual analysis is especially well suited to identifying how individual events might expand or shift the “funnel of choices” available to political actors and thus lead to different historical outcomes (Nye 2005, 68–69), while forward-looking scenario analysis can better illuminate surprising intersections and sociopolitical dynamics without the perceptual constraints imposed by fine-grained historical knowledge. We see scenarios as a complementary resource for exploring these dynamics in international affairs, rather than as a replacement for counterfactual analysis, historical case studies, or other methodological tools. In the scenario process developed for NEFPC, three distinct scenarios are employed, acting as cases for analytical comparison. Each scenario, as detailed below, includes a set of explicit “driving forces” which represent hypotheses about causal mechanisms worth investigating in evolving international affairs. The scenario analysis process itself employs templates (discussed further below) to serve as a graphical representation of a structured, focused investigation and thereby as the research tool for conducting case-centered comparative analysis (George and Bennett 2005). In essence, these templates articulate key observable implications within the alternative worlds of the scenarios and serve as a framework for capturing the data that emerge (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). Finally, this structured, focused comparison serves as the basis for the cross-case session emerging from the scenario analysis that leads directly to the articulation of new research agendas. The scenario process described here has thus been carefully designed to offer some guidance to policy-oriented graduate students who are otherwise left to the relatively unstructured norms by which political science dissertation ideas are typically developed. The initial articulation of a dissertation project is generally an idiosyncratic and personal undertaking (Useem 1997; Rothman 2008), whereby students might choose topics based on their coursework, their own previous policy exposure, or the topics studied by their advisors. Research agendas are thus typically developed by looking for “puzzles” in existing research programs (Kuhn 1996). Doctoral students also, understandably, often choose topics that are particularly amenable to garnering research funding. Conventional grant programs typically base their funding priorities on extrapolations from what has been important in the recent past—leading to, for example, the prevalence of Japan and Soviet studies in the mid-1980s or terrorism studies in the 2000s—in the absence of any alternative method for identifying questions of likely future significance. The scenario approach to generating research ideas is grounded in the belief that these traditional approaches can be complemented by identifying questions likely to be of great empirical importance in the real world, even if these do not appear as puzzles in existing research programs or as clear extrapolations from past events. The scenarios analyzed at NEFPC envision alternative worlds that could develop in the medium (five to seven year) term and are designed to tease out issues scholars and policymakers may encounter in the relatively near future so that they can begin thinking critically about them now. This timeframe offers a period distant enough from the present as to avoid falling into current events analysis, but not so far into the future as to seem like science fiction. In imagining the worlds in which these scenarios might come to pass, participants learn strategies for avoiding failures of creativity and for overturning the assumptions that prevent scholars and analysts from anticipating and understanding the pivotal junctures that arise in international affairs. No act omission distinction for states means means based theories collapse to consequentialism. Sunstein and Vermule 05Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule. The University of Chicago Law School. “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life‐Life Tradeoffs.” JOHN M. OLIN LAW and ECONOMICS WORKING PAPER NO. 239. The Chicago Working Paper Series. March 2005 In our view, both the argument from causation and the argument from intention go wrong by overlooking the distinctive features of government as a moral agent. Whatever the general status of the act-omission distinction as a matter of moral philosophy,38 the distinction is least impressive when applied to government.39 The most fundamental point is that unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice distinction does not make a morally relevant difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do anything, or refusing to act.40 Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized private actionfor example, private killing—becomes obscure when the government formally forbids private action, but chooses a set of policy instruments that do not adequately or fully discourage it. Use particularism- root cause claims and focus on overarching structures ignore application to material injustice. Gregory Fernando Pappas 16 Texas AandM University “The Pragmatists’ Approach to Injustice”, The Pluralist Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2016, The pragmatists’ approach should be distinguished from nonideal theories whose starting point seems to be the injustices of society at large that have a history and persist through time, where the task of political philosophy is to detect and diagnose the presence of these historical injustices in particular situations of injustice. For example, critical theory today has inherited an approach to social philosophy characteristic of the European tradition that goes back to Rousseau, Marx, Weber, Freud, Marcuse, and others. Accord- ing to Roberto Frega, this tradition takes society to be “intrinsically sick” with a malaise that requires adopting a critical historical stance in order to understand how the systematic sickness affects present social situations. In other words, this approach assumes that¶ a philosophical critique of specific social situations can be accomplished only under the assumption of a broader and full blown critique of soci- ety in its entirety: as a critique of capitalism, of modernity, of western civilization, of rationality itself. The idea of social pathology becomes intelligible only against the background of a philosophy of history or of an anthropology of decline, according to which the distortions of actual social life are but the inevitable consequence of longstanding historical processes. (“Between Pragmatism and Critical Theory” 63)¶ However, this particular approach to injustice is not limited to critical theory. It is present in those Latin American and African American political philosophies that have used and transformed the critical intellectual tools of ¶ critical theory to deal with the problems of injustice in the Americas. For instance, Charles W. Mills claims that the starting point and alternative to the abstractions of ideal theory that masked injustices is to diagnose and rectify a history of an illness—the legacy of white supremacy in our actual society.11 The critical task of revealing this illness is achieved by adopting a historical perspective where the injustices of today are part of a larger historical narrative about the development of modern societies that goes back to how Europeans have progressively dehumanized or subordinated others. Similary, radical feminists as well as Third World scholars, as reaction to the hege- monic Eurocentric paradigms that disguise injustices under the assumption of a universal or objective point of view, have stressed how our knowledge is always situated. This may seem congenial with pragmatism except the locus of the knower and of injustices is often described as power structures located in “global hierarchies” and a “world-system” and not situations.12¶ Pragmatism only questions that we live in History or a “World-System” (as a totality or abstract context) but not that we are in history (lowercase): in a present situation continuous with others where the past weighs heavily in our memories, bodies, habits, structures, and communities. It also does not deny the importance of power structures and seeing the connections be- tween injustices through time, but there is a difference between (a) inquiring into present situations of injustice in order to detect, diagnose, and cure an injustice (a social pathology) across history, and (b) inquiring into the his- tory of a systematic injustice in order to facilitate inquiry into the present unique, context-bound injustice. To capture the legacy of the past on present injustices, we must study history but also seek present evidence of the weight of the past on the present injustice.¶ If injustice is an illness, then the pragmatists’ approach takes as its main focus diagnosing and treating the particular present illness, that is, the particular situation-bound injustice and not a global “social pathology” or some single transhistorical source of injustice. The diagnosis of a particular injustice is not always dependent on adopting a broader critical standpoint of society in its entirety, but even when it is, we must be careful to not forget that such standpoints are useful only for understanding the present evil. The concepts and categories “white supremacy” and “colonialism” can be great tools that can be of planetary significance. One could even argue that they pick out much larger areas of people’s lives and injustices than the categories of class and gender, but in spite of their reach and explanatory theoretical value, they are nothing more than tools to make reference to and ameliorate particular injustices experienced (suffered) in the midst of a particular and unique re- lationship in a situation. No doubt many, but not all, problems of injustice are a consequence of being a member of a group in history, but even in these cases, we cannot a priori assume that injustices are homogeneously equal for all members of that group. Why is this important? The possible pluralism and therefore complexity of a problem of injustice does not always stop at the level of being a member of a historical group or even a member of many groups, as insisted on by intersectional analysis. There may be unique cir- cumstances to particular countries, towns, neighborhoods, institutions, and ultimately situations that we must be open to in a context-sensitive inquiry. If an empirical inquiry is committed to capturing and ameliorating all of the harms in situations of injustice in their raw pretheoretical complexity, then this requires that we try to begin with and return to the concrete, particular, and unique experiences of injustice.¶ Pragmatism agrees with Sally Haslanger’s concern about Charles Mills’s view. She writes: “The goal is not just a theory that is historical (v. ahistori- cal), but is sensitive to historical particularity, i.e., that resists grand causal narratives purporting to give an account of how domination has come about and is perpetuated everywhere and at all times” (1). For “the forces that cause and sustain domination vary tremendously context by context, and there isn’t necessarily a single causal explanation; a theoretical framework that is useful as a basis for political intervention must be highly sensitive to the details of the particular social context” (1).13¶ Although each situation is unique, there are commonalities among the cases that permit inquiry about common causes. We can “formulate tentative general principles from investigation of similar individual cases, and then . . . check the generalizations by applying them to still further cases” (Dewey, Lectures in China 53). But Dewey insists that the focus should be on the indi- vidual case, and was critical of how so many sociopolitical theories are prone to starting and remaining at the level of “sweeping generalizations.” He states that they “fail to focus on the concrete problems which arise in experience, allowing such problems to be buried under their sweeping generalizations” (Lectures in China 53).¶ The lesson pragmatism provides for nonideal theory today is that it must be careful to not reify any injustice as some single historical force for which particular injustice problems are its manifestation or evidence for its exis- tence. Pragmatism welcomes the wisdom and resources of nonideal theories that are historically grounded on actual injustices, but it issues a warning about how they should be understood and implemented. It is, for example, sympathetic to the critical resources found in critical race theory, but with an important qualification. It understands Derrick Bell’s valuable criticism as context-specific to patterns in the practice of American law. Through his inquiry into particular cases and civil rights policies at a particular time and place, Bell learned and proposed certain general principles such as the one of “interest convergence,” that is, “whites will promote racial advantages for blacks only when they also promote white self-interest.”14 But, for pragma- tism, these principles are nothing more than historically grounded tools to use in present problematic situations that call for our analysis, such as deliberation in establishing public policies or making sense of some concrete injustice. The principles are falsifiable and open to revision as we face situation-specific injustices. In testing their adequacy, we need to consider their function in making us see aspects of injustices we would not otherwise appreciate.15 Institutions are inevitable and learning to pragmatically engage them best facilitates change Themba-Nixon 2K – Makani Themba-Nixon, “Changing the Rules: What Public Policy Means for Organizing,” Colorlines. Oakland: Jul 31, 2000. Vol. 3, Iss. 2; pg. 12 In essence, policies are the codification of power relationships and resource allocation. Policies are the rules of the world we live in. Changing the world means changing the rules. So, if organizing is about changing the rules and building power, how can organizing be separated from policies? Can we really speak truth to power, fight the right, stop corporate abuses, or win racial justice without contesting the rules and the rulers, the policies and the policymakers? The answer is no-and double no for people of color. Today, racism subtly dominates nearly every aspect of policymaking. From ballot propositions to city funding priorities, policy is increasingly about the control, de-funding, and disfranchisement of communities of color. What Do We Stand For? Take the public conversation about welfare reform, for example. Most of us know it isn't really about putting people to work. The right's message was framed around racial stereotypes of lazy, cheating "welfare queens" whose poverty was "cultural." But the new welfare policy was about moving billions of dollars in individual cash payments and direct services from welfare recipients to other, more powerful, social actors. Many of us were too busy to tune into the welfare policy drama in Washington, only to find it washed up right on our doorsteps. Our members are suffering from workfare policies, new regulations, and cutoffs. Families who were barely getting by under the old rules are being pushed over the edge by the new policies. Policy doesn't get more relevant than this. And so we got involved in policy-as defense. Yet we have to do more than block their punches. We have to start the fight with initiatives of our own. Those who do are finding offense a bit more fun than defense alone. Living wage ordinances, youth development initiatives, even gun control and alcohol and tobacco policies are finding their way onto the public agenda, thanks to focused community organizing that leverages power for community-driven initiatives. - Over 600 local policies have been passed to regulate the tobacco industry. Local coalitions have taken the lead by writing ordinances that address local problems and organizing broad support for them. - Nearly 100 gun control and violence prevention policies have been enacted since 1991. - Milwaukee, Boston, and Oakland are among the cities that have passed living wage ordinances: local laws that guarantee higher than minimum wages for workers, usually set as the minimum needed to keep a family of four above poverty. These are just a few of the examples that demonstrate how organizing for local policy advocacy has made inroads in areas where positive national policy had been stalled by conservatives. Increasingly, the local policy arena is where the action is and where activists are finding success. Of course, corporate interests-which are usually the target of these policies-are gearing up in defense. Tactics include front groups, economic pressure, and the tried and true: cold, hard cash. Despite these barriers, grassroots organizing can be very effective at the smaller scale of local politics. At the local level, we have greater access to elected officials and officials have a greater reliance on their constituents for reelection. For example, getting 400 people to show up at city hall in just about any city in the U.S. is quite impressive. On the other hand, 400 people at the state house or the Congress would have a less significant impact. Add to that the fact that all 400 people at city hall are usually constituents, and the impact is even greater. Recent trends in government underscore the importance of local policy. Congress has enacted a series of measures devolving significant power to state and local government. Welfare, health care, and the regulation of food and drinking water safety are among the areas where states and localities now have greater rule. Devolution has some negative consequences to be sure. History has taught us that, for social services and civil rights in particular, the lack of clear federal standards and mechanisms for accountability lead to uneven enforcement and even discriminatory implementation of policies. Still, there are real opportunities for advancing progressive initiatives in this more localized environment. Greater local control can mean greater community power to shape and implement important social policies that were heretofore out of reach. To do so will require careful attention to the mechanics of local policymaking and a clear blueprint
of what we stand for. Getting It in Writing Much of the work of framing what we stand for takes place in the shaping of demands. By getting into the policy arena in a proactive manner, we can take our demands to the next level. Our demands can become law, with real consequences if the agreement is broken. After all the organizing, press work, and effort, a group should leave a decisionmaker with more than a handshake and his or her word. Of course, this work requires a certain amount of interaction with "the suits," as well as struggles with the bureaucracy, the technical language, and the all-too-common resistance by decisionmakers. Still, if it's worth demanding, it's worth having in writing-whether as law, regulation, or internal policy. From ballot initiatives on rent control to laws requiring worker protections, organizers are leveraging their power into written policies that are making a real difference in their communities. Of course, policy work is just one tool in our organizing arsenal, but it is a tool we simply can't afford to ignore. Making policy work an integral part of organizing will require a certain amount of retrofitting. We will need to develop the capacity to translate our information, data, and experience into stories that are designed to affect the public conversation. Perhaps most important, we will need to move beyond fighting problems and on to framing solutions that bring us closer to our vision of how things should be. And then we must be committed to making it so. Plan Defining anti-Zionism as anti-Semitic chills on-campus discourse that attempts to criticize Israel or support Palestine Emmons 16 Alex Emmons, Senate Responds to Trump-Inspired Anti-Semitism By Targeting Students Who Criticize Israel, The Intercept, December 2 2016 A draft of the bill obtained by The Intercept encourages the Department of Education to use the State Department’s broad, widely criticized definition of anti-Semitism when investigating schools. That definition, from a 2010 memo, includes as examples of anti-Semitism “delegitimizing” Israel, “demonizing” Israel, “applying double standards” to Israel, and “focusing on Israel only for peace or human rights investigations.” Critics have pointed out that those are political — not racist — positions, shared by a significant number of Jews, and qualify as protected speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution. According to the draft, the bill does not adopt the definition as a formal legal standard, it only directs the State Department to “take into consideration” the definition when investigating schools for anti-Semitic discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The memo’s definition — which is widely supported by Israeli advocacy groups — was intended for identifying anti-Semitic groups overseas. Even then, it came with caveats. Criticisms of Israel are only examples of possible anti-Semitism “taking into account the overall context,” and the memo concludes: “However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.” Attempts to adopt the definition as a standard for campus censorship have drawn criticism from civil rights groups, free speech advocates, newspapers, hundreds of academics, and even one of the definition’s crafters, who wrote a column last year arguing it should not be applied to campuses. The bill approved by the Senate on Thursday was supported by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Jewish Federations of North America, and the Anti-Defamation League. “The definition will have a severe chilling effect on campuses, and that is the explicit goal of the Israel advocacy organizations who promote it,” said Liz Jackson, an attorney with the group Palestine Legal. “Student activists for Palestinian rights already operate in a repressive environment. If this bill passes, they will face the specter of federal investigation simply for engaging in criticism of the Israeli government’s abusive policies.” Campus activists are being subject to an increasingly broad censorship effort by Israeli-allied groups. Each year, Palestine Legal documents hundreds of instances of obstruction, censorship, or punishment of pro-Palestinian activism at colleges and universities. In December 2015, for example, one student at George Washington University was ordered by campus police to remove a Palestinian flag from her window, and threatened with further disciplinary action. At other campuses, students have been suspended or threatened with expulsion for demonstrating against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. The University of Illinois in 2014 fired a tenure-track professor for tweeting about Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Filing complaints with the Department of Education has been a favored tactic of groups including the Zionist Organization of America and the Brandeis Center, which have written letters to the department alleging that events like demonstrations and film screenings amount to “harassment” or “intimidation,” and create a “hostile environment on the basis of national origin” for Jewish students on campus. Thus, the plan Resolved: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech that criticizes the State of Israel. Volokh 16 Eugene Volokh, teaches free speech law, religious freedom law, church-state relations law, a First Amendment Amicus Brief Clinic, and tort law, at UCLA School of Law, where he has also often taught copyright law, criminal law, and a seminar on firearms regulation, “University of California Board of Regents is wrong about ‘anti-Zionism’ on campus,” The Washington Post, March 16, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/03/16/university-of-california-board-of-regents-is-wrong-about-anti-zionism-on-campus/?utm_term=.cfab0cd93ad6 The University of California Board of Regents has just released its Final Report of the Regents Working Group on Principles Against Intolerance, which includes a proposed set of such principles. I hope to blog some more about the actual proposal in the coming days, but what has made the news is the passage in the introduction to the report’s “Contextual Statement” that says: Fundamentally, commenters noted that historic manifestations of anti-Semitism have changed and that expressions of anti-Semitism are more coded and difficult to identify. In particular, opposition to Zionism1 often is expressed in ways that are not simply statements of disagreement over politics and policy, but also assertions of prejudice and intolerance toward Jewish people and culture. Anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and other forms of discrimination have no place at the University of California…. Footnote 1: Merriam Webster defines Zionism as follows: an international movement originally for the establishment of a Jewish national or religious community in Palestine and later for the support of modern Israel…. The Oxford American Dictionary defines Zionism as follows: A movement for (originally) the reestablishment and (now) the development and protection of a Jewish nation in what is now Israel. I’m ethnically Jewish (I say “ethnically” because I’m not religious), and I support Israel. It’s the one democracy among its neighbors, and for all its flaws it’s doing a pretty good job faced with very difficult circumstances. Whatever one might say about whether Israel should have been created in 1948, it’s there, and undoing that decision would be a disaster in many ways. And I do think that a good deal of anti-Zionism is indeed anti-Semitic. But I think the regents are flat wrong to say that “anti-Zionism” has “no place at the University of California.” Even though they’re not outright banning anti-Zionist speech, but rather trying to sharply condemn it, I think such statements by the regents chill debate, especially by university employees and students who (unlike me) lack tenure. (For more on that, see here.) And this debate must remain free, regardless of what the regents or I think is the right position in the debate. Whether the Jewish people should have an independent state in Israel is a perfectly legitimate question to discuss — just as it’s perfectly legitimate to discuss whether Basques, Kurds, Taiwanese, Tibetans, Northern Cypriots, Flemish Belgians, Walloon Belgians, Faroese, Northern Italians, Kosovars, Abkhazians, South Ossetians, Transnistrians, Chechens, Catalonians, Eastern Ukranians and so on should have a right to have independent states. Sometimes the answer might be “yes.” Sometimes it might be “no.” Sometimes the answer might be “it depends.” But there’s no uncontroversial principle on which these questions can be decided. They have to be constantly up for inquiry and debate, especially in places that are set up for inquiry and debate: universities. Whether Israel is entitled to exist as an independent Jewish state is just as fitting a subject for discussion as whether Kosovo or Northern Cyprus or Kurdistan or Tawain or Tibet or a Basque nation should exist as an independent state for those ethnic groups. Of course, Israel is different from the other countries in that it has already been internationally recognized as an independent state. But while that’s an important practical argument, and an important argument under international law, it can’t determine what should be talked about at universities. International recognition can be granted, and it can be taken away. Certainly international recognition doesn’t conclusively resolve either moral or pragmatic questions about whether an ethnic group is entitled to a state of their own. The United Nations of 1947, or the great majority of the governments of today, may have been right or they may have been wrong. We can’t decide even for ourselves whether they’re right or wrong without hearing a lively debate about the subject. And certainly the University of California Board of Regents ought not prejudge this debate. I entirely agree that, to give an example given by the regents, “vandalism targeting property associated with Jewish people or Judaism” should be condemned and punished. I think that UCLA student government should not be allowed to discriminate against Jewish candidates for student government positions. And I agree, as I said, that some anti-Zionist speech and speakers are indeed hostile to Jews as an ethnic group, rather than just opposing a particular government or nation-state. But the regents should not be telling professors and students that “there is no place” at the University of California for a political viewpoint on the existence of Israel as a nation-state — a statement that is likely to and intended to deter debate on that subject. Indeed, universities are the very places where such matters should indeed be discussed. Advantage 1 is Islamophobia Suppression of pro-Palestine movements on campus denies Palestinian students the ability to form solidarity Nadeau and Sears 11 Mary-Jo Nadeau and Alan Sears, Mary-Jo Nadeau teaches at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto-Mississauga. Alan Sears teaches at the Department of Sociology, Ryerson University, Toronto. “This Is What Complicity Looks Like: Palestine and the Silencing Campaign on Campus,” The Bullet, March 5, 2011, http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/475.php The silencing campaign is particularly dangerous given the overall political climate, which facilitates the neoliberalization of education. The goal of neoliberalism in post-secondary education is to make the universities serve exclusively economic goals, preparing students for the corporate workplace and creating know-how that can be commercialized. This requires a serious culture shift on campuses. One of the core political projects of neoliberalism on campus has been to roll back the spaces for campus activism and freedom of expression originally won by student militancy in the 1960s and 1970s. The campus silencing campaign against Palestine solidarity aligns in important ways with this neoliberal agenda, shutting down political spaces in the interest of a narrow vocational conception of education. Campus equity movements are particular targets in this broader effort, as they have won a certain limited space for themselves, and often critique the limits of the dominant forms of academic knowledge. The silencing campaign around Palestine solidarity organizing has played a leading role in the attack on freedom of expression on campuses. There are in fact two ideas of academic freedom and campus freedom of expression at stake. The first is the narrow and professional conception of academic freedom, which stresses the right of the professor to conduct free inquiry within his or her own specific realm of expertise and to disseminate the results of that inquiry through publication or teaching. This sense of academic freedom informs the influential “Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure” developed in the U.S. in 1915. The second, and more recent, conception of campus freedom of expression and academic freedom was won through struggles from below by the radical student movement of the 1960s. The freedom struggles of African-Americans galvanized activists, including students who fought for the right to build solidarity campaigns on campuses. This was strongly opposed by university administrations, who sought to keep activist politics safely off campus. Nowhere was this struggle sharper than at the Berkeley campus of University of California. There, the Free Speech Movement fought for political rights on campus, challenging the administration of Clark Kerr who was perhaps the most prominent advocate of the technocratic university serving the needs of corporations and the state. Clark Kerr was, in many ways, the forerunner of the current neoliberal strategy of reorganizing universities to focus more clearly on the service of business and the lean state. In the 1960s, Kerr was actually defeated by a mass, militant student movement. But the technocratic vision that the radical student movement of the 1960s successfully defended against has returned in new and aggressive forms under neoliberalism. And part of this agenda is to politically cleanse campuses, stripping away the political rights students won through militancy in the 1960s. The attack on Palestine solidarity is a leading thrust in the current campaign to roll back campus political expression and to define academic freedom in narrow professional terms. The Iacobucci report at York, discussed below, is an important example of this logic. The gains of campus equity movements since the 1960s pose an important obstacle to the narrow definition of academic freedom. Serious struggles against racism, sexism and heterosexism necessarily raise questions about the nature of knowledge and its supposed objectivity. These movements show the ways fundamental inequalities distort knowledge, often in unrecognized ways. Equity movements therefore challenge the conception of expertise that underlies the narrow definition of academic freedom, arguing that the person who experiences systemic inequality often sees it more clearly than someone in a privileged position. As the case for Israeli policy has become harder to make after five years of the highly effective Palestinian-led global Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, pro-Israel advocacy organizations have sought to shut down their opponents through silencing. In doing so, they are not only attempting yet again to shut down any expression of Palestinian experience, but also to weaken protections for freedom of expression and narrow the conception of academic freedom. This is a serious attack, and one that resonates with the neoliberal restructuring of the universities. Attempts to conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism leads to campaigns by pro-Israel groups that demean and marginalize Muslim-American students Solomon 16 Daniel J. Solomon, “Inflammatory Pro-Israel Posters Pop Up on Campus — Are They Islamophobic?,” Forward, October 26, 2016, http://forward.com/news/national/352698/inflammatory-pro-israel-posters-pop-up-on-campus-are-they-islamophobic/ A row over Israel on campus is as predictable as the fall of autumn leaves, and it’s no different this season. Fliers accusing pro-Palestinian students of being anti-Semitic have cropped at numerous colleges in October — including the University of Chicago, Tufts University, Brooklyn College and Berkeley — and have been claimed by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a rightwing organization labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Do you want to show your support for Hamas terrorists whose stated goal whose stated goal is the elimination of the Jewish people and the Jewish state? Join us! Students for Justice in Palestine at Tufts University.” read one flier procured by the Tufts Daily. It also featured a Palestinian militant wrapped in a keffiyeh, or traditional headscarf and toting a machine gun. Other posters included specific callouts to individual faculty and students, accusing them of collaboration with jihadists. According to the anti-Zionist site Electronic Intifada, a flier at San Francisco State University labeled one professor “a leader of the Hamas BDS campaign,” while one at Berkeley said that a professor was a “supporter of Hamas terrorists” and an “Islamophobia alarmist.” Most of the posters featured the slogan #Jewhatred and directed people to the Freedom Center’s Web site. Horowitz’s organization has been termed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has described Horowitz as “a driving force of the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and anti-black movements.” According to Electronic Intifada, the current poster campaign was preceded by a smaller episode last spring at the University of California–Los Angeles, where the group circulated similar fliers. Critics of the posters — both campus administrators and others — have said they create an atmosphere of fear. “This is not an issue of free speech; this is bullying behavior that is unacceptable and will not be tolerated on our campus,” Leslie Wong, the president of San Francisco State, said in a comment run by Electronic Intifada. Joanne Barker, a professor at the university, told the Web site that her school “should be contacting federal and state authorities to investigate this incident as a hate crime.” Recently, some rightwing Israel advocates have adopted more hard-nosed tactics intended to publicly shame and sanction their perceived enemies. Created last year, one such effort, the Canary Mission, has compiled dossiers on hundreds of students and faculty that it sees as anti-Israel or anti-Semitic – often conflating the two. Another new organization, the Amcha Initiative, has an “anti-Semitism tracker” on its Web site that puts calls for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against the Jewish state (BDS) in the same category as Jew-hatred. This also comes on the heels of a controversy at Berkeley, where students and faculty clashed with one another over a course that presented Zionism as a “settler colonialist” movement. Islamophobia empirically leads to hate crimes, fractures communities, and increases national security threats. Foran 16 Clare Foran, Donald Trump and the Rise of Anti-Muslim Violence, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trump-muslims-islamophobia-hate-crime/500840/ A new report from California State University-San Bernardino’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism suggests that political rhetoric may play a role in mitigating or fueling hate crimes. The report shows that anti-Muslim hate crimes in the U.S. rose sharply in 2015 to the highest levels since the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. It also suggests that Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric could have contributed to this backlash against American Muslims. Post 9/11, pro-Palestine movements were conflated with Jihadism leading to rampant Islamophobia which the university took an active role in. At a time where Islamophobia is being peddled at massive scale, dissent from the other side is key to breaking down the specter of the Muslim as a terrorist other. Bazian 15 Bazian, Hatem. "The Islamophobia Industry and the Demonization of Palestine: Implications for American Studies." American Quarterly 67.4 (2015): 1057-1066 The 2001 attacks introduced a shift in US foreign policy and introduced a more muscular and military interventionist approach toward the Arab and Muslim world with the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq as well as a robust US military presence in over thirty new countries.14 The coinciding of the 9/11 attacks with the start of the second Palestinian Intifada presented a golden opportunity for a strong cadre of neoconservatives connected to the American Enterprise Institute to push for a more decisively pro-Israeli stand in the Bush administration.15 The top tier of the Bush administration adopted a neoconservative line of thinking.16 The neoconservatives in the administration were committed to Israel’s defense and opposed to territorial compromise with the Palestinians; several had participated in drafting the “Clean Break” strategy in 1998.17 The post–September 11 shift focused on a preemptive strategy directed at what they called “terrorist” organizations with global reach and nation-states that provide support or shelter to groups, such as Al-Qaeda and affiliated organizations, but not groups engaged in national struggles like Palestinian factions and the Basque separatists in Spain. President Bush’s “either you are with us or with the terrorists” framing forced nation-states to make policy decisions to facilitate access to execute this global war. The global alliance that emerged cooperated in the “War on Terror,” with Israel playing a central role, providing training and know-how and marketing its “extensive expertise” in fighting terrorism. Israel’s security agencies jumped into the counterterrorism-training business and managed to become key players in local, regional, national, and international joint terrorism programs. For example, Urban Shield, a jointcounterterrorism training program held in the San Francisco Bay Area, which centers Islamophobia in its conceptual framework and posits Muslims and Arabs as potential threats in its training program, has the Israeli security team playing a major role in setting the scenarios for supposed terrorist attacks and providing guidance on how to profile terrorists.18 Israel was a key participant in the War on Terror, highlighting the “Iraqi threat” that was presented as directly “linked” to the funding of suicide bombings. Critical to the Iraq campaign was a communication strategy devised by US pro-Israel supporters to influence public opinion and maintain the focus on Saddam Hussein while managing to intensify a negative view of the Pales- tinians. PR firms like the Luntz Research Companies pushed public opinion farther to the right and in support of the Iraq invasion as a way to defend Israel. The PR document prepared by this organization offered specific talking points and recommendations on how to speak about Israel to the US public.19 While some might point to a conspiracy, the reality is that a well-organized, disciplined, and well-funded Zionist and neoconservative network operated in an ideologically fertile and supportive administration with allies in sensitive positions who managed to shape public debates on issues pertaining to war at home and abroad. Indeed, those who operated in this space managed to refortify and again consolidate Israel’s narrative in the United States and dominate the discourse inside academe, including American studies. Israeli spokespeople were very effective in deploying their messaging at the local, regional, and national levels in the United States, while the pro-Palestine responses were often delayed and singular in nature. The communication strategy was built on years of negative stereotyping, and misrepresentation of Arabs and Muslims made the language easier to deploy in an existing productive and orientalist materiality. Edward Said (Orientalism 1978 and Covering Islam 1981) and Jack Shaheen (Reel Bad Arabs 2001) ground the subject and point to the cumulative effect of such pro-Israeli strategies. The pro-Israel communication strategy was deployed in existing racist and essentialist representations of Arabs and Muslims, which, in post-9/11, were successfully focused on Palestinians in general and Hamas in particular as the archetypal terrorist. This communication strategy made it possible for Israel to become more connected to US policy formations in fighting the War on Terror. More precisely, Israel’s know-how on fighting Palestinian “terrorism” was peddled and packaged as the best and most successful approach
to dealing with a fomented Islamic threat. Overnight, Israel became the model for such a strategy with the emergence of numerous Israel-linked corporate outfits offering training services and counterterrorism strategies that helped consolidate the stereotypical image of the Arab, Muslim, and most definitely Palestinian terrorist across the United States, as joint terrorism task forces and intelligence agencies adopted wholesale the Israeli security framework and thus Israeli communication strategy, with many taking up training courses or visiting Israel with a distinctive and hostile view of Arabs and Muslims upon their return.20 Consequently, the US academy was brought into the same project with immediate development of courses that further problematize Islam and Muslims as archetypal terrorists, investment in teaching the Arabic language as a necessary service to the national security apparatus, and cooperation with Israeli institutions on studying violence and counterterrorism. In addition, several key Islamophobic figures became regular guests at universities, including a select group of Muslims connected and funded by the same Islamophobic industry.21 The result is that Islam and Muslims are studied in the academy as an inferior and terrorist “other” in need of interventions and remedies. Furthermore, the ever-present link to the questions or concerns of Israel-affiliated scholars dominate the framing of Islam and Muslims in the US academy, with a constant litmus test applied to individual scholars on Israel and Palestine, as the latest case of Salaita firing illustrates this point clearly.22 Further, almost all US top leaders have visited Israel to get “educated” about the challenges facing the country and Israel’s effectiveness in fighting “terrorism.” The fully funded trips to Israel by US politicians, journalists, and academics are designed to shape public discourse, since the participants begin to use Israeli talking points when discussing Palestine, Arabs, and Muslims. The participants who went on these fully paid tours included a large number of university presidents and top administrative leaders on campus.23 These trips and Israeli securitized training programs are designed to increase support for Israel and have diverse spokespeople who can influence public opinion and maintain hegemonic backing for Israel in the United States. Recently, Shalom Hartman Institute’s Muslim Leadership Initiative began to target American Muslim leaders for fully funded trips.24 The unchallenged pro-Israel lobby is a violent manifestation of latent Islamophobia. Academia is key to disrupt this process. Bazian 15 Bazian, Hatem. "The Islamophobia Industry and the Demonization of Palestine: Implications for American Studies." American Quarterly 67.4 (2015): 1057-1066 In a recent article analyzing a host of survey results since 2001, Charles Kurzman concludes that the data illustrate how “American attitudes toward Muslim Americans have grown more negative” and that “a growing segment of the . . . population is willing to express negative views about Muslim Americans in recent years.”28 More alarmingly, the data show that the percentage of Americans responding unfavorably to Muslims in general has steadily increased since 2006. The survey results raise important questions about the causes for such a shift, the forces behind it, and how best to reverse it in the future. Indeed, the alarming data reflect the success of the Islamophobia industry and its massive investment in demonizing Muslims as a launching pad for pro-Israel groups from which to maintain US unconditional support for Israel. One way to understand the unfolding pro-Israel strategy is to extend Edward Said’s use of “Latent” and “Manifest Orientalism” to the study of Islamophobia. Said argued that Arab and Muslim subjects are constructed and “judged in terms of, and in comparison to, the West, so they are always the Other, the conquerable, and the inferior.”29 Kurzman’s and Said’s writings bring into focus the link between what I refer to as latent and manifest Islamophobia.30 Latent Islamophobia is conceived through an inception process using films, news reports, media talking heads, book publishing, and emphasis on Islam as a violent, backward, and oppressive religion inclined toward despotism and lack of progress. Culture production is not independent of politics or economy; rather, it is informed and hegemonically determined by it. Manifest Islamophobia is evident in the speeches and writing of Daniel Pipes, a right-wing Israel supporter and founder of the McCarthyite-type web site Campus Watch. Speaking before the convention of the American Jewish Congress on October 21, 2001, Pipes stated, “I worry very much from the Jewish point of view that the presence, and increased stature, and affluence, and enfranchisement of American Muslims. . . . will present true dangers to American Jews.”31 This offers a glimpse into some of the thinking behind the Islamophobia industry and how it mobilizes to demonize of Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians. Conclusion Academe should take the lead in exploring the entanglement of the pro-Israel groups and organizations in Islamophobia content production. Scholars in American studies should centralize research and teaching about Islamophobia because of the impact it has in normalizing racist discourses in society. I urge American studies scholars to be at the forefront and earnestly embrace Islamophobia studies with intersectionality and connectedness to all struggles for social justice while also affirming the centrality of Palestine’s narrative in the field. In this regard, the forum on Palestine in American studies can play a vital role in collaboratively addressing the Islamophobia crisis with regular panels at the annual conference and regional academic workshops on how to teach and counter it on campus and community levels through partnerships with the American Cultures Community Engaged Scholarship. Lastly, American studies scholars should build robust academic relations with Palestinian universities, foster exchange programs, and proactively seek to centralize Palestinian narratives in the conversation and expose Israel’s role in promoting a racist and hostile campus and civil society environments that seek to limit academic freedom and speech while hiding behind distortions about BDS, Palestine, Islam, Muslims and the “War on Terror.”32 Even if you think BDS is bad, censorship is worse- far right positions on the Israel-Palestine conflict that lead to censorship are also what justify marginalization within Jewish communities. Empirics with Hillel International prove JVP 15 Jewish Voice for Peace, “STIFLING DISSENT HOW ISRAEL’S DEFENDERS USE FALSE CHARGES OF ANTI-SEMITISM TO LIMIT THE DEBATE OVER ISRAEL ON CAMPUS,” Fall 2015, https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/JVP_Stifling_Dissent_Full_Report_Key_90745869.pdf On college campuses across the country, there has been a concerted effort to purge anyone supporting BDS or Palestinian rights from mainstream Jewish organizations. In many places, involvement in the Jewish community has become dependent on passing an ideological litmus test. It is no exaggeration to say that this process often mimics McCarthyism -- the period of time in the 1950s when political activists were “blacklisted” and accused of treason or disloyalty by the US government -- in its stridency and intensity. 2.1 Hillel’s Israel Guidelines Hillel is the world’s largest Jewish student organization and is active on more than 550 colleges and universities worldwide. Their stated mission is to “enrich the lives of Jewish undergraduate and graduate students” and to provide a place for people to participate in Jewish communal life on campus. Hillel had traditionally been a home for all Jews, regardless of politics. But in 2010, Hillel International issued new guidelines on Israel, stating that “Hillel will not partner with, house, or host organizations, groups, or speakers that as a matter of policy or practice: •Deny the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state with secure and recognized borders; •Delegitimize, demonize, or apply a double standard to Israel; •Support boycott of, divestment from, or sanctions against the State of Israel; •Exhibit a pattern of disruptive behavior towards campus events or guest speakers or foster an atmosphere of incivility.”11 Hillel’s guidelines encapsulate the pervasive campus atmosphere of ongoing exclusion, marginalization and defamation of Jews whose politics don’t serve the mainstream Jewish agenda on Israel, which is – largely – not to interfere with Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, or inside of Israel. Hillel claims that any individual Jewish student is welcome within Hillel, regardless of that student’s politics. What is explicitly unwelcome is that student’s right to organize for Palestinian rights and to end the Israeli occupation using tactics that are outside of the pro-Israel consensus – a consensus that refrains from confronting Israel too directly. In his op-ed announcing the guidelines, Hillel International CEO Wayne Firestone emphasized a commitment to pluralism in the Jewish community and invoked the Jewish tradition of Talmudic debate as a way to argue that Hillel supports a plethora of political opinion, despite the guidelines. Yet the guidelines explicitly exclude particular views from inclusion within the formal Jewish community. When the guidelines were announced, JVP’s Cecilie Surasky predicted, “These new restrictive guidelines will only further alienate an increasing number of young Jewish students from Hillels, especially those who passionately embrace the values of justice and equality.” Surasky was entirely correct in her prediction. Soon after the guidelines were passed, Brandeis Hillel rejected the campus Jewish Voice for Peace chapter from Hillel membership; a student leader at SUNY Binghamton was forced to resign from Hillel after co-sponsoring an campus event highlighting the Palestinian popular struggle against the Israeli occupation; and Harvard Hillel refused to host an event featuring Israeli politician Avraham Burg because the cosponsor fell outside of the Hillel guidelines. Countless other events, potential student partnerships, and open discussions were no doubt quashed by the guidelines’ heavy shadow. The new student organization Open Hillel was formed in 2012 in response to the pressure put on students to conform to Hillel’s Israel guidelines. Seeking the elimination of the guidelines and dedicated to open discourse, Open Hillel is organizing on college campuses across the country.12 Case studies below look in detail at the ways in which these boundaries limit debate, marginalize dissent, and exclude students from participating in campus iJewish life. Attempts to censor anti-Israeli speech is an attempt to “normalize” what is not normal. The way Israel maintains its oppression is through normalization of its practices. Opening up dialogue allows the international community to disrupt the image that Israel’s practices are normal. Azzam 16 Zeina Azzam, “Israel as Oppressor, Palestine as Oppressed: The ‘normalization’ of what is not normal,” Mondoweiss, June 14, 2016, http://mondoweiss.net/2016/06/palestine-oppressed-normalization/#sthash.NK3kIYHC.dpuf Indeed, objectivity often seems to be absent in situations in which people have been accustomed to a longstanding status quo, even if it is unjust, inhumane, or illegal. Although sociologist Diane Vaughan’s theory of the “normalization of deviance” is usually applied to organizational dynamics, it can also shed light on behavior in larger communities and social groupings, such as Israelis and Palestinians. This theory posits that over time, people become so used to frequent “deviant” behavior that they stop considering it as such, and in fact start to regard it as “a normal occurrence.” There are many notorious examples of this theory; the one most frequently cited is the history of a design flaw (the infamous O-rings) in the space shuttle program that led to the Challenger’s explosion thirty years ago and the death of all the astronauts on board. Vaughan argued that it was NASA’s culture of dismissing what seemed to be inconsequential—though growing—problems, over time, which paved the way for the Challenger disaster. The back page of her book notes that, “history, power, and politics combined to create a disastrous mistake.” A parallel situation can be seen at the highest levels of the Israeli government. The pernicious and public maligning of Palestinians by Israeli lawmakers has become so commonplace that it is hardly questioned or noticed anymore—inside Israel or by the world community. Historian and political analyst Vijay Prashad writes: Netanyahu’s cabinet reeks of hate speech. His Deputy Defense Minister Rabbi Eli Ben Dahan said of Palestinians in 2013, “To me they are like animals; they aren’t human.” Last year, Israel’s Welfare Minister Haim Katz said, “The land of Israel is whole. There is no Palestine.” He said that the Palestinians should go off to Jordan. Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon denied the Palestinians the basic elements of humanity. Israelis mourn their dead, he said earlier this year, while Palestinians “seek death,” living in a “society that respects nothing.” Israel’s Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked compared Palestinians to “snakes” and called for their destruction, “They have to die.” Neither has Netanyahu distanced himself from this hateful language, nor have the supporters of Israel been called to account for such talk. It passes as normal. How is it that high level Israeli lawmakers can denigrate Palestinians to such extremes, and the international community accepts their statements? Vaughan’s theory is useful in that it takes into account history, power, and politics, but one could say that it does not go far enough in the Israel-Palestinian context because it suggests that decision makers are often subtly influenced by each other and may realize their mistakes only in hindsight. In fact, it is evident that Israeli government officials make purposeful and clear-cut statements, decisions, and laws that dehumanize and oppress Palestinians living both in the occupied territories and in Israel. These are calculated choices. The principal concept of the normalization of deviant practices (which can also be termed unjust, undemocratic, and colonial practices) applies very well in the Palestinian case, as Israel’s goal is to be treated as a “normal”
state despite its objectively aberrant treatment of the Palestinians. Clearly, therefore, its oppressive practices in the occupied territories, entrenched military occupation, and apartheid-like policies toward Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and inside Israel should make the international community constantly vigilant and critical of Israel’s modus operandi. Normalizing the Abnormal Efforts at reconciling the two sides of the conflict have been criticized for using the present and seemingly “normalized” state of affairs as a starting point, and for not recognizing Israel’s historically unjust and harmful policies. Last year, for example, Palestinian activists protested a conference to discuss an initiative called “Two States, One Homeland,” saying that it implicitly legitimizes West Bank settlements, which is a form of normalization. (It is interesting to note that the conference group of speakers and discussants also included settlers.) A member of the popular struggle committee opposing the initiative, Mahmoud Zuwara, explained, “I am in contact with hundreds of Israelis, and very much support our cooperation with them. But the way to do this is through a joint effort, through a joint popular struggle. Israelis need to work out in the open, under the sun, against the crimes of the army and the settlers….” To Zuwara, the initial nexus for cooperation has to include the questioning of the status quo. It has to involve, from the start, efforts to resist and dismantle the accepted paradigm of military occupation and settlements. Underview
Use reasonability on T. The brightline is if I show that you could have predicted this aff and there are 7 minutes of link turns to this AC, I am fair. Contradictory definitions of any means neg can always read T on this topic. The neg can always call for more or less specification, depending on the 1AC advocacy. This kills topic discussion because negs are incentivized to always layer the case debate with T and skews time because 1AR’s are always forced to restart. 2. Re-evaluate the debate as whole-res under neg T interps. Key to reciprocity—. I can’t read T against the neg so it’s a strategy that only the neg gets access too—making it game over allows neg to abuse that power. 3. All theory arguments have an implicit aff flex standard- the most recent empirics of late elim rounds show huge neg side bias Adler 15, Are Judges Just Guessing? A Statistical Analysis of LD Elimination Round Panels by Steven Adler http://nsdupdate.com/2015/03/30/are-judges-just-guessing-a-statistical-analysis-of-ld-elimination-round-panels-by-steven-adler/ Yet a plausible objection here might be that maybe the elimination round data need to be further segmented. For instance, perhaps the data do not meet this randomization because judges can easily distinguish between winners and losers in early elimination rounds, which typically contain more-lopsided matchups, but that in late elimination rounds the decision is much murkier. In fact, I find some support for this hypothesis, though it may be an artifact of a smaller sample-size for this segment.To evaluate this hypothesis, I replicated the above analysis, but pared down to the 36 coded rounds that took place in quarterfinals or later. In these rounds, the Neg side-bias was even more pronounced, with Neg winning 61 of elimination rounds, so the ‘expected’ randomization rate on ballots to achieve such an overall win-rate would be 57 for the Neg and 43 for the Aff. This creates the following expected distribution, compared to the actual observed distribution for these late elimination rounds:
(used in negative statements and questions) some, or even the smallest amount (of) 5. Neg advocacies must defend the same actor as the aff a) fairness- otherwise this justifies you getting an infinite number of different actors that can do things that solve the aff harms because they are responsible for said harmswhich gives you perfect solvency that I can never contest b) truth testability- is it doesn’t prove the aff is a bad idea because even if it would be nice if another actor solved the problem, if it’s not realistic than the non-ideal actor still has the obligation. 6. Solutions to oppression need to be grounded in policy rather than abstraction. K’s must be tied to an implementable, political solution to be effective. Bryant 12: Left,” Larval Subjects—Levi R. Bryant’s philosophy blog, November 11th, Available Online at http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/, Accessed 02-21-2014) Unfortunately, the academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction. It’s good at carrying out critiques that denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of alternatives. This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative. Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park: The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this: Phase 1: Collect Underpants Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit! They even have a catchy song to go with their work: Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic left. Our plan seems to be as follows: Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Revolution and complete social transformation! Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be done at phase 2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives. In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where everything begins to fall apart. Even though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world. To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound! Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing? But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This type of “revolutionary” is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business. Well done! But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced, and when we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail. How, I wonder, are we to do anything at all when we have no concrete proposals? We live on a planet of 6 billion people. These 6 billion people are dependent on a certain network of production and distribution to meet the needs of their consumption. That network of production and distribution does involve the extraction of resources, the production of food, the maintenance of paths of transit and communication, the disposal of waste, the building of shelters, the distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc. What are your proposals? How will you meet these problems? How will you navigate the existing mediations or semiotic and material features of infrastructure? Marx and Lenin had proposals. Do you? Have you even explored the cartography of the problem? Today we are so intellectually bankrupt on these points that we even have theorists speaking of events and acts and talking about a return to the old socialist party systems, ignoring the horror they generated, their failures, and not even proposing ways of avoiding the repetition of these horrors in a new system of organization. Who among our critical theorists is thinking seriously about how to build a distribution and production system that is responsive to the needs of global consumption, avoiding the problems of planned economy, ie., who is doing this in a way that gets notice in our circles? Who is addressing the problems of micro-fascism that arise with party systems (there’s a reason that it was the Negri and Hardt contingent, not the Badiou contingent that has been the heart of the occupy movement). At least the ecologists are thinking about these things in these terms because, well, they think ecologically. Sadly we need something more, a melding of the ecologists, the Marxists, and the anarchists. We’re not getting it yet though, as far as I can tell. Indeed, folks seem attracted to yet another critical paradigm, Laruelle. I would love, just for a moment, to hear a radical environmentalist talk about his ideal high school that would be academically sound. How would he provide for the energy needs of that school? How would he meet building codes in an environmentally sound way? How would she provide food for the students? What would be her plan for waste disposal? And most importantly, how would she navigate the school board, the state legislature, the federal government, and all the families of these students? What is your plan? What is your alternative? I think there are alternatives. I saw one that approached an alternative in Rotterdam. If you want to make a truly revolutionary contribution, this is where you should start. Why should anyone even bother listening to you if you aren’t proposing real plans? But we haven’t even gotten to that point. Instead we’re like underpants gnomes, saying “revolution is the answer!” without addressing any of the infrastructural questions of just how revolution is to be produced, what alternatives it would offer, and how we would concretely go about building those alternatives. Masturbation. “Underpants gnome” deserves to be a category in critical theory; a sort of synonym for self-congratulatory masturbation. We need less critique not because critique isn’t important or necessary– it is –but because we know the critiques, we know the problems. We’re intoxicated with critique because it’s easy and safe. We best every opponent with critique. We occupy a position of moral superiority with critique. But do we really do anything with critique? What we need today, more than ever, is composition or carpentry. Everyone knows something is wrong. Everyone knows this system is destructive and stacked against them. Even the Tea Party knows something is wrong with the economic system, despite having the wrong economic theory. None of us, however, are proposing alternatives. Instead we prefer to shout and denounce. Good luck with that.
3/25/17
JF - 1AC - Kant
Tournament: Kandi King RR | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harrison RP | Judge: Fife, Paramo Kandi King RR R1 1AC 1AC Framework A priori knowledge exists independent of human experience and necessarily constrains morality. Kant 87 “Critique of Pure Reason” by Immanuel Kant 1787 Translated and Edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood “The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant” re published 1998 Now it is easy to show that in human cognition there actually are such necessary and in the strictest sense universal, thus pure a priori judgments. If one wants an example from the sciences, one need only look at all the propositions of mathematics; if one would have one from the commonest use of the understanding, the proposition that every alteration must have a cause will do; indeed in the latter the very concept of a cause so obviously contains the concept of a necessity of connection with an effect and a strict universality of rule that it would be entirely lost if one sought, as Hume did, to derive it from a frequent association of that which happens with that which precedes and a habit (thus a merely subjective necessity) of connecting representations arising from that association.13 Even without requiring such examples for the proof of the reality of pure a priori principles in our cognition, one could establish their indispensability for the possibility of experience itself, thus establish it II priori. For where would experience itself get its certainty if all rules in accordance with which it proceeds were themselves in turn always empirical, thus contingent hence one could hardly allow these to count as first principles. Yet here we can content ourselves with having displayed the pure use of our cognitive faculty as a fact together with its indication. Not merely in judgments, however, but even in concepts is an origin of some of them revealed a priori. Gradually remove from your experiential concept of a body everything that is empirical in it - the color, the hardness or softness, the weight, even the impenetrability - there still remains the space that was occupied by the body (which has now entirely disappeared), and you cannot leave that out. Likewise, if you remove from your empirical concept of every object,' whether corporeal or incorporeal, all those properties of which experience teaches you, you could still not take from it that by means of which you think of it as a substance or as dependent on a substance (even though this concept contains more determination than that of an object! in general). Thus, convinced by the necessity with which this concept presses itself on you, you must concede that it has its seat in your faculty of cognition a priori. That justifies universalizability- A) absent universal ethics, morality becomes arbitrary and fails to guide action, which means that ethics is rendered useless. Therefore err aff on risk of offense since anything else means ethics cannot serve it’s purpose. B) priori principles definitionally apply to everyone since they are definitionally independent of human experience therefore ethics is universal. And, prefer universalizability independently- any other norm justifies someone’s ability to impede on your ends, which also means universalizability acts as a side constraint on ends-based frameworks. Siyar 99 Jamsheed Aiam Siyar: Kant’s Conception of Practical Reason. Tufts University, 1999: . Now, when I represent my end as to be done, I represent it as binding me to certain courses of action, precluding other actions, etc. Thus, my ends function as constraints for me in that they determine what I can or must do (at least if I am to be consistent). I may of course give up an end such as that of eating ice cream at a future point; yet while I have the end, I must see myself as bound to do what is necessary to realize it.35 Thus, I must represent my ends as constraints that I have adopted, constraints that structure the possible space of choice and action for me. Further, given that my end is rationally determined, I take it to be generally recognizable that my end functions as a rationally determined constraint. That is, I take it that other subjects can also recognize my end as an objective constraint, for I take it that they as well as myself can cognize its determining grounds—the source of its objective worth—through the exercise of reason. Indeed, in representing an end, I in effect demand recognition for it from other subjects: since the end functions as an objective though self-imposed constraint for me, I must demand that this constraint be recognized as such. The thought here is simply that if I am committed to some end, e.g. my ice cream eating policy, I must act in certain ways to realize it. In this context, I cannot be indifferent to the attitudes and actions of others, for these may either help or hinder my pursuit of my end. Hence, if I am in fact committed to realizing my end, i.e. if I represent an end at all, I must demand that the worth of my end, its status as to be done, be recognized by others. A violation of freedom is a contradiction and can never be universalized. Stephen Engstrom 08 (PhD, Professor of Ethics at University of Pittsburg). “Universal Legislation As the Form of Practical Knowledge”. Pg. 19-20 “Given the preceding considerations, it’s a straightforward matter to see how a maxim of action that assaults the freedom of others with a view to furthering one’s own ends results in a contradiction when we attempt to will it as a universal law in accordance with the foregoing account of the formula of universal law. Such a maxim would lie in a practical judgment that deems it good on the whole to act to limit others’ outer freedom, and hence their self-sufficiency, their capacity to realize their ends, where doing so augments, or extends, one’s own outer freedom and so also one’s own self-sufficiency. 19In this passage, Kant mentions assaults on property as well as on freedom. But since property is a specific, socially instituted form of freedom, I have omitted mention of it to focus on the primitive case. Now on the interpretation we’ve been entertaining, applying the formula of universal law involves considering whether it’s possible for every person—every subject capable of practical judgment—to shares the practical judgment asserting the goodness of every person’s acting according to the maxim in question. Thus in the present case the application of the formula involves considering whether it’s possible for every person to deem good every person’s acting to limit others’ freedom, where practicable, with a view to augmenting their own freedom. Since here all persons are on the one hand deeming good both the limitation of others’ freedom and the extension of their own freedom, while on the other hand, insofar as they agree with the similar judgments of others, also deeming good the limitation of their own freedom and the extension of others’ freedom, they are all deeming good both the extension and the limitation of both their own and others’ freedom.” Thus, the standard is consistency with a system of equal outer freedoms. Prefer additionally-
Argumentation presupposes some basic freedom principle, otherwise it cannot occur. Hoppe 98 Hans Hermann (professor of business, UNLV) Liberty magazine, September 1998 21 Second, it must be noted that argumentation does not consist of free-floating propositions but is a form of ac-tion requirees ing the employment of scarce means; and furthermore that the means, which a person demonstrates by preferring to engages in propositional exchange are those of private property. No one could possibly propose anything, and no one could become con- vinced of any proposition by argumentative means, if one's right to make exclusive use of one's physical body were not already presupposed. It is one's recognition of another's mutual- ly exclusive control over his own body which explains the distinctive character- istic of propositional exchanges: while one may disagree about what has been said, it is still possible to agree at least on the fact that there is disagreement. And it is obvious, too, that such a property right in one's own body must be said to be justified a priori. Anyone who would try to justify any norm of whatever content must already presuppose an exclusive right of control over his or her body simply in order to say "I propose such and such." And anyone disputing such a right, then, would become caught up in a practical contradiction, since in arguing so one would already implicitly have accepted the very norm that one was disputing. Also this implies if the framework debate is messy default to kant as it would not enforce an ethical standard on others we were unsure about but rather let them discover the true ethical theory. Moreover, agents cannot reject their ability to be free—ethics is only coherent when humanity is respected. Gregor and Sullivan 96 “The Metaphysics of Morals” Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, 2nd Edition Mary J. Gregor, Roger J. Sullivan, Cambridge University Press 1996 A human being cannot renounce his personality as long as he is a subject of duty, hence as long as he lives; and it is a contradiction that they should be authorized to withdraw from all obligation, that is, freely to act as if no authorization were needed for this action. To annihilate the subject of morality in one’s own person is to root out the existence of morality itself from the world, as far as one can, even though morality is an end in itself. Consequently, disposing of oneself as a mere means to some discretionary end is debasing humanity in one’s person (homo noumenon), to which man (homo phaenomenon) was nevertheless entrusted for preservation. To deprive oneself of an integral part or organ (to maim oneself) – for example, to give away or sell a tooth to be transplanted into another’s mouth, or to have oneself castrated in order to get an easier livelihood as a singer, and so forth – are ways of partially murdering oneself. But to have a dead or diseased organ amputated when it endangers one’s life, or to have something cut off that is a part but not an organ of the body, for example, one’s hair, cannot be counted as a crime against one’s own person – although cutting one’s hair in order to sell it is not altogether free from blame. 2. Kant isn’t pure abstraction; the categorical imperative is the best middle ground which is key to mutual recognition between people Farr 2 Arnold Farr (prof of phil @ UKentucky, focusing on German idealism, philosophy of race, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and liberation philosophy). “Can a Philosophy of Race Afford to Abandon the Kantian Categorical Imperative?” JOURNAL of SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, Vol. 33 No. 1, Spring 2002, 17–32. Kant is often accused of making the moral agent an abstract, empty, noumenal subject. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Kantian subject is an embodied, empirical, concrete subject. However, this concrete subject has a dual nature. Kant claims in the Critique of Pure Reason as well as in the Grounding that human beings have an intelligible and empirical character.15 It is impossible to understand and do justice to Kant’s moral theory without taking seriously the relation between these two characters. The very concept of morality is impossible without the tension between the two. By “empirical character” Kant simply means that we have a sensual nature. We are physical creatures with physical drives or desires. The very fact that I cannot simply satisfy my desires without considering the rightness or wrongness of my actions suggests that my empirical character must be held in check by something, or else I behave like a Freudian id. My empiri- cal character must be held in check by my intelligible character, which is the legislative activity of practical reason. It is through our intelligible character that we formulate principles that keep our empirical impulses in check. The categorical imperative is the supreme principle of morality that is constructed by the moral agent in his/her moment of self-transcendence. What I have called self-transcendence may be best explained in the following passage by Onora O’Neill: In restricting our maxims to those that meet the test of the categorical imperative we refuse to base our lives on maxims that necessarily make our own case an exception. The reason why a universilizability criterion is morally significant is that it makes our own case no special exception (G, IV, 404). In accepting the Categorical Imperative we accept the moral reality of other selves, and hence the possibility (not, note, the reality) of a moral community. The Formula of Universal Law enjoins no more than that we act only on maxims that are open to others also.16 O’Neill’s description of the universalizability criterion includes the notion of self-transcendence that I am working to explicate here to the extent that like self-transcendence, universalizable moral principles require that the individ- ual think beyond his or her own particular desires. The individual is not allowed to exclude others as rational moral agents who have the right to act as he acts in a given situation. For example, if I decide to use another person merely as a means for my own end I must recognize the other person’s right to do the same to me. I cannot consistently will that I use another as a means only and will that I not be used in the same manner by another. Hence, the universalizability criterion is a principle of consistency and a principle of inclusion. That is, in choosing my maxims I attempt to include the perspective of other moral agents. Abstraction is necessary and inevitable in ethics- the alternative is unchecked egoism. Farr 2 Arnold Farr (prof of phil @ UKentucky, focusing on German idealism, philosophy of race, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and liberation philosophy). “Can a Philosophy of Race Afford to Abandon the Kantian Categorical Imperative?” JOURNAL of SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, Vol. 33 No. 1, Spring 2002, 17–32. To avoid ethical egoism one must abstract from (think beyond) one’s own personal interest and subjective maxims. That is, the categorical imperative requires that I recognize that I am a member of the realm of rational beings. Hence, I organize my maxims in consideration of other rational beings. Under such a principle other people cannot be treated merely as a means for my end but must be treated as ends in themselves. The merit of the categorical imperative for a philosophy of race is that it contravenes racist ideology to the extent that racist ideology is based on the use of persons of a different race as a means to an end rather than as ends in themselves. Embedded in the formulation of an end in itself and the formula of the kingdom of ends is the recognition of the common hope for humanity. That is, maxims ought to be chosen on the basis of an ideal, a hope for the amelioration of humanity. This ideal or ethical commonwealth (as Kant calls it in the Religion) is the kingdom of ends.34 Although the merits of Kant’s moral theory may be recognizable at this point, we are still in a bit of a bind. It still seems problematic that the moral theory of a racist is essentially an antiracist theory. Further, what shall we do with Henry Louis Gates’s suggestion that we use the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime to deconstruct the Grounding? What I have tried to suggest is that instead of abandoning the categorical imperative we should attempt to deepen our understanding of it and its place in Kant’s critical philosophy. A deeper reading of the Grounding and Kant’s philosophy in general may produce the deconstruction35 suggested by Gates. However, a text is not necessarily deconstructed by reading it against another. Texts often deconstruct themselves if read properly. To be sure, the best way to understand a text is to read it in context. Hence, if the Grounding is read within the context of the critical philosophy, the tools for a deconstruction of the text are provided by its context and the tensions within the text. Gates is right to suggest that the Grounding must be deconstructed. However, this deconstruction requires much more than reading the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime against the Grounding. It requires a complete engagement with the critical philosophy. Such an engagement discloses some of Kant’s very significant claims about humanity and the practical role of reason. With this disclosure, deconstruction of the Grounding can begin. What deconstruction will reveal is not necessarily the inconsistency of Kant’s moral philosophy or the racist or sexist nature of the categorical imperative, but rather, it will disclose the disunity between Kant’s theory and his own feelings about blacks and women. Although the theory is consistent and emancipatory and should apply to all persons, Kant the man has his own personal and moral problems. Although Kant’s attitude toward people of African descent was deplorable, it would be equally deplorable to reject the categorical imperative without first exploring its emancipatory potential. 3. Fixed principles are key to solving for and measuring our response to oppression- things like anti-ethics leave us unable to measure and react to oppression accordingly. Chesterton Gilbert Chesterton Christian apologist and writer. “Orthodoxy.” 1908. modified for gendered language. Silly examples are always simpler; let us suppose a person wanted a particular kind of world; say, a blue world. He would have no cause to complain of the slightness or swiftness of his task; he might toil for a long time at the transformation; he could work away (in every sense) until all was blue. He could have heroic adventures; the putting of the last touches to a blue tiger. He could have fairy dreams; the dawn of a blue moon. But if they worked hard, that high-minded reformer would certainly (from his own point of view) leave the world better and bluer than he found it. If he altered a blade of grass to his favorite color every day, he would get on slowly. But if they altered their his favorite color every day, they would not get on at all. If, after reading a fresh philosopher, they started to paint everything red or yellow, their work would be thrown away: there would be nothing to show except a few blue tigers walking about, specimens of their early bad manner. This is exactly the position of the average modern thinker. It will be said that this is avowedly a preposterous example. But it is literally the fact of recent history. The great and grave changes in our political civilization all belonged to the early nineteenth century, not to the later. 4. Consequentialism is incoherent. A) We can’t be culpable for consequences—they’re determined by external forces. Hegel 20 George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel The Philosophy of Right 1820 The will has before it an outer reality, upon which it operates. But to be able to do this, it must have a representation of this reality. True responsibility is mine only in so far as the outer reality was within my consciousness. The will, because this external matter is supplied to it, is finite; or rather because it is finite, the matter is supplied. When I think and will rationally, I am not at this standpoint of finitude, nor is the object I act upon something opposed to me. The finite always has limit and boundary. There stands opposed to me that which is other than I, something accidental and externally necessary; it may or may not fall into agreement with me. But I am only what relates to my freedom; and the act is the purport of my will only in so far as I am aware of it. Œdipus, who unwittingly slew his father, is not to be arraigned as a patricide. In the ancient laws, however, less value was attached to the subjective side of the act than is done to-day. Hence arose amongst the ancients asylums, where the fugitive from revenge might be received and protected. 118. An act, when it has become an external reality, and is connected with a varied outer necessity, has manifold consequences. These consequences, being the visible shape, whose soul is the end of action, belong to the act. But at the same time the inner act, when realized as an end in the external world, is handed over to external forces, which attach to it something quite different from what it is in itself, and thus carry it away into strange and distant consequences. It is the right of the will to adopt only the first consequences, since they alone lie in the purpose. B) Every consequence causes another consequence in a chain of infinite events. That means either every action would have infinite value or there’s no way to weigh. C) induction fails. Induction assumes that things will always happen the same way in the future as they have in the past. But this begs the question of how we know what happened in the past will happen in the future. Thus, induction is logically fallacious. D) Consequentialism cannot guide action without some other external framework. Morality must be action guiding, but saying a certain action is bad requires a reason for it, which exists external to consequences since reason must be grounded in a priori truth.
Offense I advocate that public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech. What that means is up for debate- the neg can read any DA as long as they read evidence that it’s constitutionally protected speech in their link, however I have the right to contest said links. Respecting free speech is a necessary part of treating people as ends—it’s the foundation for an autonomous will Eberle 94 Eberle, Law @ Roger Williams, 94 (Wake Forest LR, Winter) The Court's decision in R.A.V. reaffirms the preeminence of free speech in our constitutional value structure. n62 Theoretically, free speech is intrinsically valuable as a chief means by which we develop our faculties and control our destinies. n63 Free speech is also of instrumental value in facilitating other worthy ends such as democratic or personal self-government, n64 public and private decisionmaking, n65 and the advancement of knowledge and truth. n66 Ultimately, the value of free speech rests upon a complex set of justifications, as compared to reliance on any single foundation. n67 The majority of the Court in R.A.V. preferred a nonconsequentialist view, finding that speech is valuable as an end itself, independent of any consequences that it might produce. In this view, free speech is an essential part of a just and free society that treats all people as responsible moral agents. Accordingly, people are entrusted with the responsibility of making judgments about the use or abuse of speech. n68 From this vantage point, the majority saw a certain moral equivalency in all speech. Even hate speech merits protection under the First Amendment, because all speech has intrinsic value. This is so because all speech, even hate speech, is a communication to the world, and therefore implicates the speaker's autonomy or self-realization Speech restrictions prevent people from exercising freedom. Lambert 16 (Saber, writer @ being libertarian, “The Degradation of Free Speech and Personal Liberty,” April 9, 2016, https://beinglibertarian.com/the-degradation-of-free-speech-and-personal-liberty Many individuals in society claim that they live in a free nation full of individual liberties. North American constitutions such as the ones implemented in the United States and Canada allow for freedom of speech. However, it is evident that the government has implemented and enforced policies to the contrary. There are a plethora of entertainment programs that have strict censorship policies that go against freedom of speech as it disallows, for example, television producers and musicians to use words or phrases that may be offensive directly or indirectly to a person or group. Regardless, if it is possibly offensive to one or many, the U.S. and Canadian constitutions allow for individuals to say very controversial things. However, restricting one’s freedom of speech in the form of censorship greatly impacts the exchange of ideas that are said to contribute to the (possibly) improvement of society. It is not up to the government to decide what individuals choose to say, read, or hear, and it should not be up to the government to decide what is acceptable within society. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the United States controls all forms of television broadcasting and claims “it is a violation of federal law to air obscene programming at any time. It is also a violation of federal law to air indecent programming or profane language during certain hours.” It is quite clear that censorship by institutional power is a way to control a society in the sense that it determines what individuals in society can legally say, hear, or read. It is against the majoritarian virtues and values that are constitutionally instilled within a society, and is often paralleled to a form of dictatorship – no matter how miniscule. Regardless of the content, outlawing types of free speech is a contradiction. Varden 10 Helga Varden (Associate Professor of Philosophy atthe University of Illinois) “A Kantian Conception of Free Speech” May 22nd 2010 Freedom of Expression in a Diverse World Volume 3 of the series AMINTAPHIL: The Philosophical Foundations of Law and Justice pp 39-55 http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.10072F978-90-481-8999-1_4 There is clear textual support that Kant provides the kind of twofold defense of free speech argued here, namely that communication of thought does not typically involve private wrongdoing and that the state must protect free speech in order to function as a representative authority. To outlaw free speech, Kant argues in the essay “What is Enlightenment?”, is to “renounce enlightenment... and to violate the sacred right of humanity and trample it underfoot” (8: 39). Outlawing free speech is not only stupid, since it makes enlightenment or governance through reason impossible, but it involves denying people their right of humanity. Their right of humanity is denied by outlawing free speech, because such legislation involves using coercion against the citizens even when their speech does not deprive anyone of what is theirs. Moreover, outlawing free speech evidences a government “which misunderstands itself” (8: 41). Similarly, Kant argues both in this text and in “Theory and Practice” that such legislation expresses sheer irrational behavior on the part of a government. “Freedom of the pen”, Kant writes in the latter essay, is the sole palladium of the people’s rights. For to want to deny them this freedom is not only tantamount to taking from them any claim to a right with respect to the supreme commander (according to Hobbes), but is also to withhold from the latter – whose will gives order to the subjects as citizens only by representing the general will of the people – all knowledge of matters that he himself would change if he knew about them and to put him in contradiction with himself.... (8: 304, cf. 8: 39f) Free speech is seen as the ultimate safeguard or protection of the people’s rights. Therefore, a public authority – an authority representing the will of the citizens and yet the will of no one in particular – cannot outlaw free speech, since citizens qua citizens cannot be seen as consenting to it. Such a decree would bring the sovereign ‘in contradiction with himself’ since it would involve denying the sovereign the vital information it needs in order to act as the representative of the people. In “What is Enlightenment?” Kant expands this point: “the public use of one’s reason must always be free... by the public use of one’s own reason I understand that use which someone makes of it as a scholar before the entire public of the world of readers” (8: 37). Every citizen must have the right to engage truthfully, yet critically in public affairs – to be a scholar – and so to raise her voice and explain why she judges the current public system of laws to be unjust or unfair. If such voices are not raised, the public authority cannot possibly be able to govern wisely; without a public expres- sion of the consequences for right of particular laws, the public authority does not have the information required to secure right for all and so to represent its citizen Even immoral speech cannot be legally restricted because it doesn’t coerce other individuals inherently- you can just choose not to listen. Varden 10 Helga Varden (Associate Professor of Philosophy atthe University of Illinois) “A Kantian Conception of Free Speech” May 22nd 2010 Freedom of Expression in a Diverse World Volume 3 of the series AMINTAPHIL: The Philosophical Foundations of Law and Justice pp 39-55 http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.10072F978-90-481-8999-1_4 2 Virtuous Versus Rightful Private Speech In order to understand Kant’s conception of free speech we need a good grasp of his conception of rightful relations in general. With this conception in hand, we can see how Kant conceives of rightful private speech. Then we can see how rightful private speech is distinguished from rightful public speech, namely that which is protected or outlawed by various public law measures, including free speech legislation. Right, for Kant, is solely concerned with people’s actions in space and time, or what he calls our “external use of choice” (6: 213f, 224ff). When we deem each other and ourselves capable of deeds, meaning that we see each other and ourselves as the authors of our actions, we “impute” these actions to each other and to ourselves. Such imputation, Kant argues, shows that we judge ourselves and each other as capable of freedom under laws with regard to external use of choice – or ‘external freedom’ (6: 227). Moreover, when we interact, we need to enable reciprocal external freedom, meaning that we must find a way of interacting that is consistent with everybody’s external freedom. And this is where justice, or what Kant calls ‘right’ comes in. Right is the relation between interacting persons’ external freedom such that reciprocal external freedom is realized (6: 230). This is what Kant means when he says that rightful interactions are interactions reconcilable with each person’s innate right to freedom, namely the right to “independence from being constrained by another’s choices... insofar as it can coexist with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law” (6: 237). For Kant, right requires that universal laws of freedom, rather than anyone’s arbitrary choices, reciprocally regulate interacting individuals’ external freedom. The first upshot of this conception of right is that anything that concerns morality as such is beyond its proper grasp. Right concerns only external freedom, which is limited to what can be hindered in space and time (coerced), whereas morality also requires internal freedom. That is to say, morality encompasses both right and virtue, and virtue requires what Kant calls freedom with regard to “internal use of choice”. Internal freedom requires a person both to act on universalizable maxims and to do so from the motivation of duty (6: 220f) – and neither can be coercively enforced. This is why Kant argues that only freedom with regard to interacting persons’ external use of choice (right) can be coercively enforced; freedom with regard to both internal (virtue) and external use of choice – morality – cannot be coercively enforced (ibid.). Because morality requires freedom with regard to both internal and external use of choice, it cannot be enforced. This distinction between internal and external use of choice and freedom explains why Kant maintains that most ways in which a person uses words in his interactions with others cannot be seen as involving wrongdoing from the point of view of right: “such things as merely communicating his thoughts to them, telling or promising them something, whether what he says is true and sincere or untrue and insincere” do not constitute wrongdoing because “it is entirely up to them the listeners whether they want to believe him or not” (6: 238). The utterance of words in space and time does not have the power to hinder anyone else’s external freedom, including depriving him of his means. Since words as such cannot exert physical power over people, it is impossible to use them as a means of coercion against another. For example, if you block my way, you coerce me by hindering my movements: you hinder my external freedom. If, however, you simply tell me not to move, you have done nothing coercive, nothing to hinder my external freedom, as I can simply walk passed you. So, even though by means of your words, you attempt to influence my internal use of choice by providing me with possible reasons for acting, you accomplish nothing coercive. That is, you may wish that I take on your proposal for action, but you do nothing to force me to do so. Whether or not I choose to act on your suggestion is still entirely up to me. Therefore, you cannot choose for me. My choice to act on your words is beyond the reach of your words, as is any other means I might have. Indeed, even if what you suggest is the virtuous thing to do, your words are powerless with regard to making me act virtuously. Virtuous action requires not only that I act on the right maxims, but that I also do so because it is the right thing to do, or from duty. Because the choice of maxims (internal use of choice) and duty (internal freedom) are beyond the grasp of coercion, Kant holds that most uses of words, including immoral ones such as lying, cannot be seen as involving wrongdoing from the point of view of right. Outweighs- a) even if some speech is bad that doesn’t provide a reason that public colleges and universities have the right to restrict speech. The action is wrong but it can be taken care of in other ways b) This would only warrant that we should advice against such speech but we can never restrict under the framework because that would assign your will above the sovereign’s. Empirics flow aff- speech codes on college campuses were policy failures. Friedersdorf 15, 12-10-2015, "The Lessons of Bygone Free-Speech Fights," Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/what-student-activists-can-learn-from-bygone-free-speech-fights/419178/ He was writing after the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, and Stanford implemented speech codes targeted at racist and sexist speech. These were efforts to respond to increasing diversity on campuses, where a number of students spewed racist and sexist speech that most everyone in this room would condemn. But those speech codes were policy failures. There is no evidence that hate speech or bigotry decreased on any campus that adopted them. At Michigan, the speech code was analyzed by Marcia Pally, a professor of multicultural studies, who found that “black students were accused of racist speech in almost 20 cases. Students were punished only twice under the code’s anti-racist provisions, both times for speech by or on behalf of blacks.” Counterspeech works- empirics prove it promotes inclusion needed for movements- this also responds to silencing turns since even if those targeted cannot speak up, the community can. Calleros 95 Calleros, Charles R. “Paternalism, Counterspeech, and Campus Hate-Speech Codes: A Reply to Delgado and Yun” (Professor of Law, Arizona State University). HeinOnline. Arizona State Law Journal. 1995 However, campus communities that have creatively used this approach can attest to the surprising power of counterspeech. Examples of counterspeech to hateful racist and homophobic speech at Arizona State and Stanford Universities are especially illustrative.61 In an incident that attracted national attention, the campus community at Arizona State University ("A.S.U.") constructively and constitutionally responded to a racist poster displayed on the outside of the speaker's dormitory door in February 1991. Entitled "WORK APPLICATION," it contained a number of ostensibly employment-related questions that advanced hostile and demeaning racial stereotypes of African-Americans and Mexican-Americans. Carla Washington, one of a group of African- American women who found the poster, used her own speech to persuade a resident of the offending room voluntarily to take the poster down and allow her to photocopy it. After sending a copy of the poster to the campus newspaper along with an opinion letter deploring its racist stereotypes, she demanded action from the director of her residence hall. The director organized an immediate meeting of the dormitory residents to discuss the issues. In this meeting, I explained why the poster was protected by the First Amendment, and the women who found the poster eloquently described their pain and fears. One of the women, Nichet Smith, voiced her fear that all nonminorities on campus shared the hostile stereotypes expressed in the poster. Dozens of residents expressed their support and gave assurances that they did not share the hostile stereotypes, but they conceded that even the most tolerant among them knew little about the cultures of others and would 62 benefit greatly from multicultural education. The need for multicultural education to combat intercultural ignorance and stereotyping became the theme of a press conference and public rally organized by the student African-American Coalition leader, Rossie Turman, who opted for highly visible counterspeech despite demands from some students and staff to discipline the owner of the offending poster. The result was a series of opinion letters in the campus newspaper discussing the problem of racism, numerous workshops on race relations and free speech, and overwhelming approval in the Faculty Senate of a measure to add a course on American cultural diversity to the undergraduate breadth 63 requirement. The four women who initially confronted the racist poster were empowered by the meeting at the dormitory residence and later received awards from the local chapter of the NAACP for their activism.64 Rossie Turman was rewarded for his leadership skills two years later by becoming the first African-American elected President of Associated Students of A.S.U.,65 a student body that numbered approximately 40,000 students, only 66 2.3 percent of them African-American. Although Delgado and Yun are quite right that the African-American students should never have been burdened with the need to respond to such hateful speech, Hentoff is correct that the responses just described helped them develop a sense of self-reliance and constructive activism. Moreover, the students' counterspeech inspired a community response that lightened the students' burden and provided them with a sense of community support and empowerment. Indeed, the students received assistance from faculty and administrators, who helped organize meetings, wrote opinion letters, spoke before the Faculty Senate, or joined the students in issuing public statements at the press conference and public rally.67 Perhaps most important, campus administrators wisely refrained from disciplining the owners of the poster, thus directing public attention to the issue of racism and ensuring broad community support in denouncing the racist poster. Many members of the campus and surrounding communities might have leapt to the racist speaker's defense had the state attempted to discipline the speaker and thus had created a First Amendment issue. Instead, they remained united with the offended students because the glare of the public spotlight remained sharply focused on the racist incident without the distraction of cries of state censorship. Although the counterspeech was not aimed primarily at influencing the hearts and minds of the residents of the offending dormitory room, its vigor in fact caught the residents by surprise. 68 It prompted at least three of them to apologize publicly and to display curiosity about a civil rights movement that they were too young to have witnessed first hand. 69 This effective use of education and counterspeech is not an isolated instance at A.S.U., but has been repeated on several occasions, albeit on smaller scales.7° One year after the counterspeech at A.S.U., Stanford University responded similarly to homophobic speech. In that case, a first-year law student sought to attract disciplinary proceedings and thus gain First Amendment martyrdom by shouting hateful homophobic statements about a dormitory staff member. The dean of students stated that the speaker was not subject to discipline under Stanford's code of conduct but called on the university community to speak out on the issue, triggering an avalanche of counterspeech. Students, staff, faculty, and administrators expressed their opinions in letters to the campus newspaper, in comments on a poster board at the law school, in a published petition signed by 400 members of the law school community disassociating the law school from the speaker's epithets, and in a letter written by several law students reporting the incident to a prospective employer of the offending student.71 The purveyor of hate speech indeed had made a point about the power of speech, just not the one he had intended. He had welcomed disciplinary sanctions as a form of empowerment, but the Stanford community was alert enough to catch his verbal hardball and throw it back with ten times the force. Thus, the argument that counterspeech is preferable to state suppression of offensive speech is stronger and more fully supported by experience than is conceded by Delgado and Yun. In both of the cases described above, the targets of hateful speech were supported by a community united against bigotry. The community avoided splitting into factions because the universities eliminated the issue of censorship by quickly announcing that the hateful speakers were protected from disciplinary retaliation. Indeed, the counterspeech against the bigotry was so powerful in each case that it underscored the need for top administrators to develop standards for, and some limitations on, their participation in such partisan speech. 72 Of course, the community action in these cases was effective and empowering precisely because a community against bigotry existed. At A.S.U. and Stanford, as at most universities, the overwhelming majority of students, faculty, and staff are persons of tolerance and good will who deplore at least the clearest forms of bigotry and are ready to speak out Of course, the community action in these cases was effective and empowering precisely because a community against bigotry existed. At A.S.U. and Stanford, as at most universities, the overwhelming majority of students, faculty, and staff are persons of tolerance and good will who deplore at least the clearest forms of bigotry and are ready to speak out against intolerance when it is isolated as an issue rather than diluted in muddied waters along with concerns of censorship. Just as the nonviolent demonstrations of Martin Luther King, Jr., depended partly for their success on the consciences of the national and international audiences monitoring the fire hoses and attack dogs on their television sets and in the print media,73 the empowerment of the targets of hateful speech rests partly in the hands of members of the campus community who sympathize with them. One can hope that the counterspeech and educational measures used with success at A.S.U. and Stanford stand a good chance of preserving an atmosphere of civility in intellectual inquiry at any campus community in which compassionate, open minds predominate. On the other hand, counterspeech by the targets of hate speech could be less empowering on a campus in which the majority of students, faculty, and staff approve of hostile epithets directed toward members of minority groups. One hopes that such campuses are exceedingly rare; although hostile racial stereotyping among college students in the United States increased during the last decade, those students who harbored significant hostilities (as contrasted with more pervasive but less openly hostile, subconscious racism) still represented a modest fraction of all students.74 Moreover, even in a pervasively hostile atmosphere, counterspeech might still be more effective than broad restrictions on speech. Underview
The res is negative state action, which means the aff limits state power and doesn’t link to critiques of the state. Dempsey 9 Michelle, Professor of Law, Villanova University School of Law, http://www.academia.edu/352923/Sex_Trafficking_and_Criminalization_In_Defense_of_Feminist_Abolitionism 42 The unintended consequences of criminalizing the purchase of sex include the harms that may be suffered disproportionately by men who are already socially disem-powered. Given the negative uses of criminal law throughout history and still today, such as racist law-enforcement policies, there is reason to resist using the criminal law as a tool for positive social change. See generally M ICHAEL T ONRY , M ALIGN N EGLECT —R ACE , C RIME , AND P UNISHMENT IN A MERICA (1995) (discussing the disparate impact crime-control policies can have on disadvantaged communities); Angela J. Davis, Be- nign Neglect of Racism in the Criminal Justice System , 94 M ICH . L. R EV . 1660, 1663 (1996)(reviewing T ONRY , supra ) (discussing racial discrimination within the criminal justice system). Since racism is fundamentally inconsistent with feminist commitments to ab-olish all wrongful structural inequalities, feminists should resist any reforms that will tend to exacerbate racism. See D EMPSEY , supra note 9, at 129-35. This risk of unin-tended consequences poses a serious objection to feminist abolitionism. Yet, it is important to bear in mind that feminist-abolitionist reforms like the Swedish model, if adopted in the United States, would not expand the criminal law’s power; it would re-duce it. At present, in most jurisdictions throughout the United States, both sellers and buyers are criminalized. Feminist abolitionist reforms would therefore restrict the power of the criminal law by decriminalizing people who sell sex. Thus, to the extent that current criminal laws are being used in racist and other problematic ways (e.g., by targeting disempowered women of color who sell sex, while allowing relatively power-ful middle-class white men to go free), the proposed reforms would improve the criminal justice system by limiting its scope. 2. The idea that the authority figures become the arbiter of acceptable speech causes a crack down on dissent and kills minority views from even being heard in the first place. Fisher 17 (Anthony L. Fisher, associate editor at Reason.com, where his beats include criminal justice, civil liberties, free speech, and foreign affairs. He is also a sports and culture columnist at The Week.). “The free speech problem on campus is real. It will ultimately hurt dissidents”. Vox, Jan 2, 2017. http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/13/13931524/free-speech-pen-america-campus-censorship It’s already happening. Just ask the Palestinian activists whose boycott campaigns against Israel have has been deemed hate speech by a number of public universities, and whose future political activities could be endangered by an act of Congress. Just this month, the Senate unanimously passed the "Anti-Semitism Awareness Act,” which directs the Department of Education to use the bill's contents as a guideline when adjudicating complaints of anti-Semitism on campus. Among the speech-chilling components of the bill, the political (and subjective) act of judging Israel by an "unfair double standard" could be considered hate speech. To cite other examples of unintended consequences of the crackdown on “offensive” speech, a black student at the University of Michigan was punished for calling another student “white trash,” and conservative law students at Georgetown claimed they were “traumatized” when an email critical of deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia landed in their inboxes. The PEN America report also notes the Foundation for Individual Rights’ analysis of hundreds of campuses with “severely restrictive” speech codes. While a number of these campuses don't aggressively enforce their speech codes, the rules remain on the books; more than a dozen such codes have been overturned in the courts. What’s even more concerning is the increasingly popular notion that some ideas, such as opposition to abortion, should simply be “non-platformed" — that is, deemed unworthy of even being heard on campus. Although the trend of denying contentious speakers such as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice or refugee turned Dutch politician and critic of Islam Ayaan Hirsi Ali public platforms by "disinviting" them from campus is disconcerting, it is not censorship. However, a pro-choice group physically blocking the display of a pro-life group on the campus of the University of Georgia is a form of censorship. As is the case of University of California Santa Barbara professor Mireille Miller-Young, who assaulted a young woman holding a pro-life placard including graphic imagery in a "free speech" zone on campus and stole her sign. When the young woman objected to the theft of her property, Miller-Young replied, "I may be a thief, but you're a terrorist." Like it or not, almost half of all Americans consider themselves pro-life. Banning their perspective from campus won't win over converts, and it’s both immoral and counterproductive to declare completely legitimate political perspectives beyond the pale. Think of antiwar protests or demonstrations in support of integration when both causes were broadly unpopular, and then try to consider a majority on campus declaring their school a "safe space" from such "offensive" expressions of free speech. 3. Interpretation: Neg advocacies must defend the same actor as the aff a) fairness- otherwise this justifies you getting an infinite number of different actors that can do things that solve the aff harms because they are responsible for said harmswhich gives you perfect solvency that I can never contest b) truth testability- is it doesn’t prove the aff is a bad idea because even if it would be nice if another actor solved the problem, if it’s not realistic than the non-ideal actor still has the obligation 4. 1AR theory is legit and drop the debater—its key to aff strat since the neg has no incentive to not be abusive since they can just go for drop the arg and win off time skew screwing over the 1AR.
3/24/17
JF - 1AC - Patriotic Correctness
Tournament: Harvard Westlake RR | Round: 2 | Opponent: Lynbrook VV | Judge: Scoggin, Randall Framing The role of the ballot is to evaluate the simulated consequences of the affirmative policy vs a competiting neg policy option. The aff deploys the state to learn scenario planning- even if politics is bad, scenario analysis of politics is pedagogically valuable- it enhances creativity, deconstructs biases and teaches advocacy skills Barma et al 16 – (May 2016, Advance Publication Online on 11/6/15, Naazneen Barma, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Brent Durbin, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Professor of Government at Smith College, Eric Lorber, JD from UPenn and PhD in Political Science from Duke, Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, Rachel Whitlark, PhD in Political Science from GWU, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Project on Managing the Atom and International Security Program within the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, “‘Imagine a World in Which’: Using Scenarios in Political Science,” International Studies Perspectives 17 (2), pp. 1-19, http://www.naazneenbarma.com/uploads/2/9/6/9/29695681/using_scenarios_in_political_science_isp_2015.pdf) What Are Scenarios and Why Use Them in Political Science? Scenario analysis is perceived most commonly as a technique for examining the robustness of strategy. It can immerse decision makers in future states that go beyond conventional extrapolations of current trends, preparing them to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and to protect themselves from adverse exogenous shocks. The global petroleum company Shell, a pioneer of the technique, characterizes scenario analysis as the art of considering “what if” questions about possible future worlds. Scenario analysis is thus typically seen as serving the purposes of corporate planning or as a policy tool to be used in combination with simulations of decision making. Yet scenario analysis is not inherently limited to these uses. This section provides a brief overview of the practice of scenario analysis and the motivations underpinning its uses. It then makes a case for the utility of the technique for political science scholarship and describes how the scenarios deployed at NEFPC were created. The Art of Scenario Analysis We characterize scenario analysis as the art of juxtaposing current trends in unexpected combinations in order to articulate surprising and yet plausible futures, often referred to as “alternative worlds.” Scenarios are thus explicitly not forecasts or projections based on linear extrapolations of contemporary patterns, and they are not hypothesis-based expert predictions. Nor should they be equated with simulations, which are best characterized as functional representations of real institutions or decision-making processes (Asal 2005). Instead, they are depictions of possible future states of the world, offered together with a narrative of the driving causal forces and potential exogenous shocks that could lead to those futures. Good scenarios thus rely on explicit causal propositions that, independent of one another, are plausible—yet, when combined, suggest surprising and sometimes controversial future worlds. For example, few predicted the dramatic fall in oil prices toward the end of 2014. Yet independent driving forces, such as the shale gas revolution in the United States, China’s slowing economic growth, and declining conflict in major Middle Eastern oil producers such as Libya, were all recognized secular trends that—combined with OPEC’s decision not to take concerted action as prices began to decline—came together in an unexpected way. While scenario analysis played a role in war gaming and strategic planning during the Cold War, the real antecedents of the contemporary practice are found in corporate futures studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Raskin et al. 2005). Scenario analysis was essentially initiated at Royal Dutch Shell in 1965, with the realization that the usual forecasting techniques and models were not capturing the rapidly changing environment in which the company operated (Wack 1985; Schwartz 1991). In particular, it had become evident that straight-line extrapolations of past global trends were inadequate for anticipating the evolving business environment. Shell-style scenario planning “helped break the habit, ingrained in most corporate planning, of assuming that the future will look much like the present” (Wilkinson and Kupers 2013, 4). Using scenario thinking, Shell anticipated the possibility of two Arab-induced oil shocks in the 1970s and hence was able to position itself for major disruptions in the global petroleum sector. Building on its corporate roots, scenario analysis has become a standard policymaking tool. For example, the Project on Forward Engagement advocates linking systematic foresight, which it defines as the disciplined analysis of alternative futures, to planning and feedback loops to better equip the United States to meet contemporary governance challenges (Fuerth 2011). Another prominent application of scenario thinking is found in the National Intelligence Council’s series of Global Trends reports, issued every four years to aid policymakers in anticipating and planning for future challenges. These reports present a handful of “alternative worlds” approximately twenty years into the future, carefully constructed on the basis of emerging global trends, risks, and opportunities, and intended to stimulate thinking about geopolitical change and its effects.4 As with corporate scenario analysis, the technique can be used in foreign policymaking for long-range general planning purposes as well as for anticipating and coping with more narrow and immediate challenges. An example of the latter is the German Marshall Fund’s EuroFutures project, which uses four scenarios to map the potential consequences of the Euro-area financial crisis (German Marshall Fund 2013). Several features make scenario analysis particularly useful for policymaking.5 Long-term global trends across a number of different realms—social, technological, environmental, economic, and political—combine in often-unexpected ways to produce unforeseen challenges. Yet the ability of decision makers to imagine, let alone prepare for, discontinuities in the policy realm is constrained by their existing mental models and maps. This limitation is exacerbated by well-known cognitive bias tendencies such as groupthink and confirmation bias (Jervis 1976; Janis 1982; Tetlock 2005). The power of scenarios lies in their ability to help individuals break out of conventional modes of thinking and analysis by introducing unusual combinations of trends and deliberate discontinuities in narratives about the future. Imagining alternative future worlds through a structured analytical process enables policymakers to envision and thereby adapt to something altogether different from the known present. Designing Scenarios for Political Science Inquiry The characteristics of scenario analysis that commend its use to policymakers also make it well suited to helping political scientists generate and develop policy-relevant research programs. Scenarios are essentially textured, plausible, and relevant stories that help us imagine how the future political-economic world could be different from the past in a manner that highlights policy challenges and opportunities. For example, terrorist organizations are a known threat that have captured the attention of the policy community, yet our responses to them tend to be linear and reactive. Scenarios that explore how seemingly unrelated vectors of change—the rise of a new peer competitor in the East that diverts strategic attention, volatile commodity prices that empower and disempower various state and nonstate actors in surprising ways, and the destabilizing effects of climate change or infectious disease pandemics—can be useful for illuminating the nature and limits of the terrorist threat in ways that may be missed by a narrower focus on recognized states and groups. By illuminating the potential strategic significance of specific and yet poorly understood opportunities and threats, scenario analysis helps to identify crucial gaps in our collective understanding of global politicaleconomic trends and dynamics. The notion of “exogeneity”—so prevalent in social science scholarship—applies to models of reality, not to reality itself. Very simply, scenario analysis can throw into sharp relief often-overlooked yet pressing questions in international affairs that demand focused investigation. Scenarios thus offer, in principle, an innovative tool for developing a political science research agenda. In practice, achieving this objective requires careful tailoring of the approach. The specific scenario analysis technique we outline below was designed and refined to provide a structured experiential process for generating problem-based research questions with contemporary international policy relevance.6 The first step in the process of creating the scenario set described here was to identify important causal forces in contemporary global affairs. Consensus was not the goal; on the contrary, some of these causal statements represented competing theories about global change (e.g., a resurgence of the nation-state vs. border-evading globalizing forces). A major principle underpinning the transformation of these causal drivers into possible future worlds was to “simplify, then exaggerate” them, before fleshing out the emerging story with more details.7 Thus, the contours of the future world were drawn first in the scenario, with details about the possible pathways to that point filled in second. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that some of the causal claims that turned into parts of scenarios were exaggerated so much as to be implausible, and that an unavoidable degree of bias or our own form of groupthink went into construction of the scenarios. One of the great strengths of scenario analysis, however, is that the scenario discussions themselves, as described below, lay bare these especially implausible claims and systematic biases.8 An explicit methodological approach underlies the written scenarios themselves as well as the analytical process around them—that of case-centered, structured, focused comparison, intended especially to shed light on new causal mechanisms (George and Bennett 2005). The use of scenarios is similar to counterfactual analysis in that it modifies certain variables in a given situation in order to analyze the resulting effects (Fearon 1991). Whereas counterfactuals are traditionally retrospective in nature and explore events that did not actually occur in the context of known history, our scenarios are deliberately forward-looking and are designed to explore potential futures that could unfold. As such, counterfactual analysis is especially well suited to identifying how individual events might expand or shift the “funnel of choices” available to political actors and thus lead to different historical outcomes (Nye 2005, 68–69), while forward-looking scenario analysis can better illuminate surprising intersections and sociopolitical dynamics without the perceptual constraints imposed by fine-grained historical knowledge. We see scenarios as a complementary resource for exploring these dynamics in international affairs, rather than as a replacement for counterfactual analysis, historical case studies, or other methodological tools. In the scenario process developed for NEFPC, three distinct scenarios are employed, acting as cases for analytical comparison. Each scenario, as detailed below, includes a set of explicit “driving forces” which represent hypotheses about causal mechanisms worth investigating in evolving international affairs. The scenario analysis process itself employs templates (discussed further below) to serve as a graphical representation of a structured, focused investigation and thereby as the research tool for conducting case-centered comparative analysis (George and Bennett 2005). In essence, these templates articulate key observable implications within the alternative worlds of the scenarios and serve as a framework for capturing the data that emerge (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). Finally, this structured, focused comparison serves as the basis for the cross-case session emerging from the scenario analysis that leads directly to the articulation of new research agendas. The scenario process described here has thus been carefully designed to offer some guidance to policy-oriented graduate students who are otherwise left to the relatively unstructured norms by which political science dissertation ideas are typically developed. The initial articulation of a dissertation project is generally an idiosyncratic and personal undertaking (Useem 1997; Rothman 2008), whereby students might choose topics based on their coursework, their own previous policy exposure, or the topics studied by their advisors. Research agendas are thus typically developed by looking for “puzzles” in existing research programs (Kuhn 1996). Doctoral students also, understandably, often choose topics that are particularly amenable to garnering research funding. Conventional grant programs typically base their funding priorities on extrapolations from what has been important in the recent past—leading to, for example, the prevalence of Japan and Soviet studies in the mid-1980s or terrorism studies in the 2000s—in the absence of any alternative method for identifying questions of likely future significance. The scenario approach to generating research ideas is grounded in the belief that these traditional approaches can be complemented by identifying questions likely to be of great empirical importance in the real world, even if these do not appear as puzzles in existing research programs or as clear extrapolations from past events. The scenarios analyzed at NEFPC envision alternative worlds that could develop in the medium (five to seven year) term and are designed to tease out issues scholars and policymakers may encounter in the relatively near future so that they can begin thinking critically about them now. This timeframe offers a period distant enough from the present as to avoid falling into current events analysis, but not so far into the future as to seem like science fiction. In imagining the worlds in which these scenarios might come to pass, participants learn strategies for avoiding failures of creativity and for overturning the assumptions that prevent scholars and analysts from anticipating and understanding the pivotal junctures that arise in international affairs. Imagining state solutions is key to getting students into politics and prevent a ceding of power to political elites. Giroux 06, Henry, Sociologist, “The abandoned generation: The urban debate league and the politics of possibility,” 2006 The decline of democratic values and informed citizenship can be seen in research studies done by The Justice Project in 2001 in which a substantial number of teenagers and young people were asked what they thought democracy meant. The answers testified to a growing depoliticization of American life and largely consisted of statements along the following lines: "Nothing," "I don't know," or "My rights, just like, pride, I guess, to some extent, and paying taxes," or "I just think, like, what does it really mean? I know its our, like, our government, but I don't know what it 6 technically is." The transition from being ignorant about democracy to actually sup- porting antidemocratic Tendencies can be seen in a number of youth surveys that have been taken since 2000. For instance, a survey released by the University of California, Berkeley, revealed that 69 percent of students support school prayer and 44 percent of young people aged fifteen to twenty-two support government restric- tions on abortions. A 2004 survey of 112,003 high school students on First Amendment rights showed that one third of students surveyed believed that the First Amendment went too far in the rights it guarantees and 36 percent believed that the press enjoyed too much freedom. This suggests not just a failing of education, but a crisis of citizenship and democracy. One consequence of the decline in democratic values and citizenship literacy is that all levels of government are being hollowed our, their role reduced to dismantling the gains of the welfare state as they increasingly construct policies that criminalize social problems and prioritize penal methods over social investments. When citizenship is reduced to consumerism, it should come as no surprise that people develop an indifference to civic engagement and participation in democratic public life. Unlike some theorists who suggest that politics as critical exchange and social engagement is either dead or in a state of terminal arrest, I believe that the current depressing state of politics points to an urgent challenge: reformulating the crisis of democracy as a fundamental crisis of vision, meaning, education, and political agency. Central to my argument is the assumption that politics is not simply about power, but also, as Cornelius Castoriadis points out, "has to do with political judgments and value choices," meaning that questions of civic education—learning how 8 to become a skilled citizen—afe central to democracy itself. Educators at all levels need to challenge the assumption that politics is dead, or the nature of politics will be determined exclusively by government leaders and experts m the heat of moral frenzy. Educators need to take a more critical position, arguing that knowledge, debate, and dialogue about pressing social problems offer individuals and groups some hope in shaping the conditions that bear down on their lives. Ideal theory strips away particularities making ethics inaccessible and epistemically skewed Mills 05, Charles, 2005, Ideal Theory” as Ideology, “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.” (175) Thus, the standard is resisting material inequalities. Non-ideal theory necessitates consequentialism since instead of following rules that assume an already equal playing field, we take steps to correct the material injustice. Debate should deal with the real-world consequences of oppression. Curry 14, Tommy, The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century, Victory Briefs, 2014, 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 “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 definitiocan with normative/prescriptive/evaluative issues, against factual/descriptive issues.” At the most general level, there is a 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 we must reformulate the values which deny the legitimacy of the living wage, and those values predicated on the flawed views of the oppressed worker, Blacks, and the colonized (dignity, justice, fairness, rights, etc.) used to currently justify the living wages in under our contemporary moral parameters. No act omission distinction for states means means based theories collapse to consequentialism. Sunstein and Vermule 05Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule. The University of Chicago Law School. “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life‐Life Tradeoffs.” JOHN M. OLIN LAW and ECONOMICS WORKING PAPER NO. 239. The Chicago Working Paper Series. March 2005 In our view, both the argument from causation and the argument from intention go wrong by overlooking the distinctive features of government as a moral agent. Whatever the general status of the act-omission distinction as a matter of moral philosophy,38 the distinction is least impressive when applied to government.39 The most fundamental point is that unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice distinction does not make a morally relevant difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do anything, or refusing to act.40 Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized private actionfor example, private killing—becomes obscure when the government formally forbids private action, but chooses a set of policy instruments that do not adequately or fully discourage it. Policy making debates require consequentialism- it’s the only moral theory available to governments Goodin 90 Robert Goodin, Philosophy Fellow @ The Australian National Defense University. “THE UTILITARIAN RESPONSE”, 1990, p. 141-2. AS 11/4/13 My larger argument turns on the proposition that there is something special about the situation of public officials that makes utilitarianism more probable for them than private individuals. Before proceeding with the large argument, I must therefore say what it is that makes it so special about for public officials and their situations that make it is both more necessary and more desirable for them to adopt a more credible form of utilitarianism. Consider, first, the argument from necessity. Public officials are obliged to make their choices under uncertainty, and uncertainty of a very special sort at that. All choices – public and private alike – are made under some degree of uncertainty, of course. But in the nature of things, private individuals will usually have more complete information on the peculiarities of their own circumstances and on the ramifications that alternative possible choices might have for them. Public officials, in contrast, they are relatively poorly informed as to the effects that their choices will have on individuals, one by one. What they typically do know are generalities: averages and aggregates. They know and what will happen most often to most people as a result of their various possible choices, but that is all. That is enough to allows public policy-makers to use the utilitarian calculus – assuming they want to use it at all – to chose general rules or conduct.
Harms Patriotic Correctness runs rampant- dissent is charged with treason and lines of critical thought are silenced. Higher education has been coopted by the military industrial complex, reducing the roles of teachers to mere technicians. Educators should reject the call of abstraction and open up everything for contestation. Giroux 13, Henry, Public Intellectuals Against the Neoliberal University, 2013, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/19654-public-intellectuals-against-the-neoliberal-university Increasingly, as universities are shaped by an audit culture, the call to be objective and impartial, whatever one's intentions, can easily echo what George Orwell called the official truth or the establishment point of view. Lacking a self-consciously democratic political focus, teachers are often reduced, or reduce themselves, to the role of a technician or functionary engaged in formalistic rituals, unconcerned with the disturbing and urgent problems that confront the larger society or the consequences of one's pedagogical practices and research undertakings. Hiding behind appeals to balance and objectivity, too many scholars refuse to recognize that being committed to something does not cancel out what C. Wright Mills once called hard thinking. Teaching needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom, to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles and public issues. In opposition to the instrumental model of teaching, with its conceit of political neutrality and its fetishization of measurement, I argue that academics should combine the mutually interdependent roles of critical educator and active citizen. This requires finding ways to connect the practice of classroom teaching with important social problems and the operation of power in the larger society while providing the conditions for students to view themselves as critical agents capable of making those who exercise authority and power answerable for their actions. Higher education cannot be decoupled from what Jacques Derrida calls a democracy to come, that is, a democracy that must always "be open to the possibility of being contested, of contesting itself, of criticizing and indefinitely improving itself."33 Within this project of possibility and impossibility, critical pedagogy must be understood as a deliberately informed and purposeful political and moral practice, as opposed to one that is either doctrinaire, instrumentalized or both. Moreover, a critical pedagogy should also gain part of its momentum in higher education among students who will go back to the schools, churches, synagogues and workplaces to produce new ideas, concepts and critical ways of understanding the world in which young people and adults live. This is a notion of intellectual practice and responsibility that refuses the professional neutrality and privileged isolation of the academy. It also affirms a broader vision of learning that links knowledge to the power of self-definition and to the capacities of students to expand the scope of democratic freedoms, particularly those that address the crisis of education, politics, and the social as part and parcel of the crisis of democracy itself. In order for critical pedagogy, dialogue and thought to have real effects, they must advocate that all citizens, old and young, are equally entitled, if not equally empowered, to shape the society in which they live. This is a commitment we heard articulated by the brave students who fought tuition hikes and the destruction of civil liberties and social provisions in Quebec and to a lesser degree in the Occupy Wall Street movement. If educators are to function as public intellectuals, they need to listen to young people who are producing a new language in order to talk about inequality and power relations, attempting to create alternative democratic public spaces, rethinking the very nature of politics, and asking serious questions about what democracy is and why it no longer exists in many neoliberal societies. These young people who are protesting the 1 recognize that they have been written out of the discourses of justice, equality and democracy and are not only resisting how neoliberalism has made them expendable, they are arguing for a collective future very different from the one that is on display in the current political and economic systems in which they feel trapped. These brave youth are insisting that the relationship between knowledge and power can be emancipatory, that their histories and experiences matter, and that what they say and do counts in their struggle to unlearn dominating privileges, productively reconstruct their relations with others, and transform, when necessary, the world around them. Militarism makes people disposable- justifying and creating everyday violence like shootings and drone strikes. Heg Good doesn’t impact turn the aff-military criticism is good because it stops the glorification of the military and violence, which spillsover. Giroux 16, Henry, Gun Culture and the American Nightmare of Violence, 2016, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34349-gun-culture-and-the-american-nightmare-of-violence Gun violence in the United States has produced a culture soaked in blood - a culture that threatens everyone and extends from accidental deaths, suicides and domestic violence to mass shootings. In late December, a woman in St. Cloud, Florida, fatally shot her own daughter after mistaking her for an intruder. Less than a month earlier, on December 2, in San Bernardino, California, was the mass shooting that left 14 people dead and more than 20 wounded. And just two months before that, on October 1, nine people were killed and seven wounded in a mass shooting at a community college in Roseburg, Oregon. Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that relies on violence to feed the coffers of the merchants of death. Given the profits made by arms manufacturers, the defense industry, gun dealers and the lobbyists who represent them in Congress, it comes as no surprise that the culture of violence cannot be abstracted from either the culture of business or the corruption of politics. Violence runs through US society like an electric current offering instant pleasure from all cultural sources, whether it be the nightly news or a television series that glorifies serial killers. At a policy level, violence drives the arms industry and a militaristic foreign policy, and is increasingly the punishing state's major tool to enforce its hyped-up brand of domestic terrorism, especially against Black youth. The United States is utterly wedded to a neoliberal culture in which cruelty is viewed as virtue, while mass incarceration is treated as the chief mechanism to "institutionalize obedience." At the same time, a shark-like mode of competition replaces any viable notion of solidarity, and a sabotaging notion of self-interest pushes society into the false lure of mass consumerism. The increasing number of mass shootings is symptomatic of a society engulfed in racism, fear, militarism, bigotry and massive inequities in wealth and power. Guns and the hypermasculine culture of violence are given more support than young people and life itself. Over 270 mass shootings have taken place in the United States in 2015 alone, proving once again that the economic, political and social conditions that underlie such violence are not being addressed. Sadly, these shootings are not isolated incidents. For example, one child under 12 years old has been killed every other day by a firearm, which amounts to 555 children killed by guns in three years. An even more frightening statistic and example of a shocking moral and political perversity was noted in data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which states that "2,525 children and teens died by gunfire in the United States in 2014; one child or teen death every 3 hours and 28 minutes, nearly 7 a day, 48 a week." Such figures indicate that too many youth in the United States occupy what might be called war zones in which guns and violence proliferate. In this scenario, guns and the hypermasculine culture of violence are given more support than young people and life itself. The predominance of a relatively unchecked gun culture and a morally perverse and politically obscene culture of violence is particularly evident in the power of the gun lobby and its political advocates to pass laws in eight states to allow students and faculty to carry concealed weapons "into classrooms, dormitories and other buildings" on campuses. In spite of the rash of recent shootings on college campuses, Texas lawmakers, for instance, passed one such "campus carry bill," which will take effect in August 2016. To add insult to injury, they also passed an "open carry bill" that allows registered gun owners to carry their guns openly in public. Such laws not only reflect "the seemingly limitless legislative clout of gun interests," but also a rather irrational return to the violence-laden culture of the "Wild West." As in the past, individuals will be allowed to walk the streets, while openly carrying guns and packing heat as a measure of their love of guns and their reliance upon violence as the best way to address any perceived threat to their security. This return to the deadly practices of the " Wild West" is neither a matter of individual choice nor some far-fetched yet allegedly legitimate appeal to the Second Amendment. On the contrary, mass violence in the United States has to be placed within a broader historical, economic and political context in order to address the totality of the forces that produce it. Focusing merely on mass shootings or the passing of potentially dangerous gun legislation does not get to the root of the systemic forces that produce the United States' love affair with violence and the ideologies and criminogenic institutions that produce it. Imperial policies that promote aggression all across the globe are now matched by increasing levels of lawlessness and state repression, which mutually feed each other. On the home front, civil society is degenerating into a military organization, a space of lawlessness and warlike practices, organized primarily for the production of violence. For instance, as Steve Martinot observes at CounterPunch, the police now use their discourse of command and power to criminalize behavior; in addition, they use military weapons and surveillance tools as if they are preparing for war, and create a culture of fear in which militaristic principles replace legal principles. He writes: This suggests that there is an institutional insecurity that seeks to cover itself through social control ... the cops act out this insecurity by criminalizing individuals in advance. No legal principle need be involved. There is only the militarist principle.... When police shoot a fleeing subject and claim they are acting in self-defense (i.e. threatened), it is not their person but the command and control principle that is threatened. To defend that control through assault or murderous action against a disobedient person implies that the cop's own identity is wholly immersed in its paradigm. There is nothing psychological about this. Self-worth or insecurity is not the issue. There is only the military ethic of power, imposed on civil society through an assumption of impunity. It is the ethos of democracy, of human self-respect, that is the threat. The rise of violence and the gun culture in the United States cannot be separated from a transformation in governance in the United States. Political sovereignty has been replaced by economic sovereignty as corporate power takes over the reins of governance. The more money influences politics, the more corrupt the political culture becomes. Under such circumstances, holding office is largely dependent on having huge amounts of capital at one's disposal, while laws and policies at all levels of government are mostly fashioned by lobbyists representing big business corporations and financial institutions. Moreover, such lobbying, as corrupt and unethical as it may be, is now carried out in the open by the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other individuals, groups and institutions invested in the militarization of US society. This lobbying is then displayed as a badge of honor - a kind of open testimonial to the lobbyists' disrespect for democratic governance. But money in politics is not the only major institutional factor in which everyday and state violence are nourished by a growing militarism. As David Theo Goldberg has argued in his essay "Mission Accomplished: Militarizing Social Logic," the military has also assumed a central role in shaping all aspects of society. Militarization is about more than the use of repressive power; it also represents a powerful social logic that is constitutive of values, modes of rationality and ways of thinking. According to Goldberg, The military is not just a fighting machine.... It serves and socializes. It hands down to the society, as big brother might, its more or less perfected goods, from gunpowder to guns, computing to information management ... In short, while militarily produced instruments might be retooled to other, broader social purpose - the military shapes pretty much the entire range of social production from commodities to culture, social goods to social theory. The militarization and corporatization of social logic permeates US society. The general public in the United States is largely depoliticized through the influence of corporations over schools, higher education and other cultural apparatuses. The deadening of public values, civic consciousness and critical citizenship are also the result of the work of anti-public intellectuals representing right-wing ideological and financial interests, a powerful set of corporate-controlled media agencies that are largely center-right and a market-driven public pedagogy that reduces the obligations of citizenship to the endless consumption and discarding of commodities. Military ideals permeate every aspect of popular culture, policy and social relations. In addition, a pedagogy of historical, social and racial amnesia is constructed and circulated through celebrity and consumer culture. A war culture now shapes every aspect of society as warlike values, a hypermasculinity and an aggressive militarism seep into every major institution in the United States, including schools, the corporate media and local police forces. The criminal legal system has become the default structure for dealing with social problems. More and more people are considered disposable because they offend the sensibilities of the financial elite, who are rapidly consolidating class power. Under such circumstances, violence occupies an honored place. This outweighs a. Root Cause- once violence becomes normalized, then anything including the neg impacts can occur and no one cares, making solving them impossible b. Aggregation- Militarism impacts constantly occur which means they aggregate every single day. By the time the neg impacts occur- the aff will massively outweighs on magnitude. Plan Resolved: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict constitutionally protected speech that criticizes the military’s policies. Wilson 10, John K., Ph.D candidate with dissertation on the history of academic freedom in America and author of three books, early excerpt from Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies which was later published in 2010 In the wake of 9/11, academic freedom suffered under a wave of patriotic correctness in America. An institution of higher learning should not fear controversy or prefer bland clichés to intellectual content. All colleges should prohibit banning speakers, even if they dissent from a particular orthodoxy. The response to the terrible acts of terrorism on September 11, 2001, did not require an exception to the rules of academic freedom. To the contrary, the period after 9/11 was a moment when intellectual scrutiny of American foreign policy wasmore important than ever. Higher education did no worse, and perhaps better, than other American i n s t i t u t i on s , s u ch as Con g ress and the media, that accepted the Bush Administration plans, often without debate or inquiry. Sadly, though, the enemies of academic freedom too often succeeded in their aim of silencing dissent. Both the ideal and the practice of academic freedom have been under attack since 9/11, as America became a place where, in the words of Bush press secretary Ari Fleisher, you had to “watch what you say.”31 Advantage States Patriotic correctness silences anti-military dissent. Multiple examples and empirical surveys prove. Wilson 2, John K., Ph.D candidate with dissertation on the history of academic freedom in America and author of three books, early excerpt from Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies which was later published in 2010 Compared to earlier “wartime” situations, academic freedom is far more protected today than at any time in the past. But the danger posed to academic freedom cannot be ignored. Efforts to silence faculty and students, even when they are unsuccessful, can make others around the country more reluctant to speak openly. Only by denouncing all efforts at censorship and vigorously defending the right of freedom on college campuses, can we continue to protect academic freedom. The cliché of our times, constantly repeated but often true, is that 9/11 “changed everything.” One thing that it changed was academic freedom. The controversy over the limits of free speech on college campuses across the nation began immediately. On the morning of September 11, 2001, University of New Mexico history professor Richard Berthold joked with his class, “Anyone who would blow up the Pentagon would have my vote.” Berthold received death threats, keeping him off campus. On September 27, an unidentified person left a message on the provost’s voice-mail saying if Berthold were not “ousted” within 24 hours, Berthold would be ousted by other sources. Berthold was threatened in front of his home by a biker who came at him screaming obscenities, and he received several angry e-mails and letters with messages such as “I’d like to blow you up.” New Mexico state representative William Fuller declared,“Treason is giving aide or comfort to the enemy. Any terrorist who heard Berthold’s comment was comforted.” In the end, Berthold was pressured to retire from his job because of those 11 words he spoke on 9/11.Mohammad Rahat, an Iranian citizen and University of Miami medical technician who turned 22 years old on September 11, 2001, declared in a meeting that day, “Some birthday gift from Osama bin Laden.” Although Rahat said that he meant it “in a sarcastic way,” Rahat was suspended and then fired on September 25, 2001. Paula Musto, vice president of university relations, declared that Rahat’s “comments were deeply disturbing to his co-workers and superiors at the medical school. They were inappropriate and unbecoming for someone working in a research laboratory. He was fired because he made those comments, certainly not because of his ethnic background.” Rahat had received only positive evaluation in 13 months working in the lab. 6 At the University of California at Los Angeles, library assistant Jonnie Hargis was suspended without pay for one week after sending an e-mail response criticizing American policies in Iraq and Israel. Hargis’ union successfully pursued a grievance; Hargis was repaid for his lost income, the incident was stricken from his job record, and the university was forced to clarify its e-mail policies.7On September 13, 2001, two resident assistants in Minnesota complained to the dean of students that undergraduates felt fearful and uneasy because some professors questioned the competence of the Bush Administration. According to the resident assistants,“The recent attacks extend beyond political debate, and for professors to make negative judgments on our government before any action has taken place only fosters a cynical attitude in the classroom.” The administration asked faculty to think hard about what they said. Greg Kneser, dean of students, declared:“There were students who were just scared, and an intellectual discussion of the political ramifications of this was not helpful for them. They were frightened, and they look to their faculty not just for intellectual debate” but as “people they trust.”8 Even hypothetical discussions were suspicious. Portland Community College philosophy professor Stephen Carey challenged students in his critical thinking class to consider an extreme rhetorical proposition that would cause great emotion, like “Bush should be hung, strung up upside down, and left for the buzzards.” One student’s mother, misunderstanding the example, called the FBI and accused Carey of threatening to kill the President, and the Secret Service investigated him.9 When four leftist faculty at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill (UNC) criticized U.S. foreign policy at a teach-in, Scott Rubush of FrontPage magazine, declared, “They’re using state resources to the practical effect of aiding and abetting the Taliban.”The magazine recommended that these faculty be fired. “Tell the good folks at UNC–Chapel Hill what you think of their decision to allow anti-American rallies on their state-supported campus,” FrontPage urged. The administration received hundreds of angry e-mails, and was denounced on the floor of the North Carolina legislature. Several antiwar faculty members received death threats.10 In addition to phys i cal threats and attack s , A rab and Muslim students also faced enormous scru t i ny from the authori t i e s . An October 2001 survey by the Am e ri can Association of Collegiate Registrars and Ad m i s s i ons Officers found thatat least 220 colleges had been contacted by law enforcement in the weeks after 9/11. Police or FBI agents made 99 requests for private “n on - d i re c t o ry ”i n f o rm a t i on ,s u ch as course sch e d u l e s , that under law cannot be released without student con s e n t , a s u b p o e n a , or a pending danger (on ly 12 of the requests had a subpoena, a l t h o u g h the Immigra t i on and Na t u ra l i za t i on Se rvice doesn’t re q u i reconsent for inform a t i on on foreign students). Most requests were for individual students, although 16 requests for student re c o rds were “based on ethnicity. ” Law enforcement re c e i ve d the inform a t i on from 159 sch o o l s , and on ly eight denied any re q u e s t s . I n response to the violence and persecution against Muslim and Arab students, some colleges did try to restrict offensive speech in ways that resulted in threats to academic fre e d om . At Orange Coast Com mu n i ty College (OCC) on September 20, 2001, government professor Ken Hearlson was suspended for 11 weeks after Muslim students accused him of being biased against them and calling them “terrorists.” Hearlson denied the accusation. A tape recording of the class found that the most extreme statements were misheard, although Hearlson did apparently point a finger at Middle Eastern students while he blamed Arab countries for fomenting terrorism.11 In a case at Johns Hopkins University, Charles H. Fairbanks Jr., director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), was demoted (but later reinstated) after a September 14 panel discussion on terrorism in which he criticized Iraq, Pakistan, and Palestinians.12 I n response to the violence and persecution against Muslim and Arab students, some colleges did try to restrict offensive speech in ways that resulted in threats to academic fre e d om . At Orange Coast Com mu n i ty College (OCC) on September 20, 2001, government professor Ken Hearlson was suspended for 11 weeks after Muslim students accused him of being biased against them and calling them “terrorists.” Hearlson denied the accusation. A tape recording of the class found that the most extreme statements were misheard, although Hearlson did apparently point a finger at Middle Eastern students while he blamed Arab countries for fomenting terrorism.11 In a case at Johns Hopkins University, Charles H. Fairbanks Jr., director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), was demoted (but later reinstated) after a September 14 panel discussion on terrorism in which he criticized Iraq, Pakistan, and Palestinians.12 Anti-military views expressed in an e-mail could put a professor’s job at risk. At Chicago’s St. Xavier University, history professor Peter Kirstein sent this response to an Air Force cadet asking him to help promote an Air Force event: “You are a disgrace to this country and I am furious you would even think I would support you and your aggressive baby killing tactics of collateral damage.” Although Kirstein apologized for his e-mail, many called for his dismissal. On November 15, 2002, St. Xavier president Richard Yanikoski announced that Kirstein would be immediately suspended, receive a reprimand, and undergo a post-tenure review during a Spring 2003 sabbatical.13 Another tenured professor was suspended for responding rudely to an unsolicited e-mail and saying that killing is wrong. While conservatives contended that a few cases of censorship proved that left-wing thought police rule over college campuses, my extensive survey of academic freedom and civil liberties at American universities found the opposite: left-wing critics of the Bush Administration suffered by far the most numerous and most serious violations of their civil liberties. Censorship of conservatives was rare, and almost always overturned in the few cases where it occurred. Patriotic correctness—not political correctness—reigned supreme after 9/11. This censorship prevents higher education from being the uniquely key institution that can create a cultural shift away from militarism by teaching students to resist. Jaschik and Giroux 07, Henry Giroux and Scott Jaschik, 'The University in Chains', (Interview), 2007, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/07/giroux Q: How do you think the state of academic freedom has changed since 9/11? A: Criticisms of the university as a stronghold of dissent have a long and inglorious history in the United States, extending from attacks in the 19th century by religious fundamentalists to anti-communist witch-hunts conducted in the 1920s, 1930s, and again in the 1950s, during the infamous era of McCarthyism. Harkening back to the infamous McCarthy era, a newly reinvigorated war is currently being waged by Christian nationalists, reactionary neoconservatives, and corporate fundamentalists against the autonomy and integrity of all those independent institutions that foster social responsibility, critical thought, and critical citizenship. While the attack is being waged on numerous fronts, the universities are where the major skirmishes are taking place. What is unique about this attack on academic freedom are the range and scope of the forces waging an assault on higher education. It is much worse today, because corporations, the national security state, the Pentagon, powerful Christian evangelical groups, non-government agencies, and enormously wealthy right-wing individuals and institutions have created powerful alliances -- the perfect storm so to speak -- that are truly threatening the freedoms and semi-autonomy of American universities. Higher education in the United States is currently being targeted by a diverse number of right-wing forces that have assumed political power and are waging an aggressive and focused campaign against the principles of academic freedom, sacrificing critical pedagogical practice in the name of patriotic correctness and dismantling the ideal of the university as a bastion of independent thought, and uncorrupted inquiry. Ironically, it is through the vocabulary of individual rights, academic freedom, balance, and tolerance that these forces are attempting to slander, even vilify, an allegedly liberal and left-oriented professoriate, to cut already meager federal funding for higher education, to eliminate tenure, and to place control of what is taught and said in classrooms under legislative oversight. There is more at work in the current attack than the rampant anti-intellectualism and paranoid style of American politics outlined in Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, written over 40 years ago. There is also the collective power of radical right-wing organizations, which in their powerful influence on all levels of government in spite of a democratically controlled Congress and most liberal social institutions feel compelled to dismantle the open, questioning cultures of the academy. Underlying recent attacks on the university is an attempt not merely to counter dissent but to destroy it and in doing so to eliminate all of those remaining public spaces, spheres, and institutions that nourish and sustain a culture of questioning so vital to a democratic civil society. Dissent is often equated with treason; the university is portrayed as the weak link in the war on terror by powerful educational agencies; professors who advocate a culture of questioning and critical engagement run the risk of having their names posted on Internet web sites while being labeled as un-American; and various right-wing individuals and politicians increasingly attempt to pass legislation that renders critical analysis a liability and reinforces, with no irony intended, a rabid anti-intellectualism under the call for balance and intellectual diversity. Genuine politics begins to disappear as people methodically lose those freedoms and rights that enable them to speak, act, dissent, and exercise both their individual right to resistance and a shared sense of collective responsibility. While higher education is only one site, it is one of the most crucial institutional and political spaces where democratic subjects can be shaped, democratic relations can be experienced, and anti-democratic forms of power can be identified and critically engaged. It is also one of the few spaces left where young people can think critically about the knowledge they gain, learn values that refuse to reduce the obligations of citizenship to either consumerism or the dictates of the national security state, and develop the language and skills necessary to defend those institutions and social relations that are vital to a substantive democracy. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt insisted, a meaningful conception of politics appears only when concrete spaces exist for people to come together to talk, think critically, and act on their capacities for empathy, judgment, and social responsibility. What the current attack on higher education threatens is a notion of the academy that is faithful to its role as a crucial democratic public sphere, one that offers a space both to resist the “dark times” in which we now live and to embrace the possibility of a future forged in the civic struggles requisite for a viable democracy.
Empowering academics is uniquely key to disrupting the culture of militarism in universities. The only way the system survives is if academia continues to produce scholarship uncritical of it Chatterjee and Maira 14 Piya Chatterjee, Backstrand Chair and Professor of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Scripps College, Sunaina Maira, Professor of Asian American Studies at UC Davis, “The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent,” University of Minnesota Press, 2014 JW In a post-9/ 11 world, the U.S. university has become a particularly charged site for debates about nationalism, patriotism, citizenship, and democracy. The “crisis” of academic freedom emerges from events such as the ones we witnessed in Riverside and Davis but also in many other campuses where administrative policing flexes its muscles along with the batons, chemical weapons, and riot gear of police and SWAT teams and where containment and censorship of political critique is enacted through the collusion of the university, partisan off-campus groups and networks, and the state. After 9/ 11, we have witnessed a calamitously repressive series of well-coordinated attacks against scholars who have dared to challenge the national consensus on U.S. wars and overseas occupations. Yet there has been stunningly little scholarly attention paid to this policing of knowledge, especially against academics who have dared to challenge the national consensus on U.S. wars and overseas occupations and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Simultaneously, the growing privatization of the public university, as in California, has demonstrated the ways in which the gates of access to public higher education are increasingly closed and the more subtle ways in which dissident scholarly and pedagogical work (and their institutional locations) is delegitimized and— in particularly telling instances— censored at both public and private institutions. The 9/ 11 attacks and the crises of late capitalism in the global North have intensified the crisis of repression in the United States and also the ongoing restructuring of the academy— as well as resistance to that process— here as well as in the global South. 2 What does it mean, then, to challenge the collusion of the university with militarism and occupation, the privatization of higher education, and economies of knowledge from within the U.S. university? When scholars and students who openly connect U.S. state formation to imperialism, war, and racial violence are disciplined, then how are we to understand freedom , academic and otherwise? How is post-9/ 11 policing and surveillance linked to racial, gendered, and class practices in the neoliberal academy? Has the War on Terror simply deepened a much longer historical pattern of wartime censorship and monitoring of intellectual work or is this something new? This edited volume offers reports from the trenches of a war on scholarly dissent that has raged for two or three decades now and has intensified since 9/ 11, analyzed by some of the very scholars who have been targeted or have directly engaged in these battles. The stakes here are high. These dissenting scholars and the knowledges they produce are constructed by right-wing critics as a threat to U.S. power and global hegemony, as has been the case in earlier moments in U.S. history, particularly during the Cold War. Much discussion of incidents where academics have been denied tenure or publicly attacked for their critique of U.S. foreign or domestic policies, as in earlier moments, has centered on the important question of academic freedom. However, the chapters in this book break new ground by demonstrating that what is really at work in these attacks are the logics of racism, warfare, and nationalism that undergird U.S. imperialism and also the architecture of the U.S. academy. Our argument here is that these logics shape a systemic structure of repression of academic knowledge that counters the imperial, nation-building project. The premise of this book is that the U.S. academy is an “imperial university.” As in all imperial and colonial nations, intellectuals and scholarship play an important role— directly or indirectly, willingly or unwittingly— in legitimizing American exceptionalism and rationalizing U.S. expansionism and repression, domestically and globally. The title of this book, then, is not a rhetorical flourish but offers a concept that is grounded in the particular imperial formation of the United States, one that is in many ways ambiguous and shape-shifting. 3 It is important to note that U.S. imperialism is characterized by deterritorialized, flexible, and covert practices of subjugation and violence and as such does not resemble historical forms of European colonialism that depended on territorial colonialism. 4 As a settler-colonial nation, it has over time developed various strategies of control that include proxy wars, secret interventions, and client regimes aimed at maintaining its political, economic, and military dominance around the globe, as well as cultural interventions and “soft power.” The chapters here help to illuminate and historicize the role of the U.S. university in legitimizing notions of Manifest Destiny and foundational mythologies of settler colonialism and exceptional democracy as well as the attempts by scholars and students to challenge and subvert them. This book demonstrates the ways in which the academy’s role in supporting state policies is crucial, even— and especially—as a presumably liberal institution. Indeed, it is precisely the support of a liberal class that is always critical for the maintenance of “benevolent empire.” 5 As U.S. military and overseas interventions are increasingly framed as humanitarian wars— to save oppressed others and rescue victimized women— it is liberal ideologies of gender, sexuality, religion, pluralism, and democracy that are key to uphold. 6 The university is a key battleground in these culture wars and in producing as well as contesting knowledges about the state of the nation. Education has already been corrupted- I control uniqueness on this issue- its time to act now. Chile empirically proves- the aff spillsover to real reform. Williams 15, Jo, Remaking education from below: the Chilean student movement as public pedagogy, 2015, Australian Journal of Adult Learning More than ever the crisis of schooling represents, at large, the crisis of democracy itself and any attempt to understand the attack on public schooling and higher education cannot be separated from the wider assault on all forms of public life not driven by the logic of the market (Giroux, 2003:7) “Fin al lucro en educación, nuestros sueños no les pertenecen” (end profit making in education, nobody owns our dreams 1 ) (slogan of the Chilean student movement, inspired by the French student uprisings of May-June 1968) Over the past four decades, as the economic and ideological depravity of neoliberal policy and its market-driven logic (D. W. Hursh and Henderson, 2011) has been brought to bear on every aspect of education, the very concept of ‘public’ has been negated. Characteristics such as user-pays, competition, assaults on teachers, and mass standardised-testing and rankings, are among the features of a schooling, which is now very much seen as a private rather than public good (Giroux, 2003). The question of public education as a democratic force for the radical transformation of a violently unjust society seems rarely if ever asked, and a dangerous co-option and weakening of the language and practice of progressive pedagogy has occurred to the extent that notions of inclusion and success are increasingly limited to narrowly conceived individualist and competitive measures of market advantage. As Giroux notes “the forces of neo-liberalism dissolve public issues into utterly privatised and individualistic concerns (2004:62), and despite ongoing official rhetoric “the only form of citizenship increasingly being offered to young people is consumerism” (2003:7). Neoliberal education sees students and young people as passive consumers, the emphasis of schooling on learning how to be governed rather than how to govern (Giroux, 2003:7). In such a context the space for a public pedagogy, based on challenging the hegemony of neoliberal ideology and aligned with collective resistance, appears limited at best. And yet, every day people, teachers, students and communities do engage in political struggle, enacting pedagogies that seek to unveil rather than continue to mask the political structures and organisation that ensures power remains in the hands of the few, and at the service of the few, at the expense of the rest of us. Giroux characterises public pedagogies as defined by hope, struggle and a politicisation of the education process. He argues for …a politics of resistance that extends beyond the classroom as part of a broader struggle to challenge those forces of neo-liberalism that currently wage war against all collective structures capable of defending vital social institutions as a public good (Giroux, 2003:14). Central to Giroux’s argument is the need for critical educators to look to, value, and engage in and with social movements as they emerge and develop as sites of resistance. To …take sides, speak out, and engage in the hard work of debunking corporate culture’s assault on teaching and learning, orient their teaching for social change, connect learning to public life and link knowledge to the operations of power (Giroux, 2004:77). He argues that “progressive education in an age of rampant neoliberalism requires an expanded notion of the public, pedagogy, solidarity, and democratic struggle” (Giroux, 2003:13), and that moreover, educators need to work against a “politics of certainty” and instead develop and engage in pedagogical practice that problematises the world and fosters a sense of collective resistance and hope (2003:14). A neoliberal vision of the ‘good citizen’ and ‘good student’ presumes passivity, acceptance of the status quo and an individualistic disposition. Critical pedagogues must seek out and embrace opportunities to support and celebrate collective political action, not only because it develops a sense of social and political agency but also because it constitutes a powerful basis for authentic learning and active and critical citizenship in an unjust world (Freire, 1970). The Chilean student movement stands as one such example of challenging and inspiring counter-practice and a reclaiming of pedagogy as political and public. For ten years students have filled Chile’s streets, occupied their schools and universities, and organised conferences, public Remaking education from below: the Chilean student movement as public pedagogy 499 meetings, political stunts, creative actions and protests. Students and young people have been at the centre of the largest and most sustained political action seen in Chile since the democratic movement of the 80s, which eventually forced out the Pinochet dictatorship. Despite global trends in the opposite direction, the Chilean students have fundamentally influenced a nationwide education reform program constituting significant changes to the existing system which has been described as an extreme example of market-driven policy (Valenzuela, Bellei, and Ríos, 2014:220). Most importantly, they have forced and led a nationwide dialogue on the question of education and social justice in Chile and an interrogation of the current, grossly inequitable and elitist model (Falabella, 2008). This article begins by reviewing the experiences of the Chilean student movement to date and offering a brief explanation of the historical development of the education system it seeks to dismantle. It then considers the movement as an example of public pedagogies, concluding with a discussion of how it might inform notions of radical educational practice and a return of the student and pedagogue as authentic and critical subjects. Counterspeech works- empirics prove it promotes inclusion needed for movements and resolves hate speech- censorship simply alienates others Calleros 95 Calleros, Charles R. “Paternalism, Counterspeech, and Campus Hate-Speech Codes: A Reply to Delgado and Yun” (Professor of Law, Arizona State University). HeinOnline. Arizona State Law Journal. 1995 However, campus communities that have creatively used this approach can attest to the surprising power of counterspeech. Examples of counterspeech to hateful racist and homophobic speech at Arizona State and Stanford Universities are especially illustrative.61 In an incident that attracted national attention, the campus community at Arizona State University ("A.S.U.") constructively and constitutionally responded to a racist poster displayed on the outside of the speaker's dormitory door in February 1991. Entitled "WORK APPLICATION," it contained a number of ostensibly employment-related questions that advanced hostile and demeaning racial stereotypes of African-Americans and Mexican-Americans. Carla Washington, one of a group of African- American women who found the poster, used her own speech to persuade a resident of the offending room voluntarily to take the poster down and allow her to photocopy it. After sending a copy of the poster to the campus newspaper along with an opinion letter deploring its racist stereotypes, she demanded action from the director of her residence hall. The director organized an immediate meeting of the dormitory residents to discuss the issues. In this meeting, I explained why the poster was protected by the First Amendment, and the women who found the poster eloquently described their pain and fears. One of the women, Nichet Smith, voiced her fear that all nonminorities on campus shared the hostile stereotypes expressed in the poster. Dozens of residents expressed their support and gave assurances that they did not share the hostile stereotypes, but they conceded that even the most tolerant among them knew little about the cultures of others and would 62 benefit greatly from multicultural education. The need for multicultural education to combat intercultural ignorance and stereotyping became the theme of a press conference and public rally organized by the student African-American Coalition leader, Rossie Turman, who opted for highly visible counterspeech despite demands from some students and staff to discipline the owner of the offending poster. The result was a series of opinion letters in the campus newspaper discussing the problem of racism, numerous workshops on race relations and free speech, and overwhelming approval in the Faculty Senate of a measure to add a course on American cultural diversity to the undergraduate breadth 63 requirement. The four women who initially confronted the racist poster were empowered by the meeting at the dormitory residence and later received awards from the local chapter of the NAACP for their activism.64 Rossie Turman was rewarded for his leadership skills two years later by becoming the first African-American elected President of Associated Students of A.S.U.,65 a student body that numbered approximately 40,000 students, only 66 2.3 percent of them African-American. Although Delgado and Yun are quite right that the African-American students should never have been burdened with the need to respond to such hateful speech, Hentoff is correct that the responses just described helped them develop a sense of self-reliance and constructive activism. Moreover, the students' counterspeech inspired a community response that lightened the students' burden and provided them with a sense of community support and empowerment. Indeed, the students received assistance from faculty and administrators, who helped organize meetings, wrote opinion letters, spoke before the Faculty Senate, or joined the students in issuing public statements at the press conference and public rally.67 Perhaps most important, campus administrators wisely refrained from disciplining the owners of the poster, thus directing public attention to the issue of racism and ensuring broad community support in denouncing the racist poster. Many members of the campus and surrounding communities might have leapt to the racist speaker's defense had the state attempted to discipline the speaker and thus had created a First Amendment issue. Instead, they remained united with the offended students because the glare of the public spotlight remained sharply focused on the racist incident without the distraction of cries of state censorship. Although the counterspeech was not aimed primarily at influencing the hearts and minds of the residents of the offending dormitory room, its vigor in fact caught the residents by surprise. 68 It prompted at least three of them to apologize publicly and to display curiosity about a civil rights movement that they were too young to have witnessed first hand. 69 This effective use of education and counterspeech is not an isolated instance at A.S.U., but has been repeated on several occasions, albeit on smaller scales.7° One year after the counterspeech at A.S.U., Stanford University responded similarly to homophobic speech. In that case, a first-year law student sought to attract disciplinary proceedings and thus gain First Amendment martyrdom by shouting hateful homophobic statements about a dormitory staff member. The dean of students stated that the speaker was not subject to discipline under Stanford's code of conduct but called on the university community to speak out on the issue, triggering an avalanche of counterspeech. Students, staff, faculty, and administrators expressed their opinions in letters to the campus newspaper, in comments on a poster board at the law school, in a published petition signed by 400 members of the law school community disassociating the law school from the speaker's epithets, and in a letter written by several law students reporting the incident to a prospective employer of the offending student.71 The purveyor of hate speech indeed had made a point about the power of speech, just not the one he had intended. He had welcomed disciplinary sanctions as a form of empowerment, but the Stanford community was alert enough to catch his verbal hardball and throw it back with ten times the force. Thus, the argument that counterspeech is preferable to state suppression of offensive speech is stronger and more fully supported by experience than is conceded by Delgado and Yun. In both of the cases described above, the targets of hateful speech were supported by a community united against bigotry. The community avoided splitting into factions because the universities eliminated the issue of censorship by quickly announcing that the hateful speakers were protected from disciplinary retaliation. Indeed, the counterspeech against the bigotry was so powerful in each case that it underscored the need for top administrators to develop standards for, and some limitations on, their participation in such partisan speech. 72 Of course, the community action in these cases was effective and empowering precisely because a community against bigotry existed. At A.S.U. and Stanford, as at most universities, the overwhelming majority of students, faculty, and staff are persons of tolerance and good will who deplore at least the clearest forms of bigotry and are ready to speak out Of course, the community action in these cases was effective and empowering precisely because a community against bigotry existed. At A.S.U. and Stanford, as at most universities, the overwhelming majority of students, faculty, and staff are persons of tolerance and good will who deplore at least the clearest forms of bigotry and are ready to speak out against intolerance when it is isolated as an issue rather than diluted in muddied waters along with concerns of censorship. Just as the nonviolent demonstrations of Martin Luther King, Jr., depended partly for their success on the consciences of the national and international audiences monitoring the fire hoses and attack dogs on their television sets and in the print media,73 the empowerment of the targets of hateful speech rests partly in the hands of members of the campus community who sympathize with them. One can hope that the counterspeech and educational measures used with success at A.S.U. and Stanford stand a good chance of preserving an atmosphere of civility in intellectual inquiry at any campus community in which compassionate, open minds predominate. On the other hand, counterspeech by the targets of hate speech could be less empowering on a campus in which the majority of students, faculty, and staff approve of hostile epithets directed toward members of minority groups. One hopes that such campuses are exceedingly rare; although hostile racial stereotyping among college students in the United States increased during the last decade, those students who harbored significant hostilities (as contrasted with more pervasive but less openly hostile, subconscious racism) still represented a modest fraction of all students.74 Moreover, even in a pervasively hostile atmosphere, counterspeech might still be more effective than broad restrictions on speech.
Even if the militarism framing is wrong- discussion and education on the issue creates responsible citizens in other areas by enabling them to think about the world in a different way Evans and Giroux 16, Brad Evans and Henry Giroux, The Violence of Forgetting, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/opinion/the-violence-of-forgetting.htmlB.E.: Considering Hannah Arendt’s warning that the forces of domination and exploitation require “thoughtlessness” on behalf of the oppressors, how is the capacity to think freely and in an informed way key to providing a counter to violent practices? H.G.: Young people can learn to challenge violence, like those in the antiwar movement of the early ’70s or today in the Black Lives Matter movement. Education does more than create critically minded, socially responsible citizens. It enables young people and others to challenge authority by connecting individual troubles to wider systemic concerns. This notion of education is especially important given that racialized violence, violence against women and the ongoing assaults on public goods cannot be solved on an individual basis. Violence maims not only the body but also the mind and spirit. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, it lies “on the side of belief and persuasion.” If we are to counter violence by offering young people ways to think differently about their world and the choices before them, they must be empowered to recognize themselves in any analysis of violence, and in doing so to acknowledge that it speaks to their lives meaningfully. There is no genuine democracy without an informed public. While there are no guarantees that a critical education will prompt individuals to contest various forms of oppression and violence, it is clear that in the absence of a formative democratic culture, critical thinking will increasingly be trumped by anti-intellectualism, and walls and war will become the only means to resolve global challenges. Creating such a culture of education, however, will not be easy in a society that links the purpose of education with being competitive in a global economy.There is a growing culture of conformity and quietism on university campuses, made evident in the current call for safe spaces and trigger warnings. This is not just conservative reactionism, but is often carried out by liberals who believe they are acting with the best intentions. Violence comes in many forms and can be particularly disturbing when confronted in an educational setting if handled dismissively or in ways that blame victims. Yet troubling knowledge cannot be condemned on the basis of making students uncomfortable, especially if the desire for safety serves merely to limit access to difficult knowledge and the resources needed to analyze it. Critical education should be viewed as the art of the possible rather than a space organized around timidity, caution and fear. Creating safe spaces runs counter to the notion that learning should be unsettling, that students should challenge common sense assumptions and be willing to confront disturbing realities despite discomfort. The political scientist Wendy Brown rightly argues that the “domain of free public speech is not one of emotional safety or reassurance,” and is “ not what the public sphere and political speech promise.” A university education should, Brown writes, “ call you to think, question, doubt” and “ incite you to question everything you assume, think you know or care about.” This is particularly acute when dealing with pedagogies of violence and oppression. While there is a need to be ethically sensitive to the subject matter, our civic responsibility requires, at times, confronting truly intolerable conditions. The desire for emotionally safe spaces can be invoked to protect one’s sense of privilege — especially in the privileged sites of university education. This is further compounded by the frequent attempts by students to deny some speakers a platform because their views are controversial. While the intentions may be understandable, this is a dangerous road to go down. Confronting the intolerable should be challenging and upsetting. Who could read the testimonies of Primo Levi and not feel intellectually and emotionally exhausted? Or Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, not to mention those of Malcolm X? It is the conditions that produce violence that should upset us ethically and prompt us to act responsibly, rather than to capitulate to a privatized emotional response that substitutes a therapeutic language for a political and worldly one. Underview
All theory arguments have an implicit aff flex standard- the most recent empirics of late elim rounds show huge neg side bias Adler 15, Are Judges Just Guessing? A Statistical Analysis of LD Elimination Round Panels by Steven Adler http://nsdupdate.com/2015/03/30/are-judges-just-guessing-a-statistical-analysis-of-ld-elimination-round-panels-by-steven-adler/ Yet a plausible objection here might be that maybe the elimination round data need to be further segmented. For instance, perhaps the data do not meet this randomization because judges can easily distinguish between winners and losers in early elimination rounds, which typically contain more-lopsided matchups, but that in late elimination rounds the decision is much murkier. In fact, I find some support for this hypothesis, though it may be an artifact of a smaller sample-size for this segment.To evaluate this hypothesis, I replicated the above analysis, but pared down to the 36 coded rounds that took place in quarterfinals or later. In these rounds, the Neg side-bias was even more pronounced, with Neg winning 61 of elimination rounds, so the ‘expected’ randomization rate on ballots to achieve such an overall win-rate would be 57 for the Neg and 43 for the Aff. This creates the following expected distribution, compared to the actual observed distribution for these late elimination rounds: 2. Vote aff if I win a counter-interp a. AFF flex – negative has the ability to win on either layer so the aff needs the same ability in the 2ar. 2AR is too short to win a new shell and play defense against the 2NR theory arguments so the AFF needs reciprocal layers rather than adding more unreciprocal avenues. That’s not a problem in the long 2nr. b. reciprocity- Only the neg can read T because only the aff has a burden to be topical. Thus the aff needs an RVI to compensate for the neg’s unique avenue to the ballot. 3. On T, prefer reasonable aff interps. The judge should use reasonability with a bright line of the presence of link and impact turn ground for the negative. Since he has equal access to offense, there’s no abuse because structural access to the ballot is the same. A. There are multiple legitimate interpretations of the topic and the aff goes into the round with no knowledge of 1NC strategy. I had to choose between mutually exclusive interps and the neg can always read T so don’t punish me for having to set grounds. B. Increases topical clash by avoiding unnecessary theory C. I can’t read T on the neg and the NC is reactive, so he can always pick a strategy that adapts to meet my AC and give him a shot at winning the round. 4. Semantic considerations are Racist- Niemi 15, Rebar, Mr. Nebel’s neighborhood, OR Nebel Tea– I sip it, 2015, http://premierdebatetoday.com/2015/09/22/nebel-t-i-sip-it/ Though I believe Mr. Nebel to be fundamentally wrong on the debate theoretical level, I have a more serious objection. I will make this claim in the strongest terms I possibly can. Correctness is racism. Correctness is “you must be either a boy or a girl or you are wrong.” Correctness is “the ideal functioning body versus all others.” Correctness is one kind of person having access to The Truth and others lacking it. Correctness is “sit down and shut up.” Correctness is “your kind aren’t welcome here.” Any debater who runs so called “Nebel T” and any judge who votes for this argument must acknowledge that they are situationally and strategically embracing a perspective from which there is an implicit or explicit metric of what it means to be a competent english speaker. What is the logical conclusion of speaking competent english? The notion that “mongrel” forms of english are inferior, diminished, unpersuasive, and should not have access to the ballot. Quite possibly the notion that those who can’t live up to these standards should not be involved in debate. After all, their dialects are not what resolutions are written in – it is people like Mr. Nebel whose dialect prescribes correct resolutional meaning. You may say that “competent speakers” was a rhetorical flourish, I am nitpicking, and that Mr. Nebel should certainly be allowed to take back his offensive speech. I will say this: the competent english speaker, aka the correct type of thinking and being, is the fundamental goal and top-level value that Mr. Nebel appeals to throughout his articles. If this is “not what he meant” then he did not mean that debaters should pay any attention to nor follow his logic. Either he defends correctness or he concedes the irrelevance and negative impacts to fairness and education of his position. Nebel may appeal to pragmatics as a way out of the appeal to correctness, but in fact, his pragmatic claims are a pragmatic justification for correctness. This concedes pragmatics first anyway, and that so to speak, is a flow I can win on. It is my opinion that there is no in or out of round benefit that correctness could provide sufficient to outweigh the toxicity of its implementation and rhetorical methodology.
3/18/17
JF - 1AC - Util
Tournament: Harvard Westlake RR | Round: 4 | Opponent: Lynbrook HW | Judge: timmons and torson Util 1AC AC Framework
Psychological evidence proves we don’t identify with our future selves. Continuous personal identity doesn’t exist. Opar 14 (Alisa Opar is the articles editor at Audubon magazine; cites Hal Hershfield, an assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business; and Emily Pronin, a psychologist at Princeton) “Why We Procrastinate” Nautilus January 2014 The British philosopher Derek Parfit espoused a severely reductionist view of personal identity in his seminal book, Reasons and Persons: It does not exist, at least not in the way we usually consider it. We humans, Parfit argued, are not a consistent identity moving through time, but a chain of successive selves, each tangentially linked to, and yet distinct from, the previous and subsequent ones. The boy who begins to smoke despite knowing that he may suffer from the habit decades later should not be judged harshly: “This boy does not identify with his future self,” Parfit wrote. “His attitude towards this future self is in some ways like his attitude to other people.” Parfit’s view was controversial even among philosophers. But psychologists are beginning to understand that it may accurately describe our attitudes towards our own decision-making: It turns out that we see our future selves as strangers. Though we will inevitably share their fates, the people we will become in a decade, quarter century, or more, are unknown to us. This impedes our ability to make good choices on their—which of course is our own—behalf. That bright, shiny New Year’s resolution? If you feel perfectly justified in breaking it, it may be because it feels like it was a promise someone else made. “It’s kind of a weird notion,” says Hal Hershfield, an assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “On a psychological and emotional level we really consider that future self as if it’s another person.” Using fMRI, Hershfield and colleagues studied brain activity changes when people imagine their future and consider their present. They homed in on two areas of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, which are more active when a subject thinks about himself than when he thinks of someone else. They found these same areas were more strongly activated when subjects thought of themselves today, than of themselves in the future. Their future self “felt” like somebody else. In fact, their neural activity when they described themselves in a decade was similar to that when they described Matt Damon or Natalie Portman. And subjects whose brain activity changed the most when they spoke about their future selves were the least likely to favor large long-term financial gains over small immediate ones. Emily Pronin, a psychologist at Princeton, has come to similar conclusions in her research. In a 2008 study, Pronin and her team told college students that they were taking part in an experiment on disgust that required drinking a concoction made of ketchup and soy sauce. The more they, their future selves, or other students consumed, they were told, the greater the benefit to science. Students who were told they’d have to down the distasteful quaff that day committed to consuming two tablespoons. But those that were committing their future selves (the following semester) or other students to participate agreed to guzzle an average of half a cup. We think of our future selves, says Pronin, like we think of others: in the third person. The disconnect between our present and time-shifted selves has real implications for how we make decisions. We might choose to procrastinate, and let some other version of our self deal with problems or chores. Or, as in the case of Parfit’s smoking boy, we can focus on that version of our self that derives pleasure, and ignore the one that pays the price. But if procrastination or irresponsibility can derive from a poor connection to your future self, strengthening this connection may prove to be an effective remedy. This is exactly the tactic that some researchers are taking. Anne Wilson, a psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, has manipulated people’s perception of time by presenting participants with timelines scaled to make an upcoming event, such as a paper due date, seem either very close or far off. “Using a longer timeline makes people feel more connected to their future selves,” says Wilson. That, in turn, spurred students to finish their assignment earlier, saving their end-of-semester self the stress of banging it out at the last minute. We think of our future selves, says Pronin, like we think of others: in the third person. Hershfield has taken a more high-tech approach. Inspired by the use of images to spur charitable donations, he and colleagues took subjects into a virtual reality room and asked them to look into a mirror. The subjects saw either their current self, or a digitally aged image of themselves (see the figure, Digital Old Age). When they exited the room, they were asked how they’d spend $1,000. Those exposed to the aged photo said they’d put twice as much into a retirement account as those who saw themselves unaged. This might be important news for parts of the finance industry. Insurance giant Allianz is funding a pilot project in the midwest in which Hershfield’s team will show state employees their aged faces when they make pension allocations. Merrill Edge, the online discount unit of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has taken this approach online, with a service called Face Retirement. Each decade-jumping image is accompanied by startling cost-of-living projections and suggestions to invest in your golden years. Hershfield is currently investigating whether morphed images can help people lose weight. Of course, the way we treat our future self is not necessarily negative: Since we think of our future self as someone else, our own decision making reflects how we treat other people. This proves util – a. If a person isn’t a continuous unit, it doesn’t matter how goods are distributed among people, which supports util since util only maximizes benefits, ignoring distribution across people. b. Other theories assume identity matters. Util’s the only possible theory if identity is irrelevant. 2. States have no act-omission distinction which means they are responsible for the state of affairs they bring about, so constraint based theories collapse to util. Sunstein and Vermule 05 (Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermuele, “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life-Life Tradeoffs,” Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper No. 85 (March 2005), p. 17.) In our view, both the argument from causation and the argument from intention go wrong by overlooking the distinctive features of government as a moral agent. Whatever the general status of the act-omission distinction as a matter of moral philosophy,38 the distinction is least impressive when applied to government.39 The most fundamental point is that unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice between or among possible policies for regulating third parties. The distinction between acts and omissions may not be intelligible in this context, and even if it is, the distinction does not make a morally relevant difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do anything, or refusing to act.40 Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized private action—for example, private killing—becomes obscure when the government formally forbids private action, but chooses a set of policy instruments that do not adequately or fully discourage it. If there is no act-omission distinction, then government is fully complicit with any harm it allows, so decisions are moral if they minimize harm. All means based and side constraint theories collapse because two violations require aggregation. Outweighs- The state is inevitable- speaking the language of power through policymaking is the only way to create social change in debate. Coverstone 5 Alan Coverstone (masters in communication from Wake Forest, longtime debate coach) “Acting on Activism: Realizing the Vision of Debate with Pro-social Impact” Paper presented at the National Communication Association Annual Conference November 17th 2005 Powerful personal narratives unconnected to political power are regularly co-opted by those who do learn the language of power. One need look no further than the annual state of the Union Address where personal story after personal story is used to support the political agenda of those in power. The so-called role-playing that public policy contest debates encourage promotes active learning of the vocabulary and levers of power in America. Imagining the ability to use our own arguments to influence government action is one of the great virtues of academic debate. Gerald Graff (2003) analyzed the decline of argumentation in academic discourse and found a source of student antipathy to public argument in an interesting place. I’m up against…their aversion to the role of public spokesperson that formal writing presupposes. It’s as if such students can’t imagine any rewards for being a public actor or even imagining themselves in such a role. This lack of interest in the public sphere may in turn reflect a loss of confidence in the possibility that the arguments we make in public will have an effect on the world. Today’s students’ lack of faith in the power of persuasion reflects the waning of the ideal of civic participation that led educators for centuries to place rhetorical and argumentative training at the center of the school and college curriculum. (Graff, 2003, p. 57) The power to imagine public advocacy that actually makes a difference is one of the great virtues of the traditional notion of fiat that critics deride as mere simulation. Simulation of success in the public realm is far more empowering to students than completely abandoning all notions of personal power in the face of governmental hegemony by teaching students that “nothing they can do in a contest debate can ever make any difference in public policy.” Contest debating is well suited to rewarding public activism if it stops accepting as an article of faith that personal agency is somehow undermined by the so-called role playing in debate. Debate is role-playing whether we imagine government action or imagine individual action. Imagining myself starting a socialist revolution in America is no less of a fantasy than imagining myself making a difference on Capitol Hill. Furthermore, both fantasies influenced my personal and political development virtually ensuring a life of active, pro-social, political participation. Neither fantasy reduced the likelihood that I would spend my life trying to make the difference I imagined. One fantasy actually does make a greater difference: the one that speaks the language of political power. The other fantasy disables action by making one a laughingstock to those who wield the language of power. Fantasy motivates and role-playing trains through visualization. Until we can imagine it, we cannot really do it. Role-playing without question teaches students to be comfortable with the language of power, and that language paves the way for genuine and effective political activism. Debates over the relative efficacy of political strategies for pro-social change must confront governmental power at some point. 3. Phenomenal introspection is the only accessible process for normative judgments, and entails happiness is good. Sinhababu Neil Sinhababu (National University of Singapore). “The epistemic argument for hedonism.” No date. “To use phenomenal introspection is to look inward at one's subjective experience, or phenomenology, and determine what it’s it is like. One can use phenomenal introspection reliably while dreaming or hallucinating, as long as one can determine what the dream or hallucination is like. By itself, phenomenal introspection produces no beliefs about things outside experience, or about relations between our experiences and non-experiential things. It cannot by itself produce judgments about the rightness of actions or the goodness of non-experiential things, as these are located outside of experience. Phenomenal introspection can be wrong, but is generally reliable. As experience is rich in detail, one could get some of the details wrong in one's belief. Under adverse conditions when one has false expectations about what one's experiences will be, or when one is in an extreme emotional state, one might make larger errors. Paradigmatically reliable processes like vision share these failings. Vision sometimes produces false beliefs under adverse conditions, or when we are looking at complex things. It is, nevertheless, fairly reliable. The view that phenomenal introspection is unreliable about our phenomenal states is about as radical as skepticism about the reliability of vision. While contemporary psychologists reject introspection into one's motivations and other causal processes as unreliable, phenomenal introspection fares better. Daniel Kahneman, for example, writes that “experienced utility is best measured by moment-based methods that assess the experience of the present.”20 Even those most skeptical about the reliability of phenomenal introspection, like Eric Schwitzgebel, concede that if we can reliably introspect whether we are in serious pain. Then we should be able to introspectively determine what pain is like. I assume the reliability of phenomenal introspection in what follows. One can form a variety of beliefs using phenomenal introspection. For example, one can believe that one is having sound experiences of particular noises and visual experiences of different shades of color. When looking at a lemon and considering the phenomenal states that are yellow experiences, one can form some beliefs about their intrinsic features – for example, that they are bright experiences. And when considering experiences of pleasure, one can make some judgments about their intrinsic features – for example, that they are good experiences. Just as one can look inward at one's experience of lemon yellow and appreciate its brightness, one can look inward at one's experience of pleasure and appreciate its goodness. When I consider a situation of increasing pleasure, I can form the belief that things are better than they were before, in the same way I form the belief that there is more brightness in my visual field as lemon yellow replaces black..”” (712) This justifies util. Sinhababu 2 Neil Sinhababu (National University of Singapore). “The epistemic argument for hedonism.” No date. “Even though phenomenal introspection only tells me about my own phenomenal states, I can know that others' pleasure is good. Of course, I cannot phenomenally introspect their pleasures any more than I can phenomenally introspect pleasures that I will experience next year. But if I consider my experiences of lemon yellow and ask what it would be like if others had the same experiences, I must think that they would be having bright experiences. Similarly, if in a pleasant moment I consider what it is it’s like when others have exactly the experience I am I’m having, I must think that they are having good experiences. If they have exactly the same experiences I am having, their experiences will have exactly the same intrinsic properties as mine. This is also how I know that if I have the same experience in the future, it will have the same intrinsic properties. Even though the only pleasure I can introspect is mine now, Thus I should believe that pleasures experienced by others and myself at other times are good, just as I should believe that yellow experienced by others and myself at other times is bright. My argument thus favors the kind of universal hedonism that supports utilitarianism, not egoistic hedonism” 4. The only way that we know an action is good or bad is through its results. A violation of a constraint might be bad because it results in treating someone as a means. Talking about how we can only know intent does nothing for you: consequentialists concede this, and speculate about end states based on the aims of the actions. Thus, the standard is maximizing expected well-being. I defend the whole resolution – i.e., a world in which public colleges do not restrict any constitutionally protected free speech, however, I will accept neg preferences on issues of spec and implementation.
Advantage 1 - Dissent The alt right is energized in the status quo—limits on free speech are just being used to sustain white supremacy Harkinson 12/6 (Josh, reporter @ mother jones, “The Push to Enlist "Alt-Right" Recruits on College Campuses,” December 6, 2016, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/12/richard-spencer-alt-right-college-activism/) How much support is there for the loose-knit coalition of white nationalists and other far-right extremists known as the "alt-right"? Despite a spike in media coverage for the movement in the wake of Donald Trump's victory, a recent conference hosted by white nationalist Richard Spencer, who coined the term "alt-right," drew only about 275 attendees in Washington, DC. And after a video from the event went viral, showing audience members giving Nazi salutes to Spencer's cry of "hail Trump," the movement faced a fierce backlash. Although Trump named alt-right hero Stephen Bannon as his chief White House strategist, the president-elect went on to disavow the alt-right—in general terms, at least—in an interview with the New York Times. The movement gained momentum online in 2016 but is no longer just about social media, says Spencer; he sees a need to prove that the alt-right can attract supporters in the real world. And he says the best place to do that is on college campuses, starting with a speech he plans to deliver on Tuesday on the campus of Texas AandM University. "People in college are at this point in their lives where they are actually open to alternative perspectives, for better and for worse," Spencer says. "I think you do need to get them while they are young. I think rewiring the neurons of someone over 50 is effectively impossible." Recruiting on college campuses has long been a goal for "academic racists" such as Jared Taylor and Peter Brimelow, a white nationalist whom Spencer helped bring to Duke University for an event in 2007, when Spencer was a student there. In May, Spencer and other white nationalists set up a "safe space" on the University of California-Berkeley's Sproul Plaza to discuss "how race affects people of European heritage." This outweighs- even if day to day racism might be lower, these ideologies have become politically instituted into the mainstream. This means it’s try or die- hate speech is incredibly high now, it’s just a question of engagement from the other side. Roberts 16 (Stephen, writer @ political storm, “The Alt-Right: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly,” December 2, 2016, http://www.politicalstorm.com/alt-right-good-bad-ugly/) The ugly. There is also a virulent strain of white supremacism at work within the alt-right. Nationalism, when coupled with ethnicity, becomes downright racism. We must display caution here (in a way that many in the alt-right do not): not all of the alt-right are white supremacists. It would be supremely unfair to loop President-elect Trump in with this group simply because they supported him. Even Steve Bannon—former Breitbart editor and current Trump advisor—should not be called a white supremacist for expressing sympathy toward some of alt-rights aims, like nationalism. At the same time, we cannot entirely decouple Bannon and others from the more virulent strains. When popular pundits like Ann Coulter can peddle in the language of the alt-right—using terms like “cuckservative,” for example—she is peddling those virulent views into the mainstream. By providing outlets for elements of this movement that are far beyond the paleoconservative pale, figures like Coulter are generating greater publicity and acceptance for it. The GOP, in particular, must be especially concerned about this movement. It lends itself to the outdated stereotype of the GOP as the racist, misogynistic party. There is nothing wrong with being a nationalist—in fact, renewed patriotism and concern for our national well-being should be strongly encouraged. One can be an anti-PC iconoclast, however, without engaging in the same level of mockery that one would typically expect of the elites. The GOP should carefully distinguish between the populist movement, which swept Trump into power, and the alt-right—and then excise the latter. Being able to speak out is key to solve- a) It allows us to identify racists, see their viewpoints, and it counter effectively. ACLU 16. American Civil Liberties Union. For almost 100 years, the ACLU has worked to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States., “Hate Speech on Campus”, ACLU, 2016. https://www.aclu.org/other/hate-speech-campus Where racist, sexist and homophobic speech is concerned, the ACLU believes that more speech -- not less -- is the best revenge. This is particularly true at universities, whose mission is to facilitate learning through open debate and study, and to enlighten. Speech codes are not the way to go on campuses, where all views are entitled to be heard, explored, supported or refuted. Besides, when hate is out in the open, people can see the problem. Then they can organize effectively to counter bad attitudes, possibly change them, and forge solidarity against the forces of intolerance.
b) It also leads to a bystander effect whereby people in the middle can also be convinced to stay away from that mindset though debate Malik 12 Kenan Malik, I am a writer, lecturer and broadcaster. My latest book is The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics, “why hate speech should not be banned”, April 12, 2012, https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/why-hate-speech-should-not-be-banned/ Second, in challenging obnoxious sentiments, we are not simply challenging those who spout such views; we are also challenging the potential audience for such views. Dismissing obnoxious or hateful views as not worthy of response may not be the best way of engaging with such an audience. Whether or not an obnoxious claim requires a reply depends, therefore, not simply on the nature of the claim itself, but also on the potential audience for that claim. c) Counterspeech works- empirics prove it promotes inclusion needed for movements and resolves hate speech- censorship simply alienates others Calleros 95 Calleros, Charles R. “Paternalism, Counterspeech, and Campus Hate-Speech Codes: A Reply to Delgado and Yun” (Professor of Law, Arizona State University). HeinOnline. Arizona State Law Journal. 1995 However, campus communities that have creatively used this approach can attest to the surprising power of counterspeech. Examples of counterspeech to hateful racist and homophobic speech at Arizona State and Stanford Universities are especially illustrative.61 In an incident that attracted national attention, the campus community at Arizona State University ("A.S.U.") constructively and constitutionally responded to a racist poster displayed on the outside of the speaker's dormitory door in February 1991. Entitled "WORK APPLICATION," it contained a number of ostensibly employment-related questions that advanced hostile and demeaning racial stereotypes of African-Americans and Mexican-Americans. Carla Washington, one of a group of African- American women who found the poster, used her own speech to persuade a resident of the offending room voluntarily to take the poster down and allow her to photocopy it. After sending a copy of the poster to the campus newspaper along with an opinion letter deploring its racist stereotypes, she demanded action from the director of her residence hall. The director organized an immediate meeting of the dormitory residents to discuss the issues. In this meeting, I explained why the poster was protected by the First Amendment, and the women who found the poster eloquently described their pain and fears. One of the women, Nichet Smith, voiced her fear that all nonminorities on campus shared the hostile stereotypes expressed in the poster. Dozens of residents expressed their support and gave assurances that they did not share the hostile stereotypes, but they conceded that even the most tolerant among them knew little about the cultures of others and would 62 benefit greatly from multicultural education. The need for multicultural education to combat intercultural ignorance and stereotyping became the theme of a press conference and public rally organized by the student African-American Coalition leader, Rossie Turman, who opted for highly visible counterspeech despite demands from some students and staff to discipline the owner of the offending poster. The result was a series of opinion letters in the campus newspaper discussing the problem of racism, numerous workshops on race relations and free speech, and overwhelming approval in the Faculty Senate of a measure to add a course on American cultural diversity to the undergraduate breadth 63 requirement. The four women who initially confronted the racist poster were empowered by the meeting at the dormitory residence and later received awards from the local chapter of the NAACP for their activism.64 Rossie Turman was rewarded for his leadership skills two years later by becoming the first African-American elected President of Associated Students of A.S.U.,65 a student body that numbered approximately 40,000 students, only 66 2.3 percent of them African-American. Although Delgado and Yun are quite right that the African-American students should never have been burdened with the need to respond to such hateful speech, Hentoff is correct that the responses just described helped them develop a sense of self-reliance and constructive activism. Moreover, the students' counterspeech inspired a community response that lightened the students' burden and provided them with a sense of community support and empowerment. Indeed, the students received assistance from faculty and administrators, who helped organize meetings, wrote opinion letters, spoke before the Faculty Senate, or joined the students in issuing public statements at the press conference and public rally.67 Perhaps most important, campus administrators wisely refrained from disciplining the owners of the poster, thus directing public attention to the issue of racism and ensuring broad community support in denouncing the racist poster. Many members of the campus and surrounding communities might have leapt to the racist speaker's defense had the state attempted to discipline the speaker and thus had created a First Amendment issue. Instead, they remained united with the offended students because the glare of the public spotlight remained sharply focused on the racist incident without the distraction of cries of state censorship. Although the counterspeech was not aimed primarily at influencing the hearts and minds of the residents of the offending dormitory room, its vigor in fact caught the residents by surprise. 68 It prompted at least three of them to apologize publicly and to display curiosity about a civil rights movement that they were too young to have witnessed first hand. 69 This effective use of education and counterspeech is not an isolated instance at A.S.U., but has been repeated on several occasions, albeit on smaller scales.7° One year after the counterspeech at A.S.U., Stanford University responded similarly to homophobic speech. In that case, a first-year law student sought to attract disciplinary proceedings and thus gain First Amendment martyrdom by shouting hateful homophobic statements about a dormitory staff member. The dean of students stated that the speaker was not subject to discipline under Stanford's code of conduct but called on the university community to speak out on the issue, triggering an avalanche of counterspeech. Students, staff, faculty, and administrators expressed their opinions in letters to the campus newspaper, in comments on a poster board at the law school, in a published petition signed by 400 members of the law school community disassociating the law school from the speaker's epithets, and in a letter written by several law students reporting the incident to a prospective employer of the offending student.71 The purveyor of hate speech indeed had made a point about the power of speech, just not the one he had intended. He had welcomed disciplinary sanctions as a form of empowerment, but the Stanford community was alert enough to catch his verbal hardball and throw it back with ten times the force. Thus, the argument that counterspeech is preferable to state suppression of offensive speech is stronger and more fully supported by experience than is conceded by Delgado and Yun. In both of the cases described above, the targets of hateful speech were supported by a community united against bigotry. The community avoided splitting into factions because the universities eliminated the issue of censorship by quickly announcing that the hateful speakers were protected from disciplinary retaliation. Indeed, the counterspeech against the bigotry was so powerful in each case that it underscored the need for top administrators to develop standards for, and some limitations on, their participation in such partisan speech. 72 Of course, the community action in these cases was effective and empowering precisely because a community against bigotry existed. At A.S.U. and Stanford, as at most universities, the overwhelming majority of students, faculty, and staff are persons of tolerance and good will who deplore at least the clearest forms of bigotry and are ready to speak out Of course, the community action in these cases was effective and empowering precisely because a community against bigotry existed. At A.S.U. and Stanford, as at most universities, the overwhelming majority of students, faculty, and staff are persons of tolerance and good will who deplore at least the clearest forms of bigotry and are ready to speak out against intolerance when it is isolated as an issue rather than diluted in muddied waters along with concerns of censorship. Just as the nonviolent demonstrations of Martin Luther King, Jr., depended partly for their success on the consciences of the national and international audiences monitoring the fire hoses and attack dogs on their television sets and in the print media,73 the empowerment of the targets of hateful speech rests partly in the hands of members of the campus community who sympathize with them. One can hope that the counterspeech and educational measures used with success at A.S.U. and Stanford stand a good chance of preserving an atmosphere of civility in intellectual inquiry at any campus community in which compassionate, open minds predominate. On the other hand, counterspeech by the targets of hate speech could be less empowering on a campus in which the majority of students, faculty, and staff approve of hostile epithets directed toward members of minority groups. One hopes that such campuses are exceedingly rare; although hostile racial stereotyping among college students in the United States increased during the last decade, those students who harbored significant hostilities (as contrasted with more pervasive but less openly hostile, subconscious racism) still represented a modest fraction of all students.74 Moreover, even in a pervasively hostile atmosphere, counterspeech might still be more effective than broad restrictions on speech. d) Britain empirically proves you can’t eliminate bigotry by banning it so any limitation empirically causes more violence. Malik 12 Kenan Malik, I am a writer, lecturer and broadcaster. My latest book is The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics, “why hate speech should not be banned”, April 12, 2012, https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/why-hate-speech-should-not-be-banned/ And in practice, you cannot reduce or eliminate bigotry simply by banning it. You simply let the sentiments fester underground. As Milton once put it, to keep out ‘evil doctrine’ by licensing is ‘like the exploit of that gallant man who thought to pound up the crows by shutting his Park-gate’. Take Britain. In 1965, Britain prohibited incitement to racial hatred as part of its Race Relations Act. The following decade was probably the most racist in British history. It was the decade of ‘Paki-bashing’, when racist thugs would seek out Asians to beat up. It was a decade of firebombings, stabbings, and murders. In the early 1980s, I was organizing street patrols in East London to protect Asian families from racist attacks. Nor were thugs the only problem. Racism was woven into the fabric of public institutions. The police, immigration officials – all were openly racist. In the twenty years between 1969 and 1989, no fewer than thirty-seven blacks and Asians were killed in police custody – almost one every six months. The same number again died in prisons or in hospital custody. When in 1982, cadets at the national police academy were asked to write essays about immigrants, one wrote, ‘Wogs, nignogs and Pakis come into Britain take up our homes, our jobs and our resources and contribute relatively less to our once glorious country. They are, by nature, unintelligent. And can’t at all be educated sufficiently to live in a civilised society of the Western world’. Another wrote that ‘all blacks are pains and should be ejected from society’. So much for incitement laws helping create a more tolerant society. Today, Britain is a very different place. Racism has not disappeared, nor have racist attacks, but the open, vicious, visceral bigotry that disfigured the Britain when I was growing up has largely ebbed away. It has done so not because of laws banning racial hatred but because of broader social changes and because minorities themselves stood up to the bigotry and fought back. Advantage 2 – Institutional Criticism Limiting free speech prevents criticism of institutions – universities will crack down on student press and critical opinions. Sanders ‘06 (Chris Sanders, "CENSORSHIP 101: ANTI-HAZELWOOD LAWS AND THE PRESERVATION OF FREE SPEECH AT COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES", 11/30/2006 , Alabama Law Review) Post-Hazelwood censorship disputes have not been limited to high schools; a number of colleges and universities have gotten in on the action as well. In 2003, the acting president of Hampton University in Virginia seized the entire press run of the student newspaper, Hampton Script, after it printed her letter responding to a story about a school cafeteria’s healthcode violations on page three, rather than on the front page as she requested.106 An Indiana university last year briefly instituted a policy to require students to get approval from the school’s marketing department before speaking with reporters.107 In Alabama, an art student sued in late 2005 after university officials removed his artwork, which included nudity, from an on-campus exhibit that cautioned visitors before they entered that some of the works might contain nudity.108 And a growing number of higher education institutions have begun to test the First Amendment’s boundaries by establishing “free speech zones” that limit the on-campus locations where citizens can express their grievances109 and by instituting (frequently overbroad) “speech codes” in an attempt to combat racial and sexual harassment.110 In today’s atmosphere of increasing collegiate regulation of student speech, the application of the Hazelwood test to universities could unintentionally cripple college journalism. Because most colleges’ student publications receive some form of financial assistance from the university—either directly through student fee allocations or indirectly through the provision of free or low-cost office space or equipment—the Hazelwood framework established for school-sponsored student expression potentially could apply to the vast majority of college publications.111 Such an outcome would leave student newspaper or yearbook editors in a difficult position: Do they play nice and allow administrators to exercise prior review, which could convert their publications into little more than propaganda-laden puff pieces, or do they stick to their ethical guns and risk funding cuts or worse? Under Hazelwood, college editors would be forced to conduct a cost-benefit analysis when faced with a column that expresses an unpopular opinion or a story that could make their school look bad. Inevitably, like many of their high school counterparts, some might decide to forego the hassle.112 The fallout from Hazelwood’s application to colleges would not be limited to newspapers and yearbooks.113 Other forms of student expression, such as a student group’s choice of speaker or performance artist, could be subject to administrative veto. Newly created publications would be especially vulnerable, as they would likely have a more difficult time demonstrating their status as a public forum than established publications. Even professors could wake up one day to discover that the academic freedom they have cherished for so long is now nothing more than “a professional courtesy that college administrators may lawfully disregard on pedagogical grounds.”114 If Hazelwood arrives on college campuses, it is difficult to see a stopping point for the wreckage it could leave in its wake. The idea that the authority figures become the arbiter of acceptable speech causes a crack down on dissent and kills minority views from even being heard in the first place. Fisher 17 (Anthony L. Fisher, associate editor at Reason.com, where his beats include criminal justice, civil liberties, free speech, and foreign affairs. He is also a sports and culture columnist at The Week.). “The free speech problem on campus is real. It will ultimately hurt dissidents”. Vox, Jan 2, 2017. http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/13/13931524/free-speech-pen-america-campus-censorship RC It’s already happening. Just ask the Palestinian activists whose boycott campaigns against Israel have has been deemed hate speech by a number of public universities, and whose future political activities could be endangered by an act of Congress. Just this month, the Senate unanimously passed the "Anti-Semitism Awareness Act,” which directs the Department of Education to use the bill's contents as a guideline when adjudicating complaints of anti-Semitism on campus. Among the speech-chilling components of the bill, the political (and subjective) act of judging Israel by an "unfair double standard" could be considered hate speech. To cite other examples of unintended consequences of the crackdown on “offensive” speech, a black student at the University of Michigan was punished for calling another student “white trash,” and conservative law students at Georgetown claimed they were “traumatized” when an email critical of deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia landed in their inboxes. The PEN America report also notes the Foundation for Individual Rights’ analysis of hundreds of campuses with “severely restrictive” speech codes. While a number of these campuses don't aggressively enforce their speech codes, the rules remain on the books; more than a dozen such codes have been overturned in the courts. What’s even more concerning is the increasingly popular notion that some ideas, such as opposition to abortion, should simply be “non-platformed" — that is, deemed unworthy of even being heard on campus. Although the trend of denying contentious speakers such as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice or refugee turned Dutch politician and critic of Islam Ayaan Hirsi Ali public platforms by "disinviting" them from campus is disconcerting, it is not censorship. However, a pro-choice group physically blocking the display of a pro-life group on the campus of the University of Georgia is a form of censorship. As is the case of University of California Santa Barbara professor Mireille Miller-Young, who assaulted a young woman holding a pro-life placard including graphic imagery in a "free speech" zone on campus and stole her sign. When the young woman objected to the theft of her property, Miller-Young replied, "I may be a thief, but you're a terrorist." Like it or not, almost half of all Americans consider themselves pro-life. Banning their perspective from campus won't win over converts, and it’s both immoral and counterproductive to declare completely legitimate political perspectives beyond the pale. Think of antiwar protests or demonstrations in support of integration when both causes were broadly unpopular, and then try to consider a majority on campus declaring their school a "safe space" from such "offensive" expressions of free speech. Criticism of institutions is key to preventing mass government violence endless warfare. D’Souza 96 Frances, Prof. Anthropology Oxford, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/hearings/19960425/droi/freedom_en.htm?textMode=on There are undoubted connections between access to information, or rather the lack of it, and war, as indeed there are between poverty, the right to freedom of expression and development. One can argue that democracy aims to increase participation in political and other decision-making at all levels. In this sense democracy empowers people. The poor are denied access to information on decisions which deeply affect their lives, are thus powerless and have no voice; the poor are not able to have influence over their own lives, let alone other aspect of society. Because of this essential powerlessness, the poor are unable to influence the ruling elite in whose interests it may be to initiate conflict and wars in order to consolidate their own power and position. Of the 126 developing countries listed in the 1993 Human Development Report, war was ongoing in 30 countries and severe civil conflict in a further 33 countries. Of the total 63 countries in conflict, 55 are towards the bottom scale of the human development index which is an indicator of poverty. There seems to be no doubt that there is a clear association between poverty and war. It is reasonably safe to assume that the vast majority of people do not ever welcome war. They are normally coerced, more often than not by propaganda, into fear, extreme nationalist sentiments and war by their governments. If the majority of people had a democratic voice they would undoubtedly object to war. But voices are silenced. Thus, the freedom to express one's views and to challenge government decisions and to insist upon political rather than violent solutions, are necessary aspects of democracy which can, and do, avert war. Government sponsored propaganda in Rwanda, as in former Yugoslavia, succeeded because there weren't the means to challenge it. One has therefore to conclude that it is impossible for a particular government to wage war in the absence of a compliant media willing to indulge in government propaganda. This is because the government needs civilians to fight wars for them and also because the media is needed to re-inforce government policies and intentions at every turn. In a totalitarian state where the expression of political views, let alone the possibility of political organis-ation, is strenuously suppressed, one has to ask what other options are open to a genuine political movement intent on introducing justice. All too often the only perceived option is terrorist attack and violence because it is, quite literally, the only method available to communicate the need for change. Advantage 3 – Co-Option Injurious speech is specifically conditioned by a history of social normalization. Strategies that account for the damage of the utterance in the moment cannot solve for the violence that precedes and follows the moment. BUTLER 97 “Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performativity” by Judith Butler 1997 As utterances, they work to the extent that they are given in the form of a ritual, that is, repeated in time, and, hence, maintain a sphere of operation that is not restricted to the moment of the utterance itself. The illocutionary speech act performs its deed at the moment of the utterance, and yet to the extent that the moment is ritualized, it is never merely a single moment. The "moment" in ritual is a condensed historicity: it exceeds itself in past and future directions, an effect of prior and future invocations that constitute and escape the instance of utterance.” (Pg. 3) Implications-
Censorship is guaranteed failure-- It prevents survival strategies and it requires using injurious speech in its own critique. This ensures recirculation. BUTLER 2 “Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performativity” by Judith Butler 1997 “Neither view can account for the restaging and resignifying of offensive utterance, deployments of linguistic power that seek at once to expose and counter the offensive exercise of speech. I will consider these at greater length in the chapters to come, but consider for a moment how often such terms are subject to resignification. Such a redoubling of injurious speech takes place not only in rap music and in various forms of political parody and satire, but in the political and social critique of such speech, where "mentioning" those very terms is crucial to the arguments at hand, and even in the legal arguments that make the call for censorship, in which the rhetoric that is deplored is invariably proliferated within the context of legal speech. Paradoxically, the explicit legal and political arguments that seek to tie such speech to certain contexts fail to note that even in their own discourse, such speech has become citational, breaking with the prior contexts of its utterance and acquiring new contexts for which it was not intended. The critical and legal discourse on hate speech is itself a restaging of the performance of hate speech. Empirics flow aff. Friedersdorf 15, 12-10-2015, "The Lessons of Bygone Free-Speech Fights," Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/what-student-activists-can-learn-from-bygone-free-speech-fights/419178/ He was writing after the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, and Stanford implemented speech codes targeted at racist and sexist speech. These were efforts to respond to increasing diversity on campuses, where a number of students spewed racist and sexist speech that most everyone in this room would condemn. But those speech codes were policy failures. There is no evidence that hate speech or bigotry decreased on any campus that adopted them. At Michigan, the speech code was analyzed by Marcia Pally, a professor of multicultural studies, who found that “black students were accused of racist speech in almost 20 cases. Students were punished only twice under the code’s anti-racist provisions, both times for speech by or on behalf of blacks.” Outweighs: A. Reversibility – when a policy originally protecting the oppressed is co-opted to target and punish those same marginalized groups, it’s even harder to repeal since it masquerades as a liberal policy, ruse of solvency prevents repeal. B. Probability – it’s empirically verified, outweighs analytics since that’s what actually happens in the real world. 2. Censorship is an issue of interpretation. This ensures cooption. BUTLER 3 “Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performativity” by Judith Butler 1997 “Indeed, recent efforts to establish the incontrovertibly wounding power of certain words seem to founder on the question of who does the interpreting of what such words mean and what they perform. The recent regulations governing lesbian and gay self-definition in the military or, indeed, the recent controversies over rap music suggest that no clear consensus is possible on the question of whether there is a clear link between the words that are uttered and their putative power to injure.9 Underview Freedom of speech creates a culture of dialogue that outweighs bad speech. Prefer because our evidence is comparative Rauch 13 Jonathan Rauch, The Case for Hate Speech, The Atlantic, November 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-case-for-hate-speech/309524 History shows that the more open the intellectual environment, the better minorities will do. A generation ago, the main obstacle to gay equality was not hatred, though of course there was a good deal of that. Most people who supported the repressive status quo meant well. The bigger problem, rather, was that people had wrong ideas about homosexuality: factual misapprehensions and moral misjudgments born of ignorance, superstition, taboo, disgust. If people think you are a threat to their children or their family, they are going to fear and hate you. Gays’ most urgent need was epistemological, not political. We had to replace bad ideas with good ones. Our great blessing was to live in a society that understands where knowledge comes from: not from political authority or personal revelation, but from a public process of open-ended debate and discussion, in which every day millions of people venture and test billions of hypotheses. All but a few of those theories are found wanting, but some survive and flourish over time, and those comprise our knowledge. The restless process of trial and error does not allow human knowledge to be complete or perfect, but it does allow for steady improvement. If a society is open to robust critical debate, you can look at a tape of its moral and intellectual development over time and know which way it is running: usually toward less social violence, more social participation, and a wider circle of dignity and toleration. And if you see a society that is stuck and not making that kind of progress, you can guess that its intellectual system is not very liberal. The critical factor in the elimination of error is not individuals’ commitment to the truth as they see it (if anything, most people are too confident they’re right); it is society’s commitment to the protection of criticism, however misguided, upsetting, or ungodly.
2. Singular political strategies don’t exist – methodological pluralism is necessary to avoid endless political violence. Bleiker 14 – (6/17, Roland, Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, “International Theory Between Reification and Self-Reflective Critique,” International Studies Review, Volume 16, Issue 2, pages 325–327) Methodological pluralism lies at the heart of Levine's sustainable critique. He borrows from what Adorno calls a “constellation”: an attempt to juxtapose, rather than integrate, different perspectives. It is in this spirit that Levine advocates multiple methods to understand the same event or phenomena. He writes of the need to validate “multiple and mutually incompatible ways of seeing” (p. 63, see also pp. 101–102). In this model, a scholar oscillates back and forth between different methods and paradigms, trying to understand the event in question from multiple perspectives. No single method can ever adequately represent the event or should gain the upper hand. But each should, in a way, recognize and capture details or perspectives that the others cannot (p. 102). In practical terms, this means combining a range of methods even when—or, rather, precisely when—they are deemed incompatible. They can range from poststructual deconstruction to the tools pioneered and championed by positivist social sciences.The benefit of such a methodological polyphony is not just the opportunity to bring out nuances and new perspectives. Once the false hope of a smooth synthesis has been abandoned, the very incompatibility of the respective perspectives can then be used to identify the reifying tendencies in each of them. For Levine, this is how reification may be “checked at the source” and this is how a “critically reflexive moment might thus be rendered sustainable” (p. 103). It is in this sense that Levine's approach is not really post-foundational but, rather, an attempt to “balance foundationalisms against one another” (p. 14). There are strong parallels here with arguments advanced by assemblage thinking and complexity theory—links that could have been explored in more detail. 3. We need to embrace the state as a heuristic—our argument is not that the state is good but that learning the levers of power is key to confronting it. Zanotti 14 Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Her research and teaching include critical political theory as well as international organizations, UN peacekeeping, democratization and the role of NGOs in post-conflict governance.“Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World” – Alternatives: Global, Local, Political – vol 38(4):p. 288-304,. A little unclear if this is late 2013 or early 2014 – The Stated “Version of Record” is Feb 20, 2014, but was originally published online on December 30th, 2013. Obtained via Sage Database. By questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that focuses on power and subjects’ relational character and the contingent processes of their (trans)formation in the context of agonic relations. Options for resistance to governmental scripts are not limited to ‘‘rejection,’’ ‘‘revolution,’’ or ‘‘dispossession’’ to regain a pristine ‘‘freedom from all constraints’’ or an immanent ideal social order. It is found instead in multifarious and contingent struggles that are constituted within the scripts of governmental rationalities and at the same time exceed and transform them. This approach questions oversimplifications of the complexities of liberal political rationalities and of their interactions with non-liberal political players and nurtures a radical skepticism about identifying universally good or bad actors or abstract solutions to political problems. International power interacts in complex ways with diverse political spaces and within these spaces it is appropriated, hybridized, redescribed, hijacked, and tinkered with. Governmentality as a heuristic focuses on performing complex diagnostics of events. It invites historically situated explorations and careful differentiations rather than overarching demonizations of ‘‘power,’’ romanticizations of the ‘‘rebel’’ or the ‘‘the local.’’ More broadly, theoretical formulations that conceive the subject in non-substantialist terms and focus on processes of subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses, and on hybridization as the terrain for political transformation, open ways for reconsidering political agency beyond the dichotomy of oppression/rebellion. These alternative formulations also foster an ethics of political engagement, to be continuously taken up through plural and uncertain practices, that demand continuous attention to ‘‘what happens’’ instead of fixations on ‘‘what ought to be.’’ Such ethics of engagement would not await the revolution to come or hope for a pristine ‘‘freedom’’ to be regained. Instead, it would constantly attempt to twist the working of power by playing with whatever cards are available and would require intense processes of reflexivity on the consequences of political choices. To conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault ‘‘my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.’
3/18/17
JF - 1AC - Util - V2
Tournament: Kandi King RR | Round: 2 | Opponent: Success Academy SC | Judge: Sims, Koshak Kandi King RR R2 1AC Framing ROB The role of the ballot is to compare the simulated consequences of the affirmative policy vs the negative to best combat oppression. Debate should deal with real world consequences of oppression, which comes first. Curry 14, Tommy, The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century, Victory Briefs, 2014, 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 “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 definitiocan with normative/prescriptive/evaluative issues, against factual/descriptive issues.” At the most general level, there is a 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 we must reformulate the values which deny the legitimacy of the living wage, and those values predicated on the flawed views of the oppressed worker, Blacks, and the colonized (dignity, justice, fairness, rights, etc.) used to currently justify the living wages in under our contemporary moral parameters. Use particularism- root cause claims and focus on overarching structures ignore application to material injustice. Gregory Fernando Pappas 16 Texas AandM University “The Pragmatists’ Approach to Injustice”, The Pluralist Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2016, The pragmatists’ approach should be distinguished from nonideal theories whose starting point seems to be the injustices of society at large that have a history and persist through time, where the task of political philosophy is to detect and diagnose the presence of these historical injustices in particular situations of injustice. For example, critical theory today has inherited an approach to social philosophy characteristic of the European tradition that goes back to Rousseau, Marx, Weber, Freud, Marcuse, and others. Accord- ing to Roberto Frega, this tradition takes society to be “intrinsically sick” with a malaise that requires adopting a critical historical stance in order to understand how the systematic sickness affects present social situations. In other words, this approach assumes that¶ a philosophical critique of specific social situations can be accomplished only under the assumption of a broader and full blown critique of soci- ety in its entirety: as a critique of capitalism, of modernity, of western civilization, of rationality itself. The idea of social pathology becomes intelligible only against the background of a philosophy of history or of an anthropology of decline, according to which the distortions of actual social life are but the inevitable consequence of longstanding historical processes. (“Between Pragmatism and Critical Theory” 63)¶ However, this particular approach to injustice is not limited to critical theory. It is present in those Latin American and African American political philosophies that have used and transformed the critical intellectual tools of ¶ critical theory to deal with the problems of injustice in the Americas. For instance, Charles W. Mills claims that the starting point and alternative to the abstractions of ideal theory that masked injustices is to diagnose and rectify a history of an illness—the legacy of white supremacy in our actual society.11 The critical task of revealing this illness is achieved by adopting a historical perspective where the injustices of today are part of a larger historical narrative about the development of modern societies that goes back to how Europeans have progressively dehumanized or subordinated others. Similary, radical feminists as well as Third World scholars, as reaction to the hege- monic Eurocentric paradigms that disguise injustices under the assumption of a universal or objective point of view, have stressed how our knowledge is always situated. This may seem congenial with pragmatism except the locus of the knower and of injustices is often described as power structures located in “global hierarchies” and a “world-system” and not situations.12¶ Pragmatism only questions that we live in History or a “World-System” (as a totality or abstract context) but not that we are in history (lowercase): in a present situation continuous with others where the past weighs heavily in our memories, bodies, habits, structures, and communities. It also does not deny the importance of power structures and seeing the connections be- tween injustices through time, but there is a difference between (a) inquiring into present situations of injustice in order to detect, diagnose, and cure an injustice (a social pathology) across history, and (b) inquiring into the his- tory of a systematic injustice in order to facilitate inquiry into the present unique, context-bound injustice. To capture the legacy of the past on present injustices, we must study history but also seek present evidence of the weight of the past on the present injustice.¶ If injustice is an illness, then the pragmatists’ approach takes as its main focus diagnosing and treating the particular present illness, that is, the particular situation-bound injustice and not a global “social pathology” or some single transhistorical source of injustice. The diagnosis of a particular injustice is not always dependent on adopting a broader critical standpoint of society in its entirety, but even when it is, we must be careful to not forget that such standpoints are useful only for understanding the present evil. The concepts and categories “white supremacy” and “colonialism” can be great tools that can be of planetary significance. One could even argue that they pick out much larger areas of people’s lives and injustices than the categories of class and gender, but in spite of their reach and explanatory theoretical value, they are nothing more than tools to make reference to and ameliorate particular injustices experienced (suffered) in the midst of a particular and unique re- lationship in a situation. The aff deploys the state to learn scenario planning- even if politics is bad, scenario analysis of politics is pedagogically valuable- it enhances creativity, deconstructs biases and teaches advocacy skills Barma et al 16 May 2016, Advance Publication Online on 11/6/15, Naazneen Barma, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Brent Durbin, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Professor of Government at Smith College, Eric Lorber, JD from UPenn and PhD in Political Science from Duke, Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, Rachel Whitlark, PhD in Political Science from GWU, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Project on Managing the Atom and International Security Program within the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, “‘Imagine a World in Which’: Using Scenarios in Political Science,” International Studies Perspectives 17 (2), pp. 1-19, What Are Scenarios and Why Use Them in Political Science? Scenario analysis is perceived most commonly as a technique for examining the robustness of strategy. It can immerse decision makers in future states that go beyond conventional extrapolations of current trends, preparing them to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and to protect themselves from adverse exogenous shocks. The global petroleum company Shell, a pioneer of the technique, characterizes scenario analysis as the art of considering “what if” questions about possible future worlds. Scenario analysis is thus typically seen as serving the purposes of corporate planning or as a policy tool to be used in combination with simulations of decision making. Yet scenario analysis is not inherently limited to these uses. This section provides a brief overview of the practice of scenario analysis and the motivations underpinning its uses. It then makes a case for the utility of the technique for political science scholarship and describes how the scenarios deployed at NEFPC were created. The Art of Scenario Analysis We characterize scenario analysis as the art of juxtaposing current trends in unexpected combinations in order to articulate surprising and yet plausible futures, often referred to as “alternative worlds.” Scenarios are thus explicitly not forecasts or projections based on linear extrapolations of contemporary patterns, and they are not hypothesis-based expert predictions. Nor should they be equated with simulations, which are best characterized as functional representations of real institutions or decision-making processes (Asal 2005). Instead, they are depictions of possible future states of the world, offered together with a narrative of the driving causal forces and potential exogenous shocks that could lead to those futures. Good scenarios thus rely on explicit causal propositions that, independent of one another, are plausible—yet, when combined, suggest surprising and sometimes controversial future worlds. For example, few predicted the dramatic fall in oil prices toward the end of 2014. Yet independent driving forces, such as the shale gas revolution in the United States, China’s slowing economic growth, and declining conflict in major Middle Eastern oil producers such as Libya, were all recognized secular trends that—combined with OPEC’s decision not to take concerted action as prices began to decline—came together in an unexpected way. While scenario analysis played a role in war gaming and strategic planning during the Cold War, the real antecedents of the contemporary practice are found in corporate futures studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Raskin et al. 2005). Scenario analysis was essentially initiated at Royal Dutch Shell in 1965, with the realization that the usual forecasting techniques and models were not capturing the rapidly changing environment in which the company operated (Wack 1985; Schwartz 1991). In particular, it had become evident that straight-line extrapolations of past global trends were inadequate for anticipating the evolving business environment. Shell-style scenario planning “helped break the habit, ingrained in most corporate planning, of assuming that the future will look much like the present” (Wilkinson and Kupers 2013, 4). Using scenario thinking, Shell anticipated the possibility of two Arab-induced oil shocks in the 1970s and hence was able to position itself for major disruptions in the global petroleum sector. Building on its corporate roots, scenario analysis has become a standard policymaking tool. For example, the Project on Forward Engagement advocates linking systematic foresight, which it defines as the disciplined analysis of alternative futures, to planning and feedback loops to better equip the United States to meet contemporary governance challenges (Fuerth 2011). Another prominent application of scenario thinking is found in the National Intelligence Council’s series of Global Trends reports, issued every four years to aid policymakers in anticipating and planning for future challenges. These reports present a handful of “alternative worlds” approximately twenty years into the future, carefully constructed on the basis of emerging global trends, risks, and opportunities, and intended to stimulate thinking about geopolitical change and its effects.4 As with corporate scenario analysis, the technique can be used in foreign policymaking for long-range general planning purposes as well as for anticipating and coping with more narrow and immediate challenges. An example of the latter is the German Marshall Fund’s EuroFutures project, which uses four scenarios to map the potential consequences of the Euro-area financial crisis (German Marshall Fund 2013). Several features make scenario analysis particularly useful for policymaking.5 Long-term global trends across a number of different realms—social, technological, environmental, economic, and political—combine in often-unexpected ways to produce unforeseen challenges. Yet the ability of decision makers to imagine, let alone prepare for, discontinuities in the policy realm is constrained by their existing mental models and maps. This limitation is exacerbated by well-known cognitive bias tendencies such as groupthink and confirmation bias (Jervis 1976; Janis 1982; Tetlock 2005). The power of scenarios lies in their ability to help individuals break out of conventional modes of thinking and analysis by introducing unusual combinations of trends and deliberate discontinuities in narratives about the future. Imagining alternative future worlds through a structured analytical process enables policymakers to envision and thereby adapt to something altogether different from the known present. Designing Scenarios for Political Science Inquiry The characteristics of scenario analysis that commend its use to policymakers also make it well suited to helping political scientists generate and develop policy-relevant research programs. Scenarios are essentially textured, plausible, and relevant stories that help us imagine how the future political-economic world could be different from the past in a manner that highlights policy challenges and opportunities. For example, terrorist organizations are a known threat that have captured the attention of the policy community, yet our responses to them tend to be linear and reactive. Scenarios that explore how seemingly unrelated vectors of change—the rise of a new peer competitor in the East that diverts strategic attention, volatile commodity prices that empower and disempower various state and nonstate actors in surprising ways, and the destabilizing effects of climate change or infectious disease pandemics—can be useful for illuminating the nature and limits of the terrorist threat in ways that may be missed by a narrower focus on recognized states and groups. By illuminating the potential strategic significance of specific and yet poorly understood opportunities and threats, scenario analysis helps to identify crucial gaps in our collective understanding of global politicaleconomic trends and dynamics. The notion of “exogeneity”—so prevalent in social science scholarship—applies to models of reality, not to reality itself. Very simply, scenario analysis can throw into sharp relief often-overlooked yet pressing questions in international affairs that demand focused investigation. Scenarios thus offer, in principle, an innovative tool for developing a political science research agenda. In practice, achieving this objective requires careful tailoring of the approach. The specific scenario analysis technique we outline below was designed and refined to provide a structured experiential process for generating problem-based research questions with contemporary international policy relevance.6 The first step in the process of creating the scenario set described here was to identify important causal forces in contemporary global affairs. Consensus was not the goal; on the contrary, some of these causal statements represented competing theories about global change (e.g., a resurgence of the nation-state vs. border-evading globalizing forces). A major principle underpinning the transformation of these causal drivers into possible future worlds was to “simplify, then exaggerate” them, before fleshing out the emerging story with more details.7 Thus, the contours of the future world were drawn first in the scenario, with details about the possible pathways to that point filled in second. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that some of the causal claims that turned into parts of scenarios were exaggerated so much as to be implausible, and that an unavoidable degree of bias or our own form of groupthink went into construction of the scenarios. One of the great strengths of scenario analysis, however, is that the scenario discussions themselves, as described below, lay bare these especially implausible claims and systematic biases.8 An explicit methodological approach underlies the written scenarios themselves as well as the analytical process around them—that of case-centered, structured, focused comparison, intended especially to shed light on new causal mechanisms (George and Bennett 2005). The use of scenarios is similar to counterfactual analysis in that it modifies certain variables in a given situation in order to analyze the resulting effects (Fearon 1991). Whereas counterfactuals are traditionally retrospective in nature and explore events that did not actually occur in the context of known history, our scenarios are deliberately forward-looking and are designed to explore potential futures that could unfold. As such, counterfactual analysis is especially well suited to identifying how individual events might expand or shift the “funnel of choices” available to political actors and thus lead to different historical outcomes (Nye 2005, 68–69), while forward-looking scenario analysis can better illuminate surprising intersections and sociopolitical dynamics without the perceptual constraints imposed by fine-grained historical knowledge. We see scenarios as a complementary resource for exploring these dynamics in international affairs, rather than as a replacement for counterfactual analysis, historical case studies, or other methodological tools. In the scenario process developed for NEFPC, three distinct scenarios are employed, acting as cases for analytical comparison. Each scenario, as detailed below, includes a set of explicit “driving forces” which represent hypotheses about causal mechanisms worth investigating in evolving international affairs. The scenario analysis process itself employs templates (discussed further below) to serve as a graphical representation of a structured, focused investigation and thereby as the research tool for conducting case-centered comparative analysis (George and Bennett 2005). In essence, these templates articulate key observable implications within the alternative worlds of the scenarios and serve as a framework for capturing the data that emerge (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). Finally, this structured, focused comparison serves as the basis for the cross-case session emerging from the scenario analysis that leads directly to the articulation of new research agendas. The scenario process described here has thus been carefully designed to offer some guidance to policy-oriented graduate students who are otherwise left to the relatively unstructured norms by which political science dissertation ideas are typically developed. The initial articulation of a dissertation project is generally an idiosyncratic and personal undertaking (Useem 1997; Rothman 2008), whereby students might choose topics based on their coursework, their own previous policy exposure, or the topics studied by their advisors. Research agendas are thus typically developed by looking for “puzzles” in existing research programs (Kuhn 1996). Doctoral students also, understandably, often choose topics that are particularly amenable to garnering research funding. Conventional grant programs typically base their funding priorities on extrapolations from what has been important in the recent past—leading to, for example, the prevalence of Japan and Soviet studies in the mid-1980s or terrorism studies in the 2000s—in the absence of any alternative method for identifying questions of likely future significance. The scenario approach to generating research ideas is grounded in the belief that these traditional approaches can be complemented by identifying questions likely to be of great empirical importance in the real world, even if these do not appear as puzzles in existing research programs or as clear extrapolations from past events. The scenarios analyzed at NEFPC envision alternative worlds that could develop in the medium (five to seven year) term and are designed to tease out issues scholars and policymakers may encounter in the relatively near future so that they can begin thinking critically about them now. This timeframe offers a period distant enough from the present as to avoid falling into current events analysis, but not so far into the future as to seem like science fiction. In imagining the worlds in which these scenarios might come to pass, participants learn strategies for avoiding failures of creativity and for overturning the assumptions that prevent scholars and analysts from anticipating and understanding the pivotal junctures that arise in international affairs. Institutions are inevitable and learning to pragmatically engage them best facilitates change Themba-Nixon 2K – Makani Themba-Nixon, “Changing the Rules: What Public Policy Means for Organizing,” Colorlines. Oakland: Jul 31, 2000. Vol. 3, Iss. 2; pg. 12 In essence, policies are the codification of power relationships and resource allocation. Policies are the rules of the world we live in. Changing the world means changing the rules. So, if organizing is about changing the rules and building power, how can organizing be separated from policies? Can we really speak truth to power, fight the right, stop corporate abuses, or win racial justice without contesting the rules and the rulers, the policies and the policymakers? The answer is no-and double no for people of color. Today, racism subtly dominates nearly every aspect of policymaking. From ballot propositions to city funding priorities, policy is increasingly about the control, de-funding, and disfranchisement of communities of color. What Do We Stand For? Take the public conversation about welfare reform, for example. Most of us know it isn't really about putting people to work. The right's message was framed around racial stereotypes of lazy, cheating "welfare queens" whose poverty was "cultural." But the new welfare policy was about moving billions of dollars in individual cash payments and direct services from welfare recipients to other, more powerful, social actors. Many of us were too busy to tune into the welfare policy drama in Washington, only to find it washed up right on our doorsteps. Our members are suffering from workfare policies, new regulations, and cutoffs. Families who were barely getting by under the old rules are being pushed over the edge by the new policies. Policy doesn't get more relevant than this. And so we got involved in policy-as defense. Yet we have to do more than block their punches. We have to start the fight with initiatives of our own. Those who do are finding offense a bit more fun than defense alone. Living wage ordinances, youth development initiatives, even gun control and alcohol and tobacco policies are finding their way onto the public agenda, thanks to focused community organizing that leverages power for community-driven initiatives. - Over 600 local policies have been passed to regulate the tobacco industry. Local coalitions have taken the lead by writing ordinances that address local problems and organizing broad support for them. - Nearly 100 gun control and violence prevention policies have been enacted since 1991. - Milwaukee, Boston, and Oakland are among the cities that have passed living wage ordinances: local laws that guarantee higher than minimum wages for workers, usually set as the minimum needed to keep a family of four above poverty. These are just a few of the examples that demonstrate how organizing for local policy advocacy has made inroads in areas where positive national policy had been stalled by conservatives. Increasingly, the local policy arena is where the action is and where activists are finding success. Of course, corporate interests-which are usually the target of these policies-are gearing up in defense. Tactics include front groups, economic pressure, and the tried and true: cold, hard cash. Despite these barriers, grassroots organizing can be very effective at the smaller scale of local politics. At the local level, we have greater access to elected officials and officials have a greater reliance on their constituents for reelection. For example, getting 400 people to show up at city hall in just about any city in the U.S. is quite impressive. On the other hand, 400 people at the state house or the Congress would have a less significant impact. Add to that the fact that all 400 people at city hall are usually constituents, and the impact is even greater. Recent trends in government underscore the importance of local policy. Congress has enacted a series of measures devolving significant power to state and local government. Welfare, health care, and the regulation of food and drinking water safety are among the areas where states and localities now have greater rule. Devolution has some negative consequences to be sure. History has taught us that, for social services and civil rights in particular, the lack of clear federal standards and mechanisms for accountability lead to uneven enforcement and even discriminatory implementation of policies. Still, there are real opportunities for advancing progressive initiatives in this more localized environment. Greater local control can mean greater community power to shape and implement important social policies that were heretofore out of reach. To do so will require careful attention to the mechanics of local policymaking and a clear blueprint of what we stand for. Getting It in Writing Much of the work of framing what we stand for takes place in the shaping of demands. By getting into the policy arena in a proactive manner, we can take our demands to the next level. Our demands can become law, with real consequences if the agreement is broken. After all the organizing, press work, and effort, a group should leave a decisionmaker with more than a handshake and his or her word. Of course, this work requires a certain amount of interaction with "the suits," as well as struggles with the bureaucracy, the technical language, and the all-too-common resistance by decisionmakers. Still, if it's worth demanding, it's worth having in writing-whether as law, regulation, or internal policy. From ballot initiatives on rent control to laws requiring worker protections, organizers are leveraging their power into written policies that are making a real difference in their communities. Of course, policy work is just one tool in our organizing arsenal, but it is a tool we simply can't afford to ignore. Making policy work an integral part of organizing will require a certain amount of retrofitting. We will need to develop the capacity to translate our information, data, and experience into stories that are designed to affect the public conversation. Perhaps most important, we will need to move beyond fighting problems and on to framing solutions that bring us closer to our vision of how things should be. And then we must be committed to making it so. Advantage Plan The alt right is energized in the status quo—limits on free speech are just being used to sustain white supremacy, meaning disads are non-unique and the case outweighs. Harkinson 12/6 (Josh, reporter @ mother jones, “The Push to Enlist "Alt-Right" Recruits on College Campuses,” December 6, 2016, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/12/richard-spencer-alt-right-college-activism/) How much support is there for the loose-knit coalition of white nationalists and other far-right extremists known as the "alt-right"? Despite a spike in media coverage for the movement in the wake of Donald Trump's victory, a recent conference hosted by white nationalist Richard Spencer, who coined the term "alt-right," drew only about 275 attendees in Washington, DC. And after a video from the event went viral, showing audience members giving Nazi salutes to Spencer's cry of "hail Trump," the movement faced a fierce backlash. Although Trump named alt-right hero Stephen Bannon as his chief White House strategist, the president-elect went on to disavow the alt-right—in general terms, at least—in an interview with the New York Times. The movement gained momentum online in 2016 but is no longer just about social media, says Spencer; he sees a need to prove that the alt-right can attract supporters in the real world. And he says the best place to do that is on college campuses, starting with a speech he plans to deliver on Tuesday on the campus of Texas AandM University. "People in college are at this point in their lives where they are actually open to alternative perspectives, for better and for worse," Spencer says. "I think you do need to get them while they are young. I think rewiring the neurons of someone over 50 is effectively impossible." Recruiting on college campuses has long been a goal for "academic racists" such as Jared Taylor and Peter Brimelow, a white nationalist whom Spencer helped bring to Duke University for an event in 2007, when Spencer was a student there. In May, Spencer and other white nationalists set up a "safe space" on the University of California-Berkeley's Sproul Plaza to discuss "how race affects people of European heritage." Thus, I defend the resolution as a general principle- I will defend all constitutionally protected speech should be restricted, what that means is up for debate.
Subpoint A is Speech Code Failure Attempts to restrict free speech cause more problems and cannot work. 6 independent reasons- 1) The idea that the authority figures become the arbiter of acceptable speech causes a crack down on dissent and kills minority views from even being heard in the first place. Fisher 17 (Anthony L. Fisher, associate editor at Reason.com, where his beats include criminal justice, civil liberties, free speech, and foreign affairs. He is also a sports and culture columnist at The Week.). “The free speech problem on campus is real. It will ultimately hurt dissidents”. Vox, Jan 2, 2017. http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/13/13931524/free-speech-pen-america-campus-censorship It’s already happening. Just ask the Palestinian activists whose boycott campaigns against Israel have has been deemed hate speech by a number of public universities, and whose future political activities could be endangered by an act of Congress. Just this month, the Senate unanimously passed the "Anti-Semitism Awareness Act,” which directs the Department of Education to use the bill's contents as a guideline when adjudicating complaints of anti-Semitism on campus. Among the speech-chilling components of the bill, the political (and subjective) act of judging Israel by an "unfair double standard" could be considered hate speech. To cite other examples of unintended consequences of the crackdown on “offensive” speech, a black student at the University of Michigan was punished for calling another student “white trash,” and conservative law students at Georgetown claimed they were “traumatized” when an email critical of deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia landed in their inboxes. The PEN America report also notes the Foundation for Individual Rights’ analysis of hundreds of campuses with “severely restrictive” speech codes. While a number of these campuses don't aggressively enforce their speech codes, the rules remain on the books; more than a dozen such codes have been overturned in the courts. What’s even more concerning is the increasingly popular notion that some ideas, such as opposition to abortion, should simply be “non-platformed" — that is, deemed unworthy of even being heard on campus. Although the trend of denying contentious speakers such as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice or refugee turned Dutch politician and critic of Islam Ayaan Hirsi Ali public platforms by "disinviting" them from campus is disconcerting, it is not censorship. However, a pro-choice group physically blocking the display of a pro-life group on the campus of the University of Georgia is a form of censorship. As is the case of University of California Santa Barbara professor Mireille Miller-Young, who assaulted a young woman holding a pro-life placard including graphic imagery in a "free speech" zone on campus and stole her sign. When the young woman objected to the theft of her property, Miller-Young replied, "I may be a thief, but you're a terrorist." Like it or not, almost half of all Americans consider themselves pro-life. Banning their perspective from campus won't win over converts, and it’s both immoral and counterproductive to declare completely legitimate political perspectives beyond the pale. Think of antiwar protests or demonstrations in support of integration when both causes were broadly unpopular, and then try to consider a majority on campus declaring their school a "safe space" from such "offensive" expressions of free speech. 2) Empirics flow aff- speech codes on college campuses were policy failures. Friedersdorf 15, 12-10-2015, "The Lessons of Bygone Free-Speech Fights," Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/what-student-activists-can-learn-from-bygone-free-speech-fights/419178/ He was writing after the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, and Stanford implemented speech codes targeted at racist and sexist speech. These were efforts to respond to increasing diversity on campuses, where a number of students spewed racist and sexist speech that most everyone in this room would condemn. But those speech codes were policy failures. There is no evidence that hate speech or bigotry decreased on any campus that adopted them. At Michigan, the speech code was analyzed by Marcia Pally, a professor of multicultural studies, who found that “black students were accused of racist speech in almost 20 cases. Students were punished only twice under the code’s anti-racist provisions, both times for speech by or on behalf of blacks.” Outweighs: A. Probability – it’s empirically verified, outweighs analytics since that’s what actually happens in the real world. B. Turns arguments about minority speech restrictions in the status quo—free speech isn’t exclusionary, only restrictions. The ability to for minorities to speak freely is restricted in the squo because anti-racist policies are used against the same groups themselves. 3) The attempt to close political space is always imperfect and engenders resistance – censoring speech doesn’t change minds but redirects them – that threatens institutions and leaves supporters less prepared to defend their gains. Resistance to abortion proves. Bonnie Honig 93, Nancy Duke Lewis Professor in the departments of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown, 4-15-1993, "Political Theory And The Displacement Of Politics," Cornell University Press. When a woman’s right to choose was first recognized in 1973 by a very different Court in Roe v. Wade, many citizens celebrated the Court‘s decision as the end of a battle. Those opposed to the decision, however, vowed to roll back Roe v. Wade and. nineteen years later, they have had great success.6 The battle is being refought in the Court and in the state houses. Those who thought it was won in 1973 were surprised by this sequence of events. Many assumed that, once juridically recognized, the right to abort a pregnancy would never be returned to the space of political contest. In the past two decades they went on to fight other battles, doing relatively little to mobilize citizens and communities to protect and stabilize this new right, leaving pro-life organizations relatively free to repoliticize and redefine the issues. In response to the juridical settlement of a woman's right to choose, pro-lifers focused on the fetus and the family and on the relations of obligation and responsibility that tie women to them. Soon abortion became known as baby killing. pro-choice became antifamily, and pregnant single women became icons of danger whose wanton, (literally) unregulated sexuality threatens the safety and the identity of the American family. These identities and identifications are not stable. But in the absence of resistance to them, they could be stabilized. That realization has energized pro-choice citizens into action in the last few years. and the sites of the battle are proliferating. ¶ These observations are by no means meant to imply that it would be better not to entrench a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy—that is a different debate, one that turns on considerations of political strategy and equal justice. My point is that there is a lesson to be learned from the experience of those who misread Roe as the end of a battle and later found themselves ill equipped and unprepared to stabilize and secure their still unstable rights when they were repoliticized and contested by their opponents. In their mistaken belief that the agon had been successfully shut down by law, pro-choice citizens ceded the agon to their opponents and found, years later, that the terms of the contest had shifted against them. Disempowered by their belief that the law had settled the issue without remainder, they failed to engage the concerns of moderate citizens who harbored doubts about the morality of abortion, leaving them and their doubts to be mobilized and radicalized by those who had no doubts about the practice‘s immorality and who were determined to see it outlawed again.7 ¶ To affirm the perpetuity of contest is not to celebrate a world without points of stabilization; it is to affirm the reality of perpetual contest. even within an ordered setting, and to identify the affirmative dimensions of contestation. It is to see that the always imperfect closure of political space tends to engender remainders and that, if those remainders are not engaged, they may return to haunt and destabilize the very closures that deny their existence. Outweighs: A. Probability – empirical examples of Trump and abortion closing the opposing political space is only counterproductive in real life, B. Scope – this attitude of non-engagement is a paradigmatic issue, so the Aff helps all social justice communities by encouraging more engagement through dialogue everywhere. Even if free speech might not be the perfect solution, it is comparatively better to any other alternative—restrictions just make the problem worse. Kenan Malik 12 (Indian-born English writer, lecturer and broadcaster, trained in neurobiology and the history of science.). “Why Hate Speech Should Not Be Banned”. Pandemonium, 2012. https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/why-hate-speech-should-not-be-banned/ And in practice, you cannot reduce or eliminate bigotry simply by banning it. You simply lets the sentiments fester underground. As Milton once put it, to keep out ‘evil doctrine’ by licensing is ‘like the exploit of that gallant man who thought to pound up the crows by shutting his Park-gate’. Take Britain. In 1965, Britain prohibited incitement to racial hatred as part of its Race Relations Act. The following decade was probably the most racist in British history. It was the decade of ‘Paki-bashing’, when racist thugs would seek out Asians to beat up. It was a decade of firebombings, stabbings, and murders. In the early 1980s, I was organizing street patrols in East London to protect Asian families from racist attacks. Nor were thugs the only problem. Racism was woven into the fabric of public institutions. The police, immigration officials – all were openly racist. In the twenty years between 1969 and 1989, no fewer than thirty-seven blacks and Asians were killed in police custody – almost one every six months. The same number again died in prisons or in hospital custody. When in 1982, cadets at the national police academy were asked to write essays about immigrants, one wrote, ‘Wogs, nignogs and Pakis come into Britain take up our homes, our jobs and our resources and contribute relatively less to our once glorious country. They are, by nature, unintelligent. And can’t at all be educated sufficiently to live in a civilised society of the Western world’. Another wrote that ‘all blacks are pains and should be ejected from society’. So much for incitement laws helping create a more tolerant society. Today, Britain is a very different place. Racism has not disappeared, nor have racist attacks, but the open, vicious, visceral bigotry that disfigured the Britain when I was growing up has largely ebbed away. It has done so not because of laws banning racial hatred but because of broader social changes and because minorities themselves stood up to the bigotry and fought back. 4) Censoring speech makes it more attractive – psychological studies prove. Mattimore 15: PATRICK MATTIMORE member of the Society of Professional Journalists and has written commentaries for a variety of publications, daily newspapers, professional magazines, and weeklies. His areas of expertise are law, psychology, and education. He taught high school psychology for many years in the US, and was an adjunct professor of law in the Temple University/Tsinghua University LLM program in Beijing, where he also taught psychology at a private college. “Guest commentary: If you want to make something more desired, make sure it gets censored” December 10, 2015. http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2015/12/10/guest-commentary-if-you-want-to-make-something-more-desired-make-sure-it-gets-censored/ What makes government censorship of the press and resultant self-censorship by media itself even more baffling, is that psychological science suggests that it doesn’t work. If you want to make an idea, or nearly anything, more valuable to someone, make it less available by censoring it. For example, more than 40 years ago, when University of North Carolina students learned that a speech opposing coed dorms on campus would be banned, psychologists reported that the students became more opposed to the idea of coed dorms. Without ever hearing the speech, students became more sympathetic to its argument. Advertisers have long been aware of the power of prohibitory admonitions to promote products, enticing consumers by advising them to not taste the forbidden fruit. Before advertisers for Charmin bathroom tissue exhorted customers: “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin,” it’s likely no one ever had. By ordering stories covered up, the government ensures that those stories will be accorded more importance than they warrant. By limiting individuals’ access to information, that information becomes more attractive. Psychologist Robert Cialdini calls this the principle of scarcity. We want those things that are hard to get even though there is logically no more reason to want a scarce item than a plentiful one. 5) People with the ideologies you want to censor are still out there and use the censorship apparatus against you, so censorship’s net benefit is non-unique. Bart Cammaerts ‘9, London School of Economics and Political Science, England, 11-2009, "Radical pluralism and free speech in online public spaces," International Journal of Cultural Studies, However, in a context where a powerful extreme right actively propagates such racist ideologies, both implicitly and explicitly, this becomes another issue altogether. And it is here that the limits of a radical plurality of voices within a democracy expose themselves. It is therefore to some extent understandable that some Belgian politicians from left to right, from federalists to nationalists are calling for more pro-active government intervention regarding online hate speech, preferably at a European level of governance. Of course, given the deeply offensive and repulsive nature of many of the comments being made online and the context in which they were produced, it is difficult to remain neutral here; rational detachment is not an option. Such vitriolic discourses should make any democratic person angry, demanding that something be done about this. The question remains what that something then is. Whilst laws and regulation or even technical solutions might be able to remove some of these discourses from the public space, therefore the ideas and ideology behind these discourses have not disappeared from the political. It might be useful in this regard to briefly recount Butler’s (1997) work on ‘excitable speech’ in which she uses Foucault’s History of Sexuality to argue that forbidding hate-speech all together through (state) censorship above all aids in proliferating these discourses further throughout society. This can also be related to what Mouffe calls the inherently conflictual nature of the political. Butler is not per se against limitations to the freedom of speech, but points to the need to be aware of the difficulties of combating hate speech through legal measures and the practical consequences of this. She refers to difficult questions such as: who defines what is hurtful, offensive, wounding or injurious speech and what is the context in which such language is being used? But whilst there might be an overall consensus that the discourses being discussed in this paper are totally unacceptable and do not belong in a democracy, not even from the perspective of a radical democracy or pluralism, the question of where and how we draw the line as a democracy between what is acceptable within a pluralist perspective and what is not? And how is this then implemented and enforced? Internet filtering and monitoring remain technical and policy options when it comes to combating hate speech on the internet. However, active censorship in a democracy tends to backfires in several ways. In relation to this case study, it could be argued that democracy might lose out in two ways. First, anti-democratic forces are able to construct democratic parties and institutions as ‘undemocratic’ on a continuous basic, claiming that they suppress ‘the true thoughts of the people’, using in effect the formal rules of democracy to destroy democratic culture arguing for a democratic right to be a racist. Second, how to guarantee that once a regime of content control online is in place, it will not be used to silence other voices that at some future moment in time are considered to be undesirable by a majority? And do we really want content on the internet controlled, monitored and filtered on a permanent basis? This is, however, by no means a plea for complacency and/or ignorance, but to carefully think through the implications of intervention to exclude voices from public spaces of communication and interaction all together. Efforts to combat the incitement of hatred through democratic and legal ways should be encouraged, ‘in order to to secure a minimum of civility’ (Rosenfeld, 2001: 63). Exposure in the mainstream media of those that produce such discourses and formal legal complaints by racism watchdogs are important and fairly effective tools for achieving that (except when anonymity is invoked). The embracement of censorship of online content by democratic societies in addition to this, would not only represent crossing the rubicon, but also focuses merely on removing some of the symptoms of racism, not the root causes of it. Subpoint B is Counter-speech Free speech, even if it’s not perfect, solves these harms better: 1) Empirics prove it promotes inclusion needed for movements- this also responds to silencing turns since even if those targeted cannot speak up, the community can. Calleros 95 Calleros, Charles R. “Paternalism, Counterspeech, and Campus Hate-Speech Codes: A Reply to Delgado and Yun” (Professor of Law, Arizona State University). HeinOnline. Arizona State Law Journal. 1995 However, campus communities that have creatively used this approach can attest to the surprising power of counterspeech. Examples of counterspeech to hateful racist and homophobic speech at Arizona State and Stanford Universities are especially illustrative.61 In an incident that attracted national attention, the campus community at Arizona State University ("A.S.U.") constructively and constitutionally responded to a racist poster displayed on the outside of the speaker's dormitory door in February 1991. Entitled "WORK APPLICATION," it contained a number of ostensibly employment-related questions that advanced hostile and demeaning racial stereotypes of African-Americans and Mexican-Americans. Carla Washington, one of a group of African- American women who found the poster, used her own speech to persuade a resident of the offending room voluntarily to take the poster down and allow her to photocopy it. After sending a copy of the poster to the campus newspaper along with an opinion letter deploring its racist stereotypes, she demanded action from the director of her residence hall. The director organized an immediate meeting of the dormitory residents to discuss the issues. In this meeting, I explained why the poster was protected by the First Amendment, and the women who found the poster eloquently described their pain and fears. One of the women, Nichet Smith, voiced her fear that all nonminorities on campus shared the hostile stereotypes expressed in the poster. Dozens of residents expressed their support and gave assurances that they did not share the hostile stereotypes, but they conceded that even the most tolerant among them knew little about the cultures of others and would 62 benefit greatly from multicultural education. The need for multicultural education to combat intercultural ignorance and stereotyping became the theme of a press conference and public rally organized by the student African-American Coalition leader, Rossie Turman, who opted for highly visible counterspeech despite demands from some students and staff to discipline the owner of the offending poster. The result was a series of opinion letters in the campus newspaper discussing the problem of racism, numerous workshops on race relations and free speech, and overwhelming approval in the Faculty Senate of a measure to add a course on American cultural diversity to the undergraduate breadth 63 requirement. The four women who initially confronted the racist poster were empowered by the meeting at the dormitory residence and later received awards from the local chapter of the NAACP for their activism.64 Rossie Turman was rewarded for his leadership skills two years later by becoming the first African-American elected President of Associated Students of A.S.U.,65 a student body that numbered approximately 40,000 students, only 66 2.3 percent of them African-American. Although Delgado and Yun are quite right that the African-American students should never have been burdened with the need to respond to such hateful speech, Hentoff is correct that the responses just described helped them develop a sense of self-reliance and constructive activism. Moreover, the students' counterspeech inspired a community response that lightened the students' burden and provided them with a sense of community support and empowerment. Indeed, the students received assistance from faculty and administrators, who helped organize meetings, wrote opinion letters, spoke before the Faculty Senate, or joined the students in issuing public statements at the press conference and public rally.67 Perhaps most important, campus administrators wisely refrained from disciplining the owners of the poster, thus directing public attention to the issue of racism and ensuring broad community support in denouncing the racist poster. Many members of the campus and surrounding communities might have leapt to the racist speaker's defense had the state attempted to discipline the speaker and thus had created a First Amendment issue. Instead, they remained united with the offended students because the glare of the public spotlight remained sharply focused on the racist incident without the distraction of cries of state censorship. Although the counterspeech was not aimed primarily at influencing the hearts and minds of the residents of the offending dormitory room, its vigor in fact caught the residents by surprise. 68 It prompted at least three of them to apologize publicly and to display curiosity about a civil rights movement that they were too young to have witnessed first hand. 69 This effective use of education and counterspeech is not an isolated instance at A.S.U., but has been repeated on several occasions, albeit on smaller scales.7° One year after the counterspeech at A.S.U., Stanford University responded similarly to homophobic speech. In that case, a first-year law student sought to attract disciplinary proceedings and thus gain First Amendment martyrdom by shouting hateful homophobic statements about a dormitory staff member. The dean of students stated that the speaker was not subject to discipline under Stanford's code of conduct but called on the university community to speak out on the issue, triggering an avalanche of counterspeech. Students, staff, faculty, and administrators expressed their opinions in letters to the campus newspaper, in comments on a poster board at the law school, in a published petition signed by 400 members of the law school community disassociating the law school from the speaker's epithets, and in a letter written by several law students reporting the incident to a prospective employer of the offending student.71 The purveyor of hate speech indeed had made a point about the power of speech, just not the one he had intended. He had welcomed disciplinary sanctions as a form of empowerment, but the Stanford community was alert enough to catch his verbal hardball and throw it back with ten times the force. Thus, the argument that counterspeech is preferable to state suppression of offensive speech is stronger and more fully supported by experience than is conceded by Delgado and Yun. In both of the cases described above, the targets of hateful speech were supported by a community united against bigotry. The community avoided splitting into factions because the universities eliminated the issue of censorship by quickly announcing that the hateful speakers were protected from disciplinary retaliation. Indeed, the counterspeech against the bigotry was so powerful in each case that it underscored the need for top administrators to develop standards for, and some limitations on, their participation in such partisan speech. 72 Of course, the community action in these cases was effective and empowering precisely because a community against bigotry existed. At A.S.U. and Stanford, as at most universities, the overwhelming majority of students, faculty, and staff are persons of tolerance and good will who deplore at least the clearest forms of bigotry and are ready to speak out Of course, the community action in these cases was effective and empowering precisely because a community against bigotry existed. At A.S.U. and Stanford, as at most universities, the overwhelming majority of students, faculty, and staff are persons of tolerance and good will who deplore at least the clearest forms of bigotry and are ready to speak out against intolerance when it is isolated as an issue rather than diluted in muddied waters along with concerns of censorship. Just as the nonviolent demonstrations of Martin Luther King, Jr., depended partly for their success on the consciences of the national and international audiences monitoring the fire hoses and attack dogs on their television sets and in the print media,73 the empowerment of the targets of hateful speech rests partly in the hands of members of the campus community who sympathize with them. One can hope that the counterspeech and educational measures used with success at A.S.U. and Stanford stand a good chance of preserving an atmosphere of civility in intellectual inquiry at any campus community in which compassionate, open minds predominate. On the other hand, counterspeech by the targets of hate speech could be less empowering on a campus in which the majority of students, faculty, and staff approve of hostile epithets directed toward members of minority groups. One hopes that such campuses are exceedingly rare; although hostile racial stereotyping among college students in the United States increased during the last decade, those students who harbored significant hostilities (as contrasted with more pervasive but less openly hostile, subconscious racism) still represented a modest fraction of all students.74 Moreover, even in a pervasively hostile atmosphere, counterspeech might still be more effective than broad restrictions on speech. 2) Censorship prevents survival strategies and it requires using injurious speech in its own critique, meaning that the aff is key to personal liberation. Butler 97 “Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performativity” by Judith Butler 1997 “Neither view can account for the restaging and resignifying of offensive utterance, deployments of linguistic power that seek at once to expose and counter the offensive exercise of speech. I will consider these at greater length in the chapters to come, but consider for a moment how often such terms are subject to resignification. Such a redoubling of injurious speech takes place not only in rap music and in various forms of political parody and satire, but in the political and social critique of such speech, where "mentioning" those very terms is crucial to the arguments at hand, and even in the legal arguments that make the call for censorship, in which the rhetoric that is deplored is invariably proliferated within the context of legal speech. Paradoxically, the explicit legal and political arguments that seek to tie such speech to certain contexts fail to note that even in their own discourse, such speech has become citational, breaking with the prior contexts of its utterance and acquiring new contexts for which it was not intended. The critical and legal discourse on hate speech is itself a restaging of the performance of hate speech. 3) Even if you cannot convince the racists, there are people in the middle who can be convinced by free speech. Malik 12 Kenan Malik, I am a writer, lecturer and broadcaster. My latest book is The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics, “why hate speech should not be banned”, April 12, 2012, https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/why-hate-speech-should-not-be-banned/ Second, in challenging obnoxious sentiments, we are not simply challenging those who spout such views; we are also challenging the potential audience for such views. Dismissing obnoxious or hateful views as not worthy of response may not be the best way of engaging with such an audience. Whether or not an obnoxious claim requires a reply depends, therefore, not simply on the nature of the claim itself, but also on the potential audience for that claim. 4) Allowing for freedom of discussion solves better for issues of hate speech since it means everyone can be in the open to counter ACLU Hate Speech On Campus, https://www.aclu.org/other/hate-speech-campus Where racist, sexist and homophobic speech is concerned, the ACLU believes that more speech -- not less -- is the best revenge. This is particularly true at universities, whose mission is to facilitate learning through open debate and study, and to enlighten. Speech codes are not the way to go on campuses, where all views are entitled to be heard, explored, supported or refuted. Besides, when hate is out in the open, people can see the problem. Then they can organize effectively to counter bad attitudes, possibly change them, and forge solidarity against the forces of intolerance. Underview Theory
Theory precludes the k a) b) 2. Fairness precludes education a) b) 3. Interpretation: Neg advocacies must defend the same actor as the aff a) ground - b) truth testability- Kritik Solutions to oppression need to be grounded in policy rather than abstraction. K’s must be tied to an implementable, political solution to be effective. Bryant 12: Left,” Larval Subjects—Levi R. Bryant’s philosophy blog, November 11th, Available Online at http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/, Accessed 02-21-2014) Unfortunately, the academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction. It’s good at carrying out critiques that denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of alternatives. This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative. Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park: The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this: Phase 1: Collect Underpants Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit! They even have a catchy song to go with their work: Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic left. Our plan seems to be as follows: Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Revolution and complete social transformation! Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be done at phase 2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives. In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where everything begins to fall apart. Even though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world. To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound! Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing? But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This type of “revolutionary” is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business. Well done! But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced, and when we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail. How, I wonder, are we to do anything at all when we have no concrete proposals? We live on a planet of 6 billion people. These 6 billion people are dependent on a certain network of production and distribution to meet the needs of their consumption. That network of production and distribution does involve the extraction of resources, the production of food, the maintenance of paths of transit and communication, the disposal of waste, the building of shelters, the distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc. What are your proposals? How will you meet these problems? How will you navigate the existing mediations or semiotic and material features of infrastructure? Marx and Lenin had proposals. Do you? Have you even explored the cartography of the problem? Today we are so intellectually bankrupt on these points that we even have theorists speaking of events and acts and talking about a return to the old socialist party systems, ignoring the horror they generated, their failures, and not even proposing ways of avoiding the repetition of these horrors in a new system of organization. Who among our critical theorists is thinking seriously about how to build a distribution and production system that is responsive to the needs of global consumption, avoiding the problems of planned economy, ie., who is doing this in a way that gets notice in our circles? Who is addressing the problems of micro-fascism that arise with party systems (there’s a reason that it was the Negri and Hardt contingent, not the Badiou contingent that has been the heart of the occupy movement). At least the ecologists are thinking about these things in these terms because, well, they think ecologically. Sadly we need something more, a melding of the ecologists, the Marxists, and the anarchists. We’re not getting it yet though, as far as I can tell. Indeed, folks seem attracted to yet another critical paradigm, Laruelle. I would love, just for a moment, to hear a radical environmentalist talk about his ideal high school that would be academically sound. How would he provide for the energy needs of that school? How would he meet building codes in an environmentally sound way? How would she provide food for the students? What would be her plan for waste disposal? And most importantly, how would she navigate the school board, the state legislature, the federal government, and all the families of these students? What is your plan? What is your alternative? I think there are alternatives. I saw one that approached an alternative in Rotterdam. If you want to make a truly revolutionary contribution, this is where you should start. Why should anyone even bother listening to you if you aren’t proposing real plans? But we haven’t even gotten to that point. Instead we’re like underpants gnomes, saying “revolution is the answer!” without addressing any of the infrastructural questions of just how revolution is to be produced, what alternatives it would offer, and how we would concretely go about building those alternatives. Masturbation. “Underpants gnome” deserves to be a category in critical theory; a sort of synonym for self-congratulatory masturbation. We need less critique not because critique isn’t important or necessary– it is –but because we know the critiques, we know the problems. We’re intoxicated with critique because it’s easy and safe. We best every opponent with critique. We occupy a position of moral superiority with critique. But do we really do anything with critique? What we need today, more than ever, is composition or carpentry. Everyone knows something is wrong. Everyone knows this system is destructive and stacked against them. Even the Tea Party knows something is wrong with the economic system, despite having the wrong economic theory. None of us, however, are proposing alternatives. Instead we prefer to shout and denounce. Good luck with that. The res is negative state action, which means the aff limits state power and doesn’t link to critiques of the state. Dempsey 9 Michelle, Professor of Law, Villanova University School of Law, http://www.academia.edu/352923/Sex_Trafficking_and_Criminalization_In_Defense_of_Feminist_Abolitionism 42 The unintended consequences of criminalizing the purchase of sex include the harms that may be suffered disproportionately by men who are already socially disem-powered. Given the negative uses of criminal law throughout history and still today, such as racist law-enforcement policies, there is reason to resist using the criminal law as a tool for positive social change. See generally M ICHAEL T ONRY , M ALIGN N EGLECT —R ACE , C RIME , AND P UNISHMENT IN A MERICA (1995) (discussing the disparate impact crime-control policies can have on disadvantaged communities); Angela J. Davis, Be- nign Neglect of Racism in the Criminal Justice System , 94 M ICH . L. R EV . 1660, 1663 (1996)(reviewing T ONRY , supra ) (discussing racial discrimination within the criminal justice system). Since racism is fundamentally inconsistent with feminist commitments to ab-olish all wrongful structural inequalities, feminists should resist any reforms that will tend to exacerbate racism. See D EMPSEY , supra note 9, at 129-35. This risk of unin-tended consequences poses a serious objection to feminist abolitionism. Yet, it is important to bear in mind that feminist-abolitionist reforms like the Swedish model, if adopted in the United States, would not expand the criminal law’s power; it would re-duce it. At present, in most jurisdictions throughout the United States, both sellers and buyers are criminalized. Feminist abolitionist reforms would therefore restrict the power of the criminal law by decriminalizing people who sell sex. Thus, to the extent that current criminal laws are being used in racist and other problematic ways (e.g., by targeting disempowered women of color who sell sex, while allowing relatively power-ful middle-class white men to go free), the proposed reforms would improve the criminal justice system by limiting its scope. The best statistical evidence empirically shows that we are progressing Feldscher 13, Karen, (Senior Writer/Project Manager at Harvard School of Public Health), “Progress, but challenges in reducing racial disparities,” Harvard School of Public Health, 9 September 2013. http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/progress-but-challenges-in-reducing-racial-disparities/ September 19, 2013 — Disparities between blacks and whites in the U.S. remain pronounced—and health is no exception. A panel of experts at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) discussed these disparities—what they are, why they persist, and what to do about them—at a September 12, 2013 event titled “Dialogue on Race, Justice, and Public Health.” The event was held in Kresge G-1 and featured panelists Lisa Coleman, Harvard University’s chief diversity officer; David Williams, Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health in the HSPH Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences; Chandra Jackson, Yerby Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the HSPH Department of Nutrition; and Zinzi Bailey, a fifth-year doctoral student in the HSPH Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Robert Blendon, Richard L. Menschel Professor of Public Health and Professor of Health Policy and Political Analysis at HSPH, moderated the discussion. Gains, but pains Health care disparities are troubling, Coleman said. One study found that doctors recommended coronary revascularization—bypass surgery that replaces blocked blood vessels with new ones—among white patients with heart disease 50 of the time, but just 23 of the time for blacks. Black women are less likely to be given a bone marrow density test than white women, even when it’s known they’ve had prior fractures. And the black infant mortality rate is 2.3 times higher than that of non-Hispanic whites. Each speaker acknowledged that racial minorities have made significant gains over the past half-century, but said there is much more work still to do. They cited statistics providing stark evidence of continuing disparities in health, wealth, education, income, arrest and incarceration rates, foreclosure rates, and poverty. Coleman called the data “disconcerting; in some cases, alarming.” Schools are desegregated, she said, but not integrated; median income is $50,000 per year for whites but $31,000 a year for blacks and $37,000 a year for Hispanics; since the 1960s, the unemployment rate among blacks has been two to two-and-a-half times higher than for whites; and one in three black men can expect to spend time in prison during their lifetimes. Blendon shared results from surveys that accentuate sharp differences of opinion about how well blacks are faring in the U.S. For instance, in a survey that asked participants if they thought that the lives of black Americans had changed dramatically over the past 50 years, 54 of whites said yes but only 29 of blacks did. Another survey asked whether or not people approved of the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial; 51 of whites approved but only 9 of blacks did. Reducing disparities through research, education Jackson talked about growing up in a segregated neighborhood in Atlanta and attending a school with 99 black students and inadequate resources. She became the first in her family to attend college. Now, through her research, she hopes to expose and reduce racial health disparities. In a recent study in the American Journal of Epidemiology, Jackson and colleagues reported that blacks—particularly black professionals—get less sleep than whites, which can have potentially negative impacts on health. Bailey discussed what’s known as the “school-to-prison pipeline”—a trajectory in which black teens do poorly in school, get held back a grade, drop out, commit a crime, then end up in jail. On the flip side, she said, there are “diversity pipelines” to recruit minority students into higher education. “Often these programs target students who have already avoided the school-to-prison pipeline,” Bailey said, noting that she would like to see higher education institutions connect with black students at earlier ages to steer them toward positive choices.
3/25/17
MA - 1AC - Immigration Ordinances Plan
Tournament: TFA | Round: 1 | Opponent: Flower Mound LA | Judge: idk Harms Welcome to the housing renaissance- ordinances are the new Jim Crow as undocumented migrants face rising challenges towards adequate housing. Lal 13 Lal, Prerna, You Cannot Live Here — Restrictive Housing Ordinances as the New Jim Crow (June 1, 2013) Following the failure of comprehensive immigration reform in 2006 and 2007, local leaders in over a hundred municipalities considered ordinances to control immigration populations, particularly the growth of Latinos in their neighborhoods. These ordinances varied in aggression but the gist of these policies was to prohibit undocumented immigrants from renting in the jurisdiction, impose civil and monetary penalties for landlords who rented to undocumented immigrants, deny business licenses to those employers who hired undocumented immigrants, and adopt English as the official language (Oliveri, 2009; Romero, 2008). Varsanyi (2008) explains this proliferation of anti-immigrant ordinances by pointing to Immigrant-driven demographics, which has generated social and cultural changes that seem threatening to many people, and these perceived threats have resulted in legislation aimed at controlling or expelling new residents. Ramakrishnan and Wong (2007) contend that the rise in local immigration legislation is a result of Republican Party dominance at the local level since most of the jurisdictions adopting restrictive ordinances were not experiencing an influx of new immigrants. What is missing from these explanations is a sustained inquiry into the role of race in explaining state and local efforts to limit immigrants in their jurisdiction. I contend that the proliferation of local anti-immigrant restrictive housing ordinances in predominantly white residential areas was motivated by racial animus towards Latinos, and parallelsed Jim Crow era racial zoning laws and sundown towns. At the heart of these ordinances is a drive to construct all immigrants as a threat to white suburban living- ordinances are just an excuse for racist sentiments. Bono Marisa. “ Don't You Be My Neighbor: Restrictive Housing Ordinances as the New Jim Crow.” The Modern American, SummerFall, 2007, 29-38. A closer examination of the reasons set forth by public officials to justify targeting undocumented immigrants, reveals that they are not only unfounded, but do not distinguish between undocumented immigrants and Latinos in general. Furthermore, localities do not avail themselves of alternative solutions that refrain from targeting subordinated groups of people. Put simply, in light of these considerations, the only conclusion a critical observer can reach is that these justifications are pretexts for racial exclusion. When Farmers Branch councilmember O’Hare stated publicly that it was necessary to protect property values,68 the city failed to offer any connection between immigration status and problems related to health, safety, welfare, or declining property values. Worse, Farmers Branch did not show that those problems even existed.69 Neither O’Hare nor other proponents of the ordinance pointed to any studies, reports, or statistics to support a correlation between immigration status and societal ills. In fact, at the same time as the touted increase in the Farmers Branch Latino population, the total number of criminal offenses in Farmers Branch declined – from 1,413 in 2003 to 1,306 in 2005.70 The Texas Educational Agency recently recognized schools in the Carrolton Farmers Branch School District for academic excellence in the 2004-2005 school year, an achievement those schools had not obtained in recently preceding years.71 Furthermore, O’Hare’s public comments did not distinguish between undocumented immigrants and Latinos. To explain fluctuations in property values, O’Hare reasoned that “what I would call less desirable people move into the neighborhoods, people who don’t value education, people who don't value taking care of their properties....”72 He claimed that retail operations cater to low-income and Spanish-speaking customers, leaving “no place for people with a good income to shop.”73 Yet, his statements again fail to discern between undocumented immigrants and Latinos in general.74 Similarly, the City of Escondido based its ordinance on findings that “the harboring of illegal aliens in dwelling units in the City, and crime committed by illegal aliens, harm the health, safety and welfare of legal residents in the City.”75 Unlike the City of Farmers Branch, Escondido relied on a June 2006 study by the National Latino Research Center at California State University San Marcos (hereafter “NLRC study”) addressing housing conditions in the Mission Park area of Escondido.76 The NLRC study, however, found that the causes for substandard housing in Escondido were the high costs of housing and the unavailability of affordable subsidized housing in Escondido – not the presence of “illegal aliens.”77 In Hazleton, Mayor Ray Barletta insisted “that illegal immigration leads to higher crime rates, contributes to overcrowded classrooms and failing schools, subjects our hospitals to fiscal hardship and legal residents to substandard quality of care, and destroys our neighborhoods and diminishes our overall quality of life.”78 Yet, he has also publicly admitted that he does not know how many “illegal aliens” live, work, or attend school in the city, or how many Hazleton crimes have been committed by “illegal immigrants,” legal residents, or citizens.79 Furthermore, according to statistics compiled by the Pennsylvania State Police Uniform Crime Reporting System, there has been a reduction of total arrests in Hazleton over the past five years, including a reduction in serious crimes such as rapes, robberies, homicides, and assaults.80 Under Hazleton’s violent crime index (VCI), undocumented immigrants committed no violent crime until 2006, when three such cases were reported out of 1,397.81 Barletta also claimed that Hazleton’s budget was “buckling under the strain of illegal immigrants,” but admitted that he was unaware how many undocumented workers contributed to the city’s budget by paying taxes.82 In 2000, Hazleton had a $1.2 million deficit, in stark contrast to the surplus it enjoys today.83 The town also saw its largest increase in property values last year.84 Its net assets are up 18, and its bond rating is AAA.85 Amidst the baseless assertions about immigrants, legal alternatives exist that would more directly address the tribulations claimed by public officials. For example, it is not clear why a city, without evidence showing the cause-and-effect between blight-like overcrowding and a certain class of residents, would not pursue remedies that did not target that group of residents. Where concerns about property values arise, a city could enforce stricter penalties for landlords who were not keeping their buildings up to code. Where the occurrence of crime is shown to be increasing, a city could fund community watch programs in appropriate areas, if not train and hire additional police officers. There are myriad alternative solutions to these alleged societal woes. Yet none are being utilized by cities that turn to restrictive housing ordinances. Thus, municipalities with restrictive housing ordinances fail to show a connection between the presence of immigrant populations and alleged societal harms. They also ignore less restrictive solutions that would more directly address those harms to the extent that they actually exist. Moreover, municipalities that pass restrictive housing ordinances simultaneously incur overwhelming legal and economic costs that they are often unable to afford. For example, after Riverside, New Jersey, passed a restrictive ordinance in the fall of 2006, thousands of Latinos fled the community, creating a forceful blow to the local economy. Local businesses floundered, and many were forced to close.86 By the time Riverside voted to rescind the ordinance a year later, it had already spent $82,000 in attorney’s fees fending off a legal challenge to its law.87 It is likely that Riverside would have spent many times that amount had it seen the challenge through to conclusion. Thus, the record of these cities reveals the intent behind the legal exclusion of the undocumented. In short, local governments’ willingness to engage in certain behavior – ignoring the variety of obvious legal solutions, willingly incurring staggering economic and legal costs, and simultaneously admitting to the nonexistence of evidence that linkings predominantly Latino undocumented immigrant populations to threatened safety or welfare – speaks for itself. The intent behind exclusionary ordinances is to use immigration status as a pretext for the racial exclusion of Latinos. It’s only going to get worse under Donald Trump’s attempts to “Make America Great Again”. Ben Carson, for example don’t even believe in the anti-discrimination laws that exist in the squo. Williams 2-1 Jumaane D. Williams (Deputy leader, New York City Council), Ben Carson is dangerous for HUD. He got the job anyway because Trump has normalized incompetence, Quartz, 2/1/2017. https://qz.com/899568/donald-trumps-cabinet-confirmations-ben-carsons-hud-secretary-confirmation-is-a-dangerous-normalization-of-incompetence/ One example is his opposition on a HUD staple: the fair housing rule. This country has a long history of systematically denying housing to black and brown Americans. Indeed, US president Donald Trump and his father have also been accused of housing discrimination. The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing program exists to address these issues by requiring local communities to examine patterns of income and racial discrimination in housing. Yet Carson believes these types of preventive measures against discrimination are “mandated social-engineering schemes.” Further, he believes it is not the role of the government to “legislate racial equality,” which in his words can be “downright dangerous.” Another cause for major concern is Caron’s belief that poverty is a choice. HUD oversees federal rental assistance programs that serve more than five million of the country’s lowest-income families. The agency is also provides federal government funding for the nation’s public housing developments. A great number of these families live in New York, including the country’s largest public housing system. The root of the justifications lies in a loophole in federal policy- currently, even through the Fair Housing Act would render ordinances unconstitutional, they are permitted under the guise of state rights. Batson 08 Todd D. Batson, No Vacancy: Why Immigrant Housing Ordinances Violate FHA and Section 1981, 74 Brook. L. Rev. (2008). Available at: http://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/blr/vol74/iss1/5 The United States has always faced immigration challenges. After the Pilgrims established the first U.S. colony in New England,2 an ensuing immigration stream grew the U.S. population to over 300 million people within 386 years.3 This population growth has increased the demands for social services and the costs required to maintain infrastructure.4 As one response to these rising costs and other immigration concerns, state and municipal governments have enacted local laws to regulate immigrant housing.' Yet while Congress has exclusive power to regulate immigration, there is no per se federal preemption of every state and municipal immigration law.6 Rather, federal immigration laws only preempt those state and municipal laws that specify which immigrants may enter the United States and the conditions under which those immigrants may remain.7 In Villas at Parkside Partners v. City of Farmers Branch,' the Northern District of Texas enjoined a municipal ordinance that regulated immigrant housing.9 The court held that federal authority preempted the municipal ordinance because the ordinance enacted a locally prescribed framework to determine which immigrants could rent apartments. ° However, the court suggested that it would affirm an ordinance that deferred to federal immigration standards." Such deference is problematic because while border communities might prioritize immigration concerns, regulation of immigrant housing is a national problem that requires a uniform, federal approach. 2 It directly implicates political functions involving foreign affairs and relations, 3 an area where federal courts typically defer to the Executive Branch. Plan Plan Text: The United States Federal Government should remove all restricting housing ordinances and end all legal administrations that curtail immigrant access to housing by expanding the jurisdiction of the Fair Housing Act to apply to states’ obligations to protect immigrants. Batson 08 Todd D. Batson, No Vacancy: Why Immigrant Housing Ordinances Violate FHA and Section 1981, 74 Brook. L. Rev. (2008). Available at: http://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/blr/vol74/iss1/5
State and municipal governments may neither slam their front doors shut, nor gate-keep their communities by determining which immigrants may enter and remain. 7 4 Unlawful immigration does impose costs on state and municipal governments, and border communities may very well bear those costs disproportionately. However, exporting immigration costs to neighboring communities is no solution.'75 Rather, state and municipal governments should coalesce around a unified plan and lobby Congress to address the immigration problem comprehensively. A comprehensive regulatory framework would avoid inconsistent regulation from state and local governments. The framework would be more likely to provide tenants and property owners notice of their legal obligations, and would provide adequate and meaningful review. Congress has the power to articulate a standard of scrutiny that addresses equal protection concerns for immigrants. A federal statute, moreover, would represent the cooperation and contributions of the nation as a whole. Since immigration policies directly implicate political functions involving foreign affairs and relations,'76 a nationally accountable Congress is the appropriate body to address these concerns. Congress may take longer to act than state and municipal governments would like. Thus, in the interim, state and municipal communities are likely to elect at least some politicians running "tough on immigration" campaigns. These politicians are likely to encourage state and municipal regulations of immigrant housing. Yet this Note has discussed the legal deficiencies with local regulations.'77 Because of these legal deficiencies, local residents must challenge immigrant housing ordinances under FHA and Section 1981 V' In the end, a comprehensive, well-reasoned approach to immigration will best address the national problem, while ensuring that the United States' doors to the "tempest-tost"'79 remain open. Advantage 1 is Cultural Shift Rejecting immigration restrictions transforms landscapes by re-shaping social values through disruption of racial narratives and contestation of political norms. Lal 13 Lal, Prerna, You Cannot Live Here — Restrictive Housing Ordinances as the New Jim Crow (June 1, 2013) A great influx of Latino immigration has transformed how place and race is lived in America. Latino immigrants challenge the black/white binary that has long shaped U.S. race relations, and their continued migration to suburbs will likely play a transformative role in changing the urban/suburban landscape (Price, 2012). While many Latinos continue to face concentrated poverty and live in highly segregated areas (Logan Prerna Lal 17 2010; Massey, 2007), mass migration can radically transform both the city and suburban landscape. As immigrant workers continue to increase in the American workforce over the next few decades, both cities and suburbs will become new spaces of political contestation. As Latinos move from cities to suburbs, they can expand labor market and cultural networks, and help to integrate newly arriving immigrants into both the urban and suburban landscape. Independent of anything else, the 1AC leads to a spillover effect- rights based approach to housing is key to spurring more positive policy reform, Adams 08, Kristen David (Professor of Law, Stetson University College of Law). "Do we need a right to housing." Nev. LJ 9 (2008): 275. Rights are more powerful than goals, policies, commitments, and other non-rights. One illustration of this truth is that the United States has recognized a commitment to “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family” dating back to 1949.162 This resolution came from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union Address, in which he urged the adoption of a “Second Bill of Rights” that would include a right to housing.163 Congress officially adopted Roosevelt’s housing goal in 1949.164 Thus, a commitment to housing for all persons in the United States is not an entirely new concept, but creating an affirmative right to housing would take Congress’ previous commitment to a whole new level and require that it be met. The 1949 commitment lacked specific goals that would have made it enforceable and meaningful.165 Currently, the United States falls far short of providing housing to every family in America who needs it; instead, only about one-fourth of those who qualify for housing assistance actually receive it.166 The 1949 commitment can therefore be seen as an example of why affordable housing goals are not sufficient. Instead, rights are required.167 Rights, unlike goals, tend to provide the level of specificity needed to motivate follow through. Unlike goals, rights also create grounds for litigation if no follow through is forthcoming.168 In addition to having greater power than non-rights, rights create legitimacy for programs to enforce those rights.169 Having a right to housing should put the brakes on continual budget cuts for housing programs i
n the legislative appropriations process.170 Making housing a right may also motivate increased construction of affordable housing.171 Redlining’s impacts still affect Latino and black communities today. Housing ordinances perpetuates mass income inequality. There is a historical obligation to reject racist ordinances. Boak 16 For minorities, pain is severe decade after housing peaked By JOSH BOAK Jun. 20, 2016 2:47 PM EDT bigstory.ap.org/article/b8ceee210bb344e68bebe95ab73faf5a/10-years-after-housing-bubble-damage-lingers-minorities The problem is most pronounced among minorities who already had lower ownership rates before the bubble. Actions such as "redlining" — which for decades denied loans to minorities — excluded black neighborhoods from government-backed mortgages. This made it harder for minorities to buy even as the U.S. economy surged after World War II and overall home ownership rates climbed. Many minority homeowners who bought or refinanced during the bubble eventually became trapped by predatory mortgages, some requiring no money down and monthly payments that eventually ballooned. Advantage 2 is Legal Spillover The 1AC would provide strong legal backing for potential lawsuits, setting a legal precedent in favor of immigrants. Batson 08 Todd D. Batson, No Vacancy: Why Immigrant Housing Ordinances Violate FHA and Section 1981, 74 Brook. L. Rev. (2008). Available at: http://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/blr/vol74/iss1/5
CHALLENGING IMMIGRANT HOUSING ORDINANCES IS MOST PRACTICAL UNDER THE FAIR HOUSING ACT AND SECTION 1981 This Note argues that because of the legal deficiencies with immigrant housing ordinances, 4 the most practical challenges to them arise under FHA and Section 1981. FHA prohibits housing practices that have a discriminatory effect on parties because of race, color, or national origin."' Thus, while an equal protection challenge requires proof of discriminatory intent,"' courts have interpreted FHA more broadly." 7 Additionally, Section 1981 prohibits parties from restricting any person's right to enter a contract because of race, ethnicity, or national origin.2 8 As a result, Section 1981 prohibits any state or municipal law that forbids a property owner or manager from entering leases with unlawful immigrants." 9 This Note argues that in comparison to a preemption, due process or equal protection challenge, plaintiffs face a lower bar to establish wrongdoing under FHA and Section 1981. It follows that the most practical means to challenge these immigrant housing ordinances are FHA and Section 1981. By doing so, plaintiffs can defeat local piecemeal efforts to regulate immigrant housing and thereby encourage a uniform, national approach to a common problem. Congress enacted FHA13° to provide fair housing throughout the nation and to prohibit all public and private racial discrimination in the sale and rental of real property. 3' The reach of FHA is broad, covering most dwellings and protecting any person seeking to rent or purchase a dwelling, regardless of immigration status.'32 While there is a limited exemption for single-family homes, the exemption does not extend to apartment complexes."' Thus, apartment complex owners and managers must comply with FHA provisions. Immigrant housing ordinances injure both tenants and property owners, and both groups have standing to challenge the ordinances under FHA.'34 The ordinances harm tenants because they disparately impact minority renters. Further, the ordinances infringe on tenants' rights to enjoy a diverse community.'35 They harm property owners and managers, in contrast, because they are too vague.'36 Property owners and managers lack sufficient notice and guidance regarding their new legal obligations.'37 Thus, in an effort to comply with local regulations, they may incidentally violate federal laws. Property owners and managers face a basic dilemma: they may abide by federal laws and risk violating local ordinances, or they may abide by local ordinances and risk violating federal laws. Winning lawsuits can be a massive leg-up for marginalized communities stuck in poverty- between 1990 and 2001 that lead to over 150 million dollars in recovery. Wiki n.d. Housing discrimination (United States), From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_discrimination_(United_States) The federal government has passed other initiatives in addition to the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 and Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 helped with discrimination in mortgage lending and lenders' problems with credit needs.12 The Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988 was passed to give the federal government the power to enforce the original Fair Housing Act to correct past problems with enforcement.13 The amendment established a system of administrative law judges to hear cases brought to them by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development and to levy fines.14 Because of the relationship between housing discrimination cases and private agencies, the federal government passed the two initiatives. The Fair Housing Assistance Program of 1984 was passed to assist public agencies with processing complaints, and the Fair Housing Initiatives program of 1986 supported private and public fair housing agencies in their activities, such as auditing.13 Between 1990 and 2001 these two programs have resulted in over one thousand housing discrimination lawsuits and over $155 million in financial recovery.13 However, the lawsuits and financial recoveries generated from fair housing discrimination cases only scratches the surface of all instances of discrimination. Silverman and Patterson concluded that the underfunding and poor implementation of federal, state and local policies designed to address housing discrimination results in less than 1 of all instances of discrimination being addressed.15 Moreover, they found that local nonprofits and administrators responsible for enforcing fair housing laws had a tendency to downplay discrimination based on family status and race when designing implementation strategies.16 The 1AC causes a social change that moves people onto the side of immigrants. David Schultz, Vice President, Minnesota Civil Liberties Union and Stephen E. Gottlieb, Cleveland-Marshall School of Law, “Legal Functionalism and Social Change: A Reassessment of Rosenberg’s The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change?” JOURNAL OF LAW AND POLICY v. 12, Winter 1996, p. 63+. Further, since law imposes social costs n90 and affects incentives, n91 the decision itself, without extra-judicial assistance, raised new obstacles to segregation. n92 What once was a nearly costless behavior suddenly entailed increased litigation costs, fines, and injunctions; the threat of executive action against segregation now was increasingly real; and it now was likely that other related behaviors also would be similarly burdened. Independent of victory, case studies prove that litigation spurs legislation. Richard A. L. Gambitta, Chair of the Political Science and Geography Department, University of Texas-San Antonio, GOVERNING THROUGH THE COURTS, ed. Gambitta, May, and Foster, 1981, p. 275-276. Similar to the aftermath of the “winning” litiation in Serrano and Robinson, the losing litigation in Rodriguez was followed by positive, though limited, policy reform and relative equalization. How did the Rodriguez litigaton contribute to the policy reform and expenditure change? I suggest, in ways similar to Serrano and Robinson. The litigation process performed a legislative agenda-setting function. All three cases contributed to setting a legislative agenda that otherwise would not have 276 transpired. Additionally, the litigation processes bolstered the political positions of the advocates of change, though the policy outcomes were tempered by, as they are always subject to and at least partially determined by, the inherent compromises of the majoritarian processes and institutions (Casper, 1972; Clune, 1979; Horowitz, 1977; Lehn, 1978; Scheingold, 1974). Framework The standard is rejecting structural oppression. The nature of governments necessitates pragmatic policy. Martin Rhonheimer. “The Political Ethos of Constitutional Democracy and the Place of Natural Law in Public Reason: Rawls's "Political Liberalism" Revisited” http://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1364andcontext=ajj “It is a fundamental feature of political philosophy to be part of practical philosophy. Political philosophy belongs to ethics, which is practical, for it both reflects on practical knowledge and aims at action. Therefore, it is not only normative, but must consider the concrete conditions of realization. The rationale of political institutions and action must be understood as embedded in concrete cultural and, therefore, historical contexts and as meeting with problems that only in these contexts are understandable. A normative political philosophy which would abstract from the conditions of realizability would be trying to establish norms for realizing the "idea of the good" or of "the just" (as Plato, in fact, tried to do in his Republic). Such a purely metaphysical view, however, is doomed to failure. As a theory of political praxis, political philosophy must include in its reflection the concrete historical context, historical experiences and the corresponding knowledge of the proper logic of the political. 4 Briefly: political philosophy is not metaphysics, which contemplates the necessary order of being, but practical philosophy, which deals with partly contingent matters and aims at action. Moreover, unlike moral norms in general-natural law included-which rule the actions of a person-"my acting" and pursuing the good-the logic of the political is characterized by acts like framing institutions
and establishing legal rules by which not only personal actions but the actions of a multitude of persons are regulated by the coercive force of state power, and by which a part of citizens exercises power over others. Political actions are, thus, both actions of the whole of the body politic and referring to the whole of the community of citizens. 5 Unless we wish to espouse a platonic view according to which some persons are by nature rulers while others are by nature subjects, we will stick to the Aristotelian differentiation between the "domestic" and the "political" kind of rule 6: unlike domestic rule, which is over people with a common interest and harmoniously striving after the same good and, therefore, according to Aristotle is essentially "despotic," political rule is exercised over free persons who represent a plurality of interests and pursue, in the common context of the polis, different goods. The exercise of such political rule, therefore, needs justification and is continuously in search of consent among those who are ruled, but who potentially at the same time are also the rulers. Thus, unlike individual ethics, which is concerned with the goodness, fulfillment and flourishing of human persons, political ethics and philosophy-as a conception of political action and the political, that is, the common good -must be right from the beginning, and even on the level of basic principles, prudential in a specific way: it is a principled kind of prudence, based on the specific subject matter of the political, that guides actions-e.g., lawmaking—chosen for, and in many cases in behalf of, a multitude of free persons the results of which are enforced by means of the coercive apparatus of what we nowadays call "the state." This principled kind of political prudence and its inherent logic of specifically political justification constitute "public reason." “ This means that a) you reject abstract ethical theories—at the end of the day, no one cares whether they willed a contradiction or not, but rather the government concerns itself with outcomes of its actions, and b) absent of the neg explaining why they link to political philosophy, you default my framework. Governments have an obligation to reject forms of structural oppression—it prevents voices from being heard and comes first under any framework. WINTER AND LEIGHTON – D. D. Winter and Dana Leighton. “STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE SECTION INTRODUCTION”. 6/1/99 http://sites.saumag.edu/danaleighton/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2015/09/SVintro-2.pdf “Finally, to recognize the operation of structural violence forces us to ask questions about how and why we tolerate it, questions which often have painful answers for the privileged elite who unconsciously support it. A final question of this section is how and why we allow ourselves to be so oblivious to structural violence. Susan Opotow offers an intriguing set of answers, in her article Social Injustice. She argues that our normal perceptual/cognitive processes divide people into in-groups and out-groups. Those outside our group lie outside our scope of justice. Injustice that would be instantaneously confronted if it occurred to someone we love or know is barely noticed if it occurs to strangers or those who are invisible or irrelevant. We do not seem to be able to open our minds and our hearts to everyone, so we draw conceptual lines between those who are in and out of our moral circle. Those who fall outside are morally excluded, and become either invisible, or demeaned in some way so that we do not have to acknowledge the injustice they suffer. Moral exclusion is a human failing, but Opotow argues convincingly that it is an outcome of everyday social cognition. To reduce its nefarious effects, we must be vigilant in noticing and listening to oppressed, invisible, outsiders. Inclusionary thinking can be fostered by relationships, communication, and appreciation of diversity. Like Opotow, all the authors in this section point out that structural violence is not inevitable if we become aware of its operation, and build systematic ways to mitigate its effects. Learning about structural violence may be discouraging, overwhelming, or maddening, but these papers encourage us to step beyond guilt and anger, and begin to think about how to reduce structural violence. “ Prefer this because ethics can’t be grounded in ideal theory. Dreaming of a nonexistent perfect world does nothing to actually create change, it just leaves content with the flawed status quo. Charles Mills 05. “Ideal Theory” as Ideology. 2005. http://www.douglasficek.com/teaching/phi-102/mills.pdf RC “I suggest that this spontaneous reaction, far from being philosophically naïve or jejune, is in fact the correct one. If we start from what is presumably the uncontroversial premise that the ultimate point of ethics is to guide our actions and make ourselves better people and the world a better place, then ideal theory the framework above will not only be unhelpful, but will in certain respects be deeply antithetical to the proper goal of theoretical ethics as an enterprise. In modeling humans, human capacities, human interaction, human institutions, and human society on ideal-as-idealized-models, in never exploring how deeply different this is from ideal-as-descriptive-models, we are abstracting away from realities crucial to our comprehension of the actual workings of injustice in human interactions and social institutions, and thereby guaranteeing that the ideal-as-idealized-model will never be achieved. It is no accident that historically subordinated groups have always been deeply skeptical of ideal theory, generally see its glittering ideals as remote and unhelpful, and are attracted to nonideal theory, or what significantly overlaps it, “naturalized” theory. In the same essay cited above, Jaggar identifies a “unity of feminist ethics in at least one dimension,” a naturalism “characteristic, though not definitive, of it” (Jaggar 2000, 453). Marxism no longer has the appeal it once did as a theory of oppression, but it was famous for emphasizing, as in The German Ideology, the importance of descending from the idealizing abstractions of the Young Hegelians to a focus on “real, active men,” not “men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived,” but “as they actually are,” in (class) relations of domination (Marx and Engels 1976, 35–36). And certainly black Americans, and others of the racially oppressed, have always operated on the assumption that the natural and most illuminating starting point is the actual conditions of nonwhites, and the discrepancy between them and the vaunted American ideals. Thus Frederick Douglass’s classic 1852 speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” points out the obvious, that the inspiring principles of freedom and independence associated with the celebration are not equally extended to black slaves: “I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. . . . The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. . . . This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn” (1996, 116, emphasis in original). So given this convergence in gender, class, and race theory on the need to make theoretically central the existence and functioning of the actual non-ideal structures that obstruct the realization of the ideal, what defensible arguments for abstracting away from these realities could there be?” Failing to adopt a non-ideal theory allows for use to ignore hypocrisy in our own philosophy. Charles Mills 05. “Ideal Theory” as Ideology. 2005. http://www.douglasficek.com/teaching/phi-102/mills.pdf RC “Or consider a (today) far more respectable ideal, that of autonomy. This notion has been central to ethical theory for hundreds of years, and is, of course, famously most developed in Kant’s writings. But recent work in feminist theory has raised questions as to whether it is an attractive ideal at all, or just a reflection of male privilege. Human beings are dependent upon others for a long time before they can become adult, and if they live to old age, are likely to be dependent upon others for many of their latter years. But traditionally, this work has been done by women, and so it has been invisible or taken for granted, not theorized. Some feminist ethicists have argued for the simple abandonment of autonomy as an attractive value, but others have suggested that it can be redeemed once it is reconceptualized to take account of this necessarily inter- relational aspect (MacKenzie and Stoljar, 2000). So the point is that idealization here obfuscates the reality of care giving that makes any achievement of autonomy possible in the first place, and only through nonideal theory are we sensitized to the need to balance this value against other values, and rethink it. Somewhat similarly, think of the traditional left critique of a liberal concept of freedom that focuses simply on the absence of juridical barriers, and ignores the many ways in which economic constraints can make working-class liberties largely nominal rather than substantive.”
3/16/17
MA - 1AC - Kant
Tournament: South Texas NSDA Quals | Round: 3 | Opponent: Idk | Judge: Bram I cant spell their last name sorry Agency, or the setting and pursuing of ends, is inescapable. Ferrero Luca Ferrero (University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee) “Constitutivism and the Inescapability of Agency” Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. IV January 12th 2009 pp. 6-8 3.2 Agency is special under two respects. First, agency is the enterprise with the largest jurisdiction.12 All ordinary enterprises fall under it. To engage in any ordinary enterprise is ipso facto to engage in the enterprise of agency. In addition, there are instances of behavior that fall under no other enterprise but agency. First, intentional transitions in and out of particular enterprises might not count as moves within those enterprises, but they are still instances of intentional agency, of bare intentional agency, so to say. Second, agency is the locus where we adjudicate the merits and demerits of participating in any ordinary enterprise. Reasoning whether to participate in a particular enterprise is often conducted outside of that enterprise, even while one is otherwise engaged in it. Practical reflection is a manifestation of full-fledged intentional agency but it does not necessary belong to any other specific enterprise. Once again, it might be an instance of bare intentional agency. In the limiting case, agency is the only enterprise that would still keep a subject busy if she were to attempt a ʻradical re-evaluationʼ of all of her engagements and at least temporarily suspend her participation in all ordinary enterprises.13 3.3 The second feature that makes agency stand apart from ordinary enterprises is agencyʼs closure. Agency is closed under the operation of reflective rational assessment. As the case of radical re-evaluations shows, ordinary enterprises are never fully closed under reflection. There is always the possibility of reflecting on ordinary enterprises their justification while standing outside of them. Not so for rational agency. The constitutive features of agency (no matter whether they are conceived as aims, motives, capacities, commitments, etc.) continue to operate even when the agent is assessing whether she is justified in her engagement in agency. One cannot put agency on hold while trying to determine whether agency is justified because this kind of practical reasoning is the exclusive job of intentional agency. This does not mean that agency falls outside of the reach of reflection. But even reflection about agency is a manifestation of agency.14 Agency is not necessarily self-reflective but all instances of reflective assessment, including those directed at agency itself, fall under its jurisdiction; they are conducted in deference to the constitutive standards of agency. This kind of closure is unique to agency. What is at work in reflection is the distinctive operation of intentional agency in its discursive mode. What is at work is not simply the subjectʼs capacity to shape her conduct in response to reasons for action but also her capacity both to ask for these reasons and to give them. Hence, agencyʼs closure under reflective rational assessment is closure under agencyʼs own distinctive operation: Agency is closed under itself.15 This outweighs: A. Agents can’t arbitrarily ignore rationality since it function as a condition of agency in the first place. So even if another framework were true, that too would operate within the requirements of reason itself. B. Morality must provide a motivational reason for action otherwise agents can’t be morally culpable. Simply knowing that an action is immoral is not sufficient to override the action absent of some motivation to do so. And, agency is non-optional, which means rationality is intrinsically binding and motivational. And, agency posits universalizability. Two warrants.
Ends must be universalizable. Any other norm justifies someone’s ability to impede on your ends, which also means reason acts as a side constraint on ends-based frameworks. Siyar Jamsheed Aiam Siyar: Kant’s Conception of Practical Reason. Tufts University, 1999: . Now, when I represent my end as to be done, I represent it as binding me to certain courses of action, precluding other actions, etc. Thus, my ends function as constraints for me in that they determine what I can or must do (at least if I am to be consistent). I may of course give up an end such as that of eating ice cream at a future point; yet while I have the end, I must see myself as bound to do what is necessary to realize it.35 Thus, I must represent my ends as constraints that I have adopted, constraints that structure the possible space of choice and action for me. Further, given that my end is rationally determined, I take it to be generally recognizable that my end functions as a rationally determined constraint. That is, I take it that other subjects can also recognize my end as an objective constraint, for I take it that they as well as myself can cognize its determining grounds—the source of its objective worth—through the exercise of reason. Indeed, in representing an end, I in effect demand recognition for it from other subjects: since the end functions as an objective though self-imposed constraint for me, I must demand that this constraint be recognized as such. The thought here is simply that if I am committed to some end, e.g. my ice cream eating policy, I must act in certain ways to realize it. In this context, I cannot be indifferent to the attitudes and actions of others, for these may either help or hinder my pursuit of my end. Hence, if I am in fact committed to realizing my end, i.e. if I represent an end at all, I must demand that the worth of my end, its status as to be done, be recognized by others. 2. Universal willing is a prerequisite to self-determination of action. Anything else means desire controls our actions, thus the actor is no longer an agent. Korsgaard“Self-Constitution in the Ethics of Plato and Kant” by Christine M. Korsgaard The second step is to see that particularistic willing makes it impossible for you to distinguish yourself, your principle of choice, from the various incentives on which you act. According to Kant you must always act on some incentive or other, for every action, even action from duty, involves a decision on a proposal: something must suggest the action to you. And in order to will particularistically, you must in each case wholly identify with the incentive of your action. That incentive would be, for the moment, your law, the law that defined your agency or your will. It’s important to see that if you had a particularistic will you would not identify with the incentive as representative of any sort of type, since if you took it as a representative of a type you would be taking it as universal. For instance, you couldn’t say that you decided to act on the inclination of the moment, because you were so inclined. Someone who takes “I shall do the things I am inclined to do, whatever they might be” as his maxim has adopted a universal principle, not a particular one: he has the principle of treating his inclinations as such as reasons. A truly particularistic will must embrace the incentive in its full particularity: it, in no way that is further describable, is the law of such a will. So someone who engages in particularistic willing does not even have a democratic soul. There is only the tyranny of the moment: the complete domination of the agent by something inside him. Thus the standard is consistency with willing universal maxims. Prefer the standard.
A priori knowledge is a constraint on knowledge. Wood “Critique of Pure Reason” by Immanuel Kant 1787 Translated and Edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood “The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant” re published 1998 Now it is easy to show that in human cognition there actually are such necessary and in the strictest sense universal, thus pure a priori judgments. If one wants an example from the sciences, one need only look at all the propositions of mathematics; if one would have one from the commonest use of the understanding, the proposition that every alteration must have a cause will do; indeed in the latter the very concept of a cause so obviously contains the concept of a necessity of connection with an effect and a strict universality of rule that it would be entirely lost if one sought, as Hume did, to derive it from a frequent association of that which happens with that which precedes and a habit (thus a merely subjective necessity) of connecting representations arising from that association.13 Even without requiring such examples for the proof of the reality of pure a priori principles in our cognition, one could establish their indispensability for the possibility of experience itself, thus establish it II priori. For where would experience itself get its certainty if all rules in accordance with which it proceeds were themselves in turn always empirical, thus contingent hence one could hardly allow these to count as first principles. Yet here we can content ourselves with having displayed the pure use of our cognitive faculty as a fact together with its indication. Not merely in judgments, however, but even in concepts is an origin of some of them revealed a priori. Gradually remove from your experiential concept of a body everything that is empirical in it - the color, the hardness or softness, the weight, even the impenetrability - there still remains the space that was occupied by the body (which has now entirely disappeared), and you cannot leave that out. Likewise, if you remove from your empirical concept of every object,' whether corporeal or incorporeal, all those properties of which experience teaches you, you could still not take from it that by means of which you think of it as a substance or as dependent on a substance (even though this concept contains more determination than that of an object! in general). Thus, convinced by the necessity with which this concept presses itself on you, you must concede that it has its seat in your faculty of cognition a priori. A priori principles mean universalizability. Wood 2 “Critique of Pure Reason” by Immanuel Kant 1787 Translated and Edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood “The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant” re published 1998 At issue here is a mark by means of which we can securely distinguish a pure cognition from an empirical one. Experience teaches us, to be sure, that something is constituted thus and so, but not that it could not be otherwise. First, then, if a proposition is thought along with its necessity, it is an a priori judgment; if it is, moreover, also not derived from any proposition except one that in turn is valid as a necessary proposition, then it is absolutely a priori. Second: Experience never gives its judgments true or strict but only assumed and comparative universality (through induction), so properly it must be said: as far as we have yet perceived, there is no exception to this or that rule. Thus if a judgment is thought in strict universality, i.e., in such a way that no exception at all is allowed to be possible, then it is not derived from experience, but is rather valid absolutely a priori. Empirical universality is therefore only an arbitrary increase in validity from that which holds in most cases to that which holds in all, as in, e.g., the proposition "All bodies are heavy," whereas strict universality belongs to a judgment essentially; this points to a special source of cognition for it, namely a faculty of a priori cognition. Necessity and strict universality are therefore secure indications of an a priori cognition, and also belong together inseparably. But since in their use it is sometimes easier to show the empirical limitation in judgments than the contingency in them, or is often more plausible to show the unrestricted universality that we ascribe to a judgment than its necessity, it is advisable to employ separately these two criteria, each of which is in itself infallible. 12 2. Kantianism is a pre-requisite to any other form of discussion on this topic- a) This topic requires universalism as a starting point for particular material discussions. King 1 Housing as a Freedom Right” PETER KING Housing Studies, Vol. 18, No. 5, 661–672, September 2003 Centre for Comparative Housing Research, Department of Public Policy, De Montfort University, Leicester “Discussions on statutory rights tend to be question-begging, in that they take for granted that rights exist, and that therefore action is necessary by the state to institutionalise them and then to act upon them. But what we need to know is why rights exist and thus why it is that governments have felt the need to legislate for them. This initially necessitates an abstract discussion, which defines rights and how they might be categorised. We might then be able to attaches the notion of rights to housing in a more fundamental way. What this means, in effect, is that statutory housing rights rest on an understanding of a need for a right to housing. This is not merely a semantic argument. The terminological distinction here is important. The concept of housing rights tells us what we have (or in some cases, ought to have), whilst the right to housing is a justificatory argument which addresses why we should have certain forms of provision in the first place. Housing rights tell us what this provision might be, but not why it ought to be there. The right to housing is therefore serving an deeper but more abstract purpose.” (663) b) Even if their approach to ethics is best, we should still use a universal approach in this specific instance. Concentrating on social distinctions with the concrete other dooms the political priority of the right to housing. King 2 Housing as a Freedom Right” PETER KING Housing Studies, Vol. 18, No. 5, 661–672, September 2003 Centre for Comparative Housing Research, Department of Public Policy, De Montfort University, Leicester “Second, this argument, by offering a fundamental basis for housing policy, places housing alongside other welfare goods. One of the key problems for housing policy is its relatively low political priority when compared to issues such as health, education and transport. This is because, in the developed world at least, housing as a social problem it is all too frequently seen as particularist and concerned with a minority concern of the population. Housing policy, particularly in the developed world, is equated with social housing and not with the generality of the population, whereas health provision is of concerns to nearly all the popu- lation. Discourses based on needs or equality, despite their strong normative appeal, exacerbate this problem by emphasising the distinct characteristics of those who ought to be helped. It can be argued, therefore, that social housing justified on grounds of need or equality, it institutionalises the very social exclusion it is intended to remedy. However, a discourse based on freedom rights concentrates on common features within a population by emphasising those basic elements which most take for granted, but which are impossible without access to housing. Hence, the stress is on what is common and universal to us all and not what separates or excludes certain groups or individuals. This offers a much more powerful basis for policy than that presented by need or equality. Thus again the freedom rights argument presents the means to discuss housing across widely different political structures and levels of economic development.” (670) 3. Only the AC framework explains how a state obligation can function. This also takes out util, governments have side-constraints. Korsgaard 08 Korsgaard, Christine M (Exceptionally practical reasoner). 2008. Taking the law into our own hands: Kant on the right to revolution. In The Constitution of Agency, 233-262. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Originally published in Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls, eds. Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman, and Christine M. Korsgaard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Why is it permissible for others to force or coerce you to conform to the duties of justice? The Universal Principle of Justice in effect says that the only restriction on freedom is consistency with the freedom of everyone else. Anything that is consistent with universal freedom is just, and you therefore have a right to do it. If someone tries to interfere with that right, he is interfering with your freedom and so violating the Universal Principle of Justice. Violations of the Universal Principle of Justice may be opposed by coercion for the simple reason that anything that hinders a hindrance to freedom is consistent with freedom, and anything that is consistent with universal freedom is just. It follows that rights are coercively enforceable. Indeed, coercive enforceability is not something attached to rights; it is constitutive of their very nature (MPJ 6:232). To have a right just is to have the executive authority to enforce a certain claim. This in turn is the foundation of the executive or coercive authority of the political state. Kant’s political philosophy is a social contract theory, in obvious ways in the tradition of Locke. But the differences are important. In Locke’s view, individuals have rights in the state of nature, and may enforce those rights. But when each person determines and enforces his own rights the result is social disorder. Since this disorder is contrary to our interests, people join together into a political state, transferring our executive authority to a government. 1AC – Advocacy Advocacy Text: The United States ought to guarantee the right to housing. I don’t defend implementation but can grant links if asked in CX. The framework questions whether or not the affirmative’s rights based approach to housing passes the test of non-contradiction, which is prerequisite to policy action. King 3 Housing as a Freedom Right” PETER KING Housing Studies, Vol. 18, No. 5, 661–672, September 2003 Centre for Comparative Housing Research, Department of Public Policy, De Montfort University, Leicester “This paper has suggested there is great merit in presenting housing as a freedom right instead of a socio-economic claim. It has been argued that rights are important entities and can serve, if presented properly, to heighten the political and moral significance of housing. Indeed, this rights-based argument can be used to claim that housing is an elemental right upon which other basic human functions depend. I believe this to be an argument of some significance that has implications for policy and for the status of housing more generally.” 1AC – Contention A violation of freedom is a contradiction. Stephen Engstrom (PhD, Professor of Ethics at University of Pittsburg). “Universal Legislation As the Form of Practical Knowledge”. Pg. 19-20 “Given the preceding considerations, it’s a straightforward matter to see how a maxim of action that assaults the freedom of others with a view to furthering one’s own ends results in a contradiction when we attempt to will it as a universal law in accordance with the foregoing account of the formula of universal law. Such a maxim would lie in a practical judgment that deems it good on the whole to act to limit others’ outer freedom, and hence their self-sufficiency, their capacity to realize their ends, where doing so augments, or extends, one’s own outer freedom and so also one’s own self-sufficiency. 19In this passage, Kant mentions assaults on property as well as on freedom. But since property is a specific, socially instituted form of freedom, I have omitted mention of it to focus on the primitive case. Now on the interpretation we’ve been entertaining, applying the formula of universal law involves considering whether it’s possible for every person—every subject capable of practical judgment—to shares the practical judgment asserting the goodness of every person’s acting according to the maxim in question. Thus in the present case the application of the formula involves considering whether it’s possible for every person to deem good every person’s acting to limit others’ freedom, where practicable, with a view to augmenting their own freedom. Since here all persons are on the one hand deeming good both the limitation of others’ freedom and the extension of their own freedom, while on the other hand, insofar as they agree with the similar judgments of others, also deeming good the limitation of their own freedom and the extension of others’ freedom, they are all deeming good both the extension and the limitation of both their own and others’ freedom.” Now, affirm- First, the right to housing is an intrinsic extension of our right to freedom. It serves as the bedrock that allows us to freely exercise all other rights. King 4 Housing as a Freedom Right” PETER KING Housing Studies, Vol. 18, No. 5, 661–672, September 2003 Centre for Comparative Housing Research, Department of Public Policy, De Montfort University, Leicester “Freedom rights can be seen as negative rights, in that they prohibit coercion and interference in the interests of others (Berlin, 1969). The importance of negative rights for some libertarian thinkers such as Machan (1989) and Ras- mussen and Den Uyl (1991), is that they do not clash. Omissions can have simultaneous multiple effects. Coercion by the state impinges on the rights of all its citizens. But importantly, these thinkers would argue that the enjoyment of life, liberty and property by one does not deny it to others. The amount of liberty in any society is not governed by a zero-sum game, where one person taking a share diminishes the pool left for the rest. However, socio-economic claims frequently entail the distribution of scarce resources, and thus any settlement will involve the adjudication between rival claims. Thus, because they involve finite resources, these claims place individual rights-holders in direct competition with their fellow citizens. As a result, these libertarians thinkers limit the remit of rights to indivisible goods such as liberty and autonomy, and to property rights, which, they suggest, underpin these other rights. Sen (1985) has argued that the notion of negative rights, as propounded in this case by Nozick (1974), is flawed. Sen questions whether it is sufficient to allow individuals legitimately to pursue their ends even when this might have disastrous consequences. Sen’s point is that individuals may be unable to command certain necessary goods because they have no entitlement to possess those goods. In this case, they have no property rights over goods and services. Bengtsson (1995) relates Sen’s argument to housing, and states, “It is not difficult to find examples of how people have been deprived of shelter, just because they lacked—and others had—control of private property” (p. 126). This implies that the positive rights of some, to property, clash with the negative rights of others. Again it suggests that one cannot divorce rights-based theories from utilitarian considerations (which is precisely why libertarian theories like those of Machan and Rasmussen and Den Uyl restrict rights to negative entities only). An interesting way around the apparent clash between freedom rights and socio-economic claims has been offered by Waldron (1993b). His discussion is also important for a further reason. It shows that the right to housing might actually be one of the most significant rights, if not the most significant right. This is because it acts as the bedrock for all others, in that all rights must be situated.” (665-666)
Second, the situated nature of existence requires we own property before we are able to freely will actions. The right to housing ensures that everyone can wills freely regardless of your starting point. King 5Housing as a Freedom Right” PETER KING Housing Studies, Vol. 18, No. 5, 661–672, September 2003 Centre for Comparative Housing Research, Department of Public Policy, De Montfort University, Leicester
“Property rules determine where one has a right to be. They define rights of use and exclusion. Thus they grant the owner the power to exclude those with whom they do not wish to share the property. This situation applies whether the property is owned privately or by some public body. This means that some agents have property rights that they can legitimately exercise over their property. This may involve excluding all others from that property. However, all actions are situated in that they must be done somewhere. One must sleep somewhere, wash somewhere, urinate somewhere, and so on. Thus one is not free to perform an action unless there is somewhere where one is free to perform it. Waldron limits his discussion of actions to those absolutely necessary for human survival. However, his list is not an exhaustive one. Indeed, all actions, be they urinating, love-making, reading a book or discussing philosophy, are situated. As will be seen when Nussbaum’s fuller list of functionings is discussed, it is the situated nature of what might be called higher order functions that lead to a full right to housing.” (667) Third, an absolutist account of property is coercive. It constrains the homeless from literally doing anything by using the logic of violating someone’s property rights. King 6 Housing as a Freedom Right” PETER KING Housing Studies, Vol. 18, No. 5, 661–672, September 2003 Centre for Comparative Housing Research, Department of Public Policy, De Montfort University, Leicester
“Homelessness is defined by Waldron as the very condition where one is “excluded from all the places governed by private property rules” (1993b, p. 313, author’s emphasis). The homeless are entitled only to be in public places. They have no right to be on private property unless given permission by the owner. They must therefore rely on public places to undertake their situated functions. But this is possible, however, only so long as the public authorities that own this property tolerate them. Just as private owners can exercise their right to exclude, so can public bodies. Waldron rightly points out that there is an increasing regulation and policing of public property that prevents the homeless from exercising their basic functions in public. Waldron gives the example of removing seating from subways in US cities to prevent them from being used by the homeless. This form of ‘zero tolerance’ of vagrancy can also be seen in the attitudes of politicians and public agencies in the UK. The homeless are seen as having no right to be on the streets, there being enough hostel spaces for them. In addition, begging is seen as aggressive and intimidatory behaviour. Waldron argues that “a person not free to be in any place is not free to do anything” (p. 316). One important consequence of this argument is to show that freedom rights do indeed clash. Property rights, as commonly defined in terms of exclusivity of use and disposal, are clearly freedom rights. Private individuals and public corporations who prevent the homeless from accessing their property are thus acting entirely legally and within their rights. Yet there are certain rights we must have, homeless or not, if we are to carry out our basic functions. These too are freedom rights, in that we must be free to be in a place before we can undertake these basic functions. But the situated nature of this freedom means that certain rights can only be fulfilled when the property rights of some are overruled. Likewise, side-constraints prohibiting interference to property rights may well mean that the basic rights of others are infringed because they do not have the freedom to be. The homeless might be so constrained that they are literally unable to do anything without infringing the rights of others.” (667)
Finally, rights based approaches are key. They reaffirm individual freedom and check power relations. Consequential considerations collapse to rights in order to preserve their overall utility. King 7 Housing as a Freedom Right” PETER KING Housing Studies, Vol. 18, No. 5, 661–672, September 2003 Centre for Comparative Housing Research, Department of Public Policy, De Montfort University, Leicester
“First, though, it is necessary to suggest briefly why rights-based arguments are important. Waldron (1993a) contends that theories of rights teach us about the importance of individual interests, and that they cannot simply be overridden for a seemingly superior (s ocial) good. He sees that the idea of individual rights is attractive “because each of us wants a life governed in part by their own thinking, feeling and decision-making” (p. 583), and not have this trumped by considerations of utility. We are all important beings and thus in what sense can it be legitimate to sacrifice one or some of us for the perceived benefit of others? We might, if we were selfish, see our interests as more important than those of others, and therefore ours should take precedence. However, once we appreciate that this selfishness is likely to be reciprocated, and consequently all that this boils down to is power relations, we might wish to return to some recognition that the interests of others count as much as our own.” (662) 1AC – Underview Truth Testing The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best meets their burden under a truth testing paradigm. This requires the AFF to prove the resolution true and the NEG to prove the resolution false. A. Text- To affirm is defined as: “to say that something is true in a confident way” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/affirm and to negate is defined as: “to deny the existence or truth of” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/negate So, the binding standards ascribed in the actions of affirming and negating assume a truth testing model. B. Any property assumes the truth of the property -. Thus any counter-role of the ballot collapses to truth testing. Frege ’03. Frege, Gottlob. “The Thought: A Logical Inquiry” in Logicism and the Philosophy of Language: Selections from Frege and Russell. Broadview Press. March 2003. Pg. 204. “It may nevertheless be thought that we cannot recognize a property of a thing without at the same time realizing the thought that this thing has this property to be true. So with every property of a thing is joined a property of a thought, namely, that of truth. It is also worthy of notice that the sentence “I smell the scent of violets” has just the same content as the sentence “it is true that I smell the scent of violets”. Util Underview Empirics flow aff- a right to housing is effective at reducing poverty and homelessness. Carrier 15 Scott Carrier, Peabody Award-winning journalist, “Room for Improvement,” Mother Jones March 2015 In 1992, a psychologist at New York University named Sam Tsemberis decided to test a new model. His idea was to just give the chronically homeless a place to live, on a permanent basis, without making them pass any tests or attend any programs or fill out any forms. "Okay," Tsemberis recalls thinking, "they're schizophrenic, alcoholic, traumatized, brain damaged. What if we don't make them pass any tests or fill out any forms? They aren't any good at that stuff. Inability to pass tests and fill out forms was a large part of how they ended up homeless in the first place. Why not just give them a place to live and offer them free counseling and therapy, health care, and let them decide if they want to participate? Why not treat chronically homeless people as human beings and members of our community who have a basic right to housing and health care?" Tsemberis and his associates, a group called Pathways to Housing, ran a large test in which they provided apartments to 242 chronically homeless individuals, no questions asked. In their apartments they could drink, take drugs, and suffer mental breakdowns, as long as they didn't hurt anyone or bother their neighbors. If they needed and wanted to go to rehab or detox, these services were provided. If they needed and wanted medical care, it was also provided. But it was up to the client to decide what services and care to participate in. The results were remarkable. After five years, 88 percent of the clients were still in their apartments, and the cost of caring for them in their own homes was a little less than what it would have cost to take care of them on the street. A subsequent study of 4,679 New York City homeless with severe mental illness found that each cost an average of $40,449 a year in emergency room, shelter, and other expenses to the system, and that getting those individuals in supportive housing saved an average of $16,282. Soon other cities such as Seattle and Portland, Maine, as well as states like Rhode Island and Illinois, ran their own tests with similar results. Denver found that emergency-service costs alone went down 73 percent for people put in Housing First, for a savings of $31,545 per person; detox visits went down 82 percent, for an additional savings of $8,732. By 2003, Housing First had been embraced by the Bush administration. Multiple countries prove housing rights are possible and effective. ABA 13 AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION, Report on the Right to Housing, 8/12/13, http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/homelessness_poverty/resolution117.authcheckdam.pdf Scotland, France, and South Africa all show that the progressive implementation of the right to housing through legislation and case law is possible where the political will exists. Scotland’s Homeless Act of 2003 progressively expanded the right to be immediately housed and the right to long-term, supportive housing for as long as it is needed, starting with target populations, but available to all in need as of 2012. The law also includes a private right of action and requires jurisdictions to plan for development of adequate affordable housing supplies.54 France created similar legislation in 2007 in response to public pressure and a decision of the European Committee on Social Rights under the European Social Charter.55 South Africa’s constitutional right to housing protects even those squatting in informal settlements, requiring the provision of adequate alternative housing before families and individuals can be evicted.56 This law has been enforced in local communities to even require rebuilding housing that has been torn down.57 While not yet perfect, these countries are proving that progressively implementing the right to housing is both economically feasible and judicially manageable.
3/18/17
MA - 1AC - Precarity
Tournament: TFA | Round: 6 | Opponent: Kinkaid VL | Judge: Jacob Koshak Part 1 is the Framework Agency cannot be separated from norms of dependency towards Others. Precariousness, or the state of being vulnerable towards the other and opaque, ground existence. 2 warrants:
Although we believe we act as independent agents, our judgements are always mediated by a set of norms that are not fully our own. Butler Giving an Account of Oneself. Judith Butler. Diacritics, Vol. 31, No. 4. (Winter, 2001), pp. 22-40. In all the talk about the social construction of the subject, we have perhaps over-looked the fact that the very being of the self is dependent not just on the existence of the Other-in its singularity, as Levinas would have it, though surely that-but also on the possibility that the normative horizon within which the Other sees and listens and knows and recognizes is also subject to a critical opening. This opening calls into question the limits of established regimes of truth, where a certain risking of the self becomes, as Levinas claims, the sign of virtue see Foucault. Whether or not the Other is singular, the Other is recognized and confers recognition through a set of norms that govern recognizability. So whereas the Other may be singular, if not radically personal, the norms are to some extent impersonal and indifferent, and they introduce a disorientation of perspective for the subject in the midst of recognition as an encounter. For if I understand myself to be conferring recognition on you, for instance, then I take seriously that the recognition comes from me. But in the moment that I realize that the terms by which I confer recognition are not mine alone, that I did not singlehandedly make them, then I am, as it were, dispossessed by the language that I offer. In a sense, I submit to a norm of recognition when I offer recognition to you, so that I am both subjected to that norm and the agency of its use.
2. To give a full account of one’s agency is impossible. My body has a history that I cannot recollect, yet nonetheless it grounds who I am. Existence begins with bare vulnerability towards the Other. I cannot escape this relationship because it grounds a part of who I am that I don’t have an account for. Butler 2 Giving an Account of Oneself. Judith Butler. Diacritics, Vol. 31, No. 4. (Winter, 2001), pp. 22-40. There are, then, several ways in which the account I may give of myself has the potential to break apart and to become undermined. My efforts to give an account of myself founder in part upon the fact of my exposure to you, an exposure in spoken language and, in a different way, in written address as well see Felman. This is a condition of my narration that I cannot fully thematize within any narrative I might provide, and that does not fully yield to a sequential account. There is a bodily referent here, a condition of me, that I can point to, but I cannot narrate precisely, even though there are no doubt stories about where my body went and what it did and did not do. But there is also a history to my body for which I can have no recollection, and there is as well a part of bodily experience-what is indexed by the word "exposure-that only with difficulty, if at all, can assume narrative form. On the other hand, exposure, like the operation of the norm, constitutes the conditions of my own emergence and knowability, and I cannot be present to a temporality that precedes my own capacity for self-reflec- tion. This means that my narrative begins in media res, when many things have already taken place to make me and my story in language possible. And it means that my story always arrives late., reconstructing, even as I produce myself differently in the very act of telling. My account of myself is partial, haunted by that for which I have no definitive story. I cannot explain exactly why I have emerged in this way, and my efforts at narrative reconstruction are always undergoing revision. There is that in me and of me for which I can give no account. But does this mean that I am not, in the moral sense, accountable for who I am and for what I do? And if I find that despite my best efforts, a certain opacity persists and I cannot make myself fully accountable to you, is this ethical failure? Or is it a failure that gives rise to a certain ethical disposition in the place of a full and satisfying notion of narrative accountability? This means that Identity is fluid – agency and ability to act as an agent depends upon bare vulnerability towards Others to ground who one is and how one acts. Since relationships with Others change, identity changes. Implications: A. Static starting points are counterproductive to notions of fluid identity because they start from the assumption of a universal relationship with the other, which is impossible. B. Any starting point of liberation that does not relate its methodology to vulnerability fails to apprehend the conditions of existence because they have treated the subject as singular and its narrative as independent of the Other. And, the subject does not have jurisdiction over its own opacity so it cannot ignore obligations from precariousness because they ground the subject in ways that cannot be repossessed in giving an account one’s self. Butler 3 Giving an Account of Oneself. Judith Butler. Diacritics, Vol. 31, No. 4. (Winter, 2001), pp. 22-40. “In recent years, the critique of poststructuralism, itself loquacious, has held that the postulation of a subject who is not self-grounding undermines the possibility of respon- sibility and, in particular, of giving an account of oneself. Critics have argued that the various critical reconsiderations of the subject, including those that do away with the theory of the subject altogether, cannot provide the basis for an account of responsibil- ity, that if we are, as it were, divided, ungrounded, or incoherent from the start, it will be impossible to ground a notion of personal or social responsibility on the basis of such a view. I would like to try to rebut this view in what follows, and to show how a theory of subject-formation that acknowledges the limits of self-knowledge can work in the ser- vice of a conception of ethics and, indeed, of responsibility. If the subject is opaque to itself, it is not therefore licensed to do what it wants or to ignore its relations to others. Indeed, if it is precisely by virtue of its relations to others that it is opaque to itself, and if those relations to others are precisely the venue for its ethical responsibility, then it may well follow that it is precisely by virtue of the subject's opacity to itself that it sustains some of its most important ethical bonds.”
Outweighs: It is not sufficiently binding on agents to simply know is moral. The ethical theory must provide a reason why agents must care about being moral. Butler explains that our theory is binding in virtue of not having control over our precarious history. Thus, the standard is rejecting norms that deny the precariousness of our agency.
Additionally prefer- deconstructive logic is constitutive of metaphysics. All concepts, identities, and judgements are constructed in opposition to their negative. There can be no conception of good without bad, friendship without betrayal, promises without promise breaking. Ontological violence is foundational to any ethical or political framework. Hagglund “THE NECESSITY OF DISCRIMINATION DISJOINING DERRIDA AND LEVINAS” MARTIN HÄGGLUND “Derrida targets precisely this logic of opposition. As he argues in Of Grammatology, metaphysics has always regarded violence as derivative of a primary peace. The possibility of violence can thus be accounted for only in terms of a Fall, that is, in terms of a fatal corruption of a pure origin. By deconstructing this figure of thought, Derrida seeks to elucidate why violence does is not merely an empirical accident that befalls something that precedes it. Rather, violence stems from an essential impropriety that does not allow anything to be sheltered from death and forgetting. Consequently, Derrida takes issue with what he calls the “ethico-theoretical decision” of metaphysics, which postulates the simple to be before the complex, the pure before the impure, the sincere before the deceitful, and so on. All divergences from the positively valued term are thus explained away as symptoms of “alienation,” and the desirable is conceived as the return to what supposedly has been lost or corrupted. In contrast, Derrida argues that what makes it possible for anything to be at the same time makes it impossible for anything to be in itself. The integrity of any “positive” term is necessarily compromised and threatened by its “other.” Such constitutive alterity answers to an essential corruptibility, which undercuts all ethico-theoretical decisions of how things ought to be in an ideal world.11 A key term here is what Derrida calls “undecidability.” With this term he designates the necessary opening toward the coming of the future. The coming of the future is strictly speaking “undecidable,” since it is a relentless displacement that unsettles any defi nitive assurance or given meaning. One can never know what will have happened. Promises may always be turned into threats, friendships into enmities, fidelities into betrayals, and so on. There is no opposition between undecidability and the making of decisions. On the contrary, Derrida emphasizes that one always acts in relation to what cannot be predicted, that one always is forced to make decisions even though the consequences of these decisions cannot be finally established. Any kind of decision (ethical, political, juridical, and so forth) is more or less violent, but it is nevertheless necessary to make decisions. Once again, I want to stress that violent differentiation by no means should be understood as a Fall, where violence supervenes upon a harmony that precedes it. On the contrary, discrimination has to be regarded as a is constitutive condition. Without divisional marks—which is to say: without segregating borders—there would be nothing at all. Encountering radical difference is to encounter the limits of acknowledgement itself. You can never know the radically different as they know themselves because your identity depends on the exclusion of theirs, yet nonetheless you need them to have any conception of yourself. Embracing radical difference requires we embrace precariousness and interdependence of our nature in order to better understand the other. Butler 4 Giving an Account of Oneself. Judith Butler. Diacritics, Vol. 31, No. 4. (Winter, 2001), pp. 22-40. UH-DD Can a new sense of ethics emerge from that inevitable ethical failure? I suggest that it can, and that it would be spawned from a certain willingness to acknowledge the limits of acknowledgment itself, that when we claim to know and present ourselves, we will fail in some ways that are nevertheless essential to who we are, and that we cannot expect anything else from others. If we speak about an acknowledgment of the limits of acknowledgment itself, are we then assuming that acknowledgment in the first sense is full and complete in its determination of the limits of acknowledgment in the second? In other words, do we know in an unqualified way that acknowledgment is always qualified? Is the first kind of knowing qualified by the qualification that it knows? This would have to be the case, for to acknowledge one's own opacity or that of another does not transform opacity into transparency. To know the limits of acknowledgment is a self-limiting act and, as a result, to experience the limits of knowing itself. This can, by the way, constitute a disposition of humility, and of generosity, since I will need to be forgiven for what I cannot fully know, what I could not have fully known, and I will be under a similar obligation to offer forgiveness to others who are also constituted in partial opacity to themselves.
Impact Calculus-
Grievability is a precondition for precariousness. The state of being rendered ungrievable is more than just being oppressed. Non-grievability separates death from having any impact on a social relationship, which reduces agency to something outside of precariousness. Grievability is necessary to apprehended the vulnerability in our ontology. Butler 5 “Frames of War” by Judith Butler 2009 UH-DD “Over and against an existential concept of finitude that singularizes our relation to death and to life, precariousness underscores our radical substitutability and anonymity in relation both to certain socially facilitated modes of dying and death and to other socially conditioned modes of persisting and flourishing. It is not that we are born and then later become precarious, but rather that precariousness is coextensive with birth itself (birth is, by definition, precarious), which means that it matters whether or not this infant being survives, and that its survival is dependent on what we might call a social network of hands. Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to care for that being so that it may live. Only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of the life appear. Thus, grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters. For the most part, we imagine that an infant comes into the world, is sustained in and by that world through to adulthood and old age, and finally dies. We imagine that when the child is wanted, there is celebration at the beginning of life. But there can be no celebration without an implicit understanding that the life is grievable, that it would be grieved if it were lost, and that this future anterior is installed as the condition of its life. In ordinary language, grief attends the life that has already been lived, and presupposes that life as having ended. But, according to the future anterior (which is also part of ordinary language), grievability is a condition of a life's emergence and sustenance.7 The future anterior, "a life has been lived," is presupposed at the beginning of a life that has only begun to be lived. In other words, "this will be a life that will have been lived" is the presupposition of a grievable life, which means that this will be a life that can be regarded as a life, and be sustained by that regard. Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life. Instead, "there is a life that will never have been lived," sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost. The apprehension of grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of precarious life. Grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of the living being as living, exposed to non-life from the start.” 14-15
2. The framework is not ends based. structural violence matters because it makes distinctions between levels of precocity, but ungreivability comes first because it positions subjects outside of grievability when in fact they are grievable A. Ending the denial of precarity requires that we orient ourselves to deconstruct grievability. We do this through a repetitive deconstruction of ungrievable frames. Butler 61 Judith Butler, “Frames of War”
The frame that seeks to contain, convey, and determine what is seen (and sometimes, for a stretch, succeeds in doing precisely that) depends upon the conditions of reproducibility in order to succeed. And yet, this very reproducibility entails a constant breaking from context, a constant delimitation of new context, which means that the "frame" does not quite contain what it conveys, but breaks apart every time it seeks to give definitive organization to its content. In other words, the frame does not hold anything together in one place, but itself becomes a kind of perpetual breakage, subject to a temporal logic by which it moves from place to place. As the frame constantly breaks from its context, this self-breaking becomes part of the very definition. This leads us to a different way of understanding both the frame's efficacy and its vulnerability to reversal, to subversion, even to critical instrumentalization. What is taken for granted in one instance becomes thematized critically or even incredulously in another. This shifting temporal dimension of the frame constitutes the possibility and trajectory of its affect as well. Thus the digital image circulates outside the confines of Abu Ghraib, or the poetry in Guantanamo is recovered by constitutional lawyers who arrange for its publication throughout the world. The conditions are set for astonishment, outrage, revulsion, admiration, and discovery, depending on how the content is framed by shifting time and place. The movement of the image or the text outside of confinement is a kind of "breaking out," so that even though neither the image nor the poetry can free anyone from prison, or stop a bomb or, indeed, reverse the course of the war, they nevertheless do provide the conditions for breaking out of the quotidian acceptance of war and for a more generalized horror and outrage that will support and impel calls for justice and an end to violence. Part 2 is the Ungrievable Homeless exclusion is based upon fear and disease rhetoric—homeless bodies are social and physically excluded. Amster Amster, Randall. “Patterns of Exclusion: Sanitizing Space, Criminalizing Homelessness,” Social Justice. Vol. 30, No. 1 (91), Race, Security and Social Movements (2003), pp. 195-221 In light of the hegemonic nature of the Disney aesthetic, it is worth considering how this notion of "disease" seems to originate primarily within the dominant culture, and then is projected onto marginalized populations such as the homeless. In this regard, it is instructive to consider how constructions of street people and the homeless serve to perpetuate stereotypes and maintain stigmatization, since¶ these processes serve to reinforce such projections and reify bourgeois fears. As Talmadge Wright (1997:69) infers, "the homeless body in the public imagination represents the body of decay, the degenerate body, a body that is constantly¶ rejected by the public as 'sick,' 'scary,' 'dirty,' and 'smelly,' and a host of other pejoratives used to create social distance between housed and unhoused persons."¶ This sense of social distancing reflects "the desire of those who feel threatened to¶ distance themselves from defiled people and defiled places...places associated with¶ ethnic and racial minorities, like the inner city, that are still tainted and perceived as¶ polluting in racist discourses, and place-related phobias that are similarly evident in¶ response to other minorities, like gays and the homeless" (Sibley, 1995: 49, 59). In analyzing "new urban spaces," Wright (2000: 27) thus observes: "In effect, street people, camping in parks, who exhibit appearances at odds with middle class comportment, evoke fears of 'contamination' and disgust, a reminder of the¶ power of abjection. Homeless persons embody the social fear of privileged consumers, fear for their families, for their children, fear that 'those' people will¶ harm them and therefore must be placed as far away as possible from safe¶ neighborhoods." Likewise, Samira Kawash (1998: 329) notes: "The public view of the homeless as 'filth' marks the danger of this body as body to the homogeneity¶ and wholeness of the public... The solution to this impasse appears as the ultimate aim of the 'homeless wars': to exert such pressures against this body that will reduce it to nothing, to squeeze it until it is so small that it disappears, such that the circle of the social will again appear closed." Bringing this cycle of demonization¶ and repression to its logical conclusion, Wright (2000: 27) concludes: "The subsequent social death which homeless persons endure is all too often accompanied by real death and injury as social exclusion moves from criminalization of poverty to social isolation and incarceration in institutional systems of control¶shelters and prisons."
The physical existence of homelessness is life on the margins of society, exposed to hunger, poverty, social exclusion, and humiliation in cities where affordable housing is¶ supplanted by new development, influx of capital, and the overriding logic of¶ consumption (Harvey; 2013; Scheper-Hughes, 2004). Denied the same life chances, this¶ structural violence is compounded by cultural stigma and stereotypes associated with¶ homelessness, the everyday indifference of domiciled citizens, and the routine prejudice of bureaucratic settings (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004). In the context of¶ neoliberal United States, where a rugged American individualism inculcates societal¶ dispositions, the inequality, social marginalisation, and poverty of homelessness can be¶ misrecognised as the natural order of things, prompting some individuals to internalise¶ blame for their situation as homeless. This is the symbolic violence of neoliberalism¶ whereby individuals’ “habitus”, their preconscious likes, dislikes, preferences, and¶ beliefs, exist in submission to the neoliberal logic of productivity, accountability and¶ successful citizenship (Bourdieu, 2000). To diverge from this neoliberal subject is to¶ break from recognizable frames of worthy life, and to exists as a precarious Other: a homeless body that becomes unnameable and ungrievable (Butler, 2006). Laura has a name, a face, a body. She is a human, as are the thousands of people who, for myriad reasons, are homeless or precariously housed in Washington D.C. Despite cohabiting in the same city and sharing a common humanity, people who are homeless exist on the margins; bereft of equal life chances, they are a swathe of society living a radically parallel life. This research hopes to relay the experiences of several people who are homeless as they navigate the social and physical spaces of the city. My goal is not to “reveal” or “uncover” the lives of these homeless individuals; such language suggests homelessness as a hidden or concealed existence in need of a benevolent researcher to expose - a claim that is visibly false.
Part 3 is The Home Advocacy: I defend the resolution as a general principle, but can specify further if asked in CX. First, there is no current public space in which one can be homeless and grievable. Private space for the homeless is key. Peck 2 Peck, Alice. “CREATING INTERSECTIONS: MAPPING THE PARALLEL LIVES OF HOMELESSNESS IN WASHINGTON D.C.” George Mason University. http://digilib.gmu.edu/jspui/bitstream/handle/1920/10342/Peck_thesis_2015.pdf?sequence=1andisAllowed=y Despite inhabiting¶ environments of poverty, instability and precarity, the symbolic power of the neoliberal¶ logic inculcates all bodies – both those homeless and those domiciled, with the habitus¶ that this is the natural way of things. Homeless subjects, as unproductive, inactive bodies, are not considered mournable lives, and the disposition of indifference to the inequity and intolerable suffering of homelessness becomes normalised. This segregation between the¶ homeless and domiciled is not only normalised, but actively created and controlled through the construction of spatial poverty in cities.¶ Increasing commodification of urban spaces and the segregation of cities along¶ economic lines renders social marginalization and spatial exclusion an inevitable byproduct of urban redevelopment. Spatial exclusion is guaranteed through the development of spaces that are gated, privatized, commodified, and under surveillance,¶ spaces which deny access to populations, like the homeless, who do not possess sufficient economic capital to enter (Harvey, 2013). Drawing on David Harvey’s theories of¶ neoliberalism connects processes of urban redevelopment within Washington D.C. to¶ individual experiences of homelessness, contextualising the daily marginalisation of the¶ homeless at the micro level within macro processes of neoliberalism. This spatial and social marginalisation is enforced through the surveillance,¶ discipline, and criminalisation of homeless bodies in urban spaces, a form of power¶ wielded over the homeless as a deliberate force to render them invisible and remove them¶ from the public eye.
Second, denying housing annihilates not only a place for the homeless, but also their existence. The right to housing is the right to exist. Amster 2 Amster, Randall. “Patterns of Exclusion: Sanitizing Space, Criminalizing Homelessness,” Social Justice. Vol. 30, No. 1 (91), Race, Security and Social Movements (2003), pp. 195-221 With the homeless, it is very apparent: panhandling, sleeping in public, and¶ sidewalk sitting. Despite frequent assertions that only "conduct" is being targeted¶ and not "status" (e.g., Kelling and Coles, 1996:40), it is clear that certain conduct¶ attaches to specific groups, and that proscribing the conduct is equivalent to¶ criminalizing the category. In some cases, as with teen curfews or "car cruising"¶ laws, the prohibited conduct affects the target group's identities and liberties, but¶ does not necessarily undermine their basic ability to survive, Neil Smith (1996:¶ 225), however, observes that "the criminalization of more and more aspects of the¶ everyday life of homeless people is increasingly pervasive." Likewise, Ferrell¶ (2001:164) notes that the daily lives of the homeless "are all but outlawed through¶ a plethora of new statutes and enforcement strategies regarding sitting, sleeping,¶ begging, loitering, and 'urban camping.'"3 As Mitchell (1998a: 10) emphasizes,¶ "if homeless people can only live in public, and if the things one must do to live are not allowed in public space, then homelessness is not just criminalized; life for homeless people is made impossible." The implications and intentions are all too¶ clear:¶ By in effect annihilating the spaces in which the homeless must live, these laws seek simply to annihilate homeless people themselves.... The intent¶ is clear: to control behavior and space such that homeless people simply¶ cannot do what they must do in order to survive without breaking laws.¶ Survival itself is criminalized.... In other words, we are creating a world in which a whole class of people simply cannot be, entirely because they have no place to be (Mitchell, 1997a: 305-311) 4¶ According to Smith (1996: 230), "in the revanchist city, homeless people suffer¶ a symbolic extermination and erasure."¶ An impressive and detailed body of work that illustrates and amplifies these¶ points has been generated by Maria Foscarinis and various associates affiliated¶ with her National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP). A series¶ of scholarly articles (e.g., Foscarinis et al., 1999; Foscarinis, 1996; Foscarinis and¶ Herz, 1995; Brown, 1999), demonstrates beyond doubt an ongoing and pervasive¶ national trend toward "the criminalization of homelessness," evidenced by the¶ mounting number of cities and towns with laws prohibiting behaviors including¶ "aggressive panhandling," "urban camping," and "sidewalk sitting." Third, it is also more than physical spaces, housing determines interpersonal relationships, and life is not precarious without this social existence. Hartman Hartman, Chester. Poverty and Race Research Action Council, “The Case for a Right to Housing” Housing Policy Debate, Volume 9, Issue 2.
The right to adequate housing finds legal substance within more¶ than a dozen international human rights texts . . . and has been¶ reaffirmed in numerous international declaratory and policyoriented¶ instruments. More than fifty national constitutions¶ enshrine various formulations of housing rights and other¶ housing-related state responsibilities . . . and a plethora of domestic¶ laws in nearly all countries have a bearing upon one or¶ more of the core elements of housing rights. Without exception,¶ every government has explicitly recognized that adequate housing¶ is a right under international law. Though on the surface a¶ favorable situation, such legal recognition at the international¶ level has rarely been transformed into effective domestic legislative¶ and policy measures seeking to apply and implement—in¶ good faith—international obligations relevant to housing¶ rights. . . . No government could realistically proclaim that housing¶ rights exist as much in fact as they do in law (Leckie 1994,¶ 14–15; see also Herman 1994).¶ In short, because housing is so central to one’s life, it merits attaining the status of a right. It is at the core of one’s social and personal life, determining the kinds of influences and relationships one has and access to key opportunities and services (education, employment,¶ health care). Housing also is an outward sign of status and¶ affects the health and well-being of the surrounding community.¶ Probably only those who have experienced how hard it is to have¶ personal and family stability or land a job without a home, how¶ hard it is to keep up with schoolwork in an overcrowded apartment,¶ how much the sheer pressure to make the rent can overwhelm the¶ rest of one’s life—experiences largely foreign to the housing policy¶ analysts, academics, and bureaucrats who read and write articles¶ such as this—can fully comprehend just how central decent, affordable¶ housing is, or might be, and how limiting and burdensome is¶ its absence. Why just housing?¶ The question may be raised: Why housing? Why not a right to decent,¶ affordable food? To health care? Why not guarantee people¶ enough income so that, like the majority of Americans, they can¶ purchase the housing, health care, and other basics they need in¶ the market? I would answer as follows.¶ 230 Chester Hartman¶ We certainly should have a right to decent, affordable food11 and¶ health care (in the latter case, the costs, it should be noted, would¶ be somewhat lower were housing-related detriments to good health¶ eliminated); our recent failure to pass single-payer health reform¶ legislation or otherwise provide these guarantees is a tragedy of¶ massive proportions. It is not an either/or proposition, and movements¶ for basic rights must coalesce into a more potent political¶ force. Housing has a special character, not only because it consumes so large a portion of the household budget, especially for lower-income families, but because it is, as noted above, the central setting for so much of one’s personal and family life as well as the locus of mobility opportunities, access to community resources, and societal status (Hartman 1975).¶ It would be wonderful if everyone in the United States had enough¶ income to satisfy his or her needs in the market, but that goal is¶ even less likely to be achieved than is the goal of decent housing for¶ all. Widening income inequality and the structure of the job market¶ make it hard to imagine how everyone could have enough income to¶ pay for housing and other necessities. In fact, an increasingly large¶ number of Americans are unable to attain a decent standard of living¶ as prices outstrip incomes (Stone 1993). Moreover, that approach¶ misreads the nature of the housing market. The profitmaximizing¶ behavior of all actors in that market—landowners,¶ developers, builders, materials suppliers, real estate brokers, landlords,¶ even homeowners—at all points works against assuring that¶ everyone has decent, affordable housing, absent a legally enforceable¶ right to housing and explicit commitment of resources to its realization.
Fourth, housing rights are uniquely key- they force the government to recognize of the existence of homelessness. Housing is only getting more exclusive—the question is not whether or not a right to housing is perfect, but rather if there will be societal recognition of the homeless in its absence. Thomas and Culhane 11 Byrne, Thomas. Dennis Culhane. “Right to Housing: An Effective Means for Addressing Homelessness, The Edward V. Sparer Symposium Issue: Partnering against Poverty: Examining Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Public Interest Lawyering” Issue 3 Volume 14, Issue 3 (2011)
As we have seen, one of the primary benefits of the existence of a right to housing framework in European countries is that it obliges governments to take the problems of homelessness and housing instability seriously and at least in theory, to make a concerted effort towards providing for the housing¶ needs of their citizenry. The fact that such an equivalent framework is largely nonexistent in the United States leads to the question of what then, exists in its absence. In other words, is there any framework in the¶ United States that places some responsibility on the government to provide for the housing needs of¶ vulnerable Americans? And if so, what has been the track record in upholding this responsibility? The¶ remainder of this section will be dedicated primarily to addressing these two questions.¶ In response to the first question, on a national level, the nearest approximation of a right to housing¶ in the United States can be found in the Housing Act of 1949, which calls for “the realization as soon as¶ feasible of the goal of a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family.”43 While¶ strongly worded, the inclusion of this provision is not quite strong enough to be interpreted as establishing a¶ right to housing for all American citizens. Instead, it is perhaps more appropriate to describe it, as Freeman¶ does, as “an explicit social contract to provide adequate housing for America’s entire population.”44 That¶ there was an intent to make good on this contract seemed apparent in the initial decades following the¶ passage of the Housing Act of 1949, as there were great expansions in public housing and a number of¶ measures were introduced that made it possible for millions of Americans to purchase homes.45 However,¶ more recent experience indicates that the social contract created by the Housing Act is not a binding one, as¶ progress has fallen sharply in providing for the housing needs of vulnerable Americans experiencing¶ homelessness and housing instability.The degree to which progress towards the goal of providing a decent home for all Americans has stalled can be seen most clearly in the dwindling supply of affordable rental units for low-income individuals, who are most at risk of experiencing homelessness. Between 1995 and 2005, roughly 2.2¶ million low-cost rental units were lost from the nation’s rental stock, a figure that was twice as large as the¶ loss of all other types of units combined. This trend has continued through the economic recession, and most¶ of the losses in low-income units are permanent due to demolition, natural disasters or conversion to nonresidential¶ uses. Fifth, this is try or die-- It is either private spaces or criminalization—no world exists in which the homeless are grievable without housing. Amster 3 Amster, Randall. “Patterns of Exclusion: Sanitizing Space, Criminalizing Homelessness,” Social Justice. Vol. 30, No. 1 (91), Race, Security and Social Movements (2003), pp. 195-221
file:///Users/morgangrosch/Downloads/2976817220(2).pdf An impressive and detailed body of work that illustrates and amplifies these points has been generated by Maria Foscarinis and various associates affiliated with her National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP). A series of scholarly articles (e.g., Foscarinis et al., 1999; Foscarinis, 1996; Foscarinis and¶ Herz, 1995; Brown, 1999), demonstrates beyond doubt an ongoing and pervasive national trend toward "the criminalization of homelessness," evidenced by the mounting number of cities and towns with laws prohibiting behaviors including "aggressive panhandling," "urban camping," and "sidewalk sitting."5 In assessing the purpose of these laws, Foscarinis (1996: 22) notes that "some cities state¶ expressly that their intention is to drive their homeless residents out of the city.... In other cases, the stated purpose is to remove homeless people from particular¶ places, such as parks, streets or downtown areas.... Some target the 'visible' homeless with the goal of making them 'invisible.'" Noting certain negative¶ effects of such laws in terms of public policy including poor use of fiscal¶ resources, divisiveness, and a deepening of political and social tensions ?¶ Foscarinis (1996: 63) concludes that "decriminalization responses to homelessness¶ are inhumane, do not solve the problem, and are subject to constitutional¶ challenge."¶ In 1999, the NLCHP published an influential report (Out of Sight ? Out of¶ Mind? Anti-Homeless Laws, Litigation, and Alternatives in 50 United States¶ Cities) that expanded on some of these important points. The report found that, in¶ the cross-section of cities surveyed, 86 had anti-begging ordinances, while 73¶ had anti-sleeping laws. The presence of such laws and accompanying enforcement strategies was also found to constitute "poor public policy" by acting as barriers to self-sufficiency, unduly burdening the criminal justice system, wasting scarce municipal resources, and subjecting cities to legal liabilities and expenses. The report concluded that "criminalization is ineffective, counterproductive, and¶ inhumane," and suggested "alternatives to criminalization," including expanded¶ services, places to perform necessary functions, transitional and public housing,¶ more employment opportunities, and greater cooperation among city officials,¶ business people, and the homeless themselves (NLCHP, 1999; Foscarinis et al.,¶ 1999; Brown, 1999). Additional positive alternatives are noted in a subsequent¶ article that analyzes the NLCHP report. Fabyankovic (2000) includes alliances¶ formed between police officers, homeless advocates, and outreach workers;¶ programs that help the homeless move toward self-sufficiency; compassionate¶ approaches rather than law enforcement approaches; the development of police¶ sensitivity training programs; the creation of a day labor center; and the mediation¶ of disputes between property owners and the homeless. An absolutist account of property contributes to eugenic ideologies. It constrains the homeless from literally doing anything by using the logic of violating someone’s property rights. The right to housing is key to affirm their intrinsic greivability. King Housing as a Freedom Right” PETER KING Housing Studies, Vol. 18, No. 5, 661–672, September 2003 Centre for Comparative Housing Research, Department of Public Policy, De Montfort University, Leicester
“Homelessness is defined by Waldron as the very condition where one is “excluded from all the places governed by private property rules” (1993b, p. 313, author’s emphasis). The homeless are entitled only to be in public places. They have no right to be on private property unless given permission by the owner. They must therefore rely on public places to undertake their situated functions. But this is possible, however, only so long as the public authorities that own this property tolerate them. Just as private owners can exercise their right to exclude, so can public bodies. Waldron rightly points out that there is an increasing regulation and policing of public property that prevents the homeless from exercising their basic functions in public. Waldron gives the example of removing seating from subways in US cities to prevent them from being used by the homeless. This form of ‘zero tolerance’ of vagrancy can also be seen in the attitudes of politicians and public agencies in the UK. The homeless are seen as having no right to be on the streets, there being enough hostel spaces for them. In addition, begging is seen as aggressive and intimidatory behaviour. Waldron argues that “a person not free to be in any place is not free to do anything” (p. 316). One important consequence of this argument is to show that freedom rights do indeed clash. Property rights, as commonly defined in terms of exclusivity of use and disposal, are clearly freedom rights. Private individuals and public corporations who prevent the homeless from accessing their property are thus acting entirely legally and within their rights. Yet there are certain rights we must have, homeless or not, if we are to carry out our basic functions. These too are freedom rights, in that we must be free to be in a place before we can undertake these basic functions. But the situated nature of this freedom means that certain rights can only be fulfilled when the property rights of some are overruled. Likewise, side-constraints prohibiting interference to property rights may well mean that the basic rights of others are infringed because they do not have the freedom to be. The homeless might be so constrained that they are literally unable to do anything without infringing the rights of others.” (667)
Underview K stuff Empirics flow aff- a right to housing is effective at reducing poverty and homelessness. Carrier 15 Scott Carrier, Peabody Award-winning journalist, “Room for Improvement,” Mother Jones March 2015 In 1992, a psychologist at New York University named Sam Tsemberis decided to test a new model. His idea was to just give the chronically homeless a place to live, on a permanent basis, without making them pass any tests or attend any programs or fill out any forms. "Okay," Tsemberis recalls thinking, "they're schizophrenic, alcoholic, traumatized, brain damaged. What if we don't make them pass any tests or fill out any forms? They aren't any good at that stuff. Inability to pass tests and fill out forms was a large part of how they ended up homeless in the first place. Why not just give them a place to live and offer them free counseling and therapy, health care, and let them decide if they want to participate? Why not treat chronically homeless people as human beings and members of our community who have a basic right to housing and health care?" Tsemberis and his associates, a group called Pathways to Housing, ran a large test in which they provided apartments to 242 chronically homeless individuals, no questions asked. In their apartments they could drink, take drugs, and suffer mental breakdowns, as long as they didn't hurt anyone or bother their neighbors. If they needed and wanted to go to rehab or detox, these services were provided. If they needed and wanted medical care, it was also provided. But it was up to the client to decide what services and care to participate in. The results were remarkable. After five years, 88 percent of the clients were still in their apartments, and the cost of caring for them in their own homes was a little less than what it would have cost to take care of them on the street
. A subsequent study of 4,679 New York City homeless with severe mental illness found that each cost an average of $40,449 a year in emergency room, shelter, and other expenses to the system, and that getting those individuals in supportive housing saved an average of $16,282. Soon other cities such as Seattle and Portland, Maine, as well as states like Rhode Island and Illinois, ran their own tests with similar results. Denver found that emergency-service costs alone went down 73 percent for people put in Housing First, for a savings of $31,545 per person; detox visits went down 82 percent, for an additional savings of $8,732. By 2003, Housing First had been embraced by the Bush administration.
3/10/17
MA - 1AC - Util
Tournament: South Texas NSDA Quals | Round: 1 | Opponent: Kempner | Judge: David Slaughter Bratt, Rachel (Ph.D, Professor and Chair of the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University), Michael E. Stone, and Chester Hartman. "Why a right to housing is needed and makes sense: Editors’ introduction." The affordable housing reader (2013): 53-71. The call to adopt and implement a Right to Housing not only has an ethical basis in principles of justice and ideals of a commonwealth. It is also based on a highly pragmatic perspective— the central role that housing plays in peoples’ lives.
Because I agree with Rachel Bratt, I affirm the resolution: Resolved: The United States ought to guarantee the right to housing. To clarify the round, I offer the following observation. The resolution is not a question of specific implementation, rather it’s a question of what governments are obligated to provide. This comes before discussion of specific policies or ways the government has implemented a right to housing in the past. Ought in the resolution just implies that an obligation exists, not specific policies. For example, we can say governments ought guarantee the 1st amendment as a principle, but that doesn’t mean we need a policy to put it in place. Framework I value Morality, as the word ought in the resolution indicates a moral obligation. The Value Criterion is promoting wellbeing. Governments ought to promote well-being. Rawls We may note first that there is, indeed, a way of thinking of society which makes it easy to suppose that the most rational conception of justice and a just society is utilitarian. For consider: each man in realizing his their own interests is certainly free to balance his their own losses against his their own gains. We may impose a sacrifice on ourselves now for the sake of a greater advantage later. A person quite properly acts, at least when others are not affected, to achieve his their own greatest good, to advance his their rational ends as far as possible. Now why should not a society acts on precisely the same principle applied to the group and therefore regard that which is rational for one man as right for an association of men? Just as the well-being of a person is constructed from the series of satisfactions that are experienced at different moments in the course of his life, so in very much the same way the well-being of society is to be constructed from the fulfillment of the systems of desires of the many individuals who belong to it. Since the principle for an individual is to advance as far as possible his their own welfare, his own system of desires, the principle for society is to advance as far as possible the welfare of the group, to realize to the greatest extent the comprehensive system of desire arrived at from the desires of its members. Just as an individual balances present and future gains against present and future losses, so a society may balance satisfactions and dissatisfactions between different individuals. And so by these reflections one reaches the principle of utility in a natural way: a society is properly arranged when its institutions maximize the net benefit of satisfaction. The principle of choice for an association of men is interpreted as an extension of the principle of choice for one man. Social justice is the principle of rational prudence applied to an aggregative conception of the welfare of the group. This Entails that you vote for the debater that saves the most lives. Life is an inalienable right, and loss of life outweighs any other harm. If I prove that a right to housing is necessary to save lives, you vote affirmative. Contention 1 – Housing is Key to stop Poverty and promote well-being Losing One’s Home Spills over – It impairs one’s work and could even lead to suicide. Desmond, Matthew (Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University), and Carl Gershenson. "Housing and employment insecurity among the working poor." Social Problems (2016): spv025. Why might forced removal from housing lead to job loss? We propose that eviction temporarily diminishes the ability of many low-wage workers to perform at their jobs. Before we elaborate, let us stress two important contextual points. First, as noted above, many low-wage workers staff jobs that do not offer paid leave, advanced scheduling notice, or many protections from termination (Kalleberg 2011). Such working conditions make it difficult to respond to life disruptions in a way that does not affect workplace performance. A more privileged worker might use a paid sick day to attend eviction court, but this option is not available to many low-wage workers. Second, involuntary displacement from housing often is a drawn-out process involving several trying events that take place before the actual moment of removal (e.g., multiple court appearances) and after it (e.g., homelessness, temporary shelter). The process of removal itself, from first eviction notice to relocating to a new apartment, can stretch over months (Desmond and Shollenberger 2015), during which time workers will be expected to perform adequately at their already tasking jobs that offer little room for error. The period before the forced move—which may be characterized by conflicts with a landlord or lengthy encounters with the judicial system—can lead to workers making mistakes due to their preoccupation with non-work matters. After the forced move, workers may have to miss work to search for new housing. Owing to the stigma of an eviction, they may have increased search times. Many will ultimately settle for subpar housing and within a year will have moved again (Desmond et al. 2015). Forced moves can result in workers’ relocating to less convenient locations, which may increase their likelihood of tardiness and absenteeism. If the renter has children, he or she may need to find childcare arrangements and acclimate their children to new schools. In the worst cases, forced moves lead to homelessness, the dissolution of families, and the loss of possessions (Burt 2001). These conditions could also impair job performance. The accumulated stress of all of these factors— beginning in the period before the eviction and persisting even after workers have found new lodgings—compromises workers’ mental and emotional capacities. Indeed, research has shown that after eviction, renters report significantly higher rates of depression and parenting stress (Desmond and Kimbro 2015); and some studies have even linked eviction to suicide (Fowler et al. 2015). Each renter may experience a forced move differently, but all of these paths have the potential to lead to decreased job performance and, in some cases, job loss. Jobs are key in this instance. Without a job, one does not have a steady source of income, and will inevitably be retrenched into poverty. Only by providing decent jobs to homeless people can we help them become self-sufficient. Empirical studies prove that a right to housing is needed to provide jobs to homeless people. Desmond, Matthew (Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University), and Carl Gershenson. "Housing and employment insecurity among the working poor." Social Problems (2016): spv025. We find, first, both job loss and forced removal from housing to be common events in the lives of low-income working renters in Milwaukee. We calculated that roughly one in five working renters involuntarily lost a job two years prior to being interviewed; in the same timespan, roughly one in five also involuntarily lost a home. Applying a variety of statistical techniques on novel retrospective data of working renters in Milwaukee, this study provides evidence that housing loss leads to a substantial increase in the probability of job loss. We estimate the likelihood of experiencing job loss to be between 11 and 22 percentage points higher for workers who experienced a preceding forced move, compared to observationally identical workers who did not. When we examined the effects of forced removal for respondents with relatively stable work histories and those with unstable employment, we found forced removal to be an actuator of job loss for both groups.17 This suggests, troublingly, that forced removal leads to job loss even among stably employed workers and that double precarity is not a condition restricted only to already unstable, short-term employees. Furthermore, fixed-effect discrete hazard models show our results to be robust to omitted variable bias. And our finding that job loss is a weaker predictor of housing loss than vice versa further supports our conclusions. Because sequence matters, we are more confident that the observed relationship between housing loss and job loss is not spurious. Contention 2 – The right to housing is possible and necessary A recent study found we have a monetary responsibility to help. It cost taxpayers 3 times as much to allow homelessness instead of just providing houses: Keyes 16 Scott. "Leaving Homeless Person On the Streets: $31,065. Giving Them Housing: $10,051." ThinkProgress. 08 Aug. 2016. DT Late last week, the Central Florida Commission on Homelessness released a new study showing that, when accounting for a variety of public expenses, Florida residents pay $31,065 per chronically homeless person every year they live on the streets. The study, conducted by Creative Housing Solutions, an Oklahoma-based consultant group, tracked public expenses accrued by 107 chronically homeless individuals in central Florida. These ranged from criminalization and incarceration costs to medical treatment and emergency room intakes that the patient was unable to afford. Andrae Bailey, CEO of the commission that released the study, noted to the Orlando Sentinel that most chronically homeless people have a physical or mental disability, such as post-traumatic stress disorder. “These are not people who are just going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get a job,” he said. “They’re never going to get off the streets on their own.” The most recent count found 1,577 chronically homeless individuals living in three central Florida counties — Osceola, Seminole, and Orange, which includes Orlando. As a result, the region is paying nearly $50 million annually to let homeless people languish on the streets. There is a far cheaper option though: giving homeless people housing and supportive services. The study found that it would cost taxpayers just $10,051 per homeless person to give them a permanent place to live and services like job training and health care. That figure is 68 percent less than the public currently spendings by allowing homeless people to remain on the streets. If central Florida took the permanent supportive housing approach, it could save $350 million over the next decade. This is just the latest study showing how fiscally irresponsible it is for society to allow homelessness to continue. A study in Charlotte earlier this year found a new apartment complex oriented towards homeless people saved taxpayers $1.8 million in the first year alone. Similarly, the Centennial State will save millions by giving homeless people in southeast Colorado a place to live. And in Osceola County, Florida, researchers earlier this year found that taxpayers had spent $5,081,680 over the past decade in incarceration expenses to repeatedly jail just 37 chronically homeless people. This means you should not listen to negative arguments about how it is too hard to fund housing projects- it really isn’t and we can succeed. A rights based approach to housing is key – the aff is the best possible solution. Adams, Kristen David (Professor of Law, Stetson University College of Law). "Do we need a right to housing." Nev. LJ 9 (2008): 275. Rights are more powerful than goals, policies, commitments, and other non-rights. One illustration of this truth is that the United States has recognized a commitment to “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family” dating back to 1949.162 This resolution came from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union Address, in which he urged the adoption of a “Second Bill of Rights” that would include a right to housing.163 Congress officially adopted Roosevelt’s housing goal in 1949.164 Thus, a commitment to housing for all persons in the United States is not an entirely new concept, but creating an affirmative right to housing would take Congress’ previous commitment to a whole new level and require that it be met. The 1949 commitment lacked specific goals that would have made it enforceable and meaningful.165 Currently, the United States falls far short of providing housing to every family in America who needs it; instead, only about one-fourth of those who qualify for housing assistance actually receive it.166 The 1949 commitment can therefore be seen as an example of why affordable housing goals are not sufficient. Instead, rights are required.167 Rights, unlike goals, tend to provide the level of specificity needed to motivate follow through. Unlike goals, rights also create grounds for litigation if no follow through is forthcoming.168 In addition to having greater power than non-rights, rights create legitimacy for programs to enforce those rights.169 Having a right to housing should put the brakes on continual budget cuts for housing programs in the legislative appropriations process.170 Making housing a right may also motivate increased construction of affordable housing.171 The Right to housing inclusion in society, developing communal bonds necessary to recreate society. Hoover Joe Hoover, “The human right to housing and community empowerment: home occupation, eviction defence and community land trusts” 2015. The move to occupy both land and housing achieves a number of goals. It raises the issue of housing in a dramatic and public way, forcing the public and government officials to confront the reality of the housing crisis. It politicises what is seen as a private matter, turning the personal catastrophe of homelessness, eviction and foreclosure into public discussions about housing policy, government responsibility and the injustice created by treating housing as a commodity.70 Finally, this tactic builds community power by bringsing individuals together for common purposes, to live together on vacant land, to refurbish abandoned homes and to assist individuals resisting displacement. Attempting to reconstruct the idea of home as a right and to create forms of communal ownership is the most difficult task groups in the USA face because it requires the most profound change. ONEDC has a history of developing cooperative housing for low-income residents by mobilising funds available to the community so that residents can buy their buildings and run them for themselves.71 Dominic Moulden highlighted the potential of this tactic despite the difficulty in achieving it, as creating resident-owned housing fosters autonomy within the community and builds relationships of solidarity by allowing residents to see their own power and capacity, while also requiring them to take on the responsibility of being members in a community. Contention 3 – Homelessness The Sad truth is that the homeless person in the United States is at a much higher risk of death than the housed person. NHCHC 06 - National Health Care for the Homeless Council 2006 Homelessness dramatically elevates one's risk of illness, injury and death. For every age group, homeless persons are three times more likely to die than the general population. Middle-aged homeless men and young homeless women are at particularly increased risk.1 The average age of death of homeless persons is about 50 years, the age at which Americans commonly died in 1900.2 Today, non-homeless Americans can expect to live to age 78.3 Homeless people suffer the same illnesses experienced by people with homes, but at rates three to six times higher.4 This includes potentially lethal communicable diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and influenza, as well as cancer, heart disease, diabetes and hypertension. Homeless persons die from illnesses that can be treated or prevented. Crowded, poorly-ventilated living conditions, found in many shelters, promote the spread of communicable diseases. Research shows that risk of death on the streets is only moderately affected by substance abuse or mental illness, which must also be understood as health problems. Physical health conditions such as heart problems or cancer are more likely to lead to an early death for homeless persons. The difficulty getting rest, maintaining medications, eating well, staying clean and staying warm prolong and exacerbate illnesses, sometimes to the point where they are life threatening. Don’t Let the Neg stand up and argue their way out of this – the numbers re on our side. With over half a million Homeless people on any given day, according to NAEH (http://www.endhomelessness.org/pages/snapshot_of_homelessness), only affordable housing can put an end to the cycle of Poverty these people face every day. This is empirically proven by a study from UTAH. Carrier 15 http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/housing-first-solution-to-homelessness-utah In 1992, a psychologist at New York University named Sam Tsemberis decided to test a new model. His idea was to just give the chronically homeless a place to live, on a permanent basis, without making them pass any tests or attend any programs or fill out any forms. "Okay," Tsemberis recalls thinking, "they're schizophrenic, alcoholic, traumatized, brain damaged. What if we don't make them pass any tests or fill out any forms? They aren't any good at that stuff. Inability to pass tests and fill out forms was a large part of how they ended up homeless in the first place. Why not just give them a place to live and offer them free counseling and therapy, health care, and let them decide if they want to participate? Why not treat chronically homeless people as human beings and members of our community who have a basic right to housing and health care?" Tsemberis and his associates, a group called Pathways to Housing, ran a large test in which they provided apartments to 242 chronically homeless individuals, no questions asked. In their apartments they could drink, take drugs, and suffer mental breakdowns, as long as they didn't hurt anyone or bother their neighbors. If they needed and wanted to go to rehab or detox, these services were provided. If they needed and wanted medical care, it was also provided. But it was up to the client to decide what services and care to participate in. The results were remarkable. After five years, 88 percent of the clients were still in their apartments, and the cost of caring for them in their own homes was a little less than what it would have cost to take care of them on the street. A subsequent study of 4,679 New York City homeless with severe mental illness found that each cost an average of $40,449 a year in emergency room, shelter, and other expenses to the system, and that getting those individuals in supportive housing saved an average of $16,282. Soon other cities such as Seattle and Portland, Maine, as well as states like Rhode Island and Illinois, ran their own tests with similar results. Denver found that emergency-service costs alone went down 73 percent for people put in Housing First, for a savings of $31,545 per person; detox visits went down 82 percent, for an additional savings of $8,732. By 2003, Housing First had been embraced by the Bush administration. There is no doubt about it – the numbers are on the aff’s side. With over half a million people on any given day at risk of death, only steady affordable housing can provide a stepping stone into a self-sufficient, nourishing lifestyle.
3/1/17
ND - 1AC - Agonism - Surveillance Advantage
Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: Triples | Opponent: Stuyvesant PY | Judge: Panel Framework Attempting to understand beings, communities, and ethics as pure will inevitably fail:
There is no possibility of understanding people in and of themselves. All identities are understood through the differentiation of social relations, which are by necessity constantly changing. BUTLER: (Judith Butler. 1992. “Continent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of “Postmodernism” Feminists Theorize the Political) “In a sense, the subject is constituted through an exclusion and differentiation, perhaps a repression, that is subsequently concealed, covered over, by the effect of autonomy. In this sense, autonomy is the logical consequence of a disavowed dependency, which is to say that the autonomous subject can maintain the illusion of its autonomy insofar as it covers over the break out of which it is constituted. This dependency and this break are already social relations, ones which precede and condition the formation of the subject. As a result, this is not a relation in which the subject finds itself, as one of the relations that forms it situation. The subject is constructed through acts of exclusion and differentiation that distinguished the subject from its constitutive outside, a domain of abjected alterity. There is no ontologically intact reflexivity to the subject which is then placed within a cultural context; that cultural context, as it were, is already there as the disarticulated process of that subject’s production, one that is concealed by the frame that would situate a ready-made subject in an external web of cultural relations. We may be tempted to think that to assume the subject in advance is necessary in order to safeguard the agency of the subject. But to claim that the subject is constituted is not to claim that it is determined; on the contrary, the constituted character of the subject is the very precondition of its agency. For what is it that enables a purposive and significant reconfiguration of cultural and political relations, if not a relation that can be turned against itself, reworked, resisted? Do we need to assume theoretically from the start a subject with agency before we can articulate the terms of a significant social and political task of transformation, resistance, radical democratization? If we do not offer in advance the theoretical guarantee of that agent, are we doomed to give up transformation and meaningful political practice? My suggestion is that agency belongs to a way of thinking about persons as instrumental actors who confront an external political field. But if we agree that politics and power exist already at the level at which the subject and its agency are articulated and made possible, then agency can be presumed only at the cost of refusing to inquire into its construction. Consider that “agency” has no formal existence or, if it does, it has no bearing on the question at hand. In a sense, the epistemological model that offers us a pregiven subject or agent is one that refuses to acknowledge that agency is always and only a political prerogative. As such, it seems crucial to question the conditions of its possibility, not to take it for granted as an a priori guarantee. We need instead to ask, what possibilities of mobilization that are produced on the basis of existing configurations of discourse and power? Where are the possibilities of reworking that very matrix of power by which we are constituted, of reconstituting the legacy of that constitution, and of working against each other those processes of regulation at can destabilize existing power regimes? For if the subject is constituted by power, that power does not cease at the moment the subject is constituted, for that subject is never fully constituted, but is subjected and produced time and again. That subject is neither a ground nor a product, but the permanent possibility of a certain resignifying process, one which gets detoured and stalled through other mechanisms of power, but which is power’s own possibility of being reworked. The subject is an accomplishment regulate and produced in advance. And is as such fully political; indeed, perhaps most political at the point in which it is claimed to be prior to politics itself.” Implications: A. Ethics has to start with the self – otherwise it can’t guide action because its principle doesn't have a claim on what I ought to do. But, there is no single stable self. Any attempt to theorize the self would fail to understand the ontological status of the agent. MILLS: Charles W. Mills, “Ideal Theory” as Ideology, 2005 “An idealized social ontology. Morality theory deals with the normative, but it cannot avoid some characterization of the human beings who make up the society, and whose interactions with one another are its subject. So some overt or tacit social ontology has to be presupposed. An idealized social ontology of the modern type (as against, say, a Platonic or Aristotelian type) will typically assume the abstract and undifferentiated equal atomic individuals of classical liberalism. Thus it will abstract away from relations of structural domination, exploitation, coercion, and oppression, which in reality, of course, will pro- foundly shape the ontology of those same individuals, locating them in superior and inferior positions in social hierarchies of various kinds.” (168) B. Constraints K impacts – a social ontology conditions the subject in a way that resists concrete and structural inequalities, that's a second implication from Mills. 2. Discrimination is constitutive of any moral theory because it requires one to distinguish between the ethical and anti-ethical. Differentiation becomes a condition for any decision, so justice is found in violence. HÄGGLUND: “THE NECESSITY OF DISCRIMINATION DISJOINING DERRIDA AND LEVINAS” MARTIN HÄGGLUND “Derrida targets precisely this logic of opposition. As he argues in Of Grammatology, metaphysics has always regarded violence as derivative of a primary peace. The possibility of violence can thus be accounted for only in terms of a Fall, that is, in terms of a fatal corruption of a pure origin. By deconstructing this figure of thought, Derrida seeks to elucidate why violence does is not merely an empirical accident that befalls something that precedes it. Rather, violence it stems from an essential impropriety that does not allow anything to be sheltered from death and forgetting. Consequently, Derrida takes issue with what he calls the “ethico-theoretical decision” of metaphysics, which postulates the simple to be before the complex, the pure before the impure, the sincere before the deceitful, and so on. All divergences from the positively valued term are thus explained away as symptoms of “alienation,” and the desirable is conceived as the return to what supposedly has been lost or corrupted. In contrast, Derrida argues that what makes it possible for anything to be at the same time makes it impossible for anything to be in itself. The integrity of any “positive” term is necessarily compromised and threatened by its “other.” Such constitutive alterity answers to an essential corruptibility, which undercuts all ethico-theoretical decisions of how things ought to be in an ideal world.11 A key term here is what Derrida calls “undecidability.” With this term he designates the necessary opening toward the coming of the future. The coming of the future is strictly speaking “undecidable,” since it is a relentless displacement that unsettles any defi nitive assurance or given meaning. One can never know what will have happened. Promises may always be turned into threats, friendships into enmities, fidelities into betrayals, and so on. There is no opposition between undecidability and the making of decisions. On the contrary, Derrida emphasizes that one always acts in relation to what cannot be predicted, that one always is forced to make decisions even though the consequences of these decisions cannot be finally established. Any kind of decision (ethical, or political decision, juridical, and so forth) is more or less violent, but it is nevertheless necessary to make decisions. Once again, I want to stress that violent differentiation by no means should be understood as a Fall, where violence supervenes upon a harmony that precedes it. On the contrary, discrimination has to be regarded as a is constitutive condition. Without divisional marks—which is to say: without segregating borders—there would be nothing at all. In effect, every attempt to organize life in accordance with ethical or political prescriptions will have been marked by a fundamental duplicity. On the one hand, it is necessary to draw boundaries, to demarcate, in order to form any community whatsoever. On the other hand, it is precisely because of these excluding borders that every kind of community is characterized by a more or less palpable instability. What cannot be included opens the threat as well as the chance that the prevalent order may be transformed or subverted. In Specters of Marx, Derrida pursues this argument in terms of an originary “spec- trality.” A salient connotation concerns phantoms and specters as haunting reminders of the victims of historical violence, of those who have been excluded or extinguished from the formation of a society. The notion of spectrality is not, however, exhausted by these ghosts that question the good conscience of a state, a nation, or an ideology. Rather, Derridaʼs aim is to formulate a general “hauntology” (hantologie), in contrast to the traditional “ontology” that thinks being in terms of self-identical presence. What is important about the figure of the specter, then, is that it cannot be fully present: it has no being in itself but marks a relation to what is no longer or not yet. And since time— the disjointure between past and future—is a condition even for the slightest moment, Derrida argues that spectrality is at work in everything that happens. An identity or community can never escape the machinery of exclusion, can never fail to engender ghosts, since it must demarcate itself against a past that cannot be encompassed and a future that cannot be anticipated. Inversely, it will always be threatened by what it can- not integrate in itself—haunted by the negated, the neglected, and the unforeseeable. Thus, a rigorous deconstructive thinking maintains that we are always already in- scribed in an “economy of violence” where we are both excluding and being excluded. No position can be autonomous or absolute but is necessarily bound to other positions that it violates and by which it is violated. The struggle for justice can thus not be a struggle for peace, but only for what I will call “lesser violence.” Derrida himself only uses this term briefly in his essay “Violence and Metaphysics,” but I will seek to develop its significance.The starting point for my argument is that all decisions made in the name of justice are made in view of what is judged to be the lesser violence. If there is always an economy of violence, decisions of justice cannot be a matter of choosing what is nonviolent. To justify something is rather to contend that it is less violent than something else. This does not mean that decisions made in view of lesser violence are actually less violent than the violence they oppose. On the contrary, even the most horrendous acts are justified in view of what is judged to be the lesser violence. For example, justifications of genocide clearly appeal to an argument for lesser violence, since the extinction of the group in question is claimed to be less violent than the dangers it poses to another group. The disquieting point, however, is that all decisions of justice are is implicated in the logic of violence. The desire for lesser violence is never innocent, since it is a desire for violence in one form or another, and here can be no guarantee that it is in the service of perpetrating the better.” (46-48) Impacts: A. Controls the internal link to every other framework because any theory requires us to choose a conception of morality otherwise they are baseless and cannot prescribe an obligation. So, other theories would have to concede exclusion of beliefs as a condition for their normativity in the first place. B. Precedes idealized frameworks. The belief in absolute peace is self-contradictory and justifies absolute violence. HÄGGLUND 2: “THE NECESSITY OF DISCRIMINATION DISJOINING DERRIDA AND LEVINAS” MARTIN HÄGGLUND “A possible objection here is that we must strivinge toward an ideal origin or end, an arkhe or telos that would prevail beyond the possibility of violence. Even if every community is haunted by victims of discrimination and forgetting, we should try to reach a state of being that does not exclude anyone, namely, a consummated presence that includes everyone. However, it is precisely with such an “ontological” the thesis that Derridaʼs hauntological thinking takes issue. At several places in Specters of Marx he maintains that a completely present life—which would not be “out of joint,” not haunted by any ghosts—would be nothing but a complete death. Derridaʼs point is not simply that a peaceful state of existence is impossible to realize, as if it were a desirable, albeit unattainable end. Rather, he challenges the very idea that absolute peace is desirable. In a state of being where all violent change is precluded, nothing can ever happen. Absolute peace is thus inseparable from absolute violence, as Derrida argued already in “Violence and Metaphysics.” Anything that would finally put an end to violence (whether the end is a religious salvation, a universal justice, a harmonious intersubjectivity or some other ideal) would end the possibility of life in general. The idea of absolute peace is the idea of eliminating the undecidable future that is the con- dition for anything to happen. Thus, the idea of absolute peace is the idea of absolute violence.” (49) And, democratic agonism is the only thing that can overcome ontological violence:
The only way to resolve the inevitable conflict that comes with pluralism in our agency and ethics is to embrace that it is in fact inevitable. This requires an agonistic commitment, which recognizes that conflict is inevitable, but frames the other as a legitimate opponent instead of an enemy. MOUFFE: “The Democratic Paradox” by Chantal Mouffe 2000 "A well-functioning democracy calls for a vibrant clash of democratic political positions. If this is missing there is the danger that this democratic confrontation will be replaced by a confrontation among other forms of collective identification, as is the case with identity politics. Too much emphasis on consensus and the refusal of confrontation lead to apathy and disaffection with political participation. Worse still, the result can be the crystallization of collective passions around issues which cannot be managed by the democratic process and an explosion of antagonisms that can tear up the very basis of civility." (104) Our starting point is key- we don’t pretend to overcome all exclusion, we just exclude the exclusionary thing. MOUFFE: (Chantal Mouffe, Professor at the Department of Political Science of the Institute for Advanced Studies. June 2000. “The Democratic Paradox”) “To avoid any confusion, I should specify that, contrary to some postmodern thinkers who envisage a pluralism without any frontiers, I do not believe that a democratic pluralist politics should not consider as legitimate all the demands formulated in a given Society. The pluralism that I advocate it requires discriminatesing between demands, which are to be accepted as part of the agonistic debate and those, which are to be excluded. A democratic society cannot treat those who put its basic institutions into question as legitimate adversaries. The agonistic approach does not pretend to encompass all differences and to overcome all forms of exclusions. But exclusions are envisaged in political and not in moral terms. Some demands are excluded, not because they are declared to be’ 'evil', but because they challenge the institutions constitutive of the democratic political association. To be sure, the very nature of those institutions is also part of the agonistic debate, but, for such a debate to take place, the existence of a shared symbolic space is necessary. This is what I meant when I argued in Chapter 2 that democracy requires a 'conflictual consensus': consensus on the ethico-political values of liberty and equality for all, dissent about their interpretation. A line should therefore be drawn between those who reject those values outright and those who, while accepting them, fight for conflicting interpretations.” Aiming toward consensus is a false goal because consensus is impossible, difference in inevitable. Contestation is key. Dividing people up and treating them as enemies is also a false goal because it denies that the existence of their opposing identity is what constructs yours.
Thus, the standard is promoting agonistic democracy. To clarify, it’s a question of creating procedural elements that allow discussion, not specific ends. Prefer additionally:
Educational spaces must embrace contestation as a condition for resistance. Any attempt to exclude challenges reaffirms pedagogical imperialism. RICKERT: (Thomas, “"Hands Up, You're Free": Composition in a Post-Oedipal World”, JacOnline Journal,) “This essay will employ Deleuze's and Zizek's theories to illustrate the limitations of writing pedagogies that rely on modernist strategies of critical distance or political agency. Implicit in such pedagogies is the faith that teaching writing can resist dominant social practices and empower students; however, the notion that we can actually foster resistance through teaching is questionable. As Paul Mann states, "all the forms of opposition have long since revealed themselves as means of advancing it. ... The mere fact that something feels like resistance and still manages to offend a few people (usually not even the right people) hardly makes it effective" (138). In light of Mann's statement, I urge us to take the following position: teaching writing is fully complicitous with dominant social practices, and inducing students to write in accordance with institutional precepts can be as disabling as it is enabling. By disabling, I do not mean that learning certain skills-typically those most associated with current-traditional rhetorics, such as superficial forms of grammatical correctness, basic organization, syntactic clarity, and such-are not useful. Such skills are useful, and they are often those most necessary for tapping the power that writing can wield. In learning such skills, however, we should also ask what students aren’t are not learning. What other forms of writing and thinking are being foreclosed or distorted, forms of writing that have their own, different powers? If one of our goals as teachers of writing is to initiate students into rhetorics of power and resistance, we should also be equally attuned to rhetorics of contestation. Specifically, we must take on the responsibility that comes with the impossibility of knowing the areas of contention and struggle that will be the most important in our students' lives. Pedagogy could reflect this concern in its practices by attending to the idea that each student's life is its own telos, meaning that the individual struggles of each student cannot and should not necessarily mirror our own. Or, to put it another way, students must sooner or later overcome us, even though we may legitimate our sense of service with the idea that we have their best interests in mind. However, we should be suspicious of this presumptive ethic, for, as Mann astutely observes, "nothing is more aggressive than the desire to serve the other” (48) 2. Double bind – to act morally one must first know what is the right thing to do, which means any moral system has to be derivative of the procedures intrinsic to agonistic conflict: A. If our moral belief changes after an agonistic conflict, then it shows that preserving the relationship based off of openness and disagreement is necessary to identity moral errors. B. If my moral belief remains the same, I have practiced commitment to my belief because defending it assumes values in the belief.
Plan Resolved: The United States should limit the qualified immunity of police officers by removing the “clearly established” element of qualified immunity in doctrine. Wright 15 (Journalist and PHD in Law. "Want to Fight Police Misconduct? Reform Qualified Immunity." http://abovethelaw.com/2015/11/want-to-fight-police-misconduct-reform-qualified-immunity/) And change should begin with an act of Congress rolling back qualified immunity. Removing the “clearly established” element of qualified immunity would be a good start — after all, shouldn’t it be enough to deviate from a basic standard of care, to engage in conduct that a reasonable officer would know is illegal, without having to show that that conduct’s illegality has already been clearly established in the courts? Contention 1- Surveillance SCOTUS’s interpretation of the fourth Amendment gives police incredible search power. Carbado 16 Carbado, Devon "Blue-on-Black Violence: A Provisional Model of Some of the Causes." ,2016 By prohibiting the government from engaging in unreasonable searches and seizures, the Fourth Amendment is supposed to impose constraints on the police. However, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Amendment in ways that empower, rather than constrain, the police. More precisely, the Court’s interpretation of the Fourth Amendment allows police officers to force engagement with African-Americans with little or no basis. To put the point more provocatively, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Fourth Amendment to protect police officers, not black people.130 Indeed, we might think of the Fourth Amendment as a Privileges and Immunities Clause for police officers—it confers tremendous power and discretion to police officers with respect to when they can engage people (the “privilege” protection of the Fourth Amendment) and protects them from criminal and civil sanction with respect to how they engage people (the “immunities” protection of the Fourth Amendment). The impact is that fourth Amendment power has become non-existent- only the plan solves. Carbado 16 Carbado, Devon "Blue-on-Black Violence: A Provisional Model of Some of the Causes." ,2016 With respect to whether the officer’s conduct violated the plaintiff’s constitutional rights, the standard, as in the criminal context, centers on reasonableness: whether a reasonable officer would have believed that the use of force was necessary.195 And, as in the criminal context, juries will often defer to an officer’s claim that he/she employed deadly force because he/she feared for his/her life.196 Moreover, implicit and explicit biases can inform their decision making.197 With respect to the “clearly established” doctrine, there are two problems with the standard. First, courts often avoid deciding the question of whether the officer’s conduct violated the Constitution and rule instead on whether the constitutional right in question was clearly established.198 The Supreme Court has made clear that lower courts are free to proceed in this way,199 making it relatively easy for courts to make the defense of qualified immunity available to a police officer without having to decide whether the officer violated a constitutional right.200 This avoidance compounds the extent to which the law is unsettled. And, the greater the uncertainty about the law, the greater the doctrinal space for a police officer to argue that particular rights were not “clearly established” at the time the officer acted.201 In other words, the more courts avoid weighing in on the sub stantive question of whether police conduct violates the Constitution, the more leeway police officers have to argue that their conduct did not violate a clearly established right. Consider, for example, Stanton v. Sims.202 There, the Court avoided the question of whether an officer’s entrance into a yard to effectuate the arrest of a misdemeanant violated the Fourth Amendment, but ruled that the right to avoid such an intrusion was not clearly established.203 Unless and until the Supreme Court expressly rules that, absent exigent circumstances, one has a right to be free from warrantless entry into one’s yard, courts will likely grant qualified immunity in cases involving such arrests.204 A second problem with the “clearly established” doctrine pertains to how courts apply it. According to the Supreme Court, in applying the “clearly established” standard, the inquiry is whether the right is “sufficiently clear ‘that every reasonable official would have understood that what he/she is doing violates that right.’”205 This standard creates rhetorical room for police officers to argue that not “every” reasonable officer would have understood that the right in question was clearly established.206 The standard is also, as Karen Blum observes, “riddled with contradictions and complexities.” 207 Eleventh Circuit Judge Charles Wilson puts the point this way: The way in which courts frame the question, “was the law clearly established,” virtually guarantees the outcome of the qualified immunity inquiry. Courts that permit the general principles enunciated in cases factually distinct from the case at hand to “clearly establish” the law in a particular area will be much more likely to deny qualified immunity to government actors in a variety of contexts. Conversely, those courts that find the law governing a particular area to be clear ly established only in the event that a factually identical case can be found, will find that government actors enjoy qualified immunity in nearly every context.208 When one adds the difficulties of the “clearly established” standard to the other dimensions of the qualified immunity doctrine, it becomes clear that the qualified immunity regime erects a significant doctrinal hurdle to holding police officers accountable for acts of violence. Diluted 4th Amendment protections massively expand government power, enabling mass surveillance – that chills democratic deliberation and kills privacy Hafetz 13 Jonathan Hafetz, "How NSA surveillance endangers the Fourth Amendment," National Constitution Center, 8/13/2013 The New York Times has reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) is combing through vast amounts of Americans’ email and text communications into and out of the country. This latest revelation—part of the continuing fallout from the disclosures of government documents by former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden—underscores the frayed fabric of the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment and the threat to the values it protects. We already knew that the government was sweeping up international communications of American citizens under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA). While the FAA authorizes the government to target foreigners abroad, it also permits the government to collect Americans’ communications with those foreign targets, as well as to retain and disseminate that information to other government agencies and foreign governments. The Times story, however, makes clear that the NSA is also acquiring—without a warrant—the communications of any foreigner “about the target,” once a target has been identified, thus sweeping in an even wider range of communications by U.S. citizens than previously believed. The Fourth Amendment provides a bulwark against this type of dragnet surveillance. Before searching Americans’ private communications, the Fourth Amendment requires that the government demonstrate probable cause or individualized suspicion. The Fourth Amendment also interposes an independent judiciary between the government and its citizenry—requiring that the government obtain a warrant by making this individualized showing before a federal judge. Review by a neutral and independent decisionmaker is crucial to the Madisonian system of checks and balances, designed to prevent government overreaching and safeguard individual freedoms. The NSA surveillance programs undermine these protections, threatening to render them a dead letter for all “foreign intelligence information”—a category broadly defined to include information not only about terrorism, but also about intelligence activities, national defense, and even the “foreign affairs” of the United States. Further, given the lax standards the NSA uses to determine whether prospective surveillance targets are foreigners abroad, errors are inevitable. This means that the NSA is likely collecting the content of purely domestic communications as well. In 1978, Congress established a special court—known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)—to review requests for national security surveillance. But, at best, the FISC is merely providing review of the overall surveillance programs conducted under the FAA, and not individual requests for information. Moreover, no FISC ruling explaining its legal analysis of the FAA or “about the target” searches of Americans’ cross-border communications has been disclosed to the public. The secrecy that shrouds the FISC’s decisions heightens the risk to the Fourth Amendment, as even the reasoning used to justify massive government surveillance remains secret. The impact of NSA surveillance is deep and far-reaching. Vacuuming up Americans’ communications undermines basic principles of privacy. It also chills the communications and discourse essential to a democratic society and fundamentally alters the citizenry’s relation with its government. The NSA’s widespread, suspicionless surveillance of Americans’ private communications will not only impact the work of journalists, lawyers, and others who frequently communicate with people abroad. It will also affect the conduct of ordinary citizens, now fearful of visiting a controversial website or discussing a particular topic via email. Over time, the vibrant exchange of ideas essential to democracy will diminish and trust in the government will erode. At the same time, the government will be emboldened to justify further incursions on individual liberty in name of protecting the United States from terrorism or other threats. Surveillance is structurally antagonistic towards demarcating black bodies as hyper visible and subject to oversight. Browne 12 Race and Surveillance Simone Browne 2012 Routledge International Handbooks : Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies.:Taylor and Francic, p 105 “According to Christian Parenti, the history of surveillance in America can be traced to the “simple accounts” of slave owners (2003: 15). Of course, the accounting practices of transatlantic slavery were also present outside of the Americas. These simple accounts included slave vessel manifests listing human cargo, plantation inventories, diaries which contained observations about plantation life and instructions for governing slaves. One example involved the “General Rules” recorded by Charles Tait for his Columbus, Texas plantation: “4th In giving orders always do it in a mild tone, and try to leave the impression on the mind of the negro that what you say is the result of reflection.” The detailed cataloguing of slave life was a mechanism of disciplinary power, where disciplinary power, as Michel Foucault tells us, is “exercised through its invisibility,” while imposing a “compulsory visibility” on its targets (1979: 187). Disciplinary power, then, operated on the enslaved as a racializing surveillance that individuals were at once subjected to and that produced slaves them as racial, and therefore enslavable, subjects. Such a racializing surveillance was apparent in the plantation security system, a system that which relied on, as Parenti lays out, three “information technologies: the written slave pass, organized slave patrols, and wanted posters for runaways” (2003: 15). Here, surveillance and literacy were closely articulated as slaves and indentured servants who could read and write could also forge passes and manumission papers or alter existing ones by replacing dates, names and other unique identifiers, in this way functioning as “antebellum hackers” able to “crack the code of the planters’ security system” (20). These forged passes were used for unauthorized travel outside of the plan- tation and were produced by fugitives upon demand by slave patrollers, or “pattie rollers,” who were often non-property owning but armed white men who policed slave mobilities. Sometimes producing a forged pass was not necessary. Any piece of printed text would do given that fugitive slaves were aware that many of these pattie rollers were illiterate, so they would hand over these “passes” when apprehended. This security system, then, relied on the “racially defined contours of (white) literacy and (Black) illiteracy,” a dichotomy that was not so readily upheld (18). Less easily counterfeited passes were later fashioned out of metal. The compulsory visibility of the racial subject can be seen in the circulation of newspapers advertisements and wanted posters for runaway slaves and truant servants. These texts were primarily aimed at a white public that was assumed to be literate and free, and who in consuming these texts became part of the apparatus of surveillance, the eyes and ears of face-to-face watching and regulating. In detailing physical descriptions, the surveillance technology of the fugitive slave advertisement made the already hypervisible racial subject legible as “out of place.” For instance, a March 15 1783 advertisement in The Royal Gazette offering a “Two Dollars reward” for “a Mulatto, or Quadroon Girl, about 14 years of age, named Seth, but calls herself Sall,” attests to the role of fugitive slave notices, and similarly wanted posters, in upholding racial categorization. This notice went on to state: “sometimes says she is white and often paints her face to cover that deception.” Seth’s, or Sall’s, duplicity is not limited to her use of an alias, as this notice tells us, but also to her racial ambiguity, witness her apparent choosing to self-identify or pass as white, rather than as “a Mulatto” (one black parent and one white parent) or a “Quadroon Girl” (one black grandparent) as per the racial nomenclature that arose out of slavery. Later such classifications as a form of population management were made official with the first US federal census in 1790. I will return to the census as a technology that formalized racial categorization later. For now, the wanted notice for fugitive slaves as an information technology demonstrates that then as now race was a social construct that required constant policing and oversight. However, the format of the fugitive notice was repurposed in the form of handbills that functioned as a means of counter-surveillance. An 1851 handbill produced by abolitionist Theodore Parker attests to this as it cautioned “colored people of Boston” to steer clear of “watchmen and police officers” and to “keep a sharp look out for kidnappers, and have top eye open.” “Top eye” here was a directive to look out and about with keen intent as police officers were empowered to act as slave catchers under fugitive slave laws. Black spectatorship, along with the gazes of white abolitionists and other allies, functioned as a form of oppositional looking back at racializing surveillance. In her discussion of black spectatorship, the gaze and looking relations during slavery and the racial apartheid of Jim Crow in the southern United States, bell hooks tells us that black people often “cultivated the habit of casting the gaze downward so as not to appear uppity. To look directly was an assertion of subjectivity, equality” (1992: 168). hooks suggests that the often violent ways in which blacks were denied the right to look back—think of the gruesome beating and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mis- sissippi in 1955, allegedly for looking at a white woman—“had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze” (116). Such politicized and oppositional looking were agential acts and can be seen, for example, in a June 14th 1783 runaway slave notice printed in the Royal Gazette for 16-year-old Sam, who is described in the notice as “five feet high” and “remarkable in turning up the whites of his eyes when spoken to.” This notice records Sam’s oppositional gaze, his looking back, and shows us that resistance can be found even in the simple act of rolling one’s eyes. Black looks have the power to trouble surveillance as a “technology of whiteness” Discourse of criminality excludes black agents from democratic deliberation. TRIVINGO: Trivingo ‘13. Franco V. Trivingo Guns and Virtue: The Virtue Ethical Case Against Gun Carrying Public Affairs Quarterly Volume 27 Number 4 10/2013 “For the virtue ethicist, virtue is not something that I can accomplish by myself; rather, it involves cultivating certain kinds of relationships and living in a certain kind of community. For example, a person could not flourish if everyone she knew used her for profit, or if she lived in a deeply repressive and sexist society.56 What effect does cultivating the willingness to use a gun in self-defense have on one's attitude toward other people, most of whom will not in fact be criminals? As much research has demonstrated, the willingness to kill is enabled by a number of mechanisms that serve to dehumanize the potential target." The habit of carrying a gun may involve non-conscious representations of a generic "criminal" as evil and/or subhuman. Such repeated dehumanization may have deleterious effects on one's character by inhibitsing the development of virtuous character traits, enabling the development of vicious character traits, and adversely affecting moral deliberation and perception. This dehumanization can be seen as operative in two ways. First, the discourse surrounding justification for gun carrying refers to "criminals," not as individual moral subjects, but as subhuman threats to the safety of moral agents. As I note above, these attitudes are likely to be mediated by social identities, that is, one will be more likely to dehumanize African Americans. Thus, the "criminal" is likely to have has a certain "look." Consider Lott's description of what criminals are like: To put it bluntly, criminals are not typical citizens. As is well known, young males from their mid-teens to mid-thirties commit a disproportionate share of crime, but even this categorization can be substantially narrowed. We know that criminals tend to have low IQs as well as atypical personalities. For ex-ample, delinquents generally tend to be more 'assertive, unafraid, aggressive, uncontrolled, unconventional, extroverted and poorly socialized'. . . Other evidence indicates that criminals tend to be more impulsive and put relatively little weight on future events. Finally, we cannot ignore the unfortunate fact that crime (particularly violent crime and especially murder) is disproportionately committed against blacks by blacks." This picture assimilates criminals and psychopaths, who lack empathy and as a matter of fact have no qualms about harming other humans.59 The criminal is thus so deeply different and "other" that he—and it is almost always a "he"—is simply not afforded the same moral consideration as "regular" humans. Collins claims that this picture of the criminal, while picking up on certain statistically relevant correlations, is grossly overdrawn and unhelpful for predicting violence f° Second, in order for handgun carrying to be effective, one must be willing—or think one is willing—to use deadly force should it become necessary. In On Killing, Grossman argues that successfully training someone to become willing to kill involves several distancing mechanisms, all of which involves dehumanizing the potential targets.6' The distancing mechanisms include "cultural distance, such as racial and ethnic differences"; "moral distance, which takes into consideration the kind of intense belief in moral superiority"; and "social distance, which considers the impact of practice in thinking of a particular class as less than human.-62 These distancing mechanisms are meant to overcome our strong resistance to serious violence, and this resistance is a significant feature of our moral psychological makeup.63 In short, the psychological mechanisms that enable killing bypass the resistance by dehumanizing, in one way or another, the potential "target:. In order to become willing to kill another human being—even in self-defense—it is psychologically enabling to see that person as sub- or non-human.64 The core point here is that to the extent that one is successful, on one's own, at distancing oneself from others in preparing to commit serious violence, one is thereby and to that extent morally harming oneself. One does so precisely by compromising one's own ability to recognize the humanity in others, thereby undermining one's capacity for empathic concern. A reduced capacity for empathic concern will affect all sorts of other-regarding virtues, since they depend on perceiving the other as a fellow human. One may become callous and insensitive, when confronted with the suffering of these others; one may become cruel and malicious in what one says about them and hopes for them; one may become spiteful and vindic-tive when confronted with wrongdoing that "they" have committed. Conversely, several virtuous character traits may become harder to develop and impossible to fully realize: compassion, sympathy, benevolence, and kindness come to mind. A practiced attitude of dehumanization toward a certain set of people, the violent criminals, whoever one imagines them to be, is likely to have deleterious effects on moral deliberation and moral perception, which may end up fostering vicious character traits and inhibiting the development of virtuous character traits. In short, one will not be able to afford others the proper amount of moral consideration. To recognize basic human dignity from a virtue ethical perspective means that one affords others due consideration in one's moral outlook and deliberations about what to do. One must perceive others and their goals, values, and ideals as morally relevant and salient features of one's own moral situation. One needs to see them as having some basic moral value." The deleterious effects of gun carrying are on moral deliberation and moral perception can be seen as operative on two levels. First, such dehumanization cannot be done with sufficient fineness of grain to avoid dehumanizing those who are only superficially similar to the violent criminals. Since one's notion of the "criminal" is likely to be mediated by social identity and thus drawn in an overly broad way, one will develop bad habits of deliberation with respect to those who may "look like" one of "the criminals." These mechanisms are also likely to be operative at the non-conscious level, that is, one may not be aware that one is, in moral deliberation, implicitly denying the humanity of those who are only superficially similar to the criminal. One's moral perception may be affected in such a way that one simply fails to see certain groups of people as human moral agents. Second, even if one's notion of the criminal is accurate and somehow manages to avoids undue generalization, it is clear that the criminal deserves some moral consideration. The dehumanization that enables violence would seem to go too far in the denyial of moral consideration to the criminal. This may be manifested in expressed attitudes of indifference to what happens to criminals, how they are or have been treated, or, as we have seen, the belief that they ought to be treated more harshly or even killed.”
Underview: Theory analytics
K spikes
3/18/17
ND - 1AC - Distinction
Tournament: UT | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Cy-Woods CJ | Judge: Drew Burd Part One—Truth Testing: The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best meets their burden under a truth testing paradigm. This requires the AFF to prove the resolution true and the NEG to prove the resolution false. To clarify, the judge cannot vote on education or fairness impacts under my role of the ballot, only the truth or falsity of the resolution. Three warrants:
Standards of goodness for any activity, like debate, inevitably collapse to following the intrinsic form of the activity. The particular ends of the activity are inseparable from the rules that govern it. This alone explains the possibility of binding standards. BOYLE and LAVIN: Boyle, Matthew and Douglas Lavin. 2010. Goodness and desire. In Desire, Practical Reason, and the Good, ed. Sergio Tenenbaum. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 32-33. “A certain standard of goodness for a thing follows inevitably from its belonging to a kind characterized by a functionally-organized system of powers: this, we suppose, is the crux of Aristotle’s famous “function argument.” If the objection to this is that it illegitimately infers an “ought” from an “is,” we are not sure that we understand the charge. The sort of “saying what a thing is” that is at issue here is: ascribesing to it a certain form, where a form is something that as such involves directedness toward certain ends. If the question is supposed to be why the thing at issue ought to pursue those ends, we ask: from what standpoint is this question posed? If the thing in question genuinely is a bearer of such-and-such a form, then it is a pursuer of such-and-such ends, and essentially so. It can no more renounce these ends than it can cease to be itself. But if the objection is that there can be no such thing as a “form” in the sense that would validate these claims, then we would want to dispute this, though to confront the various challenges to this notion would be too large a task to take on here. We hope the foregoing discussion suggests, at any rate, that the costs of giving up this notion would be significant. For it suggests that the notion belongs, not simply to some strange pre- modern metaphysical outlook, but to a characterization of the underlying structure of forms of thought and speech that we all constantly employ, and whose soundness few philosophers seriously question. If the Aristotelian standpoint on goal-directed activity is right, then to regard something as a goal-directed agent is necessarily to regard it as the bearer of a certain form, and thus as directed toward a certain system of goods, goods the pursuit of which orients, more or less remotely, its various particular doings.” Constitutivism implies truth testing: A. To affirm is defined as: “to say that something is true in a confident way” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/affirm and to negate is defined as: “to deny the existence or truth of” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/negate So, the binding standards ascribed in the actions of affirming and negating assume a truth testing model. B. Analytic Outweighs: a) b) c) d) Underview- truth testing means you should not evaluate theory a) b) 2. Analytic a) b) 3. Any counter role of the ballot collapses to truth testing—any property assumes the truth of the property. FREGE: Frege ’03. Frege, Gottlob. “The Thought: A Logical Inquiry” in Logicism and the Philosophy of Language: Selections from Frege and Russell. Broadview Press. March 2003. Pg. 204. “It may nevertheless be thought that we cannot recognize a property of a thing without at the same time realizing the thought that this thing has this property to be true. So with every property of a thing is joined a property of a thought, namely, that of truth. It is also worthy of notice that the sentence “I smell the scent of violets” has just the same content as the sentence “it is true that I smell the scent of violets”. So it seems, then, that nothing is added to the thought by my ascribing to it the property of truth. And yet is it not a great result when the scientist after much hesitation and careful inquiry, can finally say “ what I supposed is true ” The meaning of the word “ true ” seems to be altogether unique. May we not be dealing here with something which cannot, in the ordinary sense, be called a quality at all? In spite of this doubt I want first to express myself in accordance with ordinary usage, as if truth were a quality, until something more to the point is found.” Part Two—Burden: The sufficient affirmative burden is to prove that there is no morally relevant distinction between police officers and normal citizens that justifies a distinction in punishment. The negative must defend an advocacy that is competitive with the AFF’s burden in order to prove the resolution false under the AFF’s interp of the resolution. Prefer the AFF’s interp of the resolution: The binding feature of the U.S. Criminal Justice System is that citizens should be held accountable for their actions and that wrongdoing should be punished in some form. DUFF: Antony Duff ‘13, Theories of Criminal Law, SEP 2013 “Civil wrongs are typically treated as ‘private’ matters in the sense that it is for the victim to investigate what happened, to identify the alleged wrongdoer, and to bring a case against him. The law provides the institutions (the courts, arbitration panels) through which that case can be brought; it lays down the norms by reference to which the case is decided; it specifies what remedies are available; it might also help successful plaintiffs to extract damages from unwilling defendants. But it is for the injured party to bring, or to decide not to bring, a case; to pursue, or to abandon, that case; to insist on extracting the damages the court awarded, or to forgo them. The case is described and understood as ‘P v D’: P sues D, and the case thus belongs to her. The criminal law, however, provides for the public investigation, prosecution and punishment of crimes: for a police force, tasked with investigating (as well as preventing) crime and detecting criminals; for a system of criminal courts, in which defendants are tried for the crimes that they are alleged to have committed (and whose workings are structured by a complex array of procedural rules and requirements); for a system of punishments that will be imposed by the courts, and administered by other institutions and officials. Now the police act in the name and with the authority not just of the victim, but of the whole polity; it is for the prosecuting authority, not for the victim, to decide whether, and on what charge, anyone will be prosecuted. If the victim does not want the case to go to court, the prosecutors will in fact often not proceed with it—because it would be hard to do so without the victim's willing co-operation, or out of concern for the victim's feelings; but cases can be prosecuted despite the victim's unwillingness (this can be an important issue for prosecutors dealing with domestic violence; see Dempsey 2009). When the case comes to court, it is described not as ‘P v D’, but as ‘State v D’, or ‘People v D’, or ‘Queen v D’: D is prosecuted not by an individual victim, but by the polity—or, in societies that have not yet shaken off the trappings of undemocratic monarchy, by its sovereign. (Some legal systems allow the possibility of private prosecutions; this is one of several ways in which the distinction between criminal and civil law is neither sharp nor watertight.)” Analytic:
analytic a) b) 2. analytic Part Three—Offense: The affirmatives advocacy is that there is no morally relevant distinction between police officers and regular agents.
The nature of conflict entails starting from the assumption of equality. It is on the burden of the contestant to prove that certain individuals should fall outside of our categories. MANSBRIDGE: “Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political” edited by Seyla Benhabib – “Using Power/Fighting Power: The Polity” by Jane Mansbridge DD “First, when conflicting interests erode the bases for any others standards other than equality, equality becomes the only mutually acceptable default position. This essentially negative argument, which Isaiah Berlin makes in general terms, is particularly applicable to majority rule. Berlin points out that all norms of rules (without which there can be no society) have a structure such that within the categories created by the rule all individuals are treated equally. This is the meaning of a rule. Members of any society, asked to justify a rule, give reasons for including or excluding individuals from the relevant categories. When no good reason for a distinction can be given, the default presumption is that individuals will be treated equally. Following this logic, struggles over the franchise have taken the form of struggles over reasons for exclusion. Whenever the underlying rationale for traditional exclusions erodes, more previously excluded individual gain the vote.” (53) 2. Analytic 3. Analytic 4. Legal distinctions cannot generate moral distinctions in the form of the agent. SHAPIRO: Shapiro, Scott J. B.A., Columbia, 1987; J.D., Yale, 1990; Ph.D., Columbia, 1996. Professor of Law and Philosophy at Yale Law School, Former Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan and Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Authority (2000). Stanford/Yale Jr. Faculty Forum Research Paper 00-05; Cardozo Law School, Public Law Research Paper No. 24. SSRN. http://ssrn.com/abstract=233830 or doi:10.2139/ssrn.233830 "It is sometimes thought that Wolff’s challenge to authority is merely a special case of a more general paradox, one that purports to show the incompatibility of authority and rationality. The general argument is familiar: Consider any directive issued by an authority and any action required by that directive. Either the balance of reasons supports that action or it does not. If the balance of reasons supports the action, an agent should conform to the directive, but not because conformity is required by the directive, rather because agents should always act according to the balance of reasons. On the other hand, if the balance of reasons does not support the action, then an agent should not conform to the directive because agents should never act against the balance of reasons. It would seem, therefore, that authoritative directives can never be reasons for action – if a directive gave the right result, the directive would be irrelevant; if the directive gave the wrong result, then the obedience to the directive would be unreasonable. Since authoritative directives can never be reasons for action, it follows that rational agents can never obey authority. The proof: Rational agents always aim to act on undefeated reasons and act in accordance with that aim. If an agent were to obey an authority, they would either have to believe that they had an undefeated reason to obey or believed that they didn’t have an undefeated reason but would have obeyed anyway. If the former were true, then the agent would have irrational beliefs, given that according to the first argument, authoritative directives can never be reasons for action. If the latter were true, then the agent would not be acting in accordance with the aim of acting on undefeated reasons.” 5. Moral distinctions between agents subconsciously normalize oppression. TAMDGIDI: Mohammad H. Tamdgidi, Prof. @ U. Mass-Boston, “I Change Myself, I Change the World”: Gloria Anzaldua’s Sociological Imagination in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza”, Humanity and Society, 2008, p. JSTOR “The thesis of global social change via radical self-knowledge and transformation is neither an anecdotal nor a passing episode in Anzaldua's work. It is a continuing and central hypothesis that significantly inspired Borderlands and her later writings and informed much of her literary laboratory and social praxis. She reminded her readers emphatically of this thesis in Borderlands: My "awakened dreams" are about shifts. Thought shifts, reality shifts, gender shifts: one person metamorphoses into another in a world where people fly through the air, heal from mortal wounds. I am playing with my Self, I am playing with the world's soul, I am the dialogue between my Self and el espiritu del mundo. I change myself, I change the world (1987, p.71). She further wrote: The struggle is inner: Chicano, indio, American Indian, mojado, mexicano, immigrant Latino, Anglo in power, working class Anglo, Black, Asian-our psyches resemble the bordertowns and are populated by the same people. The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in the outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the "real" world unless it first happens in the images in our heads (1987, p.87). To comprehend the paradoxical nature of this simultaneous "work" on self and global transformation, it is crucial to understand the paradigmatic significance Anzaldua attributes to the problem of dualism and the root source of much of what's wrong in human life. All major concepts in Anzaldua's thought, such as "borderlands," "bridging," "nepantilism" ("an Aztec word meaning torn between ways" 1978, p.7 8), "nepantleras" (those who can travel across different spiritual worlds),2 etc., are invented, borrowed, or revived to make possible the transcendence of dualistic modes of living, thinking, feeling and sensing that permeate the deepest recesses of human self and global realities. The tragedies of human violence, war, exploitation, oppression, and alienation, are, at their roots, products of the violence of dualism. In other words, for Anzaldua, the "end game" for the project of human transformation-for which self or global dimensions are not separated as entities in which one is a "means" to the other's "end," but are the same and simultaneous-is to eliminate the dualistic thinking that underlies all modes of racial, sexist, classist, homophobic, individualistic, xenophobic, orientalist, imperial/colonial, and other ideological modes of human alienation and oppression. 4 Anzaldua's critique of dualism is not a denial of the dialectical mode of development of phenomena in nature, society and mind. A fundamental problem for her is binaries become habitually rigidified, dogmatized and rendered static to the point where they become unbridgeable and create lasting personal and broader social wounds. Healing involves a process of observation, questioning, and dialectical reengagement and "bridging" of rigidified binaries. In Anzaldua's view (and this is crucial), what makes dualisms so difficult to heal and transform-leading to is their becoming rigidified as habituated modes of thinking and behavior in the inner and global realms-is itself a product of the dualistic separation of conscious and subconscious minds. It is this splitting of waking consciousness from the subconscious mind, and the reification of the split as if given in nature (and not brought on and perpetuated by specific social upbringing and modes of education), that helps reproduce and further entrench other modes of dualistic thinking, feeling, sensing, behaving and relating.5 This ensemble of the immense variety of habituated dualisms subtly permeating human inner and global life is "the enemy within" that must be the target of the simultaneous work on the self and the world: The borders and walls that are supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior; these habits and patterns are the enemy within. Rigidity means death. Only by remaining flexible is she able to stretch the psyche horizontally and vertically. La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, characterized by movements away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes...The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to shows in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended. The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war (Anzaldua 1987, pp. 79- 80). The massive, subtle and complex, work of self and global transformation to end rape, violence6 and war, is effectively conceptualized by Anzaldua in terms of a massive project of uprooting habituated dualisms and planting healing seeds of integrative human experience. This is both the beginning and the end games of the human liberation project for her. Playing it does not have to be postponed to an indefinite future, but can and should begin in the here-and-now, inward out. It signifies the mixture of her utopian, mystical and scientific projects at work in understanding and transcending/healing the root of human alienation and violence. To recognize and change the manifestations of diverse forms of dualism as permeating the most private recesses of oneself is at the same time an exercise in radical understanding and changing of the world. For this reason, in Anzaldua, one finds a paradoxical sense that "size" both matters and does not matter. It matters because breaking down the dualism of small and large should be also a subject of conscious rethinking to appreciate how broader world-historical social transformation can (and may most effectively) arise from small changes in the here-and-nows within. It matters not, because one then realizes that one does not need to postpone or leap over small changes to bring about broader social change. Radical transformation of an inner habit, as minute as an attitude, feeling, or bias, may potentially have significant butterfly effects and repercussions for larger, global, social processes. How Anzaldua's own "work" on herself-as a nepantlera and spiritual traveler across diverse borderlandshas shaped and influenced a generation of intellectuals and activists is an illustrative case in point. Living as a Chicana Lesbian and Feminist in the borderlands of dualistic social experiences provides Anzaldua with an opportunity to demonstrate to her public audience and readers how the immense work can begin through chronicling her own efforts in writing and working on herself. This, in my view, provides the key to understanding the transformative nature of Anzaldua's writings in general and in her Borderlands in particular.”
Part Four—Underview: On a theoretical level, this burden is best:
The aff is key to reciprocity- 2. Phil ed- Debating about principles of equality is the basis of all ethical systems and assumptions. Gosepath 11 Gosepath, Stefan, "Equality", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/equality/.This fundamental idea of equal respect for all persons and of the equal worth or equal dignity of all human beings (Vlastos 1962) is accepted as a minimal standard by all leading schools of modern Western political and moral culture. Any political theory abandoning this notion of equality will not be found plausible today. In a period in which metaphysical, religious and traditional views have lost their general plausibility (Habermas 1983, p. 53, 1992, pp. 39-44), it appears impossible to peacefully reach a general agreement on common political aims without accepting that persons must be treated as equals. As a result, moral equality constitutes the ‘egalitarian plateau’ for all contemporary political theories (Kymlicka 1990, p.5). Finally, the use of educational spaces as sites of empowerment place the judge into the role of the authoritarian adjudicator who molds students in accordance to a particular political end. This kills any conception of critical citizenship and advocacy skills. RICKERT: Rickert, Thomas. ""Hands Up, You're Free": Composition in a Post-Oedipal World." JacOnline Journal “An example of the connection between violence and pedagogy is implicit in the notion of being "schooled" as it has been conceptualized by Giroux and Peter Mclaren. They explain, "Fundamental to the principles that inform critical pedagogy is the conviction that schooling for self- and social empowerment is ethically prior to questions of epistemology or to a mastery of technical or social skills that are primarily tied to the logic of the marketplace" (153-54). A presumption here is that it is the teacher who knows (best), and this orientation gives the concept of schooling a particular bite: though it presents itself as oppositional to the state and the dominant forms of pedagogy that serve the state and its capitalist interests, it nevertheless reinscribes an authoritarian model that is congruent with any number of oedipalizing pedagogies that "school" the student in proper behavior. As Diane Davis notes, radical, feminist, and liberatory pedagogies "often camouflage pedagogical violence in their move from one mode of 'normalization' to another" and "function within a disciplinary matrix of power, a covert carceral system, that aims to create useful subjects for particular political agendas" (212). Such oedipalizing pedagogies are less effective in practice than what the claims for them assert; indeed, the attempt to "school" students in the manner called for by Giroux and McLaren is complicitous with the malaise of postmodern cynicism. Students will dutifully go through their liberatory motions, producing the proper assignments, but it remains an open question whether they carry an oppositional politics with them. The "critical distance" supposedly created with liberatory pedagogy also opens up a cynical distance toward the writing produced in class.” (299-300)
3/18/17
ND - 1AC - Pearson vs Callahan
Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: 1 | Opponent: Lexington KL | Judge: Bennett Eckert Government obligations necessitate tradeoffs—that means util. Woller 97 Gary Woller BYU Prof., “An Overview by Gary Woller”, A Forum on the Role of Environmental Ethics, June 1997, pg. 10 “Moreover, virtually all public policies entail some redistribution of economic or political resources, such that one group's gains must come at another group's ex- pense. Consequently, public policies in a democracy must be justified to the public, and especially to those who pay the costs of those policies. Such but justification cannot simply be assumed a priori by invoking some higher-order moral principle. Appeals to a priori moral principles, such as environmental preservation, also often fail to acknowledge that public policies inevitably entail trade-offs among competing values. Thus since policymakers cannot justify inherent value conflicts to the public in any philosophical sense, and since public policies inherently imply winners and losers, the policymakers' duty is to the public interest requires them to demonstrate that the redistributive effects and value trade-offs implied by their polices are somehow to the overall advantage of society. At the same time, deontologically based ethical systems have severe practical limitations as a basis for public policy. At best, Also, a priori moral principles provide only general guidance to ethical dilemmas in public affairs and do not themselves suggest appropriate public policies, and at worst, they create a regimen of regulatory unreasonableness while failing to adequately address the problem or actually making it worse.” Thus, the standard is maximizing expected pleasure. Prefer:
No act/omission for governments—constraint based theories collapse to util. Sunstein and Vermule 05 (Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermuele, “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life-Life Tradeoffs,” Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper No. 85 (March 2005), p. 17.) In our view, both the argument from causation and the argument from intention go wrong by overlooking the distinctive features of government as a moral agent. Whatever the general status of the act-omission distinction as a matter of moral philosophy,38 the distinction is least impressive when applied to government.39 The most fundamental point is that unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice between or among possible policies for regulating third parties. The distinction between acts and omissions may not be intelligible in this context, and even if it is, the distinction does not make a morally relevant difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do anything, or refusing to act.40 Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized private action—for example, private killing—becomes obscure when the government formally forbids private action, but chooses a set of policy instruments that do not adequately or fully discourage it. 2. Empiricism- only the real world can serve as the basis for ethical reasoning. Schwartz: The empirical support for the fundamental principle of empiricism is diffuse but salient. Our common empirical experience and experimental psychology offer evidence that humans do not have any capacity to garner knowledge except by empirical sources. The fact is that we believe that there is no source of knowledge, information, or evidence apart from observation, empirical scientific investigations, and our sensory experience of the world, and we believe this on the basis of our empirical a posteriori experiences and our general empirical view of how things work. For example, we believe on empirical evidence that humans are continuous with the rest of nature and that we rely like other animals on our senses to tell us how things are. If humans are more successful than other animals, it is not because we possess special non-experiential ways of knowing, but because we are better at cooperating, collating, and inferring. In particular we do not have any capacity for substantive a priori knowledge. There is no known mechanism by which such knowledge would be made possible. This is an empirical claim. This requires util to adjudicate- all judgments are determined based on consequences of pleasure and pain. Nagel: I I shall defend the unsurprising claim that sensory pleasure is good and pain bad, no matter whose they are. The point of the exercise is to see how the pressures of objectification operate in a simple case. Physical pleasure and pain do not usually depend on activities or desires which themselves raise questions of justification and value. They are just is a sensory experiences in relation to which we are fairly passive, but toward which we feel involuntary desire or aversion. Almost everyone takes the avoidance of his own pain and the promotion of his own pleasure as subjective reasons for action in a fairly simple way; they are not back up by any further reasons. On the other hand if someone pursues pain or avoids pleasure, either it as a means to some end or it is backed up by dark reasons like guilt or sexual masochism. What sort of general value, if any, ought to be assigned to pleasure and pain when we consider these facts from an objective standpoint? What kind of judgment can we reasonably make about these things when we view them in abstraction from who we are? We can begin by asking why there is no plausibility in the zero position, that pleasure and pain have no value of any kind that can be objectively recognized. That would mean that I have no reason to take aspirin for a severe headache, however I may in fact be motivated; and that looking at it from outside, you couldn't even say that someone had a reason not to put his hand on a hot stove, just because of the pain. Try looking at it from the outside and see whether you can manage to withhold that judgment. If the idea of objective practical reason makes any sense at all, so that there is some judgment to withhold, it does not seem possible. If the general arguments against the reality of objective reasons are no good, then it is at least possible that I have a reason, and not just an inclination, to refrain from putting my hand on a hot stove. But given the possibility, it seems meaningless to deny that this is so. Oddly enough, however, we can think of a story that would go with such a denial. It might be suggested that the aversion to pain is a useful phobia—having nothing to do with the intrinsic undesirability of pain itself—which helps us avoid or escape the injuries that are signaled by pain. (The same type of purely instrumental value might be ascribed to sensory pleasure: the pleasures of food, drink, and sex might be regarded as having no value in themselves, though our natural attraction to them assists survival and reproduction.) There would then be nothing wrong with pain in itself, and someone who was never motivated deliberately to do anything just because he knew it would reduce or avoid pain would have nothing the matter with him. He would still have involuntary avoidance reactions, otherwise it would be hard to say that he felt pain at all. And he would be motivated to reduce pain for other reasons—because it was an effective way to avoid the danger being signaled, or because interfered with some physical or mental activity that was important to him. He just wouldn't regard the pain as itself something he had any reason to avoid, even though he hated the feeling just as much as the rest of us. (And of course he wouldn't be able to justify the avoidance of pain in the way that we customarily justify avoiding what we hate without reason—that is, on the ground that even an irrational hatred makes its object very unpleasant!) There is nothing self-contradictory in this proposal, but it seems nevertheless insane. Without some positive reason to think there is nothing in itself good or bad about having an experience you intensely like or dislike, we can't seriously regard the common impression to the contrary as a collective illusion. Such things are at least good or bad for us, if anything is. What seems to be going on here is that we cannot from an objective standpoint withhold a certain kind of endorsement of the most direct and immediate subjective value judgments we make concerning the contents of our own consciousness. We regard ourselves as too close to those things to be mistaken in our immediate, nonideological evaluative impressions. No objective view we can attain could possibly overrule our subjective authority in such cases. There can be no reason to reject the appearances here. 3. Reductionism means that there is no personal identity which concludes util Schultz 86 Bart Schultz, Senior Lecturer in Humanities (Philosophy) and Director of the Humanities Division's Civic Knowledge Project at the University of Chicago, “Persons, Selves, and Utilitarianism,” Ethics, Vol. 96, No. 4 (Jul., 1986), pp. 721-745 JW The theory of personal identity that might be used to support util- itarianism is that which Parfit once labeled the "Complex View," though he now refers to it as the "Reductionist View" (pp. 209-17). On the Reductionist View, which is the view of Grice, Quinton, Perry, and Parfit, the fact of one's identity over time just consists in various other particular physical and psychological facts-especially, for Parfit, the relations of memory, character, intention, and so forth. By contrast, on the "Simple," or "Non-Reductionist," view, the view of Geach, Chisholm, and Swinburne, personal identity involves either a separate "further fact" or a separately existing entity-such as a Cartesian ego-over and above these psycho- logical continuities. On this view, one's identity may hold quite indepen- dently of these relations and is not reducible to them, although they may provide evidence for it. On the Reductionist View, as Parfit describes it, persons are not separately real entities-there is simply nothing more to them than the various interrelated physical and mental events. All of these facts could be described, and indeed a complete description of reality given, without claiming that persons exist. Even mental states or experiences can be described without claiming that they are had by a person or that persons exist. Furthermore, since on this view the continued existence of a person over time just involves relations that, in their nature, can hold to varying degrees, in cases where these relations hold to an intermediate degree there may not be any deep difference between a person's identity holding or failing to hold. For example, we can imagine a mad neurosurgeon who operates on me in such a way that after the operation the resulting person is, both physically and psychologically, roughly half my former self and half a completely different person. Now, although it may be clear that if I had been completely made over into a replica of somebody else, I would not have survived, and that if almost no changes in my physical or mental make-up had occurred, I would still be me, how does one describe the intermediate case? Have I survived? The question, Parfit argues, is an empty one. Although all of the relevant facts are known, no answer will be truly nonarbitrary. Personal identity can, in this sense, be indeterminate. Of course, adherents of the Non-Reductionist View will hold that the question cannot be empty, that a person's identity always either holds or fails to hold, and that there is a deep difference between the two, just as there is a deep difference between an experience being mine and its being someone else's. An experience cannot be more or less mine; a future person cannot be more or less me. The important point here is that on the Reductionist View the nature and identity of persons is akin to that of other complex persisting objects, such as ships, clubs, or nations. Just as most of us would hold an atomistic, reductionist view of nations, according to which there is nothing more to them or their identity over time than individual persons associated by various cultural, political, and geographical relations, so on the Reductionist View we would hold that there is nothing more to persons than the various and variously associated mental and physical events. It is in this sense that on the Reductionist View we may believe that personal identity is less "deep," that there is less to it than we had been inclined to think. This leads to util a. If people are just a series of certain disconnected physical and mental states, the only relevant impact is maximizing experiences within those states of affairs b. Other theories presume identity is relevant. If identity is irrelevant, then util must be true
Plan Resolved: The Supreme Court of the United States should limit qualified immunity for police officers by forcing lower courts to give reason for exercising constitutional discretion, effectively overturning the precedent set in Pearson v. Callahan. Walker 15 Christopher J. Walker, Assistant Professor of Law, Michael E. Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University, Aaron L. Nielson, Associate Professor of Law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, “The New Qualified Immunity,” Southern California Law Review, Vol. 89, pp. 1-65, Oct. 19, 2015 JW Whereas the core constitutional stagnation fear expressed about Pearson discretion is probably exaggerated, the facts on the ground nevertheless show that Pearson is not perfect. There appears to be some stagnation with respect to rights-making; variation across the circuits; and the potential of substantive asymmetries. All of this suggests that the Supreme Court might need to revisit Pearson. Indeed, following Camreta, there may be some appetite to require lower courts to decide whether the alleged right is clearly established and, if it is not, to stop the analysis there.230 Others, however, may press for a return to Saucier, as many scholars advised when Pearson was decided.231 Neither of those options is perfect, nor, in any event, likely. Accordingly, we urge a middle path: the Court should require lower courts—both trial and appellate courts—to give reasons for exercising (or not) their Pearson discretion to reach constitutional questions. We are not writing on a blank slate, but borrow from long-settled principles of administrative law that stress the danger that arises when decisionmakers fail to contemporaneously explain why they have elected to exercise their discretion in a particular way.232 The value of reason giving is not limited to administrative law but has been explored in the law more generally,233 and we are not the first to import it into civil litigation.234 In fact, in his initial response to Pearson, Jack Beermann advanced a reason- giving recommendation: “At a minimum, in light of the strong reasons for reaching the constitutional merits, courts should be required to give reasons for not doing so.”235 The plan is topical- Pearson lead to two expansions of QI- a) no longer bound by legal discretion and b) creating a necessary standard of previous establishment in legal law. So the plan limits qualified immunity, I just have an enforcement mechanism. If this plan is FX-T, so is every other plan on this topic, since they still rely on some enforcement mechanism i.e. Congress or a different court ruling. Advantage 1 – Con Stagnation Pearson v. Callahan established a precedent of deference to the lower courts which creates confusion on which rights the Constitution guarantees Walker 15 Christopher J. Walker, Assistant Professor of Law, Michael E. Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University, Aaron L. Nielson, Associate Professor of Law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, “The New Qualified Immunity,” Southern California Law Review, Vol. 89, pp. 1-65, Oct. 19, 2015 JW Qualified immunity, however, is more than just substantively controversial; it also creates a procedural puzzle. This immunity shields government officials from personal liability whenever an alleged right was not “clearly established.” This means that a plaintiff seeking damages from an individual officer must clear two hurdles. First, she must be able to show that her constitutional right was violated. And second, she must be able to show that “a reasonable person would have known” of the violation at the time.12 Hence the puzzle: Because many constitutional issues arise in cases subject to qualified immunity, if courts were simply to resolve such claims on the ground that there is no clearly established right, then the constitutional rights may never be clearly established—especially when new fact patterns and technologies are at issue. This dilemma has been dubbed “constitutional stagnation.”13 Yet few judicial principles are as entrenched as Justice Brandeis’s warning that a court should “not pass upon a constitutional question . . . if there is also present some other ground upon which the case may be disposed of”14—a rule Alexander Bickel included among his “passive virtues” for judging.15 With qualified immunity, the urge to prevent constitutional stagnation and the rule against reaching constitutional questions unnecessarily are at loggerheads. The Supreme Court has long struggled with this puzzle. Most recently, in 2009, the Court changed the procedures governing qualified immunity. In Pearson, 16 the Court unanimously overruled Saucier v. Katz, which had required that courts “must” first decide whether the Constitution was violated and only then decide whether the constitutional right at issue was clearly established.17 Rather than requiring Saucier’s rigid “order of battle,” Pearson leaves sequencing to the “sound discretion” of the lower courts.18 Pearson thus effectuates Justice Breyer’s forceful charge—based on concerns about judicial resources and the dangers of unnecessary constitutional decisions—to “end the failed Saucier experiment now.”19 Whereas Saucier gave courts no flexibility at all, Pearson now gives courts maximalist discretion.20 Pearson was controversial when decided and “remains controversial” today.21 This is unsurprising. Pearson poses thorny theoretical questions. Many scholars and judges fear, for instance, that without Saucier, constitutional law will “stagnate as lower courts flee from the merits.”22 Reflecting the same point but from a different perspective, Judge Harvey Wilkinson celebrates Pearson as a signal that “the trend toward constitutional avoidance seems, finally, to be taking hold.”23 Some contend that Saucier had an important psychological component—that forcing courts to decide constitutional questions first affected whether they imposed liability.24 Others reject that view.25 Many also worry that courts will get bogged down in debates about when to decide constitutional questions.26 Empirically proven that Pearson increased constitutional stagnation as circuit courts refused to answer constitutional questions Walker 15 Christopher J. Walker, Assistant Professor of Law, Michael E. Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University, Aaron L. Nielson, Associate Professor of Law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, “The New Qualified Immunity,” Southern California Law Review, Vol. 89, pp. 1-65, Oct. 19, 2015 JW On the other hand, if one is concerned not only with courts reaching constitutional questions, but also with courts finding constitutional violations where the law is not clearly established (in other words, in the pure Saucier manner), the numbers may be less encouraging. In only one in twenty instances (5.0 or 53 claims) in which qualified immunity was granted did the court recognize a constitutional violation that was not clearly established but that, because of the court’s decision, would be in future cases. This means that in the overwhelming majority of cases in which courts opt to use their discretion to decide the constitutional merits, they are concluding that no right has been violated. To be sure, assessing whether Pearson discretion has increased the risk of constitutional stagnation requires a comparison between pre- and post-Pearson judicial decisionmaking. As discussed in Part II.A, several empirical studies were conducted before Pearson and two were conducted on cases decided shortly after Pearson. These studies do not provide perfect comparisons, as the methodologies differ. For instance, like this study, the Leong and Rolfs studies analyze both published and unpublished circuit decisions, whereas the Hughes, Sobolski-Steinberg, and JonesYauch studies look only at published decisions.194 Each study analyzes cases from different time periods before and after Saucier and Pearson, 195 which may matter. Similarly, whereas most of the prior studies draw on random samples of cases that contained certain keys words,196 our study, like the Jones-Yauch study, looks at every case within the defined population (and time period) but that population is limited to those decisions that cite Pearson. With those qualifications in mind, comparing the studies’ findings provides some (albeit limited) context on the development of constitutional law before and after Pearson, as well as before and after Saucier—the Supreme Court precedent that required courts to answer constitutional questions in every case.197 Table 1 provides that purely descriptive comparison.198 As these comparisons suggest, circuit courts unsurprisingly opt not to reach constitutional questions as often; indeed, this result flows directly from Pearson. What matters, however, is how often courts do so. The data suggest that courts decline to decide constitutional questions at a rate similar to the pre-Saucier period—in around one in four cases, as opposed to less than six percent during the Saucier regime. The overall rate of reaching constitutional questions accordingly has decreased after Pearson; it would be shocking if it were otherwise. This decrease by itself is not necessarily problematic. For the reasons given by the Pearson Court, some cases are poor vehicles to decide constitutional questions because, for instance, they are poorly briefed.199 Presumably no one thinks it is a bad thing that those cases are not being resolved on constitutional grounds. 200 Moreover, it is not obvious that civil libertarians should prefer Saucier. Imagine a world in which courts keep declining to clarify a point of law regarding a certain practice. Police might avoid that practice, or use it sparingly, because of the legal uncertainty. But if the practice is declared constitutional, police may no longer be reluctant to use it broadly. Nonetheless, as to constitutional stagnation in the pure Saucier sense, the concern about post-Pearson stagnation appears well founded: all of the post-Pearson studies—ours and the Jones-Rauch and Rolfs studies—found that circuit courts found constitutional violations of rights that were not clearly established in 3.6, 7.9, and 2.5, respectively, of the total claims reviewed, whereas the three pre-Pearson studies found rates ranging from 6.5 to 13.9 during the Saucier mandatory sequencing regime.201 Our findings suggest something has changed. The implications of these findings for substantive constitutional law are important. Pure Saucier cases are often difficult—as they should be. Finding a constitutional violation that has not been identified before is one of the most momentous things a judge can do. Such cases are often contentious. For instance, to return to the example used in the Introduction, the en banc Ninth Circuit’s holding that Officer Aikala’s use of a Taser on Ms. Mattos violated the Fourth Amendment but that the right was not “clearly established”202 prompted fierce dissent. Indeed, then-Chief Judge Kozinski warned that the majority’s constitutional “mistake will be paid for in the blood and lives of police and members of the public.”203 Hence, it is possible that courts—perhaps for the sake of comity on the bench or simply because of the call of other work—may decide not to resolve difficult constitutional questions. For instance, in one case, a prisoner’s “ovary and lymph nodes were removed without her consent during a radical hysterectomy.”204 A divided panel concluded that the doctors did not violate any clearly established law.205 The majority’s decision to just apply qualified immunity rather than reach the constitutional question obviously can be defended. But one could imagine other panels resolving the constitutional question too, as the Supreme Court did in Plumhoff v. Rickard. 206 The risk, post-Pearson, is that this type of constitutional question—i.e., a contentious one—may fall through the cracks more often after Pearson than before it.207 In sum, post-Pearson constitutional law continues to develop, but the finding of constitutional violations (when granting qualified immunity)— the pure Saucier development of constitutional law—has decreased. The data thus provide at least some support for the post-Pearson constitutional stagnation theory discussed in Part I.D Qualified immunity doesn’t even involve a question of constitutionality anymore as a result of Pearson v. Callahan. Chen 15 Alan K. Chen, William M. Beaney Memorial Research Chair and professor of law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, “Qualified Immunity Liming Access to Justice and Impeding Development of the Law,” Human Rights Magazine Vol 41 No 1, 2015, http://www.americanbar.org/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/2015~-~-vol~-~-41-/vol~-~-41~-~-no~-~-1~-~~-~-lurking-in-the-shadows~-~-the-supreme-court-s-qui/qualified-immunity-limiting-access-to-justice-and-impeding-devel.html JW To address this concern, the Court at one point instructed lower courts to order their decision making so that they first addressed whether the official’s conduct violated the Constitution before deciding whether he or she had immunity from suit. Saucier v. Katz, 533 U.S. 194, 200 (2001). Thus, as in Savana Redding’s case, while she might not have benefited from the articulation of the relevant constitutional rule, at least similarly situated future plaintiffs could have benefited. But just a few years later, the Court reversed course and restored the lower courts’ discretion to determine in which order to decide those questions. Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U.S. 223, 242 (2009). There was some skepticism about how often lower courts addressed the merits question first, even under the Saucier regime, Alan K. Chen, Rosy Pictures and Renegade Officials: The Slow Death of Monroe v. Pape, 78 UMKC L. Rev. 889, 927 n.247 (2010), or if, when they did, they recognized a previously unarticulated constitutional right. Nancy Leong, The Saucier Qualified Immunity Experiment: An Empirical Analysis, 36 Pepp . L. Rev. 667, 692– 93 (2009). In any event, lower courts now have a green light to avoid the “harder” constitutional law question and simply decide that defendants are entitled to immunity whether or not they violated the Constitution. What this means is that in cases involving cutting-edge issues of constitutional law, qualified immunity may itself prevent the law from ever becoming clearly established. A couple of examples will help illustrate this phenomenon. One area of First Amendment doctrine that is not yet fully developed is whether or not citizens have a right to surreptitiously record police officers during the course of their duties. In Kelly v. Borough of Carlisle, 622 F.3d 248, 259 (3d Cir. 2010), the court reviewed the First Amendment claim of an automobile passenger who attempted to videotape a police officer during a traffic stop. After discovering the passenger’s conduct, the officer arrested him and confiscated his camera. Id. at 251–52. Rather than address the merits of the passenger’s First Amendment claim, the Third Circuit instead found that the right to record police officers was not clearly established and affirmed the officer’s claim that he was entitled to qualified immunity. Id. at 262. Other federal courts have followed this same practice, thus failing to clarify or advance the relevant First Amendment law. See Szymecki v. Houck, 353 F. App’x 852, 852–53 (4th Cir. 2009). US military readiness is low now. Maze ‘13 Rick Maze. Services prepare for scant recruiting year. May. 2, 2013. http://www.armytimes.com/article/20130502/NEWS/305020027/Services-prepare-scant-recruiting-year Finding recruits to join the military in 2014 could be increasingly challenging, even with declining recruiting goals, defense and service personnel officials are warning Congress. At the moment, it’s hard to see the problem: The services all met their goals for quality and quantity for the active forces in the first quarter of fiscal 2013. In the reserve components, only the Army Reserve has missed its goals. “Generally, a slow economy makes recruiting less challenging, and operates to the advantage of those who are hiring, including the U.S. military,” said Jessica Wright, acting undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, in an April 17 statement provided to the Senate Armed Services Committee. But the rosy recruiting environment could be coming to an end as the economy shows “signs of economic improvement, “she said. And if thats not enough of a concern, other factors also are in play. Among them: Fifty-seven percent of parents, teacher, counselors and similar authority figures who influence decisions about enlisting in the military generally dont recommend military service, Wright said. One in five youths ages 12 to 19 is overweight, according to an April 24 statement by Army personnel officials provided to the Senate committee. This compares with one in 20 in 1960. The trend is getting worse, with one in four expected to be overweight by 2015. “A higher number of youths are going to college directly from high school,” Wright said — but conversely, Army officials noted that 20 percent of high school students fail to graduate. Graduation, they said, is “a critical milestone in becoming competitive to serve in highly skilled positions” in the military. And, the multiple deployments required over the past decade for many service members raise concerns in service-aged youths that this high operating tempo will continue, Wright said. These concerns have received only passing attention from Congress, apparently because there is no immediate crisis. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s military personnel panel held two hearings recently on military personnel programs, with only one question focusing directly on recruiting. The House Armed Services Committee’s personnel panel does not plan to hold a hearing on recruiting and retention issues before it begins writing its version of the 2014 defense budget in mid-May. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., wondered if the services were “having to do anything unusual or extra” to fill the ranks. Frederick Vollrath, assistant defense secretary for readiness and force management, said, “Currently, recruiting is on track and in good shape,” but he added that the situation easily could change. “We hope that the economy in the United States continues to improve and the unemployment rate continues to go down. That is our fondest wish, along with every other citizen,” Vollrath said. “But, as that occurs, and we believe that will occur, we know by experience that we have to be attuned to the fact that recruiting is probably going to get a little more difficult.” Vollrath also said it’s “sometimes hard to explain” to people outside the military that the force is getting smaller “but we still would like to hire.” Constitutional review key to military readiness which prevents extinction risk. Kellman 89,Barry, Judicial Abdication of Military Tort Accountability: But Who is to Guard the Guard Themselves, http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3099andcontext=dlj In this era of thermonuclear weapons, America must uphold its historical commitment to be a nation of law. Our strength grows from the resolve to subject military force to constitutional authority. Especially in these times when weapons proliferation can lead to nuclear winter, when weapons production can cause cancer, when soldiers die unnecessarily in the name of readiness: those who control military force must be held accountable under law. As the Supreme Court recognized a generation ago, the Founders envisioned the army as a necessary institution, but one dangerous to liberty if not confined within its essential bounds. Their fears were rooted in history. They knew that ancient republics had been overthrown by their military leaders. . . . . . . . We cannot close our eyes to the fact that today the peoples of many nations are ruled by the military. We should not break faith with this Nation's tradition of keeping military power subservient to civilian authority, a tradition which we believe is firmly embodied in the Constitution. n1 Our fears may be rooted in more recent history. During the decade of history's largest peacetime military expansion (1979-1989), more than 17,000 service personnel were killed in training accidents. n2 In the same period, virtually every facility in the nuclear bomb complex has been revealed *1598 to be contaminated with radioactive and poisonous materials; the clean-up costs are projected to exceed $ 100 billion. n3 Headlines of fatal B-1B bomber crashes, n4 the downing of an Iranian passenger plane, n5 the Navy's frequent accidents n6 including the fatal crash of a fighter plane into a Georgia apartment complex, n7 remind Americans that a tragic price is paid to support the military establishment. Other commentaries may distinguish between the specific losses that might have been preventable and those which were the random consequence of what is undeniably a dangerous military program. This Article can only repeat the questions of the parents of those who have died: "Is the military accountable to anyone? Why is it allowed to keep making the same mistakes? How many more lives must be lost to senseless accidents?" n8 This Article describes a judicial concession of the law's domain, ironically impelled by concerns for "national security." In three recent controversies involving weapons testing, the judiciary has disallowed tort accountability for serious and unwarranted injuries. In United States v. Stanley, n9 the Supreme Court ruled that an Army sergeant, unknowingly drugged with LSD by the Central Intelligence Agency, could not pursue a claim for deprivation of his constitutional rights. In Allen v. United States, n10 civilian victims of atmospheric atomic testing were denied a right of tort recovery against the government officials who managed and performed the tests. Finally, in Boyle v. United Technologies, n11 the Supreme Court ruled that private weapons manufacturers enjoy immunity from product liability actions alleging design defects. A critical analysis of these decisions reveals that the judiciary, notably the Rehnquist Court, has abdicated its responsibility to review civil matters involving the military security establishment. n12 *1599 Standing at the vanguard of "national security" law, n13 these three decisions elevates the task of preparing for war to a level beyond legal *1600 accountability. They suggest that determinations of both the ends and the means of national security are inherently above the law and hence unreviewable regardless of the legal rights transgressed by these determinations. This conclusion signals a dangerous abdication of judicial responsibility. The very underpinnings of constitutional governance are threatened by those who contend that the rule of law weakens the execution of military policy. Their argument -- that because our adversaries are not restricted by our Constitution, we should become more like our adversaries to secure ourselves -- cannot be sustained if our tradition of adherence to the rule of law is to be maintained. To the contrary, the judiciary must be willing to demand adherence to legal principles by assessing responsibility for weapons decisions. This Article posits that judicial abdication in this field is not compelled and certainly is not desirable. The legal system can provide a useful check against dangerous military action, more so than these three opinions would suggest. The judiciary must rigorously scrutinize military decisions if our 18th century dream of a nation founded in musket smoke is to remain recognizable in a millennium ushered in under the mushroom cloud of thermonuclear holocaust.
Advantage 2 – 4th Amendment SCOTUS’s interpretation of the fourth Amendment gives police incredible search power. Carbado 16 Carbado, Devon "Blue-on-Black Violence: A Provisional Model of Some of the Causes." ,2016 By prohibiting the government from engaging in unreasonable searches and seizures, the Fourth Amendment is supposed to impose constraints on the police. However, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Amendment in ways that empower, rather than constrain, the police. More precisely, the Court’s interpretation of the Fourth Amendment allows police officers to force engagement with African-Americans with little or no basis. To put the point more provocatively, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Fourth Amendment to protect police officers, not black people.130 Indeed, we might think of the Fourth Amendment as a Privileges and Immunities Clause for police officers—it confers tremendous power and discretion to police officers with respect to when they can engage people (the “privilege” protection of the Fourth Amendment) and protects them from criminal and civil sanction with respect to how they engage people (the “immunities” protection of the Fourth Amendment). The impact is that fourth Amendment power has become non-existent- only the plan solves. Carbado 16 Carbado, Devon "Blue-on-Black Violence: A Provisional Model of Some of the Causes." ,2016 With respect to whether the officer’s conduct violated the plaintiff’s constitutional rights, the standard, as in the criminal context, centers on reasonableness: whether a reasonable officer would have believed that the use of force was necessary.195 And, as in the criminal context, juries will often defer to an officer’s claim that he/she employed deadly force because he/she feared for his/her life.196 Moreover, implicit and explicit biases can inform their decision making.197 With respect to the “clearly established” doctrine, there are two problems with the standard. First, courts often avoid deciding the question of whether the officer’s conduct violated the Constitution and rule instead on whether the constitutional right in question was clearly established.198 The Supreme Court has made clear that lower courts are free to proceed in this way,199 making it relatively easy for courts to make the defense of qualified immunity available to a police officer without having to decide whether the officer violated a constitutional right.200 This avoidance compounds the extent to which the law is unsettled. And, the greater the uncertainty about the law, the greater the doctrinal space for a police officer to argue that particular rights were not “clearly established” at the time the officer acted.201 In other words, the more courts avoid weighing in on the sub stantive question of whether police conduct violates the Constitution, the more leeway police officers have to argue that their conduct did not violate a clearly established right. Consider, for example, Stanton v. Sims.202 There, the Court avoided the question of whether an officer’s entrance into a yard to effectuate the arrest of a misdemeanant violated the Fourth Amendment, but ruled that the right to avoid such an intrusion was not clearly established.203 Unless and until the Supreme Court expressly rules that, absent exigent circumstances, one has a right to be free from warrantless entry into one’s yard, courts will likely grant qualified immunity in cases involving such arrests.204 A second problem with the “clearly established” doctrine pertains to how courts apply it. According to the Supreme Court, in applying the “clearly established” standard, the inquiry is whether the right is “sufficiently clear ‘that every reasonable official would have understood that what he/she is doing violates that right.’”205 This standard creates rhetorical room
for police officers to argue that not “every” reasonable officer would have understood that the right in question was clearly established.206 The standard is also, as Karen Blum observes, “riddled with contradictions and complexities.” 207 Eleventh Circuit Judge Charles Wilson puts the point this way: The way in which courts frame the question, “was the law clearly established,” virtually guarantees the outcome of the qualified immunity inquiry. Courts that permit the general principles enunciated in cases factually distinct from the case at hand to “clearly establish” the law in a particular area will be much more likely to deny qualified immunity to government actors in a variety of contexts. Conversely, those courts that find the law governing a particular area to be clear ly established only in the event that a factually identical case can be found, will find that government actors enjoy qualified immunity in nearly every context.208 When one adds the difficulties of the “clearly established” standard to the other dimensions of the qualified immunity doctrine, it becomes clear that the qualified immunity regime erects a significant doctrinal hurdle to holding police officers accountable for acts of violence. Diluted 4th Amendment protections massively expand government power, enabling mass surveillance – that chills democratic deliberation and kills privacy Hafetz 13 Jonathan Hafetz, "How NSA surveillance endangers the Fourth Amendment," National Constitution Center, 8/13/2013 The New York Times has reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) is combing through vast amounts of Americans’ email and text communications into and out of the country. This latest revelation—part of the continuing fallout from the disclosures of government documents by former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden—underscores the frayed fabric of the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment and the threat to the values it protects. We already knew that the government was sweeping up international communications of American citizens under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA). While the FAA authorizes the government to target foreigners abroad, it also permits the government to collect Americans’ communications with those foreign targets, as well as to retain and disseminate that information to other government agencies and foreign governments. The Times story, however, makes clear that the NSA is also acquiring—without a warrant—the communications of any foreigner “about the target,” once a target has been identified, thus sweeping in an even wider range of communications by U.S. citizens than previously believed. The Fourth Amendment provides a bulwark against this type of dragnet surveillance. Before searching Americans’ private communications, the Fourth Amendment requires that the government demonstrate probable cause or individualized suspicion. The Fourth Amendment also interposes an independent judiciary between the government and its citizenry—requiring that the government obtain a warrant by making this individualized showing before a federal judge. Review by a neutral and independent decisionmaker is crucial to the Madisonian system of checks and balances, designed to prevent government overreaching and safeguard individual freedoms. The NSA surveillance programs undermine these protections, threatening to render them a dead letter for all “foreign intelligence information”—a category broadly defined to include information not only about terrorism, but also about intelligence activities, national defense, and even the “foreign affairs” of the United States. Further, given the lax standards the NSA uses to determine whether prospective surveillance targets are foreigners abroad, errors are inevitable. This means that the NSA is likely collecting the content of purely domestic communications as well. In 1978, Congress established a special court—known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)—to review requests for national security surveillance. But, at best, the FISC is merely providing review of the overall surveillance programs conducted under the FAA, and not individual requests for information. Moreover, no FISC ruling explaining its legal analysis of the FAA or “about the target” searches of Americans’ cross-border communications has been disclosed to the public. The secrecy that shrouds the FISC’s decisions heightens the risk to the Fourth Amendment, as even the reasoning used to justify massive government surveillance remains secret. The impact of NSA surveillance is deep and far-reaching. Vacuuming up Americans’ communications undermines basic principles of privacy. It also chills the communications and discourse essential to a democratic society and fundamentally alters the citizenry’s relation with its government. The NSA’s widespread, suspicionless surveillance of Americans’ private communications will not only impact the work of journalists, lawyers, and others who frequently communicate with people abroad. It will also affect the conduct of ordinary citizens, now fearful of visiting a controversial website or discussing a particular topic via email. Over time, the vibrant exchange of ideas essential to democracy will diminish and trust in the government will erode. At the same time, the government will be emboldened to justify further incursions on individual liberty in name of protecting the United States from terrorism or other threats. These impacts particularly harm the poor and form structural violence. Carbado 16 Carbado, Devon "Blue-on-Black Violence: A Provisional Model of Some of the Causes." ,2016 Group vulnerability increases the likelihood that the police will target African- Americans, particularly those who are marginalized both inside and outside of the black community, such as LGBTQ people.83 Marginalized groups are more vulnerable to police contact and violence because members of these groups often have non-normative identities to which stereotypes of criminality and presumptions of disorder apply.84 Additionally, people with vulnerable identities are less likely to report instances of police abuse and less likely to be believed when they do. That is to say, members of vulnerable groups are impossible witnesses to their own victimization and lack the social standing and credibility to articulate it.
Underview was some stuff
3/18/17
ND - 1AC - Pearson vs Callahan - V2
Tournament: UT | Round: 1 | Opponent: Village AP | Judge: V Mambapoor New plan text, new advantages I value morality since the resolution poses a normative question over what our obligations are through the word ought.. This means we should focus on the theory of obligations, which is what morality does. The standard is resisting material inequalities. This necessitates consequentialism- rather than following general abstract principles, we should level the playing field first. Prefer:
Debate should deal with the real-world consequences of oppression. Curry 14, Tommy, The Cost of a Thing: A Kingian Reformulation of a Living Wage Argument in the 21st Century, Victory Briefs, 2014, 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 “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 definitiocan with normative/prescriptive/evaluative issues, against factual/descriptive issues.” At the most general level, there is a 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 we must reformulate the values which deny the legitimacy of the living wage, and those values predicated on the flawed views of the oppressed worker, Blacks, and the colonized (dignity, justice, fairness, rights, etc.) used to currently justify the living wages in under our contemporary moral parameters. 2. Non-natural moral facts are epistemology inaccessible. Papineau 07 David Papineau is an academic philosopher. He works as Professor of Philosophy of Science at King's College London, having previously taught for several years at Cambridge University and been a fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge, “Naturalism”. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/ 2007) Moore took this argument to show that moral facts comprise a distinct species of non-natural fact. However, any such non-naturalist view of morality faces immediate difficulties, deriving ultimately from the kind of causal closure thesis discussed above. If all physical effects are due to a limited range of natural causes, and if moral facts lie outside this range, then it follow that moral facts can never make any difference to what happens in the physical world (Harman, 1986). At first sight this may seem tolerable (perhaps moral facts indeed don't have any physical effects). But it has very awkward epistemological consequences. For beings like us, knowledge of the spatiotemporal world is mediated by physical processes involving our sense organs and cognitive systems. If moral facts cannot influence the physical world, then we can’t it is hard to see how we can have any knowledge of them. It is a natural fact that pain is bad. Nagel 86 Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere, HUP, 1986: 156-168. I shall defend the unsurprising claim that sensory pleasure is good and pain is bad, no matter whose they are. The point of the exercise is to see how the pressures of objectification operate in a simple case. Physical pleasure and pain do not usually depend on activities or desires which themselves raise questions of justification and value. They are just sensory experiences in relation to which we are fairly passive, but something oward which we feel involuntary desire or aversion. Almost Everyone takes the avoidance of his own pain and the promotion of his own pleasure as subjective reasons for action in a fairly simple way; they are not backed up by any further reasons. Inherency Previously, to disregard qualified immunity, courts first determined if officers violated clearly established constitutional law and then determined if it was reasonable for the officer to act the way they did. Pearson v Callahan in 2009 allowed lower courts to decide the order in which they answered those questions, which has led to lower courts skipping the first question—stats prove. Walker 15 Christopher J. Walker, Assistant Professor of Law, Michael E. Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University, Aaron L. Nielson, Associate Professor of Law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, “The New Qualified Immunity,” Southern California Law Review, Vol. 89, pp. 1-65, Oct. 19, 2015 On the other hand, if one is concerned not only with courts reaching constitutional questions, but also with courts finding constitutional violations where the law is not clearly established (in other words, in the pure Saucier manner), the numbers may be less encouraging. In only one in twenty instances (5.0 or 53 claims) in which qualified immunity was granted did the court recognize a constitutional violation that was not clearly established but that, because of the court’s decision, would be in future cases. This means that in the overwhelming majority of cases in which courts opt to use their discretion to decide the constitutional merits, they are concluding that no right has been violated. To be sure, assessing whether Pearson discretion has increased the risk of constitutional stagnation requires a comparison between pre- and post-Pearson judicial decisionmaking. As discussed in Part II.A, several empirical studies were conducted before Pearson and two were conducted on cases decided shortly after Pearson. These studies do not provide perfect comparisons, as the methodologies differ. For instance, like this study, the Leong and Rolfs studies analyze both published and unpublished circuit decisions, whereas the Hughes, Sobolski-Steinberg, and JonesYauch studies look only at published decisions.194 Each study analyzes cases from different time periods before and after Saucier and Pearson, 195 which may matter. Similarly, whereas most of the prior studies draw on random samples of cases that contained certain keys words,196 our study, like the Jones-Yauch study, looks at every case within the defined population (and time period) but that population is limited to those decisions that cite Pearson. With those qualifications in mind, comparing the studies’ findings provides some (albeit limited) context on the development of constitutional law before and after Pearson, as well as before and after Saucier—the Supreme Court precedent that required courts to answer constitutional questions in every case.197 Table 1 provides that purely descriptive comparison.198 As these comparisons suggest, circuit courts unsurprisingly opt not to reach constitutional questions as often; indeed, this result flows directly from Pearson. What matters, however, is how often courts do so. The data suggest that courts decline to decide constitutional questions at a rate similar to the pre-Saucier period—in around one in four cases, as opposed to less than six percent during the Saucier regime.
Plan Thus the plan text—Resolved: Using White v. Pauly, a case in that is currently in the 10th circuit court of appeals, the Supreme Court of the United States ought to limit qualified immunity for police officers by forcing lower courts to give reason for exercising Pearson constitutional discretion, effectively overturning the precedent set in Pearson v. Callahan. Walker 15 Christopher J. Walker, Assistant Professor of Law, Michael E. Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University, Aaron L. Nielson, Associate Professor of Law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, “The New Qualified Immunity,” Southern California Law Review, Vol. 89, pp. 1-65, Oct. 19, 2015 Whereas the core constitutional stagnation fear expressed about Pearson discretion is probably exaggerated, the facts on the ground nevertheless show that Pearson is not perfect. There appears to be some stagnation with respect to rights-making; variation across the circuits; and the potential of substantive asymmetries. All of this suggests that the Supreme Court might need to revisit Pearson. Indeed, following Camreta, there may be some appetite to require lower courts to decide whether the alleged right is clearly established and, if it is not, to stop the analysis there.230 Others, however, may press for a return to Saucier, as many scholars advised when Pearson was decided.231 Neither of those options is perfect, nor, in any event, likely. Accordingly, we urge a middle path: the Court should require lower courts—both trial and appellate courts—to give reasons for exercising (or not) their Pearson discretion to reach constitutional questions. We are not writing on a blank slate, but borrow from long-settled principles of administrative law that stress the danger that arises when decisionmakers fail to contemporaneously explain why they have elected to exercise their discretion in a particular way.232 The value of reason giving is not limited to administrative law but has been explored in the law more generally,233 and we are not the first to import it into civil litigation.234 In fact, in his initial response to Pearson, Jack Beermann advanced a reason- giving recommendation: “At a minimum, in light of the strong reasons for reaching the constitutional merits, courts should be required to give reasons for not doing so.”235
To clarify, the aff forces courts to explain why they are skipping the first question of constitutionality if they choose to when granting qualified immunity.
Advantage 1: Decision-Making A requirement would lead to better judicial rulings-multiple warrants Walker 3 Christopher J. Walker, Assistant Professor of Law, Michael E. Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University, Aaron L. Nielson, Associate Professor of Law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, “The New Qualified Immunity,” Southern California Law Review, Vol. 89, pp. 1-65, Oct. 19, 2015 The reasons for reason giving discussed above should have a great deal of purchase in the context of qualified immunity. Where there is an “explicit grant of discretion”—which is Pearson to a tee—and “an explicit list of policies” at play—which again reflects Pearson—then a court should be required to “give reasons on the record for its decision.”272 Such a requirement would encourage more rational decision making by ensuring that all the relevant pros and cons for exercising Pearson discretion are considered; it would facilitate further judicial review and external dialogue with interested parties; and it would encourage the development of and better governing standards. For all the reasons that reason giving makes sense in the context of administrative law, there is good cause to think reason giving also makes sense in the context of qualified immunity. For instance, reason giving would help alleviate a number of the potential problems with the current broad discretion provided by Pearson. It is reasonable to think that the potential asymmetries discussed above would be lessened as judges more carefully think about the reasons for exercising Pearson discretion and fear more searching judicial review. Similarly, latent ideological biases would be better uncovered as “the introspection that often attends the reason-giving process may reveal that what the judge had assumed to be a proper, controlling factor is not the real one at work.”273 Likewise, discrepancies across circuits may be reduced as judges in all circuits give more attention to the problem. In this way, Pearson’s pathologies can be somewhat mitigated.
Reason giving creates clear legal standards for future cases Walker 4Christopher J. Walker, Assistant Professor of Law, Michael E. Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University, Aaron L. Nielson, Associate Professor of Law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, “The New Qualified Immunity,” Southern California Law Review, Vol. 89, pp. 1-65, Oct. 19, 2015 At the same time, giving reasons does not simply improve the outcome of a particular case. It also fosters the development of general principles that guide decision making in subsequent cases: “To provide a reason in a particular case is thus to transcend the very particularity of that case.”270 As Professor Beermann explains, “even if no standard is created immediately to guide the decision of whether to reach the merits, a requirement that courts give reasons could foster the development, in a common law manner, of a set of practices that could ultimately crystallize into governing standards. Lack of clarification allows lower courts to expand qualified immunity unchecked, which means that there is empirical proof that the aff puts more cases in court- that’s also our Walker evidence from inherency. De Stefan 16 Lindsey De Stefan, J.D. Candidate, 2017, Seton Hall University School of Law; B.A., Ramapo College of New Jersey, “No Man Is Above the Law and No Man Is Below It:” How Qualified Immunity Reform Could Create Accountability and Curb Widespread Police Misconduct" (2017). Law School Student Scholarship. Paper 850 One problem with qualified immunity results from the so-called two-pronged inquiry. In 2001, concerned that disposing of cases based solely on the “clearly established” prong would “stunt the development” of constitutional law, the Court mandated that lower courts first decide whether there was a constitutional violation before determining whether the right was clearly established.76 The decision in Saucier v. Katz was, to say the least, unpopular,77 and in 2009, the Court unanimously overruled the decision and once again left the procedural sequence to the discretion of lower courts.78 But because courts are no longer required to address the two-part inquiry in any particular order, the practical effect has been precisely what the Court feared in its Saucier decision: frequent disposal of cases based on the perceived lack of a "clearly established" right without ever addressing the merits of the constitutional claim.79 A recent survey of circuit court cases decided since Pearson v. Callahan in 2009 demonstrates the frequency with which lower courts are disposing of cases based on a lack of a clearly established law.80 The study, which analyzed 844 published and unpublished Courts of Appeal opinions decided between 2009 and 2012, encompassing 1,460 total claims, found that qualified immunity was granted in 1,055 of the claims, or approximately 72 percent of the time.81 In 534 (or nearly 51 percent) of the claims in which the court granted immunity, the court concluded that the right asserted was not clearly established.82 So in more than half of the claims in which immunity was granted, the basis for the court’s holding was the absence of clearly established law But perhaps somewhat ironically, the concept of a “clearly” established right is in and of itself less than clear, and a great deal of confusion exists over what rights fall within this vague classification. 83 In essence, approximately 50 percent of the time, a court’s decision to grant immunity to an official is based on a muddled and uncertain legal precept. In order to qualify as clearly established, “a right must be sufficiently clear that every reasonable official would have understood that what he is doing violates that right." 84 There are few unambiguous bright-line rules in modern constitutional jurisprudence, and most doctrines are instead articulated as relatively vague standards or balancing tests.85 In addition, because there are considerable distinctions in terms of the structure, aim, and available alternative remedies of various constitutional rights, the general-purpose nature of qualified immunity is problematic.86 Defining a clearly established law is straightforward when the right is laid out in a stable and fairly specific doctrine, but when the rule changes, the new law only becomes clearly established when a clarifying court decision is handed down.87 When such constitutional rights are violated, qualified immunity allows officials to avoid liability because of a failure to anticipate developments in the law. 88 And although the Court held in 2002 that there need not be a case on point in order to find clearly established law,89 it has nevertheless continued to grant qualified immunity in the absence of similar precedent.90 Unsurprisingly, lower courts struggle with the question of whether a right is clearly established, and the circuits have developed markedly varying approaches to the inquiry.91 Finally, year after year, despite attempts to clarify the doctrine, it seems that the Supreme Court has only further added to the confusion of lower courts. Indeed, almost without fail, Supreme Court cases since Pearson have apparently further expanded the qualified immunity doctrine by upholding its application in all manner of diverse situations—seemingly in every set of circumstances with which it has been presented. 92 Setting clear standards is key to creating a legal precedent that restores community coalitions and creates trust. De Stefan 2 De Stefan, Lindsey, (J.D. Candidate, 2017, Seton Hall University School of Law) “No Man Is Above the Law and No Man Is Below It:” How Qualified Immunity Reform Could Create Accountability and Curb Widespread Police Misconduct" (2017). Law School Student Scholarship By beginning to mend the qualified immunity doctrine in these ways, the Court will allow¶more civil suits for the vindication of constitutional rights to succeed. This will help to reduce the public mentality—strengthened by recent events—that cops get away with everything, in every¶regard. Civil suits avoid subjecting law enforcement to any criminal liability that, because of¶recent events, many laypersons believe is warranted. While this may be true in select¶circumstances, reality demonstrates that criminal charges are highly unlikely to stick against a¶police officer. But allowing more civil suits to go forward will serve as an important reminder to¶both civilians and law enforcement that the police are not above the law, and that they are held¶accountable for their wrongdoings. In turn, this accountability will begin to heal the relationship between law enforcement and communities by serving as the first step on what will surely be a¶long path to rebuilding the trust that is so crucial. Meta-studies prove that police accountability and legitimacy stops the culture of fear and spillovers to decrease overall violence. Mazerolle et al 13, Lorraine, Sarah Bennett, Jacqueline Davis, Elise Sargeant and Matthew Manning, 2013, Legitimacy in Policing: A Systematic Review, http://thecapartnership.org/cms/assets/uploads/2016/02/Mazerolle_Legitimacy_Review-1.pdf The systematic search found 163 studies that reported on police led interventions, and a final set of 30 studies contained data suitable for meta-analysis. The direct outcomes analyzed were legitimacy, procedural justice, and citizen cooperation/compliance and satisfaction/confidence in the police. In addition, an indirect outcome, reoffending, was also analyzed. The main finding of this review is that police interventions that comprised dialogue with a procedural justice component (or stated specifically that the intervention sought to increase legitimacy) did indeed enhance citizens’ views on the legitimacy of the police, with all direct outcomes apart from legitimacy itself being statistically significant. Our review shows that by police adopting procedurally just dialogue, they can use a variety of interventions to enhance legitimacy, reduce reoffending, and promote citizen satisfaction, confidence, compliance and cooperation with the police.
Advantage 2: Judicial Legitimacy Judicial Legitimacy is \low now- the court is in danger. Posner 15, Eric, The Supreme Court’s Loss of Prestige, 2015, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_chicago/2015/10/the_supreme_court_is_losing_public_approval_and_prestige.html The Supreme Court begins its term this year with a smorgasbord of ideologically tasty morsels, including cases on affirmative action, labor rights, the death penalty, religion, and probably abortion. The court has never been more aggressive about resolving the country’s political debates. And yet it is ideologically polarized and more unpopular than it has been in quite a while. This seems like a paradox, but it is a paradox with an explanation: The public distrusts Congress and the executive branch even more than it distrusts the court. Even with lifetime appointments, the justices cannot afford to anger the public too much—since the public can demand that Congress strip the court of power if the justices go too far. But as long as the justices annoy people less than Congress and the president do, they needn’t worry about such repercussions. The court has suffered a long slide in public approval. Gallup has announced that for the first time in many years, more people disapprove (50 percent) than approve (45 percent) of its performance. Fifteen years ago approval hovered in the 50–60 percent range. A majority of people (53 percent) still trust the Supreme Court, but that number used to be in the 70 percent range.
Providing reasons is the keystone of court legitimacy Walker 5 Christopher J. Walker, Assistant Professor of Law, Michael E. Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University, Aaron L. Nielson, Associate Professor of Law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, “The New Qualified Immunity,” Southern California Law Review, Vol. 89, pp. 1-65, Oct. 19, 2015 Not only does reason giving facilitate judicial review and public scrutiny, but it also provides greater assurance to litigants that the most important arguments have gotten a full hearing. Hence, Professor Mashaw explains that requiring reasons “increases the power of participants . . . to force decisionmakers to consider problems and issues that they raise by submitting comments.”265 It also improves the dialogue both within the government and between the government and the public.266 In so doing it “demonstrates respect for the governed subject.”267 Such respect may take on added importance in the qualified immunity context, where federal courts exercise discretion to decide the constitutionality of acts committed by state officials against the backdrop of federalism concerns (or federal officers against the backdrop of separation of powers). Reason giving also provides assurances to the public at large “that decisionmaking processes are fair such that the process for reaching a decision is relatively predictable, even if the outcome of every decision is not.”268 This demonstrated rationality is considered by many administrative law scholars to be “the touchstone of legitimacy in the liberal, administrative state.”269
Judicial Legitimacy is key to the Court’s power Gibson et al 14, James Gibson, Department of Political Science Professor of African and African American Studies Director, Program on Citizenship and Democratic Values Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy and Michael Nelson, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science Graduate Student Associate, Center for Empirical Research in the Law, 2014, http://mjnelson.wustl.edu/papers/AnnualReview.pdf The Supreme Court has little meaningful inherent or constitutional jurisdiction; instead, it gets its power to decide issues from ordinary legislation. What Congress giveth, Congress can taketh away. Even the fundamental structure of the institution – e.g., the number of justices on the Court – can change (and has throughout American history). Without legitimacy, the Supreme Court can be punished for the disagreeable decisions it makes, and/or those decisions can be ignored (for an important analysis of the Court/Congressional relations, see Clark 2011). The justices of Court are keenly aware of the importance of legitimacy to their institution, often discussing the concept in their rulings. For example, Justices O’Connor, Souter, and Kennedy, in their well-known opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) write: The Court's power lies, rather, in its legitimacy, a product of substance and perception that shows itself in the people's acceptance of the Judiciary as fit to determine what the Nation's law means, and to declare what it demands. . . The Court must take care to speak and act in ways that allow people to accept its decisions on the terms the Court claims for them, as grounded truly in principle, not as compromises with social and political pressures having, as such, no bearing on the principled choices that the Court is obliged to make. Thus, the Court's legitimacy depends on making legally principled decisions under circumstances in which their principled character is sufficiently plausible to be accepted by the Nation (865-866).
2 Impacts: A) Court power is key to check back the legislator from hugely oppressive laws- Brown v. Board proves. Somin 16, Ilya, The Supreme Court Is a Check on Big Government, Protection for Minorities, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/07/06/is-the-supreme-court-too-powerful/the-supreme-court-is-a-check-on-big-government-protection-for-minorities The Supreme Court gets many things wrong. Yet America would be a far worse society without it. If judicial review were seriously curtailed, the executive and legislative branches of government could ignore most constitutional limits on their powers. This is a particularly grave danger in a world where government is as large and powerful as it is today – spending nearly 40 percent of our gross domestic product, and regulating almost every aspect of human activity. Without an independent judiciary to check their vast powers, federal and state governments would often be free to use their full might to censor opposition speech, confiscate property and otherwise persecute those they disapprove of. Avoiding that is well-worth the price of putting up with a good many flawed judicial rulings. Public opinion imposes some constraints on oppressive policies. But with a government as large and complex as ours, many of its abuses are little-known to voters, who generally pay scant attention to public policy. Moreover, some of the worst abuses target groups disliked by mainstream public opinion, such as unpopular ethnic and religious minorities. Absent judicial protection for political rights, political incumbents could even use their powers to insulate themselves against future electoral competition – as has happened in some other countries that lack strong judicial review. The court’s historical record is mixed. But it has had a major beneficial impact in helping protect the rights of racial minorities – not only in iconic cases like Brown v. Board of Education, but in lesser-known decisions, like Buchanan v. Warley, an underappreciated 1917 ruling that struck down laws preventing blacks from moving into majority-white neighborhoods. There is also little doubt that unpopular speech and religious worship has far greater protection than would exist in the court’s absence. The same is true of the rights of criminal defendants, another vulnerable group that tends to get short shrift from the political process. In recent years, the court has done much to curtail uncompensated takings of private property by both federal and state officials. This June, it struck down a program that seized large quantities of raisins from their producers to facilitate a cartel that raises prices for the benefit of politically connected agribusiness interests. Many Americans have reason to be grateful for this little-known aspect of the court’s work. Historically, many of the court’s worst decisions were cases where it chose not to strike down an oppressive unconstitutional policy – cases like Plessy v. Ferguson, which permitted racial segregation, and Korematsu v. United States, which permitted the expulsion of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast during World War II. Weakening the court would increase the incidence of such outrages.
B) Judicial review can empirically hold government officials accountable- legalism is wrong in the instance, the plan specifically accounts for it. Chemerinsky 04 Erwin, Alston and Bird Professor of Law, Duke University, “David C. Baum Memorial Lecture: In Defense of Judicial Review: The Perils of Popular Constitutionalism,” UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LAW REVIEW, 2004, p. 685-687.
Fourth, there are Court decisions that require compliance by others in government, but that the judiciary can enforce through its contempt power. This is typified by the classic negative injunction. The court issues an injunction and punishes violations by contempt. Usually, the threat of contempt is sufficient to gain the government's compliance. If an employer is sued for using a racially discriminatory test in hiring, then the court, upon finding a violation of the law, can enjoin future use of the test. If the employer is recalcitrant and continues to use the test, then the court can hold the employer in contempt of court. Fifth, there are Court decisions that are enforced through the award of money damages that are likely to change government conduct. An obvious example is the law of the Takings Clause. If the Supreme Court were to hold that a taking occurs whenever a government regulation decreases the value of a person's property, then the judiciary could enforce this by awarding money damages in the future. There is no doubt that this would profoundly *687 alter government as it would have to pay compensation for a wide array of laws, from zoning statutes to environmental regulations. More generally, damages can deter wrongful government conduct. Section 1983 litigation has as part of its purpose deterring government from violating constitutional rights. For instance, the possibility of money damages for sexual harassment provides strong encouragement for government employers to refrain from such behavior. Sixth, there are Court decisions that require substantial actions by government in compliance and implementation and therefore continuing judicial monitoring and enforcement. The most obvious example is the school desegregation litigation. Changing the government laws that segregated parks or water fountains simply required taking down the "whites only" sign. If the government failed to do this, then the court could impose contempt. Although there was a period of massive resistance in the mid-1950s, compliance with the court orders was obtained in a relatively short period of time. Desegregating schools, however, was a far more daunting challenge because it required affirmative steps ranging from changing pupil assignments, to redrawing attendance zones, to busing. The above six categories are not exhaustive, but they are instructive of the many ways in which courts can change government.In some of the categories, there is a very high likelihood that judicial action will succeed in altering government conduct. Denying the government an injunction or invalidating a criminal statute virtually always will succeed in changing government behavior. In some of the categories government compliance is less certain. When the Court awards money damages against the government, particularly against the federal government, there is relatively little that the judiciary can do except hope for voluntary compliance. When the Court issues an affirmative injunction, such as for school desegregation, compliance might be a more lengthy and uncertain process. Those who criticize the impact of Court decisionstend to pick their examples from the most problematic categories. Recognizing the range of situations where the judiciary can change government helps in properly assessing the ability of courts to make a difference.
K Underview 3. Policy analysis is particularly empowering for marginalized bodies even if you’re not a policymaker. Shulock 99 Nancy, PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC POLICY -~-- professor of Public Policy and Administration and director of the Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Policy (IHELP) at Sacramento State University, The Paradox of Policy Analysis: If It Is Not Used, Why Do We Produce So Much of It?, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 18, No. 2, 226–244 (1999) In my view, none of these radical changes is necessary. As interesting as our politics might be with the kinds of changes outlined by proponents of participatory and critical policy analysis, we do not need these changes to justify our investment in policy analysis. Policy analysis already involves discourse, introduces ideas into politics, and affects policy outcomes. The problem is not that policymakers refuse to understand the value of traditional policy analysis or that policy analysts have not learned to be properly interactive with stakeholders and reflective of multiple and nontechnocratic perspectives. The problem, in my view, is only that policy analysts, policymakers, and observers alike do not recognize policy analysis for what it is. Policy analysis has changed, right along with the policy process, to become the provider of ideas and frames, to help sustain the discourse that shapes citizen preferences, and to provide the appearance of rationality in an increasingly complex political environment. Regardless of what the textbooks say, there does not need to be a client in order for ideas from policy analysis to resonate through the policy environment.10¶ Certainly there is room to make our politics more inclusive. But those critics who see policy analysis as a tool of the power elite might be less concerned if they understood that analysts are only adding to the debate—they are unlikely to be handing ready-made policy solutions to elite decisionmakers for implementation. Analysts themselves might be more contented if they started appreciating the appropriation of their ideas by the whole gamut of policy participants and stopped counting the number of times their clients acted upon their proposed solutions. And the cynics disdainful of the purported objectivism of analysis might relax if analysts themselves would acknowledge that they are seeking not truth, but to elevate the level of debate with a compelling, evidence-based presentation of their perspectives. Whereas critics call, unrealistically in my view, for analysts to present competing perspectives on an issue or to “design a discourse among multiple perspectives,” I see no reason why an individual analyst must do this when multiple perspectives are already in abundance, brought by multiple analysts. If we would acknowledge that policy analysis does not occur under a private, contractual process whereby hired hands advise only their clients, we would not worry that clients get only one perspective.¶ Policy analysis is used, far more extensively than is commonly believed. Its use could be appreciated and expanded if policymakers, citizens, and analysts themselves began to present it more accurately, not as a comprehensive, problem-solving, scientific enterprise, but as a contributor to informed discourse.
For years Lindblom 1965, 1968, 1979, 1986, 1990 has argued that we should understand policy analysis for the limited tool that it is—just one of several routes to social problem solving, and an inferior route at that. Although I have learned much from Lindblom on this odyssey from traditional to interpretive policy analysis, my point is different. Lindblom sees analysis as having a very limited impact on policy change due to its ill-conceived reliance on science and its deluded attempts to impose comprehensive rationality on an incremental policy process. I, with the benefit of recent insights of Baumgartner, Jones, and others into the dynamics of policy change, see that even with these limitations, policy analysis can have a major impact on policy. Ideas, aided by institutions and embraced by citizens, can reshape the policy landscape. Policy analysis can supply the ideas.
3/18/17
ND - 1AR - Kant Add-On
Tournament: UT | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Cy-Woods CJ | Judge: Drew Burd For the negative to prove a morally relevant distinction, it most come a priori. Kant“Critique of Pure Reason” by Immanuel Kant 1787 Translated and Edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood “The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant” re published 1998: Now it is easy to show that in human cognition there actually are such necessary and in the strictest sense universal, thus pure a priori judgments. If one wants an example from the sciences, one need only look at all the propositions of mathematics; if one would have one from the commonest use of the understanding, the proposition that every alteration must have a cause will do; indeed in the latter the very concept of a cause so obviously contains the concept of a necessity of connection with an effect and a strict universality of rule that it would be entirely lost if one sought, as Hume did, to derive it from a frequent association of that which happens with that which precedes and a habit (thus a merely subjective necessity) of connecting representations arising from that association.13 Even without requiring such examples for the proof of the reality of pure a priori principles in our cognition, one could establish their indispensability for the possibility of experience itself, thus establish it II priori. For where would experience itself get its certainty if all rules in accordance with which it proceeds were themselves in turn always empirical, thus contingent hence one could hardly allow these to count as first principles. Yet here we can content ourselves with having displayed the pure use of our cognitive faculty as a fact together with its indication. Not merely in judgments, however, but even in concepts is an origin of some of them revealed a priori. Gradually remove from your experiential concept of a body everything that is empirical in it - the color, the hardness or softness, the weight, even the impenetrability - there still remains the space that was occupied by the body (which has now entirely disappeared), and you cannot leave that out. Likewise, if you remove from your empirical concept of every object,' whether corporeal or incorporeal, all those properties of which experience teaches you, you could still not take from it that by means of which you think of it as a substance or as dependent on a substance (even though this concept contains more determination than that of an object! in general). Thus, convinced by the necessity with which this concept presses itself on you, you must concede that it has its seat in your faculty of cognition a priori. That affirms, there are no apriori relevant moral distinctions in out lives. Kant 2: At issue here is a mark by means of which we can securely distinguish a pure cognition from an empirical one. Experience teaches us, to be sure, that something is constituted thus and so, but not that it could not be otherwise. First, then, if a proposition is thought along with its necessity, it is an a priori judgment; if it is, moreover, also not derived from any proposition except one that in turn is valid as a necessary proposition, then it is absolutely a priori. Second: Experience never gives its judgments true or strict but only assumed and comparative universality (through induction), so properly it must be said: as far as we have yet perceived, there is no exception to this or that rule. Thus if a judgment is thought in strict universality, i.e., in such a way that no exception at all is allowed to be possible, then it is not derived from experience, but is rather valid absolutely a priori. Empirical universality is therefore only an arbitrary increase in validity from that which holds in most cases to that which holds in all, as in, e.g., the proposition "All bodies are heavy," whereas strict universality belongs to a judgment essentially; this points to a special source of cognition for it, namely a faculty of a priori cognition. Necessity and strict universality are therefore secure indications of an a priori cognition, and also belong together inseparably. But since in their use it is sometimes easier to show the empirical limitation in judgments than the contingency in them, or is often more plausible to show the unrestricted universality that we ascribe to a judgment than its necessity, it is advisable to employ separately these two criteria, each of which is in itself infallible. 12
3/18/17
SO - 1AC - Armenia
Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 3 | Opponent: Dulles AW | Judge: Hunter Harwood The state is inevitable- policymaking is the only way to create change. Coverstone 5 Alan Coverstone (masters in communication from Wake Forest, longtime debate coach) “Acting on Activism: Realizing the Vision of Debate with Pro-social Impact” Paper presented at the National Communication Association Annual Conference November 17th 2005 An important concern emerges when Mitchell describes reflexive fiat as a contest strategy capable of “eschewing the power to directly control external actors” (1998b, p. 20). Describing debates about what our government should do as attempts to control outside actors is debilitating and disempowering. Control of the US government is exactly what an active, participatory citizenry is supposed to be all about. After all, if democracy means anything, it means that citizens not only have the right, they also bear the obligation to discuss and debate what the government should be doing. Absent that discussion and debate, much of the motivation for personal political activism is also lost. Those who have co-opted Mitchell’s argument for individual advocacy often quickly respond that nothing we do in a debate round can actually change government policy, and unfortunately, an entire generation of debaters has now swallowed this assertion as an article of faith. The best most will muster is, “Of course not, but you don’t either!” The assertion that nothing we do in debate has any impact on government policy is one that carries the potential to undermine Mitchell’s entire project. If there is nothing we can do in a debate round to change government policy, then we are left with precious little in the way of pro-social options for addressing problems we face. At best, we can pursue some Pilot-like hand washing that can purify us as individuals through quixotic activism but offer little to society as a whole. It is very important to note that Mitchell (1998b) tries carefully to limit and bound his notion of reflexive fiat by maintaining that because it “views fiat as a concrete course of action, it is bounded by the limits of pragmatism” (p. 20). Pursued properly, the debates that Mitchell would like to see are those in which the relative efficacy of concrete political strategies for pro-social change is debated. In a few noteworthy examples, this approach has been employed successfully, and I must say that I have thoroughly enjoyed judging and coaching those debates. The students in my program have learned to stretch their understanding of their role in the political process because of the experience. Therefore, those who say I am opposed to Mitchell’s goals here should take care at such a blanket assertion. However, contest debate teaches students to combine personal experience with the language of political power. Powerful personal narratives unconnected to political power are regularly co-opted by those who do learn the language of power. One need look no further than the annual state of the Union Address where personal story after personal story is used to support the political agenda of those in power. The so-called role-playing that public policy contest debates encourage promotes active learning of the vocabulary and levers of power in America. Imagining the ability to use our own arguments to influence government action is one of the great virtues of academic debate. Gerald Graff (2003) analyzed the decline of argumentation in academic discourse and found a source of student antipathy to public argument in an interesting place. I’m up against…their aversion to the role of public spokesperson that formal writing presupposes. It’s as if such students can’t imagine any rewards for being a public actor or even imagining themselves in such a role. This lack of interest in the public sphere may in turn reflect a loss of confidence in the possibility that the arguments we make in public will have an effect on the world. Today’s students’ lack of faith in the power of persuasion reflects the waning of the ideal of civic participation that led educators for centuries to place rhetorical and argumentative training at the center of the school and college curriculum. (Graff, 2003, p. 57) The power to imagine public advocacy that actually makes a difference is one of the great virtues of the traditional notion of fiat that critics deride as mere simulation. Simulation of success in the public realm is far more empowering to students than completely abandoning all notions of personal power in the face of governmental hegemony by teaching students that “nothing they can do in a contest debate can ever make any difference in public policy.” Contest debating is well suited to rewarding public activism if it stops accepting as an article of faith that personal agency is somehow undermined by the so-called role playing in debate. Debate is role-playing whether we imagine government action or imagine individual action. Imagining myself starting a socialist revolution in America is no less of a fantasy than imagining myself making a difference on Capitol Hill. Furthermore, both fantasies influenced my personal and political development virtually ensuring a life of active, pro-social, political participation. Neither fantasy reduced the likelihood that I would spend my life trying to make the difference I imagined. One fantasy actually does make a greater difference: the one that speaks the language of political power. The other fantasy disables action by making one a laughingstock to those who wield the language of power. Fantasy motivates and role-playing trains through visualization. Until we can imagine it, we cannot really do it. Role-playing without question teaches students to be comfortable with the language of power, and that language paves the way for genuine and effective political activism. Debates over the relative efficacy of political strategies for pro-social change must confront governmental power at some point. There is a fallacy in arguing that movements represent a better political strategy than voting and person-to-person advocacy. Sure, a full-scale movement would be better than the limited voice I have as a participating citizen going from door to door in a campaign, but so would full-scale government action. Unfortunately, the gap between my individual decision to pursue movement politics and the emergence of a full-scale movement is at least as great as the gap between my vote and democratic change. They both represent utopian fiat. Invocation of Mitchell to support utopian movement fiat is simply not supported by his work, and too often, such invocation discourages the concrete actions he argues for in favor of the personal rejectionism that under girds the political cynicism that is a fundamental cause of voter and participatory abstention in America today. Working within the state is not a form of complacency within violence, but rather provides a means of understanding the state and breaking it down. Zanotti 14 Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Her research and teaching include critical political theory as well as international organizations, UN peacekeeping, democratization and the role of NGOs in post-conflict governance.“Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World” – Alternatives: Global, Local, Political – vol 38(4):p. 288-304,. A little unclear if this is late 2013 or early 2014 – The Stated “Version of Record” is Feb 20, 2014, but was originally published online on December 30th, 2013. Obtained via Sage Database. By questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that focuses on power and subjects’ relational character and the contingent processes of their (trans)formation in the context of agonic relations. Options for resistance to governmental scripts are not limited to ‘‘rejection,’’ ‘‘revolution,’’ or ‘‘dispossession’’ to regain a pristine ‘‘freedom from all constraints’’ or an immanent ideal social order. It is found instead in multifarious and contingent struggles that are constituted within the scripts of governmental rationalities and at the same time exceed and transform them. This approach questions oversimplifications of the complexities of liberal political rationalities and of their interactions with non-liberal political players and nurtures a radical skepticism about identifying universally good or bad actors or abstract solutions to political problems. International power interacts in complex ways with diverse political spaces and within these spaces it is appropriated, hybridized, redescribed, hijacked, and tinkered with. Governmentality as a heuristic focuses on performing complex diagnostics of events. It invites historically situated explorations and careful differentiations rather than overarching demonizations of ‘‘power,’’ romanticizations of the ‘‘rebel’’ or the ‘‘the local.’’ More broadly, theoretical formulations that conceive the subject in non-substantialist terms and focus on processes of subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses, and on hybridization as the terrain for political transformation, open ways for reconsidering political agency beyond the dichotomy of oppression/rebellion. These alternative formulations also foster an ethics of political engagement, to be continuously taken up through plural and uncertain practices, that demand continuous attention to ‘‘what happens’’ instead of fixations on ‘‘what ought to be.’’83 Such ethics of engagement would not await the revolution to come or hope for a pristine ‘‘freedom’’ to be regained. Instead, it would constantly attempt to twist the working of power by playing with whatever cards are available and would require intense processes of reflexivity on the consequences of political choices. To conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault ‘‘my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.’’84
Policy making necessitates tradeoffs—that means util. Governments can only justify legitimate policies to the public through a utilitarian framework. Thus, prefer util since its the most educational for this round as it best simulates policymaking. Woller 97 Gary Woller (BYU Professor). “An Overview by Gary Woller.” A Forum on the Role of Environmental Ethics. June 1997. pp. 10. Moreover, virtually all public policies entail some redistribution of economic or political resources, such that one group's gains must come at another group's ex- pense. Consequently, public policies in a democracy must be justified to the public, and especially to those who pay the costs of those policies. Such justification cannot simply be assumed a priori by invoking some higher-order moral principle. Appeals to a priori moral principles, such as environmental preservation, also often fail to acknowledge that public policies inevitably entail trade-offs among competing values. Thus since policymakers cannot justify inherent value conflicts to the public in any philosophical sense, and since public policies inherently imply winners and losers, the policymakers' duty to the public interest requires them to demonstrate that the redistributive effects and value trade-offs implied by their polices are somehow to the overall advantage of society. At the same time, deontologically based ethical systems have severe practical limitations as a basis for public policy. At best, a priori moral principles provide only general guidance to ethical dilemmas in public affairs and do not themselves suggest appropriate public policies, and at worst, they create a regimen of regulatory unreasonableness while failing to adequately address the problem or actually making it worse. For example, a moral obligation to preserve the environment by no means implies the best way, or any way for that matter, to do so, just as there is no a priori reason to believe that any policy that claims to preserve the environment will actually do so. Any number of policies might work, and others, although seemingly consistent with the moral principle, will fail utterly. That deontological principles are an inadequate basis for environmental policy is evident in the rather significant irony that most forms of deontologically based environmental laws and regulations tend to be implemented in a very utilitarian manner by street-level enforcement officials. Moreover, ignoring the relevant costs and benefits of environmental policy and their attendant incentive structures can, as alluded to above, actually work at cross purposes to environmental preservation. (There exists an extensive literature on this aspect of regulatory enforcement and the often perverse outcomes of regulatory policy. See, for example, Ackerman, 1981; Bartrip and Fenn, 1983; Hawkins, 1983, 1984; Hawkins and Thomas, 1984.) Even the most die-hard preservationist/deontologist would, I believe, be troubled by this outcome. The above points are perhaps best expressed by Richard Flathman, The number of values typically involved in public policy decisions, the broad categories which must be employed and above all, the scope and complexity of the consequences to be anticipated militate against reasoning so conclusively that they generate an imperative to institute a specific policy. It is seldom the case that only one policy will meet the criteria of the public interest (1958, p. 12). It therefore follows that in a democracy, policymakers have an ethical duty to establish a plausible link between policy alternatives and the problems they address, and the public must be reasonably assured that a policy will actually do something about an existing problem; this requires the means-end language and methodology of utilitarian ethics. Good intentions, lofty rhetoric, and moral piety are an insufficient. Thus, the standard is maximizing expected well being. Prefer:
No act/omission for governments—constraint based theories collapse to util. Sunstein and Vermule 05 (Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermuele, “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life-Life Tradeoffs,” Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper No. 85 (March 2005), p. 17.) In our view, any effort to distinguish between acts and omissions goes wrong by overlooking the distinctive features of government as a moral agent. If correct, this point has broad implications for criminal and civil law. Whatever the general status of the act/omission distinction as a matter of moral philosophy, the distinction is least impressive when applied to government, because the most plausible underlying considerations do not apply to official actors. The most fundamental point is that unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice between or among possible policies for regulating third parties. The distinction between acts and omissions may not be intelligible in this context, and even if it is, the distinction does not make a morally relevant difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do anything or refusing to act. Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized private action – for example, private killing – becomes obscure when government formally forbids private action but chooses a set of policy instruments that do not adequately or fully discourage it. If there is no act-omission distinction, then government is fully complicit with any harm it allows, so decisions are moral if they minimize harm. All means based and side constraint theories collapse because two violations require aggregation. 2. Revisionary intuitionism is true and concludes util: Yudkowsky 08, Eliezer, research fellow of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, The ‘Intuitions’ Behind ‘Utilitarianism, 2008, http://lesswrong.com/lw/n9/the_intuitions_behind_utilitarianism/ I haven’t said much about metaethics – the nature of morality – because that has a forward dependency on a discussion of the Mind Projection Fallacy that I haven’t gotten to yet. I used to be very confused about metaethics. After my confusion finally cleared up, I did a postmortem on my previous thoughts. I found that my object-level moral reasoning had been valuable and my meta-level moral reasoning had been worse than useless. And this appears to be a general syndrome – people do much better when discussing whether torture is good or bad than when they discuss the meaning of “good” and “bad”. Thus, I deem it prudent to keep moral discussions on the object level wherever I possibly can. Occasionally people object to any discussion of morality on the grounds that morality doesn’t exist, and in lieu of jumping over the forward dependency to explain that “exist” is not the right term to use here, I generally say, “But what do you do anyway?” and take the discussion back down to the object level. Paul Gowder, though, has pointed out that both the idea of choosing a googolplex dust specks in a googolplex eyes over 50 years of torture for one person, and the idea of “utilitarianism”, depend on “intuition”. He says I’ve argued that the two are not compatible, but charges me with failing to argue for the utilitarian intuitions that I appeal to. Now “intuition” is not how I would describe the computations that underlie human morality and distinguish us, as moralists, from an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness and/or a rock. But I am okay with using the word “intuition” as a term of art, bearing in mind that “intuition” in this sense is not to be contrasted to reason, but is, rather, the cognitive building block out of which both long verbal arguments and fast perceptual arguments are constructed. I see the project of morality as is a project of renormalizing intuition. We have intuitions about things that seem desirable or undesirable, intuitions about actions that are right or wrong, intuitions about how to resolve conflicting intuitions, intuitions about how to systematize specific intuitions into general principles. Delete all the intuitions, and you aren’t left with an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness, you’re left with a rock. Keep all your specificintuitions and refuse to build upon the reflective ones, and you aren’t left with an ideal philosopher of perfect spontaneity and genuineness, you’re left with a grunting caveperson running in circles, due to cyclical preferences and similar inconsistencies. “Intuition”, as a term of art, is not a curse word when it comes to morality – there is nothing else to argue from. Even modus ponens is an “intuition” in this sense – it‘sjust that modus ponens still seems like a good idea after being formalized, reflected on, extrapolated out to see if it has sensible consequences, etcetera. So that is “intuition”. However, Gowder did not say what he meant by “utilitarianism”. Does utilitarianism say… That right actions are strictly determined by good consequences? That praiseworthy actions depend on justifiable expectations of good consequences? That probabilities of consequences should normatively be discounted by their probability, so that a 50 probability of something bad should weigh exactly half as much in our tradeoffs? That virtuous actions always correspond to maximizing expected utility under some utility function? That two harmful events are worse than one? That two independent occurrences of a harm (not to the same person, not interacting with each other) are exactly twice as bad as one? That for any two harms A and B, with A much worse than B, there exists some tiny probability such that gambling on this probability of A is preferable to a certainty of B? If you say that I advocate something, or that my argument depends on something, and that it is wrong, do please specify what this thingy is… anyway, I accept 3, 5, 6, and 7, but not 4; I am not sure about the phrasing of 1; and 2 is true, I guess, but phrased in a rather solipsistic and selfish fashion: you should not worry about being praiseworthy. Now, what are the “intuitions” upon which my “utilitarianism” depends? This is a deepish sort of topic, but I’ll take a quick stab at it. First of all, it’s not just that someone presented me with a list of statements like those above, and I decided which ones sounded “intuitive”. Among other things, if you try to violatinge “utilitarianism”, you runs into paradoxes, contradictions, circular preferences, and other things that aren’tmsymptoms of moral wrongness so much as moral incoherence. After you think about moral problems for a while, and also find new truths about the world, and even discover disturbing facts about how you yourself work, you often end up with different moral opinions than when you started out. This does not quite define moral progress, but it is how we experience moral progress. As part of my experienced moral progress, I’ve drawn a conceptual separation between questions of type Where should we go? and questions of type How should we get there? (Could that be what Gowder means by saying I’m “utilitarian”?) The question of where a road goes – where it leads – you can answer by traveling the road and finding out. If you have a false belief about where the road leads, this falsity can be destroyed by the truth in a very direct and straightforward manner. When it comes to wanting to go to a particular place, this want is not entirely immune from the destructive powers of truth. You could go there and find that you regret it afterward (which does not define moral error, but is how we experience moral error). But, even so, wanting to be in a particular place seems worth distinguishing from wanting to take a particular road to a particular place. Our intuitions about where to go are arguable enough, but our intuitions about how to get there are frankly messed up. After the two hundred and eighty-seventh research study showsing that people will chop their own feet off if you frame the problem the wrong way, you start to distrust first impressions. When you’ve read enough research on scope insensitivity shows – people will pay only 28 more to protect all 57 wilderness areas in Ontario than one area, people will pay the same amount to save 50,000 lives as 5,000 lives… that sort of thing… Well, the worst case of scope insensitivity I’ve ever heard of was described here by Slovic: Other recent research shows similar results. Two Israeli psychologists asked people to contribute to a costly life-saving treatment. They could offer that contribution to a group of eight sick children, or to an individual child selected from the group. The target amount needed to save the child (or children) was the same in both cases. Contributions to individual group members far outweighed the contributions to the entire group. There’s other research along similar lines, but I’m just presenting one example, ’cause, y’know, eight examples would probably have less impact. If you know the general experimental paradigm, then the reason for the above behavior is pretty obvious – focusing your attention on a single child creates more emotional arousal than trying to distribute attention around eight children simultaneously. So people are willing to pay more to help one child than to help eight. Now, you could look at this intuition, and think it wasrevealing some kind of incredibly deep moral truth which shows that one child’s good fortune is somehow devalued by the other children’s good fortune. But what about the billions of other children in the world? Why isn’t it a bad idea to help this one child, when that causes the value of all the other children to go down? How can it be significantly better to have 1,329,342,410 happy children than 1,329,342,409, but then somewhat worse to have seven more at 1,329,342,417? Or you could look at that and say: “Thuse intuition is wrong: the brain can’t successfully multiply by eight and get a larger quantity than it started with. But it ought to, normatively speaking.” And once you realize that the brain can’t multiply by eight, then the other cases of scope neglect stop seeming to reveal some fundamental truth about 50,000 lives being worth just the same effort as 5,000 lives, or whatever. You don’t get the impression you’re looking at the revelation of a deep moral truth about nonagglomerative utilities. It’s just that the brain doesn’t goddamn multiply. Quantities get thrown out the window. If you have $100 to spend, and you spend $20 each on each of 5 efforts to save 5,000 lives, you will do worse than if you spend $100 on a single effort to save 50,000 lives. Likewise if such choices are made by 10 different people, rather than the same person. As soon as you start believing that it is better to save 50,000 lives than 25,000 lives, that simple preference of final destinations has implications for the choice of paths, when you consider five different events that save 5,000 lives. (It is a general principle that Bayesians see no difference between the long-run answer and the short-run answer; you never get two different answers from computing the same question two different ways. But the long run is a helpful intuition pump, so I am talking about it anyway.) The aggregative valuation strategy of “shut up and multiply” arises from the simple preference to have more of something – to save as many lives as possible – when you have to describe general principles for choosing more than once, acting more than once, planning at more than one time. Aggregation also arises from claiming that the local choice to save one life doesn’t depend on how many lives already exist, far away on the other side of the planet, or far away on the other side of the universe. Three lives are one and one and one. No matter how many billions are doing better, or doing worse. 3 = 1 + 1 + 1, no matter what other quantities you add to both sides of the equation. And if you add another life you get 4 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. That’s aggregation. When you’ve read enough heuristics and biases research, and enough coherence and uniqueness proofs for Bayesian probabilities and expected utility, and you’ve seen the “Dutch book” and “money pump” effects that penalize trying to handle uncertain outcomes any other way, then you don’t see the preference reversals in the Allais Paradox as revealing some incredibly deep moral truth about the intrinsic value of certainty. It just goes to shows that the brain doesn’t goddamn multiply. The primitive, perceptual intuitions that make a choice “feel good” don’t handle probabilistic pathways through time very skillfully, especially when the probabilities have been expressed symbolically rather than experienced as a frequency. So you reflect, devise more trustworthy logics, and think it through in words. When you see people insisting that no amount of money whatsoever is worth a single human life, and then driving an extra mile to save $10; or when you see people insisting that no amount of money is worth a decrement of health, and then choosing the cheapest health insurance available; then you don’t think that their protestations reveal some deep truth about incommensurable utilities. Part of it, clearly, is that primitive intuitions don’t successfully diminish the emotional impact of symbols standing for small quantities – anything you talk about seems like “an amount worth considering”. And part of it has to do with preferring unconditional social rules to conditional social rules. Conditional rules seem weaker, seem more subject to manipulation. If there’s any loophole that lets the government legally commit torture, then the government will drive a truck through that loophole. So it seems like there should be an unconditional social injunction against preferring money to life, and no “but” following it. Not even “but a thousand dollars isn’t worth a 0.0000000001 probability of saving a life”. Though the latter choice, of course, is revealed every time we sneeze without calling a doctor. The rhetoric of sacredness gets bonus points for seeming to express an unlimited commitment, an unconditional refusal that signals trustworthiness and refusal to compromise. So you conclude that moral rhetoric espouses qualitative distinctions, because espousing a quantitative tradeoff would sound like you were plotting to defect. On such occasions, people vigorously want to throw quantities out the window, and they get upset if you try to bring quantities back in, because quantities sound like conditions that would weaken the rule. But you don’t conclude that there are actually two tiers of utility with lexical ordering. You don’t conclude that there is actually an infinitely sharp moral gradient, some atom that moves a Planck distance (in our continuous physical universe) and sends a utility from 0 to infinity. You don’t conclude that utilities must be expressed using hyper-real numbers. Because the lower tier would simply vanish in any equation. It would never be worth the tiniest effort to recalculate for it. All decisions would be determined by the upper tier, and all thought spent thinking about the upper tier only, if the upper tier genuinely had lexical priority. As Peter Norvig once pointed out, if Asimov’s robots had strict priority for the First Law of Robotics (“A robot shall not harm a human being, nor through inaction allow a human being to come to harm”) then no robot’s behavior would ever show any sign of the other two Laws; there would always be some tiny First Law factor that would be sufficient to determine the decision. Whatever value is worth thinking about at all, must be worth trading off against all other values worth thinking about, because thought itself is a limited resource that must be traded off. When you reveal a value, you reveal a utility. I don’t say that morality should always be simple. I’ve already said that the meaning of music is more than happiness alone, more than just a pleasure center lighting up. I would rather see music composed by people than by nonsentient machine learning algorithms, so that someone should have the joy of composition; I care about the journey, as well as the destination. And I am ready to hear if you tell me that the value of music is deeper, and involves more complications, than I realize – that the valuation of this one event is more complex than I know. But that’s for one event. When it comes to multiplying by quantities and probabilities, complication is to be avoided – at least if you care more about the destination than the journey. When you’ve reflected on enough intuitions, and corrected enough absurdities, you start to see a common denominator, a meta-principle at work, which one might phrase as “Shut up and multiply.” Where music is concerned, I care about the journey. When lives are at stake, I shut up and multiply. It is more important that lives be saved, than that we conform to any particular ritual in saving them. And the optimal path to that destination is governed by laws that are simple, because they are math. And that’s why I’m a utilitarian – at least when I am doing something that is overwhelmingly more important than my own feelings about it – which is most of the time, because there are not many utilitarians, and many things left undone. 3. Empiricism- only the real world can serve as the basis for ethical reasoning. Schwartz: The empirical support for the fundamental principle of empiricism is diffuse but salient. Our common empirical experience and experimental psychology offer evidence that humans do not have any capacity to garner knowledge except by empirical sources. The fact is that we believe that there is no source of knowledge, information, or evidence apart from observation, empirical scientific investigations, and our sensory experience of the world, and we believe this on the basis of our empirical a posteriori experiences and our general empirical view of how things work. For example, we believe on empirical evidence that humans are continuous with the rest of nature and that we rely like other animals on our senses to tell us how things are. If humans are more successful than other animals, it is not because we possess special non-experiential ways of knowing, but because we are better at cooperating, collating, and inferring. In particular we do not have any capacity for substantive a priori knowledge. There is no known mechanism by which such knowledge would be made possible. This is an empirical claim. This requires util to adjudicate- all judgments are determined based on consequences of pleasure and pain. Nagel: Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere, HUP, 1986: 156-168. I shall defend the unsurprising claim that sensory pleasure is good and pain bad, no matter whose they are. The point of the exercise is to see how the pressures of objectification operate in a simple case. Physical pleasure and pain do not usually depend on activities or desires which themselves raise questions of justification and value. They are just is a sensory experiences in relation to which we are fairly passive, but toward which we feel involuntary desire or aversion. Almost everyone takes the avoidance of his own pain and the promotion of his own pleasure as subjective reasons for action in a fairly simple way; they are not back up by any further reasons. On the other hand if someone pursues pain or avoids pleasure, either it as a means to some end or it is backed up by dark reasons like guilt or sexual masochism. What sort of general value, if any, ought to be assigned to pleasure and pain when we consider these facts from an objective standpoint? What kind of judgment can we reasonably make about these things when we view them in abstraction from who we are? We can begin by asking why there is no plausibility in the zero position, that pleasure and pain have no value of any kind that can be objectively recognized. That would mean that I have no reason to take aspirin for a severe headache, however I may in fact be motivated; and that looking at it from outside, you couldn't even say that someone had a reason not to put his hand on a hot stove, just because of the pain. Try looking at it from the outside and see whether you can manage to withhold that judgment. If the idea of objective practical reason makes any sense at all, so that there is some judgment to withhold, it does not seem possible. If the general arguments against the reality of objective reasons are no good, then it is at least possible that I have a reason, and not just an inclination, to refrain from putting my hand on a hot stove. But given the possibility, it seems meaningless to deny that this is so. Oddly enough, however, we can think of a story that would go with such a denial. It might be suggested that the aversion to pain is a useful phobia—having nothing to do with the intrinsic undesirability of pain itself—which helps us avoid or escape the injuries that are signaled by pain. (The same type of purely instrumental value might be ascribed to sensory pleasure: the pleasures of food, drink, and sex might be regarded as having no value in themselves, though our natural attraction to them assists survival and reproduction.) There would then be nothing wrong with pain in itself, and someone who was never motivated deliberately to do anything just because he knew it would reduce or avoid pain would have nothing the matter with him. He would still have involuntary avoidance reactions, otherwise it would be hard to say that he felt pain at all. And he would be motivated to reduce pain for other reasons—because it was an effective way to avoid the danger being signaled, or because interfered with some physical or mental activity that was important to him. He just wouldn't regard the pain as itself something he had any reason to avoid, even though he hated the feeling just as much as the rest of us. (And of course he wouldn't be able to justify the avoidance of pain in the way that we customarily justify avoiding what we hate without reason—that is, on the ground that even an irrational hatred makes its object very unpleasant!) There is nothing self-contradictory in this proposal, but it seems nevertheless insane. Without some positive reason to think there is nothing in itself good or bad about having an experience you intensely like or dislike, we can't seriously regard the common impression to the contrary as a collective illusion. Such things are at least good or bad for us, if anything is. What seems to be going on here is that we cannot from an objective standpoint withhold a certain kind of endorsement of the most direct and immediate subjective value judgments we make concerning the contents of our own consciousness. We regard ourselves as too close to those things to be mistaken in our immediate, nonideological evaluative impressions. No objective view we can attain could possibly overrule our subjective authority in such cases. There can be no reason to reject the appearances here.
Inherency: Metsamor’s decommissioning has been delayed- it’s operating until at least 2026. Daly 13 John Daly, the chief analyst for Oilprice.com, “Armenia’s Metsamor NPP, Built Near Fault Line, Gets 10 Year Life Extension,” Oil Price, September 23, 2013, http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Armenias-Metsamor-NPP-Built-Near-Fault-Line-Gets-10-Year-Life-Extension.html Armenia’s Metsamor NPP, Built Near Fault Line, Gets 10 Year Life Extension By John Daly - Sep 23, 2013, 6:52 PM CDT In a major piece of bad news for Armenia’s neighbors Turkey, Azerbaijan and Georgia, Armenia's energy minister Armen Movsisyan has told journalists that the country’s aging Metsamor NPP, originally scheduled for decommissioning in 2016," will operate until 2026."But not to worry, Armenia's President Serzh Sarkisian earlier this month signed an agreement with Russia’s state nuclear agency Rosatom to assist in renovating the facility, as in 2012 Armenia had postponed the Metsamor’s decommissioning until 2020. So, why the long faces in the Caucasus? Armenia has plans for new nuclear reactors but they’ve been postponed –they’re stuck with Metsamor for the foreseeable future. Sahakyan 16 Armine (Human rights activist based in Armenia) “Armenia Continues to Gamble on Aging Nuclear Plant in a Quake-Prone Area” Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/armine-sahakyan/armenia-continues-to-gamb_b_9788186.html Armenia was supposed to have a new nuclear power plant this year that would replace one that National Geographic suggested a few years ago was the most dangerous in the world. The new plant was to have twice the electrical-generating capacity of the current one, allowing Armenia not only to meet its own power needs but to export electricity to neighboring counties. We’re well in to 2016, and not only is the new plant not operational — work on it hasn’t even begun. Plan text: Resolved: Armenia and the EU should ban the production of nuclear power in Armenia using the EU proposal for preventing the 2026 renewal of Metsamor. Daly 2 http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Armenias-Metsamor-NPP-Built-Near-Fault-Line-Gets-10-Year-Life-Extension.html Armenia’s Metsamor NPP, Built Near Fault Line, Gets 10 Year Life Extension By John Daly - Sep 23, 2013, 6:52 PM CDT The European Union has repeatedly called for the plant to be closed down, arguing that it poses a threat to the region, classifying Metsamor’s reactors as the "oldest and least reliable" category of all the 66 Soviet reactors built in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In 2004 the European Union's envoy called Metsamor "a danger to the entire region," but Armenia later turned down the EU's offer of a 200 million euro loan to finance Metsamor's shutdown,
Advantage 1: Meltdowns The Metsamor power plant – Armenia’s only form of nuclear power – is incredibly dangerous. It uses old tech, is unreliable, and lies on earthquake territory. Lavelle et al 11 Marianne Lavelle and Josie Garthwaite (National Geographic News) “Is Armenia's Nuclear Plant the World's Most Dangerous?” National Geographic News April 14th 2011 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2011/04/110412-most-dangerous-nuclear-plant-armenia/ In the shadow of Mount Ararat, the beloved and sorrowful national symbol of Armenia, stands a 31-year-old nuclear plant that is no less an emblem of the country's resolve and its woe. The Metsamor power station is one of a mere handful of remaining nuclear reactors of its kind that were built without primary containment structures. All five of these first-generation water-moderated Soviet units are past or near their original retirement ages, but one salient fact sets Armenia's reactor apart from the four in Russia. Metsamor lies on some of Earth's most earthquake-prone terrain. In the wake of Japan's quake-and-tsunami-triggered Fukushima Daiichi crisis, Armenia's government faces renewed questions from those who say the fateful combination of design and location make Metsamor among the most dangerous nuclear plants in the world. Seven years ago, the European Union's envoy was quoted as calling the facility "a danger to the entire region," but Armenia later turned down the EU's offer of a 200 million euro ($289 million) loan to finance Metsamor's shutdown. The United States government, which has called the plant "aging and dangerous," underwrote a study that urged construction of a new one. She continues: But the VVER 440s share one characteristic with Chernobyl that has been a continuing concern to many who live nearby: They have no containment structure. Instead, VVER 440s rely on an "accident localization system," designed to handle small ruptures. In the event of a large rupture, the system would vent directly to the atmosphere. "They cannot cope with large primary circuit breaks," the NEI's 1997 Source Book on Soviet nuclear plants concluded. "As with most Soviet-designed plants, electricity production by the VVER-440 Model V230s came at the expense of safety." Antonia Wenisch of the Austrian Institute of Applied Ecology in Vienna, calls Metsamor "among the most dangerous" nuclear plants still in operation. A rupture "would almost certainly immediately and massively fail the confinement," she said in an email. "From that point, there is an open reactor building, a core with no water in it, and accident progression with no mitigation at all." Armenian Meltdown would cause massive life loss, kill agriculture, and threaten four other countries. Sahakyan 2 Armine (Human rights activist based in Armenia) “Armenia Continues to Gamble on Aging Nuclear Plant in a Quake-Prone Area” Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/armine-sahakyan/armenia-continues-to-gamb_b_9788186.html So Armenia continues to make due with the Metsamor plant. The International Atomic Energy Agency has inspected the facility, and declared it safe. But other experts are skeptical. The big worry is that the plant has no containment building — a steel or concrete shell that would prevent radiation from escaping during an accident. If a rupture developed in the reactor’s skin, radiation would have to be vented into the air to prevent a build-up of pressure that could trigger a meltdown or explosion. The longer a nuclear plant operates, the thinner its reactor skin becomes, experts say — and thinner skins are subject to rupture. A rupture would mean “an open reactor building, a core with no water in it (to cool the reactor) and accident progression with no mitigation at all,” said Antonia Wenisch of the Vienna-based Austrian Institute of Applied Ecology in Vienna. The stakes in Armenia’s nuclear gamble are high. An accident at Metsamor would devastate the capital of Yerevan, only 20 miles away and home to a third of Armenia’s population. It would also render unusable the Aras River Valley, Armenia’s premier agricultural area, where Metasamor is situated. In addition, radiation would envelop Turkey, whose border is only 10 miles from the nuclear facility, and Armenian neighbors Georgia and Iran. Technological changes and alternate reactors won’t solve – can still melt down and causes increased cancer rates. Idayatova 16 Anakhanum “Armenia’s Metsamor nuclear plant can cause major radiation accident” Trend News Agencyhttp://en.trend.az/world/turkey/2536379.html Armenia's Metsamor nuclear power plant is a major threat not only for the entire Caucasus region, but it also poses a danger for the Armenian population, Malik Ayub Sumbal, journalist, expert on geopolitical and international conflicts, told Trend via e-mail May 20. Sumbal, who is also the founder of The Caspian Times news platform, said that the international community must learn a lesson from an accident at the Japanese Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and prevent another disaster, which may be caused by Armenia's Metsamor nuclear power plant. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was an energy accident at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, initiated primarily by the tsunami that was triggered by the earthquake on March 11, 2011."The Metsamor nuclear power plant also poses a great threat for Turkey, as it is located just 16 kilometers off its borders," the expert said. "Moreover, the plant can cause cancer and other dangerous diseases among people living on the border with Armenia."Armenia has a nuclear power plant, Metsamor, built in 1970. The power plant was closed after a devastating earthquake in Spitak in 1988. But despite the international protests, the power plant's operation was resumed in 1995. Moreover, a second reactor was launched there. According to the ecologists and scholars all over the region, seismic activity of this area turns operation of the Metsamor nuclear power plant in an extremely dangerous enterprise, even if a new type of reactor is built. And, nuclear meltdowns are a high risk threat that can cause massive death rates with time. Ross 11, Timothy J. Ross (Ph.D, Stanford University Professor, Dept. Of civil engineering, University of New Mexico) Dec. 14, 2011 "Avoiding Apocalypse: Congress Should Ban Nuclear Power." www.law.buffalo.edu/content/dam/law/restricted-assets/pdf/environmental/papers/ross12.pdf Despite proponents’ claims that it is safe, the history of nuclear energy is marked by a number of disasters and near disasters. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine is one of the most frightening examples of the potentially catastrophic consequences of a nuclear accident. An estimated 220,000 people were displaced from their homes, and the radioactive fallout from the accident made 4,440 square kilometers of agricultural land and 6,820 square kilometers of forests in Belarus and Ukraine unusable. It is extremely difficult to get accurate information about the health effects from Chernobyl. Government agencies in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus estimate that about 25,000 of the 600,000 involved in fire-fighting and clean up operations have died so far because of radiation exposure from the accident.(4) According to an April 2006 report commissioned by the European Greens for the European Parliament, there will be an additional 30,000 to 60,000 fatal cancer deaths worldwide from the accident.(5) In 1979, the United States had its own disaster following an accident at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Reactor in Pennsylvania. Although there were no immediate deaths, the incident had serious health consequences for the surrounding area. A 1997 study found that those people living downwind of the reactor at the time of the event were two to ten times more likely to contract lung cancer or leukemia than those living upwind of the radioactive fallout.(6) The dangers of nuclear power have been underscored more recently by the close call of a catastrophic meltdown at the Davis-Besse reactor in Ohio in 2002, which in the years preceding the incident had received a near-perfect safety score.(3) Climate change may further increase the risk of nuclear accidents. Heat waves, which are expected to become more frequent and intense as a result of global warming, can force the shut down or the power output reduction of reactors. During the 2006 heat wave, reactors in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Minnesota, as well as in France, Spain and Germany, were impacted. The European heat wave in the summer of 2003 caused cooling problems at French reactors that forced engineers to tell the government that they could no longer guarantee the safety of the country’s 58 nuclear power reactors.(3) Advantage 2- Turkey-Armenia Relations. Armenia/Turkey Relations are strained- there has been a recent outbreak of anti-Armenia sentiment after German recognition of the Armenian genocide- action needs to be taken now. MacDonald 16 Alex MacDonald, “New footage implicates alleged coup plotters in Dink murder,” September 7, 2016 http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/new-footage-implicates-alleged-coup-plotters-murder-turkish-armenian-activist-791069797 Activists have warned that Armenians in Turkey continue to face suspicion and discrimination. A poll released in 2011 suggested that 73.9 of Turks held negative views about Armenians, just ahead of Jews and Greeks. Some Armenians have expressed fear over a surge in nationalist sentiment in Turkey, which often targets Armenians. “I stopped wearing my necklace that has an ornamental cross on it a few months back. Not because I wanted to but due to fear,” said Turkish-Armenian Jaklin Solakyan, speaking to Middle East Eye in April. “I am really fed up of being denigrated and discriminated against. This is my country, and I am an equal citizen. Why do we need to be constantly targeted because we are minorities?” In particular, the issue of the Armenian genocide is a taboo subject in Turkey, where the government continues to argue that the killings that took place in 1915 did not constitute a genocide and saw an equal number of Turks, Kurds and Armenians killed. Turkish government officials threatened to break off ties with Germany after the parliament voted to recognise the Armenian genocide in early June. Also means another impact of the aff is Armenia Turkish improve relations would help alleviate conditions of systemic racism in Turkey. Banning Metsamor is key to maintaining Turkey-Armenia relations. Daily News 14 “Turkey wants nuclear plant in Armenia to be shut down,” March/21/2014, http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkey-wants-nuclear-plant-in-armenia-to-be-shut-down~-~-~-~-~-~-.aspx?pageID=238andnid=63928 The Metsamor nuclear power plant in Armenia is outdated and should be urgently closed down, Turkish Energy Minister Taner Yıldız has said, re-voicing concerns about the safety of the plant. Speaking with reporters during a visit to the Turkish province of Iğdır near Turkey’s eastern border on March 21, Yıldız said Turkey had sent an official appeal to the International Atomic Energy Agency concerning the shutdown of the plant. “The nuclear plant, which was put online in 1980, has had a lifespan of 30 years. This plant has expired and should be immediately closed,” Yıldız said. He stressed Metsamor is just 16 kms away from Turkey’s border, and it was necessary to bring the issue to international attention and obtain support for the plant’s closure. Armenia-Turkey relations are key to both improving Turkish relations to other countries and improving economic growth in Armenia. Giragosain 09 Richard Giragosian, Director of the Armenian Centre for National and International Studies (ACNIS) in Yerewan, “Changing Armenia-Turkish Relations1,” 2009 http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/georgien/06380.pdf Changing Armenia-Turkish Relations February 2009 Richard Giragosian is Director of the Armenian Centre for National and International Studies (ACNIS) in Yerewan. After nearly a decade and a half of tense relations, closed borders and a lack of diplomatic relations, Armenia and Turkey are moving quickly to normalize relations. Following an official invitation extended in July 2008 by Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian, Turkish President Abdullah Gul became the first-ever Turkish head of state to visit Armenia. The September 2008 visit marked the public opening of a new process of engagement after months of secret meetings between Armenian and Turkish officials in Switzerland. The changing relationship between Armenia and Turkey can result in a “win-win” situation for both countries. For Armenia, it provides a much-needed foreign policy success and a new economic opportunity. For Turkey a possible rapprochement in Turkish-Armenian relations would do much to improve Turkey’s standing in the eyes of both the European Union and the United States. A border opening and subsequent diplomatic relations would enhance Turkey’s record of domestic reform. Just as crucially, the regional landscape has also changed in the wake of the August 2008 conflict in Georgia, offering a new impetus for opening the Armenian-Turkish border and heralding a new level of Russian support for a breakthrough between Armenia and Turkey. US-Turkey relations key to create Middle East stability which prevents radical violence. UPI 13 UPI, “Israel 'seeks to repair ties with Turkey,” Feb 27, 2013 http://www.upi.com/Israel-seeks-to-repair-ties-with-Turkey/38621361997592/?spt=su The Americans are keen for strategic reasons to have the two non-Arab military powers in the eastern Mediterranean back together to possibly restore a modicum of stability in a region that's swirling with conflict, sectarian hatreds and political turmoil. Obama is to visit Israel in March. Kerry is on his maiden trip as top U.S. diplomat and is to visit Ankara, where he's expected to raise the issue of Turkish-Israeli relations. There appears to be an effort by both sides to patch up a relationship, encouraged by the United States which viewed the Turkey-Israeli alliance as vitally important for regional stability.
2/3/17
SO - 1AC - Butler
Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 2 | Opponent: CPS ZD | Judge: Dylan Cavanaugh Agency cannot be separated from norms of dependency towards Others. Vulnerability and opaqueness ground existence. 2 warrants:
Although we believe we act as independent agents, our judgements are always mediated by a set of norms that are not fully our own. Butler Giving an Account of Oneself. Judith Butler. Diacritics, Vol. 31, No. 4. (Winter, 2001), pp. 22-40. In all the talk about the social construction of the subject, we have perhaps over-looked the fact that the very being of the self is dependent not just on the existence of the Other-in its singularity, as Levinas would have it, though surely that-but also on the possibility that the normative horizon within which the Other sees and listens and knows and recognizes is also subject to a critical opening. This opening calls into question the limits of established regimes of truth, where a certain risking of the self becomes, as Levinas claims, the sign of virtue see Foucault. Whether or not the Other is singular, the Other is recognized and confers recognition through a set of norms that govern recognizability. So whereas the Other may be singular, if not radically personal, the norms are to some extent impersonal and indifferent, and they introduce a disorientation of perspective for the subject in the midst of recognition as an encounter. For if I understand myself to be conferring recognition on you, for instance, then I take seriously that the recognition comes from me. But in the moment that I realize that the terms by which I confer recognition are not mine alone, that I did not singlehandedly make them, then I am, as it were, dispossessed by the language that I offer. In a sense, I submit to a norm of recognition when I offer recognition to you, so that I am both subjected to that norm and the agency of its use.
2. To give an account of one’s agency is impossible. My body has a history that I cannot recuperate, yet nonetheless grounds who I am. Existence begins with bare vulnerability towards the Other. I cannot escape this relationship because it grounds a part of who I am that I don’t have an account for. Butler 2 Giving an Account of Oneself. Judith Butler. Diacritics, Vol. 31, No. 4. (Winter, 2001), pp. 22-40. There are, then, several ways in which the account I may give of myself has the potential to break apart and to become undermined. My efforts to give an account of myself founder in part upon the fact of my exposure to you, an exposure in spoken language and, in a different way, in written address as well see Felman. This is a condition of my narration that I cannot fully thematize within any narrative I might provide, and that does not fully yield to a sequential account. There is a bodily referent here, a condition of me, that I can point to, but I cannot narrate precisely, even though there are no doubt stories about where my body went and what it did and did not do. But there is also a history to my body for which I can have no recollection, and there is as well a part of bodily experience-what is indexed by the word "exposure-that only with difficulty, if at all, can assume narrative form. On the other hand, exposure, like the operation of the norm, constitutes the conditions of my own emergence and knowability, and I cannot be present to a temporality that precedes my own capacity for self-reflec- tion. This means that my narrative begins in media res, when many things have already taken place to make me and my story in language possible. And it means that my story always arrives late., reconstructing, even as I produce myself differently in the very act of telling. My account of myself is partial, haunted by that for which I have no definitive story. I cannot explain exactly why I have emerged in this way, and my efforts at narrative reconstruction are always undergoing revision. There is that in me and of me for which I can give no account. But does this mean that I am not, in the moral sense, accountable for who I am and for what I do? And if I find that despite my best efforts, a certain opacity persists and I cannot make myself fully accountable to you, is this ethical failure? Or is it a failure that gives rise to a certain ethical disposition in the place of a full and satisfying notion of narrative accountability? Analytics: a) b) c)
And, the subject does not have jurisdiction over its own opacity so it cannot ignore obligations from precariousness because they ground the subject in ways that cannot be repossessed in giving an account one’s self. Butler 3 Giving an Account of Oneself. Judith Butler. Diacritics, Vol. 31, No. 4. (Winter, 2001), pp. 22-40. “In recent years, the critique of poststructuralism, itself loquacious, has held that the postulation of a subject who is not self-grounding undermines the possibility of respon- sibility and, in particular, of giving an account of oneself. Critics have argued that the various critical reconsiderations of the subject, including those that do away with the theory of the subject altogether, cannot provide the basis for an account of responsibil- ity, that if we are, as it were, divided, ungrounded, or incoherent from the start, it will be impossible to ground a notion of personal or social responsibility on the basis of such a view. I would like to try to rebut this view in what follows, and to show how a theory of subject-formation that acknowledges the limits of self-knowledge can work in the ser- vice of a conception of ethics and, indeed, of responsibility. If the subject is opaque to itself, it is not therefore licensed to do what it wants or to ignore its relations to others. Indeed, if it is precisely by virtue of its relations to others that it is opaque to itself, and if those relations to others are precisely the venue for its ethical responsibility, then it may well follow that it is precisely by virtue of the subject's opacity to itself that it sustains some of its most important ethical bonds.”
Thus, the standard is rejecting norms that deny the precariousness of our agency. Precariousness is defined as understanding our vulnerability as agents to the world around us- there is always difference that needs to be acknowledged for an ethical system to be formed.
Prefer additionally:
Identity depends upon differentiation in the subject. 2 warrants:
Any identity depends upon its negative to have a conception of that structure, so violence is constitutive of any judgement. HÄGGLUND “THE NECESSITY OF DISCRIMINATION DISJOINING DERRIDA AND LEVINAS” MARTIN HÄGGLUND “Derrida targets precisely this logic of opposition. As he argues in Of Grammatology, metaphysics has always regarded violence as derivative of a primary peace. The possibility of violence can thus be accounted for only in terms of a Fall, that is, in terms of a fatal corruption of a pure origin. By deconstructing this figure of thought, Derrida seeks to elucidate why violence is not merely an empirical accident that befalls something that precedes it. Rather, violence it stems from an essential impropriety that does not allow anything to be sheltered from death and forgetting. Consequently, Derrida takes issue with what he calls the “ethico-theoretical decision” of metaphysics, which postulates the simple to be before the complex, the pure before the impure, the sincere before the deceitful, and so on. All divergences from the positively valued term are thus explained away as symptoms of “alienation,” and the desirable is conceived as the return to what supposedly has been lost or corrupted. In contrast, Derrida argues that what makes it possible for anything to be at the same time makes it impossible for anything to be in itself. The integrity of any “positive” term is necessarily compromised and threatened by its “other.” Such constitutive alterity answers to an essential corruptibility, which undercuts all ethico-theoretical decisions of how things ought to be in an ideal world.11 A key term here is what Derrida calls “undecidability.” With this term he designates the necessary opening toward the coming of the future. The coming of the future is strictly speaking “undecidable,” since it is a relentless displacement that unsettles any defi nitive assurance or given meaning. One can never know what will have happened. Promises may always be turned into threats, friendships into enmities, fidelities into betrayals, and so on. There is no opposition between undecidability and the making of decisions. On the contrary, Derrida emphasizes that one always acts in relation to what cannot be predicted, that one always is forced to make decisions even though the consequences of these decisions cannot be finally established. Any kind of decision (ethical, political juridical, and so forth) is more or less violent, but it is nevertheless necessary to make decisions. Once again, I want to stress that violent differentiation by no means should be understood as a Fall, where violence supervenes upon a harmony that precedes it. On the contrary, discrimination has to be regarded as a constitutive condition. Without divisional marks—which is to say: without segregating borders—there would be nothing at all. In effect, every attempt to organize life in accordance with ethical or political prescriptions will have been marked by a fundamental duplicity. On the one hand, it is necessary to draw boundaries, to demarcate, in order to form any community whatsoever. On the other hand, it is precisely because of these excluding borders that every kind of community is characterized by a more or less palpable instability. What cannot be included opens the threat as well as the chance that the prevalent order may be transformed or subverted. In Specters of Marx, Derrida pursues this argument in terms of an originary “spec- trality.” A salient connotation concerns phantoms and specters as haunting reminders of the victims of historical violence, of those who have been excluded or extinguished from the formation of a society. The notion of spectrality is not, however, exhausted by these ghosts that question the good conscience of a state, a nation, or an ideology. Rather, Derridaʼs aim is to formulate a general “hauntology” (hantologie), in contrast to the traditional “ontology” that thinks being in terms of self-identical presence. What is important about the figure of the specter, then, is that it cannot be fully present: it has no being in itself but marks a relation to what is no longer or not yet. And since time— the disjointure between past and future—is a condition even for the slightest moment, Derrida argues that spectrality is at work in everything that happens. An identity or community can never escape the machinery of exclusion, can never fail to engender ghosts, since it must demarcate itself against a past that cannot be encompassed and a future that cannot be anticipated. Inversely, it will always be threatened by what it can- not integrate in itself—haunted by the negated, the neglected, and the unforeseeable. Thus, a rigorous deconstructive thinking maintains that we are always already in- scribed in an “economy of violence” where we are both excluding and being excluded. No position can be autonomous or absolute but is necessarily bound to other positions that it violates and by which it is violated. The struggle for justice can thus not be a struggle for peace, but only for what I will call “lesser violence.” Derrida himself only uses this term briefly in his essay “Violence and Metaphysics,” but I will seek to develop its significance.The starting point for my argument is that all decisions made in the name of justice are made in view of what is judged to be the lesser violence. If there is always an economy of violence, decisions of justice cannot be a matter of choosing what is nonviolent. To justify something is rather to contend that it is less violent than something else. This does not mean that decisions made in view of lesser violence are actually less violent than the violence they oppose. On the contrary, even the most horrendous acts are justified in view of what is judged to be the lesser violence. For example, justifications of genocide clearly appeal to an argument for lesser violence, since the extinction of the group in question is claimed to be less violent than the dangers it poses to another group. The disquieting point, however, is that all decisions of justice are is implicated in the logic of violence. The desire for lesser violence is never innocent, since it is a desire for violence in one form or another, and there can be no guarantee that it is in the service of perpetrating the better.” (46-48) 2. The state can never recognize universal equality since it depends upon exclusion in its very construction. Ought implies can so ethics must recognize that state obligations stem from violence. Mouffe “The Democratic Paradox” by Chantal Mouffe 2000 DD “In order to illustrate his point, Schmitt indicates that, even in modem democratic states where universal human equality has been established, there is a category of people who are excluded as foreigners or aliens and that there is therefore no abso¬lute equality of persons. He also shows how the correlate of the equality among the citizenry found in those states is a much stronger emphasis on national homo¬geneity and on the line of demarcation between those who belong to the state and those who remain outside it. This is, he notes, to be expected and, if this were not the case and a state attempted to realize the universal equality of individuals in the political realm without concern for national or any other form of homogeneity, the consequence would be a complete devaluation of political equality and of politics itself. To be sure, this would in no way mean the disappearance of substantive inequalities, but says Schmitt,‘they would shift in another sphere, perhaps separated from the political and concen¬trated in the economic, leaving this area to take on a new, disproportionately decisive importance. Under the conditions of superficial political equality, another sphere in which substantial inequalities prevail (today for example the economic sphere) will dominate politics.’ It seems to me that, unpleasant as they are to liberal ears, those arguments need to be considered carefully. They carry an important warning for those who believe that the process of globalization is laying the basis for worldwide democratization and cosmopolitan citizenship. They also provide important insights for understand¬ing the current dominance of economics over politics. We should indeed be aware that without a demos to which they belong, those cosmopolitan citizen pilgrims would in fact have loset the possibility of exercising their democratic rights of law¬making. They would be left, at best, with their liberal rights of appealing to transna¬tional courts to defend their individual rights when those have been violated. In all probability, such a cosmopolitan democracy, if it were ever to be realized, would not be more than an empty name disguising the actual disappearance of democratic forms of government and indicating the triumph of the liberal form of governmental rationality that Foucault called ‘govermentality’. True, by reading him in that way, I am doing violence to Schmitt’s questioning since his main concern is not democratic participation but political unity. He con¬siders that such a unity is crucial because without it the state cannot exist. But his reflections are relevant for the issue of democracy since he considers that in a demo¬cratic state, it is through their participation in this unity that the citizens can be treated as equals and exercise their democratic rights. Democracy, according to Schmitt, consists fundamentally in the identity between rulers and ruled. It is linked to the fundamental principle of the unity of the demos and the sovereignty of its will. But for the people to rule it is necessary to determine who belongs to the peo¬ple. "Without any criterion to determine who are the bearers of democratic rights, the will of the people cannot take shape. It could, of course, be objected that this is a view of democracy which is at odds with the liberal democratic one and some would certainly claim that this should not be called democracy but populism. To be sure, Schmitt is no democrat in the liberal understanding of the term and he had only contempt for the constraints imposed by liberal institutions on the democratic will of the people. But the issue that he raises is a crucial one, even for those who advocate liberal democratic forms. The logic of democracy does indeed imply a moment of closure which is required by the very process of constituting the ‘people’. This cannot be avoided, even in a liberal democratic model, it can only be negotiated differently. But this can only be done if this closure and the paradox that it implies are acknowledged. By stressing that the identity of a democratic political community hinges on the possibility of drawing a frontier between ‘us’ and ‘them’, Schmitt highlights the fact that democracy always entails relations of inclusion/exclusion. This is a vital insight that democrats would be ill-advised to dismiss because they dislike its author. One of the main problems with liberalism—and one that can endanger democracy—is precisely its incapacity to conceptualize such a frontier. As Schmitt indicates, the central concept of liberal discourse is ‘humanity’, which, as he rightly points out, is not a political concept and does not correspond to any political entity. The central question of the political constitution of ‘the people’ is something that liberal theory is unable to tackle adequately because the necessity of drawing a ‘frontier’ is in contradiction with its universalistic rhetoric. Against the liberal emphasis on ‘humanity’, it is important to stress that the key concepts in concep¬tualizing democracy are the ‘demos’ and the ‘people’.” (41-44) Implications: A. Precedes idealized starting points. They necessitate a world of nothingness and justify absolute violence. HÄGGLUND 2: “THE NECESSITY OF DISCRIMINATION DISJOINING DERRIDA AND LEVINAS” MARTIN HÄGGLUND “A possible objection here is that we must strive toward an ideal origin or end, an arkhe or telos that would prevail beyond the possibility of violence. Even if every community is haunted by victims of discrimination and forgetting, we should try to reach a state of being that does not exclude anyone, namely, a consummated presence that includes everyone. However, it is precisely with such an “ontological” the thesis that Derridaʼs hauntological thinking takes issue. At several places in Specters of Marx he maintains that a completely present life—which would not be “out of joint,” not haunted by any ghosts—would be nothing but a complete death. Derridaʼs point is not simply that a peaceful state of existence is impossible to realize, as if it were a desirable, albeit unattainable end. Rather, he challenges the very idea that absolute peace is desirable. In a state of being where all violent change is precluded, nothing can ever happen. Absolute peace is thus inseparable from absolute violence, as Derrida argued already in “Violence and Metaphysics.” Anything that would finally put an end to violence (whether the end is a religious salvation, a universal justice, a harmonious intersubjectivity or some other ideal) would end the possibility of life in general. The idea of absolute peace is the idea of eliminating the undecidable future that is the con- dition for anything to happen. Thus, the idea of absolute peace is the idea of absolute violence.” (49)
Encountering radical difference is to encounter the limits of acknowledgement itself. You can never know the radically different as they know themselves because your identity depends on the exclusion of theirs, yet nonetheless you need them to have any conception of yourself. Embracing radical difference requires we embrace precariousness in order to better understand the other. Butler 4 Giving an Account of Oneself. Judith Butler. Diacritics, Vol. 31, No. 4. (Winter, 2001), pp. 22-40. UH-DD Can a new sense of ethics emerge from that inevitable ethical failure? I suggest that it can, and that it would be spawned from a certain willingness to acknowledge the limits of acknowledgment itself, that when we claim to know and present ourselves, we will fail in some ways that are nevertheless essential to who we are, and that we cannot expect anything else from others. If we speak about an acknowledgment of the limits of acknowledgment itself, are we then assuming that acknowledgment in the first sense is full and complete in its determination of the limits of acknowledgment in the second? In other words, do we know in an unqualified way that acknowledgment is always qualified? Is the first kind of knowing qualified by the qualification that it knows? This would have to be the case, for to acknowledge one's own opacity or that of another does not transform opacity into transparency. To know the limits of acknowledgment is a self-limiting act and, as a result, to experience the limits of knowing itself. This can, by the way, constitute a disposition of humility, and of generosity, since I will need to be forgiven for what I cannot fully know, what I could not have fully known, and I will be under a similar obligation to offer forgiveness to others who are also constituted in partial opacity to themselves. “So how do these concerns relate to the question of whether one can give an account of oneself? Let us remember that one gives an account of oneself to another, and that every accounting takes place in the context of an address. I give an account of myself to you. Further, the con
Impact Calc: a) analytic b) Analytic
Advocacy: Countries will prohibit the production of nuclear power. I defend the resolution on general principle. If reasonable, I will defend a specific advocacy or implementation if you ask me to do so in cross x or prep time.
Advantage 1 is Grievability The United States has historically manipulated data on radioactive waste risk to cover up disproportionate radiation exposure on minorities and continues to underestimate future waste risk. This renders lives ungrievable. The ability to manipulate data in order to congeal oppression is the active construction of the politics of disposability. Alldred et al 09 Mary Alldred and Kristin Shrader-Frechette, Environmental Injustice in Siting Nuclear http://www3.nd.edu/~kshrader/pubs/final-pdf-ej-nuke-siting-wi-Alldred_08-0544.pdf US nuclear-waste policies in stages (8)–(9), radioactive waste transport/storage, likewise have already caused Environmental Injustice, or EIJ (as serious contamination at Hanford, Maxey Flats, Sa- vannah River, and other cases have shown), and EIJ also is likely when future waste-containment canisters fail— long before the million years that (the US National Acad- emy of Sciences says) nuclear wastes must be completely secured.22 Because the US government has falsified and manipulated data on radioactive-waste risk 22,23,24 (much of which will be borne by Appalachian, Latino, and Na- tive-American populations, who live in higher propor- tions near existing and proposed nuclear-waste-storage sites),3 United Nations and nuclear-industry studies warn that the US government may underestimate future waste- repository-radiation doses by 9–12 orders of magnitude.25 Yet even if proposed future US nuclear-waste standards are met, their leniency likely will impose EIJ on future generations. After 10,000 years, they would allow exposures of 100 millirems/year (limits 1,000 percent higher than current standards for US Department of Energy facilities). They also use only mean or average dose to assess regulatory compliance. This means that, provided that the average person’s exposure is no more than 100 millirems, many other people would be allowed to receive higher, even fatal, doses.8,26 And, A. Even if you solve for waste you still render lives ungrievable because the power plants remain disproportionately placed. This means nuclear threats are pushed off towards the disposal. B. Even if you proportionally place nuclear power plants you still randomly render lives disposable. The impact is no longer disproportionate, but still exists.
And, nuclear power depends on the congealment of worker radiation doses. This allows them to trick employees for the sole purpose of fueling the nuclear industry. Alldred 2 Mary Alldred and Kristin Shrader-Frechette, Environmental Injustice in Siting Nuclear http://www3.nd.edu/~kshrader/pubs/final-pdf-ej-nuke-siting-wi-Alldred_08-0544.pdf In stages (2)–(5) of the nuclear fuel cycle, tens of millions of radiation workers, including nearly two million in the United States,16 also have faced EIJ. US nuclear-facility owners legally may expose workers to annual radiation doses up to 50 times higher than those allowed for mem- bers of the public,17 although there is no safe dose of ion- izing radiation.7 Yet radiation workers typically receive no hazard pay or compensating wage differential.3 Often they also do not voluntarily accept dangerous nuclear jobs but take them because of economic necessity,3 because gov- ernment falsification of worker radiation doses has mislead them,18,19 or because flawed radiation standards, flawed risk disclosure, and flawed workplace-radiation monitor- ing cause them to underestimate risks.20 Yet the risks are substantial. The International Agency for Research on Can- cer (IARC) shows roughly 1 additional fatal cancer each time 60 people are exposed to the maximum-allowable, an- nual occupational-radiation dose of 50 mSv
And, the state of being rendered ungrievable is more than just being oppressed. Non-grievability separates death from having any impact on a social relationship, which reduces agency to something outside of precariousness. Grievability is necessary to apprehended the vulnerability in our ontology. Butler 6 “Frames of War” by Judith Butler 2009 UH-DD “Over and against an existential concept of finitude that singularizes our relation to death and to life, precariousness underscores our radical substitutability and anonymity in relation both to certain socially facilitated modes of dying and death and to other socially conditioned modes of persisting and flourishing. It is not that we are born and then later become precarious, but rather that precariousness is coextensive with birth itself (birth is, by definition, precarious), which means that it matters whether or not this infant being survives, and that its survival is dependent on what we might call a social network of hands. Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to care for that being so that it may live. Only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of the life appear. Thus, grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters. For the most part, we imagine that an infant comes into the world, is sustained in and by that world through to adulthood and old age, and finally dies. We imagine that when the child is wanted, there is celebration at the beginning of life. But there can be no celebration without an implicit understanding that the life is grievable, that it would be grieved if it were lost, and that this future anterior is installed as the condition of its life. In ordinary language, grief attends the life that has already been lived, and presupposes that life as having ended. But, according to the future anterior (which is also part of ordinary language), grievability is a condition of a life's emergence and sustenance.7 The future anterior, "a life has been lived," is presupposed at the beginning of a life that has only begun to be lived. In other words, "this will be a life that will have been lived" is the presupposition of a grievable life, which means that this will be a life that can be regarded as a life, and be sustained by that regard. Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life. Instead, "there is a life that will never have been lived," sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost. The apprehension of grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of precarious life. Grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of the living being as living, exposed to non-life from the start.” 14-15 And, the prohibition is key. Norms of non-grievability depend upon the reproduction of their usage through frames, such as the manipulation and underdetermination of data. Our stance must impede upon the reproduction of this frame, which requires we recognize that nuclear power is inseparable from its norms of usage. Butler 7 “Frames of War” by Judith Butler 2009 UH-DD “The frame that seeks to contain, convey, and determine what is seen (and sometimes, for a stretch, succeeds in doing precisely that) depends upon the conditions of reproducibility in order to succeed. And yet, this very reproducibility entails a constant breaking from context, a constant delimitation of new context, which means that the "frame" does not quite contain what it conveys, but breaks apart every time it seeks to give definitive organization to its content. In other words, the frame does not hold anything together in one place, but itself becomes a kind of perpetual breakage, subject to a temporal logic by which it moves from place to place. As the frame constantly breaks from its context, this self-breaking becomes part of the very definition. This leads us to a different way of understanding both the frame's efficacy and its vulnerability to reversal, to subversion, even to critical instrumentalization. What is taken for granted in one instance becomes thematized critically or even incredulously in another. This shifting temporal dimension of the frame constitutes the possibility and trajectory of its affect as well. Thus the digital image circulates outside the confines of Abu Ghraib, or the poetry in Guantanamo is recovered by constitutional lawyers who arrange for its publication throughout the world. The conditions are set for astonishment, outrage, revulsion, admiration, and discovery, depending on how the content is framed by shifting time and place. The movement of the image or the text outside of confinement is a kind of "breaking out," so that even though neither the image nor the poetry can free anyone from prison, or stop a bomb or, indeed, reverse the course ofthe war, they nevertheless do provide the conditions for breaking out of the quotidian acceptance of war and for a more generalized horror and outrage that will support and impel calls for justice and an end to violence. Earlier we noted that one sense of "to be framed" means to be subject to a con, to a tactic by which evidence is orchestrated so to make a false accusation appear true. Some power manipulates the terms of appearance and one cannot break out of the frame; one is framed, which means one is accused, but also judged in advance, without valid evidence and without any obvious means of redress. But if the frame is understood as a certain "breaking out," or "breaking from," then it would seem to be more analogous to a prison break. This suggests a certain release, a loosening of the mechanism of control, and with it, a new trajectory of affect. The frame, in this sense, permits-even requires-this breaking out. This happened when the photos of Guantanamo prisoners kneeling and shackled were released to the public and outrage ensued; it happened again when the digital images from Abu Ghraib were circulated globally across the internet, facilitating a widespread visceral tum against the war. What happens at such moments? And are they merely transient moments or are they, in fact, occasions when the frame as a forcible and plausible con is exposed, resulting in a critical and exuberant release from the force of illegitimate authority?” 10-11
And, the prohibition is key. Historical injustice commits us to historical rectification. This means we undo what has historically caused the problem. Mills: (“White Time: The chronic Injustice of Ideal Theory” Du Bois Review. 2014 ) “Would it be in the least surprising, then, if the version of social contract theory that Rawls resurrects more than a century and a half later with the publication of Theory continues to be structured by this exclusionary normative blueprint? As the second wave of feminist political theorists pointed out (most famously Susan Moller Okin 1989), the substantive as against merely nominal inclusion of women required a redrawing of the contract’s assumptions about the demarcation of the public and private spheres, and the realms where justice did and did not apply. Gender justice neces- sitated a gender-based reconceptualization of the apparatus. My claim would be that racial justice requires a similarly profound rethinking, and that the crucial normative boundary here—the racial equivalent of the public/private demarcation—is temporal: the limitation of justice to the distributive and synchronic. For if racial oppression has indeed been central to the history and structure of the United States, or, more generally the Western “democracies” (putatively) that become Rawls’ normative reference-point, then the substantive normative inclusion of previously excluded non-White populations will require the correction of the disadvantages inherited diachronically from that history. Rectificatory justice will be their priority. I suggest, then, that the Whiteness of the Rawlsian theoretical temporality as originally formulated by Rawls, and subsequently developed in the secondary litera- ture by the overwhelmingly White community of political philosophers, inheres in the simple fact that the entire apparatus is oriented towards ideal distributive justice, not non-ideal rectificatory justice. Though Rawls (1999c) asserted at the start of Theory that ideal theory was the best foundation for doing non-ideal theory, he never made good on this claim. Nowhere in the two thousand pages of Rawls’ five authored books is there any discussion of rectificatory justice (“compensatory justice” for Rawls). For the four-stage sequence to provide a theoretical entrée for such matters, a self-conscious theorization of ill-ordered societies characterized by systemic oppression would be necessary, and an explanation of how the successive raising of different layers of the veil must modify—in the transition from the original position through the constitu- tional and legislative stages to the stage of the “application of rules to particular cases by judges and administrators” (Rawls 1999c, p. 175)—the two principles so as to derive appropriate norms of compensatory justice to remedy past wrongs and eliminate ongo- ing structural subordination. But no such account is provided. Instead, Rawls (1999c) tells us that “principles of partial compliance theory are discussed from the point of view of the original position after those of ideal theory have been chosen” (p. 175), and directs us to section thirty-nine, where we learn only that we should prioritize the remedying of the most extreme “deviations from perfect justice” guided by the “lexi- cal ranking of the ideal principles” (p. 216). But no details are given, unlike for “the cases of civil disobedience and conscientious refusal” (p. 175) which are discussed at length over five sections of the book (sections fifty-five to fifty-nine). Neither in Rawls nor his myriad commentators, exegetes, and disciples over the succeeding forty years has there been any attempt to work out what the principles of compensatory justice would be for “removing” (1999c, p. 216) the “pressing and urgent” injustices revealed by the final lifting of the veil, despite the fact that achieving “a systematic grasp” (p. 8) of the principles for guiding such removal was precisely the rationale for beginning with ideal theory in the first place. I submit that the complete lack of urgency about these matters makes clear that the “history” that has been permitted entry to the four-stage process is the sanitized and idealized White time of the modern Western liberal Euro-states, conceived of as “democracies” simpliciter rather than (in Pierre van den Berghe’s (1972 1978) famous phrase) Herrenvolk democracies, and purged of their actual history (undesirable and unacknowledged non-White time) of genocide, slavery, aboriginal expropriation, and absolutist colonial rule over people of color. The history of racial oppression cannot be admitted into the “socially shared moral geography” (Lipsitz 2011, p. 29) of the White mnemonic philosophical community, because of its foundational disruption of the notion of society as a cooperative venture created by human beings whose moral equality is reciprocally recognized. The contractarian framework fits with the “mental relief map,” the “norms of remembrance” (Zerubavel 2003, pp. 7, 5), of the modern Euro- narrative, completely amnesiac about—or, at best, radically revisionist of—the colonial past. The legitimacy of distributive justice as a classless entitlement of all White men is now admitted. The struggle of White women to expand this entitlement is challenge enough. The struggle of people of color not merely to be distributively included but to raise the deeper question of making rectificatory rather than distributive justice central is too extreme even to be considered. Ideal theory establishes the coor- dinates for a White time map in which issues of rectificatory justice, the dikailogical concern most pressing for the non-White population, are literally off the map. It is a general manifestation of the socially privileged demography of the profession, and, with respect to race, its Whiteness. The very fact that the deep and flagrant racial injustice that has been central to modern world history is so undiscussed in the Rawls literature brings home how White this whole discourse is. It is the normative discourse of the non-enslaved, the non-expropriated, and the non-survivors victims of genocide— the discourse of the racially privileged Euro- and White settler population, whose normative temporality need pay no attention in determining questions of justice to a deeply non-ideal (non-admitted, non-mapped, non-theorized, and thus non-existent) past that has been altered not metaphysically but representationally, gated out of their moral consideration.”
Advantage 2 is Condemnation
Nuclearization enforces an epistemically bankrupt model of thinking about our relationship towards the other in the international arena. It shatters conceptions of unity and contributes to the condemnation of difference. Wise Environmental Racism and Nuclear Development By the WISE-Amsterdam Collective WISE News Communique; 387-388; March 28, 1993; www.antenna.nlwise; Accessed August 8 2016 Racism, by itself, is a symptom of the deep sickness at the heart of our society. But racism never exists by itself. The sickness of which it is a symptom is rooted in the shattering of what was once a strong connection the people who walked the earth had with the land and all living systems. To understand this rupture -- a rupture which underlies the entwined oppressions of race, sex, class and ecological destruction -- we need to look at two things: first, at the current model of development, then at the history of the last 500 years which led to this model.The current model of development includes a system that benefits a relatively small part of the world's population who can be found in the industrialized countries and in the local elites of Central and Eastern Europe and the South. For this model to operate, political choices have to be made. In the case of nuclear development, one of the choices has been to ignore the social costs. When social costs are ignored, selected groups of people are made victims. This is marginalization.More is involved here than even the marginalization of people. Knowledge is also marginalized, set aside, lost. Traditional ways of thinking and practical knowledge disappear forever. With the development of a nuclear (nuclearized?) society, we are becoming poorer in knowledge and solutions. We have lost wisdom, impoverishing ourselves by cutting ourselves off from receiving what Starhawk, author of Dreaming the Dark, calls "the rich gifts of vision that come from those who see from a different vantage point."
We have an ethical obligation to reject condemnation. If I cannot give a full account of myself, then I cannot expect the other to give a full account of themselves. Condemnation is counter-productive to obligations from precariousness because they constrain my ability to understand the other. Butler 8 Giving an Account of Oneself. Judith Butler. Diacritics, Vol. 31, No. 4. (Winter, 2001), pp. 22-40. The scene of moral judgment, when it is the judgment of persons that is at issue, is invariably one which establishes a clear moral distance between the one who judges and the one who is judged. If you consider, for instance, Simone de Beauvoir's question, "Must We Burn Sade?," matters become more complicated. It turns out that it may be that only through an experience of the Other under conditions of suspended judgment do we finally become capable of an ethical reflection on the humanity of the Other, even when that humanity has turned against itself. And though I am certainly not arguing that we ought never to make judgments-they are necessary for political and personal life alike: I make them, and I will-I think that it would be important, in rethinking the terms of the culture of ethics, to remember that not all ethical relations are reducible to acts of judgment. The capacity to make and justify moral judgments does not exhaust the sphere of ethics, of either ethical obligation or ethical relationality. Indeed, prior to judging an Other, we must be in some relation to him or her, and this relation will ground and inform the ethical judgments we finally do make. We will, in some way, have to ask the question, "Who are you?'If we forget that we are related to those we condemn, even those we must condemn, then we lose the chance to be ethically educated or "addressed" by a consideration of who they are and what their personhood says about the range of human possibility that exists, and even to prepare ourselves for or against such possibilities. We also forget that judging an Other is a mode of address: even punishments are pronounced and delivered to the face of the Other, requiring that Other's bodily presence. Hence, if there is an ethic to the address, and judgment, including legal judgment, is one form of address, then the value of judgment will be conditioned by the form of address it takes. Consider that one way we become responsible and self-knowing is precisely by deferring judgments, since condemnation, denunciation, and excoriation works as quick ways to posit an ontological difference between judge and judged
, and even to purge oneself of another so that condemnation becomes the way in which we establish the Other as nonrecognizable. In this sense, condemnation can work precisely against self- knowledge inasmuch as it moralizes a self through a disavowal. Although self-knowledge is surely limited, that is not a reason to turn against it as a project; but condemnation tends to do precisely this, seeksing to purge and externalize one's own opacity, and in this sense failing to own its own limitations, providing no felicitous basis for a reciprocal recognition of human beings as constitutively limited.
2/3/17
SO - 1AC - Intrinsic Value
Tournament: Valley | Round: 5 | Opponent: Millburn AJ | Judge: Terrence Lonam 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. prefer:
Text 2. Reciprocity 3. Limits 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. 4. Phil Ed Impacts: a) analytics 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. Contention 1: Action Theory a) analytic b) analytic
Contention 2- Self Ownership: 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 (PRECARIOUS LIFE THE POWERS OF MOURNING AND VIOLENCE / JUDITH BUTLER DD) “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)
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 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. All rights claims rest upon the presumption that we are entitled to autonomy over our own bodies.
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)) 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. 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) 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. He continues 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 K Underview: First, treating the environment as a means to an end is anthropocentric logic, which spills over to other forms of oppression. Deckha 103 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.
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)) 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.
Underview: Analytic
3/18/17
SO - 1AC - Liberation Theology
Tournament: Valley | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Mountain View DZ | Judge: Panel Framework: Ethics is divided between ideal and non-ideal theory. Ideal theory ask what justice demands in a perfect world while non-ideal theory ask what justice demands in a world that is already unjust. Prefer non-ideal theory as a meta-ethical starting point:
Social Ontology: Ideal theory fails to recognize that agency is always political – focusing on a pre-given universal subject ignores our constitutive social relations with others. An ontology that recognizes differentiation in subjectivity is key. BUTLER: (Judith Butler. 1992. “Continent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of “Postmodernism” Feminists Theorize the Political) “In a sense, the subject is constituted through an exclusion and differentiation, perhaps a repression, that is subsequently concealed, covered over, by the effect of autonomy. In this sense, autonomy is the logical consequence of a disavowed dependency, which is to say that the autonomous subject can maintain the illusion of its autonomy insofar as it covers over the break out of which it is constituted. This dependency and this break are already social relations, ones which precede and condition the formation of the subject. As a result, this is not a relation in which the subject finds itself, as one of the relations that forms it situation. The subject is constructed through acts of exclusion and differentiation that distinguish the subject from its constitutive outside, a domain of abjected alterity. There is no ontologically intact reflexivity to the subject which is then placed within a cultural context; that cultural context, as it were, is already there as the disarticulated process of that subject’s production, one that is concealed by the frame that would situate a ready-made subject in an external web of cultural relations. We may be tempted to think that to assume the subject in advance is necessary in order to safeguard the agency of the subject. But to claim that the subject is constituted is not to claim that it is determined; on the contrary, the constituted character of the subject is the very precondition of its agency. For what is it that enables a purposive and significant reconfiguration of cultural and political relations, if not a relation that can be turned against itself, reworked, resisted? Do we need to assume theoretically from the start a subject with agency before we can articulate the terms of a significant social and political task of transformation, resistance, radical democratization? If we do not offer in advance the theoretical guarantee of that agent, are we doomed to give up transformation and meaningful political practice? My suggestion is that agency belongs to a way of thinking about persons as instrumental actors who confront an external political field. But if we agree that politics and power exist already at the level at which the subject and its agency are articulated and made possible, then agency can be presumed only at the cost of refusing to inquire into its construction. Consider that “agency” has no formal existence or, if it does, it has no bearing on the question at hand. In a sense, the epistemological model that offers us a pregiven subject or agent is one that refuses to acknowledge that agency is always and only a political prerogative. As such, it seems crucial to question the conditions of its possibility, not to take it for granted as an a priori guarantee. We need instead to ask, what possibilities of mobilization that are produced on the basis of existing configurations of discourse and power? Where are the possibilities of reworking that very matrix of power by which we are constituted, of reconstituting the legacy of that constitution, and of working against each other those processes of regulation at can destabilize existing power regimes? For if the subject is constituted by power, that power does not cease at the moment the subject is constituted, for that subject is never fully constituted, but is subjected and produced time and again. That subject is neither a ground nor a product, but the permanent possibility of a certain resignifying process, one which gets detoured and stalled through other mechanisms of power, but which is power’s own possibility of being reworked. The subject is an accomplishment regulate and produced in advance. And is as such fully political; indeed, perhaps most political at the point in which it is claimed to be prior to politics itself.”
2. Motivation: Ideal theory cannot guide action since its starting point has diverged from the descriptive model of the real world. Non-ideal theory is key for ethical motivation. MILLS: Charles W. Mills, “Ideal Theory” as Ideology, 2005 (“Ideal Theory” as Ideology CHARLES W. MILLS 2004 UH-DD) “A first possible argument might be the simple denial that moral theory should have any concern with making realistic assumptions about human beings, their capacities, and their behavior. Ethics is concerned with the ideal, so it doesn’t have to worry about the actual. But even for mainstream ethics this wouldn’t work, since, of course, ought is supposed to implies can the ideal has to be achievable by humans. Nor could it seriously be cal imed that moral theory is concerned only with mapping beautiful ideals, not their actual implementation. If any ethicist actually said this, it would be an astonishing abdication of the classic goal of ethics, and its link with practical reason. The normative here would then be weirdly detached from the prescriptive: this is the good and the right—but we are not concerned with their actual realization. Even for Plato, a classic example in at least one sense of an ideal theorist, this was not the case: the Form of the Good was supposed to motivate us, and help philosophers transform society. Nor could anyone seriously say that ideal theory is a good way to approach ethics because as a matter of fact (not as a conceptual necessity following from what “model” or “ideal” means), the normative here has come is close to converging with the descriptive: ideal- as-descriptive-model has approximated to ideal-as-idealized-model. Obviously, the dreadful and dismaying course of human history has not remotely been a record of close-to-ideal behavior, but rather of behavior that has usually been quite the polar opposite of the ideal, with oppression and inequitable treatment of the majority of humanity (whether on grounds of gender, or nationality, or class, or religion, or race) being the norm. So the argument cannot be that as a matter of definitional truth, or factual irrelevance, or factual convergence, ideal theory is required. The argument has to be, as in the quote from Rawls above, that this is the best way of doing normative theory, better than all the other contenders. But why on earth should anyone think this? Why should anyone think that abstaining from theorizing about oppression and its consequences is the best way to bring about an end to oppression? Isn’t this, on the face of it, just completely implausible?”
3. Descriptive Ideality: ideal theory ignores social realities, which in turn contradicts ideals. Normative ideals aren’t created separately from the social norms that govern us because those influence what we can count as an ideal in the first place. MILLS 2: (“Ideal Theory” as Ideology CHARLES W. MILLS 2004 UH-DD) “I suggest that this spontaneous reaction, far from being philosophically naïve or jejune, is in fact the correct one. If we start from what is presumably the uncontroversial premise that the ultimate point of ethics is to guide our actions and make ourselves better people and the world a better place, then the framework above will not only be unhelpful, but will in certain respects be deeply antithetical to the proper goal of theoretical ethics as an enterprise. In modeling humans, human capacities, human interaction, human institutions, and human society on ideal-as-idealized-models, in never exploring how deeply different this is from ideal-as-descriptive-models, we are abstracting away from realities crucial to our comprehension of the actual workings of injustice in human interactions and social institutions, and thereby guaranteeing that the ideal-as-idealized-model will never be achieved.” (170)
4. Standpoint Epistemology: Ideal theory strips away questions of particularities and isolates a universal feature of agents. This normalizes a single experience and epistemically skews ethical theorizing. MILLS 3: (“Ideal Theory” as Ideology CHARLES W. MILLS 2004 UH-DD) “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.” (175)
Next, prefer liberation theology as a method for overcoming non-ideal structures of inequality:
Value Inversion: The death of Christ represents a paradox in Christianity where POWER is weakness BORN again through death. Liberation theology inverses the value of power itself in recognition of the cross. CONE: James Cone highly influential black theologian known for his work on black liberation theology. The Cross and The Lynching Tree. Orbis Books. 2011. “The paradox of a crucified savior lies at the heart of the Christianity story. That paradox was particularly evident in the first century when crucifixion was recognized as the particular form of execution reserved by the Roman Empire for insurrectionists and rebels. It was a public spectacle accompanied by torture and shame—one of the most humiliating and painful deaths ever devised by human beings. That Jesus died this way required is special explanation. It made no rational or even spiritual sense to say that hope came out of “a place called Golgotha . . . a place of the skull.” For the Jews of Jesus’ time the punishment of crucifixion held special opprobrium, given their belief that “anyone hung on a tree is under Gods curse” (Deut 21:23). Thus, St. Paul said that the “word of the cross is foolishness” to the intellect and a stumbling block to established religion. The cross is a paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last. That God could “make a way out of no way” In Jesus’ cross was truly absurd to the intellect, yet profoundly real in the souls of black folk. Enslaved blacks who first heard the gospel message seized on the power of the cross. Christ crucified manifested God’s loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black life—that transcendent presence in the lives of black Christians that empowered them to believe that ultimately, in God’s eschatological future, they would not be defeated by the “troubles of this world,” no matter how great and painful their suffering. Believing this paradox, this absurd claim of faith was only possible through God’s “amazing grace” ad the gift of faith, grounded in humility and repentance. There was no place for the proud and the mighty, for people who think that God called them to rule over others. The cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.”
And, since our agency is not independent and constantly vulnerable towards the other our subjectivity is in a constant state of apophatic negativity. Inverting supremacy through liberation theology is the only way to account for apophatism. DANIELS: Brandy Daniels. A Poststructuralist Liberation Theology? Queer Theory and Apophaticism. Union Seminary Quarterly Review. Volume 64: 2 and 3. “Part 3: A Potential Point of Convergence: Queer Theory and Apophati cism Systematic theology is a difficult enterprise to describe. Van A. Harvey, whose A Handbook of Theological Terms appears on many a seminary syllabi, especially on introductory courses in theological studies, writes that “systematic theology is, as the name suggests, the systematic organization and discussion of the problems that arise in Christian faith.”35 Liberation theology has, historically, both situated itself within systematic theological discourse, as well as pushed back against many of its attendant methodological and theoretical presuppositions— drawing attention to the contexts in which we construct meanings and seeking to ground theological reflection both in and from the place of the marginalized, of the poor.36 In this essay, I have highlighted the value of liberation theology to the discipline, but have also sought to ask how it might be more faithful to its aims in light of a poststructuralist critique. Using Butler, I have tried to demonstrate how poststructuralism might provide resources wherein one can envision liberative aims without reifying problematic ontological and epistemological regimes of knowledge-power. In this final section, then, I want to explore how another component of the theological tradition—that of apophaticism, of negative theol ogy—might serve as a rich resource for doing theology that is simultaneously poststructuralist and liberationist. Apophatic theology, Via Negativa, is deeply embedded within the theology cal tradition, associated with the Cappadocian Fathers of the 4th century, Pseudo Dionysius, and Thomas Aquinas. This tradition of “theology by way of negation” stresses the ineffability of God, the inadequacy of human language and concepts to describe Divinity.37 As Mary Jane Rubenstein points out, “apophasis does not oppose cataphasis”—negation is not opposed to the organization and discussion of Christian faith, but rather, perhaps like liberation theology, provides a sort of epistemological frame through which to theologize.38 This epistemological emphasis on the inadequacy of human knowledge and language to describe God shapes also how we speak about ourselves, the human that is made in the imago dei. Thus, one can begin to see how a queer theoretical position is an apophatic one, through its deconstruction and eschewal of categorization and assertion of incoherent sub jectivity. Butler’s account of subversion through an explication of Paris is Burning offers one example of political agency that is enabled by a poststructuralist account of power-knowledge discourse. If knowledge, as Foucault and Butler claim, is key to control and domination, through a production of subjectivity bound to particular categories— then it is perhaps through an unknowing, a silence, that space for political transformation can be envisioned. Boesel and Keller, in their edited volume Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality, echo Butler’s claim about epistemological imperialism and point out its theological inflections in their assertion that “mastery over divine mystery routinely results in a body count.”39 What might political agency, liberation, and transformation look like when envisioned through an apophatic register? Butler emphasizes this apophatic dimension of her approach to gendered bod ies in greater detail in a later text, aptly titled Undoing Gender. Here, Butler she points out that it is precisely this notion of an autonomous identity that poststructuralism resists (a notion, I might add, that is shared by liberation theology) that is reflected in the body itself. The body does not reify autonomy but evidences its failure. It does not assume independence, but rather signifies and dependence. She explains: Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re miss ing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must), we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is not precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another, or, indeed, by virtue of another.40 Butler demonstrates that the body evidences and speaks to an apophasis, an unknowing, a dispossession. Rather than being the place where liberative aims are abandoned, however, they evidence themselves to be the place where resistance and subversion, and thus liberation, are most accessible. Butler thus provides “an unsaying of the body in the name of the body.”41 In this way, a queer, an apophatic account of the embodied self provided by post structuralism provides a liberative space that resists the mastery and control that pervades an Enlightenment ethos. This is a theme that Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller take up in depth. “Apophaticism,” Boesel and Keller explain, “it does not negate bodies as such. Rather it targets our false knowledge, the idols formed in our confusion of the finite with the infinite.”42 What Butler’s oeuvre both implicitly and explicitly elucidates is how one can recognize and affirm the lived, material, embodied existence of the marginalized and pursue the political aims of justice and liberation without falling prey to the claims of knowledge and mastery that are bound up with modernist epistemologies. This does not, however, negate or resist the aims of liberation theology—rather, it offers a space in which they can be more fully realized.”
2. Final Critique: Only transcendence in the cross provides the final critique to supremacy by inverting our epistemological understandings of power and designating intrinsic worth towards the oppressed. Sustaining current epistemologies dooms liberation in the long term. GORMAN: Michael J the Raymond E. Brown Professor of Biblical Studies and Theology at St. Mary's Seminary and University in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, where he has taught since 1991 . Cruciformity: Paul's Narrative Spirituality of the Cross. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Pub., 2001. Print “All other claims to or attempts at power are thereby rendered impotent. Hellenistic society, like perhaps all societies, was based on success. Yet Paul asserts that since Jesus, humankind is not intrinsically controlled by competition and success, superiority and inferiority, superordination and subordination. Rather, humanity is controlled by the mutual solidarity of a life born out of a common death. It is for this reason that Paul’s communities transcend gender, class, and racial barriers (Gal. 3:28): life in Christ is grounded in a power that makes somebodies out of nobodies and renders so-called somebodies no more or less significant than their “inferior.” Power in the Pauline communities is not to be found in social power but in social weakness, in those who are weak and despised, just as this power is grounded in the one who manifested God’s power as a weak and cursed “nobody” on a Roman cross. The cross “reveals the way God works now, not just the way he achieved salvation in the past. . . . He works now in conformity with the pattern seen then on the cross: it is the God of the cross with whom the Corinthians and all believers now have to deal.” Furthermore, this shared power is expressed in the Pauline communities in the possession and exercise of spiritual gifts, or gifts of grace (Greek charismata). Although there is a hierarchy to the gifts, based on their perceived ability to benefit the community (1 Cor. 12:28; ch. 14), everyone poses a gift, and each gift—and therefore each member of the community—is important and valued. Indeed, the socially inferior are the communally superior; status is not only transcended but reversed: “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. . . . . . . The members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable member do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members ay have the same care for one another. (1 Cor. 12:7, 22-25) While social distinctions remain in the Pauline communities (slaves—at least the salves of nonbelievers—are still slaves), the strongest forces experienced in these communities are not those that distinguish the socially inferior from the socially superior. Rather, these communities experience a power that transcends and reverses social status, a power known only in the cross and in communities shaped by it.”
3. Pessimism/Optimism Paradox: Pessimism creates a lack of motivation since it engrains the idea that nothing can ever get better because oppression is intrinsic to the very structure of recognition. Optimism fails since it ignores how pervasive oppression is to our structure. Only liberation theology allows us to both say we don’t fit into the world and yet not fall into mere skepticism. CHESTERSON: Gilbert K Chesterton. Orthodoxy. 1908. http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/130/pg130.html But the important matter was this, that it entirely reversed the reason for optimism. And the instant the reversal was made it felt like the abrupt ease when a bone is put back in the socket. I had often called myself an optimist, to avoid the too evident blasphemy of pessimism. But all the optimism of the age had been false and disheartening for this reason, that it had always been trying to prove that we fit in to the world. The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do NOT fit in to the world. I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal, like any other which sought its meat from God. But now I really was happy, for I had learnt that man is a monstrosity. I had been right in feeling all things as odd, for I myself was at once worse and better than all things. The optimist's pleasure was prosaic, for it dwelt on the naturalness of everything; the Christian pleasure was poetic, for it dwelt on the unnaturalness of everything in the light of the supernatural. The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the WRONG place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. I knew now why grass had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick at home.
4. Soul Murder: Social death provides an ontological understanding over how others perceive the subject, but it cannot account for Soul Murder. This refers to the subject psychologically internalizing a fractured conception of the self due to their experience of gratuitous oppression. MASON: John Edwin Mason PhD from Yale. Current Prof at UAV. teaches African history and the history of photography. He has written extensively on early nineteenth-century South Africa history, especially the history of slavery, South African popular culture, especially the Cape Town New Year's Carnival and jazz. Social death and Resurrection: Slavery and Emancipation in South Africa. University of Virginia Press. 2003. ISBN 0-8139-2178-3 “Patterson acknowledges that social death describes slavery in the ideal. Actually existing slavery was more complex, “laden with tension and contradiction in the dynamics of each of its constituent elements.” Reality was more complex than theory because most slaves refused to believe that they were dead, socially or otherwise. Most were, in Patterson’s words, “desperate for life.” Although slavery crushed some individual slaves, there is, he contends, “absolutely no evidence from the long and dismal annals of slavery to suggest that any group of slaves” internalized their masters’ way of seeing things. Like Aurora and Adonis, slaves evaded and resisted violence and fought to maintain ties of kinship and affection. Like them, slaves struggled to assert their human dignity. Patterson writes that because the slave’s “kin relations were illegitimate, they were all the more cherished. Because he was consider degraded, he was all the more infused with the yearning for dignity. Because of his formal isolation and liminality, he was acutely sensitive to the realities of community.” Slaves wanted nothing more than to become “legitimate members of society, to be socially born again.” They longed for social resurrection. I see social death as more a literary metaphor than a social theory. Metaphors are by nature inexact, both allusive and elusive, and are not to be taken literally. As a metaphor, social death powerfully evokes those aspects of the social order that did the most to shape and define the slaves’ outer lives. It has little to say, however, about the slaves’ inner lives, despite Patterson’s eloquent acknowledgment of slaves’ psychological autonomy. My understanding of the psychology of slavery draws inspiration from the writings of Nell Irvin Painter. Painter has insisted that a “fully loaded cost accounting” of slavery demand an examination of the psychology of slavery. She argues that the violence and sexual abuse that slaves endured, especially during childhood, had damaging psychological consequences. She cite modern studies of those who have suffered repeated beatings and sexual exploitation to show that victims experience “certain fairly predictable effects . . . feelings of degradation and humiliation . . . anger, hatred, and self-hatred.” Since “it is doubtful that slaves possessed an immunity that victims today lack,” they would have exhibited similar symptoms. This, she writes, constitutes “soul murder.” Painter takes the words soul murder literally, arguing that “the beating and raping of enslaved people was neither secret nor metaphorical.” While this was as true of the Cape as it was of the American South about which Painter writes, soul murder can equally well be paired with social death as a complementary metaphor. As with social death, soul murder was not absolute, and it was reversible. How closely the slaves’ psychological condition in a particular time and place approached soul murder depended on how well slaves and slave owners asserted their contradictory interests, as Painter admits. Southern slaves who were imbedded in networks of kin and fictive kin or who had been touched by religious faith survived slavery “in a human and humane manner.” This was sometimes the case at the Cape as well.Things generally turned out badly for the salves; such was the balance of power in slave societies. But things were rarely as bad as they might have been, because, like Aurora and Appollos, most slaves never ceased to fight for life in the face of soul murder and social death.” And, liberation theology provides the oppressed with meaning beyond unexplainable violence. A mere hope to continue surviving in this messed up world does not provide the conceptual motivation for anything to ever change as long as the goal remains living in this world. CONE 2: Consumed by a passion to express myself about the liberating power of the black religious experience, I continued to write and speak about this spiritual revolution erupting in the cultural and political contexts of the African American community. This message of liberation was “something like a burning fire shut up in my bones,” to use the language of Jeremiah; “I was weary with holding it in, and I could not” (Jer. 20:9). All fo m work since that first book has involved an effort to relate the gospel and the black experience-the experience of oppression as well as the struggle to find liberation and meaning. Inevitably, it has led to these reflections on the cross and the lynching tree: the essential symbol of Christianity and the quintessential emblem of black suffering. To live meaningfully, we must see light beyond the darkness. As Micea Eliade put it, “Life is not possible without an opening towards the transcendent.” The lynching era was the Heart of Darkness for the African American community. It was a time when fragments of meaning were hard to find. Some found meaning in the blues and others in collective political resistance, but for many people it was religion that helped them to look beyond their tragic situation to a time when they would “cross the river of Jordan,” “lay down dat heavy load, and “walk in Jerusalem just like John.” The Christian gospel is God’s message of liberation in an unredeemed and tortured world. As such it is a transcendent reality that lifts our spirits to a world far removed from the suffering of this one. It is an eschatological vision, an experience of transfiguration, such as Jesus experienced at his baptism (Mk1:9-11) or on Mt. Tabor (Mk 9:2-8), just because he set out on the road to Jerusalem, the road that led to Calvary. Paul had such a vision—“a light from heaven”—as he traveled the road to Damascus (Acts 9:3). Malcolm X, while in prison, had a vision of God, and so too did Martin King hear God speaking to him in his kitchen at a moment of crisis during the Montgomery bus boycott. For all four, the revelatory moment in their lives helped to prepare them to face their deaths, sustained by the conviction that this was not the end but the beginning of a new life of meaning. To paraphrase Eliade, once contact with the transcendent is found, a new existence in the world becomes possible.
The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best methodologically engages in liberation theology. RAVEGE-SEUL: Revage-Seul, Mike. "Liberation Theology and the Pedagogy of Insurrection." Truthout. N.p., 11 Jan. 2016. Web. 10 Sept. 2016. “As expressed by McLaren's colleague, Ira Shor, critical pedagogy addresses "Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context and, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media or discourse." (Empowering Education, 129) Put otherwise, McLaren's approach to teaching is about developing modes of reflection and communication that question received wisdom. It uncovers the radical causes (in the etymological sense of "root" origins) defined by social structures, history, and the interplay of ideologies as they appear in texts and public discourse. McLaren himself elaborates: "Critical pedagogy includes relationships between teaching and learning. Its proponents claim critical educational studies underwritten by a social justice agenda will require more than lifestyle changes, but concerted critique and transformation of the unbridled barbarism of capitalist social relations.” In other words, McLaren's version of critical teaching does not pretend to be "neutral." It is about changing the world. Having identified unfettered capitalism as barbaric and destructive, its aim is to provide students with powerful theoretical tools to understand themselves in relation to socio-political and economic structures. (And by the way, Peter does so in an entirely delightful way - his pages overflowing with poetic prose, classical and historical references, and even (in his final chapter) with a wonderful all-encompassing performance manifesto which more than one reviewer has identified as reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg's Howl.) Reflections on Liberation Theology But all of that was to be expected from a truly exceptional artist, philosopher, poet, teacher and activist like Peter McLaren. What was unexpected was his focus on liberation theology as itself a critical if not indispensable tool of critical social theory. As understood by McLaren, liberation theology is reflection on the following of Christ from the viewpoint of those committed to positively transforming the reality of the world's poor and oppressed. In adopting this approach, McLaren follows his mentor, Paulo Freire, who inspired the methodology employed in liberation theology's "biblical circles," where unlettered peasants uncovered the socially transformative meanings in the narratives of Jesus' familiar words and deeds. And what did they find? In Jesus, they found a man recognized by the impoverished protagonists of liberation theology as someone like them. He looked like them. According to experts in the field of forensic archeology, he resembled poor mestizos everywhere in Latin America. He probably stood about 5'1'' and weighed about 110 pounds. His skin was brown. He was a laborer, not a scholar; his hands were calloused. Ironically, Jesus also possessed characteristics that mainstream Christians often find repulsive and ungodly but familiar to the poor everywhere. He was the son of an unwed teenage mother. He was homeless at birth. If we are to believe Matthew's account, Jesus was an immigrant in Egypt for a while. The good people of his day called him a drunkard and the companion of prostitutes. They expelled him from his synagogue because he didn't seem to care about the Ten Commandments, especially the most important one - the Sabbath law. (For a Jew such excommunication and the shunning it entailed were like a death sentence.) The religious authorities said he was a heretic and possessed by the devil. The occupying Roman authorities identified him as a terrorist. They arrested him. And he ended up a victim of torture and of capital punishment carried out by crucifixion - a means of execution the Romans reserved specifically for insurgents. He was not the kind of person mainstream Christians usually admire. He was far too radical to merit their approval. Jesus' teachings were radical as well.They centered on social justice. As such they infuriated his opponents but were wildly inspiring to the poor and oppressed. His proclamation was not about himself, but about what he called "The Kingdom of God." That was the highly charged political image he used to refer to what the world would be like if God were king instead of Caesar. In that kingdom everything would be turned upside-down. The first would be last; the last would be first. The rich would be poor; and the poor would be rich. Subsequent reflection by followers of Jesus in the Book of Revelation teased all of that out and drew the conclusion that with the dawning of God's kingdom, the Roman Empire would be destroyed and replaced by a new heaven and a new earth entirely unlike empire. There (as indicated in the Acts of the Apostles) wealth would be distributed from each according to his ability to each according to his need. There would be room for everyone. If that sounds like communism, it's because, as the Mexican exegete Jose Miranda (one of McLaren's favorites) points out, the idea of communism originated with Christians, not with Marx and Engels. With all this in mind, McLaren returns to his critical theory. He traces its roots not merely to Marx and Engels or to the 20th century work of philosophers like Jurgen Habermas or to philosophical circles such as the Frankfurt School. Instead, he takes readers right back to the one he calls "Comrade Jesus."” Impact Calc: Liberation theology is intent based 1. 2. 3. 4.
Thus, I defend that countries ought to prohibit the production of nuclear power as a method of embracing liberation on the cross.
Contention:
First, extracting natural resources is part of a western spirituality that has created an ethical dualism between the environment and its subjects. This treats the environment as instrumentally valuable and propagates an epistemology based on human superiority, which is counter productive to humility in the cross. WRIGHT: “CHRISTIANITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE” By Nancy Wright UH-DD “Some feel they need to move beyond Christianity: theologian Chung Hyun Kyung writes, “Many eco-feminists reject the spirituality of traditional Western Christianity, which is based on Greek and Hellenistic dualism, of hierarchy of beings and an androcentric bias....Therefore, when we incorporate African or Asian indigenous spirituality to eco-feminist spirituality, ...The earth becomes sacred....Reaffirming our commitment to the struggle of liberation of our people and nature, we would share the symbol of a tree as the most inspiring symbol for the spirituality of eco-feminism.” 21 While I am sympathetic to Kyung’s position, I disagree that we have to move beyond Christianity. Christianity is large enough to encompass and undergird a response to environmental injustice. Foundational theological motifs to inspire work for environmental justice are: The incarnation, the suffering of Christ on the cross (as representing the suffering of the vulnerable and disenfranchised and God’s suffering with them), an understanding of the goodness of the cosmos (“for God so loved the world=cosmos” John 3:16), the motif of the Promised Land, and Jesus’ teachings about the worth of the sparrow and lily. Theologian James Cone articulated the Black Theology of Liberation as early as 1970, followed by Gustavo Gutierrez in 1973. In the forty years since, highly esteemed theologians have articulated the cry of the earth and the disenfranchised: Jurgen Moltmann, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Larry Rasmussen, Leonardo Boff, among them. As Boff writes, “The protest of Liberation theology against suffering is not limited to a single region. Every kind of repression, every cry of the poor, of the oppressed, of the marginalized anywhere in the world is an appeal to theology. ... is it possible to live in peace and happily when you know that two-thirds of human beings are suffering, hungry and poor? It’s not only the cry of the poor we must listen to but also the cry of the earth. We must do something to change the situation – there won’t be a Noah’s Ark to save only some of us.”22 The changes needed illumine the roots of Christianity, and we need the roots to flourish as Christian environmental justice advocates. As Luther wrote, we must distinguish the theology of the cross from the theology of glory: “That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened Rom. 1:20....He or she deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross....A theology of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theology of the cross calls the thing what it actually is....”23 When Christians discover that we actually need clean water for the rite of baptism, perhaps we will wake up even more. When we invite ourselves to see the biblical cosmic Christ and the Spirit of Christ in all things, through taking to heart the description of Logos/Christ in the Prologue to the Gospel of John and Colossians 1:15-20, we will hopefully discover the preciousness of Earth’s creatures. Don’t we have an obligation to remember that Jesus pointed to the lilies of the field as an icon for God’s care and radical faith claim that we need not think for the morrow or amass riches? Doesn’t that criticize a profit economy and the greed that drives it? A mutuality is embraced by ecofeminism (as Rosemary Radford Reuther defines it: “Ecofeminism claims an alternative principle of relationship between men and women, humans and the land—a mutuality in which there is no hierarchy but rather an interconnected web of life.” 24). Such mutuality reminds us that Jesus was a nature mystic and eco-feminist, because those were his concerns, too.” (11-13)
Second, preeminence in nuclear power is part of a larger race towards a hegemonic framework that aims to influence global policy through power and imperial suppression. This is counter productive to a liberation theology. THOMAS: “Black Liberation Hermeneutics: A Postcoloinal Perspective” by Richard A. Thomas UH-DD “The lasting effects of the slavocracy were that the slaveholders not only tried to enslave the physical bodies of the slaves but their minds as well.35 As noted earlier, one method of controlling the minds of the slave was through the use of the biblical text. The slaveholders but were not completely successful in their attempt to control the slaves through the Bible. Enslaved people understood God as both the creator and their source for freedom. Liberation for the slave resembled moksha in Hinduism. Slaves and had to discern for themselves the reality of Divine truth apart from what they had been taught by the slave masters. This discernment process has continued to present day for African Americans. Although they no longer face subjugation from slavery they face what Arundhati Roy observes as the “New Imperialism,” under the contemporary context. She states: “Even in its battered economic state, the United States continues to cling to hegemonic power- exercising preeminence in nuclear power, asserting its will in global policies, influencing both global culture and cultural products, advancing putatively humanitarian initiatives.”36 A key tool for the slaves to combat the oppressive forces of the slaveholders was a firm belief in Jesus as the liberator. In the same sense that slaves viewed Jesus as the liberator in past, African Americans today can create a liberation hermeneutic using Jesus as the ultimate example of the jivanmukta. If Jesus is the ultimate jivanmukta then those who want to truly follow in his path must act similarly. The jivanmukta is liberated from selfishness, permeated with the presence of the Lord and, spends their life both loving and serving others. All of these features were attributes of Jesus found within the biblical text. The description of Jesus in Matthews 20:26-28 fulfills the description of Jesus as the ultimate jivanmukta. Furthermore, liberation hermeneutic gives humankind the imperative to imitate Jesus as the jivanmukta. Paul writes in the book of Galatians: “For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.” (Galatians 5:13 NRSV) This verse encompasses all of the attributes of the jivanmukta. Humanity is free because of the realization of the Divine truth through knowing Jesus Christ. The recognition of the Divine truth allows humanity to serve one another through love. It is this biblical virtue that counters the threat of the “New Imperialism” faced in society today. A practical application for this virtue in America is the continued fight for both social and economic justice. African American continue in the struggle for justice whether it be for the hate crimes perpetuated against Emmitt Till in 1955 or the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2013. Liberation hermeneutics allows one to realize their connection to the pain and suffering caused from these tragedies. Gandhi proclaimed: “If one man falls we all fall to that extent.”37 Thus it becomes important for African Americans to work towards the alleviation of suffering of all God’s creatures. A practical approach to this is to work towards ending the social structures that caused the deaths of Emmitt Till and Trayvon Martin. Namely, those structures are racial discord, poverty, and oppressive power structures. This requires the love and service towards others found within both the biblical text and through the jivanmukta.”
Third, nuclear power is a modern Tower of Babel— it is an attempt to defy the laws of the transcendent through the modification and domination of the environment carried with the belief of superiority over one’s right to do so. CALDICOTT: Caldicott, Helen. "Pope Francis Calls Nuclear Power Plants a Modern-Day Tower of Babel - Helen Caldicott, MD." Helen Caldicott MD. N.p., 25 June 2015. Web. 16 Sept. 2016. “In an audience with Japanese Bishops, Pope Francis had criticized nuclear power by comparing it with the Tower of Babel, as reported by Takeo Okada, the Archbishop of Tokyo. When human beings attempted to reach heaven they triggered their own destruction. “Human beings should not break the natural laws set by God,” the Pope said. (Mainichi Shinbun March 22, 2015; Asahi Shinbun March 25, 2015)¶ This is probably the first clear-cut criticism of the “civil use” of nuclear power issued by the Vatican. The Pope expressed his conviction during an ad limina meeting with the Japanese bishops on March 20. “The destruction of nature is a result from human beings claiming domination (over the earth).” With these statements the Pope referred to the TEPCO-nuclear disaster in Fukushima in March 2011. Soon after the terrible disaster, the Japanese Catholic Bishops’ Conference had publicly demanded from the government the immediate shutdown of all nuclear power plants.¶ During the audience, Bishop Katsuya Taiji, head of the “Council for Justice and Peace” of the Japanese Catholic Bishops’ Conference, had handed over letters of two activists from Fukushima to the Pope. The first author was Takumi Aizawa, a school clerk from Iidate Mura, the most contaminated place in Fukushima Prefecture, who is involved in health care and protection of children since the disaster. In fact Mr. Aizawa had the great wish to inform the Pope personally about the real situation of the people in the contaminated area because the government, the administration, many doctors and scientists, and the media try to cover up the extremely dangerous situation. The second author is Mako Oshidori, a well-known journalist from Tokyo, who attended most of the TEPCO press conferences with critical questions and who is investigating the contaminated region constantly.¶ Shortly before, Mr. Aizawa and Ms. Oshidori had delivered presentations about the situation in Fukushima at the international and interreligious conference on “Contributions of religious groups to the energy shift” which was organized by the Center for Ecumenical Work in March 3.-6. 2015 in Arnoldshain (Germany). Prof. Ichiro Mitsunobu S.J., a representative of the “Council for Justice and Peace,” also participated in the conference and gave a talk about the position of the Catholic Church in Japan. Triggered by this conference, the “Council” asked the two activists to write letters to the Pope which the bishops wanted to hand over during their audience two weeks later.¶ One of the main goals of the conference in Arnoldshain on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of the TEPCO nuclear disaster was to stimulate international and interreligious networks to abandon nuclear power and to engage in climate protection. The developments outlined above may be considered a first result of such an endeavor.¶ Until now the Vatican had condemned only the military use of nuclear power. Since the Vatican is member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), it seems that with his critical statements about the “civil use” of nuclear energy Pope Francis deviates considerably from the position of his predecessors und is pursuing a new direction. Many Catholics hope that in his next encyclica on the protection of the environment the Pope will clearly voice also his critical attitude towards nuclear power.”