Opponent: Lake Highland Prep RS | Judge: Bob Shurtz
AC - Util AC NC - Court Clog DA Turns
Apple Valley
3
Opponent: New Trier AP | Judge: Ananth, Panchanadam
AC - Race AC NC - Plans Bad Rule of Law NC
Glenbrooks
2
Opponent: Rosemount TS | Judge: John Scoggin
AC - Race AC NC - Public Safety NC
Grapevine
1
Opponent: Marcus KL | Judge: Chris Vincent
AC - Radiation AC NC - Skep T 1AR - NC AC 2NR - AC RFD - No offense on AC
Longhorn Classic
1
Opponent: Dulles MK | Judge: Emily Nguyen
AC - Race NC - Biopower K
St Marks
2
Opponent: Westwood JA | Judge: Srikar Pyda
AC - Armenia AC NC - Renewable DA Sacrifice DA Anthro K 1AR - ROB Spec
TOC
1
Opponent: Harvard Westlake SP | Judge: Adam Tomasi
AC - cap ac nc - heg da title ix da terror da turns 1ar - case 2nr - title ix heg da turns 2ar - case
TOC
4
Opponent: Scarsdale GZ | Judge: Leah Shapiro
AC - cap nc - spec particularism nc turns 1ar - spec disclosure 2nr - outside of round shell bad 2ar - spec disclosure
Valley
1
Opponent: Bettendorf AW | Judge: Martin Sigalow
AC - Radiation ACv2 NC - Coal DA Skep 1AR - Shell - Extemp
Valley
1
Opponent: Bettendorf AW | Judge: Martin Sigalow
AC - Radiation ACv2 NC - Coal DA Skep 1AR - Shell - Extemp
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
Entry
Date
0 Broken Interps
Tournament: All | Round: Quads | Opponent: All | Judge: All A. Debaters may not contest an assumption in the resolution. A. Debaters may not contest multiple assumptions in the resolution. A. All offense proving the resolution true or false must impact to a single standard that is necessary and sufficient for both debaters. A. If the neg reads a necessary but insufficient burden, then they must concede the AC contention. A. The aff must explicitly specify a comprehensive role of the ballot and clarify how the round will play out under that role of the ballot in the form of a delineated text in the 1AC. To clarify, the aff must: 1/ Clarify how offense links back to the role of the ballot, such as whether post-fiat offense or pre-fiat offense matters and which comes first. 2/ Clarify what theoretical objections do and do not link to the aff, such as whether or not the aff comes before theory. 3/ Clarify how to weigh and compare between competing advocacies i.e. whether the role of the ballot is solely determined by the flow or another method of engagement. A. Must disclose text of PICs 30 min prior to the round if the aff is disclosed. A. The negative must fiat the same actor as the affirmative. A. If the negative reads an alternative or counterplan, they must have a carded solvency advocate that says why colleges and universities should defend the CP. A. Debaters may not read a K alt that fiats a mindset shift A. The negative must specify what forms of speech they restrict A. The negative must defend a unique ethical framework from the aff. To clarify you cannot straight ref.
3/20/17
0 Disclosure
Tournament: All | Round: Finals | Opponent: All | Judge: All A) Interp - Both debaters must disclose at least the following from all AC’s and NC’s read at TOC bid distributing tournaments: first, complete tag lines to all cards; second, first 3 words and last 3 words of all cards; third, the standard used to delineate what counts as offense and not offense with the claims to the warrants for that standard and fourth, taglines to all evidence read. If they do not, they must minimally have a wiki page with contact information.
2/26/17
0 Possible Interps List
Tournament: All | Round: Triples | Opponent: All | Judge: All Here's some shells 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.
4/6/17
JF - Agonism AC
Tournament: UH Cougar Classic | Round: 3 | Opponent: Cypress Wood CJ | Judge: Parker Kelly Part 1: Framework 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) 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.” 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. Analytic 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. Analytic 3. Analytic 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 general principle, but I’ll spec whatever u want in CX, I promise it’ll only take 3 seconds. 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 3 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 Censorship destroys agonistic discourse by turning speech into a weapon. Thus we must allow all instances of disagreement, which turns PICs. Butler 13, Judith, "Judith Butler’s Remarks to Brooklyn College on BDS," Nation, https://www.thenation.com/article/judith-butlers-remarks-brooklyn-college-bds/ And yet all of us here have to distinguish between the right to listen to a point of view and the right to concur or dissent from that point of view; otherwise, public discourse is destroyed by censorship. I wonder, what is the fantasy of speech nursed by the censor? There must be enormous fear behind the drive to censorship, but also enormous aggression, as if we were all in a war where speech has suddenly become artillery. Is there another way to approach language and speech as we think about this issue? Is it possible that some other use of words might forestall violence, bring about a general ethos of non-violence, and so enact, and open onto, the conditions for a public discourse that welcomes and shelters disagreement, even disarray? 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.
Part 4: Underview
The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that proves the truth or falsity of the resolution. Prefer: A) Text: Dictionary.com define to affirm as to uphold and to negate as to deny the truth of which means the sole judge obligation is to vote on the resolution’s truth or falsity. This outweighs on common usage – it is abundantly clear that our roles are verified. Only arguments that link to this burden are relevant so it’s the only distributions we have coming in the round.
1/6/17
JF - Agonism AC v2
Tournament: UH Cougar Classic | Round: 5 | Opponent: Kempner TC | Judge: Akhil Gandra Part 1: Framework 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) 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.” 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. Analytic 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. Analytics 3. 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. Part 2: Advocacy I defend the resolution as a general principle, but I’ll spec whatever u want in CX, I promise it’ll only take 3 seconds. 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 3 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 Censorship destroys agonistic discourse by turning speech into a weapon. Thus we must allow all instances of disagreement. Butler 13, Judith, "Judith Butler’s Remarks to Brooklyn College on BDS," Nation, https://www.thenation.com/article/judith-butlers-remarks-brooklyn-college-bds/ And yet all of us here have to distinguish between the right to listen to a point of view and the right to concur or dissent from that point of view; otherwise, public discourse is destroyed by censorship. I wonder, what is the fantasy of speech nursed by the censor? There must be enormous fear behind the drive to censorship, but also enormous aggression, as if we were all in a war where speech has suddenly become artillery. Is there another way to approach language and speech as we think about this issue? Is it possible that some other use of words might forestall violence, bring about a general ethos of non-violence, and so enact, and open onto, the conditions for a public discourse that welcomes and shelters disagreement, even disarray? 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.
Part 4: Underview
The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that proves the truth or falsity of the resolution. Prefer: A) Text: Dictionary.com define to affirm as to uphold and to negate as to deny the truth of which means the sole judge obligation is to vote on the resolution’s truth or falsity. Other roles are outside of the judge’s jurisdiction and pragmatic benefits are not relevant to LD. Branse 15, David, 2015, The Role of the Judge, http://nsdupdate.com/2015/09/04/the-role-of-the-judge-by-david-branse-part-one/ My ultimate view is that the role of the judge and ballot is to vote for the debater who best defends the truth or falsity of the resolution. The aff burden is to prove the resolution true; the neg’s burden is to prove it false. This certainly doesn’t forbid judges from voting on education voters in theory shells or K roles of the ballot. The judge can still be tab. I argue just that the right answer to the question “should the judge vote on education impacts?” is no. Debaters can certainly be winning the opposite though.¶ My claim is that the judge does not have the jurisdiction to reject an argument proving the truth of the resolution for its lack of critical education nor to prioritize a set of arguments for their educational value. I will refer to this as the truth-testing paradigm.¶ The judge is given one explicit obligation: to vote for the better debater (or, on some ballots, the “winner”). This article tries to establish what that means.¶ 2) Establishing the Importance of Rules¶ To determine who is better at something requires normative assessments about the rules of the activity – the winner of a competitive activity is the one who follows the rules and procedures to victory. The better soccer team is the team that scores more goals according to the rules of soccer and the better chess player is the person who achieves checkmate by moving their pieces in accordance with the rules of chess. Any competitive activity’s evaluation of the “better participant” is constrained by the rules that govern the activity.¶ The constraining role of an activity’s rules can answer a couple of common claims for education’s value and the judge as an educator does not meet this.¶ First, a common reason to view education as “a voter” is a combination of the following:¶ Argument 1: A) education is valuable, and B) debate is a unique space to provide that education.¶ To see how this claim is mistaken consider the follow example:¶ It seems apparent that two claims are true: 1) exercise is valuable, and 2) soccer is an activity structured in such a way that can to easily facilitate exercise. This, however, does not seem to be provide a strong enough reason to make the claim that: “the referee should be a facilitator of exercise”. Intuitively, if one team scored more goals than another team that happened to hustle far more, the proper response is to reward the goal-scoring team the win. There doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason to promote exercise just because exercise can easily be promoted.¶ This is because pragmatic benefits are constrained by the rules of the activity. Exercise or education should not be promoted at the expense of the rules since the rules are what define the activity. LD is only LD because of the rules governing it – if we changed the activity to promoteing practical values, then it would cease to be what it is. As soon as if referees reward teams that hustle more with the win, the game is no longer soccer, but some new sport that rewards hustle rather than goal scoring.¶ 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.
1/7/17
JF - Agonism AC v3
Tournament: Harvard Westlake | Round: 2 | Opponent: Chaminade RA | Judge: Michael Harris 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. Analytic 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:
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. (cough cough Giroux) 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. 3. 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 general principle, but will specify further if asked in CX. 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 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 Censorship destroys agonistic discourse by turning speech into a weapon Thus we must allow all instances of disagreement, which turns PICs. Butler 13, Judith, "Judith Butler’s Remarks to Brooklyn College on BDS," Nation, https://www.thenation.com/article/judith-butlers-remarks-brooklyn-college-bds/ And yet all of us here have to distinguish between the right to listen to a point of view and the right to concur or dissent from that point of view; otherwise, public discourse is destroyed by censorship. I wonder, what is the fantasy of speech nursed by the censor? There must be enormous fear behind the drive to censorship, but also enormous aggression, as if we were all in a war where speech has suddenly become artillery. Is there another way to approach language and speech as we think about this issue? Is it possible that some other use of words might forestall violence, bring about a general ethos of non-violence, and so enact, and open onto, the conditions for a public discourse that welcomes and shelters disagreement, even disarray? Censorship is an issue of interpretation. This ensures cooption by some other power. BUTLER 97: “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 To argue, on the one hand, that the offensive effect of such words is fully contextual, and that a shift of context can exacerbate or minimize that offensiveness, is still not to give an account of the power that such words are said to exercise. To claim, on the other hand, that some utterances are always offensive, regardless of context, that they carry their contexts with them in ways that are too difficult to shed, is still not to offer a way to understand how context is invoked and restaged at the moment of utterance.” (Pg. 13) Through restrictions, censorship refuses to capture the events described in language. This form of linguistic violence attempts to erase a specific language, and in effect, erase the descriptions that follow the language. Not only does this miserably fail to erase the injurious speech, but the desire to manipulate language, to control the uncontrollable presence of its descriptions, propagates a quenching desire for statist censorship. BUTLER 97: “Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performativity” by Judith Butler 1997 “Morrison's analogy suggests that language lives or dies as a living thing might live or die, and that the question of survival is central to the question of how language is used. She claims that "oppressive language . . . is violence,” not merely a representation of it. Oppressive language is not a substitute for the experience of violence. It enacts its own kind of violence. Language remains alive when it refuses to "encapsulate" (20) or "capture" (21) the events and lives it describes. But when it seeks to effect that capture, language not only loses its vitality, but acquires its own violent force, one that Morrison throughout the lecture associates with statist language and censorship. She writes, "the vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience, it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may (20) And later: "its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable:'(21) The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.” (Pg. 8-9) 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. Part 4: Underview
Aff gets 1AR theory; Otherwise the neg can be infinitely abusive and there’s no way to check against this. 2. 1AR theory is drop the debater; The 1ARs too short to be able to rectify abuse and adequately cover substance- you must be punished. 3. 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. 4. The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater that proves the truth or falsity of the resolution. Prefer: A) Text: Dictionary.com define to affirm as to uphold and to negate as to deny the truth of which means the sole judge obligation is to vote on the resolution’s truth or falsity. This outweighs on common usage – it is abundantly clear that our roles are verified. Only arguments that link to this burden are relevant so it’s the only distributions we have coming in the round.
1/14/17
JF - Cap AC
Tournament: TOC | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake SP | Judge: Adam Tomasi Part 1: Framework The role of the ballot and judge is to reject capitalism and reclaim higher education. Our greatest ethical obligation is to resist capitalism – it’s relevant under any moral theory. Morgaridge 98, Clayton, Prof of Philosophy at Lewis and Clark College, 1998, Why Capitalism is Evil 08/22 http://www.lclark.edu/~clayton/commentaries/evil.html Now none of these philosophers are naive: none of them thinks that sympathy, love, or caring determines all, or even most, human behavior. The 20th century proves otherwise. What they do offer, though, is the hope that human beings have the capacity to want the best for each other. So now we must ask, What forces are at work in our world to block or cripple the ethical response? This question, of course, brings me back to capitalism. But before I go there, I want to acknowledge that capitalism is not the only thing that blocks our ability to care. Exploitation and cruelty were around long before the economic system of capitalism came to be, and the temptation to use and abuse others will probably survive in any future society that might supersede capitalism. Nevertheless, I want to claim, the putting the world at the disposal of those with capital has done more damage to the ethical life than anything else. To put it in religious terms, capital is the devil. To show why this is the case, let me turn to capital's greatest critic, Karl Marx. Under capitalism, Marx writes, everything in nature and everything that human beings are and can do becomes an object: a resource for, or an obstacle, to the expansion of production, the development of technology, the growth of markets, and the circulation of money. For those who manage and live from capital, nothing has value of its own. Mountain streams, clean air, human lives -- all mean nothing in themselves, but are valuable only if they can be used to turn a profit.1 If capital looks at (not into) the human face, it sees there only eyes through which brand names and advertising can enter and mouths that can demand and consume food, drink, and tobacco products. If human faces express needs, then either products can be manufactured to meet, or seem to meet, those needs, or else, if the needs are incompatible with the growth of capital, then the faces expressing them must be unrepresented or silenced. Obviously what capitalist enterprises do have consequences for the well being of human beings and the planet we live on. Capital profits from the production of food, shelter, and all the necessities of life. The production of all these things uses human lives in the shape of labor, as well as the resources of the earth. If we care about life, if we see our obligations in each others faces, then we have to want all the things capital does to be governed by that care, to be directed by the ethical concern for life. But feeding people is not the aim of the food industry, or shelter the purpose of the housing industry. In medicine, making profits is becoming a more important goal than caring for sick people. As capitalist enterprises these activities aim single-mindedly at the accumulation of capital, and such purposes as caring for the sick or feeding the hungry becomes a mere means to an end, an instrument of corporate growth. Therefore ethics, the overriding commitment to meeting human need, is left out of deliberations about what the heavyweight institutions of our society are going to do. Moral convictions are expressed in churches, in living rooms, in letters to the editor, sometimes even by politicians and widely read commentators, but almost always with an attitude of resignation to the inevitable. People no longer say, "You can't stop progress," but only because they have learned not to call economic growth progress. They still think they can't stop it. And they are right -- as long as the production of all our needs and the organization of our labor is carried out under private ownership. Only a minority ("idealists") can take seriously a way of thinking that counts for nothing in real world decision making. Only when the end of capitalism is on the table will ethics have a seat at the table. That’s key to the role of the judge as an educator because status quo schools turn students to mindless consumers. McLaren 08 Peter,Critical Pedagogy Against Capitalist Schooling: Towards a Socialist Alternative. An Interview with Peter McLaren http://www.globaleducationmagazine.com/critical-pedagogy-againstcapitalist-schooling-socialist-alternative-interview-peter-mclaren/- The epistemological presuppositions that undergird neoliberal capitalism can be unraveled like an unspooled film; each application of neoliberal prescriptions to knowledge formation can be scrutinized in the context of the larger mise-en-scène. Cultural theorists have done an excellent job of understanding the impact of neoliberal ideology on the production of space, place, scale, historical time, and race, gender and class identity and human agency. I agree that this is important work and we need to look at such production in relation to the commodification of everyday life. Among other things, neoliberal logic is a logic of the lowest common denominator, a technocratic rationality in which value is accorded to how much surplus value can be extracted and accumulated..¶ While well-meaning progressive educators might be willing to criticize the manner in which humans are turned into dead objects that Marxists refer to as fetishized commodities, they are often loathe to consider the fact that within capitalist society, all value originates in the sphere of production and that one of the primary roles of schools is to serve as agents or functionaries of capital. Furthermore, they fail to understand that education is can be more reproductive of an exploitative social order than a constitutive challenge to it precisely because it rests on the foundations of capitalist exchange value. Reading Marx and Freire may not alchemize us into revolutionaries capable of transcending capitalism but ignoring what they had to say about transforming education in the context of class struggle would be a huge loss to our efforts. Impact Calc: Even if other ethical concerns are important, prioritize resisting cap on time frame. Trump’s neoliberal America is running rampant and it’s only getting worse. Bessner and Sharpe 3-22 Daniel Bessner and Matthew Sparke 3/22/17 (Daniel Bessner is the Anne H.H. and Kenneth B. Pyle Assistant Professor in American Foreign Policy at the University of Washington. Matthew Sparke is Director of Integrated Social Sciences at the University of Washington, and author of "Introducing Globalization: Ties, Tensions and Uneven Integration.) “Don’t let his trade policy fool you: Trump is a neoliberal”. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/22/dont-let-his-trade-policy-fool-you-trump-is-a-neoliberal/?utm_term=.388c185dce98 In his first speech to a joint session of Congress, President Trump promised to deliver on his populist campaign pledges to protect Americans from globalization. “For too long,” he bemoaned, “we’ve watched our middle class shrink as we’ve exported our jobs and wealth to foreign countries.” But now, he asserted, the time has come to “restart the engine of the American economy” and “bring back millions of jobs.” To achieve his goals, Trump proposed mixing massive tax-cuts and sweeping regulatory rollbacks with increased spending on the military, infrastructure and border control. This same messy mix of free market fundamentalism and hyper-nationalistic populism is presently taking shape in Trump’s proposed budget. But the apparent contradiction there isn’t likely to slow down Trump’s pro-market, pro-Wall Street, pro-wealth agenda. His supporters may soon discover that his professions of care for those left behind by globalization are — aside from some mostly symbolic moves on trade — empty. Just look at what has already happened with the GOP’s proposed replacement for Obamacare, which if enacted would bring increased pain and suffering to the anxious voters who put their trust in Trump’s populism in the first place. While these Americans might have thought their votes would win them protection from the instabilities and austerities of market-led globalization, what they are getting is a neoliberal president in populist clothing. Neoliberalism is a term most often used to critique market-fundamentalism rather than to define a particular policy agenda. Nonetheless, it is most useful to understand neoliberalism’s policy implications in terms of 10 norms that have defined its historical practice. These norms begin with trade liberalization and extend to the encouragement of exports; enticement of foreign investment; reduction of inflation; reduction of public spending; privatization of public services; deregulation of industry and finance; reduction and flattening of taxes; restriction of union organization; and, finally, enforcement of property and land ownership. Politicians don’t necessarily have to profess faith in all of these norms to be considered neoliberal. Rather, they have to buy into neoliberalism’s general market-based logic and its attendant promise of opportunity. When one compares these 10 neoliberal commandments with Trump’s policy agenda, it is clear that the president is far more neoliberal than his populist rhetoric would suggest. This conclusion will likely surprise his supporters, especially in light of Trump’s assaults on the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the North American Free Trade Agreement. Despite these attacks, however, Trump is clearly and consistently positioning himself to cut taxes on the wealthy, deregulate big business and the financial industry, and pursue a wide range of privatization plans and public-private partnerships that will further weaken American unions. In short, he will govern like the neoliberals who came before him and against whom he campaigned so ardently. In fact, Trump’s agenda aims to realize the foremost goals of neoliberalism: privatization, deregulation, tax-cutting, anti-unionism, and the strict enforcement of property rights. For example, in his address to Congress, Trump promised “a big, big cut” for American companies and boasted about his administration’s “historic effort to massively reduce job-crushing regulations.” Ironically, Trump then asserted that he will reduce regulations by “creating a deregulation task force inside of every government agency,” itself a contradictory expansion of the administrative state he had just sworn to shrink. Since so much of Trump’s agenda aligns with the long-standing ambitions of the Republican Party, it is likely that Trump will be able to work with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) to pass strictly neoliberal legislation. Unlike his approach to trade, which congressional Republicans will probably scuttle, there is little reason to doubt that we will see new legislation that privatizes public lands, overturns Dodd-Frank and other Wall Street regulations, cuts taxes on business, makes organizing unions difficult, and allows big landowners to develop, mine, log, and shoot without restraint. For all the animosity that may exist between the Trump administration and Republican congressmen, the two groups share a neoliberal vision of the world. From his new budget proposal we also know that Trump plans to continue the neoliberal assault on social service provisions —such as the subsidies in the Affordable Care Act— as well as public broadcasting, arts funding, scientific research and foreign aid. As Trump vowed to Congress, he intends to implement a plan in which “Americans purchase their own coverage, through the use of tax credits and expanded health savings accounts.” Moreover, the money he does want to spend will be expended on military and infrastructure projects that will almost certainly be organized around public-private partnerships that will fill the coffers of Trump’s business cronies. What does Trump’s neoliberal agenda mean for those whose discontent with globalization gave him the presidency? Nothing good. The irony here is that the same neoliberalism that Trump plans to strengthen created the conditions that allowed him to enter the White House. Like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Trump was correct to criticize the Obama administration, whose economic team was for a time staffed by neoliberal Democrats like Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, for saving Wall Street after the financial collapse of 2008 while allowing Main Street to go under. Trump’s victory is the direct result of the fact that American workers have not been well served by the country’s policymaking elites. Cap is in a crisis point, now is the time to develop medium term solutions. Wallerstein 08 Wallerstein, Immanuel (senior research scholar at Yale University). (2008). Remembering Andre Gunder Frank While Thinking About the Future. Monthly Review, 60(2), 50–61. Left agendas are actually complicated things to construct. For one thing, they are really constructed in three different time frames, which I shall call long-term, medium term, and short term. Many of the arguments that pervade left discussions about left strategies confuse the three-time frames, and therefore debate at cross purposes. I shall try to talk about all three-time frames but keep them separate. When I speak however about the next twenty-five years, I am speaking about the middle term, which I think is the crucial period to clarify. To make any sense of this discussion, we have to think first about the world-systemic context within which an agenda of any kind can be constructed. I have been arguing in many recent articles and books that the capitalist world-economy, our modern world-system, is in a systemic crisis, by which I mean something that is quite different from one of its repeated economic downturns or stagnations that are a built-in feature of the way it functions, or the kinds of processes that allow for the emergence of new hegemonic powers.2 What I am calling a systemic crisis occurs only once in the life of a historical system. It occurs when the mechanisms that exist to bring the system back to some kind of equilibrium no longer function adequately, and the system can be seen to be moving far from equilibrium, thereby becoming “chaotic.” Chaos is here a technical term that describes a situation in which a system fluctuates wildly, erratically, and severely. At that point, the system “bifurcates” and there ensues an acute struggle over which of two alternative paths to new systemic order it might take.3 The outcome of such a struggle is intrinsically unpredictable. Or to put it another way, it is equally possible that, in the end, the bifurcating system will take one path or the other. The struggle is thus not about whether or not to retain the current capitalist system, since it cannot survive, but about what kind of world-system (or world-systems) will replace it. I call this struggle, for reasons I shall elaborate, the struggle between the spirit of Davos and the spirit of Porto Alegre. I believe that we are already in this systemic crisis and that within twenty-five (or twenty-five to fifty) years, the issue of the choice of a replacement will be resolved. We shall find ourselves in some other kind of system, one that might be better but also one that might be worse than the present system. The long term is what will come out of that historic choice. It is therefore about that other world that is possible, to use the slogan of the World Social Forum (WSF). The long term is what has been delineated in multiple designs of utopias. Personally, I think it is possible to discuss the long term only in very general terms. I define a better world-system as one that is relatively democratic and relatively egalitarian. Historically, no world-system has been either democratic or egalitarian in any meaningful sense. One that would have these characteristics would be distinctively different from all previous historical world-systems. I don’t think we can say much more than that. Specifically, I do not think that we can define in advance the institutional structures that would result in a more democratic, more egalitarian world. We can draft whatever utopian models we wish. I don’t think it matters, because I don’t think that drafting such models will have too much impact on what actually emerges. The most we can probably do is to push in certain directions that we think might be helpful. Part 2: Strategic Silence Restrictions on free speech are trending right now in the status sqo, stifling academia. Hamer 15 Hamer, Jennifer (Professor Department of American Studies and Department of African and African-American Studies, University of Kansas), and Clarence Lang. "Race, structural violence, and the neoliberal university: The challenges of inhabitation." Critical Sociology 41.6 (2015): 897-912. Even full-time faculty have confronted their own challenges, including furloughs, salary rescissions, and threats to their pensions. For many, too, tenure exists more as a reward for conformity than as any real security for free speech (Donoghue, 2008). Further, the advent of post-tenure review, while presented as a helpful measure to encourage senior faculty to remain intellectually active, potentially can be used to discipline them. A prevailing image of the university is that of a space of unrestricted dialogue and debate. But incentives for self-censorship abound. Graduate students avoid controversy for fear of angering faculty who have the power to make critical decisions about their academic future. Assistant professors feel pressured toward quiescence for fear of not getting tenure. Tenured professors bite their tongues out of concern that they may not be promoted, or that they may be passed over for a coveted appointment or leadership opportunity. Adjunct professors avoid trouble out of fear of not having their contracts renewed, and so on. Recent legal developments have had a chilling effect, as well. In the 2006 Garcetti v. Ceballos decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public agencies could discipline employees for any speech made in connection with their jobs. The justices set aside the matter of whether the ruling might apply to faculty at public institutions of higher education, but a string of lower court decisions since then have applied Garcetti to cases involving faculty speech. A recent series of social media controversies involving faculty has also buttressed the precedent set by Garcetti. In 2014, the Kansas Board of Regents implemented a restrictive social media policy following a publicized incident in which a KU journalism professor tweeted an inflammatory remark about the National Rifle Association in the wake of a mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard in D.C. Amid pressure to terminate him, the university placed him on administrative leave. This particular Twitter fracas came shortly on the heels of a similar case at Michigan State University, where a student recorded a faculty member making disparaging anti-Republican Party comments during a classroom lecture. Perhaps the most egregious installment in the current backlash to faculty speech occurred in August 2014 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where the administration essentially revoked a faculty appointment to Steven Salaita after he came under intense scrutiny following tweets critical of Israeli military actions in the Gaza Strip. The decision left him unemployed, despite his earned credentials. Indeed, both tenured and untenured instructors have lost First Amendment lawsuits against institutions of higher education far more often than they have won (Schmidt, 2015b). In states like Wisconsin, moreover, legislators, university administrators, and regents boards have endorsed or actively pursued measures to altogether eliminate tenure and faculty involvement in university governance, which would remove the remaining fig leaf of protection that the full-time professoriat still possesses (Kelderman, 2015; Schmidt, 2015c). Impacts: A Professors right now are explicitly targeted for teaching about identity, stifling other movements and spilling over to other forms of oppression. Moynihan 17 Donald P. Moynihan (professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison), Who’s Really Placing Limits on Free Speech, NY Times, 1/9/2017 At least three times in the past six months, state legislators have threatened to cut the budget of the University of Wisconsin at Madison for teaching about homosexuality, gender and race. As a faculty member who focuses on how public organizations are managed, I hear a great deal about the dangers of political correctness in higher education. Several of Wisconsin’s elected officials have joined the growing chorus of demands for better protections for free speech on campus, even as they fail to recognize how their own politicized approach to managing campuses poses a much more fundamental risk to free speech. For example, Steve Nass, a state senator from Whitewater, has urged university leaders not to give way to “the political correctness crowd demanding safe spaces, safe words, universal apologies for hurt feelings, and speech/thought police.” But last July, Senator Nass also sent a letter to university leaders to complain about an “offensive” essay assignment on gay men’s sexual preferences. A few days ago he said that a university program that explored masculinity declares war on men after asking, “Will we have the courage to reform the U.W. system in the 2017-19 biennial budget? Senator Nass is not alone. A state representative heading a committee that oversees higher education asked for the cancellation of a course that examined white identity called “The Problem of Whiteness” and the dismissal of its instructor. The representative, Dave Murphy, said the course was “adding to the polarization of the races in our state.” If the university “stands with this professor, I don’t know how the university can expect the taxpayers to stand with U.W.-Madison.” Mr. Murphy also promised to direct his staff to screen courses in the humanities “to make sure there’s legitimate education going on. These examples show what’s being left out of a narrative about a crisis of campus speech that is becoming widely accepted. In this story, there is a battle between the traditional values of free speech and identity politics, with tolerance for disagreement being erased by an insistence on recognizing macroaggressions, safe spaces and trigger warnings. Controversial speakers are heckled or disinvited. It’s true that these battle lines are drawn across all campuses to one degree or another, but what many people don’t realize is that they are the most pressing concerns only for elite private institutions like Oberlin and Yale. This one-sided representation of campus speech doesn’t reflect my 14 years teaching in large public institutions in Michigan, Texas and Wisconsin. In that time, no student has ever demanded that my classes include a trigger warning or asked for a safe space. But my colleagues and I have been given much more reason to worry about the ideological agendas of elected officials and politically appointed governing boards. Students can protest on the campus mall, demanding that policies be changed; elected officials can pass laws or cut resources to reflect their beliefs about how a campus should operate. One group has much more power than the other. B Even if speech codes seem like a good idea in theory, they fail in practice. University efforts on promoting equality and diversity are attempts to shroud neoliberalism within academia. Wagner 11 Wagner, Anne (is assistant professor in Sociology and Child and Family Studies at Nipissing University), and June Ying Yee. "Anti-oppression in higher education: Implicating neo-liberalism." Canadian Social Work Review/Revue canadienne de service social (2011): 89-105. Although the effects of neoliberal thought are evident throughout the system, a concurrent focus on promoting principles of equity is also predominant within academia in the current socio-political context. These superficially contradictory ideologies may be understood as an attempt to shroud creeping neoliberalism within academia through promoting a visible commitment to social justice and equity issues. Although the original intent may have emanated from an interest in fostering change, these initiatives have largely become co-opted and their purpose weakened. As Ahmed (2007) argues, the plethora of initiatives and policies based on notions of "equity" and "diversity" have become a cornerstone of academic policy, promoted as a means of portraying a positive institutional image. However, these overused terms, she posits, are used primarily as a public relations tool rather than a vehicle for promoting social justice. The repetition of these words (albeit in ever-changing terminology) has contributed to "equity fatigue," as people within the sys- tem increasingly choose to ignore what they perceive to be unending rhetoric. Hallman (1998) has described such hollow expressions of commitment to equity principles as having a "magnanimous yet monotonous ring to them as ... words swirl about and descend softly like so much white liberal snow while ground disappears beneath our feet" (p. H2). In direct contrast to these realities, public promotions of equity on the part of institutions may be understood as tools used to conceal inequities, which do little to challenge the status quo of the institutional culture. Dissemination of the policy serves as a public display of the university's commitment to principles of equity, thereby becoming part of the "institutional performance" (Ahmed, 2007, p. 594) and presenting the image that the university has completed the job of addressing inequity. As Ahmed further explains, "the document becomes the fetish object . . . and its very existence is taken as evidence that the institutional world documented by the document (racism, inequality, injustice) has been overcome" (p. 597). Ironically, the policy becomes a substitute for any subsequent action and may in fact shut down any further consideration of the topic, rather than translating into a commitment to pursuing the issues. Hence, institutional actors are able to divest themselves of any further responsibility, satisfied that they have addressed equity concerns, while paradoxically remaining in a position of innocence, unimplicated in ongoing systems of oppression. As a result, those identified as members of traditionally marginalized groups are "invited in" and expected to adapt to the policies, practices, and culture as these exist. The need to introduce change, to foster meaningful inclusion, remains unacknowledged. Ultimately, as Ahmed (2007) forcefully argues, little actually changes, and systems of power and privilege within the organization continue unchallenged. C Censorship is never a viable political strategy: it is always rooted in an arbitrary system of state power that reproduces capitalism and shuts out reform. Shaw 12 Padmaja."Marx As Journalist: Revisiting The Free Speech Debate." N.p., 2010. Web. 7 Dec. 2016. http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/389. graduated with a Masters degree in Journalism from Osmania University, India, and an MA (Telecommunications) from Michigan State University, USA. She completed a PhD in Development Studies and has been teaching at the Department of Communication and Journalism, Osmania University, India, since 1988. She has two tracks of interest: Broadcast production and political economy of communication. She contributes regularly to a media watch website, The Hoot, and writes a regular column in a local English language daily newspaper, The Hans India *ellipsis from original text Marx’s opposition to censorship was not driven by any desire for an unregulated press. He argued for press laws that would be administered by independent judiciary: “… censorship … makes arbitrariness into a law. ... Just as a press law is different from a censorship law, so the judge's attitude to the press differs from the attitude of the censor. ... The independent judge belongs neither to me nor to the government. The dependent censor is himself a government organ ... The judge has a definite press offence put before him; confronting the censor is the spirit of the press. The judge judges my act according to a definite law; the censor not only punishes the crime, he makes it … The censorship does not accuse me of violating an existing law. It condemns my opinion because it is not the opinion of the censor and his superiors. My openly performed act, which is willing to submit itself to the world and its judgment, to the state and its law, has sentence passed on it by a hidden, purely negative power, which cannot give itself the form of law, which shuns the light of day, and which is not bound by any general principles”. “A censorship law is an impossibility because it seeks to punish not offences but opinions, because it cannot be anything but a formula for the censor, because no state has the courage to put in general legal terms what it can carry out in practice through the agency of the censor. For that reason, too, the operation of the censorship is entrusted not to the courts but to the police.” (Italics in original) (Marx 1842a) Describing true censorship as criticism that is the very essence of freedom of the press, Marx argued that censorship is criticism as government monopoly, but that the government wants to apply it in secrecy and does not itself want to suffer any criticism (Marx 1842b). Drawing a further distinction between press law and censorship he wrote: “In a press law, freedom punishes. In a censorship law, freedom is punished. The censorship law is a law of suspicion against freedom. The press law is a vote of confidence which the press gives itself. The press law punishes the misuse of freedom. The censorship law punishes freedom as misuse. ... Thus press law, far from being a repressive measure against freedom of the press, is merely a means to discourage repetition of violation through a penalty. … Laws are not repressive measures against freedom, any more than the law of gravity is a repressive measure against movement. ... Rather, laws are positive, clear, universal norms, in which freedom has won an impersonal, theoretical existence independent of the caprice of any individual. … Press law is the legal recognition of freedom”. (Marx 1842c) About freedom of the press, he wrote: “The free press is the ubiquitous vigilant eye of a people's soul, the embodiment of a people's faith in itself, the eloquent link that connects the individual with the state and the world, the embodied culture that transforms material struggles into intellectual struggles and idealises their crude material form. It is a people's frank confession to itself... It is the spiritual mirror in which a people can see itself, and self-examination is the first condition of wisdom”. (Marx 1842d). For Marx, the press is the “most general way for individuals to communicate their intellectual being. It knows no reputation of a person, but only the reputation of intelligence” (Marx, 1842e). Marx believed that a revolutionary movement must participate in public life and educate the proletariat and that it is necessary to protect free speech, as newspapers are the primary instruments of public communication (Hardt 2000) D Colorblindness is the root cause of many other forms of oppression. Ferber 12, Abby (Prof. of Sociology, Univ. of Colorado, Colorado Springs) "The culture of privilege: Color‐blindness, postfeminism, and christonormativity." Journal of Social Issues 68.1 (2012): 63-77. Color-blind racism assumes racial discrimination has ended, people are being treated in a color-blind fashion, and any differences we see in the success of racial groups is therefore due to inherent differences in the groups themselves. Colorblind ideology leads to the conclusion that we have done all we can. For many Whites, the election of Obama has been evoked to confirm their assumptions of a color-blind nation (Bonilla-Silva, 2010; Cunnigen and Bruce, 2010). Although many people naively embrace this view as non-racist, it reinforces and reproduces contemporary systemic racial inequality by denying its reality. These storylines “become part of the racial folklore and thus are shared, used, and believed by members of the dominant race. They are storylines because the words, phrases, and ideas used in these stories are very similar and seem scripted” (Bonilla-Silva, 2010, p. 70). These scripts are so ubiquitous that they are drawn upon to explain other forms of inequality as well. Color-blind racism needs to be examined from an intersectional perspective, making visible the ways it is connected and mutually constitutive of others ideologies of privilege. In the remainder of this article, I will examine discourses of oppression and privilege that rationalize male and Christian privilege, and argue that we must examine the ways in which these ideologies mirror color-blind racism, and reinforce one another. Postfeminism has emerged to justify and rationalize gender inequality, just as Christonormativity works to naturalize and protect Christian privilege. As Plaut argues, these cultural ideologies work together, therefore each one must be dismantled to advance the cause of social justice. Part 3: The Rally Free speech provides a starting point on which to base the class struggle. Farber 17 Samuel Farber (involved in left and socialist politics for well over fifty years) A Socialist Approach to Free Speech, Jacobin Online, 2/27/17 Indeed, breaking the ruling class control over socioeconomic power and establishing collective ownership depends on democracy: “the first step in the revolution by the working class,” proclaimed The Communist Manifesto, “is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.” For the most part, struggles for democratic rights — such as free speech, the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, workers’, and women’s rights — came after the bourgeois revolution. They were democratic conquests won through popular struggle. Free speech, free association, and other democratic freedoms allowed workers to fight for their interests. Some proponents of socialism from above tend to defend democratic freedoms only for the working class, but this perspective has a narrow and parochial view of a class that should be, as Lenin argued, “the tribune of the people,” the representative of the interests of the great social majority, and runs contrary to the socialist tradition’s strong emphasis on demanding universal political rights such as suffrage. In a more cynical vein, this political current has demanded free speech and other democratic rights only when they belong to the persecuted opposition. In contrast to this view, as Hal Draper argued in his 1968 article “Free Speech and Political Struggle”: “There can be no contradiction, no gulf in principle between what is demanded of the existing state, and what we propose for the society we want to replace it, a free society.” Consistent with this approach, we must defend free speech on its own terms, not merely because it helps to organize and fight for a new society. In this, free speech does not differ from the economic advances the working class and its allies have won. They are valuable both in their own right and because they strengthen the working class and its allies in their struggle for their emancipation. College campuses are a unique site for challenging neolib in the middle term. Tomlinson and Lipsitz 13 Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz (Professor of Black Studies, UC Santa Barbara) (2013) Insubordinate Spaces for Intemperate Times: Countering the Pedagogies of Neoliberalism, Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies Attending to this middle-range temporality compels us to think about spatiality as well. Neoliberalism has not only ‘‘taken place’’ in the sense that historians use the phrase to connote that events happen, but neoliberalism has also taken places, transforming public social sites like classrooms and community cultural events into spaces for commercial exchange. Creative collective action, however, can turn these sites into insubordinate spaces capable of serving as crucibles for building democratic capacities and capabilities. People seeking alternatives to the disciplinary subordination of neoliberalism can use using the middle-range temporality of the next two decades to develop practices, processes, and institutions promoting popular ability to participate in processes of democratic deliberation, mutual recognition, and collective accountability. Teachers and students can counter the classroom and social pedagogies of neoliberalism by cultivating new ways of knowing and new ways of being. Insubordinate spaces in the classroom can be crucibles for radically revising existing understandings of teaching and learning, of reading and writing, and of citizenship and social membership. At the same time, insubordinate spaces in communities can be sites for developing new networks of instruction, apprenticeship, and interaction. Thinking in terms of the middle run allows us to teach ourselves and others to exploit the fissures and fractures available to us. Wallerstein reminds us that the outcome of the struggle has not been foreclosed, but there is still much to do: dehegemonizing is hard work too. Students and universities protests oppose neoliberalism in higher education, establishing themselves as spaces of counter-hegemony Delgado and Ross 16 Sandra Delgado (doctoral student in curriculum studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada) and E. Wayne Ross (Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada), "Students in Revolt: The Pedagogical Potential of Student Collective Action in the Age of the Corporate University" 2016 (published on Academia.edu) As students’ collective actions keep gaining more political relevance, student and university movements also establish themselves as spaces of counter-hegemony (Sotiris, 2014). Students are constantly opening new possibilities to displace and resist the commodification of education offered by mainstream educational institutions. As Sotiris (2014) convincingly argues, movements within the university have not only the potential to subvert educational reforms, but in addition, they have become “strategic nodes” for the transformation of the processes and practices in higher education, and most importantly for the constant re-imagination and the recreation of “new forms of subaltern counter-hegemony” (p. 1). The strategic importance of university and college based moments lays precisely in the role that higher education plays in contemporary societies, namely their role in “the development of new technologies, new forms of production and for the articulation of discourses and theories on contemporary issues and their role in the reproduction of state and business personnel.” (p.8) Universities and colleges therefore, have a crucial contribution in “the development of class strategies (both dominant and subaltern), in the production of subjectivities, (and) in the transformation of collective practices” (p.8) The main objective of this paper is to examine how contemporary student movements are disrupting, opposing and displacing entrenched oppressive and dehumanizing reforms, practices and frames in today’s corporate academia. This work is divided in four sections. The first is an introduction to student movements and an overview of how student political action has been approached and researched. The second and third sections take a closer look at the repertoires of contention used by contemporary student movements and propose a framework based on radical praxis that allows us to better understand the pedagogical potential of student disruptive action. The last section contains a series of examples of students’ repertoires or tactics of contention that exemplifies the pedagogical potential of student social and political action. An Overview of Student Movements Generally speaking, students are well positioned as political actors. They have been actively involved in the politics of education since the beginnings of the university, but more broadly, students have played a significant role in defining social, cultural and political environments around the world (Altbach, 1966; Boren, 2001). The contributions and influences of students and student movements to revolutionary efforts and political movements beyond the university context are undeniable. One example is the role that students have played in the leadership and membership of the political left (e.g. students’ role in the Movimiento 26 de Julio - M-26-7 in Cuba during the 50’s and in the formation of The New Left in the United States, among others). Similarly, several political and social movements have either established alliances with student organizations or created their own chapters on campuses to recruit new members, mobilize their agendas in education and foster earlier student’s involvement in politics2 (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). Students are often considered to be “catalysts” of political and social action or “barometers” of the social unrest and political tension accumulated in society (Barker, 2008). Throughout history student movements have had a diverse and sometimes contradictory range of political commitments. Usually, student organizations and movements find grounding and inspiration in Anarchism and Marxism, however it is also common to see movements leaning towards liberal and conservative approaches. Hence, student political action has not always been aligned with social movements or organizations from the political left. In various moments in history students have joined or been linked to rightist movements, reactionary organizations and conservative parties (Altbach, 1966; Barker, 2008). Students, unlike workers, come from different social classes and seemly different cultural backgrounds. As a particularly diverse social group, students are distinguished for being heterogeneous and pluralists in their values, interests and commitments (Boren, 2001). Such diversity has been a constant challenge for maintaining unity, which has been particularly problematic in cases of national or transnational student organizations (Prusinowska, Kowzan, and Zielińska, 2012; Somma, 2012). To clarify, social classes are defined by the specific relationship that people have with the means of production. In the case of students, they are not a social class by themselves, but a social layer or social group that is identifiable by their common function in society (Stedman, 1969). The main or central aspect that unites student is the transitory social condition of being a student. In other words, students are a social group who have a common function, role in society or social objective, which is “to study” something (Lewis, 2013; Simons and Masschelein, 2009). Student movements can be understood as a form of social movement (LuesherMamashela, 2015). They have an internal organization that varies from traditionally hierarchical structures, organizational schemes based on representative democracy with charismatic leadership, to horizontal forms of decision-making (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). As many other movements, student movements have standing claims, organize different type of actions, tactics or repertoires of contention, 3 and they advocate for political, social or/and educational agendas, programs or pleas. Academia and professorial freedom is key to activism Jakobsen 12 Janet R. Jakobsen (Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and director of the Center for Research on Women at Barnard College, Columbia University), Collaborations, American quarterly 64.4 (2012): 809-813. There are potential ways to navigate this dilemma. Here I propose an approach that can preserve and build on the power of critique valued in humanistic circles, even as activist-academic collaborations contribute to both knowledge and action. The Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) has worked for the past several years on collaborative projects with community-based activist organizations in New York City. Some of the leaders of these projects had a chance to reflect on activist and academic work in a recent panel discussion at Barnard, including Ai-jen Poo of the National Domestic Workers’ Association; the activist dancer and choreographer Sydnie Mosley, who created the Harlem-based “Window Sex Project”; Amber Hollibaugh of Queers for Economic Justice; and Ana Oliveira of the New York Women’s Foundation, which provided grants to seventeen community-based organizations for a citywide project on reproductive justice. As Sydnie says in the discussion, academic research and resources can provide helpful supports to developing activist and artistic work, providing materials necessary to “create the new” as Ana puts it. The resultant projects avoid certain dangers (while doubtless encountering others) by moving across various boundaries: intermixing advocacy and critique, the empirical and the humanistic, as well as academic and activist knowledge production—sometimes “using” academic knowledge in activist pursuits and sometimes synthesizing knowledge produced in activist settings. For example, Amber spoke of the “Desiring Change” project, which started with a problem in organizing: why does desire keep dropping out of organizing projects, even projects that explicitly intend to connect desire to multiple issues? Amber’s point here is not about LGBTIQ people per se but about desire, including both erotic desire(s) and desire for another, more just, world. “How,” Amber asks, “do you build a movement that expresses hope for a different world, if you don’t claim one of the possibilities for where that hope might reside?” (Embed Amber 44:46–49:15) She is particularly concerned about how clear articulations of desire—along with joy, pleasure, and erotics—can incite people to join movements and build possibilities. Yet if desire End Page 828 repeatedly drops off the horizon as organizing progresses, could a problem lie within the model of organizing itself? The “Desiring Change” project brought together people from across organizations to ask these questions and produce new knowledge together. In other words, critique, including Amber’s critique of the state of contemporary organizing, opened new possibilities for both knowledge and action. The “Desiring Change” project was developed, in part, by activists who wanted to step back from the intensities of organizing and focus on the intellectual aspects of their projects. The academy can provide space and time for such reflection (albeit with increasing limitations); it can also provide support for the intellectual work required to develop organizing projects. In 2008 BCRW hosted the first national congress of domestic workers’ organizations, sponsored by the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance (NDWA), along with a follow-up northeast regional Congress in 2009. These groups worked with BCRW Barnard Center for Research on Women to develop a report, “Valuing Domestic Work,” that outlines the framework for their organizing along with a video highlighting their efforts. This organizing has been incredibly successful, culminating in 2010 with the New York State Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights, the first legislation passed in the United States to offer basic workplace protections to domestic workers. The bill’s passage was based on NDWA’s and DWU’s analysis of domestic workers’ status as part of a group of workers excluded from the category of labor. Through histories that deny the personhood of some workers, in the United States workers in fields like domestic work, farmwork, and various forms of piece work that are associated with slavery or immigration have also been excluded from basic labor protections, including the right to time off and basic compensation for severance of employment. In addressing this problem, the bill of rights was a major victory for domestic workers, as well as a shift in labor law in the United States. Because of its argument for legislative expansion of the category “protected workers,” at one level this organizing is basic liberal humanist advocacy. At another level, however, this organizing includes a critique of precisely the autonomous individual who is the subject of modern freedom and wage labor. First, of course, the movement shows that the effects of chattel slavery are not over when labor associated with slavery is not as “free” as other forms of work. Nor is the free market actually free. It does not allow for the free movement of individuals to sell their labor but uses national boundaries to devalue and coerce the labor of immigrants. Even more profoundly, however, the work undertaken by domestic workers challenges the liberal humanist concept of End Page 829 the autonomous individual at its core. Realization of the university as a hegemonic apparatus is the only way to understand the militant class struggle. Sotiris 14 Panagiotis Sotiris, Department of Sociology, University of the Aegean, “University movements as laboratories of counter-hegemony.” Aug 6, 2014. The realization of a hegemonic apparatus is also always linked to a transformation not just of the ideological balance of forces, but a more general transformation of forms of knowledge, consciousness and collective practice. ‘The realization of a hegemonic apparatus, in so far as it creates an new ideological terrain determines a reform of knowledge and of methods of knowledge: it is a fact of knowledge, a philosophical fact’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 365-366; Gramsci 1977, p. 1250 (Q10II, §12)). I think that this conception offers us a way to think both the importance of the university as a hegemonic apparatus (or to be more precise as part of the hegemonic apparatus of the bourgeoisie), the ways the current neoliberal entrepreneurial restructuring of the university has to be related to changes to actual hegemonic strategies, but also the political and (counter)hegemonic potential of movements within universities. This Gramscian approach can also help us understand the non-teleological historicity of the University, how it became part of the bourgeois hegemonic apparatus as the result of whole history of struggles and strategies, at all levels. Neolib obscures the importance of identity, creates colorblindness. Wagner 11 Wagner, Anne (is assistant professor in Sociology and Child and Family Studies at Nipissing University), and June Ying Yee. "Anti-oppression in higher education: Implicating neo-liberalism." Canadian Social Work Review/Revue canadienne de service social (2011): 89-105. Interestingly, neoliberalism appears to be taking hold at a time when demands from traditionally marginalized groups are gaining momentum. As barriers begin to be deconstructed and racism begins to be debated openly in various academic and community forums, the response of academia has been to emphasize issues of "excellence" and "meritocracy" and the need to compete financially for limited resources. As Smith (2010) notes, although neoliberalism acknowledges issues of gender equity, it continues to uphold the liberal myth of colour blindness (p. 48), thereby negating the salience of race and other sources of systemic inequities. The focus on purportedly neutral, standardized, individualized, and measurable performance indicators and measures supports an emphasis on "merit," which has historically shrouded systemic forms of discrimination (Smith, 2010). In this way, neoliberalism acts as a tool to retrench race-evasive discourses of neutrality that posit "Whiteness" as a referential norm, diverting attention from the way in which such supposedly neutral standards and mechanisms fortify existing systems of domination (Dei, 2008, 2009; Razack, 2002) Part 4: Speech Codes Bans on things like hate speech are hopelessly short sighted—it just treats the symptom of the problem in exchange for feel-good politics. Fisher 17 (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 The discussion of "safe spaces" has become one of the most divisive subsections of the debate over free speech on campus. PEN America’s partial endorsement of that concept may come as a surprise: The group describes the creation of "small, self-selected groups united by shared views," which could be anything from a group of five Iranian-born students kicking around stories from back home in a dormitory common room to a chapter of the Hillel club, which on some campuses consist of hundreds of Jewish students as members. But the report opposes making entire campuses "safe spaces" from discomfort. The authors argue against such a "hermetically sealed intellectual environment where inhabitants could traffic only in pre-approved ideas." This is key. Students of all political and identity stripes should be permitted to form their own independent groups for any reason, whether it’s just to feel "at home" or express sentiments that wouldn't be as popular in the broader campus community. But these students should not expect their safe space to extend to every minute of their day or every inch of the school. Unfortunately, some students have demanded campus-wide safe spaces, leading to such self-spiting actions as closing the campus from deliberately provocative speakers such as Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart technology editor/notorious internet troll. Rather than allowing Yiannapoulos's noxious grandstanding to serve as its own indictment, several campuses have preferred to keep their students “safe” from his outlandish views. But pretending "problematic" thought doesn’t exist won't make it so; such perspectives should be engaged, defeated, in the public arena of ideas. In perhaps the most cogent line of the entire report, the authors write: “Overreaction to problematic speech may impoverish the environment for speech for all.” In the name of social justice, some students are demanding administrators become the arbiters of what speech is legitimate and what isn’t. These students don’t seem to grasp that by granting authority figures the power to adjudicate which speakers have the right to be heard, they will inevitably find their own speech silenced when opponents claim offense, fear, or discomfort.
4/29/17
JF - Kant AC
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 6 | Opponent: American Heritage Boca Delray EM | Judge: David Branse I value morality since the resolution is normative. Every agent has a practical identity that is the source of value. Christine M. Korsgaard 92, professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. “The Sources of Normativity”, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values Those who think that the human mind is internally luminous and transparent to itself think that the term “self-consciousness” is appropriate because what we get in human consciousness is a direct encounter with the self. Those who think that the human mind has a reflective structure use the term too, but for a different rea- son. The reflective structure of the mind is a source of “self- consciousness” because it forces us to have a conception of our- selves. As Kant argues, this is a fact about what it is like to be reflectively conscious and it does not prove the existence of a meta- physical self. From a third person point of view, outside of the deliberative standpoint, it may look as if what happens when someone makes a choice is that the strongest of his conflicting desires wins. But that isn’t the way it is for you when you deliber- ate. When you deliberate, it is as if there were something over and above all of your desires, something that is you, and that chooses which desire to act on. This means that the principle or law by which you determine your actions is one that you regard as being expressive of yourself. To identify with such a principle or law is to be, in St. Paul’s famous phrase, a law to yourself. An agent might think of herself as a Citizen in the Kingdom of Ends. Or she might think of herself as a member of a family or an ethnic group or a nation. She might think of herself as the steward of her own interests, and then she will be an egoist. Or she might think of herself as the slave of her passions, and then she will be a wanton. And how she thinks of herself will deter- mine whether it is the law of the Kingdom of Ends, or the law of some smaller group, or the law of the egoist, or the law of the wanton that is the law that she is to herself. The conception of one’s identity in question here is not a theo- retical one, a view about what as a matter of inescapable scientific fact you are. It is better understood as a description under which you value yourself, a description under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking. So I will call this a conception of your practical identity. Practical identity is a complex matter and for the average person there will be a jumble of such conceptions. You are a human being, a woman or a man, an adherent of a certain religion, a member of an ethnic group, someone’s friend, and so on. And all of these identities give rise to reasons and obligations. Your reasons express your identity, your nature; your obligations spring from what that identity forbids. And, reason is inescapable—even asking for reason uses reason. Any attempt to make a coherent argument is still evaluated from reason which means agency is confined by reason. And, truth exist independent of human experience since certain things are self-proving, i.e. a triangle has three sides. It doesn’t matter whether we call it something since the truth of the statement is contained within itself. In contrast, things that are true by observation are just true by matter of chance. For example, we conceive of a world in which I have blue hair since it is only by chance that I have brown hair. Reject a posteriori truth since they are just arbitrary states, not constitutive of our ethical theories. The content of normative claims has to be contained within themselves—the nature of obligation is what gives us the ability to deduct what obligations we have. David Velleman 05 (Professor of Philosophy at New York University). “A Brief Introduction to Kantian Ethics”. 2005. Kant reasoned that if moral requirements don't derive their force from any external authority, then they must carry their authority with them, simply by virtue of what they require. That's why Kant thought that he could derive the content of our obligations from the very concept of an obligation. The concept of an obligation, he argued, is the concept of an intrinsically authoritative requirement—a requirement that, simply by virtue of what it requires, forestalls any question as to its authority. So if we want to know what we're morally required to do, we must find something such that a requirement to do it would not be open to question. We must find something such that a requirement would carry authority simply by virtue of requiring that thing. That means only my framework can be binding—agents can try reject other normative metrics if unless the value of the obligation is contained within itself. Second Analytic Thus, the standard is consistency in the rational will. Prefer it independently:
Absent a rational will, actions become unintelligible since the intent determines the action. Christine Korsgaard 14 (Professor at Harvard University) “How to be an Aristotelian Kantian Constitutivist.” 2014 “First of all, no one thinks a wholly “external performance,” if that just means a bodily movement, has any moral value. Suppose that you are starving, and I am about to eat a sandwich when I learn about this. And suppose that just then I am attacked by a series of involuntary muscle spasms that cause me to make exactly the same physical movements I would make if I were giving you my sandwich. No one would claim that this “external performance” has any moral value. An act must be done with a certain proximate or immediate intention in order to count as an act at all. And that proximate or immediate intention is already part of an action’s motive. So in order to even count as “giving you my sandwich” I have to at least intend to transmit the sandwich from my possession to yours.” 2. The ability to rationally will an end is prerequisite to any moral theory because it allows to choose moral actions in the first place and adhere to ethical codes. This coopts ethical theories like util because the ability to pursue pleasure is a prerequisite to achieving pleasure. 3. Anything being good commits us to valuing it unconditionally. Christine M. Korsgaard 06 ( Professor at Harvard) “Morality and the Logic of Caring: A Comment on Harry Frankfurt”. Pg. 7 RC “If practical reasons are public, however, it must be possible for us to share them: that is, to share in their normative force. Any reasons that I assign to you must also be ones that I can share with you and can take to have normative force for me. In that case I cannot will to steal an object from you unless I could possibly will that you should in similar circumstances steal the object from me. Assuming that I cannot do that, consistent with my end of possessing the object, I find that I cannot will this maxim as a universal law. And therefore I conclude that my wanting something cannot provide a sufficient reason for stealing it. So if the universal law universalizes over all rational beings and yields public reasons, then it turns out to be something like Kant’s moral law.” Also means that only my framework gives reason for action and thus guide agents to act in certain ways. Contention I advocate that public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech. I’ll defend consequentialist impacts, but they’re not relevant under my framework since I just need to need to show that the maxim of the aff is consistent with the rational will. And, the aff is omission since public colleges and universities are not taking an action, whereas the neg has to defend the proactive measure of restricting free speech. First Analytic Second, there is a distinction between right and virtue. Right refers to external freedom, i.e. your ability to not be coerced, whereas virtue refers to a more internal freedom, i.e. you being internally motivated to make an ethical choice. Restricting free speech prevents being from being able to truly act on ethical choices. Helga Varden 10 (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). “A Kantian Conception of Free Speech”. Springer, 22 May 2010. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.10072F978-90-481-8999-1_4 RC 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. That’s creates inconsistency in the rational will—people will ethical actions from unethical motivations which leads to contradiction. Third, it’s impossible for words to violate someone’s external freedom since it is up to the listener to believe them or not. Helga Varden 2 (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). “A Kantian Conception of Free Speech”. Springer, 22 May 2010. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.10072F978-90-481-8999-1_4 RC 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 her 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 coer- cion, 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. And, yes, while in some instances words can be used coerce others, i.e. fighting words, that simply justifies limiting free speech in that particular instance, not as general principle. Moreover, simply saying something immoral or reprehensible is different from coercion via threats. Helga Varden 3 (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). “A Kantian Conception of Free Speech”. Springer, 22 May 2010. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.10072F978-90-481-8999-1_4 RC Second, it is important to distinguish threats of coercion from merely immoral speech. When you threaten me, you tell me that you do not intend to interact rightfully with me in the future. Simply saying so does not deprive me of anything that is mine, of course, but if you are serious and have the ability to make a strike against me, that is, if you really are threatening me, then you intend to back up your words with physical force. When you really threaten me, neither are you uttering ‘empty words’ nor are you taking yourself to be doing so. For example, assume that instead of yielding to your threat, I begin to walk away. You then move forward to block my retreat. This signals your intention to follow through with the threat. In fact, you might engage in other acts to signal that the threat is not empty. Perhaps you crush my hat under your foot or take a baseball bat to my car. In cases like these the words con- tained in the threat no longer function merely as speech but take on the role of communicating an intended future wrongdoing against me. Hence, threats are not considered mere speech on this view.
2/22/17
JF - SV AC
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 2 | Opponent: Byram Hills AS | Judge: Sophia Caldera Framework – Structural Violence Morality must start from the non-ideal circumstances we have inherited. We can never achieve the ideal consequences that ethical theories aspire for without a focus on social reality Mills 05 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. This approach to ethics justifies focus on resolving material conditions of violence. Morality isn’t just something that we strive for in a vaccum, rather, we resolve it based on the empirical world. Pappas 16 Gregory Fernando Pappas Texas AandM University “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 prob- lematic 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 prac- tice a much more personalized medicine than we do today, that is, provide a diagnosis and a solution specific to each patient. Thus, the standard is resolving material conditions of violence. Prefer additionally: First, the standard outweighs on actor specificity. Government must be practical and cannot concern itself with metaphysical questions – its only role is to protect citizens’ interests Rhonheimer 05 (Martin, Prof Of Philosophy at The Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome). “THE POLITICAL ETHOS OF CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY AND THE PLACE OF NATURAL LAW IN PUBLIC REASON: RAWLS’S “POLITICAL LIBERALISM” REVISITED” The American Journal of Jurisprudence vol. 50 (2005), pp. 1-70 “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) analytic b) analytic Second, there is no act/omission for governments—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. Third, the oppressed don’t care about the abstract- they want actual consequential change. Anything else is just a reflection of privilege. Utt ’13: Jamie Utt is a writer and a diversity and inclusion consultant and sexual violence prevention educator, “Intent vs. Impact: Why Your Intentions Don’t Really Matter,” July 30, 2013 I cannot tell you how often I’ve seen people attempt to deflect criticism about their oppressive language or actions by making the conversation about their intent. At what point does the “intent” conversation stop mattering so that we can step back and look at impact? After all, in the end, what does the intent of our action really matter if our actions have the impact of furthering the marginalization or oppression of those around us? In some ways, this is a simple lesson of relationships. If I say something that hurts my partner, it doesn’t much matter whether I intended the statement to mean something else – because my partner is hurting. I need to listen to how my language hurt my partner. I need to apologize. And then I need to reflect and empathize to the best of my ability so I don’t do it again. But when we’re dealing with the ways in which our identities intersect with those around us – and, in turn, the ways our privileges and our experiences of marginalization and oppression intersect – this lesson becomes something much larger and more profound. This becomes a lesson of justice. What we need to realize is that when it comes to people’s lives and identities, the impact of our actions can be profound and wide-reaching. And that’s far more important than the question of our intent. We need to ask ourselves what might be or might have been the impact of our actions or words. And we need to step back and listen when we are being told that the impact of our actions is out of step with our intents or our perceptions of self. Identity Privilege and Intent For people of identity privilege, this is where listening becomes vitally important, for our privilege can often shield us from understanding the impact of our actions. After all, as a person of privilege, I can never fully understand the ways in which oppressive acts or language impact those around me. What I surely can do is listen with every intent to understand, and I can work to change my behavior. Because what we need to understand is that making the conversation about intent is inherently a privileged action. The reason? It ensures that you and your identity (and intent) stay at the center of any conversation and action while the impact of your action or words on those around you is marginalized. So if someone ever tells you to “check your privilege,” what they may very well mean is: “Stop centering your experience and identity in the conversation by making this about the intent of your actions instead of their impact.” That is: Not everything is about you. “What They Did” vs. “What They Are” The incredible Ill Doctrine puts it well when he explains the difference between the “What They Did” conversation and the “What They Are” conversation, which you can watch here. In essence, the “intent” conversation is one about “what they are.” Because if someone intended their action to be hurtful and racist/sexist/transphobic/pickyourpoison, then they must inherently be racist/sexist/transphobic/pickyourpoison. On the other hand, the “impact” conversation is one about “what they did.” For you, it takes the person who said or did the hurtful thing out of the center and places the person who was hurt in the center. It ensures that the conversation is about how “what they did” hurts other people and further marginalizes or oppresses people. Advocacy I defend whole res – i.e., a world in which public colleges do not restrict any constitutionally protected free speech. Advantage – Racism Advantage one is racism- The 1AC’s endorsing of free speech eliminates structures of oppression – a) it allows us to identify racists so that we can persuade them otherwise; this solves the root cause of oppression. 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 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. 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. Of course, as the British experience shows, hatred exists not just in speech but also has physical consequences. Is it not important, critics of my view ask, to limit the fomenting of hatred to protect the lives of those who may be attacked? In asking this very question, they are revealing the distinction between speech and action. The aff creates a spillover effect – challenging oppression in everyday discussions is key to shaping larger cultural landscapes. Malik 2 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/ Much of what we call hate speech consists, however, of claims that may be contemptible but yet are accepted by many as morally defensible. Hence I am wary of the argument that some sentiments are so immoral they can simply be condemned without being contested. First, such blanket condemnations are often a cover for the inability or unwillingness politically to challenge obnoxious sentiments. 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. Student protest combats racial inequality by sparking national dialogue and movements Curwen 15 Thomas Curwen, Jason Song and Larry Gordon (reporters), "What's different about the latest wave of college activism," LA Times, 11/18/2015 Although some of the strategies may seem familiar, it is the speed and the urgency of today's protests that are different. "What is unique about these issues is how social media has changed the way protests take place on college campuses," said Tyrone Howard, associate dean of equity, diversity and inclusion at UCLA. "A protest goes viral in no time flat. With Instagram and Twitter, you're in an immediate news cycle. This was not how it was 20 or 30 years ago." Howard also believes that the effectiveness of the actions at the University of Missouri has encouraged students on other campuses to raise their voices. "A president stepping down is a huge step," he said. "Students elsewhere have to wonder, 'Wow, if that can happen there, why can't we bring out our issues to the forefront as well?'" Shaun R. Harper, executive director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education, agrees. The resignation of two top Missouri administrators, Harper said, showed students and athletes around the country that they have power they may not have realized before. The protests show "we're all together and we have the power to make the change we deserve," said Lindsay Opoku-Acheampong, a senior studying biology at Occidental. "It's affirming," said Dalin Celamy, also a senior at the college. "It lets us know we're not crazy; it's happening to people who are just like you all over the country." Celamy, along with other students, not only watched the unfolding protests across the country, but also looked to earlier protests, including an occupation of an administrative building at Occidental in 1968. Echoes of the 1960s in today's actions are clear, said Robert Cohen, a history professor at New York University and author of "Freedom's Orator," a biography of Mario Savio, who led the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. "The tactical dynamism of these nonviolent protests and the public criticism of them are in important ways reminiscent of the 1960s," Cohen said. "Today's protests, like those in the '60s, are memorable because they have been effective in pushing for change and sparking dialogue as well as polarization." Although the targets of these protests are the blatant and subtle forms of racism and inequity that affect the students' lives, the message of the protests resonates with the recent incidents of intolerance and racial inequity on the streets of America. There is a reason for this, Howard said. Campuses are microcosms of society, he said, and are often comparable in terms of representation and opportunity. "So there is a similar fight for more representation, acceptance and inclusion." The dynamic can create a complicated and sensitive social order for students of color to negotiate. "Latino and African American students are often under the belief if they leave their community and go to colleges, that it will be better," Howard said. "They believe it will be an upgrade over the challenges that they saw in underserved and understaffed schools. But if the colleges and universities are the same as those schools, then there is disappointment and frustration." In addition, Howard said, when these students leave their community to go to a university, they often feel conflicted. "So when injustice comes up," he said, "they are quick to respond because it is what they saw in their community. On some level, it is their chance to let their parents and peers know that they have not forgotten the struggle in the community." On campuses and off, Harper, of the University of Pennsylvania center, finds a rising sense of impatience among African Americans about social change. "As a black person, I think black people are just fed up. It's time out for ignoring these issues," he said. While protests in the 1960s helped create specific safeguards for universities today, such as Title IX, guaranteeing equal access for all students to any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance, a gap has widened over the years between students and administrators over perceptions of bias. Institutions often valued for their support of free speech find themselves wrestling with the prospect of limiting free speech, but to focus on what is or isn't politically correct avoids the more important issue, Cohen said: whether campuses are diverse enough or how to reduce racism. Occidental student Raihana Haynes-Venerable has heard criticism that modern students are too sensitive, but she argues that subtle forms of discrimination still have a profound effect. She pointed to women making less than men and fewer minorities getting jobs as examples. "This is the new form of racism," she said. Attempts to silence problematic perspectives on campus only functions to further empower them. Beinart 2/3 Peter Beinart (Contributing editor at The Atlantic and an associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York), "Milo Yiannopoulos Tested Progressives—and They Failed", The Atlantic, 02/03/2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/everyone-has-a-right-to-free-speech-even-milo/515565/?utm_source=atlfb
The second argument for preventing Yiannopoulos from speaking is that his ideas are more than merely offensive. His conduct at public events has constituted harassment. As a group of Berkeley professors detailed in a letter, Yiannopoulos, projected a picture of a trans student onto a screen during his speech at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, last December—an event that was also live-streamed on Breitbart News. He “continued to ridicule and vilify her in front of the live campus audience and the online audience. The student was so disturbed by this experience that she withdrew from the university.” But this argument is weak, too. Yiannopoulos’s behavior at the Milwaukee campus sounds disgusting. But as Dirks wrote in response, “critical statements and even the demeaning ridicule of individuals are largely protected by the Constitution.” If they were not, a lot of comedians would have trouble performing live. And even if the targeted UWM student has grounds to sue, Berkeley cannot prevent the College Republicans from hosting Yiannopoulos because of the possibility that he might do something like that again. Politically, the problem with shutting Yiannopoulos down is obvious. The reason the College Republicans invited him in the first place was “because we believe there exists a dearth of intellectual diversity on this campus,” and “conservative thought is actively repressed.” Not letting him speak on campus just makes their point. It lets Yiannopoulos depict himself as a victim of “political correctness.” Which is the grievance that fuels his ugly persona in the first place. Advantage – State Control Advantage two is state control- Putting restrictions on free speech creates a dangerous slippery slope and leads to co-option of movements that lead to silencing of voices. Universities should not be the arbiters of communication. Fisher 16 Anthony L. Fisher, Dec 13, 2016, “Opposition to “offensive” speech on campuses will ultimately burn dissidents”, http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/13/13931524/free-speech-pen-america-campus-censorship In perhaps the most cogent line of the entire report, the authors write: “Overreaction to problematic speech may impoverish the environment for speech for all.” In the name of social justice, some students are demanding administrators become the arbiters of what speech is legitimate and what isn’t. These students don’t seem to grasp that by granting authority figures the power to adjudicate which speakers have the right to be heard, they will inevitably find their own speech silenced when opponents claim offense, fear, or discomfort. Calls for crackdowns on “offensive” speech inevitably boomerang It’s already happening. Just ask the Palestinian activists whose boycott campaigns against Israel have 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. Any risk of restriction is just another instance on of the sovereign encroaching on life—the state maintains a monopoly on power and dictates who is and is not political. Smith 11 Mick, Department of Philosophy and School of Environmental Studies , Queen's University , Kingston, Canada). “Against ecological sovereignty: Agamben, politics and globalization”. 23 Feb 2011. Schmitt’s Political Theology (2005, p. 5) opens with his famous definition – ‘the sovereign is he who decides on the exception’; that is to say, it is the ultimate mark of sovereign power to be able to suspend the normal rule of law and political order by declaring a ‘state of emergency’ (exception). What is more, since such a suspension is paradigmatically only envisaged under exceptional circumstances (at times of political crisis) the precise conditions of its imposition cannot be pre-determined (and hence codified in law or a procedural politics) but depends precisely upon an extra-legal/procedural decision made by the very power that thereby awards itself a monopoly on political power/action. Agamben, like Schmitt, emphasises how the possibility of this ultimately arbitrary decisionistic assumption of absolute territorial power underlies all claims of state sovereignty, no matter what kind of political constitution such states espouse. Paradoxically, then, the (state of) exception is precisely that situation that (ap)proves the sovereign power’s rule. ‘What the ‘‘ark’’ of power contains at its center is the state of exception – but this is essentially an empty space’ (Agamben 2005, p. 86). The declaration of a state of emergency is both the ultimate political act and simultaneously the abrogation of politics per se. Here, participation in the ‘political realm’ which, from Hannah Arendt’s (1958, p. 198) and Agamben’s (which owes much to Arendt) perspective, ‘rises directly out of acting together, the ‘‘sharing of words and deeds’’’, is denied, by a political decision, to some or all of the population of a given territory, thereby reducing them to a state that Agamben refers to as ‘bare-life’, that is, human existence stripped of its ethico-political possibilities This opens up space for the worst atrocities imaginable—the state deems the human as non-human, clearing the way for genocide. Edkins 2000 Department of International Politics, University of Wales). “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp”. 2000. The camp is exemplary as a location of a zone of indistinction. Although in general the camp is set up precisely as part of a state of emergency or martial law, under Nazi rule this becomes not so much a state of exception in the sense of an external and provi- sional state of danger as but a means of establishing the Nazi state itself. The camp is "the space opened up when the state of exception begins to becomes the rule."17 In the camp, the distinction between the rule of law and chaos disappears: decisions about life and death are entirely arbitrary, and everything is possible. A zone of indistinction appears between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit. What happened in the twentieth century in the West, and paradigmatically since the advent of the camp, was that the space of the state of exception transgressed its bound- aries and started to coincide with the normal order. The zone of indistinction expanded from a space of exclusion within the nor- mal order to take over that order entirely. In the concentration camp, inhabitants are stripped of every political status, and the arbitrary power of the camp attendants confronts nothing but what Agamben calls bare life, or homo sacer, a creature who can be killed but not sacrificed.18 This figure, an essential figure in modern politics, is constituted by and constitu- tive of sovereign power. Homo sacer is produced by the sovereign ban and is subject to two exceptions: he is excluded from human law (killing him does not count as homicide) and he is excluded from divine law (killing him is not a ritual killing and does not count as sacrilege). He is set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law. This double exclusion of course also counts as a double inclusion: "homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificability and is included in the com- munity in the form of being able to be killed."19 This exposes homo sacer to a new kind of human violence such as is found in the camp and constitutes the political as the double exception: the ex- clusion of both the sacred and the profane. Student protests oppose neoliberalism in higher education, translating theory into praxis Delgado and Ross 16 Sandra Delgado (doctoral student in curriculum studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada) and E. Wayne Ross (Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada), "Students in Revolt: The Pedagogical Potential of Student Collective Action in the Age of the Corporate University" 2016 (published on Academia.edu) As students’ collective actions keep gaining more political relevance, student and university movements also establish themselves as spaces of counter-hegemony (Sotiris, 2014). Students are constantly opening new possibilities to displace and resist the commodification of education offered by mainstream educational institutions. As Sotiris (2014) convincingly argues, movements within the university have not only the potential to subvert educational reforms, but in addition, they have become “strategic nodes” for the transformation of the processes and practices in higher education, and most importantly for the constant re-imagination and the recreation of “new forms of subaltern counter-hegemony” (p. 1). The strategic importance of university and college based moments lays precisely in the role that higher education plays in contemporary societies, namely their role in “the development of new technologies, new forms of production and for the articulation of discourses and theories on contemporary issues and their role in the reproduction of state and business personnel.” (p.8) Universities and colleges therefore, have a crucial contribution in “the development of class strategies (both dominant and subaltern), in the production of subjectivities, (and) in the transformation of collective practices” (p.8) The main objective of this paper is to examine how contemporary student movements are disrupting, opposing and displacing entrenched oppressive and dehumanizing reforms, practices and frames in today’s corporate academia. This work is divided in four sections. The first is an introduction to student movements and an overview of how student political action has been approached and researched. The second and third sections take a closer look at the repertoires of contention used by contemporary student movements and propose a framework based on radical praxis that allows us to better understand the pedagogical potential of student disruptive action. The last section contains a series of examples of students’ repertoires or tactics of contention that exemplifies the pedagogical potential of student social and political action. An Overview of Student Movements Generally speaking, students are well positioned as political actors. They have been actively involved in the politics of education since the beginnings of the university, but more broadly, students have played a significant role in defining social, cultural and political environments around the world (Altbach, 1966; Boren, 2001). The contributions and influences of students and student movements to revolutionary efforts and political movements beyond the university context are undeniable. One example is the role that students have played in the leadership and membership of the political left (e.g. students’ role in the Movimiento 26 de Julio - M-26-7 in Cuba during the 50’s and in the formation of The New Left in the United States, among others). Similarly, several political and social movements have either established alliances with student organizations or created their own chapters on campuses to recruit new members, mobilize their agendas in education and foster earlier student’s involvement in politics2 (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). Students are often considered to be “catalysts” of political and social action or “barometers” of the social unrest and political tension accumulated in society (Barker, 2008). Throughout history student movements have had a diverse and sometimes contradictory range of political commitments. Usually, student organizations and movements find grounding and inspiration in Anarchism and Marxism, however it is also common to see movements leaning towards liberal and conservative approaches. Hence, student political action has not always been aligned with social movements or organizations from the political left. In various moments in history students have joined or been linked to rightist movements, reactionary organizations and conservative parties (Altbach, 1966; Barker, 2008). Students, unlike workers, come from different social classes and seemly different cultural backgrounds. As a particularly diverse social group, students are distinguished for being heterogeneous and pluralists in their values, interests and commitments (Boren, 2001). Such diversity has been a constant challenge for maintaining unity, which has been particularly problematic in cases of national or transnational student organizations (Prusinowska, Kowzan, and Zielińska, 2012; Somma, 2012). To clarify, social classes are defined by the specific relationship that people have with the means of production. In the case of students, they are not a social class by themselves, but a social layer or social group that is identifiable by their common function in society (Stedman, 1969). The main or central aspect that unites student is the transitory social condition of being a student. In other words, students are a social group who have a common function, role in society or social objective, which is “to study” something (Lewis, 2013; Simons and Masschelein, 2009). Student movements can be understood as a form of social movement (LuesherMamashela, 2015). They have an internal organization that varies from traditionally hierarchical structures, organizational schemes based on representative democracy with charismatic leadership, to horizontal forms of decision-making (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). As many other movements, student movements have standing claims, organize different type of actions, tactics or repertoires of contention, 3 and they advocate for political, social or/and educational agendas, programs or pleas.
2/18/17
JF - Util AC
Tournament: UH Cougar Classic | Round: 2 | Opponent: Kinkaid SM | Judge: Emily Nguyen First, necessary enablers are the only way to structure action- If I have an obligation to X, and doing Y is necessary to do X, I have an obligation to do Y. Sinnott-Armstrong. Walter, "An argument for consequentialism." Philosophical Perspectives (1992): 399-421. Page 400 “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’. This principle is confirmed by moral reasons with negative structures. I have a moral reason to help a friend this afternoon. I cannot do so if I play golf this afternoon. Not playing golf this afternoon will enable me to help my friend. So I have a moral reason not to play golf this afternoon. Similarly, I have a moral reason not to endanger other drivers (beyond acceptable limits). I can’t drink too much before I drive without endangering other drivers. Not drinking too much will enable me to avoid endangering other drivers. Therefore, I have a moral reason not to drink too much before I drive. The validity of such varied arguments confirms moral substitutability.” And, this structure of action necessitates consequentialism or NEC. Sinnott-Armstrong 2. Walter, "An argument for consequentialism." Philosophical Perspectives (1992): 399-421. Page 400 “All of this leads to necessary enabler consequentialism or NEC. NEC claims that all moral reasons for acts are provided by facts that the acts are necessary enablers for preventing harm or promoting good. All moral reasons on this theory are consequential reasons, but there are tow kinds. Some moral reasons are prevention reasons, because they are facts that an act is a necessary enabler for preventing harm or loss. For example, if giving Alice food is necessary and enables me to prevent her from starving, then that fact is a moral reason to give her food. In this case, I would not cause her death even if I let her starve, but other moral prevention reasons are reasons to avoid causing harm. For example, if turning my car to the left is necessary and enablers me to avoid killing Bobby, that is a moral reason to turn my car to the left. The other kind of moral reason is a promotion reason. This kind of reason occurs when doing something is necessary and enables me to promote (or maximize) some good. For example, I have a moral reason to throw a surprise party for Susan if this is necessary and enables me to make her happy. Because of substitutability, these moral reasons for actions also yield moral reasons against contrary actions. There are then also moral reasons not to do what will cause harm or ensure a failure to prevent harm or promote good. What makes these facts moral reasons is that they can make an otherwise immoral act moral. If I have a moral reason to feed my child, then it might be immoral to give my only food to Alice, who is a stranger. But his would not be immoral if giving Alice good is necessary and enables me to prevent Alice from starving, as long as my child will not starve also. Similarly, it is normally immoral to lie to Susan, but a lie can be moral if it is necessary and enables me to keep my party for Susan a surprise, and if this is also necessary and enables me to make her happy. Thus, NEC fits nicely into the above theory of moral reasons. NEC can provide a natural explanation of moral substitutability for both kinds of reasons. I have a prevention moral reason to give someone food when doing so is necessary and enables me to prevent that person from starving. Suppose that buying food is a necessary enabler for giving the person food, and getting in my car is a necessary enabler for buying food. Moral substitutability warrants the conclusion that I have a moral reason to get in my car. And this act of getting in my car does have the property of being a necessary enabler for preventing starvation. Thus, the necessary enabler has the same property that provided the moral reason to give the food in the first place. This explains why substitutability holds for moral prevention reasons. The other kind of moral reason covers necessary enabler for promoting good. In my example above, if a surprise party is a necessary enabler for making Susan happy, and letting people know about the party is a necessary enabler for having a party, then letting people know is a necessary enabler for making Susan happy. The very fact that provides a moral reason to have the party also provides a moral reason to let people know about it. Thus, NEC can explain why moral substitutability holds for every kind of reason that is includes. Similarly explanations work for moral reasons not to do certain acts, and this explanatory power is a reason to favor NEC. Of course, this should come as no surprise. NEC was intentionally structured to that it would explain moral substitutability. But this does not detract from its explanatory force. The point is that moral substitutability remains a mystery unless we restrict our substantive theory to moral reasons that obey moral substitutability by their very nature. The crucial advantage of NEC lies in its unity. Other theories claim that my reason to do what I promised is just that this fulfills my promise or that promise keeping is intrinsically good. However, I did not promise to start the mower, and starting the mower is not intrinsically good. Thus, my reason to start the mower derives from a different property than my reason to keep my promise. In contrast, NEC makes my reasons to keep my promise, to mow the lawn, and to start the mower derive from the very same property: being a necessary enabler of preventing harm or promoting good. This makes NEC's explanation more coherent and better. A critic might complain that NEC just postpones the problem, since NEC will eventually need to explain why certain things are good or bad, and some will be good or bad as means, but others will not. However, if what is good or bad intrinsically are states (such as pleasure and freedom or pain and death) rather than acts, then they are not the kind of thing that can be done, so there cannot be any question of a reason to do them. This makes it possible for all reasons for acts to have the same nature or derive from the same property. NEC will still have to explain why certain states are good or bad, but so will every other moral theory. The difference is that other theories will also have to explain why there are two kinds of reasons for acts and how these reasons are connected. This is what other theories cannot explain. This additional explanatory gap is avoided by the unified nature of reasons in NEC.” (415- Second, util is a lexical pre-requisite to any other framework- a. Analytic b. Analytic Thus, the standard is maximizing expected well-being. Advocacy I defend the whole resolution – i.e., a world in which public colleges do not restrict any constitutionally protected free speech. No speech can be restricted on the basis of utility since the truth of an opinion is part of its utility—that is, whether it will be useful for people to believe a certain thing is in itself a "matter of opinion" which must be discussed. Mill 63 John Stuart Mill "Utilitarianism" 1863, http://www.justiceharvard.org/resources/j-s-mill-utilitarianism-1863/ Questions about ends are, in other words, questions what things are desirable. The utilitarian doctrine is, that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end; all other things being only desirable as means to that end. What ought to be required of this doctrine- what conditions is it requisite that the doctrine should fulfil- to make good its claim to be believed? The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible, is that people hear it: and so of the other sources of our experience. In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it. If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was so. No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness. This, however, being a fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good: that each person’s happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons. Happiness has made out its title as one of the ends of conduct, and consequently one of the criteria of morality. Advantage – Racism Advantage one is racism- The 1AC’s endorsing of free speech eliminates structures of oppression – a) it allows us to identify racists so that we can persuade them otherwise; this solves the root cause of oppression. 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 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. 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. Of course, as the British experience shows, hatred exists not just in speech but also has physical consequences. Is it not important, critics of my view ask, to limit the fomenting of hatred to protect the lives of those who may be attacked? In asking this very question, they are revealing the distinction between speech and action. The aff creates a spillover effect – challenging oppression in everyday discussions is key to shaping larger cultural landscapes. Malik 2 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/ Much of what we call hate speech consists, however, of claims that may be contemptible but yet are accepted by many as morally defensible. Hence I am wary of the argument that some sentiments are so immoral they can simply be condemned without being contested. First, such blanket condemnations are often a cover for the inability or unwillingness politically to challenge obnoxious sentiments. 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. Silencing bigots only re-entrenches their position and galvanizes their opposition to social justice movements Levinovitz 16 Alan Levinovitz, assistant professor of religion at James Madison University, “How Trigger Warnings Silence Religious Students,” The Atlantic, August 30, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/silencing-religious-students-on-campus/497951/ There is no doubt that in America, the perspective of white, heterosexual Christian males has enjoyed disproportionate emphasis, particularly in higher education. Trigger warnings, safe spaces, diversity initiatives, and attention to social justice: all of these are essential for pushing back against this lopsided power dynamic. But there is a very real danger that these efforts will become overzealous and render opposing opinions taboo. Instead of dialogues in which everyone is fairly represented, campus conversations about race, gender, and religion will devolve into monologues about the virtues of tolerance and diversity. I have seen it happen, not only at the University of Chicago, my alma mater, but also at the school where I currently teach, James Madison University, where the majority of students are white and Christian. The problem, I’d wager, is fairly widespread, at least at secular universities. Silencing these voices is not a good thing for anyone, especially the advocates of marginalized groups who hope to sway public opinion. Take for example the idea that God opposes homosexuality, a belief that some students still hold. On an ideal campus, these students would feel free to voice their belief. They would then be confronted by opposing arguments, spoken, perhaps, by the very people whose sexual orientation they have asserted is sinful. At least in this kind of environment, these students would have an opportunity to see the weaknesses in their position and potentially change their minds. But if students do not feel free to voice their opinions, they will remain silent, retreating from the classroom to discuss their position on homosexuality with family, friends, and other like-minded individuals. They will believe, correctly in some cases, that advocates of gay rights see them as hateful, intolerant bigots who deserve to be silenced, and which may persuade them to cling with even greater intensity to their convictions. A more charitable interpretation of the University of Chicago letter is that it is meant to inoculate students against allergy to argument. Modern, secular, liberal education is supposed to combine a Socratic ideal of the examined life with a Millian marketplace of ideas. It is boot camp, not a hotel. In theory, this will produce individuals who have cultivated their intellect and embraced new ideas via communal debate—the kind of individuals who make good neighbors and citizens. The communal aspect of the debate is important. It demands patience, open-mindedness, empathy, the courage to question others and be questioned, and above all, attempting to see things as others do. But even though academic debate takes place in a community, it is also combat. Combat can hurt. It is literally offensive. Without offense there is no antagonistic dialogue, no competitive marketplace, and no chance to change your mind. Impious, disrespectful Socrates was executed in Athens for having the temerity to challenge people’s most deeply held beliefs. It would be a shame to execute him again. Perceived assault on free speech drives voters to the right wing which leads to disasters like the Trump presidency. Soave 16 Robby Soave, Associate editor at Reason.com, enjoys writing about college news, education policy, criminal justice reform, and television, “Trump Won Because Leftist Political Correctness Inspired a Terrifying Backlash”, Nov. 9, 2016, http://reason.com/blog/2016/11/09/trump-won-because-leftist-political-corr Trump won because of a cultural issue that flies under the radar and remains stubbornly difficult to define, but is nevertheless hugely important to a great number of Americans: political correctness. More specifically, Trump won because he convinced a great number of Americans that he would destroy political correctness. I have tried to call attention to this issue for years. I have warned that political correctness actually is a problem on college campuses, where the far-left has gained institutional power and used it to punish people for saying or thinking the wrong thing. And ever since Donald Trump became a serious threat to win the GOP presidential primaries, I have warned that a lot of people, both on campus and off it, were furious about political-correctness-run-amok—so furious that they would give power to any man who stood in opposition to it. I have watched this play out on campus after campus. I have watched dissident student groups invite Milo Yiannopoulos to speak—not because they particularly agree with his views, but because he denounces censorship and undermines political correctness. I have watched students cheer his theatrics, his insulting behavior, and his narcissism solely because the enforcers of campus goodthink are outraged by it. It's not about his ideas, or policies. It's not even about him. It's about vengeance for social oppression. Trump has done to America what Yiannopoulos did to campus. This is a view Yiannopoulos shares. When I spoke with him about Trump's success months ago, he told me, "Nobody votes for Trump or likes Trump on the basis of policy positions. That's a misunderstanding of what the Trump phenomenon is." He described Trump as "an icon of irreverent resistance to political correctness." Correctly, I might add. What is political correctness? It's notoriously hard to define. I recently appeared on a panel with CNN's Sally Kohn, who described political correctness as being polite and having good manners. That's fine—it can mean different things to different people. I like manners. I like being polite. That's not what I'm talking about. The segment of the electorate who flocked to Trump because he positioned himself as "an icon of irreverent resistance to political correctness" think it means this: smug, entitled, elitist, privileged leftists jumping down the throats of ordinary folks who aren't up-to-date on the latest requirements of progressive society. Example: A lot of people think there are only two genders—boy and girl. Maybe they're wrong. Maybe they should change that view. Maybe it's insensitive to the trans community. Maybe it even flies in the face of modern social psychology. But people think it. Political correctness is the social force that holds them in contempt for that, or punishes them outright. If you're a leftist reading this, you probably think that's stupid. You probably can't understand why someone would get so bent out of shape about being told their words are hurtful. You probably think it's not a big deal and these people need to get over themselves. Who's the delicate snowflake now, huh? you're probably thinking. I'm telling you: your failure to acknowledge this miscalculation and adjust your approach has delivered the country to Trump. There's a related problem: the boy-who-cried-wolf situation. I was happy to see a few liberals, like Bill Maher, owning up to it. Maher admitted during a recent show that he was wrong to treat George Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain like they were apocalyptic threats to the nation: it robbed him of the ability to treat Trump more seriously. The left said McCain was a racist supported by racists, it said Romney was a racist supported by racists, but when an actually racist Republican came along—and racists cheered him—it had lost its ability to credibly make that accusation. This is akin to the political-correctness-run-amok problem: both are examples of the left's horrible over-reach during the Obama years. The leftist drive to enforce a progressive social vision was relentless, and it happened too fast. I don't say this because I'm opposed to that vision—like most members of the under-30 crowd, I have no problem with gender neutral pronouns—I say this because it inspired a backlash that gave us Trump. My liberal critics rolled their eyes when I complained about political correctness. I hope they see things a little more clearly now. The left sorted everyone into identity groups and then told the people in the poorly-educated-white-male identity group that that's the only bad one. It mocked the members of this group mercilessly. It punished them for not being woke enough. It called them racists. It said their video games were sexist. It deployed Lena Dunham to tell them how horrible they were. Lena Dunham! I warned that political-correctness-run-amok and liberal overreach would lead to a counter-revolution if unchecked. That counter-revolution just happened. There is a cost to depriving people of the freedom (in both the legal and social senses) to speak their mind. Advantage – State Control Advantage two is state control- Putting restrictions on free speech creates a dangerous slippery slope and leads to co-option of movements that lead to silencing of voices. Universities should not be the arbiters of communication. Fisher 16 Anthony L. Fisher, Dec 13, 2016, “Opposition to “offensive” speech on campuses will ultimately burn dissidents”, http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/13/13931524/free-speech-pen-america-campus-censorship In perhaps the most cogent line of the entire report, the authors write: “Overreaction to problematic speech may impoverish the environment for speech for all.” In the name of social justice, some students are demanding administrators become the arbiters of what speech is legitimate and what isn’t. These students don’t seem to grasp that by granting authority figures the power to adjudicate which speakers have the right to be heard, they will inevitably find their own speech silenced when opponents claim offense, fear, or discomfort. Calls for crackdowns on “offensive” speech inevitably boomerang It’s already happening. Just ask the Palestinian activists whose boycott campaigns against Israel have 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. Any risk of restriction is just another instance on of the sovereign encroaching on life—the state maintains a monopoly on power and dictates who is and is not political. Smith 11 Mick, Department of Philosophy and School of Environmental Studies , Queen's University , Kingston, Canada). “Against ecological sovereignty: Agamben, politics and globalization”. 23 Feb 2011. Schmitt’s Political Theology (2005, p. 5) opens with his famous definition – ‘the sovereign is he who decides on the exception’; that is to say, it is the ultimate mark of sovereign power to be able to suspend the normal rule of law and political order by declaring a ‘state of emergency’ (exception). What is more, since such a suspension is paradigmatically only envisaged under exceptional circumstances (at times of political crisis) the precise conditions of its imposition cannot be pre-determined (and hence codified in law or a procedural politics) but depends precisely upon an extra-legal/procedural decision made by the very power that thereby awards itself a monopoly on political power/action. Agamben, like Schmitt, emphasises how the possibility of this ultimately arbitrary decisionistic assumption of absolute territorial power underlies all claims of state sovereignty, no matter what kind of political constitution such states espouse. Paradoxically, then, the (state of) exception is precisely that situation that (ap)proves the sovereign power’s rule. ‘What the ‘‘ark’’ of power contains at its center is the state of exception – but this is essentially an empty space’ (Agamben 2005, p. 86). The declaration of a state of emergency is both the ultimate political act and simultaneously the abrogation of politics per se. Here, participation in the ‘political realm’ which, from Hannah Arendt’s (1958, p. 198) and Agamben’s (which owes much to Arendt) perspective, ‘rises directly out of acting together, the ‘‘sharing of words and deeds’’’, is denied, by a political decision, to some or all of the population of a given territory, thereby reducing them to a state that Agamben refers to as ‘bare-life’, that is, human existence stripped of its ethico-political possibilities This opens up space for the worst atrocities imaginable—the state deems the human as non-human, clearing the way for genocide. Edkins 2000 Department of International Politics, University of Wales). “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp”. 2000. The camp is exemplary as a location of a zone of indistinction. Although in general the camp is set up precisely as part of a state of emergency or martial law, under Nazi rule this becomes not so much a state of exception in the sense of an external and provi- sional state of danger as but a means of establishing the Nazi state itself. The camp is "the space opened up when the state of exception begins to becomes the rule."17 In the camp, the distinction between the rule of law and chaos disappears: decisions about life and death are entirely arbitrary, and everything is possible. A zone of indistinction appears between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit. What happened in the twentieth century in the West, and paradigmatically since the advent of the camp, was that the space of the state of exception transgressed its bound- aries and started to coincide with the normal order. The zone of indistinction expanded from a space of exclusion within the nor- mal order to take over that order entirely. In the concentration camp, inhabitants are stripped of every political status, and the arbitrary power of the camp attendants confronts nothing but what Agamben calls bare life, or homo sacer, a creature who can be killed but not sacrificed.18 This figure, an essential figure in modern politics, is constituted by and constitu- tive of sovereign power. Homo sacer is produced by the sovereign ban and is subject to two exceptions: he is excluded from human law (killing him does not count as homicide) and he is excluded from divine law (killing him is not a ritual killing and does not count as sacrilege). He is set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law. This double exclusion of course also counts as a double inclusion: "homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificability and is included in the com- munity in the form of being able to be killed."19 This exposes homo sacer to a new kind of human violence such as is found in the camp and constitutes the political as the double exception: the ex- clusion of both the sacred and the profane. Constitutionally protected speech is key- it was meant to be a counter-majoritarian right to break down institutions. 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 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. Free speech is key to preventing mass government violence endless warfare- this is a gateway to any other util impact. 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. Underview Restrictions on hate speech fail – they’ll just repackage the message using a dog-whistle that avoids the restriction but causes the same intended harm. Malik 3 (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/) Kenan Malik: I am not sure that ‘hate speech’ is a particularly useful concept. Much is said and written, of course, that is designed to promote hatred. But it makes little sense to lump it all together in a single category, especially when hatred is such a contested concept. In a sense, hate speech restriction has become a means not of addressing specific issues about intimidation or incitement, but of enforcing general social regulation. This is why if you look at hate speech laws across the world, there is no consistency about what constitutes hate speech. Britain bans abusive, insulting, and threatening speech. Denmark and Canada ban speech that is insulting and degrading. India and Israel ban speech that hurts religious feelings and incites racial and religious hatred. In Holland, it is a criminal offense deliberately to insult a particular group. Australia prohibits speech that offends, insults, humiliates, or intimidates individuals or groups. Germany bans speech that violates the dignity of, or maliciously degrades or defames, a group. And so on. In each case, the law defines hate speech in a different way. One response might be to say: Let us define hate speech much more tightly. I think, however, that the problem runs much deeper. Hate speech restriction is a means not of tackling bigotry but of rebranding certain, often obnoxious, ideas or arguments as immoral. It is a way of making certain ideas illegitimate without bothering politically to challenge them. And that is dangerous. 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.
1/6/17
JF - Util AC v2
Tournament: Barkley Forum | Round: 3 | Opponent: Stuyvesant KL | Judge: Terrence Lonam ROB The role of the ballot is to evaluate the simulated consequences of the aff world through a policymaking paradigm. You can weigh the SQUO or a competitive policymaking paradigm against the aff. Prefer:
Fairness. A. Anything moots 6 minutes of 1ac offense – forces 1ar restart. They get a 13-7-minute advantage which means we have worse discussion, even if the subject of discussion is slightly better. At the very worst that means I get to weigh the case to preserve my offense. B. Independently, there is a huge spectrum of political theories – the k can be the radical on both sides of the spectrum and multifunctional aff offense is insufficient to interact with everything. 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). 2. Heuristics. The 1AC acknowledges the state is bad in many ways. However, the aff uses state as heuristic which doesn’t affirm its legitimacy but allows enhanced governmental resistance. Zanotti 14 Dr. Laura Zanotti (Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech) “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 Framework First, necessary enablers are the only way to structure action- If I have an obligation to X, and doing Y is necessary to do X, I have an obligation to do Y. Sinnott-Armstrong. Walter, "An argument for consequentialism." Philosophical Perspectives (1992): 399-421. Page 400 “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’. This principle is confirmed by moral reasons with negative structures. I have a moral reason to help a friend this afternoon. I cannot do so if I play golf this afternoon. Not playing golf this afternoon will enable me to help my friend. So I have a moral reason not to play golf this afternoon. Similarly, I have a moral reason not to endanger other drivers (beyond acceptable limits). I can’t drink too much before I drive without endangering other drivers. Not drinking too much will enable me to avoid endangering other drivers. Therefore, I have a moral reason not to drink too much before I drive. The validity of such varied arguments confirms moral substitutability.” And, this structure of action necessitates consequentialism or NEC. Sinnott-Armstrong 2. Walter, "An argument for consequentialism." Philosophical Perspectives (1992): 399-421. Page 400 “All of this leads to necessary enabler consequentialism or NEC. NEC claims that all moral reasons for acts are provided by facts that the acts are necessary enablers for preventing harm or promoting good. All moral reasons on this theory are consequential reasons, but there are tow kinds. Some moral reasons are prevention reasons, because they are facts that an act is a necessary enabler for preventing harm or loss. For example, if giving Alice food is necessary and enables me to prevent her from starving, then that fact is a moral reason to give her food. In this case, I would not cause her death even if I let her starve, but other moral prevention reasons are reasons to avoid causing harm. For example, if turning my car to the left is necessary and enablers me to avoid killing Bobby, that is a moral reason to turn my car to the left. The other kind of moral reason is a promotion reason. This kind of reason occurs when doing something is necessary and enables me to promote (or maximize) some good. For example, I have a moral reason to throw a surprise party for Susan if this is necessary and enables me to make her happy. Because of substitutability, these moral reasons for actions also yield moral reasons against contrary actions. There are then also moral reasons not to do what will cause harm or ensure a failure to prevent harm or promote good. What makes these facts moral reasons is that they can make an otherwise immoral act moral. If I have a moral reason to feed my child, then it might be immoral to give my only food to Alice, who is a stranger. But his would not be immoral if giving Alice good is necessary and enables me to prevent Alice from starving, as long as my child will not starve also. Similarly, it is normally immoral to lie to Susan, but a lie can be moral if it is necessary and enables me to keep my party for Susan a surprise, and if this is also necessary and enables me to make her happy. Thus, NEC fits nicely into the above theory of moral reasons. NEC can provide a natural explanation of moral substitutability for both kinds of reasons. I have a prevention moral reason to give someone food when doing so is necessary and enables me to prevent that person from starving. Suppose that buying food is a necessary enabler for giving the person food, and getting in my car is a necessary enabler for buying food. Moral substitutability warrants the conclusion that I have a moral reason to get in my car. And this act of getting in my car does have the property of being a necessary enabler for preventing starvation. Thus, the necessary enabler has the same property that provided the moral reason to give the food in the first place. This explains why substitutability holds for moral prevention reasons. The other kind of moral reason covers necessary enabler for promoting good. In my example above, if a surprise party is a necessary enabler for making Susan happy, and letting people know about the party is a necessary enabler for having a party, then letting people know is a necessary enabler for making Susan happy. The very fact that provides a moral reason to have the party also provides a moral reason to let people know about it. Thus, NEC can explain why moral substitutability holds for every kind of reason that is includes. Similarly explanations work for moral reasons not to do certain acts, and this explanatory power is a reason to favor NEC. Of course, this should come as no surprise. NEC was intentionally structured to that it would explain moral substitutability. But this does not detract from its explanatory force. The point is that moral substitutability remains a mystery unless we restrict our substantive theory to moral reasons that obey moral substitutability by their very nature. The crucial advantage of NEC lies in its unity. Other theories claim that my reason to do what I promised is just that this fulfills my promise or that promise keeping is intrinsically good. However, I did not promise to start the mower, and starting the mower is not intrinsically good. Thus, my reason to start the mower derives from a different property than my reason to keep my promise. In contrast, NEC makes my reasons to keep my promise, to mow the lawn, and to start the mower derive from the very same property: being a necessary enabler of preventing harm or promoting good. This makes NEC's explanation more coherent and better. A critic might complain that NEC just postpones the problem, since NEC will eventually need to explain why certain things are good or bad, and some will be good or bad as means, but others will not. However, if what is good or bad intrinsically are states (such as pleasure and freedom or pain and death) rather than acts, then they are not the kind of thing that can be done, so there cannot be any question of a reason to do them. This makes it possible for all reasons for acts to have the same nature or derive from the same property. NEC will still have to explain why certain states are good or bad, but so will every other moral theory. The difference is that other theories will also have to explain why there are two kinds of reasons for acts and how these reasons are connected. This is what other theories cannot explain. This additional explanatory gap is avoided by the unified nature of reasons in NEC.” (415-417) Thus, the standard is maximizing expected well-being. Prefer additionally:
State Obligations- The constitutive obligation of governments is to be utilitarian. Robert Goodin 90, professor of philosophy at the Australian National University college of arts and social sciences, “The Utilitarian Response,” pgs 141-142 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 public officials and their situations that make it 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 what will happen most often to most people as a result of their various possible choices, but that is all. That is enough to allow public policy-makers to use the utilitarian calculus – assuming they want to use it at all – to choose general rules or conduct. Advocacy I defend the whole resolution – i.e., a world in which public colleges do not restrict any constitutionally protected speech. Advantage – Racism Advantage one is racism- The 1AC’s endorsing of free speech eliminates structures of oppression – a) it allows us to identify racists so that we can persuade them otherwise; this solves the root cause of oppression. 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 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. 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. Of course, as the British experience shows, hatred exists not just in speech but also has physical consequences. Is it not important, critics of my view ask, to limit the fomenting of hatred to protect the lives of those who may be attacked? In asking this very question, they are revealing the distinction between speech and action. The aff creates a spillover effect – challenging oppression in everyday discussions is key to shaping larger cultural landscapes. Malik 2 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/ Much of what we call hate speech consists, however, of claims that may be contemptible but yet are accepted by many as morally defensible. Hence I am wary of the argument that some sentiments are so immoral they can simply be condemned without being contested. First, such blanket condemnations are often a cover for the inability or unwillingness politically to challenge obnoxious sentiments. 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. Silencing bigots only re-entrenches their position and galvanizes their opposition to social justice movements Levinovitz 16 Alan Levinovitz, assistant professor of religion at James Madison University, “How Trigger Warnings Silence Religious Students,” The Atlantic, August 30, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/silencing-religious-students-on-campus/497951/ There is no doubt that in America, the perspective of white, heterosexual Christian males has enjoyed disproportionate emphasis, particularly in higher education. Trigger warnings, safe spaces, diversity initiatives, and attention to social justice: all of these are essential for pushing back against this lopsided power dynamic. But there is a very real danger that these efforts will become overzealous and render opposing opinions taboo. Instead of dialogues in which everyone is fairly represented, campus conversations about race, gender, and religion will devolve into monologues about the virtues of tolerance and diversity. I have seen it happen, not only at the University of Chicago, my alma mater, but also at the school where I currently teach, James Madison University, where the majority of students are white and Christian. The problem, I’d wager, is fairly widespread, at least at secular universities. Silencing these voices is not a good thing for anyone, especially the advocates of marginalized groups who hope to sway public opinion. Take for example the idea that God opposes homosexuality, a belief that some students still hold. On an ideal campus, these students would feel free to voice their belief. They would then be confronted by opposing arguments, spoken, perhaps, by the very people whose sexual orientation they have asserted is sinful. At least in this kind of environment, these students would have an opportunity to see the weaknesses in their position and potentially change their minds. But if students do not feel free to voice their opinions, they will remain silent, retreating from the classroom to discuss their position on homosexuality with family, friends, and other like-minded individuals. They will believe, correctly in some cases, that advocates of gay rights see them as hateful, intolerant bigots who deserve to be silenced, and which may persuade them to cling with even greater intensity to their convictions. A more charitable interpretation of the University of Chicago letter is that it is meant to inoculate students against allergy to argument. Modern, secular, liberal education is supposed to combine a Socratic ideal of the examined life with a Millian marketplace of ideas. It is boot camp, not a hotel. In theory, this will produce individuals who have cultivated their intellect and embraced new ideas via communal debate—the kind of individuals who make good neighbors and citizens. The communal aspect of the debate is important. It demands patience, open-mindedness, empathy, the courage to question others and be questioned, and above all, attempting to see things as others do. But even though academic debate takes place in a community, it is also combat. Combat can hurt. It is literally offensive. Without offense there is no antagonistic dialogue, no competitive marketplace, and no chance to change your mind. Impious, disrespectful Socrates was executed in Athens for having the temerity to challenge people’s most deeply held beliefs. It would be a shame to execute him again. Student protest combats racial inequality by sparking national dialogue and movements Curwen 15 Thomas Curwen, Jason Song and Larry Gordon (reporters), "What's different about the latest wave of college activism," LA Times, 11/18/2015 Although some of the strategies may seem familiar, it is the speed and the urgency of today's protests that are different. "What is unique about these issues is how social media has changed the way protests take place on college campuses," said Tyrone Howard, associate dean of equity, diversity and inclusion at UCLA. "A protest goes viral in no time flat. With Instagram and Twitter, you're in an immediate news cycle. This was not how it was 20 or 30 years ago." Howard also believes that the effectiveness of the actions at the University of Missouri has encouraged students on other campuses to raise their voices. "A president stepping down is a huge step," he said. "Students elsewhere have to wonder, 'Wow, if that can happen there, why can't we bring out our issues to the forefront as well?'" Shaun R. Harper, executive director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education, agrees. The resignation of two top Missouri administrators, Harper said, showed students and athletes around the country that they have power they may not have realized before. The protests show "we're all together and we have the power to make the change we deserve," said Lindsay Opoku-Acheampong, a senior studying biology at Occidental. "It's affirming," said Dalin Celamy, also a senior at the college. "It lets us know we're not crazy; it's happening to people who are just like you all over the country." Celamy, along with other students, not only watched the unfolding protests across the country, but also looked to earlier protests, including an occupation of an administrative building at Occidental in 1968. Echoes of the 1960s in today's actions are clear, said Robert Cohen, a history professor at New York University and author of "Freedom's Orator," a biography of Mario Savio, who led the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. "The tactical dynamism of these nonviolent protests and the public criticism of them are in important ways reminiscent of the 1960s," Cohen said. "Today's protests, like those in the '60s, are memorable because they have been effective in pushing for change and sparking dialogue as well as polarization." Although the targets of these protests are the blatant and subtle forms of racism and inequity that affect the students' lives, the message of the protests resonates with the recent incidents of intolerance and racial inequity on the streets of America. There is a reason for this, Howard said. Campuses are microcosms of society, he said, and are often comparable in terms of representation and opportunity. "So there is a similar fight for more representation, acceptance and inclusion." The dynamic can create a complicated and sensitive social order for students of color to negotiate. "Latino and African American students are often under the belief if they leave their community and go to colleges, that it will be better," Howard said. "They believe it will be an upgrade over the challenges that they saw in underserved and understaffed schools. But if the colleges and universities are the same as those schools, then there is disappointment and frustration." In addition, Howard said, when these students leave their community to go to a university, they often feel conflicted. "So when injustice comes up," he said, "they are quick to respond because it is what they saw in their community. On some level, it is their chance to let their parents and peers know that they have not forgotten the struggle in the community." On campuses and off, Harper, of the University of Pennsylvania center, finds a rising sense of impatience among African Americans about social change. "As a black person, I think black people are just fed up. It's time out for ignoring these issues," he said. While protests in the 1960s helped create specific safeguards for universities today, such as Title IX, guaranteeing equal access for all students to any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance, a gap has widened over the years between students and administrators over perceptions of bias. Institutions often valued for their support of free speech find themselves wrestling with the prospect of limiting free speech, but to focus on what is or isn't politically correct avoids the more important issue, Cohen said: whether campuses are diverse enough or how to reduce racism. Occidental student Raihana Haynes-Venerable has heard criticism that modern students are too sensitive, but she argues that subtle forms of discrimination still have a profound effect. She pointed to women making less than men and fewer minorities getting jobs as examples. "This is the new form of racism," she said. Advantage – State Control Advantage two is state control- Putting restrictions on free speech creates a dangerous slippery slope and leads to co-option of movements that lead to silencing of voices. Universities should not be the arbiters of communication. Fisher 16 Anthony L. Fisher, Dec 13, 2016, “Opposition to “offensive” speech on campuses will ultimately burn dissidents”, http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/13/13931524/free-speech-pen-america-campus-censorship In perhaps the most cogent line of the entire report, the authors write: “Overreaction to problematic speech may impoverish the environment for speech for all.” In the name of social justice, some students are demanding administrators become the arbiters of what speech is legitimate and what isn’t. These students don’t seem to grasp that by granting authority figures the power to adjudicate which speakers have the right to be heard, they will inevitably find their own speech silenced when opponents claim offense, fear, or discomfort. Calls for crackdowns on “offensive” speech inevitably boomerang It’s already happening. Just ask the Palestinian activists whose boycott campaigns against Israel have 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. Any risk of restriction is just another instance on of the sovereign encroaching on life—the state maintains a monopoly on power and dictates who is and is not political. Smith 11 Mick, Department of Philosophy and School of Environmental Studies , Queen's University , Kingston, Canada). “Against ecological sovereignty: Agamben, politics and globalization”. 23 Feb 2011. Schmitt’s Political Theology (2005, p. 5) opens with his famous definition – ‘the sovereign is he who decides on the exception’; that is to say, it is the ultimate mark of sovereign power to be able to suspend the normal rule of law and political order by declaring a ‘state of emergency’ (exception). What is more, since such a suspension is paradigmatically only envisaged under exceptional circumstances (at times of political crisis) the precise conditions of its imposition cannot be pre-determined (and hence codified in law or a procedural politics) but depends precisely upon an extra-legal/procedural decision made by the very power that thereby awards itself a monopoly on political power/action. Agamben, like Schmitt, emphasises how the possibility of this ultimately arbitrary decisionistic assumption of absolute territorial power underlies all claims of state sovereignty, no matter what kind of political constitution such states espouse. Paradoxically, then, the (state of) exception is precisely that situation that (ap)proves the sovereign power’s rule. ‘What the ‘‘ark’’ of power contains at its center is the state of exception – but this is essentially an empty space’ (Agamben 2005, p. 86). The declaration of a state of emergency is both the ultimate political act and simultaneously the abrogation of politics per se. Here, participation in the ‘political realm’ which, from Hannah Arendt’s (1958, p. 198) and Agamben’s (which owes much to Arendt) perspective, ‘rises directly out of acting together, the ‘‘sharing of words and deeds’’’, is denied, by a political decision, to some or all of the population of a given territory, thereby reducing them to a state that Agamben refers to as ‘bare-life’, that is, human existence stripped of its ethico-political possibilities This opens up space for the worst atrocities imaginable—the state deems the human as non-human, clearing the way for genocide. Edkins 2000 Department of International Politics, University of Wales). “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp”. 2000. The camp is exemplary as a location of a zone of indistinction. Although in general the camp is set up precisely as part of a state of emergency or martial law, under Nazi rule this becomes not so much a state of exception in the sense of an external and provi- sional state of danger as but a means of establishing the Nazi state itself. The camp is "the space opened up when the state of exception begins to becomes the rule."17 In the camp, the distinction between the rule of law and chaos disappears: decisions about life and death are entirely arbitrary, and everything is possible. A zone of indistinction appears between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit. What happened in the twentieth century in the West, and paradigmatically since the advent of the camp, was that the space of the state of exception transgressed its bound- aries and started to coincide with the normal order. The zone of indistinction expanded from a space of exclusion within the nor- mal order to take over that order entirely. In the concentration camp, inhabitants are stripped of every political status, and the arbitrary power of the camp attendants confronts nothing but what Agamben calls bare life, or homo sacer, a creature who can be killed but not sacrificed.18 This figure, an essential figure in modern politics, is constituted by and constitu- tive of sovereign power. Homo sacer is produced by the sovereign ban and is subject to two exceptions: he is excluded from human law (killing him does not count as homicide) and he is excluded from divine law (killing him is not a ritual killing and does not count as sacrilege). He is set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law. This double exclusion of course also counts as a double inclusion: "homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificability and is included in the com- munity in the form of being able to be killed."19 This exposes homo sacer to a new kind of human violence such as is found in the camp and constitutes the political as the double exception: the ex- clusion of both the sacred and the profane. Free speech is key to preventing mass government violence endless warfare- this is a gateway to any other util impact. 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.
1/28/17
JF - Util AC v3
Tournament: Barkley Forum | Round: 5 | Opponent: Charlotte Catholic DE | Judge: David Joannides First, necessary enablers are the only way to structure action- If I have an obligation to X, and doing Y is necessary to do X, I have an obligation to do Y. Sinnott-Armstrong. Walter, "An argument for consequentialism." Philosophical Perspectives (1992): 399-421. Page 400 “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’. This principle is confirmed by moral reasons with negative structures. I have a moral reason to help a friend this afternoon. I cannot do so if I play golf this afternoon. Not playing golf this afternoon will enable me to help my friend. So I have a moral reason not to play golf this afternoon. Similarly, I have a moral reason not to endanger other drivers (beyond acceptable limits). I can’t drink too much before I drive without endangering other drivers. Not drinking too much will enable me to avoid endangering other drivers. Therefore, I have a moral reason not to drink too much before I drive. The validity of such varied arguments confirms moral substitutability.” And, this structure of action necessitates consequentialism or NEC. Sinnott-Armstrong 2. Walter, "An argument for consequentialism." Philosophical Perspectives (1992): 399-421. Page 400 “All of this leads to necessary enabler consequentialism or NEC. NEC claims that all moral reasons for acts are provided by facts that the acts are necessary enablers for preventing harm or promoting good. All moral reasons on this theory are consequential reasons, but there are tow kinds. Some moral reasons are prevention reasons, because they are facts that an act is a necessary enabler for preventing harm or loss. For example, if giving Alice food is necessary and enables me to prevent her from starving, then that fact is a moral reason to give her food. In this case, I would not cause her death even if I let her starve, but other moral prevention reasons are reasons to avoid causing harm. For example, if turning my car to the left is necessary and enablers me to avoid killing Bobby, that is a moral reason to turn my car to the left. The other kind of moral reason is a promotion reason. This kind of reason occurs when doing something is necessary and enables me to promote (or maximize) some good. For example, I have a moral reason to throw a surprise party for Susan if this is necessary and enables me to make her happy. Because of substitutability, these moral reasons for actions also yield moral reasons against contrary actions. There are then also moral reasons not to do what will cause harm or ensure a failure to prevent harm or promote good. What makes these facts moral reasons is that they can make an otherwise immoral act moral. If I have a moral reason to feed my child, then it might be immoral to give my only food to Alice, who is a stranger. But his would not be immoral if giving Alice good is necessary and enables me to prevent Alice from starving, as long as my child will not starve also. Similarly, it is normally immoral to lie to Susan, but a lie can be moral if it is necessary and enables me to keep my party for Susan a surprise, and if this is also necessary and enables me to make her happy. Thus, NEC fits nicely into the above theory of moral reasons. NEC can provide a natural explanation of moral substitutability for both kinds of reasons. I have a prevention moral reason to give someone food when doing so is necessary and enables me to prevent that person from starving. Suppose that buying food is a necessary enabler for giving the person food, and getting in my car is a necessary enabler for buying food. Moral substitutability warrants the conclusion that I have a moral reason to get in my car. And this act of getting in my car does have the property of being a necessary enabler for preventing starvation. Thus, the necessary enabler has the same property that provided the moral reason to give the food in the first place. This explains why substitutability holds for moral prevention reasons. The other kind of moral reason covers necessary enabler for promoting good. In my example above, if a surprise party is a necessary enabler for making Susan happy, and letting people know about the party is a necessary enabler for having a party, then letting people know is a necessary enabler for making Susan happy. The very fact that provides a moral reason to have the party also provides a moral reason to let people know about it. Thus, NEC can explain why moral substitutability holds for every kind of reason that is includes. Similarly explanations work for moral reasons not to do certain acts, and this explanatory power is a reason to favor NEC. Of course, this should come as no surprise. NEC was intentionally structured to that it would explain moral substitutability. But this does not detract from its explanatory force. The point is that moral substitutability remains a mystery unless we restrict our substantive theory to moral reasons that obey moral substitutability by their very nature. The crucial advantage of NEC lies in its unity. Other theories claim that my reason to do what I promised is just that this fulfills my promise or that promise keeping is intrinsically good. However, I did not promise to start the mower, and starting the mower is not intrinsically good. Thus, my reason to start the mower derives from a different property than my reason to keep my promise. In contrast, NEC makes my reasons to keep my promise, to mow the lawn, and to start the mower derive from the very same property: being a necessary enabler of preventing harm or promoting good. This makes NEC's explanation more coherent and better. A critic might complain that NEC just postpones the problem, since NEC will eventually need to explain why certain things are good or bad, and some will be good or bad as means, but others will not. However, if what is good or bad intrinsically are states (such as pleasure and freedom or pain and death) rather than acts, then they are not the kind of thing that can be done, so there cannot be any question of a reason to do them. This makes it possible for all reasons for acts to have the same nature or derive from the same property. NEC will still have to explain why certain states are good or bad, but so will every other moral theory. The difference is that other theories will also have to explain why there are two kinds of reasons for acts and how these reasons are connected. This is what other theories cannot explain. This additional explanatory gap is avoided by the unified nature of reasons in NEC.” (415-417) Thus, the standard is maximizing expected well-being. Prefer additionally:
State Obligations- The constitutive obligation of governments is to be utilitarian. Robert Goodin 90, professor of philosophy at the Australian National University college of arts and social sciences, “The Utilitarian Response,” pgs 141-142 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 public officials and their situations that make it 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 what will happen most often to most people as a result of their various possible choices, but that is all. That is enough to allow public policy-makers to use the utilitarian calculus – assuming they want to use it at all – to choose general rules or conduct. Advocacy I defend the whole resolution – i.e., a world in which public colleges do not restrict any constitutionally protected speech. Advantage – Racism Advantage one is racism- The 1AC’s endorsing of free speech eliminates structures of oppression – a) it allows us to identify racists so that we can persuade them otherwise; this solves the root cause of oppression. 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 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. 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. Of course, as the British experience shows, hatred exists not just in speech but also has physical consequences. Is it not important, critics of my view ask, to limit the fomenting of hatred to protect the lives of those who may be attacked? In asking this very question, they are revealing the distinction between speech and action. The aff creates a spillover effect – challenging oppression in everyday discussions is key to shaping larger cultural landscapes. Malik 2 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/ Much of what we call hate speech consists, however, of claims that may be contemptible but yet are accepted by many as morally defensible. Hence I am wary of the argument that some sentiments are so immoral they can simply be condemned without being contested. First, such blanket condemnations are often a cover for the inability or unwillingness politically to challenge obnoxious sentiments. 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. Silencing bigots only re-entrenches their position and galvanizes their opposition to social justice movements Levinovitz 16 Alan Levinovitz, assistant professor of religion at James Madison University, “How Trigger Warnings Silence Religious Students,” The Atlantic, August 30, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/silencing-religious-students-on-campus/497951/ There is no doubt that in America, the perspective of white, heterosexual Christian males has enjoyed disproportionate emphasis, particularly in higher education. Trigger warnings, safe spaces, diversity initiatives, and attention to social justice: all of these are essential for pushing back against this lopsided power dynamic. But there is a very real danger that these efforts will become overzealous and render opposing opinions taboo. Instead of dialogues in which everyone is fairly represented, campus conversations about race, gender, and religion will devolve into monologues about the virtues of tolerance and diversity. I have seen it happen, not only at the University of Chicago, my alma mater, but also at the school where I currently teach, James Madison University, where the majority of students are white and Christian. The problem, I’d wager, is fairly widespread, at least at secular universities. Silencing these voices is not a good thing for anyone, especially the advocates of marginalized groups who hope to sway public opinion. Take for example the idea that God opposes homosexuality, a belief that some students still hold. On an ideal campus, these students would feel free to voice their belief. They would then be confronted by opposing arguments, spoken, perhaps, by the very people whose sexual orientation they have asserted is sinful. At least in this kind of environment, these students would have an opportunity to see the weaknesses in their position and potentially change their minds. But if students do not feel free to voice their opinions, they will remain silent, retreating from the classroom to discuss their position on homosexuality with family, friends, and other like-minded individuals. They will believe, correctly in some cases, that advocates of gay rights see them as hateful, intolerant bigots who deserve to be silenced, and which may persuade them to cling with even greater intensity to their convictions. A more charitable interpretation of the University of Chicago letter is that it is meant to inoculate students against allergy to argument. Modern, secular, liberal education is supposed to combine a Socratic ideal of the examined life with a Millian marketplace of ideas. It is boot camp, not a hotel. In theory, this will produce individuals who have cultivated their intellect and embraced new ideas via communal debate—the kind of individuals who make good neighbors and citizens. The communal aspect of the debate is important. It demands patience, open-mindedness, empathy, the courage to question others and be questioned, and above all, attempting to see things as others do. But even though academic debate takes place in a community, it is also combat. Combat can hurt. It is literally offensive. Without offense there is no antagonistic dialogue, no competitive marketplace, and no chance to change your mind. Impious, disrespectful Socrates was executed in Athens for having the temerity to challenge people’s most deeply held beliefs. It would be a shame to execute him again. Student protest combats racial inequality by sparking national dialogue and movements Curwen 15 Thomas Curwen, Jason Song and Larry Gordon (reporters), "What's different about the latest wave of college activism," LA Times, 11/18/2015 Although some of the strategies may seem familiar, it is the speed and the urgency of today's protests that are different. "What is unique about these issues is how social media has changed the way protests take place on college campuses," said Tyrone Howard, associate dean of equity, diversity and inclusion at UCLA. "A protest goes viral in no time flat. With Instagram and Twitter, you're in an immediate news cycle. This was not how it was 20 or 30 years ago." Howard also believes that the effectiveness of the actions at the University of Missouri has encouraged students on other campuses to raise their voices. "A president stepping down is a huge step," he said. "Students elsewhere have to wonder, 'Wow, if that can happen there, why can't we bring out our issues to the forefront as well?'" Shaun R. Harper, executive director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education, agrees. The resignation of two top Missouri administrators, Harper said, showed students and athletes around the country that they have power they may not have realized before. The protests show "we're all together and we have the power to make the change we deserve," said Lindsay Opoku-Acheampong, a senior studying biology at Occidental. "It's affirming," said Dalin Celamy, also a senior at the college. "It lets us know we're not crazy; it's happening to people who are just like you all over the country." Celamy, along with other students, not only watched the unfolding protests across the country, but also looked to earlier protests, including an occupation of an administrative building at Occidental in 1968. Echoes of the 1960s in today's actions are clear, said Robert Cohen, a history professor at New York University and author of "Freedom's Orator," a biography of Mario Savio, who led the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. "The tactical dynamism of these nonviolent protests and the public criticism of them are in important ways reminiscent of the 1960s," Cohen said. "Today's protests, like those in the '60s, are memorable because they have been effective in pushing for change and sparking dialogue as well as polarization." Although the targets of these protests are the blatant and subtle forms of racism and inequity that affect the students' lives, the message of the protests resonates with the recent incidents of intolerance and racial inequity on the streets of America. There is a reason for this, Howard said. Campuses are microcosms of society, he said, and are often comparable in terms of representation and opportunity. "So there is a similar fight for more representation, acceptance and inclusion." The dynamic can create a complicated and sensitive social order for students of color to negotiate. "Latino and African American students are often under the belief if they leave their community and go to colleges, that it will be better," Howard said. "They believe it will be an upgrade over the challenges that they saw in underserved and understaffed schools. But if the colleges and universities are the same as those schools, then there is disappointment and frustration." In addition, Howard said, when these students leave their community to go to a university, they often feel conflicted. "So when injustice comes up," he said, "they are quick to respond because it is what they saw in their community. On some level, it is their chance to let their parents and peers know that they have not forgotten the struggle in the community." On campuses and off, Harper, of the University of Pennsylvania center, finds a rising sense of impatience among African Americans about social change. "As a black person, I think black people are just fed up. It's time out for ignoring these issues," he said. While protests in the 1960s helped create specific safeguards for universities today, such as Title IX, guaranteeing equal access for all students to any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance, a gap has widened over the years between students and administrators over perceptions of bias. Institutions often valued for their support of free speech find themselves wrestling with the prospect of limiting free speech, but to focus on what is or isn't politically correct avoids the more important issue, Cohen said: whether campuses are diverse enough or how to reduce racism. Occidental student Raihana Haynes-Venerable has heard criticism that modern students are too sensitive, but she argues that subtle forms of discrimination still have a profound effect. She pointed to women making less than men and fewer minorities getting jobs as examples. "This is the new form of racism," she said. Advantage – State Control Advantage two is state control- Putting restrictions on free speech creates a dangerous slippery slope and leads to co-option of movements that lead to silencing of voices. Universities should not be the arbiters of communication. Fisher 16 Anthony L. Fisher, Dec 13, 2016, “Opposition to “offensive” speech on campuses will ultimately burn dissidents”, http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/13/13931524/free-speech-pen-america-campus-censorship In perhaps the most cogent line of the entire report, the authors write: “Overreaction to problematic speech may impoverish the environment for speech for all.” In the name of social justice, some students are demanding administrators become the arbiters of what speech is legitimate and what isn’t. These students don’t seem to grasp that by granting authority figures the power to adjudicate which speakers have the right to be heard, they will inevitably find their own speech silenced when opponents claim offense, fear, or discomfort. Calls for crackdowns on “offensive” speech inevitably boomerang It’s already happening. Just ask the Palestinian activists whose boycott campaigns against Israel have 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. Any risk of restriction is just another instance on of the sovereign encroaching on life—the state maintains a monopoly on power and dictates who is and is not political. Smith 11 Mick, Department of Philosophy and School of Environmental Studies , Queen's University , Kingston, Canada). “Against ecological sovereignty: Agamben, politics and globalization”. 23 Feb 2011. Schmitt’s Political Theology (2005, p. 5) opens with his famous definition – ‘the sovereign is he who decides on the exception’; that is to say, it is the ultimate mark of sovereign power to be able to suspend the normal rule of law and political order by declaring a ‘state of emergency’ (exception). What is more, since such a suspension is paradigmatically only envisaged under exceptional circumstances (at times of political crisis) the precise conditions of its imposition cannot be pre-determined (and hence codified in law or a procedural politics) but depends precisely upon an extra-legal/procedural decision made by the very power that thereby awards itself a monopoly on political power/action. Agamben, like Schmitt, emphasises how the possibility of this ultimately arbitrary decisionistic assumption of absolute territorial power underlies all claims of state sovereignty, no matter what kind of political constitution such states espouse. Paradoxically, then, the (state of) exception is precisely that situation that (ap)proves the sovereign power’s rule. ‘What the ‘‘ark’’ of power contains at its center is the state of exception – but this is essentially an empty space’ (Agamben 2005, p. 86). The declaration of a state of emergency is both the ultimate political act and simultaneously the abrogation of politics per se. Here, participation in the ‘political realm’ which, from Hannah Arendt’s (1958, p. 198) and Agamben’s (which owes much to Arendt) perspective, ‘rises directly out of acting together, the ‘‘sharing of words and deeds’’’, is denied, by a political decision, to some or all of the population of a given territory, thereby reducing them to a state that Agamben refers to as ‘bare-life’, that is, human existence stripped of its ethico-political possibilities This opens up space for the worst atrocities imaginable—the state deems the human as non-human, clearing the way for genocide. Edkins 2000 Department of International Politics, University of Wales). “Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp”. 2000. The camp is exemplary as a location of a zone of indistinction. Although in general the camp is set up precisely as part of a state of emergency or martial law, under Nazi rule this becomes not so much a state of exception in the sense of an external and provi- sional state of danger as but a means of establishing the Nazi state itself. The camp is "the space opened up when the state of exception begins to becomes the rule."17 In the camp, the distinction between the rule of law and chaos disappears: decisions about life and death are entirely arbitrary, and everything is possible. A zone of indistinction appears between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit. What happened in the twentieth century in the West, and paradigmatically since the advent of the camp, was that the space of the state of exception transgressed its bound- aries and started to coincide with the normal order. The zone of indistinction expanded from a space of exclusion within the nor- mal order to take over that order entirely. In the concentration camp, inhabitants are stripped of every political status, and the arbitrary power of the camp attendants confronts nothing but what Agamben calls bare life, or homo sacer, a creature who can be killed but not sacrificed.18 This figure, an essential figure in modern politics, is constituted by and constitu- tive of sovereign power. Homo sacer is produced by the sovereign ban and is subject to two exceptions: he is excluded from human law (killing him does not count as homicide) and he is excluded from divine law (killing him is not a ritual killing and does not count as sacrilege). He is set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law. This double exclusion of course also counts as a double inclusion: "homo sacer belongs to God in the form of unsacrificability and is included in the com- munity in the form of being able to be killed."19 This expo ses homo sacer to a new kind of human violence such as is found in the camp and constitutes the political as the double exception: the ex- clusion of both the sacred and the profane. Student protests oppose neoliberalism in higher education, translating theory into praxis Delgado and Ross 16 Sandra Delgado (doctoral student in curriculum studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada) and E. Wayne Ross (Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada), "Students in Revolt: The Pedagogical Potential of Student Collective Action in the Age of the Corporate University" 2016 (published on Academia.edu) As students’ collective actions keep gaining more political relevance, student and university movements also establish themselves as spaces of counter-hegemony (Sotiris, 2014). Students are constantly opening new possibilities to displace and resist the commodification of education offered by mainstream educational institutions. As Sotiris (2014) convincingly argues, movements within the university have not only the potential to subvert educational reforms, but in addition, they have become “strategic nodes” for the transformation of the processes and practices in higher education, and most importantly for the constant re-imagination and the recreation of “new forms of subaltern counter-hegemony” (p. 1). The strategic importance of university and college based moments lays precisely in the role that higher education plays in contemporary societies, namely their role in “the development of new technologies, new forms of production and for the articulation of discourses and theories on contemporary issues and their role in the reproduction of state and business personnel.” (p.8) Universities and colleges therefore, have a crucial contribution in “the development of class strategies (both dominant and subaltern), in the production of subjectivities, (and) in the transformation of collective practices” (p.8) The main objective of this paper is to examine how contemporary student movements are disrupting, opposing and displacing entrenched oppressive and dehumanizing reforms, practices and frames in today’s corporate academia. This work is divided in four sections. The first is an introduction to student movements and an overview of how student political action has been approached and researched. The second and third sections take a closer look at the repertoires of contention used by contemporary student movements and propose a framework based on radical praxis that allows us to better understand the pedagogical potential of student disruptive action. The last section contains a series of examples of students’ repertoires or tactics of contention that exemplifies the pedagogical potential of student social and political action. An Overview of Student Movements Generally speaking, students are well positioned as political actors. They have been actively involved in the politics of education since the beginnings of the university, but more broadly, students have played a significant role in defining social, cultural and political environments around the world (Altbach, 1966; Boren, 2001). The contributions and influences of students and student movements to revolutionary efforts and political movements beyond the university context are undeniable. One example is the role that students have played in the leadership and membership of the political left (e.g. students’ role in the Movimiento 26 de Julio - M-26-7 in Cuba during the 50’s and in the formation of The New Left in the United States, among others). Similarly, several political and social movements have either established alliances with student organizations or created their own chapters on campuses to recruit new members, mobilize their agendas in education and foster earlier student’s involvement in politics2 (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). Students are often considered to be “catalysts” of political and social action or “barometers” of the social unrest and political tension accumulated in society (Barker, 2008). Throughout history student movements have had a diverse and sometimes contradictory range of political commitments. Usually, student organizations and movements find grounding and inspiration in Anarchism and Marxism, however it is also common to see movements leaning towards liberal and conservative approaches. Hence, student political action has not always been aligned with social movements or organizations from the political left. In various moments in history students have joined or been linked to rightist movements, reactionary organizations and conservative parties (Altbach, 1966; Barker, 2008). Students, unlike workers, come from different social classes and seemly different cultural backgrounds. As a particularly diverse social group, students are distinguished for being heterogeneous and pluralists in their values, interests and commitments (Boren, 2001). Such diversity has been a constant challenge for maintaining unity, which has been particularly problematic in cases of national or transnational student organizations (Prusinowska, Kowzan, and Zielińska, 2012; Somma, 2012). To clarify, social classes are defined by the specific relationship that people have with the means of production. In the case of students, they are not a social class by themselves, but a social layer or social group that is identifiable by their common function in society (Stedman, 1969). The main or central aspect that unites student is the transitory social condition of being a student. In other words, students are a social group who have a common function, role in society or social objective, which is “to study” something (Lewis, 2013; Simons and Masschelein, 2009). Student movements can be understood as a form of social movement (LuesherMamashela, 2015). They have an internal organization that varies from traditionally hierarchical structures, organizational schemes based on representative democracy with charismatic leadership, to horizontal forms of decision-making (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). As many other movements, student movements have standing claims, organize different type of actions, tactics or repertoires of contention, 3 and they advocate for political, social or/and educational agendas, programs or pleas. Free speech is key to preventing mass government violence endless warfare- this is a gateway to any other util impact. 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. Hate speech is not constitutionally protected. ILTW Information Technology Law Wiki, "Constitutionally protected speech", itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Constitutionally_protected_speech All speech is considered constitutionally protected unless it falls within several limited exceptions. The right of protected speech is derived from the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution that reads, "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech."Under common law the U.S. Supreme Court has limited this right by deeming certain types of speech to be outside this protection. They are for the most part: incitement, obscenity, fighting words and offensive speech, and threats. Further, the Court has upheld laws that reasonably restrict speech on the basis of its time, place and manner. There is for the most part, no black letter law as to exactly what speech is protected and what speech crosses the line. The determination is always a matter of context and the specific facts of the situation. Revenge pornography is not constitutionally protected. Harrison 15 Anne Harrison (Student Writer for the Journal of Gender, Race and Justice), "Revenge Porn: Protected by the Constitution?" The Journal of Gender, Race and Justice. Vol 18. February 2015. https:jgrj.law.uiowa.edu/article/revenge-porn-protected-constitution Because the anti-revenge-porn criminal statutes at issue are content-based speech restrictions, the State has the burden of showing they meeting strict scrutiny. While content-based speech restrictions are presumptively invalid, legal scholars argue that the Supreme Court has held “where matters of purely private significance are at issue, First Amendment protections are less rigorous.” One scholar on the subject posited that such laws are likely to be upheld because the specific nude pictures involved “have nothing to do with public commentary about society.” There is some support for the notion that the laws will be upheld as cyber-stalking laws have not been found to violate the First Amendment. Other scholars believe that anti-revenge porn statutes are criminalizing protected expression. They maintain that the “First Amendment is not a guardian of taste.” In its lawsuit against the state of Arizona, the ACLU argues that the Constitution protects speech even when that speech is offense or emotionally distressing. The ACLU goes on to state that the Arizona law is overbroad in that it applies equally to private photographs and images that are “truly newsworthy, artistic, and historical images.”
1/28/17
MA - Convicts AC
Tournament: TFA State | Round: 5 | Opponent: Westwood JA | Judge: Sheldon Stewart Framework The role of the ballot is to evaluate the simulated consequences of aff policy vs a competing neg policy option using a consequentialist standard. 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) This approach to ethics justifies focus on resolving material conditions of violence. Morality isn’t just something that we strive for in a vaccum, rather, we resolve it based on the empirical world. Pappas 16 Gregory Fernando Pappas Texas AandM University “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 prob- lematic 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 prac- tice a much more personalized medicine than we do today, that is, provide a diagnosis and a solution specific to each patient. Thus, the standard is resolving material conditions of violence. Prefer additionally: First, the standard outweighs on actor specificity. Government must be practical and cannot concern itself with metaphysical questions – its only role is to protect citizens’ interests Rhonheimer 05 (Martin, Prof Of Philosophy at The Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome). “THE POLITICAL ETHOS OF CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY AND THE PLACE OF NATURAL LAW IN PUBLIC REASON: RAWLS’S “POLITICAL LIBERALISM” REVISITED” The American Journal of Jurisprudence vol. 50 (2005), pp. 1-70 “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. 1AC – Advantage Inherency The housing agency currently uses a 1-strike policy in which any arrest is sufficient for denial of housing. Cammett 16 Cammett, Ann (Professor of Law, Director, Family Law Practice Clinic, City University of New York School of Law). "Confronting Race and Collateral Consequences in Public Housing." Seattle UL Rev. 39 (Summer 2016): 1123. One Strike remained in place as the default policy in many places, and most PHAs throughout the country have prevented formerly incarcerated people from returning to their homes or living with their family members in subsidized housing. In response to this problem, cities such as New York, Oakland, and Chicago have implemented reforms in tenant-selection criteria that ensure a person's application for housing is not negatively impacted by a criminal record. While commendable, these *1148 are pilot projects and do not represent an overall shift in policy. Since Rucker unanimously upheld the One Strike provisions, PHAs had no incentive to radically change course and, instead, continued to vest decisionmaking on individual cases to local housing managers who either apply the strict liability standard or use vague criteria to exercise discretion. However, in 2015, HUD released guidance clarifying clarified the One Strike policy and laying out best practices for PHAs public housing authorities. It reminds PHAs that HUD does not require them to adopt or enforce One Strike rules that deny admission to anyone with a criminal record or require automatic eviction any time a household member engages in criminal activity in violation of their lease. It also makes clear that arrests without conviction are not sufficient grounds for eviction or denial of housing. To this end, PHAs were put on notice that they could not afford to ignore the disparate racial impact of arrest record screening. As noted in a report from the Shriver Center, "These entities are specifically tasked with the duty to administer these federally assisted housing programs in a manner that will affirmatively further fair housing." The Fair Housing Act outlaws housing discrimination, including racially neutral policies that have an unjustified disparate impact on racial minorities. Though facially neutral, arrest record screening disparately impacts racial minorities because their rate of arrest is disproportionate to that of the general population. Thus, HUD has an interest in monitoring the criteria that PHAs use to screen out tenants for arrests that did not result in conviction. Regardless of the nature of the criminal activity, all PHAs should establish and clarify their criteria for tenant selection and evictions and, at the very least, adopt the 2015 clarifying recommendations of HUD. Plan Plan: Resolved: The United States Federal Government should implement the right to housing by rejecting automatic exclusion and 1-strike laws. Carey 1, Corinne (researcher with the U.S. Program at Human Rights Watch) "No second chance: People with criminal records denied access to public housing." U. Tol. L. Rev. 36 (2005): 545. The United States should abandon "one strike" policies, reject all automatic federal exclusions, and prohibit local housing authorities from establishing their own. PHAs should be required to undertake individualized and meaningful assessments of each applicant to ascertain whether they pose a risk to the safety, health, and welfare of existing tenants. The United States must recognize that all its residents - even those who may not be appropriate for traditional public housing because of the risks they pose - have a right to decent and affordable housing. Policies that arbitrarily exclude people from public housing do not advance public safety - they undermine it. Denying housing to those with the fewest options threatens the health and safety of people with criminal records and, indeed, the safety of entire communities. Independent of solvency, 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. Having a right to housing should put the brakes on continual budget cuts for housing programs in the legislative appropriations process. Making housing a right may also motivate increased construction of affordable housing. Moreover, a right to housing would be key to solving for housing segregation, which divides and excludes people from the city. Bryson 06 David Bryson (Attorney for the National Housing Law Project) A Right to Housing, edited by Rachel Bratt, et al., Temple University Press, 2006. From a constitutional Right to Housing, the courts also may develop local governmental responsibility to ensure security from crime. The provider of housing may have certain responsibilities regarding security—for example, installing and maintaining adequate locks and lighting—but landlords’ and developers’ ability to protect residents from criminal activities is limited. Courts interpreting a constitutional Right to Housing would eventually have to decide what obligations a local government must assume in that regard. A similar analytical process would be undertaken with respect to other neighborhood conditions. As attributes of a Right to Housing that relate to location work their way through the judicial system, there will be details regarding local governments’ obligations to ensure adequate municipal services, insulation from environmental hazards and accessibility to commercial and professional facilities. New life may be breathed into the original equalization of municipal services cases. More work also will be done on the remedies for those local governments and public housing authorities that have operated racially segregated housing systems since the 1930s. Strategies need to be developed, now that the federal government is putting so much effort into tearing down large components of those systems, to impose liability upon the government agencies involved to replace the demolished units with decent, affordable housing that is made available to the individuals and groups that have suffered the discrimination in the past. It also may be possible to expand the bases for governmental liability beyond their having operated segregated public and assisted housing programs. Many other governmental actions have contributed to racial segregation in housing and the unequal neighborhood conditions that people of color have suffered and are still suffering. One example is stimulation of the development of virtually all-white suburban neighborhoods of single-family homes with racially restricted FHA and VA mortgage insurance and guarantees, the funding of highways and other commuter transportation systems and the maintenance of the federal and state mortgage interest deductions and other tax deductions that made homeownership affordable to the white middle class. Another is government choice to locate highways, industry, waste disposal facilities and other uses with deleterious consequences in or near neighborhoods where people of color live, while withholding from such neighborhoods the services and funding that they need to be equally decent places to live (see South Camden Citizens in Action). A third is the use of state governmental power to establish separate local governments with their own taxing and spending powers that enable the more wealthy, predominantly white communities to achieve residential environments that are in better physical condition, more secure from crime, better served by governmental agencies, more endowed with commercial facilities and, of course, served by better schools. Litigation based upon these theories would be ambitious to say the least, but achieving a Right to Housing that includes freedom from discrimination will add strength to the litigation theories. Advantage 1 is Accessibility One strike laws lead to people coming out of prison struggling with housing access. Moraff 14 Cristopher Moraff “Housing first Helps Keep Ex-Inmates off the streets (and Out of Prison)” July 23, 2014 https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/housing-first-former-prisoners-homelessness Many of the roughly 10,000 inmates who exit U.S. prisons each week following incarceration face an immediate critical question: Where will I live? While precise numbers are hard to come by, research suggests that, on average, about 10 percent of parolees are homeless immediately following their release. In large urban areas, and among those addicted to drugs, the number is even higher — exceeding 30 percent. “Without a safe and stable place to live where they can focus on improving themselves and securing their future, all of their energy is focused on the immediate need to survive the streets,” says Faith Lutze, criminal justice professor at Washington State University. “Being homeless makes it hard to move forward or to find the social support from others necessary to be successful.” Although education, employment, and treatment for drug and mental health issues all play a role in successful reintegration, these factors have little hope in the absence of stable housing. Yet, few leaving prison have the three months’ rent typically required to get an apartment. Even if they did, landlords are given wide latitude in denying leases to people with a criminal record in many states. Further, policies enacted under the Clinton administration continue to deny public housing benefits to thousands of convicted felons — the majority of whom were rounded up for non-violent offenses during the decades-long War on Drugs. Some are barred for life from ever receiving federal housing support. As a result, tens of thousands of inmates a year trade life in a cell for life on the street. According to Lutze, with each passing day, the likelihood that these people will reoffend or abscond on their parole increases considerably. And, the impact is massive- broad definitions lead to many people being denied access to resources they desparately need. Carey 2 Corinne (researcher with the U.S. Program at Human Rights Watch) "No second chance: People with criminal records denied access to public housing." U. Tol. L. Rev. 36 (2005): 545. Using the authority given to them by HUD, PHAs have adopted a variety of definitions, graphs, and matrices to guide staff evaluating applicants with criminal records. All too often, however, the criteria they have adopted are unduly broad, failing to provide any guidance on how to determine when ex-offenders or people with arrest records pose a risk to other tenants and when they do not, and which crimes warrant particular scrutiny. In addition, the periods of time during which applicants with criminal records are excluded are often unreasonably long. The impact of existing criteria is enhanced because most PHAs do not conduct an individualized assessment or consider evidence of rehabilitation or mitigation before rejecting an applicant. They have, in effect, adopted misguided "zero tolerance" policies that arbitrarily exclude needy applicants from public housing. One strike laws massively over-expand state power, leading to enhanced militarization over life and racially biased tensions. Cammett 2, Ann (Professor of Law, Director, Family Law Practice Clinic, City University of New York School of Law). "Confronting Race and Collateral Consequences in Public Housing." Seattle UL Rev. 39 (Summer 2016): 1123. Stated differently, the impact of One Strike redounds to the detriment of some innocent people who have the least power and economic resources to resist its full impact. Low-income tenants, especially older mothers trying to old families together, are the ones that invoke the most compelling claims of unfairness. As Austin notes, "cultural norms suggest that mothers are supposed to have sufficient social or moral authority with which to deter criminal behavior by their children." n104 However, evictions can and do routinely occur for minor marijuana use, an activity which is fairly common among youth. n105 It is well established that this type of recreational drug use exists among all racial and economic *1142 groups, and is not more prevalent among African Americans. n106 However, parents and children living in public housing, especially African Americans living in public housing, are especially vulnerable to surveillance and state intervention in the form of police presence, selective prosecutions, and disparate outcomes in criminal courts. n107 If the goal of zero-tolerance statutes is to invest these authorities with the power to evict violent drug dealers, they already possess the tools to do so under the criminal law, infused with enhanced militarization of policing. n108 It might seem obvious, but targeting criminal gangs who are running amok in housing projects is the job of law enforcement, which has at its disposal a panoply of criminal statutes to do its work. n109 Since knowledge or fault is not a predicate for evictions for tenants like Pearlie Rucker, local PHAs are wielding power to evict innocent tenants in an overinclusive way, and in doing so have the imprimatur of the U.S. Supreme Court and many policymakers. Advantage 2 is Crime Stable Housing decreases recidivism rates Moraff 2 Cristopher Moraff “Housing first Helps Keep Ex-Inmates off the streets (and Out of Prison)” July 23, 2014 https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/housing-first-former-prisoners-homelessness Lutze says stable housing not only reduces violations of public order laws related to living and working on the street, but it increases exposure to pro-social networks and provides a sense of safety and well-being conducive to participating in treatment and other services. That not only improves community safety, she says, but it “reduces the economic and human costs of ex-offenders cycling through our jails and prisons just because they do not have a safe place to live.” While this seems like a common sense strategy, programs that place housing at the forefront of prisoner reentry are actually relatively scarce in the U.S., and have historically been driven by a handful of pioneering non-profits. Since the 1990s, the New York-based Fortune Society has graduated hundreds of ex-offenders from its transitional housing facility in West Harlem, known as “The Castle.” The program has been so successful — with recidivism rates as low as one percent — that the group received city support to open a second facility, Castle Gardens, in 2010. A similar program run by the Delancey Street Foundation in San Francisco, offers housing and support services to drug addicts, many of them ex-offenders, in six cities. For all their success, access to these programs is limited, and demand regularly exceeds supply.
That’s key to stability of families- millions of families are disproportionately affected when their loved ones are denied housing. Cammett 3 Cammett, Ann (Professor of Law, Director, Family Law Practice Clinic, City University of New York School of Law). "Confronting Race and Collateral Consequences in Public Housing." Seattle UL Rev. 39 (Summer 2016): 1123. While barriers to public housing are typically framed as an individual problem, the more profound impact of housing instability may be on the family as a whole. Affordable housing is foundational to the economic security of individuals, and especially low-income families. The Center for American Progress estimates that between 33 million and 36.5 million children in the United States--nearly half of U.S. children--now have at least one parent with a criminal record. n118 Having a stable home, along with employment, has powerful anti-recidivism effects for parents with criminal histories. n119 When parents are rejected from public housing through the One Strike policy they are at greater risk of homelessness *1144 and family disintegration. n120 Moreover, the inability to establish safe and consistent housing can leave some families vulnerable to intervention by child welfare agencies. The plan is also key to public safety- 1-strike laws cause many ex-cons to live on the street or bounce around, increasing the chance of more violence, creating a vicious cycle. Carey 3 , Corinne (researcher with the U.S. Program at Human Rights Watch) "No second chance: People with criminal records denied access to public housing." U. Tol. L. Rev. 36 (2005): 545. Many of those excluded from public housing live on the streets, in overcrowded shelters, and in squalid transient or SRO hotels. In the best of circumstances, they crowd into the homes of family or friends for short periods of time or live in apartments they cannot afford the following month. Many of them had no housing options other than those which were rife with domestic abuse, violence, crime, and surrounded by harmful drug and alcohol use. Indeed, denying people with criminal records some form of affordable housing may creates a greater threat to public safety for communities surrounding PHA developments. Life on the streets can create desperation and incentives to break the law. "Homeless people are much more likely to collect criminal records just for being there - for living private lives in public places," explained the director of Baltimore's Healthcare for the Homeless. "If I want to drink a couple of bottles of wine, no problem. On a street corner, there are consequences." n96 That also forces difficult choices for families with children- families are either forced to split up or live without a house destroying lives. Carey 4, Corinne (researcher with the U.S. Program at Human Rights Watch) "No second chance: People with criminal records denied access to public housing." U. Tol. L. Rev. 36 (2005): 545. Lacking stable housing, parents returning from incarceration are unable to regain custody of their children. n97 Child welfare officials remove children *565 from families that cannot provide them with stable housing. Families are forced to choose between staying together or excluding a member of the household with a criminal record, in order to secure affordable housing for the rest of the family. Policies that so obviously impede the ability of families to reunite or remain together flatly contradict the "family values" espoused in the United States. n98 These policies also violate principles of international law. n99 . Transient living disrupts a child's education, emotional development, and sense of well-being. There is no way to know how many children are excluded along with their parents from public housing. But we do know that an estimated 1.5 million minor children have at least one parent in prison on any given day in the United States, and over ten million had a parent in prison at one point in their lives. n100 Children are "in some ways ... the unseen victims of the prison boom and war on drugs," n101 and, hence, they are the unseen victims of exclusionary housing policies.
3/10/17
MA - Ordinances AC
Tournament: TFA State | Round: 1 | Opponent: Stony Point EW | Judge: Robinson Maddox Framing 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) Challenging racism is a prior ethical question to any other framework Memmi 2k MEMMI Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ Unv. Of Paris Albert-; RACISM, translated by Steve Martinot, pp.163-165 The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved, yet for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism. One cannot even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which person man is not themself himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated; that is it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism because racism signifies the exclusion of the other and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is “the truly capital sin.”fn22 It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. But no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall,” says the bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming once again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal – indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality. Because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice. A just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible. This approach to ethics justifies focus on resolving material conditions of violence. Morality isn’t just something that we strive for in a vaccum, rather, we resolve it based on the empirical world. Pappas 16 Gregory Fernando Pappas Texas AandM University “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 prob- lematic 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 prac- tice a much more personalized medicine than we do today, that is, provide a diagnosis and a solution specific to each patient. Thus, the standard is resolving material conditions of violence. Prefer additionally: First, the standard outweighs on actor specificity. Government must be practical and cannot concern itself with metaphysical questions – its only role is to protect citizens’ interests Rhonheimer 05 (Martin, Prof Of Philosophy at The Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome). “THE POLITICAL ETHOS OF CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY AND THE PLACE OF NATURAL LAW IN PUBLIC REASON: RAWLS’S “POLITICAL LIBERALISM” REVISITED” The American Journal of Jurisprudence vol. 50 (2005), pp. 1-70 “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. Harms Welcome to Trump’s America. Things aren’t going to get better any time soon under his attempts to “Make America Great Again”. Ben Carson doesn’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 in the legislative appropriations process.170 Making housing a right may also motivate increased construction of affordable housing.171 Moreover, a right to housing would be key to solving for housing segregation, which divides and excludes people from the city. Bryson 06 David Bryson (Attorney for the National Housing Law Project) A Right to Housing, edited by Rachel Bratt, et al., Temple University Press, 2006. From a constitutional Right to Housing, the courts also may develop local governmental responsibility to ensure security from crime. The provider of housing may have certain responsibilities regarding security—for example, installing and maintaining adequate locks and lighting—but landlords’ and developers’ ability to protect residents from criminal activities is limited. Courts interpreting a constitutional Right to Housing would eventually have to decide what obligations a local government must assume in that regard. A similar analytical process would be undertaken with respect to other neighborhood conditions. As attributes of a Right to Housing that relate to location work their way through the judicial system, there will be details regarding local governments’ obligations to ensure adequate municipal services, insulation from environmental hazards and accessibility to commercial and professional facilities. New life may be breathed into the original equalization of municipal services cases. More work also will be done on the remedies for those local governments and public housing authorities that have operated racially segregated housing systems since the 1930s. Strategies need to be developed, now that the federal government is putting so much effort into tearing down large components of those systems, to impose liability upon the government agencies involved to replace the demolished units with decent, affordable housing that is made available to the individuals and groups that have suffered the discrimination in the past. It also may be possible to expand the bases for governmental liability beyond their having operated segregated public and assisted housing programs. Many other governmental actions have contributed to racial segregation in housing and the unequal neighborhood conditions that people of color have suffered and are still suffering. One example is stimulation of the development of virtually all-white suburban neighborhoods of single-family homes with racially restricted FHA and VA mortgage insurance and guarantees, the funding of highways and other commuter transportation systems and the maintenance of the federal and state mortgage interest deductions and other tax deductions that made homeownership affordable to the white middle class. Another is government choice to locate highways, industry, waste disposal facilities and other uses with deleterious consequences in or near neighborhoods where people of color live, while withholding from such neighborhoods the services and funding that they need to be equally decent places to live (see South Camden Citizens in Action). A third is the use of state governmental power to establish separate local governments with their own taxing and spending powers that enable the more wealthy, predominantly white communities to achieve residential environments that are in better physical condition, more secure from crime, better served by governmental agencies, more endowed with commercial facilities and, of course, served by better schools. Litigation based upon these theories would be ambitious to say the least, but achieving a Right to Housing that includes freedom from discrimination will add strength to the litigation theories. 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 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 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).
3/9/17
MA - Ordinances AC v2
Tournament: TFA State | Round: 3 | Opponent: Williams AK | Judge: Tyler Gamble Framing 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) Challenging racism is a prior ethical question to any other framework Memmi 2k MEMMI Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ Unv. Of Paris Albert-; RACISM, translated by Steve Martinot, pp.163-165 The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved, yet for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism. One cannot even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which person man is not themself himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated; that is it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism because racism signifies the exclusion of the other and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is “the truly capital sin.”fn22 It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. But no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall,” says the bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming once again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal – indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality. Because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice. A just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible. This approach to ethics justifies focus on resolving material conditions of violence. Morality isn’t just something that we strive for in a vaccum, rather, we resolve it based on the empirical world. Pappas 16 Gregory Fernando Pappas Texas AandM University “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 prob- lematic 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 prac- tice a much more personalized medicine than we do today, that is, provide a diagnosis and a solution specific to each patient. Thus, the standard is resolving material conditions of violence. Prefer additionally: First, the standard outweighs on actor specificity. Government must be practical and cannot concern itself with metaphysical questions – its only role is to protect citizens’ interests Rhonheimer 05 (Martin, Prof Of Philosophy at The Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome). “THE POLITICAL ETHOS OF CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY AND THE PLACE OF NATURAL LAW IN PUBLIC REASON: RAWLS’S “POLITICAL LIBERALISM” REVISITED” The American Journal of Jurisprudence vol. 50 (2005), pp. 1-70 “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. Harms Welcome to Trump’s America. Things aren’t going to get better any time soon under his attempts to “Make America Great Again”. Ben Carson doesn’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 in the legislative appropriations process.170 Making housing a right may also motivate increased construction of affordable housing.171 Moreover, a right to housing would be key to solving for housing segregation, which divides and excludes people from the city. Bryson 06 David Bryson (Attorney for the National Housing Law Project) A Right to Housing, edited by Rachel Bratt, et al., Temple University Press, 2006. From a constitutional Right to Housing, the courts also may develop local governmental responsibility to ensure security from crime. The provider of housing may have certain responsibilities regarding security—for example, installing and maintaining adequate locks and lighting—but landlords’ and developers’ ability to protect residents from criminal activities is limited. Courts interpreting a constitutional Right to Housing would eventually have to decide what obligations a local government must assume in that regard. A similar analytical process would be undertaken with respect to other neighborhood conditions. As attributes of a Right to Housing that relate to location work their way through the judicial system, there will be details regarding local governments’ obligations to ensure adequate municipal services, insulation from environmental hazards and accessibility to commercial and professional facilities. New life may be breathed into the original equalization of municipal services cases. More work also will be done on the remedies for those local governments and public housing authorities that have operated racially segregated housing systems since the 1930s. Strategies need to be developed, now that the federal government is putting so much effort into tearing down large components of those systems, to impose liability upon the government agencies involved to replace the demolished units with decent, affordable housing that is made available to the individuals and groups that have suffered the discrimination in the past. It also may be possible to expand the bases for governmental liability beyond their having operated segregated public and assisted housing programs. Many other governmental actions have contributed to racial segregation in housing and the unequal neighborhood conditions that people of color have suffered and are still suffering. One example is stimulation of the development of virtually all-white suburban neighborhoods of single-family homes with racially restricted FHA and VA mortgage insurance and guarantees, the funding of highways and other commuter transportation systems and the maintenance of the federal and state mortgage interest deductions and other tax deductions that made homeownership affordable to the white middle class. Another is government choice to locate highways, industry, waste disposal facilities and other uses with deleterious consequences in or near neighborhoods where people of color live, while withholding from such neighborhoods the services and funding that they need to be equally decent places to live (see South Camden Citizens in Action). A third is the use of state governmental power to establish separate local governments with their own taxing and spending powers that enable the more wealthy, predominantly white communities to achieve residential environments that are in better physical condition, more secure from crime, better served by governmental agencies, more endowed with commercial facilities and, of course, served by better schools. Litigation based upon these theories would be ambitious to say the least, but achieving a Right to Housing that includes freedom from discrimination will add strength to the litigation theories. 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 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 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). The 1AC causes a social change that moves people onto the side of immigrants. Shultz and Gottlieb 96 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.
3/10/17
ND - Race AC
Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: 3 | Opponent: New Trier AP | Judge: Ananth, Panchanadam Framework Morality must start from the non-ideal circumstances we have inherited. We can never achieve the ideal consequences that ethical theories aspire for without a focus on social reality Mills 05 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. This approach to ethics justifies focus on resolving material conditions of violence. Morality isn’t just something that we strive for in a vaccum, rather, we resolve it based on the empirical world. Pappas 16 Gregory Fernando Pappas Texas AandM University “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 prob- lematic 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 prac- tice a much more personalized medicine than we do today, that is, provide a diagnosis and a solution specific to each patient. Thus, the standard is resolving material conditions of violence. Prefer additionally: First, recognizing and combatting the structures of racism is a pre-condition to making ethical action possible- even if your ethic is true in the abstract, we need the AC framework first. Memmi 2K Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ U of Paris, Naiteire, Racism, Translated by Steve Martinot, p. 163-165 2000 The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved. Yet, for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism; one must not even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people, which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. it is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which man is not himself an outsider relative to someone else?. Racism illustrates, in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated that is, it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animosity to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduit only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order, for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism, because racism signifies the exclusion of the other, and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is ‘the truly capital sin. It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsels respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. Bur no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall.” says the Bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming one again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal—indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice, a just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible. Plan Resolved: The United States should limit qualified immunity for police officers by removing the “clearly established” element from the Qualified Immunity Doctrine as method to increase accountability for officers. I’m willing to clarify T interps in CX. 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/) In order to truly hold police accountable for bad acts, civilians must be able to bring, and win, civil rights suits themselves — not rely on the Department of Justice, or special prosecutors, or civilian review boards to hold officers accountable. And in order to both bring and win civil rights suits, civilians need a level playing field in court. Right now, they don’t have one. Instead, police officers have recourse to the broad protections of the judicially established doctrine of qualified immunity. Under this doctrine, state actors are protected from suit even if they’ve violated the law by, say, using excessive force, or performing an unwarranted body cavity search — as long as their violation was not one of “clearly established law, of which a reasonable officer would be aware.” In other words, if there’s not already a case where a court has held that an officer’s identical or near-identical conduct rose to the level of a constitutional violation there’s a good chance that even an obviously malfeasant officer will avoid liability — will avoid accountability. To bring about true accountability and change police behavior, this needs to change. 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? That’s just a start. There are plenty of other reforms that could open up civil rights lawsuits and help ensure police accountability for bad conduct. Two posts (one, two) at Balkinization by City University of New York professor Lynda Dodd provide a good overview. Campaign Zero should consider adding civil rights litigation reform to its platform, our policymakers should consider making civil rights litigation more robust, and, if we want to see justice done, we should push to make it happen.
Analytic Advantage 1 – 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. 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. Advantage 2 – Reform Qualified immunity destroys accountability for police officers-limitations are key. Bernick 15 Evan Bernick, https://fee.org/articles/to-hold-police-accountable-dont-give-them-immunity/ The sad fact is that it is often effectively impossible to hold police officers accountable for unconstitutional acts. That fact is attributable in large part to a potent well of unchecked power that many Americans have never heard of. You will not find it in the Constitution. You will not find it in any federal law. It is a judge-made doctrine, invented by the Supreme Court. It is called qualified immunity. And if those charged with enforcing the law are to be kept within the bounds of their rightful authority, it must be abolished. Section 1983, the federal law that allows citizens to sue for constitutional violations, is broad, unequivocal, and unambiguous. It says that “every person” who is acting “under color of” law who causes a “deprivation of any rights… secured by the Constitution and laws” “shall be liable to the party injured.” Section 1983 embodies a foundational principle of justice that resonates with Americans who have never heard of Marbury v. Madison: where there is a right, there is a remedy.But for decades, we have had rights without remedies. In the 1967 case of Pierson v. Ray, the Supreme Court held that police officers sued for constitutional violations can raise “qualified immunity” as a defense, and thereby escape paying out of their own pockets, even if they violated a person’s constitutional rights. This decision was unabashedly policy-oriented: it was thought that government officials would not vigorously fulfill their obligations if they could be held accountable for actions taken in good faith. Under current law, the general rule is that victims of rights violations pay the costs of their own injuries. In practice, qualified immunity provides a near-absolute defense to all but the most outrageous conduct. The Ninth Circuit has held that throwing a flash-bang grenade “blindly” into a house, injuring a toddler, isn’t outrageous enough. Just last year, in Plumhoff v. Rickard, the Supreme Court decided that firing 15 bullets at a motorist is a reasonable method to end the driver’s flight from the police. So much for “every person” “shall be liable.” Qualified immunity shields police misconduct not only from liability but also from meaningful judicial scrutiny. Private lawsuits are an essential tool in uncovering the truth about police misconduct. The discovery process can yield information that makes broader policy changes within police departments possible. At trial, judicial engagement — an impartial, evidence-based determination of the constitutionality of the officer’s actions — can take place. Allowing police violence perpetuates systems of racism in the squo. Hadden et al 16 (Bernadette R. Hadden, MSW, PHD, is Assistant professor in the MSW program at Hunter College School of Social Work New York. Willie Tolliver, PhD. Associate Professor at Silberman School of Social Work. Fabienne Snowden PHD. Professor at Hunter College School of Social Work. and Robyn Brown Manning, PHD. Professor at Hunter College School of Social "An authentic discourse: Recentering race and racism as factors that contribute to police violence against unarmed Black or African American men, Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment" http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10911359.2015.1129252#abstract) Police shootings of unarmed Black or African American men are occurring at alarming rates (Wihbey, 2014) and are indicative of a national trend of excessive force used by law enforcement agents on the bodies of people of color (American Civil Liberties Union ACLU, 2014). These incidents are happening inside and outside of Black and Hispanic neighborhoods (Carroll and Gonzalez, 2014), to low-income and middle-class Blacks or African Americans (Jones-Brown, 2009), and are frequently the result of routine encounters (ACLU, 2014). One of several challenges in obtaining an accurate count of the number of the police shootings of unarmed Black or African American men in the United States is that there are no nationally consistent measures of collecting these data (Department of Justice, 2015). This lack of standardized reporting, accompanied by public outrage, civil unrest, and community activism, calls for investigations into, and law enforcement reporting of, fatal police shootings of unarmed Black or African American men. Suggestions of racial profiling in police shootings have been presented as an explanation of the phenomenon of the disproportionate shooting of unarmed Black or African American men by law enforcement agents (Amajor, Sandars, and Pitts, 1999). In 2007 researchers found that in 10 of the United States’s largest cities, Blacks or African Americans were overly represented among victims of police shootings (Lowerstein, 2007). These findings were most visible in New York City, Las Vegas, and San Diego (Lowerstein, 2007). At a 2010 hearing calling for the investigation of police-involved shootings in Oakland, California, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) reported that from 2004 and 2008, 37 of the 45 police shootings in that city were at Black or African American suspects (Bulwa, 2010). A report from the New York City Police Department (NYCPD) illustrates that between 2000 and 2013, 97 Blacks or African Americans, 41 Hispanics, and 21 Whites were killed by NYPD police officers (NYCPD, 2014). In other words, from 2000 to 2013, more Blacks or African Americans were killed by NYCPD weapon discharges than Latinos and Whites combined. These reports identify and document the phenomenon of Black or African American men being shot and/ or killed by police officers, despite the limitations in data tracking police shootings (Graham, 2015). However, they do not inform us of the incidence or prevalence of this phenomenon Qualified immunity is structurally violent- it forces deliberation to occur through the interpretation of the oppressor, as opposed to allowing contestation of these views in court. Senkel 99 ( Tara. Attorney in New York. Civilians Often Need Protection From the Police: Let's Handcuff Police Brutality 15 N.Y.L. Sch. J. Hum. Rts. 385 (1998-1999). http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?public=falseandhandle=hein.journals/nylshr15andpage=385andcollection=journals#) While victims of police brutality can bring an action under section 1983217 against the police officer and the municipality, the police officer and municipality are each subject to liability under two different theories.218 Police officers are found liable iUnder the statute if, "while acting under color of state law, their actions violate a person's constitutional rights. 219 Municipalities are not liable under the theory of respondeat superior, but may be found liable if the police officer's conduct follows an official policy or practice of the municipality.220 There are differences between an action brought against a police officer and an action brought against a municipality, such as the defenses that can be asserted.2 Once a victim brings an excessive force claim against a police officer under section 1983, the officer may assert a defense of qualified immunity.222 In Graham, the Supreme Court did not address the issue of qualified immunity in Fourth Amendment excessive force claims. 223 However, the Court did discuss the qualified immunity defense in Harlow v. Fitzgerald. 224 In Harlow, A. Ernest Fitzgerald sued Bryce Harlow and Alexander Butterfield, Richard Nixon's White House aides, alleging they had been involved in a conspiracy to violate his constitutional and statutory rights.225 The Court held that the aides were protected by a qualified immunity. 226 The Court stated that: Bare allegations of malice should not suffice to subject governmental officials either to the costs of trial or to the burdens of broad-reaching discovery. We therefore hold that government officials performing discretionary functions, generally are shielded from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not clearly violate, established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known. 227 The Court went on to state that by defining the limits of the qualified immunity doctrine in objective terms, it was not authorizing lawless conduct.228 Rather, the objective reasonableness of an official's acts protects the public interest by discouraging unlawful conduct and compensating victims. 229 If an official could be expected to know that an act would violate statutory or constitutional rights, the officer should not perform the act, and if a person was injured by the act, that person should have a cause of action. 230 However, if the official's duties require action be taken in which clearly established rights are not involved, "the public interest may be better served by action taken 'with independence and without fear of consequences.' 231 The objective reasonableness standard was also used in Anderson v. Creighton.232 In Anderson, FBI agent Russell Anderson was working with other law enforcement officers involved in a warrantless search of Robert Creighton's home.233 The search was performed because the FBI agent believed that a bank robbery suspect might be in the house.2 34 Creighton brought an action in state court against Anderson, asserting a Fourth Amendment violation.235 Anderson removed the suit to federal court and then filed a motion for summary judgment, contending the claim was barred by his qualified immunity.236 However, the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit denied Anderson's motion, finding that Creighton demonstrated that Anderson violated Creighton's right to be protected from warrantless searches of his home. An exception from this constitutional right, the court noted, was if officers have probable cause or in situations where there are exigent circumstances.237 The U.S. Supreme Court reversed, stating that it was concerned about the test of "clearly established law"238 because if the test were applied to cases at this level of generality, it would not have any relationship to the "objective legal reasonableness., 239 The Court also stated that plaintiffs would be able to change the rule of qualified immunity "into a rule of virtually unqualified liability of government agents by alleging a violation of extremely abstract rights." 240 The right must be clear enough that a reasonable governmental official would know that his conduct violates that right. 241 The question that must be asked is an objective, albeit fact specific one, whether a reasonable officer would violate others rights or could find that Anderson's search was lawful, "in light of clearly established law and the information the searching officers possessed.' '242 The court found that Anderson's "subjective belief about the search were irrelevant." 243 Furthermore,. in Owens v. City of Independence,244 the Court held that a municipality cannot allege a qualified immunity defense. The Court stated that "many victims of municipal malfeasance would be left remediless if the city were also allowed to assert a good-faith defense." 245 Therefore, a municipality can only escape liability if it claims that a constitutional violation did not occur or that the police officer was not acting in good faith "pursuant to a policy, practice, or custom of the municipality. 246 Thus, if a police brutality victim brings an action against the police officer and municipality under section 1983, the Court will examine the claim under the Fourth Amendment and its reasonable standard to determine whether the police officer's conduct was excessive or unreasonable. Although police officers may assert a qualified immunity defense to the claim, municipalities are not afforded this defense. Civil lawsuits are empirically capable of holding officers accountable. Cheh 96 Mary Cheh (Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School), Are Lawsuits an Answer to Police Brutality, in POLICE VIOLENCE, 248 (William Geller and Hans Toch eds., Yale University Press 1996). By contrast, the civil law, because of its greater flexibility and scope, has the potential to serve as the instrument of systemic reform. In adjusting rights and settling wrongs, civil remedies generally offer distinct advantages over criminal sanctions. First, a victim of police misconduct can sue on his or her their own behalf and need not await the government's decision to go forward. Second, an injured party need not overcome the heightened procedural protections afforded the criminally accused. For example, a plaintiff can prevail under a preponderance of evidence standard rather than proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Third, although the civil law, like the criminal law, can punish via its potential for imposition of punitive damages, the civil law provides compensation to victims who have been harmed by police misconduct. Recompense is beneficial in itself, and damage awards can spur reform if the costs of misbehavior are high. Fourth, civil lawsuits permit broad discovery of information and may provide a means to uncover police misbehavior and stir public reaction. Finally, the civil law offers various possibilities for framing relief which go beyond punishment or compensation and include remediation. That is, the civil law offers equitable relief, via court injunction and specific orders, that can force a deficient department not only to pay for harm caused but to reform so that the harm is not likely to be repeated. Analytic 1. 2. Independent of deterrence, lawsuits lead to political reform for the better. Joanna Schwartz 11 (Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law.) "What Police Learn from Lawsuits." Cardozo L. Rev. 33 (2011): 841. The practices of the departments in my study are distinct in two significant ways from expectations about the uses of litigation data underlying theories of deterrence. Deterrence theorists generally expect that settlements and judgments – financial penalties – inspire performance improvement efforts. Yet the police departments in my study that gather and analyze litigation data do not focus solely – or even primarily – on settlements and judgments. Instead, they pay particular attention to the allegations of misconduct in claims and lawsuits when they are first filed, and the information developed during the course of litigation. To be sure, departments in my study also pay attention to the resolution of suits in various ways. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department tracks trends in settlements and judgments and has reviewed practices and units responsible for large payouts.115 And large settlements and judgments may focus attention on particular cases, particularly if they attract press or political attention.116 But the five departments in my study pay attention to lawsuits at the beginning and middle – as well as the end – of the litigation process. Second, deterrence theory expects that officials deciding which course of action to take weigh the costs of litigation against the benefits of the underlying conduct.117 Yet, the policies in place in the departments in my study do not facilitate this sort of weighing. Departments would not, for example, track lawsuits alleging chokeholds and then decide whether to retrain their officers about the impropriety of chokeholds based on the costs of these suits.118 Instead, departments in my study would use lawsuits, with other data, to identify chokeholds as behavior that triggered a concentration of suits, civilian complaints, and/or use of force reports. The department then would conduct an investigation and identify ways to address the underlying policy, training, or personnel problems.119 And when a department looks for trends in payouts, officials do not weigh those judgments and settlements against the costs of potential policy changes. Instead, the concentration of settlements and judgments is treated as an indication of an underlying problem that is then investigated and analyzed. By differentiating department practices from prevailing understandings of deterrence, I do not mean to suggest that these departments are immune to lawsuits’ deterrent effects. Indeed, the LASD’s elaborate efforts to track and reduce misconduct can be understood as a kind of end-product of deterrence. When the Board of Supervisors appointed the Kolts Commission to review LASD practices, they were motivated in part by a Los Angeles Times story that reported $32 million paid in settlements and judgments against the LASD over a five-year period.120 The Kolts Commission was instructed to find ways to reduce the costs of litigation against the department121 and a significant aim of Merrick Bobb’s reviews of the department remains to monitor the costs of lawsuits brought against the LASD.122 But the policies put in place by the Kolts Commission and Merrick Bobb reduce the costs of liability by understanding and addressing the underlying causes of police error and misconduct. And to achieve this understanding, the LASD and Bobb focus attention on the lessons that can be learned from lawsuits, regardless of an individual suit’s financial or political ramifications. The practices of departments in my study are more akin to those encouraged by those focused on the identification and reduction of error. Cognitive psychologists, organizational theorists, and systems engineers who study human error emphasize the importance of gathering and analyzing data about past performance at a systems level as a way of identifying the types of problems that lead to harm.123 A systems analysis approach has been used to improve safety in a number of fields including aviation safety, nuclear power, and medical care.124 In each industry, information about accidents and “near misses” is collected and analyzed for safety implications. As with efforts to improve safety in aviation, hospitals, and other industries, the departments in my study review information about past behavior from a variety of sources to identify personnel and policy failings and possible ways to improve.
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. Impact Framing To say that the “aff is a bad idea” because it causes white people to backlash and vote for Trump deflects blame and locks us into the status quo. Politics scenarios just re-entrench anti-blackness and inhibit the struggle for freedom. King 63 (Martin Luther King Jr. "Letter from a Birmingham Jail King, Jr." April 1963 AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER - UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA) I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward of freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. "I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured." "In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning of time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: stating "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity."
Method Framing The state is inevitable- policymaking is the only way to create change. Coverstone 05 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.
11/5/16
ND - Race AC v2
Tournament: Glenbrooks | Round: 2 | Opponent: Rosemount TS | Judge: John Scoggin Morality must start from the non-ideal circumstances we have inherited. We can never achieve the ideal consequences that ethical theories aspire for without a focus on social reality. Mills 05 Mills 05 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. This approach to ethics justifies focus on resolving material conditions of violence. Morality isn’t just something that we strive for in a vaccum, rather, we resolve it based on the empirical world. Pappas 16 Gregory Fernando Pappas Texas AandM University “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 prob- lematic 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 prac- tice a much more personalized medicine than we do today, that is, provide a diagnosis and a solution specific to each patient. Thus, the standard is resolving material conditions of violence. Prefer additionally: First, recognizing and combatting the structures of racism is a pre-condition to making ethical action possible- even if your ethic is true in the abstract, we need the AC framework first. Memmi 2K Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ U of Paris, Naiteire, Racism, Translated by Steve Martinot, p. 163-165 2000 The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved. Yet, for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism; one must not even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people, which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. it is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which man is not himself an outsider relative to someone else?. Racism illustrates, in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated that is, it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animosity to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduit only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order, for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism, because racism signifies the exclusion of the other, and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is ‘the truly capital sin. It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsels respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. Bur no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall.” says the Bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,” which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming one again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal—indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice, a just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible. Resolved: The United States should limit qualified immunity for police officers by removing the “clearly established” element from the Qualified Immunity Doctrine as method to increase accountability for officers. I’m willing to clarify T interps in CX. 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/) In order to truly hold police accountable for bad acts, civilians must be able to bring, and win, civil rights suits themselves — not rely on the Department of Justice, or special prosecutors, or civilian review boards to hold officers accountable. And in order to both bring and win civil rights suits, civilians need a level playing field in court. Right now, they don’t have one. Instead, police officers have recourse to the broad protections of the judicially established doctrine of qualified immunity. Under this doctrine, state actors are protected from suit even if they’ve violated the law by, say, using excessive force, or performing an unwarranted body cavity search — as long as their violation was not one of “clearly established law, of which a reasonable officer would be aware.” In other words, if there’s not already a case where a court has held that an officer’s identical or near-identical conduct rose to the level of a constitutional violation there’s a good chance that even an obviously malfeasant officer will avoid liability — will avoid accountability. To bring about true accountability and change police behavior, this needs to change. 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? That’s just a start. There are plenty of other reforms that could open up civil rights lawsuits and help ensure police accountability for bad conduct. Two posts (one, two) at Balkinization by City University of New York professor Lynda Dodd provide a good overview. Campaign Zero should consider adding civil rights litigation reform to its platform, our policymakers should consider making civil rights litigation more robust, and, if we want to see justice done, we should push to make it happen. Qualified immunity destroys accountability for police officers-limitations are key. Bernick 15 Evan Bernick, https://fee.org/articles/to-hold-police-accountable-dont-give-them-immunity/ The sad fact is that it is often effectively impossible to hold police officers accountable for unconstitutional acts. That fact is attributable in large part to a potent well of unchecked power that many Americans have never heard of. You will not find it in the Constitution. You will not find it in any federal law. It is a judge-made doctrine, invented by the Supreme Court. It is called qualified immunity. And if those charged with enforcing the law are to be kept within the bounds of their rightful authority, it must be abolished. Section 1983, the federal law that allows citizens to sue for constitutional violations, is broad, unequivocal, and unambiguous. It says that “every person” who is acting “under color of” law who causes a “deprivation of any rights… secured by the Constitution and laws” “shall be liable to the party injured.” Section 1983 embodies a foundational principle of justice that resonates with Americans who have never heard of Marbury v. Madison: where there is a right, there is a remedy.But for decades, we have had rights without remedies. In the 1967 case of Pierson v. Ray, the Supreme Court held that police officers sued for constitutional violations can raise “qualified immunity” as a defense, and thereby escape paying out of their own pockets, even if they violated a person’s constitutional rights. This decision was unabashedly policy-oriented: it was thought that government officials would not vigorously fulfill their obligations if they could be held accountable for actions taken in good faith. Under current law, the general rule is that victims of rights violations pay the costs of their own injuries. In practice, qualified immunity provides a near-absolute defense to all but the most outrageous conduct. The Ninth Circuit has held that throwing a flash-bang grenade “blindly” into a house, injuring a toddler, isn’t outrageous enough. Just last year, in Plumhoff v. Rickard, the Supreme Court decided that firing 15 bullets at a motorist is a reasonable method to end the driver’s flight from the police. So much for “every person” “shall be liable.” Qualified immunity shields police misconduct not only from liability but also from meaningful judicial scrutiny. Private lawsuits are an essential tool in uncovering the truth about police misconduct. The discovery process can yield information that makes broader policy changes within police departments possible. At trial, judicial engagement — an impartial, evidence-based determination of the constitutionality of the officer’s actions — can take place. And, the link to impacts is massive- hundreds of deaths occur yearly yet almost 98 percent of police do not face consequences for their actions. Wong 15 Kathleen Wong, 2015, 10 Police Brutality Statistics that are Absolutely Shocking, https://mic.com/articles/129981/10-police-brutality-statistics-that-are-absolutely-shocking#.779kZJJJC 6. The Guardian's The Counted project, which crowdsources and reports on police deaths, analyzed the first half of 2015 to find that an average of three people were killed daily during that time. 7. Mapping Police Violence found that black people living in Oklahoma were six times more likely to be killed by police than in Georgia. 8. It also found 98 of these events did not end with an officer being charged with a crime. Allowing police violence perpetuates systems of racism in the squo. Hadden et al 16 (Bernadette R. Hadden, MSW, PHD, is Assistant professor in the MSW program at Hunter College School of Social Work New York. Willie Tolliver, PhD. Associate Professor at Silberman School of Social Work. Fabienne Snowden PHD. Professor at Hunter College School of Social Work. and Robyn Brown Manning, PHD. Professor at Hunter College School of Social "An authentic discourse: Recentering race and racism as factors that contribute to police violence against unarmed Black or African American men, Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment" http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10911359.2015.1129252#abstract) Police shootings of unarmed Black or African American men are occurring at alarming rates (Wihbey, 2014) and are indicative of a national trend of excessive force used by law enforcement agents on the bodies of people of color (American Civil Liberties Union ACLU, 2014). These incidents are happening inside and outside of Black and Hispanic neighborhoods (Carroll and Gonzalez, 2014), to low-income and middle-class Blacks or African Americans (Jones-Brown, 2009), and are frequently the result of routine encounters (ACLU, 2014). One of several challenges in obtaining an accurate count of the number of the police shootings of unarmed Black or African American men in the United States is that there are no nationally consistent measures of collecting these data (Department of Justice, 2015). This lack of standardized reporting, accompanied by public outrage, civil unrest, and community activism, calls for investigations into, and law enforcement reporting of, fatal police shootings of unarmed Black or African American men. Suggestions of racial profiling in police shootings have been presented as an explanation of the phenomenon of the disproportionate shooting of unarmed Black or African American men by law enforcement agents (Amajor, Sandars, and Pitts, 1999). In 2007 researchers found that in 10 of the United States’s largest cities, Blacks or African Americans were overly represented among victims of police shootings (Lowerstein, 2007). These findings were most visible in New York City, Las Vegas, and San Diego (Lowerstein, 2007). At a 2010 hearing calling for the investigation of police-involved shootings in Oakland, California, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) reported that from 2004 and 2008, 37 of the 45 police shootings in that city were at Black or African American suspects (Bulwa, 2010). A report from the New York City Police Department (NYCPD) illustrates that between 2000 and 2013, 97 Blacks or African Americans, 41 Hispanics, and 21 Whites were killed by NYPD police officers (NYCPD, 2014). In other words, from 2000 to 2013, more Blacks or African Americans were killed by NYCPD weapon discharges than Latinos and Whites combined. These reports identify and document the phenomenon of Black or African American men being shot and/ or killed by police officers, despite the limitations in data tracking police shootings (Graham, 2015). However, they do not inform us of the incidence or prevalence of this phenomenon Qualified immunity is structurally violent- it forces deliberation to occur through the interpretation of the oppressor, as opposed to allowing contestation of these views in court. Senkel 99 ( Tara. Attorney in New York. Civilians Often Need Protection From the Police: Let's Handcuff Police Brutality 15 N.Y.L. Sch. J. Hum. Rts. 385 (1998-1999). http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?public=falseandhandle=hein.journals/nylshr15andpage=385andcollection=journals#) While victims of police brutality can bring an action under section 1983217 against the police officer and the municipality, the police officer and municipality are each subject to liability under two different theories.218 Police officers are found liable iUnder the statute if, "while acting under color of state law, their actions violate a person's constitutional rights. 219 Municipalities are not liable under the theory of respondeat superior, but may be found liable if the police officer's conduct follows an official policy or practice of the municipality.220 There are differences between an action brought against a police officer and an action brought against a municipality, such as the defenses that can be asserted.2 Once a victim brings an excessive force claim against a police officer under section 1983, the officer may assert a defense of qualified immunity.222 In Graham, the Supreme Court did not address the issue of qualified immunity in Fourth Amendment excessive force claims. 223 However, the Court did discuss the qualified immunity defense in Harlow v. Fitzgerald. 224 In Harlow, A. Ernest Fitzgerald sued Bryce Harlow and Alexander Butterfield, Richard Nixon's White House aides, alleging they had been involved in a conspiracy to violate his constitutional and statutory rights.225 The Court held that the aides were protected by a qualified immunity. 226 The Court stated that: Bare allegations of malice should not suffice to subject governmental officials either to the costs of trial or to the burdens of broad-reaching discovery. We therefore hold that government officials performing discretionary functions, generally are shielded from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not clearly violate, established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known. 227 The Court went on to state that by defining the limits of the qualified immunity doctrine in objective terms, it was not authorizing lawless conduct.228 Rather, the objective reasonableness of an official's acts protects the public interest by discouraging unlawful conduct and compensating victims. 229 If an official could be expected to know that an act would violate statutory or constitutional rights, the officer should not perform the act, and if a person was injured by the act, that person should have a cause of action. 230 However, if the official's duties require action be taken in which clearly established rights are not involved, "the public interest may be better served by action taken 'with independence and without fear of consequences.' 231 The objective reasonableness standard was also used in Anderson v. Creighton.232 In Anderson, FBI agent Russell Anderson was working with other law enforcement officers involved in a warrantless search of Robert Creighton's home.233 The search was performed because the FBI agent believed that a bank robbery suspect might be in the house.2 34 Creighton brought an action in state court against Anderson, asserting a Fourth Amendment violation.235 Anderson removed the suit to federal court and then filed a motion for summary judgment, contending the claim was barred by his qualified immunity.236 However, the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit denied Anderson's motion, finding that Creighton demonstrated that Anderson violated Creighton's right to be protected from warrantless searches of his home. An exception from this constitutional right, the court noted, was if officers have probable cause or in situations where there are exigent circumstances.237 The U.S. Supreme Court reversed, stating that it was concerned about the test of "clearly established law"238 because if the test were applied to cases at this level of generality, it would not have any relationship to the "objective legal reasonableness., 239 The Court also stated that plaintiffs would be able to change the rule of qualified immunity "into a rule of virtually unqualified liability of government agents by alleging a violation of extremely abstract rights." 240 The right must be clear enough that a reasonable governmental official would know that his conduct violates that right. 241 The question that must be asked is an objective, albeit fact specific one, whether a reasonable officer would violate others rights or could find that Anderson's search was lawful, "in light of clearly established law and the information the searching officers possessed.' '242 The court found that Anderson's "subjective belief about the search were irrelevant." 243 Furthermore,. in Owens v. City of Independence,244 the Court held that a municipality cannot allege a qualified immunity defense. The Court stated that "many victims of municipal malfeasance would be left remediless if the city were also allowed to assert a good-faith defense." 245 Therefore, a municipality can only escape liability if it claims that a constitutional violation did not occur or that the police officer was not acting in good faith "pursuant to a policy, practice, or custom of the municipality. 246 Thus, if a police brutality victim brings an action against the police officer and municipality under section 1983, the Court will examine the claim under the Fourth Amendment and its reasonable standard to determine whether the police officer's conduct was excessive or unreasonable. Although police officers may assert a qualified immunity defense to the claim, municipalities are not afforded this defense. Civil lawsuits are empirically capable of holding officers accountable. Cheh 96 Mary Cheh (Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School), Are Lawsuits an Answer to Police Brutality, in POLICE VIOLENCE, 248 (William Geller and Hans Toch eds., Yale University Press 1996). By contrast, the civil law, because of its greater flexibility and scope, has the potential to serve as the instrument of systemic reform. In adjusting rights and settling wrongs, civil remedies generally offer distinct advantages over criminal sanctions. First, a victim of police misconduct can sue on his or her their own behalf and need not await the government's decision to go forward. Second, an injured party need not overcome the heightened procedural protections afforded the criminally accused. For example, a plaintiff can prevail under a preponderance of evidence standard rather than proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Third, although the civil law, like the criminal law, can punish via its potential for imposition of punitive damages, the civil law provides compensation to victims who have been harmed by police misconduct. Recompense is beneficial in itself, and damage awards can spur reform if the costs of misbehavior are high. Fourth, civil lawsuits permit broad discovery of information and may provide a means to uncover police misbehavior and stir public reaction. Finally, the civil law offers various possibilities for framing relief which go beyond punishment or compensation and include remediation. That is, the civil law offers equitable relief, via court injunction and specific orders, that can force a deficient department not only to pay for harm caused but to reform so that the harm is not likely to be repeated. Independent of deterrence, lawsuits lead to political reform for the better. Shwartz 11 Joanna Schwartz 11 (Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law.) "What Police Learn from Lawsuits." Cardozo L. Rev. 33 (2011): 841. The practices of the departments in my study are distinct in two significant ways from expectations about the uses of litigation data underlying theories of deterrence. Deterrence theorists generally expect that settlements and judgments – financial penalties – inspire performance improvement efforts. Yet the police departments in my study that gather and analyze litigation data do not focus solely – or even primarily – on settlements and judgments. Instead, they pay particular attention to the allegations of misconduct in claims and lawsuits when they are first filed, and the information developed during the course of litigation. To be sure, departments in my study also pay attention to the resolution of suits in various ways. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department tracks trends in settlements and judgments and has reviewed practices and units responsible for large payouts.115 And large settlements and judgments may focus attention on particular cases, particularly if they attract press or political attention.116 But the five departments in my study pay attention to lawsuits at the beginning and middle – as well as the end – of the litigation process. Second, deterrence theory expects that officials deciding which course of action to take weigh the costs of litigation against the benefits of the underlying conduct.117 Yet, the policies in place in the departments in my study do not facilitate this sort of weighing. Departments would not, for example, track lawsuits alleging chokeholds and then decide whether to retrain their officers about the impropriety of chokeholds based on the costs of these suits.118 Instead, departments in my study would use lawsuits, with other data, to identify chokeholds as behavior that triggered a concentration of suits, civilian complaints, and/or use of force reports. The department then would conduct an investigation and identify ways to address the underlying policy, training, or personnel problems.119 And when a department looks for trends in payouts, officials do not weigh those judgments and settlements against the costs of potential policy changes. Instead, the concentration of settlements and judgments is treated as an indication of an underlying problem that is then investigated and analyzed. By differentiating department practices from prevailing understandings of deterrence, I do not mean to suggest that these departments are immune to lawsuits’ deterrent effects. Indeed, the LASD’s elaborate efforts to track and reduce misconduct can be understood as a kind of end-product of deterrence. When the Board of Supervisors appointed the Kolts Commission to review LASD practices, they were motivated in part by a Los Angeles Times story that reported $32 million paid in settlements and judgments against the LASD over a five-year period.120 The Kolts Commission was instructed to find ways to reduce the costs of litigation against the department121 and a significant aim of Merrick Bobb’s reviews of the department remains to monitor the costs of lawsuits brought against the LASD.122 But the policies put in place by the Kolts Commission and Merrick Bobb reduce the costs of liability by understanding and addressing the underlying causes of police error and misconduct. And to achieve this understanding, the LASD and Bobb focus attention on the lessons that can be learned from lawsuits, regardless of an individual suit’s financial or political ramifications. The practices of departments in my study are more akin to those encouraged by those focused on the identification and reduction of error. Cognitive psychologists, organizational theorists, and systems engineers who study human error emphasize the importance of gathering and analyzing data about past performance at a systems level as a way of identifying the types of problems that lead to harm.123 A systems analysis approach has been used to improve safety in a number of fields including aviation safety, nuclear power, and medical care.124 In each industry, information about accidents and “near misses” is collected and analyzed for safety implications. As with efforts to improve safety in aviation, hospitals, and other industries, the departments in my study review information about past behavior from a variety of sources to identify personnel and policy failings and possible ways to improve.
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. To say that the “aff is a bad idea” because it causes white people to backlash and precipitate violence deflects blame and locks us into the status quo. King 63 King 63 (Martin Luther King Jr. "Letter from a Birmingham Jail King, Jr." April 1963 AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER - UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA) I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward of freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. "I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured." "In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning of time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: stating "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity."
The state is inevitable- policymaking is the only way to create change. Coverstone 05 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. Racial progress has occurred though legal change -~-- pessimism ignores specific reforms that achieved lasting reductions in racial inequality Omi and Winant 13 Michael Omi (Sociologist at UC Berkeley, focusing on antiracism scholarship and Asian American studies) and Howard Winant (Professor of Sociology affiliated with the Black Studies and Chicana/o Studies departments of UC Santa Barbara), Resistance is futile?: a response to Feagin and Elias, Ethnic and Racial Studies Volume 36, Issue 6, p. 961-973, Special Issue: Symposium - Rethinking Racial Formation Theory. 2013. In Feagin and Elias's account, white racist rule in the USA appears unalterable and permanent. There is little sense that the ‘white racial frame’ evoked by systemic racism theory changes in significant ways over historical time. They to dismiss important rearrangements and reforms as merely ‘a distraction from more ingrained structural oppressions and deep lying inequalities that continue to define US society’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21). Feagin and Elias use a concept they call ‘surface flexibility’ to argue that white elites frame racial realities in ways that suggest change, but are merely engineered to reinforce the underlying structure of racial oppression. Feagin and Elias say the phrase ‘racial democracy’ is an oxymoron – a word defined in the dictionary as a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. If they mean the USA is a contradictory and incomplete democracy in respect to race and racism issues, we agree. If they mean that people of colour have no democratic rights or political power in the USA, we disagree. The USA is a racially despotic country in many ways, but in our view it is also in many respects a racial democracy, capable of being influenced towards more or less inclusive and redistributive economic policies, social policies, or for that matter, imperial policies. What is distinctive about our own epoch in the USA (post-Second World War to the present) with respect to race and racism? Over the past decades there has been a steady drumbeat of efforts to contain and neutralize civil rights, to restrict racial democracy, and to maintain or even increase racial inequality. Racial disparities in different institutional sites – employment, health, education – persist and in many cases have increased. Indeed, the post-2008 period has seen a dramatic increase in racial inequality. The subprime home mortgage crisis, for example, was a major racial event. Black and brown people were disproportionately affected by predatory lending practices; many lost their homes as a result; race-based wealth disparities widened tremendously. It would be easy to conclude, as Feagin and Elias do, that white racial dominance has been continuous and unchanging throughout US history. But such a perspective misses the dramatic twists and turns in racial politics that have occurred since the Second World War and the civil rights era. Feagin and Elias claim that we overly inflate the significance of the changes wrought by the civil rights movement, and that we ‘overlook the serious reversals of racial justice and persistence of huge racial inequalities’ (Feagin and Elias 2012, p. 21) that followed in its wake. We do not. In Racial Formation we wrote about ‘racial reaction’ in a chapter of that name, and elsewhere in the book as well. Feagin and Elias devote little attention to our arguments there; perhaps because they are in substantial agreement with us. While we argue that the right wing was able to ‘rearticulate’ race and racism issues to roll back some of the gains of the civil rights movement, we also believe that there are limits to what the right could achieve in the post-civil rights political landscape. So we agree that the present prospects for racial justice are demoralizing at best. But we do not think that is the whole story. US racial conditions have changed over the post-Second World War period, in ways that Feagin and Elias tend to downplay or neglect. Some of the major reforms of the 1960s have proved irreversible; they have set powerful democratic forces in motion. These racial (trans)formations were the results of unprecedented political mobilizations, led by the black movement, but not confined to blacks alone. Consider the desegregation of the armed forces, as well as key civil rights movement victories of the 1960s: the Voting Rights Act, the Immigration and Naturalization Act (Hart- Celler), as well as important court decisions like Loving v. Virginia that declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. While we have the greatest respect for the late Derrick Bell, we do not believe that his ‘interest convergence hypothesis’ effectively explains all these developments. How does Lyndon Johnson's famous (and possibly apocryphal) lament upon signing the Civil Rights Act on 2 July 1964 – ‘We have lost the South for a generation’ – count as ‘convergence’? The US racial regime has been transformed in significant ways. As Antonio Gramsci argues, hegemony proceeds through the incorporation of opposition (Gramsci 1971, p. 182). The civil rights reforms can be seen as a classic example of this process; here the US racial regime – under movement pressure – was exercising its hegemony. But Gramsci insists that such reforms – which he calls ‘passive revolutions’ – cannot be merely symbolic if they are to be effective: oppositions must win real gains in the process. Once again, we are in the realm of politics, not absolute rule. So yes, we think there were important if partial victories that shifted the racial state and transformed the significance of race in everyday life. And yes, we think that further victories can take place both on the broad terrain of the state and on the more immediate level of social interaction: in daily interaction, in the human psyche and across civil society. Indeed we have argued that in many ways the most important accomplishment of the anti-racist movement of the 1960s in the USA was the politicization of the social. In the USA and indeed around the globe, race-based movements demanded not only the inclusion of racially defined ‘others’ and the democratization of structurally racist societies, but also the recognition and validation by both the state and civil society of racially-defined experience and identity. These demands broadened and deepened democracy itself. They facilitated not only the democratic gains made in the USA by the black movement and its allies, but also the political advances towards equality, social justice and inclusion accomplished by other ‘new social movements’: second-wave feminism, gay liberation, and the environmental list and anti-war movements, among others.
12/3/16
ND - Race AC v3
Tournament: Longhorn Classic | Round: 1 | Opponent: Dulles MK | Judge: Emily Nguyen The role of the ballot is to evaluate the simulated consequences of the aff world through a policymaking paradigm. You can weigh the SQUO or a competitive policymaking paradigm against the aff. Prefer:
Fairness. A. Anything moots 6 minutes of 1ac offense – forces 1ar restart. They get a 13-7 minute advantage which means we have worse discussion, even if the subject of discussion is slightly better. At the very worst that means I get to weigh the case to preserve my offense. B. Independently, there is a huge spectrum of political theories – the k can be the radical on both sides of the spectrum and multifunctional aff offense is insufficient to interact with everything. 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). 2. Institutional Engagement. 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 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. 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. 4. Heuristics. The 1AC acknowledges the state is bad in many ways. However, the aff uses state as heuristic which doesn’t affirm its legitimacy but allows enhanced governmental resistance. Zanotti 14 Dr. Laura Zanotti (Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech) “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 Framework The standard is resisting material inequalities. Prefer:
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 “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?”
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.
2. 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 definition 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 Plan Resolved: The United States should limit qualified immunity for police officers by removing the “clearly established” element from the Qualified Immunity Doctrine as method to increase accountability for officers. I’m willing to clarify T interps in CX. 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/) In order to truly hold police accountable for bad acts, civilians must be able to bring, and win, civil rights suits themselves — not rely on the Department of Justice, or special prosecutors, or civilian review boards to hold officers accountable. And in order to both bring and win civil rights suits, civilians need a level playing field in court. Right now, they don’t have one. Instead, police officers have recourse to the broad protections of the judicially established doctrine of qualified immunity. Under this doctrine, state actors are protected from suit even if they’ve violated the law by, say, using excessive force, or performing an unwarranted body cavity search — as long as their violation was not one of “clearly established law, of which a reasonable officer would be aware.” In other words, if there’s not already a case where a court has held that an officer’s identical or near-identical conduct rose to the level of a constitutional violation there’s a good chance that even an obviously malfeasant officer will avoid liability — will avoid accountability. To bring about true accountability and change police behavior, this needs to change. 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? That’s just a start. There are plenty of other reforms that could open up civil rights lawsuits and help ensure police accountability for bad conduct. Two posts (one, two) at Balkinization by City University of New York professor Lynda Dodd provide a good overview. Campaign Zero should consider adding civil rights litigation reform to its platform, our policymakers should consider making civil rights litigation more robust, and, if we want to see justice done, we should push to make it happen. Inherency The United States is a warzone—police murder thousands of black people a year—it’s try or die. Wong ’15 (Kathleen is a branded content staff writer at Mic, “10 Police Brutality Statistics That Are Absolutely Shocking,” Mic, 12/9, https://mic.com/articles/129981/10-police-brutality-statistics-that-are-absolutely-shocking#.HiJcAd5rQ) Bracketed for efficiency
In May, the Washington Post analyzed the 385 fatal police shootings in the United States that had occurred so far in 2015. The Post noted its number, which came out to two officer-involved shooting deaths per day, was more than twice the rate that the government had recorded over the past decade. 2. That same report found blacks to be killed at three times the rate of whites or other minorities. 3. It also found that almost a quarter of those killed were identified as mentally ill by police or family members. 4. The youngest victims at the end of May, according to the Washington Post, were 16 years old (though at the time, nine ages were unknown). 5. Another Washington Post investigation from August found that black men — who constitute 6 of the nation's population — account for 40 of the 60 unarmed people who had been fatally shot by police by that time. 6. The Guardian's The Counted project, which crowdsources and reports on police deaths, analyzed the first half of 2015 to find that an average of three people were killed daily during the first half of 2015 that time. 7. Mapping Police Violence found that black people living in Oklahoma were six times more likely to be killed by police than in Georgia. 8. It also found 98 of these events did not end with an officer being charged with a crime. 9. A 2014 article by KQED found California to be the state with the most frequent occurrences of deadly officer-involved shootings, with 102 in 2011. 10. The Guardian also found that if this trend persists, the number of people killed by police will surpass 1,000 by the end of the year. Advantage 1 is Police Brutality Qualified immunity destroys accountability for police officers-limitations are key. Bernick 15 Evan Bernick, https://fee.org/articles/to-hold-police-accountable-dont-give-them-immunity/ The sad fact is that it is often effectively impossible to hold police officers accountable for unconstitutional acts. That fact is attributable in large part to a potent well of unchecked power that many Americans have never heard of. You will not find it in the Constitution. You will not find it in any federal law. It is a judge-made doctrine, invented by the Supreme Court. It is called qualified immunity. And if those charged with enforcing the law are to be kept within the bounds of their rightful authority, it must be abolished. Section 1983, the federal law that allows citizens to sue for constitutional violations, is broad, unequivocal, and unambiguous. It says that “every person” who is acting “under color of” law who causes a “deprivation of any rights… secured by the Constitution and laws” “shall be liable to the party injured.” Section 1983 embodies a foundational principle of justice that resonates with Americans who have never heard of Marbury v. Madison: where there is a right, there is a remedy.But for decades, we have had rights without remedies. In the 1967 case of Pierson v. Ray, the Supreme Court held that police officers sued for constitutional violations can raise “qualified immunity” as a defense, and thereby escape paying out of their own pockets, even if they violated a person’s constitutional rights. This decision was unabashedly policy-oriented: it was thought that government officials would not vigorously fulfill their obligations if they could be held accountable for actions taken in good faith. Under current law, the general rule is that victims of rights violations pay the costs of their own injuries. In practice, qualified immunity provides a near-absolute defense to all but the most outrageous conduct. The Ninth Circuit has held that throwing a flash-bang grenade “blindly” into a house, injuring a toddler, isn’t outrageous enough. Just last year, in Plumhoff v. Rickard, the Supreme Court decided that firing 15 bullets at a motorist is a reasonable method to end the driver’s flight from the police. So much for “every person” “shall be liable.” Qualified immunity shields police misconduct not only from liability but also from meaningful judicial scrutiny. Private lawsuits are an essential tool in uncovering the truth about police misconduct. The discovery process can yield information that makes broader policy changes within police departments possible. At trial, judicial engagement — an impartial, evidence-based determination of the constitutionality of the officer’s actions — can take place. The plan solves- cases that the aff puts in court get interacted fairly and result in success while still protecting officers- no backlash. Sheng 11 (Philip, B.A., Stanford University, John Arrillaga Scholar. An "Objectively Reasonable" Criticism of the Doctrine of Qualified Immunity in Excessive Force Cas-es Brought Under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 BYU Journal of Public Law 2011 The BYU Journal of Public Law 26 BYU J. Pub. L. 99) A better approach might be to eliminate qualified immunity altogether in excessive force cases; but rather than create a whole new test, the Court should remove the question of reasonableness from the jury and allow judges to decide whether the use of force was objectively reasonable. Under this approach, jury interaction would remain much the same, except that after all the facts are resolved, the judge would decide the ultimate constitutional question of reasonableness based on the jury's findings. While this would be a departure from settled practice, it appears to have an adequate basis in the law. For instance, trial court judges already decide the question of reasonableness on motions for summary judgment whenever facts are undisputed or viewed in the light most *109 favorable to the plaintiff. n83 Moreover, appellate judges routinely decide the question of reasonableness every time an excessive force case goes on appeal. n84 Judges are well-equipped, yet it seems odd that the constitutional question of reasonableness only goes to the judge when facts are not in dispute, but at all other times, is entrusted to the jury. It would perhaps make better sense to have the jury resolve the facts, and have the judge decide the question of reasonableness based on those facts. There are several benefits to this approach. First, it would eliminate the need for line drawing between Hope and Brosseau, and courts would not have to worry about clearly established law. Second, the Court could retreat from its "irreducibly murky" n85 distinction between Graham and Harlow. If applied judiciously, Graham alone provides law enforcement officers with adequate protection for reasonable mistakes. Third, even though they would be denied qualified immunity, law enforcement officers would benefit by having judges decide the constitutional question of reasonableness. Judges are in a better position to decide constitutional questions, having been trained in the law and having developed expertise through experience. This approach would also eliminate potential jury bias. While jury bias can cut both ways, n86 consider the case of Jared Massey, a YouTube sensation and public hero after being Tasered by a Utah Highway Patrol officer in 2007. n87 Despite an internal investigation clearing the officer, the state settled for $ 40,000 rather than risk a jury awarding more. n88 Fourth, the approach would serve the same purposes as qualified immunity by allowing claims to be decided early on summary judgment. And lawsuits deter brutality while indemnification is not guaranteed. Gilles ’01 (Mirriam, Assistant Professor, Cardozo Law School, “In Defense of making Government Pay: The Deterrent Effect of Constitutional Tort Remedies,” Georgia Law Review, Vol. 35, 2001.) OS bracketed for gender The question of whether constitutional tort remedies serve any deterrent effect is, I think, easily answered in the affirmative. No police officer wants to be sued, 2 particularly where there is no absolute guarantee that their his municipal employer will pay for their his defense and indemnify him for damages.3 Indeed, the substantive and procedural elements of the qualified immunity doctrine are largely premised on the undesirability of dragging public officials through a difficult legal process, taking their time and energies away from their official duties, and exposing them to potentially ruinous liability. 4 And even where officers are indemnified, it is reasonable to suppose that there are immense political costs (in the sense of everyday workplace politics) associated with a finding of liability and exposing the municipal employer to budgetary payouts. Common sense supports this view that constitutional damages deter police misconduct to some appreciable degree. Every day across the country, there are obviously situations in which officers are tempted to abuse a defenseless suspect in order to gain information during an interrogation, or for some other purpose. It would be foolhardy to assume that the knowledge that a suspect might sue for damages has no inhibitory effect. Independent of deterrence, lawsuits lead to political reform for the better. Schwartz 11 Joanna Schwartz 11 (Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law.) "What Police Learn from Lawsuits." Cardozo L. Rev. 33 (2011): 841. The practices of the departments in my study are distinct in two significant ways from expectations about the uses of litigation data underlying theories of deterrence. Deterrence theorists generally expect that settlements and judgments – financial penalties – inspire performance improvement efforts. Yet the police departments in my study that gather and analyze litigation data do not focus solely – or even primarily – on settlements and judgments. Instead, they pay particular attention to the allegations of misconduct in claims and lawsuits when they are first filed, and the information developed during the course of litigation. To be sure, departments in my study also pay attention to the resolution of suits in various ways. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department tracks trends in settlements and judgments and has reviewed practices and units responsible for large payouts.115 And large settlements and judgments may focus attention on particular cases, particularly if they attract press or political attention.116 But the five departments in my study pay attention to lawsuits at the beginning and middle – as well as the end – of the litigation process. Second, deterrence theory expects that officials deciding which course of action to take weigh the costs of litigation against the benefits of the underlying conduct.117 Yet, the policies in place in the departments in my study do not facilitate this sort of weighing. Departments would not, for example, track lawsuits alleging chokeholds and then decide whether to retrain their officers about the impropriety of chokeholds based on the costs of these suits.118 Instead, departments in my study would use lawsuits, with other data, to identify chokeholds as behavior that triggered a concentration of suits, civilian complaints, and/or use of force reports. The department then would conduct an investigation and identify ways to address the underlying policy, training, or personnel problems.119 And when a department looks for trends in payouts, officials do not weigh those judgments and settlements against the costs of potential policy changes. Instead, the concentration of settlements and judgments is treated as an indication of an underlying problem that is then investigated and analyzed. By differentiating department practices from prevailing understandings of deterrence, I do not mean to suggest that these departments are immune to lawsuits’ deterrent effects. Indeed, the LASD’s elaborate efforts to track and reduce misconduct can be understood as a kind of end-product of deterrence. When the Board of Supervisors appointed the Kolts Commission to review LASD practices, they were motivated in part by a Los Angeles Times story that reported $32 million paid in settlements and judgments against the LASD over a five-year period.120 The Kolts Commission was instructed to find ways to reduce the costs of litigation against the department121 and a significant aim of Merrick Bobb’s reviews of the department remains to monitor the costs of lawsuits brought against the LASD.122 But the policies put in place by the Kolts Commission and Merrick Bobb reduce the costs of liability by understanding and addressing the underlying causes of police error and misconduct. And to achieve this understanding, the LASD and Bobb focus attention on the lessons that can be learned from lawsuits, regardless of an individual suit’s financial or political ramifications. The practices of departments in my study are more akin to those encouraged by those focused on the identification and reduction of error. 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. Case studies prove that litigation spurs legislation for positive policy reform, win or lose. 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). Advantage 2 – Human Rights Qualified immunity leads to circumvention of rights and propagates police brutality – plan solves this. Johnson 15 – Tabitha Johnson, : 2015(“QUALIFIED IMMUNITY OR JUSTIFIED BRUTALITY?: AN EXAMINATION OF THE QUALIFIED IMMUNITY DOCTRINE IN PETERSON V. KOPP” Tennessee Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice, Vol. 4:2 p.265-267) The Eighth Circuit then addressed Peterson’s excessive force claim.43 During his arrest, Peterson contended that Kopp used excessive force, thus violating Peterson’s Fourth Amendment right “to be free from unreasonable seizures.”44 In determining whether Kopp used excessive force in Peterson’s arrest, the court used an “objective reasonableness” test.45 The Eighth Circuit explained that this test took into account that an officer’s actions “must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.”46 In determining whether an officer’s actions in pursuing an arrest were reasonable, the Eighth Circuit evaluated “the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether the suspect is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.”47 The court concluded that Peterson’s purported crime was not severe, he was not posing a threat to others, nor was he fleeing.48 As Peterson’s disobedience was passive and non-threatening to others, Kopp’s infliction of physical force onto Peterson was deemed excessive.49 While Kopp’s arrest failed the excessive force test, the Eighth Circuit held that Kopp was entitled to qualified immunity because Peterson’s injuries sustained from the altercation with Kopp were de minimis.50 The injuries were de minimis because Peterson “did not seek medical care and his injuries resolved themselves without medical intervention.”51 To support its conclusion, the court provided a wealth of similar cases for comparison.52 The court further noted that a recent decision changed the law regarding the applicability of qualified immunity for de minimis injuries; however, the court also clarified that it rendered the ruling after the altercation between Kopp and Peterson.53 Therefore, Kopp was reasonable in assuming that, as long as the injuries he inflicted upon Peterson were de minimis, he would remain entitled to qualified immunity as his actions were “constitutionally permissible” at the time.54 Lastly, the Eighth Circuit addressed Peterson’s two retaliation claims.55 Peterson alleged that Kopp both pepper sprayed and arrested him for participating in a constitutionally protected activity.56 In determining whether Kopp acted in retaliation, the court determined that Peterson must show that “he engaged in a protected activity,” that “the government official took adverse action against him that would chill a person of ordinary firmness from continuing in the activity,” and that “the adverse action was motivated at least in part by the exercise of the protected activity.”57 The Eighth Circuit consolidated the three prongs of the test by stating that a plaintiff need only show that “he was ‘singled out because of his exercise of constitutional rights’” in order to prevail on a retaliation claim.58 The court further implemented a fourth prong to this traditional test.59 To satisfy the test, Peterson would also need to prove a “lack of probable cause or a lack of arguable probable cause.”60 The Eighth Circuit first applied the aforementioned test to Peterson’s claim of retaliatory arrest.61 In applying this four-prong test, the Eighth Circuit held that “Kopp was entitled to qualified immunity on Peterson’s retaliatory arrest claim because, as detailed above, Kopp had at least arguable probable cause for the arrest,” as exemplified through his actions prior to his arrest.62 The Eighth Circuit then evaluated Peterson’s claim of being pepper sprayed out of retaliation.63 The court determined that Peterson presented enough evidence to prove that Kopp pepper sprayed him out of retaliation. 64 In reaching its conclusion, the Eighth Circuit noted that it was significant to Peterson’s contention that, shortly before being pepper sprayed, Peterson demanded Kopp’s badge number.65 This—along with Kopp’s outright refusal to provide Peterson with the requested information—justified the court’s decision to remand the issue.66 The court ultimately held that “a reasonable jury could conclude . . . that Kopp pepper sprayed Peterson in retaliation for asking for his badge number, and Peterson’s First Amendment right was clearly established at the time of the incident.”67 For these reasons, the Eighth Circuit remanded the retaliatory force claim for further review. IV. CONCLUSION Despite its arrival during a tumultuous era for civilian rights, Peterson does not stray from the majority of its precedents regarding the evaluation of qualified immunity. Peterson’s claims of wrongful arrest, retaliatory arrest, and excessive force all proved futile under the Eighth Circuit’s application of qualified immunity, while Peterson’s claim of retaliatory force has been remanded for further examination. It is clear from the holdings in Peterson that the doctrine of qualified immunity still reigns supreme in cases of purported police brutality. Unless there is a reevaluation of the doctrine on a fundamental and moral level, Peterson will provide precedent for further police brutality cases. Police brutality is the largest cause of a decline in US cred on human rights – the UN Human Rights Council has smashed the US for it Sheriff 15 - Natasja Sheriff, independent journalist and a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute: May 11, 2015(“US cited for police violence, racism in scathing UN review on human rights” Al Jazeera Available at http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/5/11/us-faces-scathing-un-review-on-human-rights-record.html) The United States was slammed over its rights record Monday at the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, with member nations criticizing the country for police violence and racial discrimination, the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility and the continued use of the death penalty. The issue of racism and police brutality dominated the discussion on Monday during the country’s second universal periodic review (UPR). Country after country recommended that the U.S. strengthen legislation and expand training to eliminate racism and excessive use of force by law enforcement. "I'm not surprised that the world's eyes are focused on police issues in the U.S.," said Alba Morales, who investigates the U.S. criminal justice system at Human Rights Watch. "There is an international spotlight that's been shone on the issues, in large part due to the events in Ferguson and the disproportionate police response to even peaceful protesters," she said. Anticipating the comments to come, James Cadogan, a senior counselor to the U.S. assistant attorney general, told delegates gathered in Geneva, "The tragic deaths of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Michael Brown in Missouri, Eric Garner in New York, Tamir Rice in Ohio and Walter Scott in South Carolina have renewed a long-standing and critical national debate about the even-handed administration of justice. These events challenge us to do better and to work harder for progress — through both dialogue and action." All of the names he mentioned are black men or boys who were killed by police officers or died shortly after being arrested. The events have sparked widespread anger and unrest over the past year. Cadogan added that the Department of Justice has opened more than 20 investigations in the last six years — including an investigation into the Baltimore Police Department — as well as the release of a report of the Presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing in March, which included more than 60 recommendations. But advocates like Morales say the U.S. could do much more. "Use of excessive force by police was a major part of this year's UPR, and the fact that we still don't have a reliable national figure to know how many people are killed by police or what the racial breakdown is of those people is a travesty," she said. "A nation as advanced as the U.S. should be able to gather that number." The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment. Although the problems are not new, the death of young men like Gray and Brown and the unrest that followed their killings in U.S. cities over the past year has attracted the attention — and criticism — of the international community. "Chad considers the United States of America to be a country of freedom, but recent events targeting black sectors of society have tarnished its image," said Awada Angui of the U.N. delegation to Chad. US leadership is key to the UN’s worldwide success in human rights Lagon 5/17 Mark P. Lagon, Centennial Fellow and Distinguished Senior Scholar in the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University: May 17, 2016(“A GLASS HALF FULL: WHY THE U.S. NEEDS TO BE ON THE U.N. HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL” Freedom House Available at https://freedomhouse.org/article/glass-half-full-why-us-needs-be-un-human-rights-council ) Active membership in the Council by the U.S. has contributed to successes. A resolution and rapporteur on Belarus were restored. Moreover, I would never have thought ten years ago that a resolution devoted to Iran could be passed not only in New York but in Geneva. The Human Rights Council resolution does not yet enumerate Iran’s human rights violations chapter and verse – as it should. But it has sustained a Special Rapporteur when the international community (and candidly the United States) have let nuclear nonproliferation be a pretext for deprioritizing human rights in that country – both before and after a nuclear deal with Tehran. Despite fears to the contrary, the Council once again extended the Iran mandate on March 23, 2016 by a 5 vote margin. Today, the Council and the current Iran resolution remain important vehicles for the world to increase pressure on Iran to improve its human rights record. While the Security Council has been all too inert on the atrocities of Assad in Syria, allowing ISIS to grow as a second source of atrocities, the Human Rights Council has repeatedly devoted its attention to those calamities. On August 22, 2011, the Council established a Commission of Inquiry on Syria which found that the Syrian government is responsible for violations that amount to crimes against humanity. Since then, the UNHRC has held over 20 sessions on Syria and adopted no less than 17 resolutions. The Human Rights Council was pretty feckless in calling attention to human rights abuses in Sri Lanka in the period when the United States refused to run to be a Member. After the United States got on, there was a pronounced shift in the substance of resolutions adopted on Sri Lanka, making clear the international community’s demand for accountability for mass atrocities committed during the civil war. Sri Lanka is making some progress. It is one ray of hope in Freedom House’s Freedom of the World survey, which shows ten straight years of a global recession of democracy, notably in freedom of expression, freedom of association, and rule of law. Most striking was the Commission of Inquiry launched by the Council to investigate North Korea’s atrocities. No single multilateral mandate or report on human rights has changed the terms of debate on a neglected human rights issue than this Commission headed by Australian jurist Michael Kirby. No mandate devoted to atrocities-level abuse has treated a case where open warfare has not existed for decades. And yet, so powerful were the Commission’s findings that China and Russia could not block North Korea’s human rights situation from being added to the U.N. Security Council’s standing agenda. Less striking, but highly important, was action on Eritrea – a country all but forgotten, and of little strategic importance, yet so repressive that in 2014, some 6 percent of its population fled to seek asylum. In July 2012, the Council appointed a Special Rapporteur to shine a light onto widespread human rights violations. On June 27, 2014, the Council established a Commission of Inquiry to investigate these gross and systematic abuses, with a particular focus on documenting crimes against humanity. The United States helped make the numerous Council assessments of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and in the humanitarian flotilla controversy fairer. The United States may not fix the quantitative volume and qualitative tilt of the Council’s treatment of Israel, but its presence has been helpful. And at a minimum, the United States using its voice and vote means that excessive criticism of Israel is not answered with silence. THEMATIC WORK In a second area, the thematic work of the Human Rights Council has improved, and been ameliorated by U.S. leadership. Let’s take a few examples. First, the United States helped turn around a perverse set of resolutions on defamation of religion which gave states in Islamic-majority nations cover in order to use blasphemy laws to sideline and repress freedom of religion and of expression in the name of anti-defamation. Those resolutions always have represented a latent threat for creation of a broader UN Declaration or Convention codifying their pernicious provisions. In 2011, the United States, working with a cross-regional group of partners, engaged the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to end-run intransigent, longstanding ambassadors in Geneva. The result was a new consensus framework on combatting religious intolerance, resting on the pillars of defending freedom of expression and veritable freedom of all religions. That victory is precarious and is already vulnerable. As the single most pronounced voice for freedom of conscience and expression in the international community, the U.S. should be on the Council.i Second, a much-needed mandate was created for Freedom of Assembly and Association, in large part because of U.S. leadership. At a time when autocracies and ostensible democracies worldwide are squeezing civil society groups and demonizing them for getting international advice and backing, this mandate is essential. We know the Rapporteur well. Kenyan Maina Kiai happens to have won the Freedom Award at the annual dinner where I was named to become Freedom House’s President. As Special Rapporteur, he embodies the UN’s thematic work on human rights at its most energetic and effective. I have said in my book Human Dignity and the Future of Global Institutions that multilateral measures on economic and social aspirations are not inherently less important than the political and civil liberties Freedom House champions. Yet the Human Rights Council does dignify a number of matters that no serious person could claim are really human rights. The number of mandates for economic, social, and cultural rights have grown, even while the U.S. has been on the Council as a voice of reason. Without the U.S. there, there would be even more silly mandates, like treating the real problem of toxic waste as a human rights matter. And those efforts which have proven constructive, like the Council resolution on business and human rights springing from the work of John Ruggie as Special Representative, would be in danger of being taken in the wrong direction, which bears watching as Ecuador and others seek a related treaty. UNIVERSAL PERIODIC REVIEW A third area relates to peer review. The most distinctive innovation of the negotiation I took part in to create the Council is the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). It meant all nations, including some heinous, human rights-abusing states managing to get on the Council would be subject to regular scrutiny. Some of us feared the UPR would be a pretext for winnowing the number of country-specific resolutions and rapporteurs, but they have been sustained, especially when the U.S. has been a Council Member. The UPR gives an opportunity for civil society groups to shine a light of accountability on their states. The largest part of Freedom House’s work, our true comparative advantage, is capacity-building and emergency assistance to civil society organizations in all regions of the world. We see how the UPR helps our local civil society partners assert their voice in an organized, focused and coordinated manner, which is why we support these frontline activists to engage directly in the UPR process, including appearing in Geneva and producing shadow reports. At its best, governments are adopting the practice of formally consulting with civil society, a good example being Mali, where the government arranged meetings between ministerial departments and representatives of civil society, and where the Ministry of Justice established a working group to prepare the UPR report. In more restrictive environments, civil society and even the media have the option of discussing UPR recommendations at one step removed: rather than themselves raising issues directly, they can report on recommendations raised by the international community. According to a 2014 report of the civil society organization UPR Info, 48 percent of UPR recommendations triggered action (partially or fully implemented) within two and a half years, and 19 percent of recommendations that were not accepted but merely “noted” still resulted in action. The UPR is not an unvarnished success.ii It offers an opportunity to raise human rights issues in any nation every four years, makes recommendations to states, and those states in turn make commitments to address some of the recommendations. Yet in a decade, with nations now getting repeatedly assessed, it is not clear to me that there is sufficient onus on states to live up to even the recommendations they agree to meet, much less those they do not. This is one reason Freedom House helps civil society actors, like some from Venezuela, to present their case to the expert bodies assigned to assess how much parties to UN human rights conventions fulfill their commitments, because these treaty bodies have more impact than the UPR. The United States is empirically the most vocal participant in the UPR dialogue with states under examination. The UPR will be stronger over time for U.S. involvement in the Council. Improving UN rights and preventing violations helps billions materially across the globe. CFR 13 - Council on Foreign Relations: June 19, 2013 (“The Global Human Rights Regime” From the multimedia Global Governance Monitor of the International Institutions and Global Governance program Available at http://www.cfr.org/human-rights/global-human-rights-regime/p27450#p1) Although the concept of human rights is abstract, how it is applied has a direct and enormous impact on daily life worldwide. Millions have suffered crimes against humanity. Millions more toil in bonded labor. In the last decade alone, authoritarian rule has denied civil and political liberties to billions. The idea of human rights has a long history, but only in the past century has the international community sought to galvanize a regime to promote and guard them. Particularly, since the United Nations (UN) was established in 1945, world leaders have cooperated to codify human rights in a universally recognized regime of treaties, institutions, and norms. An elaborate global system is being developed. Governments are striving to promote human rights domestically and abroad, and are partnering with multilateral institutions to do so. A particularly dynamic and decentralized network of civil-society actors is also involved in the effort. Together, these players have achieved marked success, though the institutionalization and implementation of different rights is progressing at varying rates. Response to mass atrocities has seen the greatest progress, even if enforcement remains inconsistent. The imperative to provide people with adequate public health care is strongly embedded across the globe, and substantial resources have been devoted to the challenge. The right to freedom from slavery and forced labor has also been integrated into international and national institutions, and has benefited from high-profile pressure to combat forced labor. Finally, the steady accumulation of human-rights-related conventions has encouraged most states to do more to implement binding legislation in their constitutions and statutes.
12/3/16
ND - Util AC
Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: 2 | Opponent: Lake Highland Prep RS | Judge: Bob Shurtz The standard is maximizing expected well-being. Prefer:
State Obligations- The constitutive obligation of governments is to be utilitarian. Robert Goodin 90, professor of philosophy at the Australian National University college of arts and social sciences, “The Utilitarian Response,” pgs 141-142 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 public officials and their situations that make it 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 what will happen most often to most people as a result of their various possible choices, but that is all. That is enough to allow public policy-makers to use the utilitarian calculus – assuming they want to use it at all – to choose general rules or conduct.
Analytic 2. You should default to util if I win defense on their standard—we naturally want to make the world better. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong 14 American philosopher. He specializes in ethics, epistemology, and more recently in neuroethics, the philosophy of law, and the philosophy of cognitive science, "Consequentialism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed), Even if consequentialists can accommodate or explain away common moral intuitions, that might seem only to answer objections without yet giving any positive reason to accept consequentialism. However, most people begin with the presumption that we morally ought to make the world better when we can. The question then is only whether any moral constraints or moral options need to be added to the basic consequentialist factor in moral reasoning. (Kagan 1989, 1998) If no objection reveals any need for anything beyond consequences, then consequences alone seem to determine what is morally right or wrong, just as consequentialists claim. 3. Respect for equality justifies util - util controls the internal link into K impacts and kant. Cummiskey 90 Cummiskey, David. Associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. “Kantian Consequentiaism.” Ethics 100 (April 1990), University of Chicago. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810 We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract “social entity.” It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive “overall social good.” Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that “to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has.” But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the principle that “rational nature exists as an end in itself”. Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have an equal value, then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many rational beings as possible. In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a non- value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kant’s normative theory is based on an unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have “dignity, that is, an unconditional and incomparable worth” that transcends any market value, but persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others. The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others.
Resolved: The United States should limit qualified immunity for police officers by removing the “clearly established” element from the Qualified Immunity Doctrine as method to increase accountability for officers. I’m willing to clarify T interps in CX. 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/) In order to truly hold police accountable for bad acts, civilians must be able to bring, and win, civil rights suits themselves — not rely on the Department of Justice, or special prosecutors, or civilian review boards to hold officers accountable. And in order to both bring and win civil rights suits, civilians need a level playing field in court. Right now, they don’t have one. Instead, police officers have recourse to the broad protections of the judicially established doctrine of qualified immunity. Under this doctrine, state actors are protected from suit even if they’ve violated the law by, say, using excessive force, or performing an unwarranted body cavity search — as long as their violation was not one of “clearly established law, of which a reasonable officer would be aware.” In other words, if there’s not already a case where a court has held that an officer’s identical or near-identical conduct rose to the level of a constitutional violation there’s a good chance that even an obviously malfeasant officer will avoid liability — will avoid accountability. To bring about true accountability and change police behavior, this needs to change. 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? That’s just a start. There are plenty of other reforms that could open up civil rights lawsuits and help ensure police accountability for bad conduct. Two posts (one, two) at Balkinization by City University of New York professor Lynda Dodd provide a good overview. Campaign Zero should consider adding civil rights litigation reform to its platform, our policymakers should consider making civil rights litigation more robust, and, if we want to see justice done, we should push to make it happen.
Advantage – Court Clog Caseloads low and declining, but could still ramp up, Roeder 16’ MAY 17, 2016 AT 9:00 AM “The Supreme Court’s Caseload Is On Track To Be The Lightest In 70 Years” By Oliver Roeder In one sense, Monday was a noisy news day at the Supreme Court. It handed down decisions in six cases, including yet another challenge to Obamacare, which the court essentially punted, sending the challenge back to various federal appeals courts. But in another sense, it was a day as quiet as Clarence Thomas during oral argument. The court agreed to hear exactly zero new cases, continuing to set a sparse stage for its next term, which may see the lightest caseload in its already-light recent history. So far, only 12 cases are on the court’s docket for the October 2016 term, which runs through June 2017.1 That number is far below the pace that we averaged in the 1980s and ’90s. And if the first few months of the year are an indication, the upcoming court term may be the lightest in at least 70 years. The long, downward trend in the court’s caseload began around 1980, when it routinely heard over 150 cases a term. These days, it hears about half that many. In 2014, the court heard 71 cases, the fewest since at least World War II, according to the Supreme Court Database. Now that record looks in danger of falling. The court still has ample time to add cases to next term’s docket — indeed, it often adds many between May and October — but its pace of granting cases for next term is lagging, as the adjacent chart, based on data from SCOTUSblog’s Kedar Bhatia, shows. Over the past five terms, the court had added nearly 18 cases Pearson needlessly complicated court procedure on civil rights litigation. Reversing it is key to decrease court clog. Avery 08 Michael Avery, Counsel of Record SUFFOLK LAW SCHOOL, “CORDELL PEARSON, et al., Petitioners, v. AFTON CALLAHAN, Respondent. BRIEF OF AMICI CURIAE NATIONAL POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT AND ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN JUSTICE IN SUPPORT OF RESPONDENT,” American Bar Association, August 13, 2008 JW Justice Breyer has suggested permitting lower courts some flexibility with regard to the order of decisionmaking. See Scott v. Harris, 127 S. Ct. 1769, 1780 (2007) (“We should overrule the requirement, announced in Saucier v. Katz, that lower courts must first decide the ‘constitutional question’ before they turn to the ‘qualified immunity question.’ Instead, lower courts should be free to decide the two questions in whatever order makes sense in the context of a particular case.”) (Breyer, J., concurring) (citations omitted). Amici respectfully submit that such flexibility in this area will in practice further complicate adjudications under Section 1983 and Bivens without realizing any corresponding benefit. Rather than focusing on Section 1983’s central inquiry – has a person acting under color of state law violated any constitutional right of another person? – flexibility in ordering will add yet another layer to the current two-step approach to adjudicating civil rights claims. Adding this meta-issue will only add to the already inordinate complexity, expense, and delay of litigating these cases. The current rule has the strong benefit of clarity; the merits of a civil rights claim should resolved prior to considering the defense of qualified immunity. Only in this manner can the law develop clear standards and implement the Congressional intent underlying section 1983. Court clog harms the economy—it’s bad for business. Leahy 12 Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT). “Statement Of Senator Patrick Leahy On The Nominations Of Mary Elizabeth Phillips To The Western District Of Missouri And Thomas Owen Rice To The Eastern District Of Washington.” March 6th, 2012. http://www.leahy.senate.gov/press/statement-of-senator-patrick-leahy-on-the-nominations-of-mary-elizabeth-phillips-to-the-western-district-of-missouri-and-thomas-owen-rice-to-the-eastern-district-of-washington While consensus judicial nominations are stalled without a final vote by the Senate, millions of Americans across the country are being harmed by delays. The American people and our Federal courts cannot afford these unnecessary and damaging delays. As the ABA president noted last week: “Backlogs mean justice delayed in cases involving protection of individual rights, advancement of business interests, compensation of injured victims and enforcement of federal laws. Longstanding vacancies on courts with staggering caseloads impede access to the courts. They create strains that, if not eased, threaten to reduce the quality of our justice system. They erode confidence in the courts’ ability to uphold constitutional rights and render fair and timely decisions. Delay at the federal courts puts people’s lives on hold while they wait for their cases to be resolved. Businesses face uncertainty and costly holdups, preventing them from investing and creating jobs. In sum, judicial vacancies kill jobs. Justice delayed, as the famous maxim goes, is justice denied. It’s bad for business, it’s unfair to individuals, and it slows government enforcement actions, which ultimately costs taxpayers money.” The US is key to the global economy. Caploe 09 David, CEO of the Singapore-incorporated American Centre for Applied Liberal Arts and Humanities in Asia., “Focus still on America to lead global recovery”, April 7, The Strait Times, lexis IN THE aftermath of the G-20 summit, most observers seem to have missed perhaps the most crucial statement of the entire event, made by United States President Barack Obama at his pre-conference meeting with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown: 'The world has become accustomed to the US being a voracious consumer market, the engine that drives a lot of economic growth worldwide,' he said. 'If there is going to be renewed growth, it just can't be the US as the engine.' While superficially sensible, this view is deeply problematic. To begin with, it ignores the fact that the global economy has in fact been 'America-centred' for more than 60 years. Countries - China, Japan, Canada, Brazil, Korea, Mexico and so on - either sell to the US or they sell to countries that sell to the US. This system has generally been advantageous for all concerned. America gained certain historically unprecedented benefits, but the system also enabled participating countries - first in Western Europe and Japan, and later, many in the Third World - to achieve undreamt-of prosperity. At the same time, this deep inter-connection between the US and the rest of the world also explains how the collapse of a relatively small sector of the US economy - 'sub-prime' housing, logarithmically exponentialised by Wall Street's ingenious chicanery - has cascaded into the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression. To put it simply, Mr Obama doesn't seem to understand that there is no other engine for the world economy - and hasn't been for the last six decades. If the US does not drive global economic growth, growth is not going to happen. Thus, US policies to deal with the current crisis are critical not just domestically, but also to the entire world. Consequently, it is a matter of global concern that the Obama administration seems to be following Japan's 'model' from the 1990s: allowing major banks to avoid declaring massive losses openly and transparently, and so perpetuating 'zombie' banks - technically alive but in reality dead. As analysts like Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman have pointed out, the administration's unwillingness to confront US banks is the main reason why they are continuing their increasingly inexplicable credit freeze, thus ravaging the American and global economies. Team Obama seems reluctant to acknowledge the extent to which its policies at home are failing not just there but around the world as well. Which raises the question: If the US can't or won't or doesn't want to be the global economic engine, which country will? The obvious answer is China. But that is unrealistic for three reasons. First, China's economic health is more tied to America's than practically any other country in the world. Indeed, the reason China has so many dollars to invest everywhere - whether in US Treasury bonds or in Africa - is precisely that it has structured its own economy to complement America's. The only way China can serve as the engine of the global economy is if the US starts pulling it first. Second, the US-centred system began at a time when its domestic demand far outstripped that of the rest of the world. The fundamental source of its economic power is its ability to act as the global consumer of last resort. China, however, is a poor country, with low per capita income, even though it will soon pass Japan as the world's second largest economy. There are real possibilities for growth in China's domestic demand. But given its structure as an export-oriented economy, it is doubtful if even a successful Chinese stimulus plan can pull the rest of the world along unless and until China can start selling again to the US on a massive scale. Finally, the key 'system' issue for China - or for the European Union - in thinking about becoming the engine of the world economy - is monetary: What are the implications of having your domestic currency become the global reserve currency? This is an extremely complex issue that the US has struggled with, not always successfully, from 1959 to the present. Without going into detail, it can safely be said that though having the US dollar as the world's medium of exchange has given the US some tremendous advantages, it has also created huge problems, both for America and the global economic system. The Chinese leadership is certainly familiar with this history. It will try to avoid the yuan becoming an international medium of exchange until it feels much more confident in its ability to handle the manifold currency problems that the US has grappled with for decades. Given all this, the US will remain the engine of global economic recovery for the foreseeable future, even though other countries must certainly help. This crisis began in the US - and it is going to have to be solved there too.
Economic decline causes extinction. Kemp 10 Geoffrey Kemp, Director of Regional Strategic Programs at The Nixon Center, served in the White House under Ronald Reagan, special assistant to the president for national security affairs and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs on the National Security Council Staff, Former Director, Middle East Arms Control Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2010, “The East Moves West: India, China, and Asia’s Growing Presence in the Middle East”, p. 233-4
The second scenario, called Mayhem and Chaos, is the opposite of the first scenario; everything that can go wrong does go wrong. The world economic situation weakens rather than strengthens, and India, China, and Japan suffer a major reduction in their growth rates, further weakening the global economy. As a result, energy demand falls and the price of fossil fuels plummets, leading to a financial crisis for the energy-producing states, which are forced to cut back dramatically on expansion programs and social welfare. That in turn leads to political unrest: and nurtures different radical groups, including, but not limited to, Islamic extremists. The internal stability of some countries is challenged, and there are more “failed states.” Most serious is the collapse of the democratic government in Pakistan and its takeover by Muslim extremists, who then take possession of a large number of nuclear weapons. The danger of war between India and Pakistan increases significantly. Iran, always worried about an extremist Pakistan, expands and weaponizes its nuclear program. That further enhances nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt joining Israel and Iran as nuclear states. Under these circumstances, the potential for nuclear terrorism increases, and the possibility of a nuclear terrorist attack in either the Western world or in the oil-producing states may lead to a further devastating collapse of the world economic market, with a tsunami-like impact on stability. In this scenario, major disruptions can be expected, with dire consequences for two-thirds of the planet’s population.
Advantage 2 Qualified immunity destroys accountability for police officers-limitations are key. Bernick 15 Evan Bernick, https://fee.org/articles/to-hold-police-accountable-dont-give-them-immunity/ The sad fact is that it is often effectively impossible to hold police officers accountable for unconstitutional acts. That fact is attributable in large part to a potent well of unchecked power that many Americans have never heard of. You will not find it in the Constitution. You will not find it in any federal law. It is a judge-made doctrine, invented by the Supreme Court. It is called qualified immunity. And if those charged with enforcing the law are to be kept within the bounds of their rightful authority, it must be abolished. Section 1983, the federal law that allows citizens to sue for constitutional violations, is broad, unequivocal, and unambiguous. It says that “every person” who is acting “under color of” law who causes a “deprivation of any rights… secured by the Constitution and laws” “shall be liable to the party injured.” Section 1983 embodies a foundational principle of justice that resonates with Americans who have never heard of Marbury v. Madison: where there is a right, there is a remedy.But for decades, we have had rights without remedies. In the 1967 case of Pierson v. Ray, the Supreme Court held that police officers sued for constitutional violations can raise “qualified immunity” as a defense, and thereby escape paying out of their own pockets, even if they violated a person’s constitutional rights. This decision was unabashedly policy-oriented: it was thought that government officials would not vigorously fulfill their obligations if they could be held accountable for actions taken in good faith. Under current law, the general rule is that victims of rights violations pay the costs of their own injuries. In practice, qualified immunity provides a near-absolute defense to all but the most outrageous conduct. The Ninth Circuit has held that throwing a flash-bang grenade “blindly” into a house, injuring a toddler, isn’t outrageous enough. Just last year, in Plumhoff v. Rickard, the Supreme Court decided that firing 15 bullets at a motorist is a reasonable method to end the driver’s flight from the police. So much for “every person” “shall be liable.” Qualified immunity shields police misconduct not only from liability but also from meaningful judicial scrutiny. Private lawsuits are an essential tool in uncovering the truth about police misconduct. The discovery process can yield information that makes broader policy changes within police departments possible. At trial, judicial engagement — an impartial, evidence-based determination of the constitutionality of the officer’s actions — can take place. And, the link to impacts is massive- hundreds of deaths occur yearly yet almost 98 percent of police do not face consequences for their actions. We need reform now. Wong 15 Kathleen Wong, 2015, 10 Police Brutality Statistics that are Absolutely Shocking, https://mic.com/articles/129981/10-police-brutality-statistics-that-are-absolutely-shocking#.779kZJJJC
In May, the Washington Post analyzed the 385 fatal police shootings in the United States that had occurred so far in 2015. The Post noted its number, which came out to two officer-involved shooting deaths per day, was more than twice the rate that the government had recorded over the past decade. 2. That same report found blacks to be killed at three times the rate of whites or other minorities. 3. It also found that almost a quarter of those killed were identified as mentally ill by police or family members. 4. The youngest victims at the end of May, according to the Washington Post, were 16 years old (though at the time, nine ages were unknown). 5. Another Washington Post investigation from August found that black men — who constitute 6 of the nation's population — account for 40 of the 60 unarmed people who had been fatally shot by police by that time. 6. The Guardian's The Counted project, which crowdsources and reports on police deaths, analyzed the first half of 2015 to find that an average of three people were killed daily during that time. 7. Mapping Police Violence found that black people living in Oklahoma were six times more likely to be killed by police than in Georgia. 8. It also found 98 of these events did not end with an officer being charged with a crime. Allowing police violence perpetuates systems of racism in the squo. Hadden et al 16 (Bernadette R. Hadden, MSW, PHD, is Assistant professor in the MSW program at Hunter College School of Social Work New York. Willie Tolliver, PhD. Associate Professor at Silberman School of Social Work. Fabienne Snowden PHD. Professor at Hunter College School of Social Work. and Robyn Brown Manning, PHD. Professor at Hunter College School of Social "An authentic discourse: Recentering race and racism as factors that contribute to police violence against unarmed Black or African American men, Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment" http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10911359.2015.1129252#abstract) Police shootings of unarmed Black or African American men are occurring at alarming rates (Wihbey, 2014) and are indicative of a national trend of excessive force used by law enforcement agents on the bodies of people of color (American Civil Liberties Union ACLU, 2014). These incidents are happening inside and outside of Black and Hispanic neighborhoods (Carroll and Gonzalez, 2014), to low-income and middle-class Blacks or African Americans (Jones-Brown, 2009), and are frequently the result of routine encounters (ACLU, 2014). One of several challenges in obtaining an accurate count of the number of the police shootings of unarmed Black or African American men in the United States is that there are no nationally consistent measures of collecting these data (Department of Justice, 2015). This lack of standardized reporting, accompanied by public outrage, civil unrest, and community activism, calls for investigations into, and law enforcement reporting of, fatal police shootings of unarmed Black or African American men. Suggestions of racial profiling in police shootings have been presented as an explanation of the phenomenon of the disproportionate shooting of unarmed Black or African American men by law enforcement agents (Amajor, Sandars, and Pitts, 1999). In 2007 researchers found that in 10 of the United States’s largest cities, Blacks or African Americans were overly represented among victims of police shootings (Lowerstein, 2007). These findings were most visible in New York City, Las Vegas, and San Diego (Lowerstein, 2007). At a 2010 hearing calling for the investigation of police-involved shootings in Oakland, California, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) reported that from 2004 and 2008, 37 of the 45 police shootings in that city were at Black or African American suspects (Bulwa, 2010). A report from the New York City Police Department (NYCPD) illustrates that between 2000 and 2013, 97 Blacks or African Americans, 41 Hispanics, and 21 Whites were killed by NYPD police officers (NYCPD, 2014). In other words, from 2000 to 2013, more Blacks or African Americans were killed by NYCPD weapon discharges than Latinos and Whites combined. These reports identify and document the phenomenon of Black or African American men being shot and/ or killed by police officers, despite the limitations in data tracking police shootings (Graham, 2015). However, they do not inform us of the incidence or prevalence of this phenomenon Civil lawsuits against the police are uniquely well suited to lead to structural reform. Cheh 96 Mary Cheh (Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School), Are Lawsuits an Answer to Police Brutality, in POLICE VIOLENCE, 248 (William Geller and Hans Toch eds., Yale University Press 1996). By contrast, the civil law, because of its greater flexibility and scope, has the potential to serve as the instrument of systemic reform. In adjusting rights and settling wrongs, civil remedies generally offer distinct advantages over criminal sanctions. First, a victim of police misconduct can sue on his or her their own behalf and need not await the government's decision to go forward. Second, an injured party need not overcome the heightened procedural protections afforded the criminally accused. For example, a plaintiff can prevail under a preponderance of evidence standard rather than proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Third, although the civil law, like the criminal law, can punish via its potential for imposition of punitive damages, the civil law provides compensation to victims who have been harmed by police misconduct. Recompense is beneficial in itself, and damage awards can spur reform if the costs of misbehavior are high. Fourth, civil lawsuits permit broad discovery of information and may provide a means to uncover police misbehavior and stir public reaction. Finally, the civil law offers various possibilities for framing relief which go beyond punishment or compensation and include remediation. That is, the civil law offers equitable relief, via court injunction and specific orders, that can force a deficient department not only to pay for harm caused but to reform so that the harm is not likely to be repeated. Analytic
11/5/16
SO - Armenia AC
Tournament: St Marks | Round: 2 | Opponent: Westwood JA | Judge: Srikar Pyda Analytic And, the structure of action necessitates that if there is a reason to take an action, then the same reason applies to all necessary enablers of that action. Sinnot-Armstrong “An argument for consequentialism” by Walter Sinnot-Armstrong 1992 Dartmouth College DD “(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. This principle is confirmed by moral reasons with negative structures. If I have a moral reason to help a friend this afternoon. I cannot do so if I play golf this afternoon. Not playing golf this afternoon will enable me to help my friend. So I have a moral reason not to play golf this afternoon. Similarly, I have a moral reason not to endanger other drivers (beyond acceptable limits). I can't drink too much before I drive without endangering others drivers. Not drinking too much will enable me to avoid endangering other drivers. Therefore, I have a moral reason not to drink too much before I drive.” (403) And, this account of action is best:
Analytic 2. Analytic And, this structure of action necessitates consequentialism or NEC. Sinnot-Armstrong 2 “An argument for consequentialism” by Walter Sinnot-Armstrong 1992 Dartmouth College DD “All of this leads to necessary enabler consequentialism or NEC. NEC claims that all moral reasons for acts are provided by facts that the acts are necessary enablers for preventing harm or promoting good. All moral reasons on this theory are consequential reasons, but there are tow kinds. Some moral reasons are prevention reasons, because they are facts that an act is a necessary enabler for preventing harm or loss. For example, if giving Alice food is necessary and enables me to prevent her from starving, then that fact is a moral reason to give her food. In this case, I would not cause her death even if I let her starve, but other moral prevention reasons are reasons to avoid causing harm. For example, if turning my car to the left is necessary and enablers me to avoid killing Bobby, that is a moral reason to turn my car to the left. The other kind of moral reason is a promotion reason. This kind of reason occurs when doing something is necessary and enables me to promote (or maximize) some good. For example, I have a moral reason to throw a surprise party for Susan if this is necessary and enables me to make her happy. Because of substitutability, these moral reasons for actions also yield moral reasons against contrary actions. There are then also moral reasons not to do what will cause harm or ensure a failure to prevent harm or promote good. What makes these facts moral reasons is that they can make an otherwise immoral act moral. If I have a moral reason to feed my child, then it might be immoral to give my only food to Alice, who is a stranger. But his would not be immoral if giving Alice good is necessary and enables me to prevent Alice from starving, as long as my child will not starve also. Similarly, it is normally immoral to lie to Susan, but a lie can be moral if it is necessary and enables me to keep my party for Susan a surprise, and if this is also necessary and enables me to make her happy. Thus, NEC fits nicely into the above theory of moral reasons. NEC can provide a natural explanation of moral substitutability for both kinds of reasons. I have a prevention moral reason to give someone food when doing so is necessary and enables me to prevent that person from starving. Suppose that buying food is a necessary enabler for giving the person food, and getting in my car is a necessary enabler for buying food. Moral substitutability warrants the conclusion that I have a moral reason to get in my car. And this act of getting in my car does have the property of being a necessary enabler for preventing starvation. Thus, the necessary enabler has the same property that provided the moral reason to give the food in the first place. This explains why substitutability holds for moral prevention reasons. The other kind of moral reason covers necessary enabler for promoting good. In my example above, if a surprise party is a necessary enabler for making Susan happy, and letting people know about the party is a necessary enabler for having a party, then letting people know is a necessary enabler for making Susan happy. The very fact that provides a moral reason to have the party also provides a moral reason to let people know about it. Thus, NEC can explain why moral substitutability holds for every kind of reason that is includes. Similarly explanations work for moral reasons not to do certain acts, and this explanatory power is a reason to favor NEC. Of course, this should come as no surprise. NEC was intentionally structured to that it would explain moral substitutability. But this does not detract from its explanatory force. The point is that moral substitutability remains a mystery unless we restrict our substantive theory to moral reasons that obey moral substitutability by their very nature. The crucial advantage of NEC lies in its unity. Other theories claim that my reason to do what I promised is just that this fulfills my promise or that promise keeping is intrinsically good. However, I did not promise to start the mower, and starting the mower is not intrinsically good. Thus, my reason to start the mower derives from a different property than my reason to keep my promise. In contrast, NEC makes my reasons to keep my promise, to mow the lawn, and to start the mower derive from the very same property: being a necessary enabler of preventing harm or promoting good. This makes NEC's explanation more coherent and better. A critic might complain that NEC just postpones the problem, since NEC will eventually need to explain why certain things are good or bad, and some will be good or bad as means, but others will not. However, if what is good or bad intrinsically are states (such as pleasure and freedom or pain and death) rather than acts, then they are not the kind of thing that can be done, so there cannot be any question of a reason to do them This makes it possible for all reasons for acts to have the same nature or derive from the same property. NEC will still have to explain why certain states are good or bad, but so will every other moral theory. The difference is that other theories will also have to explain why there are two kinds of reasons for acts and how these reasons are connected. This is what other theories cannot explain. This additional explanatory gap is avoided by the unified nature of reasons in NEC.” (415-417) Thus the standard is maximizing expected well-being. Prefer additionally-
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.” Analytic 2. 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 do 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.” 3. Analytic Inherency Metsamor’s decommissioning has been delayed- it’s operating until at least 2026. Daly 13 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 Resolved: Armenia should ban the production of nuclear power, accepting 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,
Adv 1 - Meltdown 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. Plans to replace Metsamor after 2016—with a new nuclear plant at the same location—are under way. But until then, Armenia has little choice but to keep Metsamor's turbines turning. As Armenians learned in the bone-chilling cold and dark days when the plant was closed down for several years, Metsamor provides more than 40 percent of power for a nation that is isolated from its neighbors and closed off from other sources of energy. "People compare the potential risk with the potential shortage of electricity that might arise if the plant were closed," says Ara Tadevosyan, director of Mediamax, a major Armenian news agency. "Having had this negative experience, people prefer to live with it, and believe that it will not be damaged in an earthquake." A Need for Nuclear The 3 million people of landlocked Armenia are unique in their energy dependence on one aging nuclear power reactor. Regional conflicts that broke out in the dissolution of the Soviet Union left the smallest of its former republics at odds with its neighbors. Azerbaijan to the east and Turkey to the west closed their borders with Armenia, cutting off most routes for oil and natural gas. The blockade, which remains in place to this day, heaped a new economic wound onto an old scar. After the massacre of more than one million Armenians during World War I and subsequent conflict, the Soviets ceded the western part of the historic Armenian homeland to Turkey. The snow-capped peak of Mount Ararat, still revered in Armenia as the resting place of Noah's Ark, emblazoned on trinkets and storefronts throughout the land, is now in Turkey. (Related: "Tough Situations in Difficult Countries") The Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant is just 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the Turkish border—in an area that includes the fertile agricultural region of the Aras River valley. It's only 20 miles (36 kilometers) from the capital of Yerevan, home to one-third of the nation's population. And it is in the midst of a strong seismic zone that stretches in a broad swath from Turkey to the Arabian Sea near India. On December 7, 1988, a 6.8-magnitude earthquake struck, killing 25,000 people and leaving 500,000 homeless. Some 60 miles (100 kilometers) from the epicenter, Metsamor, then with two operating reactors, survived the temblor without damage, according to Armenian officials and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Because the devastating earthquake heightened concerns about the seismic hazard to the facility, the Soviet government shut the nuclear plant down. Tadevosyan said that public attitudes toward Metsamor have been strongly shaped by the nation's experience living without it during the six-and-a-half years that followed. "There were severe power shortages during the winter months," he recalled in a telephone interview from Yerevan. "We had a situation where you had one hour of power a day, and sometimes no power at all for a week. You can imagine—it was as cold in the apartment as it was in the street." A pipeline to import Russian natural gas through neighboring Georgia in the north was built in 1993, but it was regularly interrupted by "sabotage and separatist strife in that country," as the World Bank noted in a 2006 report. In 1995, the government of then-independent Armenia decided to restart the younger of the two reactors. Richard Wilson, nuclear physics professor emeritus at Harvard University, was part of a delegation of outside experts in Armenia at the time. He recalls that the Russians who came from the airport to help reopen the reactor were cheered from the side of the road upon their arrival. When the unit restarted, "It became a source of energy and a source of hope for Armenia," explained Tadevosyan. "It was a symbol that dark times are over: 'We have electricity.' And it is still seen as such today." Fortifying an Old War Horse Armenian officials say modifications made to the reactor over the past 15 years have made it safer. Before Metsamor was reopened, Armenia airlifted more than 500 tons of equipment to the site (most of it from Russia), for upgrades, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group in the United States. In the years since the restart, the IAEA says close to 1,400 safety improvements have been made. Those included "seismic-resistant" storage batteries, reinforcement of the reactor building, electrical cabinets and cooling towers. The United States provided equipment for a seismic-resistant, spray-pond cooling system. Fire safety was viewed as a critical deficiency at the plant, so extensive upgrades were made, including 140 new fire doors. The result, officials say, is a reactor that is much safer than the original unit that went into service at the site on January 10, 1980. When construction began in 1969, Metsamor was a VVER 440, Model 230, an example of one of the earliest pressurized-water nuclear plant designs, developed by the Soviets between 1956 and 1970. It was not the same design as Chernobyl, which used solid graphite instead of water to moderate—or slow down—the fission reaction. (The graphite fire contributed to the world's worst nuclear disaster, and 11 of these early graphite-moderated reactors continue to operate in Russia.) (Related: "How is Japan's Nuclear Disaster Different?") The VVER 440, in contrast, used water both to moderate and to cool the fuel, as in Western designs. (Its initials, in Russian, stand for "water-water-power-reactor.") In fact, the VVER system, with multiple cooling loops, was seen as "more forgiving" than Western plants, according to archived documents from the International Nuclear Safety Program, a former U.S. Department of Energy program aimed at aiding in safety improvements at Soviet plants. VVER 440 units would be able to stand a power loss for a longer period of time than Western plants because of the large coolant volume. After Japan's nuclear crisis erupted, the head of the Armenian State Committee on Nuclear Safety Regulation, Ashot Martirosian, pointed to Metsamor's cooling system as one reason Armenians should rest assured. "Such an emergency situation cannot arise here," he told Radio Free Europe. (Related: "Japan Battles to Avert Nuclear Disaster" and "Pictures—A Rare Look Inside Fukushima Daiichi") Nuclear engineering expert Robert Kalantari, whose Framingham, Massachusetts, firm, Engineering Planning and Management, consults for U.S. and Canadian regulatory authorities, says Metsamor is like any other nuclear plant in operation worldwide. Although its safety features are different, all have to be able to be shut down safely during a so-called "design basis accident," the kind of accident anticipated in its design. He said he is confident that Metsamor could operate safely in such an accident, and that it could cope even with accidents beyond its design basis. "Metsamor is no less safe than any other reactor in operation throughout the world," Kalantari said. "Armenia as an independent country cannot survive without Metsamor, which is a functioning, safe, and reliable source of energy for the country." Lack of Containment 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. Nuclear accidents cause massive life loss, threaten the globe, and risk extinction. Lendman 11 Stephen Lendman. The People’s Voice: News and Viewpoints. “Nuclear meltdown in Japan,” March 13th, 2011. http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2011/03/13/nuclear-meltdown-in-japan For years, Helen Caldicott warned it's coming. In her 1978 book, "Nuclear Madness," she said: "As a physician, I contend that nuclear technology threatens life on our planet with extinction. If present trends continue, the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink will soon be contaminated with enough radioactive pollutants to pose a potential health hazard far greater than any plague humanity has ever experienced." More below on the inevitable dangers from commercial nuclear power caused a reactor meltdown." Stratfor downplayed its seriousness, adding that such an event "does not necessarily mean a nuclear disaster," that already may have happened – is the ultimate nightmare short of nuclear winter. According to Stratfor, "(A)s long as the reactor core, which is specifically designed to contain high levels of heat, pressure and radiation, remains intact, the melted fuel can be dealt with. If the (core's) breached but the containment facility built around (it) remains intact, the melted fuel can be....entombed within specialized concrete" as at Chernobyl in 1986. In fact, that disaster killed nearly one million people worldwide from nuclear radiation exposure. In their book titled, "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment," Alexey Yablokov, Vassily nation. One nuclear reactor can pollute half the globe. Chernobyl fallout covers the entire Northern Hemisphere." Stratfor explained that if Fukushima's floor cracked, "it is highly likely that the melting fuel will burn through (its) containment system and enter the ground. This has never happened before," mild by comparison. Potentially, millions of lives will be jeopardized. Japanese officials said Fukushima's reactor container wasn't breached. Stratfor and others said it was, making the potential calamity far worse than reported. Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) said the explosion at Fukushima's Saiichi No. 1 facility could only have been caused by a core meltdown. In fact, 3 or more reactors are affected or at risk. Events are fluid and developing, but remain very serious. The possibility of an extreme catastrophe can't be discounted. Advantage 2- 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, 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. Implications: Also means another impact of the aff is that improving Armenia Turkish 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. 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 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 http://www.upi.com/Israel-seeks-to-repair-ties-with-Turkey/38621361997592/?spt=suThe 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. Solvency Renewable Resources specifically in Armenia can solve energy crisis- they can take up half the energy grid by 2020. Vorotnikov 13 Vladislav Vorotnikov, Renewable Resources will help Armenia avoid Energy Crisis. http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/articles/2013/07/renewable-resources-will-help-armenia-avoid-energy-crisis.html Yerevan, Armenia Armenia is set to develop its renewable energy resources in the coming years, announced its deputy minister of energy and natural resources Areg Galstyan. It will set its focus mainly on hydropower plants, but it will put some emphasis on solar energy, as well. However the government is hesitant towards the development of its wind sector. The Armenian government is taking renewables development very seriously as it has little to no traditional fuel reserves. Without the alternative energy, the country could face serious crisis in coming decades. "Armenia is highly dependent on imported gas and other energy sources. Today the share of renewable resources in the total energy structure of the country accounts for 23 percent,” according to the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources. “We expect that by 2020 this figure should exceed 50 percent.” 4. The role of the ballot is to evaluate the simulated consequences of the aff world through a policymaking paradigm. You can weigh the SQUO or a competitive policymaking paradigm against the aff. Prefer: a) 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 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. b) 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).
1/23/17
SO - Radiation AC
Tournament: Grapevine | Round: 1 | Opponent: Marcus KL | Judge: Chris Vincent The standard is maximizing expected well-being. Prefer:
State Obligations- The constitutive obligation of governments is to be utilitarian. Robert Goodin 90, professor of philosophy at the Australian National University college of arts and social sciences, “The Utilitarian Response,” pgs 141-142 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 public officials and their situations that make it 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 what will happen most often to most people as a result of their various possible choices, but that is all. That is enough to allow public policy-makers to use the utilitarian calculus – assuming they want to use it at all – to choose general rules or conduct. 2. You should default to util if I win defense on their standard—we naturally want to make the world better. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong 14 American philosopher. He specializes in ethics, epistemology, and more recently in neuroethics, the philosophy of law, and the philosophy of cognitive science, "Consequentialism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed), Even if consequentialists can accommodate or explain away common moral intuitions, that might seem only to answer objections without yet giving any positive reason to accept consequentialism. However, most people begin with the presumption that we morally ought to make the world better when we can. The question then is only whether any moral constraints or moral options need to be added to the basic consequentialist factor in moral reasoning. (Kagan 1989, 1998) If no objection reveals any need for anything beyond consequences, then consequences alone seem to determine what is morally right or wrong, just as consequentialists claim. 3. Respect for equality justifies util - util controls the internal link into K impacts and kant. Cummiskey 90 Cummiskey, David. Associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. “Kantian Consequentiaism.” Ethics 100 (April 1990), University of Chicago. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810 We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract “social entity.” It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive “overall social good.” Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that “to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has.” But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the principle that “rational nature exists as an end in itself”. Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have an equal value, then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many rational beings as possible. In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a non- value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kant’s normative theory is based on an unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have “dignity, that is, an unconditional and incomparable worth” that transcends any market value, but persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others. The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others.
I defend the resolution as a general principle, but can specify further if asked in CX. I’ll defend implementation through normal means. Normal means entails phase out, shifting to climate friendly energy, and alleviating negative economic effects of removing nuclear power CCNE 13 Citizens’ Commission on Nuclear Energy, Organization Aiming at Fundamental Reform of Nuclear Energy Policy, “Our path to a nuclear-free Japan: an interim report Executive Summary,” October 2013 3.2 Review of nuclear liability regime The current compensation scheme for nuclear damage is defective and therefore should be reformed. There is a need for a new system to provide sufficient compensation for the damage caused by nuclear accidents and to provide relief for all the accident victims. The Nuclear Liability Law should be amended so that nuclear operators are liable for all damage compensation, thus factoring the risk of nuclear accidents into market calculations. As for compensation for damage caused by the disaster at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, the aim should be full compensation, with aid in the form of active government involvement to deal with the current crisis as an exception. 3.3 An energy system for a sustainable society Existing energy policy should be radically reviewed, with a view to shifting the energy system to one that will lead to a sustainable society. An energy shift should be strongly promoted through policies concerning both supply and demand sides of power generation. This shift should have the following objectives: 1. Achieve a total shutdown of all nuclear power plants: speedily establish a society that can flourish without any nuclear power plants. 2. Mitigate climate change: mitigate climate change because of its long-term and catastrophic consequences; bring energy policy in line with long-term measures on global warming. 3. Achieve energy self-sufficiency (both at the national and regional levels): reduce dependence of Japan’s energy supply on other countries and achieve national energy security; promote the use of local distributed energy, and strive to achieve energy independence at the local level. 3.4 Easing impacts on electricity supply and on the economy In the course of phasing out nuclear power, appropriate measures should be applied to alleviate short-term impacts on power supply. In order to meet current electricity demand without nuclear power generation, use of fossil fuels has increased. However, it is desirable that serious efforts be made to reduce absolute power demand. To this end, a power-saving plan with clear targets combined with varying electricity prices depending on the consumption rate should be considered. It is often argued that two factors are pressing the management of electric utilities: increasing cost of procuring fossil fuel, and costs related to nuclear power plants – for maintenance and safety precautions. By phasing out nuclear power, the latter cost will no longer be incurred. Adverse impacts on the economy can be further alleviated with policies promoting electricity saving and the introduction of renewable energy. To recapitulate, the vision is twofold: on the one hand, power consumption will be curbed with serious power-saving plans; while on the other hand local distributed renewable energy business will stimulate the local economy. To ease economic impacts on municipalities with nuclear power plants and other affiliated industries, it is important to understand the reasons why those local authorities hosted nuclear power plants in the first place. A good understanding of such matters will be the key to effectively facilitating support policies that can revive primary industry (agriculture, forestry and fishing), that make full use of resources available in the regions, and that promote local-led energy policy, especially focusing on renewable energy sources. 3.5 Decommissioning of nuclear stations and liquidation of electric utilities and related nuclear energy companies The following proposal is offered in regard to the “decommissioning process” and management issues associated with electric power companies. It is addressed to TEPCO and the eight other general electric utilities2 operating nuclear power plants in Japan. Generally, taking responsibility for mismanagement ultimately implies going bankrupt. The electric power industry is a public-utility industry. In Japan, however, private companies have been in charge of this industry. As long as the electric companies are private enterprises, they cannot avoid taking responsibility as private businesses. COMMITMENT TO NUCLEAR POWER IS ASSOCIATED WITH INCREASED EMISSIONS AND DECREASED COMMITMENT TO RENEWABLE ENERGY. The AC the best known way to reduce emissions. Germanos 8/23 Andrea Germanos (senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams, a progressive news source), New Study Casts Doubt on the Future of Nuclear Power, 8/23/2016, Ecowatch. While it's been touted by some energy experts as a so-called "bridge" to help slash carbon emissions, a new study suggests that a commitment to nuclear power may in fact be a path towards climate failure. For their study, researchers at the University of Sussex and the Vienna School of International Studies grouped European countries by levels of nuclear energy usage and plans, and compared their progress with part of the European Union's 2020 Strategy.
That 10-year strategy, proposed in 2010, calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by least 20 percent compared to 1990 levels and increasing the share of renewable energy in final energy consumption to 20 percent. The researchers found that "progress in both carbon emissions reduction and in adoption of renewables appears to be inversely is related to the strength of continuing nuclear commitments." For the study, the authors looked at three groupings. First is those with no nuclear energy. Group 1 includes Denmark, Ireland and Portugal. Group 2, which counts Germany and Sweden among its members, includes those with some continuing nuclear commitments, but also with plans to decommission existing nuclear plants. The third group, meanwhile, includes countries like Hungary and the UK which have plans to maintain current nuclear units or even expand nuclear capacity. "With reference to reductions in carbon emissions and adoption of renewables, clear relationships emerge between patterns of achievement in these 2020 Strategy goals and the different groupings of nuclear use," they wrote. For non-nuclear Group 1 countries, the average percentage of reduced emissions was 6 percent and they had an average of a 26 percent increase in renewable energy consumption. Group 2 had the highest average percentage of reduced emissions at 11 percent and they also boosted renewable energy to 19 percent. Pro-nuclear Group 3, meanwhile, had their emissions on average go up 3 percent and they had the smallest increase in renewables shares—16 percent. "Looked at on its own, nuclear power is sometimes noisily propounded as an attractive response to climate change," said Andy Stirling, professor of science and technology policy at the University of Sussex, in a media statement. "Yet if alternative options are rigorously compared, questions are raised about cost-effectiveness, timeliness, safety and security." "Looking in detail at historic trends and current patterns in Europe, this paper substantiates further doubts," he continued. "By suppressing better ways to meet climate goals, evidence suggests entrenched commitments to nuclear power may actually be counterproductive." The new study focused on Europe and Benjamin Sovacool, professor of energy policy and director of the Sussex Energy Group at the University of Sussex, stated, "If nothing else, our paper casts doubt on the likelihood of a nuclear renaissance in the near-term, at least in Europe." Contention - Radiation Nuclear radiation and waste causes acute poisoning, cancer, and death in nearby areas. Kyne et al 16 Dean Kyne, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Bob Bolin, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, “Emerging Environmental Justice Issues in Nuclear Power and Radioactive Contamination,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, July 12, 2016 In general, individuals living around nuclear power plants face potential health risks posed by complex nuclear technologies. There are two categories of risks: those stemming from day-to-day operations and those arising from catastrophic failures. In case of acute failures, large areas around the nuclear plants face potential exposure to highly toxic radioactive releases, soil and water contamination, radiation from melted fuels, and large exclusion zones of uninhabitable land (as in both Chernobyl and Fukushima). The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011 is the most recent reminder that nuclear power plants are subject to catastrophic failures with the potential to produce radiation-related diseases, as well displace hundreds of thousands of people and render large areas contaminated for centuries. And while these extreme events are relatively infrequent, when they occur multiple generations will be burdened with the environmental and health costs of these disasters, as Chernobyl has amply demonstrated (see 20). Reactors pose environmental and health risks even during routine operation in the form of low level radioactive emissions from a variety of sources 21. Further, with the U.S. commercial nuclear reactor aging, concerns exist that the likelihood of cooling system leaks, contamination events, plant fires, and other “normal accidents” could increase in frequency with aging and degrading plant infrastructure 7,22. Individuals living near nuclear power plants are potentially exposed to various sources of ionizing radiation. Every reactor releases radioactive gases that are routinely vented through stacks in the reactor roof and from the steam generators; every hour about 100 cubic feet of radioactive gases are released; purging of radioactive materials in pipes is conducted frequently (22 purges per year are allowed per reactor); discharging radioactive water into surrounding areas when it is too hazardous for plant workers to handle; using 20,000 gallons of water for cooling the reactor core every minute, with the cooling water becoming contaminated by radioactive tritium (tritiated water). Of this, 5000 gallons of tritiated water per minute are released into adjacent lakes, rivers, or the ocean, and an additional 15,000 gallons are vented into the atmosphere as steam 20. (The potential health effects of exposure to radionuclides include (1) tritium or tritiated water becoming a part of bodily fluids within one or two hours of exposure; (2) plutonium-23 causing blood cancers such as lymphoma or leukemia; (3) iodine-131 which is quickly absorbed by the thyroid causing thyroid cancer; (4) strontium-90 which the body treats like calcium staying in the breast causing breast cancer; (5) Cesium-137 which is absorbed by muscle cells causing cancer; and (6) radioactive noble gases causing mutations in eggs and sperm 23). The World Nuclear Association claimed that it is difficult to detect the cancer in the individuals who are exposed to less than 100 mSv 24. The U.S. NRC has also claimed that biological effects from exposure to low level radiation are small and may not be detectable 25. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provided guidelines to evacuate or remain in shelter when the radiation dose reaches between 1 and 5 rems (10 mSv to 50 mSv) projected dose over four days in the early stage of nuclear power accident 26. Nevertheless, in the past 30 years, scientists in Europe and the USA have repeatedly studied and confirmed that normal operation of reactors causes cancer, especially in children 27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46.
Any risk of nuclear leakage is a risk not worth taking. Fukushima’s consequences have been undercovered for years. Michael 15 Fukushima: the Extinction-Level Event that no one is Talking About. Doug Michael. March 30, 2015 Japan is a nation containing many nuclear reactors which produce roughly 30 of the nation’s electricity.3 The majority of operable nuclear reactors are right along the coast, in one of the most seismically active areas on the entire planet! The powerful tsunami caused complete devastation of three of the six nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi facility, the cores of which melted within the first three days. In November 2011, the Japanese Science Ministry reported that radioactive cesium had contaminated 11,580 twelve thousand square miles of the land surface of Japan,4 with an additional 4,500 square miles contaminated.5 The destroyed reactor sites have been dumping hundreds of tons of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean, every single day for the past four years and the devastating results are now becoming plainly obvious. Radioactive cesium (an alkali metal) rapidly contaminates an ecosystem and poisons the entire food chain, and this waste offshoot has been detected in Japanese foodstuffs over a 200 mile radius of the Daiichi facility.6 Cesium and other radioactive waste products are bioaccumulative, meaning that they accumulate in an organism at a rate faster than the organism can eliminateinge it. Of course the Japanese government and TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) have blatantly lied about the amount of radioactive waste that has been leaking into the Pacific, however, the devastating results have been impossible to ignore. I’ve wondered since the beginning of this disaster-which has already shown to be far worse that the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Ukraine, in 1986-why the world’s top, leading scientists have not come together to figure out how to stop the leaking radiation. The reason is because no one knows how to deal with this catastrophe. In March of 2015, it was reported in the Times of London, that Akira Ono, the chief of the Fukushima power station admitted that the technology needed to decommission the three melted-down reactors does not exist, and he has no idea how it will be developed.7 More recently, Naohiro Masuda, the decommissioning chief of the Fukushima Daiichi Decommissioning Company, also stated that the technology does not exist to remove the highly radioactive debris from the damaged reactors:
Only a ban can resolve risks. Lucas 12 Caroline Lucas, MP for Brighton Pavilion and a member of the cross-party parliamentary environment audit committee, “Why we must phase out nuclear power,” The Guardian, February 17, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/feb/17/phase-out-nuclear-power Fukushima, like Chernobyl 25 years before it, has shown us that while the likelihood of a nuclear disaster occurring may be low, the potential impact is enormous. The inherent risk in the use of nuclear energy, as well as the related proliferation of nuclear technologies, can and does have disastrous consequences. The only certain way to eliminate this potentially devastating risk is to phase out nuclear power altogether. Some countries appear to have learnt this lesson. In Germany, the government changed course in the aftermath of Fukushima and decided to go ahead with a previously agreed phase out of nuclear power. Many scenarios now foresee Germany sourcing 100 of its power needs from renewables by 2030. Meanwhile Italian citizens voted against plans to go nuclear with a 90 majority. The same is not yet true in Japan. Although only three out of its 54 nuclear reactors are online and generating power, while the Japanese authorities conduct "stress tests", the government hopes to reopen almost all of these and prolong the working life of a number of its ageing reactors by to up to 60 years. The Japanese public have made their opposition clear however. Opinion polls consistently show a strong majority of the population is now against nuclear power. Local grassroots movements opposing nuclear power have been springing up across Japan. Mayors and governors in fear of losing their power tend to follow the majority of their citizens. The European level response has been to undertake stress tests on nuclear reactors across the union. However, these stress tests appear to be little more than a PR exercise to encourage public acceptance in order to allow the nuclear industry to continue with business as usual. The tests fail to assess the full risks of nuclear power, ignoring crucial factors such as fires, human failures, degradation of essential infrastructure or the impact of an airplane crash. Nuclear reactors and waste disposal sites cause massive death rates for workers and people living nearby. 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 In stages (2)–(5) of the nuclear fuel cycle, tens of millions of radiation workers, including nearly two million in the United States, also have faced environmental injustice EIJ. US nuclear-facility owners legally may expose workers to annual radiation doses up to 50 times higher than those allowed for members of the public, although there is no safe dose of ionizing radiation. Yet radiation workers typically receive no hazard pay or compensating wage differential. Often they also do not voluntarily accept dangerous nuclear jobs but take them because of economic necessity, because government falsification of worker radiation doses has mislead them, or because flawed radiation standards, flawed risk disclosure, and flawed workplace-radiation monitoring cause them to underestimate risks. Yet the risks are substantial. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) shows roughly 1 additional fatal cancer each time 60 people are exposed to the maximum-allowable, annual occupational-radiation dose of 50 Sieverts mSv. US nuclear-waste policies in stages (8)–(9), radioactive waste transport/storage, likewise have already caused 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 Academy of Sciences says) nuclear wastes must be completely secured. Because the US government has falsified and manipulated data on radioactive-waste risk (much of which will be borne by Appalachian, Latino, and Native-American populations, who live in higher proportions near existing and proposed nuclear-waste-storage sites), United Nations and nuclear-industry studies warn that the US government may underestimate future waste- repository-radiation doses by 9–12 orders of magnitude. 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 expo- sures of 100 millirems/year (limits 1,000 percent higher than current standards for US Department of Energy fa- cilities). They also use only mean or average dose to as- sess 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 Transporting nuclear waste exposes large population centers to radiation- takes out any dump site CP. Kyne et al 2 Dean Kyne, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Bob Bolin, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, “Emerging Environmental Justice Issues in Nuclear Power and Radioactive Contamination,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, July 12, 2016 The primary concern of activists, tribes, and communities opposing these two sites is the sheer volume of nuclear waste that will traverse highways and railways through population centers in transit from nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons sites 12. New DOE plans referenced above would still require the large scale movement of wastes through population centers. Given the recent history of oil train accidents in North America, legitimate concerns exist as to the environmental and human health consequences should a highway or rail accident result in the release of highly toxic radioactive material in a population center. While the DOE asserts that it is “impossible” for canisters containing highly radioactive materials to rupture, the recent fire and container breach at the WIPP site suggests otherwise. Currently, with no site open to accept high level or transuranic waste, nuclear waste transportation safety issues are temporarily reduced. Of course, Yucca mountain remains a federal mandate under the NWPAA, however ill-advised the location appears in site characterization studies 17. The tail end of the nuclear fuel cycle—specifically permanent, safe burial—remains an unsolved technical problem, a deeply controversial political issue, and a significant transgenerational environmental justice concern.
Probability of high impact accident spiraling out of control. Verbruggen 08 Aviel Verbruggen, Full professor at the University of Antwerp, Energy and Environmental Economist, "Renewable and nuclear power: A common future?" Energy Policy 36, 2008, 4036–4047 As in the case of climate change, there is evidence about the convex growth of the externality costs even when uncertainty about numbers cannot be resolved. Fig. 4 shows two curves that grow steeply with the expansion of nuclear installations and the number of sites. The bottom curve expresses the likelihood of major nuclear accidents when more and more countries would engage in nuclear activities and the number of installations grows. The probability that somewhere a major accident occurs is increasing faster than linearly, also because less-acquainted countries will enter the nuclear area. The damage costs follow a steeper pattern because of the collateral damage triggered by a single accident on the other nuclear activities. Combining the two factors (probability and consequences) into a single risk measure (Covello and Merkhofer, 1993), and applying the standards of risk acceptability, the combination of a nonnegligible and growing likelihood with the immeasurable high damages of a major nuclear accident or nuclear warfare, will conclude that nuclear power falls into the non-acceptable domain of human enterprising. While the impacts of nuclear technologies, their failures and abuses, can have devastating consequences of similar size and irreversibility as climate change impacts, there are important differences between both challenges that make public understanding and policy reactions different. Carbon emission sources are continuous and numerous, globally spread and controlled by billions of decision-makers. Also the various effects are building up continuously, globally spread and fall—although unevenly—yet on all people on earth. Nuclear technologies and sources are concentrated and controlled by a few (and for security and safety reasons the few should become fewer and preferably zero), and the most harmful effects are punctual in time with effects spreading unpredictably from the point of impact (accidents, nuclear bombs). Risk assessment of the nuclear option is more extreme than risk assessment of climate change damages. The probabilities of particular events are smaller but the consequences of one single event are more catastrophic. One can learn from accidents, nearaccidents and incidents that happened and continue to happen. Although the learning processes are not well structured and characterized by opposite interpretations (nuclear advocates versus nuclear critics), a majority of the public evaluates nuclear risks higher than the benefits delivered by the power output of nuclear plants (Turkenburg, 2004; Eurobarometer, 2007). Nuclear advocates call this attitude ‘barriers’ of public acceptance (IEA, 2006a, p. 134) and the nuclear sector invested and invests lots of money to convince the public and politicians to change their mind and balloting
Nuclear waste harms future generations. Rendall 1: “Nuclear Weapons and Intergenerational Exploitation” / Dr. Matthew Rendall/ School of Politics and International Relations Intergenerational justice deals with our obligations to past or future generations, particularly those with which our own lives do not overlap. Certain actions – such as cutting down forests or producing radioactive waste – let us make gains at our descendants’ expense. Tax cuts now, debt repayments later can be a winning formula for re-election, as recent U.S. history shows. “In many intergenerational situations … it is less costly in the short term to ignore the problem,” observes Kimberly Wade-Benzoni. “… In the long run, however, it ends up costing more – but those costs accrue to a different set of people.” Intergenerational exploitation is particularly common in the environmental sphere. Nuclear power raises many of the same distributive issues as nuclear deterrence. We enjoy the electricity now; future generations face most of the risks. We exploit our descendants by creating an externality in our favor, since “future generations must bear very significant costs without having received the benefits of the activities prior to the accident.” So too with nuclear deterrence. The objection that “no reasonable person with even a limited acquaintance with the history of human affairs over the last 3,000 years could be confident of safe storage by methods involving human intervention over the enormous time periods involved” applies at least as much to nuclear weapons as to nuclear waste. Does any reasonable person, let alone a realist, expect deterrence to work for millennia without catastrophic “accidents”? The violation is the worst because future generations are the most vulnerable. Agents in current generation are alive and have a chance of acting to ameliorate their situation and are thus include in willing the means to any end, whereas future generation don’t exist.
Obligation not to harm future generations is based on minimizing harm- we outweigh under util. Taebi 11 Behnam Taebi, prof of philosophy @ Delft University, “The Morally Desirable Option for Nuclear Power Production” Philos. Technol. (2011) 24. Following Barry's principle of vital interest to the effect that “the vital interests of people in the future have the same priority as the vital interests of people in the present” (Barry 1999, 97–99), I present the obligation not to negatively influence the vital interests of future generations by safeguarding their safety and security. This can alternatively be termed the obligation “not to harm” posterity. There is something that has to be said about the origins and the applications of this principle. One of the fundamental ethical obligations underscoring all human interaction is that of avoiding harm to others. In social interaction between people, for instance, it has been argued that an individual is sovereign as long as he is not harming another individual (Mill 1859/1998: 14). This no harm principle is also a leading creed for health care professionals; the related maxim that is frequently invoked in health care is thus: “to do no harm above all else” (Beauchamp and Childress 2009: Ch. 5). In environmental policy making, too, this principle is becoming increasingly influential, for instance, where it inspires the Precautionary Principle: namely “when an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically”, as stipulated in the Wingspread Statement.6 What is particularly interesting about the precautionary principle is that it shifts the burden of proof; so, we should refrain from an activity (e.g., developing or applying a technology) unless there is enough evidence that it will not cause severe harm (Jonas 1984). Critics argue that this principle sets the bar so high that it could hamper technological innovation, but the question of where to set the bar is a matter of how to interpret the precautionary principle in the face of uncertainty. The precautionary principle has, above all else, “a purposeful role in guiding future political and regulatory action” (O’Riordan and Cameron 1994, 16). The no harm duty as advocated here resembles the precautionary principle in that it urges us to refrain from action whenever our actions might result in harm being inflicted upon future generations. So, in this interpretation, we would not guarantee future generations’ “equal opportunity”; rather, we should refrain from action if such action could endanger posterity’s “equal opportunity.” High magnitude focus precludes debate’s potential to discuss meaningful systematic issues - Assume DA’s have a 1 risk before I answer them, low risk is no risk Cohn 13, Nate, staff writer for The New Republic , Improving the Norms and Practices of Policy Debate, 2013, http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php/topic So let me offer another possibility: the problem isn’t the topic, but modern policy debate. The unrealistic scenarios, exclusive focus on policy scholarship, and inability to engage systemic impacts and philosophical questions. And so long as these problems characterize modern policy debate, teams will feel compelled to avoid it. It might be tempting to assign the blame to “USFG should.” But these are bugs, not features of plan-focused, USFG-based, active voice topics. These bugs result from practices and norms that were initially and independently reasonable, but ultimately and collectively problematic. I also believe that these norms can and should be contested. I believe it would be possible for me to have a realistic, accessible, and inclusive discussion about the merits of a federal policy with, say, Amber Kelsie. Or put differently, I’m not sure I agree with Jonah that changing the topic is the only way to avoid being “a bunch of white folks talking about nuke war.” The fact that policy debate is wildly out of touch—the fact that we are “a bunch of white folks talking about nuclear war”—is a damning indictment of nearly every coach in this activity. It’s a serious indictment of the successful policy debate coaches, who have been content to continue a pedagogically unsound game, so long as they keep winning. It’s a serious indictment of policy debate’s discontents who chose to disengage. That’s not to say there hasn’t been any effort to challenge modern policy debate on its own terms—just that they’ve mainly come from the middle of the bracket and weren’t very successful, focusing on morality arguments and various “predictions bad” claims to outweigh. Judges were receptive to the sentiment that disads were unrealistic, but negative claims to specificity always triumphed over generic epistemological questions or arguments about why “predictions fail.” The affirmative rarely introduced substantive responses to the disadvantage, rarely read impact defense. All considered, the negative generally won a significant risk that the plan resulted in nuclear war. Once that was true, it was basically impossible to win that some moral obligation outweighed the (dare I say?) obligation to avoid a meaningful risk of extinction. There were other problems. Many of the small affirmatives were unstrategic—teams rarely had solvency deficits to generic counterplans. It was already basically impossible to win that some morality argument outweighed extinction; it was totally untenable to win that a moral obligation outweighed a meaningful risk of extinction; it made even less sense if the counterplan solved most of the morality argument. The combined effect was devastating: As these debates are currently argued and judged, I suspect that the negative would win my ballot more than 95 percent of the time in a debate between two teams of equal ability.But even if a “soft left” team did better—especially by making solvency deficits and responding to the specifics of the disadvantage—I still think they would struggle. They could compete at the highest levels, but, in most debates, judges would still assess a small, but meaningful risk of a large scale conflict, including nuclear war and extinction. The risk would be small, but the “magnitude” of the impact would often be enough to outweigh a higher probability, smaller impact. Or put differently: policy debate still wouldn’t be doesn’t replicateing areal world policy assessment, teams reading small affirmatives would still be at a real disadvantage with respect to reality. Why? Oddly, this is the unreasonable result of a reasonable part of debate: the burden of refutation or rejoinder, the responsibility of debaters to “beat” arguments. If I introduce an argument, it starts out at 100 percent—you then have to disprove it. That sounds like a pretty good idea in principle, right? Well, I think so too. But it’s really tough to refute something down to “zero” percent—a team would need to completely and totally refute an argument. That’s obviously tough to do, especially since the other team is usually going to have some decent arguments and pretty good cards defending each component of their disadvantage—even the ridiculous parts. So one of the most fundamental assumptions about debate all but ensures a meaningful risk of nearly any argument—even extremely low-probability, high magnitude impacts, sufficient to outweigh systemic impacts. There’s another even more subtle element of debate practice at play. Traditionally, the 2AC might introduce 8 or 9 cards against a disadvantage, like “non-unique, no-link, no-impact,” and then go for one and two. Yet in reality, disadvantages are underpinned by dozens or perhaps hundreds of discrete assumptions each of which could be contested. By the end of the 2AR, only a handful are under scrutiny; the majority of the disadvantage is conceded, and it’s tough to bring the one or two scrutinized components down to “zero.” And then there’s a bad understanding of probability. If the affirmative questions four or five elements of the disadvantage, but the negative was still “clearly ahead” on all five elements, most judges would assess that the negative was “clearly ahead” on the disadvantage. In reality, the risk of the disadvantage has been reduced considerably. If there was, say, an 80 percent chance that immigration reform would pass, an 80 percent chance that political capital was key, an 80 percent chance that the plan drained a sufficient amount of capital, an 80 percent chance that immigration reform was necessary to prevent another recession, and an 80 percent chance that another recession would cause a nuclear war (lol), then there’s a 32 percent chance that the disadvantage caused nuclear war. I think these issues can be overcome. First, I think teams can deal with the “burden of refutation” by focusing on the “burden of proof,” which allows a team to mitigate an argument before directly contradicting its content. Here’s how I’d look at it: modern policy debate has assumed that arguments start out at “100 percent” until directly refuted. But few, if any, arguments are supported by evidence consistent with “100 percent.” Most cards don’t make definitive claims. Even when they do, they’re not supported by definitive evidence—and any reasonable person should assume there’s at least some uncertainty on matters other than few true facts, like 2+2=4. Take Georgetown’s immigration uniqueness evidence from Harvard. It says there “may be a window” for immigration. So, based on the negative’s evidence, what are the odds that immigration reform will pass? are Far less than 50 percent, if you ask me. That’s not always true for every card in the 1NC, but sometimes it’s even worse—like the impact card, which is usually a long string of “coulds.” If you apply this very basic level of analysis to each element of a disadvantage, and correctly explain math results in (.4*.4*.4*.4*.4=..01024), the risk of the disadvantage starts at a very low level, even before the affirmative offers a direct responses. Debaters should also argue that the negative hasn’t introduced any evidence at all to defend a long list of unmentioned elements in the “internal link chain.” The absence of evidence to defend the argument that, say, “recession causes depression,” may not eliminate the disadvantage, but it does raise uncertainty—and it doesn’t take much more too many additional sources of uncertainty to reduce the probability of the disadvantage to effectively zero—sort of the static, background noise of prediction.
9/27/16
SO - Radiation AC v2
Tournament: Valley | Round: 1 | Opponent: Bettendorf AW | Judge: Martin Sigalow First, actions can be explained by general substitutability, i.e. that in order to achieve some goal, we take certain actions in the process of the completion of that goal. This end goal provides a reason for us to perform otherwise meaningless tasks. Sinott-Armstrong 1 Sinott-Armstrong, Walter. "An Argument for Consequentalism." Philosophical Perspectives, 6: Ethics, 1992. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1992. 399-421. Print.
My principle can be introduced by a non-moral example from everyday life. I have a cavity, and cavities become painful when they are not filled, so I have a reason to get my cavity filled. I can't get my cavity filled without going to a dentist, so I have a reason to go to a dentist. Arguments with this form are very common.2 They are also incomplete. Suppose that no dentist will fill my cavity without an appointment, and I don't have an appointment. Then so I don't have any reason to go to a dentist. Why not? Going to a dentist would be a waste of time, since it would not enable me get my cavity filled. Of course, going to a dentist is never sufficient by itself to get my cavity filled, since I also must stay there long enough, promise payment, etc. Nonetheless, going to a dentist often enables me to get my cavity filled in the sense that, if I go to the dentist, I can do other things which will together be sufficient for me to get my cavity filled. In general, I will say that doing Y enables an agent to do X if and only if Y is part of a larger course of action that is sufficient for the agent to do X, and the agent can do the other acts that make up what is sufficient for X. Now, when going to a dentist both enables me to get my cavity filled and also is necessary to get my cavity filled, then a reason to get my cavity filled does generate I have a reason to go to a dentist. It is crucial not to overestimate his claim. Although I have some reason to go to a dentist, this reason still might be overridden. I might have an overriding reason to leave for Australia. Also, my reason to go to a dentist and my reason to get my cavity filled need not be distinct in any way that would allow me to add the force of two reasons. Even if these reasons are the same, I still have a reason to go to a dentist. That is all the above argument claims. It is also important that this argument does not require logical impossibility. It is logically possible for me to get my cavity filled without going to a dentist. My wife might know how and be willing to fill my cavity, but she doesn't and isn't. So my particular situation makes it causally impossible for me to get my cavity filled except by going to a dentist. That kind of causal impossibility is enough for the above argument to be valid. The most general principle that warrants arguments of this form is this: (GS) If there is a 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 reason for A to do Y.
This also holds for moral actions. Sinott-Armstrong 2
Since general substitutability works for other kinds of reasons for action, we would need a strong argument to deny that it holds also it should hold 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.
Deontological theories fail to explain moral substitutability. Sinott-Armstrong 3
Even though this simple kind of deontological theoriesy cannot explain moral substitutability, more complex deontological theories might seem to do better. One candidate is Kant, who accepts something like substitutability when he writes, 'Whoever wills the end, so far as reason has decisive influence on his action, wills also the indispensably necessary means to it that lie in his power.'14 Despite this claim, however, Kant fails to explain moral substitutability. Kant says in effect that there is a moral reason to do an act when the maxim of not doing that act cannot be willed as a universal law without contradiction. My moral reason to keep my promise to mow the grass is then supposed to be that not keeping promises cannot be willed universally without contradiction However, not starting my mower can be willed universally without contradiction I can even consistently and universally will not to start my mower when this is a necessary enabler for keeping a promise. The basic problem is that Kant repeatedly claims that his theory is purely a priori, but moral substitutability makes moral reasons depend on what is empirically possible. Kantians might try to avoid this problem by interpreting universizability in terms of a less pure kind of possibility and 'contradiction'. On one such interpretation, Kant claims it is contradictory to will universal promise breaking, because, if everyone always broke their promises, no promises would be trusted, so no promises could be made or, therefore, broken. There are several problems here, but the most relevant one is that people could still trust each other's promises, including their promises to mow a lawn, even if nobody ever starts his mower when this is a necessary enabler for keeping a promise. This might happen, for example, if it is common practice to keep mowers running for long periods, so those to whom promises are made assume that it is not necessary to start one's mower in order to mow the lawn. This shows that there is no contradiction of this kind in a universal will not to start my mower when this is a necessary enabler for keeping a promise. Thus, this interpretation of Kant also fails to explain why there is a moral reason to start the mower. Some defenders of Kant will insist that both of these interpretations this fails to recognize that, for Kant, certain ends are required by reason, so rational people cannot universally will anything that conflicts with these ends. One problem here is to specify which and why particular ends have this special status. It is also not clear how these rational ends would conflict with universally not starting mowers. Thus, Kant can do no better than other deontologists at explaining why there is a moral reason to start my mower or why moral substitutability holds.
Analytic
However, necessary enabler consequentialism, or NEC, explains moral substitutability. Sinott-Armstrong 4
All of this leads to necessary enabler consequentialism or NEC. NEC claims that all moral reasons for acts are provided by facts that the acts are necessary enablers for preventing harm or promoting good. All moral reasons on this theory are consequential reasons, but there are two kinds. Some moral reasons are prevention reasons, because they are facts that an act is a necessary enabler for preventing harm or loss. For example, if giving Alice food is necessary and enables me to prevent her from starving, then that fact is a moral reason to give her food. In this case, I would not cause her death even if I let her starve, but other moral prevention reasons are reasons to avoid causing harm. For example, if turning my car to the left is necessary and enables me to avoid killing Bobby, that is a moral reason to turn my car to the left. The other kind of moral reason is a promotion reason. This kind of reason occurs when doing something is necessary and enables me to promote (or maximize) some good. For example, I have a moral reason to throw a surprise party for Susan if this is necessary and enables me to make her happy. Because of substitutability, these moral reasons for actions also yield moral reasons against contrary actions. There are then also moral reasons not to do what will cause harm or ensure a failure to prevent harm or to promote good. What makes these facts moral reasons is that they can make an otherwise immoral act moral. If I have a moral reason to feed my child, then it might be immoral to give my only food to Alice, who is a stranger. But this would not be immoral if giving Alice food is necessary and enables me to prevent Alice from starving, as long as my child will not starve also. Similarly, it is normally immoral to lie to Susan, but a lie can be moral if it is necessary and enables me to keep my party for Susan a surprise, and if this is also necessary and enables me to make her happy. Thus, NEC fits nicely into the above theory of moral reasons. NEC can providesan natural explanation of moral substitutability for both kinds of moral reasons. I have a prevention moral reason to give someone food when doing so is necessary and enables me to prevents them that person from starving. Suppose that buying food is a necessary enabler for giving the person food, and getting in my car is a necessary enabler for buying food. Moral substitutability warrants the conclusion that I have a moral reason to get in my car. And this act of getting in my car does have the property of being a necessary enabler for preventing starvation. Thus, the necessary enabler has the same property that provided the moral reason to give the food in the first place. This explains why substitutability holds for moral prevention reasons. The other kind of moral reason covers necessary enablers for promoting good. In my example above, if a surprise party is a necessary enabler for making Susan happy, and letting people know about the party is a necessary enabler for having the party, then letting people know is a necessary enabler for making Susan happy. The very fact that provides a moral reason to have the party also provides a moral reason to let people know about it. Thus, NEC can explain why moral substitutability holds for every kind of moral reason that it includes. Similar explanations work for moral reasons not to do certain acts, and this explanatory power is a reason to favor NEC.17
Thus the standard is consistency with necessary enabler consequentialism.
This means that actions are moral if they are enablers for promoting happiness or minimizing harm.
Further prefer the standard since state policies require a tradeoff between resources, policy makers need to explain the reason for policies to the public and the only way to do this in a just way is to use util. Woller 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 so 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 demonstrateshow that the redistributive effects and value trade-offs implied by their polices are somehow to the overall advantage of benefit 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.
Resolved: Countries will phase out nuclear power by 2030. I’ll defend implementation through normal means. I can specify further if asked in CX.
Normal means entails phase out. Only a ban can resolve risks. Lucas 12 Lucas 12 Caroline Lucas, MP for Brighton Pavilion and a member of the cross-party parliamentary environment audit committee, “Why we must phase out nuclear power,” The Guardian, February 17, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/feb/17/phase-out-nuclear-power Fukushima, like Chernobyl 25 years before it, has shown us that while the likelihood of a nuclear disaster occurring may be low, the potential impact is enormous. The inherent risk in the use of nuclear energy, as well as the related proliferation of nuclear technologies, can and does have has disastrous consequences. The only certain way to eliminate this potentially devastating risk is to phase out nuclear power altogether. Some countries appear to have learnt this lesson. In Germany, the government changed course in the aftermath of Fukushima and decided to go ahead with a previously agreed phase out of nuclear power. Many scenarios now foresee Germany sourcing 100 of its power needs from renewables by 2030. Meanwhile Italian citizens voted against plans to go nuclear with a 90 majority. The same is not yet true in Japan. Although only three out of its 54 nuclear reactors are online and generating power, while the Japanese authorities conduct "stress tests", the government hopes to reopen almost all of these and prolong the working life of a number of its ageing reactors by to up to 60 years.
Analytic
Contention 1 – Radiation
Nuclear radiation and waste causes acute poisoning, cancer, and death in nearby areas. Kyne 16 Kyne 16 Dean Kyne, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Bob Bolin, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, “Emerging Environmental Justice Issues in Nuclear Power and Radioactive Contamination,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, July 12, 2016 In general, individuals living around nuclear power plants face potential health risks posed by complex nuclear technologies. There are two categories of risks: those stemming from day-to-day operations and those arising from catastrophic failures. In case of acute failures, large areas around the nuclear plants face potential exposure to highly toxic radioactive releases, soil and water contamination, radiation from melted fuels, and large exclusion zones of uninhabitable land (as in both Chernobyl and Fukushima). The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011 is the most recent reminder that nuclear power plants are subject to catastrophic failures with the potential to produce radiation-related diseases, as well displace hundreds of thousands of people and render large areas contaminated for centuries. And while these extreme events are relatively infrequent, when they occur multiple generations will be burdened with the environmental and health costs of these disasters, as Chernobyl has amply demonstrated (see 20). Reactors pose environmental and health risks even during routine operation in the form of low level radioactive emissions from a variety of sources 21. Further, with the U.S. commercial nuclear reactor aging, concerns exist that the likelihood of cooling system leaks, contamination events, plant fires, and other “normal accidents” could increase in frequency with aging and degrading plant infrastructure 7,22. Individuals living near nuclear power plants are potentially exposed to various sources of ionizing radiation. Every reactor releases radioactive gases that are routinely vented through stacks in the reactor roof and from the steam generators; every hour about 100 cubic feet of radioactive gases are released; purging of radioactive materials in pipes is conducted frequently (22 purges per year are allowed per reactor); discharging radioactive water into surrounding areas when it is too hazardous for plant workers to handle; using 20,000 gallons of water for cooling the reactor core every minute, with the cooling water becoming contaminated by radioactive tritium (tritiated water). Of this, 5000 gallons of tritiated water per minute are released into adjacent lakes, rivers, or the ocean, and an additional 15,000 gallons are vented into the atmosphere as steam 20. (The potential health effects of exposure to radionuclides include (1) tritium or tritiated water becoming a part of bodily fluids within one or two hours of exposure; (2) plutonium-23 causing blood cancers such as lymphoma or leukemia; (3) iodine-131 which is quickly absorbed by the thyroid causing thyroid cancer; (4) strontium-90 which the body treats like calcium staying in the breast causing breast cancer; (5) Cesium-137 which is absorbed by muscle cells causing cancer; and (6) radioactive noble gases causing mutations in eggs and sperm 23). The World Nuclear Association claimed that it is difficult to detect the cancer in the individuals who are exposed to less than 100 mSv 24. The U.S. NRC has also claimed that biological effects from exposure to low level radiation are small and may not be detectable 25. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) provided guidelines to evacuate or remain in shelter when the radiation dose reaches between 1 and 5 rems (10 mSv to 50 mSv) projected dose over four days in the early stage of nuclear power accident 26. Nevertheless, in the past 30 years, scientists in Europe and the USA have repeatedly studied and confirmed that normal operation of reactors causes cancer, especially in children 27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46.
Any risk of nuclear leakage is a risk not worth taking. Fukushima’s consequences have been undercovered for years. Michael 15 Fukushima: the Extinction-Level Event that no one is Talking About. Doug Michael. March 30, 2015 Japan is a nation containing many nuclear reactors which produce roughly 30 of the nation’s electricity.3 The majority of operable nuclear reactors are right along the coast, in one of the most seismically active areas on the entire planet! The powerful tsunami caused complete devastation of three of the six nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi facility, the cores of which melted within the first three days. In November 2011, the Japanese Science Ministry reported that radioactive cesium had contaminated 11,580 twelve thousand square miles of the land surface of Japan,4 with an additional 4,500 square miles contaminated.5 The destroyed reactor sites have been dumping hundreds of tons of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean, every single day for the past four years and the devastating results are now becoming plainly obvious. Radioactive cesium (an alkali metal) rapidly contaminates an ecosystem and poisons the entire food chain, and this waste offshoot has been detected in Japanese foodstuffs over a 200 mile radius of the Daiichi facility.6 Cesium and other radioactive waste products are bioaccumulative, meaning that they accumulate in an organism at a rate faster than the organism can eliminateinge it. Of course the Japanese government and TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) have blatantly lied about the amount of radioactive waste that has been leaking into the Pacific, however, the devastating results have been impossible to ignore. I’ve wondered since the beginning of this disaster-which has already shown to be far worse that the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Ukraine, in 1986-why the world’s top, leading scientists have not come together to figure out how to stop the leaking radiation. The reason is because no one knows how to deal with this catastrophe. In March of 2015, it was reported in the Times of London, that Akira Ono, the chief of the Fukushima power station admitted that the technology needed to decommission the three melted-down reactors does not exist, and he has no idea how it will be developed.7 More recently, Naohiro Masuda, the decommissioning chief of the Fukushima Daiichi Decommissioning Company, also stated that the technology does not exist to remove the highly radioactive debris from the damaged reactors:
Nuclear reactors and waste disposal sites cause massive death rates and environmental injustice for workers and people living nearby. 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 In stages (2)–(5) of the nuclear fuel cycle, tens of millions of radiation workers, including nearly two million in the United States, 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 members of the public, although there is no safe dose of ionizing radiation. Yet radiation workers typically receive no hazard pay or compensating wage differential. Often they also do not voluntarily accept dangerous nuclear jobs but take them because of economic necessity, because government falsification of worker radiation doses has mislead them, or because flawed radiation standards, flawed risk disclosure, and flawed workplace-radiation monitoring cause them to underestimate risks. Yet the risks are substantial. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) shows roughly 1 additional fatal cancer each time 60 people are exposed to the maximum-allowable, annual occupational-radiation dose of 50 Sieverts mSv. US nuclear-waste policies in stages (8)–(9), radioactive waste transport/storage, likewise have already caused 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 Academy of Sciences says) nuclear wastes must be completely secured. Because the US government has falsified and manipulated data on radioactive-waste risk (much of which will be borne by Appalachian, Latino, and Native-American populations, who live in higher proportions near existing and proposed nuclear-waste-storage sites), United Nations and nuclear-industry studies warn that the US government may underestimate future waste- repository-radiation doses by 9–12 orders of magnitude. 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 expo- sures of 100 millirems/year (limits 1,000 percent higher than current standards for US Department of Energy fa- cilities). They also use only mean or average dose to as- sess 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
Global contamination will be uncontainable and culminate in extinction. Lendman ‘11 Stephen Lendman, “Nuclear Meltdown in Japan”. The People’s Voice, March 13, 2011. (http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2011/03/13/nuclear-meltdown-in-japan. "As a physician, I contend that nuclear technology threatens life on our planet with extinction. If present trends continue, the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink will soon be contaminated with enough radioactive pollutants to pose a potential health hazard far greater than any plague humanity has ever experienced."More below on the inevitable dangers from commercial nuclear power proliferation, besides added military ones.On March 11, New York Times writer Martin Fackler headlined, "Powerful Quake and Tsunami Devastate Northern Japan," saying:"The 8.9-magnitude earthquake (Japan's strongest ever) set off a devastating tsunami that sent walls of water (six meters high) washing over coastal cities in the north." According to Japan's Meteorological Survey, it was 9.0. The Sendai port city and other areas experienced heavy damage. "Thousands of homes were destroyed, many roads were impassable, trains and buses (stopped) running, and power and cellphones remained down. On Saturday morning, the JR rail company" reported three trains missing. Many passengers are unaccounted for. Striking at 2:46PM Tokyo time, it caused vast destruction, shook city skyscrapers, buckled highways, ignited fires, terrified millions, annihilated areas near Sendai, possibly killed thousands, and caused a nuclear meltdown, its potential catastrophic effects far exceeding quake and tsunami devastation, almost minor by comparison under a worst case scenario. On March 12, Times writer Matthew Wald headlined, "Explosion Seen at Damaged Japan Nuclear Plant," saying: "Japanese officials (ordered evacuations) for people living near two nuclear power plants whose cooling systems broke down," releasing radioactive material, perhaps in far greater amounts than reported. NHK television and Jiji said the 40-year old Fukushima plant's outer structure housing the reactor "appeared to have blown off, which could suggest the containment building had already been breached." Japan's nuclear regulating agency said radioactive levels inside were 1,000 times above normal.Reuters said the 1995 Kobe quake caused $100 billion in damage, up to then the most costly ever natural disaster. This time, from quake and tsunami damage alone, that figure will be dwarfed. Moreover, under a worst case core meltdown, all bets are off as the entire region and beyond will be threatened with permanent contamination, making the most affected areas unsafe to live in. On March 12, Stratfor Global Intelligence issued a "Red Alert: Nuclear Meltdown at Quake-Damaged Japanese Plant," saying:Fukushima Daiichi "nuclear power plant in Okuma, Japan, appears to have caused a reactor meltdown." Stratfor downplayed its seriousness, adding that such an event "does not necessarily mean a nuclear disaster," that already may have happened - the ultimate nightmare short of nuclear winter. According to Stratfor, "(A)s long as the reactor core, which is specifically designed to contain high levels of heat, pressure and radiation, remains intact, the melted fuel can be dealt with. If the (core's) breached but the containment facility built around (it) remains intact, the melted fuel can be....entombed within specialized concrete" as at Chernobyl in 1986.In fact, that disaster killed nearly one million people worldwide from nuclear radiation exposure. In their book titled, "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment," Alexey Yablokov, Vassily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko said:"For the past 23 years, it has been clear that there is a danger greater than nuclear weapons concealed within nuclear power. Emissions from this one reactor exceeded a hundred-fold the radioactive contamination of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.""No citizen of any country can be assured that he or she can be protected from radioactive contamination. One nuclear reactor can pollute half the globe. Chernobyl fallout covers the entire Northern Hemisphere." Stratfor explained that if Fukushima's floor cracked, "it is highly likely that the melting fuel will burn through (its) containment system and enter the ground. This has never happened before," at least not reported. If now occurring, "containment goes from being merely dangerous, time consuming and expensive to nearly impossible," making the quake, aftershocks, and tsunamis seem mild by comparison. Potentially, millions of lives will be jeopardized. Japanese officials said Fukushima's reactor container wasn't breached. Stratfor and others said it was, making the potential calamity far worse than reported. Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) said the explosion at Fukushima's Saiichi No. 1 facility could only have been caused by a core meltdown. In fact, 3 or more reactors are affected or at risk. Events are fluid and developing, but remain very serious. The possibility of an extreme catastrophe can't be discounted.Moreover, independent nuclear safety analyst John Large told Al Jazeera that by venting radioactive steam from the inner reactor to the outer dome, a reaction may have occurred, causing the explosion."When I look at the size of the explosion," he said, "it is my opinion that there could be a very large leak (because) fuel continues to generate heat."Already, Fukushima way exceeds Three Mile Island that experienced a partial core meltdown in Unit 2. Finally it was brought under control, but coverup and denial concealed full details until much later. According to anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman, Japan's quake fallout may cause nuclear disaster, saying:"This is a very serious situation. If the cooling system fails (apparently it has at two or more plants), the super-heated radioactive fuel rods will melt, and (if so) you could conceivably have an explosion," that, in fact, occurred.As a result, massive radiation releases may follow, impacting the entire region. "It could be, literally, an apocalyptic event. The reactor could blow." If so, Russia, China, Korea and most parts of Western Asia will be affected. Many thousands will die, potentially millions under a worse case scenario, including far outside East Asia.Moreover, at least five reactors are at risk. Already, a 20-mile wide radius was evacuated. What happened in Japan can occur anywhere. Yet Obama's proposed budget includes $36 billion for new reactors, a shocking disregard for global safety.Calling Fukushima an "apocalyptic event," Wasserman said "(t)hese nuclear plants have to be shut," let alone budget billions for new ones. It's unthinkable, he said. If a similar disaster struck California, nuclear fallout would affect all America, Canada, Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America.outages."Critical national security and homeland defense missions are at an unacceptably high risk of extended outages from failure of the grid," the Defense Science Board concluded. "The grid is fragile, vulnerable, near its capacity limit, and outside of DOD control. In most cases, neither the grid nor on-base backup power provides sufficient reliability to ensure continuity of critical national priority functions and oversight of strategic missions in the face of long-term (several months) outage."And while the Pentagon has joined interagency efforts to beef up grid security, experts say solutions remain elusive. Four years after the Defense Science Board report, DOD has yet to define what "energy security" means at its bases, let alone how to assure it, according to dozens of interviews with military officials, lawmakers, defense energy experts, project developers and utilities.How DOD ultimately answers these questions will not only determine the limits of U.S. defenses; it is also likely to send waves through civilian energy and technology industries
There is a high probability of high impact accident spiraling out of control. Verbruggen 08 Verbruggen 08 Aviel Verbruggen, Full professor at the University of Antwerp, Energy and Environmental Economist, "Renewable and nuclear power: A common future?" Energy Policy 36, 2008, 4036–4047
As in the case of climate change, there is evidence about the convex growth of the externality costs even when uncertainty about numbers cannot be resolved. Fig. 4 shows two curves that grow steeply with the expansion of nuclear installations and the number of sites. The bottom curve expresses the likelihood of major nuclear accidents when more and more countries would engage in nuclear activities and the number of installations grows. The probability that somewhere a major accident occurs is increasing faster than linearly, also because less-acquainted countries will enter the nuclear area. The damage costs follow a steeper pattern because of the collateral damage triggered by a single accident on the other nuclear activities. Combining the two factors (probability and consequences) into a single risk measure (Covello and Merkhofer, 1993), and applying the standards of risk acceptability, the combination of a nonnegligible and growing likelihood with the immeasurable high damages of a major nuclear accident or nuclear warfare, will conclude that nuclear power falls into the non-acceptable domain of human enterprising. While the impacts of nuclear technologies, their failures and abuses, can have devastating consequences of similar size and irreversibility as climate change impacts, there are important differences between both challenges that make public understanding and policy reactions different. Carbon emission sources are continuous and numerous, globally spread and controlled by billions of decision-makers. Also the various effects are building up continuously, globally spread and fall—although unevenly—yet on all people on earth. Nuclear technologies and sources are concentrated and controlled by a few (and for security and safety reasons the few should become fewer and preferably zero), and the most harmful effects are punctual in time with effects spreading unpredictably from the point of impact (accidents, nuclear bombs). Risk assessment of the nuclear option is more extreme than risk assessment of climate change damages. The probabilities of particular events are smaller but the consequences of one single event are more catastrophic. One can learn from accidents, nearaccidents and incidents that happened and continue to happen. Although the learning processes are not well structured and characterized by opposite interpretations (nuclear advocates versus nuclear critics), a majority of the public evaluates nuclear risks higher than the benefits delivered by the power output of nuclear plants (Turkenburg, 2004; Eurobarometer, 2007). Nuclear advocates call this attitude ‘barriers’ of public acceptance (IEA, 2006a, p. 134) and the nuclear sector invested and invests lots of money to convince the public and politicians to change their mind and balloting
Nuclear waste harms future generations. Rendall 11 “Nuclear Weapons and Intergenerational Exploitation” / Dr. Matthew Rendall/ School of Politics and International Relations
Intergenerational justice deals with our obligations to past or future generations, particularly those with which our own lives do not overlap. Certain actions – such as cutting down forests or producing radioactive waste – let us make gains at our descendants’ expense. Tax cuts now, debt repayments later can be a winning formula for re-election, as recent U.S. history shows. “In many intergenerational situations … it is less costly in the short term to ignore the problem,” observes Kimberly Wade-Benzoni. “… In the long run, however, it ends up costing more – but those costs accrue to a different set of people.” Intergenerational exploitation is particularly common in the environmental sphere. Nuclear power raises many of the same distributive issues as nuclear deterrence. We enjoy the electricity now; future generations face most of the risks. We exploit our descendants by creating an externality in our favor, since “future generations must bear very significant costs without having received the benefits of the activities prior to the accident.” So too with nuclear deterrence. The objection that “no reasonable person with even a limited acquaintance with the history of human affairs over the last 3,000 years could be confident of safe storage by methods involving human intervention over the enormous time periods involved” applies at least as much to nuclear weapons as to nuclear waste. Does any reasonable person, let alone a realist, expect deterrence to work for millennia without catastrophic “accidents”? The violation is the worst because future generations are the most vulnerable. Agents in current generation are alive and have a chance of acting to ameliorate their situation and are thus include in willing the means to any end, whereas future generation don’t exist.
Contention 2 - Warming First, commitment to nuclear power is associated with increased emissions and decreased commitment to renewable energy. The AC the best known way to reduce emissions. Germanos 8/23 Andrea Germanos (senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams, a progressive news source), New Study Casts Doubt on the Future of Nuclear Power, 8/23/2016, Ecowatch. While it's been touted by some energy experts as a so-called "bridge" to help slash carbon emissions, a new study suggests that a commitment to nuclear power may in fact be a path towards climate failure. For their study, researchers at the University of Sussex and the Vienna School of International Studies grouped European countries by levels of nuclear energy usage and plans, and compared their progress with part of the European Union's 2020 Strategy.
That 10-year strategy, proposed in 2010, calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by least 20 percent compared to 1990 levels and increasing the share of renewable energy in final energy consumption to 20 percent. The researchers found that "progress in both carbon emissions reduction and in adoption of renewables appears to be inversely is related to the strength of continuing nuclear commitments." For the study, the authors looked at three groupings. First is those with no nuclear energy. Group 1 includes Denmark, Ireland and Portugal. Group 2, which counts Germany and Sweden among its members, includes those with some continuing nuclear commitments, but also with had plans to decommission existing nuclear plants. The third group, meanwhile, includes countries like Hungary and the UK which have had plans to maintain current nuclear units or even expand nuclear capacity. "With reference to reductions in carbon emissions and adoption of renewables, clear relationships emerge between patterns of achievement in these 2020 Strategy goals and the different groupings of nuclear use," they wrote. For non-nuclear Group 1 countries, the average percentage of reduced emissions was 6 percent and they had an average of a 26 percent increase in renewable energy consumption. Group 2 had the highest average percentage of reduced emissions at 11 percent and they also boosted renewable energy to 19 percent. Pro-nuclear Group 3, meanwhile, had their emissions on average go up 3 percent and they had the smallest increase in renewables shares—16 percent. "Looked at on its own, nuclear power is sometimes noisily propounded as an attractive response to climate change," said Andy Stirling, professor of science and technology policy at the University of Sussex, in a media statement. "Yet if alternative options are rigorously compared, questions are raised about cost-effectiveness, timeliness, safety and security." "Looking in detail at historic trends and current patterns in Europe, this paper substantiates further doubts," he continued. "By suppressing better ways to meet climate goals, evidence suggests entrenched commitments to nuclear power may actually be counterproductive." The new study focused on Europe and Benjamin Sovacool, professor of energy policy and director of the Sussex Energy Group at the University of Sussex, stated, "If nothing else, our paper casts doubt on the likelihood of a nuclear renaissance in the near-term, at least in Europe."
Every day, large reactors like the two at Diablo Canyon, California, individually dump about 1.25 billion gallons of water into the ocean at temperatures up to 20 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the natural environment. Diablo’s “once-through cooling systems” takes water out of the ocean and dumps it back superheated, irradiated and laden with toxic chemicals. Many U.S. reactors use cooling towers which emit huge quantities of steam and water vapor that also directly warm the atmosphere. These emissions are often chemically treated to prevent algae and other growth that could clog the towers. Those chemicals can then be carried downwind, along with radiation from the reactors. In addition, hundreds of thousands of birds die annually by flying into the reactor domes and towers. All nuclear reactors emit Carbon 14, a radioactive isotope, invalidating the industry’s claim that reactors are “carbon free.” And the fuel that reactors burn is carbon-intensive. The mining, milling, and enrichment processes needed to produce the pellets that fill the fuel rods inside the reactor cores all involve major energy expenditures, nearly all of it based on coal, oil, or gas.
Global warming is real and causes extinction. Flournoy 12 Don Flournoy 12, Citing Feng Hsu, PhD NASA Scientist @ the Goddard Space Flight Center and Don is a PhD and MA from UT, former Dean of the University College @ Ohio University, former Associate Dean at SUNY and Case Institute of Technology, Former Manager for University/Industry Experiments for the NASA ACTS Satellite, currently Professor of Telecommunications @ Scripps College of Communications, Ohio University, “Solar Power Satellites,” January 2012, Springer Briefs in Space Development, p. 10-11
In the Online Journal of Space Communication, Dr. Feng Hsu, a NASA scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center, a research center in the forefront of science of space and Earth, writes, “The evidence of global warming is alarming,” noting the potential for a catastrophic planetary climate change is real and troubling (Hsu 2010). Hsu and his NASA colleagues were engaged in monitoring and analyzing climate changes on a global scale, through which they received first-hand scientific information and data relating to global warming issues, including the dynamics of polar ice cap melting. After discussing this research with colleagues who were world experts on the subject, he wrote: I now have no doubt global temperatures are rising, and that global warming is a serious problem confronting all of humanity. No matter whether these trends are due to human interference or to the cosmic cycling of our solar system, there are two basic facts that are crystal clear: (a) there is overwhelming scientific evidence showing positive correlations between the level of CO 2 concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere with respect to the historical fluctuations of global temperature changes; and (b) the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientific community is in agreement about the risks of a potential catastrophic global climate change. That is, if we humans continue to ignore this problem and do nothing, if we continue dumping huge quantities of greenhouse gases into Earth’s biosphere, humanity will be at dire risk (Hsu 2010) . As a technology risk assessment expert, Hsu says he can show with some confidence that the planet will face more risk doing nothing to curb its fossil-based energy addictions than it will in making a fundamental shift in its energy supply. “This,” he writes, “is because the risks of a catastrophic anthropogenic climate change can be potentially the extinction of human species, a risk that is simply too high for us to take any chances.”