Value: a worthy concept or ideal which is justified as an end in itself (meaning that people think it is valuable because people think it is valuable)

Examples of Values:

Justice: to each one’s due, fairness

Freedom/Liberty: Autonomy/Agency/Individualism: the ability to do as one wishes

Life/Security/Safety: being free of injury and in good health

Happiness: contentment and pleasure in life

Dignity: feeling of self-worth or importance

Quality of Life: sum of comforts, securities, and freedoms composing good lives

Morality/Duty: ethical commitment to universal codes of conduct or respect for others

Altruism/Love: charitable or humanitarian concern for others before oneself

Criteria: a weighing mechanism or mean toward gaining the value

Outline

Before writing a case, you need to compose an outline of everything you are going to do with it: do not start a case by working on an introduction (which is unimportant compared to the structure of a coherent and persuasive argument)

Step one: write out all of the values you can think of for one side of a resolution

Step two: think of various criteria that could be used in upholding each of your value options

Step three: outline your case

The most valuable case wins the debate. Thus, cases need to prove five things:

My value is the greatest in the debate
My criterion is the fairest for adjudicating the debate
My case meets my criterion
My case achieves my value
My value is exclusive: it cannot be achieved by my opponent’s case

Thus, it makes the most sense that you structure your case like this:

Observation One: Value
Observation Two: Criteria
Contention One: [My case meets my criteria]
Contention Two: [My case achieves my value]
Contention Three: [My opponent’s case cannot uphold my value]

Fill-in-the-blanks Case (N)

Introduction:

Observation One: Resolutional Analysis – Definitions

Observation Two: My value for this round will be ___________________

My value is defined as __________________________________________________________________________

My value is the highest in this debate because ________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Observation Three: My criterion for this round will be ___________________

My criterion is defined as ________________________________________________________________________

My criterion is a fair weighing mechanism for this debate because ________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

In this debate, I will contend that __________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Contention One:

Contention Two:

Contention Three:

Cut/tag/cite (C)

This is not a planned lecture, I do it on the computer screen to demonstrate and then I handout a random card.

Rebuttals, crystallization (C)

Remind them:

1. Clearly state the voting issue in one, succinct sentence

2. Support why it is a voting issue and why you are winning the issue

3. As you discuss the voting issue make points and then state how those points respond to opponent arguments. DON’T get defensive and start answering their arguments with “they said x, that’s not true because we showed y. . .” instead do this “We have shown y, explain it, and that proves the opponent x argument to be false because . . .”

Hold Prep Time Until End

Can Stop Flowing and Move to Another Page

1.My Value is best upheld in this round

-WEIGH WEIGH WEIGH

-use your criterion

2. I am winning X argument

-pick something that both sides are focusing on

-weigh

3. Comparison of worlds

Practice Writing Voting Issues (example debate/own cases)

1 NR = 6 minutes total

-Save the majority of your downtime to take before this speech. This rebuttal is huge and important and you don’t really need that time for your first speech since half of it was completed prior to the round even starting (your case).

-Spend 2-3 minutes clearing up any issues on the flow that are new or particularly unresolved. Be careful not to dwell on issues that you are most likely losing. Just answer them offensively and move on.

-The rest of your time should be devoted to voting issues. You can, in fact, spend the entire rebuttal on voting issues and group any important arguments under the taglines of your voters. I find that the latter tactic works better with “big picture” judges (judges who either tell you that they think this way, or do not appear to be flowing very much or at all).

2 AR = 3 minutes total

-Spend your entire time on voting issues. No questions asked, I would not suggest any other method.

The new, improved, and EASY way to give good voting issues:

-I advise flowing your voters on a separate sheet of paper, just so you don’t get confused juggling paper around during your speech.

-Keep it short: 3 (at most, 4) voters are all you really need in a round. By this point, you should be able to nicely divide all arguments in the round into 3 groups.

-Clearly state the voting issue in one, succinct sentence. This sentence will ideally be worded as “I am WINNING (x argument)” or some other form of offensive language. NEVER say why you are “not losing” the argument in the tagline. This will only leave the impression that you are trying to come from behind. Even if your opponent has just beat you into the ground, keep a smile on your face and pretend like it was your best round ever. You never know what the judge might be thinking.

-Support why this is a voting issue and why you are winning the issue. Use evidence from your case and other points brought out in the round.

-As you discuss the voting issue make points and then state how those points respond to opponent arguments. DON’T get defensive and start answering their arguments with “they said x, that’s not true because we showed y. . .” instead do this “We have shown y, explain it, and that proves the opponent x argument to be false because . . .”

One method for constructing voting issues:

1.My Value is best upheld in this round

-WEIGH WEIGH WEIGH (Why is your value better than your opponents? Does it encompass your opponents? Does it just make more sense?)

-Use your criterion as a mechanism to weigh the round. Example: Under the veil of ignorance, one would also choose to have their dignity protected, rather than just Justice, because justice might not be inclusive of all members of society (utility, for example).

2. I am winning X argument

-pick something that both sides are focusing on

-weigh why your arguments here are better.

3. Comparison of worlds

-Give a short narrative about what a world under your interpretation of the resolution might look like and compare that wonderful world with the disaster that your opponent wants to inflict. This brings nebulous discussions about values and philosophies back to the real world (and is an excellent tactic for lay judges).

1. Persuasiveness

The best way to convey a persuasive tone is to have your case memorized (or somewhat close to it). I understand that this means you may have to actually write your case a few days prior to the tournament, but it is well worth it. A note on memorization: there is some study that found reading what you want to memorize directly before going to sleep increases your memory’s retention. I have tried this before a variety of tests, and it does seem to work. Give it a shot.

2. Ums

Um…no one should, eh, ever, well, say “um.” To stop this habit, try speaking in front of your teammates. Every time you say “um” or another filler word, have them either a) Yell at you (you can decide exactly what it is they should yell, depending on the environment:) OR b) Use a buzzer of some sort (slamming your hand down on a desk also works quite well). This brings the behavior to your attention and while you may be forced to speak at a slower pace to keep aware of your use of filler language, it should eventually cure the problem. My high school English teacher made good use of this and while I can see the effects slowly wearing off as I get farther and farther from high school, it worked for me!

3. Swaying

While standing rigidly at attention would be a bit awkward, there’s no excuse for rocking side-to-side while speaking (or wandering around the room…this just looks confusing and somewhat affected). Short of physical restraints, the same negative reinforcement behavior used to stop someone from saying “um” works to keep people from swaying as well. Often, this behavior is unconscious and the offender just needs to be made aware that it’s happening.

4. Eye Contact v. No Eye Contact

Having someone stare directly at you for 45 minutes, as a judge, is a bit disconcerting. At the same time, someone who refuses to make eye contact may seem nervous or dishonest. Strive for a 70-30 (or thereabouts) ratio of eye contact versus no eye contact. For the 30% of the time that you are not looking convincingly into the eyes of your critic, find a spot slightly to one say of him/her and focus there (the ceiling and the floor are off limits!).

5. Speed

I feel like maybe this deserves its own thread (if it does, let me know and I’ll work on that). Speed is a touchy subject in high school debate now. While national circuit debaters keep getting progressively faster, many regional debaters still speak at a very moderate pace. I won’t make a value judgment on either technique here, but I think the most critical thing to remember about speed is your judge. If you know that your judge is a former/current policy debater or debated in LD on the national circuit, speed should be fine (see the warning in number 6). If your judge is a parent or another lay judge, make sure that you explain everything very clearly and at a normal conversational pace. If you aren’t sure, ask. I’ve only had that method backfire once (I asked, she said she was fine with speed, and her comments after the round proved the opposite). If it does backfire, at least you know for future rounds (and can strike that judge if the option is given:).

6. Enunciation

No matter how fast you think you can speak, or how qualified your judge is to deal with speed, if you slur your words or mumble or never pause while speaking, it will not win you any extra points. Improve your enunciation by practicing tongue twisters (or your case) with a pen held lightly in between your front teeth (bite down, but only enough so you can’t fully open your mouth). If you can speak fast and clearly even with this impediment, then you’re doing great!

*****Philosophers / Values*****

Liberalism/social contract (C)

Write THE BASICS on the board.

I – Liberalism

– governments must legitimize authority

– most governments do this by relying on

1 – military or economic power / oppression

2 – religious power / divine right

3 – patriarchal power / birth right

– liberalism is a system of government that legitimizes its authority by claiming to have the people’s consent to rule

II – Machiavelli: beginning of European political thought

– Life

1 – Adviser for government overthrown by another Prince

2 – Was later caught conspiring to overthrow the new Prince

3 – After a period of imprisonment and torture, Machiavelli wrote

his masterpiece The Prince to try to suck up to his old nemesis

- The Prince is a nasty treatise on how to grab power, keep it, and avoid being ousted. A Prince should be cruel to his people because it is better to be feared than loved. The ends justify the means.

– The Discourses

1 – 20 years after The Prince, Machiavelli wrote a new argument that

distanced himself from his earlier treatise

2 – The Discourses is a moderate argument for the creation of a republic

with lots of suggestions on what helps one stand the test of time

3 – Republics survive because their peoples are embodiments of Civic

Virtue; they are responsible citizens who care for their community

III – The Iron Century and Thomas Hobbes

– The Iron Century: 1550-1650

1 – War rages all over Europe for a whole century

– Life of Thomas Hobbes

1 – Watching wars at home and abroad made him obsessed with survival

2 – Puritan man, but secretly atheistic

3 – Heavily influenced by scientific and mechanistic theories

4 – He published his book, Leviathan, in 1651

– Hobbes on people

1 – People are mechanistic: brains are wired to always work the same way

2 – Survival is the single priority of all people; they will do anything for it

3 – People are not above immorality; will kill to survive and be safe

4 – Hobbes concludes that all people are evil by nature

– The State of Nature

1 – State of Nature is Hobbes’ model for displaying the badness of people;

it is a thought experiment, not Hobbes’ view of history

2 – In the state of nature, people exist without governing authority

3 – Attempting to ensure survival, all people act violently toward each

other; their lives are “nasty, brutish, and short”

4 – All people have the Right of Nature; the Right of Nature is Hobbes’

term for the license people have to hurt each other

– The Social Contract

1 – Realizing that their lives depend on it, people make a pact called the

social contract

2 – The social contract is an agreement made among the citizens of a

society, not between citizens and the government

3 – Each person agrees to lay down Rights of Nature in exchange

for all others doing the same

– Leviathan

1 – Government is created to enforce the social contract

2 – Sovereign power must be absolute; if it is not, people may challenge

the sovereign authority, enabling them to create chaos

3 – The Sovereign may even imprison and execute his citizens; the

contract does not have authority over the Sovereign because then his power would not be absolute

– Citizen Rights

1 – Citizens only have the right to life, but this does not mean that the

Sovereign cannot kill them; only that the Sovereign is being a good Sovereign when protecting citizen’s lives

2 – Citizens have no right to property, speech, etc.

3 – Citizens of a territory conquered by another Sovereign are then obligated to their new ruler; they must abide by the contract that will keep them alive

4 – The Sovereign cannot be overthrown and contracts can’t be broken;

that would deprive him of absolute power

IV – The Glorious Revolution and John Locke

– The Glorious Revolution

1 – The Catholic James II took the throne in the late 17th Century angering many protestant British subjects

2 – British lords offered the throne to William of Orange who ascended in a bloodless revolution when James II stepped down

– The New World and Capitalism

1 – European discovery of America and the superiority of the British fleet made England the trade kingpin of the Atlantic

2 – Strong lords were forming what would become the middle class; they were most interested in trade and property expansion

– John Locke’s worldview

1 – People are born tabula rosa: they are blank slates

2 – Born without innate characteristics, people are able to build themselves into whatever they wish to become

3 – People are basically good, but society sometimes corrupts them

– Consent and the Purpose of the Contract

1 – Hobbes doesn’t allow each person to sign the contract, but Locke

says they are obligated to it anyway because of Tacit Consent: Tacit Consent says that one is obligated to the laws and institutions of a society if they receive benefits of living in it (i.e. protection)

2 – People enter the contract for more reasons than just survival; Locke says that people have three inalienable rights: life, liberty, property

3 – Property protection is a large focus of Locke’s work; disputes over property are seen as the key conflict worked out by law

4 – Property consists of:

-self

-labor

-raw material (fair amount)

-land you cultivate

-children until they understand law

-slaves and servants

-slave labor, “piece of sod slave cuts is same as you cut”

-commerce

5 – Can commit violence in name of property protection

– Locke’s political system

1 – Locke writes his theories in Two Treatises on Civil Government

2 – Locke is not advocating democracy: his system protects the life, liberty, and property of rich landowners, not peasants; that’s why he can advocate what he does and still own stock in the slave trade

3 – Legislative government is where the power should be because they represent landowner interests – compares to a parental structure…power of govt. can lessen once society adapts.

4 – Legislatures not representing landowner interests can and morally

should be overthrown; citizens have an obligation to revolt against

corrupt governments (i.e. the Glorious Revolution)

5 – However, governments also have prerogative: the ability to do illegal things if they are in the interests of the society (i.e. Oliver North)

V – Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the General Will

– Enlightenment philosophy

1 – France underwent a period of scientific and rational celebration

2 – Rousseau was at the center of the Enlightenment and translated Lockean ideas into French

- Rousseau’s State of Nature

1 – laws of nature:

-self preservation

-law of empathy (cannot hurt others)

2 – only inequality in state of nature is physical

– Equality

1 – On the Origins of Inequality is Rousseau’s attempt to figure out why government has gone wrong

2 – He concludes that people are Noble Savages: they are good at heart, but are lead astray by a corrupt society

3 – Society habituates us into lazy habits that spur corruption (i.e. failure to care for community and politics, greed, etc.)

– Rousseau’s political theory

1 – In The Social Contract, Rousseau argues for a small communal system where all people are heard and cared for

2 – The individual will can be corrupt, greedy, and arbitrary; state systems should not be based around it

3 – The popular will is discriminating and dangerous to a minority; Rousseau does not trust democracy

4 – The general will is the true focus of political systems; it is what is

actually in the best interests of the community

– Enacting the General Will

1 – A legislature is responsible for figuring out what the general will is; they must decide based on their civic responsibility

2 – The Sovereign exists to enforce and enact the laws of the legislature

3 – Corrupt sovereigns are overthrown; the legislature is never overthrown since it is the enactment of the General Will

VI – Using Social Contracts

– Contracts are flawed

1 – Debaters need to know them well, because others will use the contracts, but there are ways to use the concepts implied by the contracts without

having to defend excess baggage like Locke’s stand on slavery (don’t use Locke on reparations topic)

VII – Alternative to Social Contract

– Reciprocity

1 – Reciprocity is the mutual respect for rights created by social contracts

2 – Use reciprocity when you want to argue that law and government create institutions demanding that individuals protect each other’s rights

– Government Legitimacy

1 – Liberal governments are legitimate because they gain consent from the people in using their authority

2 – Use government legitimacy when you need to argue that values must be upheld in order to keep the state’s authority legitimate

– Locke and Rousseau’s contracts are the best

1 – Locke’s contract fits best with most judges because he was highly influential to the founding fathers and his rhetoric about inalienable rights connects with many American citizens

2 – Rousseau’s contract works well when you are arguing for greater civic duty or community solidification

Deontology Lecture (R)

The Origin of Ethics

European thinking-things

Descartes convinced all of Europe of the existence of stable human

identity: this is the idea that people have personalities that are

closed, definable, and can be placed in categories

People are thought to have agency: this is the ability to make a moral

calculation given situations and decide on action causing a proper

outcome

Calculations

Ethics are systems of thinking that provide ways for human agents to

decide courses of action

Ethics will determine what rules to obey, what variables to calculate,

and other factors in coming to a moral decision

Immanuel Kant and Deontology

Life of Kant

Son of a German minister, Kant obsesses over universalistic laws

Had a long but boring life, although the king of Prussia did ban some

of his writings for a short while

His philosophy

Deontology

What are means and ends? Means are what you do to get something. For example my means to getting to camp was driving, and the end was getting to camp.

The philosophy of deontology

The ends justify the means

If the initial action you take is moral, even if the result is bad, the action is considered moral

Additional notes

Ends are not connected to moral culpability; you cannot know the effects of an action (because you cannot predict the future) and you are not in control of those effects (because you aren’t a god)

You are not responsible for the means of other actors

People cannot be treated as means alone, but must be treated as ends in

themselves “kingdom of ends” (i.e. you cannot kill anyone to get what

you want)

Kant says you can’t lie to Nazi soldiers because you are culpable for your means alone, not the means of the Nazi soldiers. If they enact an immoral mean on Jewish victims, they are morally culpable for it, but you are not in control of those ends and are absolved of moral culpability

To lie to Nazi soldiers would be wrong because it would use them as a means to your own ends. The categorical imperative test would say that it is wrong to use people universally.

Problems with deontology

Deontology is unrealistically limiting

Choices do not always allow us to act morally; we will often

be confronted with situations where there is no moral option, and deontology leaves us helpless in those situations

Utility is preferable because it can provide guidance for decision making in any situation; it is not limited by moral rules although it can still be influenced by them

Ends can be known

We can use probability; we are reasonably certain that turning over a Jewish friend to a group of Nazi soldiers is a bad idea

Deontology is sacrificial

It makes us so consumed with our own moral

culpability that we do not act against injustices

Deontology relies on ends

The categorical imperative can only prove that certain actions are bad by making you picture a universe in which the action’s maxim is universalized

We picture the end result of universalizing the maxim; Kant’s principle relies on showing us how bad the ends are to prove that certain means are wrong

General Ways to defeat deontology

Deontology isn’t really a means to any value other than morality

Not a weighing mechanism, you either are moral meeting deontology or you aren’t you can’t use it to decide who wins the round.

It doesn’t take into account modern situational ethics

The Categorical Imperative

Definition: Act as though the MAXIM of your action were, through your will, to become universal law.” – this is a test for a categorically imperative action. Using the universalizing test allows us to see what would happen if our maxim where the universal law; that stops moral agents from acting in exception to universal laws; for example, I might test the decision to lie by imagining what would happen if everyone lied when they wished or needed to, and that causes me to avoid lying because I can see that it would be bad to apply that maxim universally

Additional Notes

The categorical imperative is the option we have to act in accordance with universal law and our moral duty to it. The categorical imperative is based on duty alone. Kant says that duty or “the will” is the only thing good without qualification (there’s nothing that makes it good, it just is) and therefore the only way to determine morality.

Universal laws are legitimate because they are universal; if there is ever a situation in which they do not apply, then they are not actually laws; laws cannot have exceptions and still be laws

Problems with the categorical imperative

A famous Kant dilemma: You are living in Germany in 1939 and Nazi soldiers knock on your door. They ask if you are hiding any Jews in your home. You are, indeed, hiding some Jewish friends. Do you lie to the soldiers? Kant’s answer is “No.” If you lie to them, you are breaking universal law.

A person wishes to commit suicide, but because of universal law, cannot will that everyone should do the same – this sacrifices autonomy

A beggar needs to borrow money to eat, s/he knows they cannot pay it back.

Contradiction: cannot will to have others take loans they cannot repay, and yet

cannot allow oneself to starve to death as suicide cannot be allowed either.

Works:

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

Critique of Pure Reason

Alan Gewirth

Basic Philosophy

Autonomous beings are moral agents

There are certain general rights that must be respected in all moral agents.

2 levels of autonomy:

the right to life and physical integrity

right not to be lied to, self-respect, and purpose (the ability to improve one’s own position)

There are certain general rights that must be respected in all moral agents (freedom and safety). Moral agents will recognize the rights of other moral agents.

Does not exactly say what is moral.

Deontological Decision-Making

The Intervening Actor:

Problem: Terrorists are holding your mother captive.

They will kill her unless you detonate an atomic bomb in New York.

Utilitarian Solution: Shoot Mom. Save a million lives.

Gewirth’s Solution: Do *nothing*

Deontological means matter; not ends.

You are not responsible for *intervening actors*; they choose to

bomb New York; you do not choose to kill your mother.

Why this isn’t crazy:

We cannot know the ends

Martin Luther King Jr. example

MLK wants to march through Birmingham

“Bull” Connor has threatened to spray marchers with fire

hoses and beat them to a pulp

MLK chooses to march anyway; is he responsible for the

ensuing violence?

Gewirth says no. Bull is the intervening actor and is solely

responsible for the violence. Gewirth has concocted this

whole argument for the purpose of defending MLK

His Main Works

-- Reason and Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

-- Human rights: essays on justification and applications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)

-- The Community of Rights (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Peter Singer

Theory of moral obligation

Moral Obligation to save a drowning baby

If you can help someone without a comparable harm being imposed upon yourself you are morally obligated to do so.

For example you have a moral obligation to save a drowning baby if you know how to swim.

Basically moral intuition.

STORY: Peter Singer has exstensive writings on how beatiality is moral, and he’s supported by PETA.

How to use singer: Singer is great in topics where you’re obligated to prove that a moral

obligation of some sort exists.

Answers to Singer

If one were to always make sacrifices then everyone would be poor off in society

Peter ignores things like kin selection

Peter Singer admits that this theory has no warrant

His Works:

Bioethics

Writings on an Ethical Life

Practical Ethics

Criterion and Utilitarianism Lecture (R)

Criterions:

Stress Importance

Stress Difficulty

Purpose/Function

Intermediary step between the value and the case

All arguments are filtered through it. Contentions -> criterion -> value.

What the judge uses to weigh the round

Criterion as a means to the value

Hypothetical example of how this would work

You value people getting presents your criterion would be UPS or bicycles

because those are the means.

LD examples

Human Rights -> Societal Welfare, Preservation of Life ->Human Life, Economic security -> QOL, Free and Fair Elections -> Fulfillment of Democratic Ideals, Safety ->QOL

Criteria as weighing mechanisms

Hypothetical example

Your value is deliciousness, huge scale that determined how delicious something was by using the criertion of chocolate and weighing what’s more cholocatey. you put chocolate cake on one side and sugar cookies on the other and it tells you what’s better achieves your value based on the criterion, of chocolateyness.

LD example

At the end of the round the judge decides what criterion to use, whether yours or your opponents based on the arguments you made in the round. Then they put the arguments that each person has won on either side of the scale and whoever gets more of the decided criterion wins. For example the judge decides that the criterion for the round is human life, your opponent wins the argument that they find a cure for cancer so that goes on one side of the scale, and you win the argument that you prevent nuclear war and thus human extinction, so that goes to the other side of the scale. Using human life as the criterion you would win because when you weigh millions of people against all people, all people wins out.

How to decide what criterion to use

Two strategies

Find evidence and make a list of arguments and see what criterion

ties them all, or a lot of them together.

Decide what you want your case to focus around and chose a value and

criterion and then find arguments that prove that you meet the criterion you’ve established

Criteria can be almost anything

You can use anything reasonable as a criterion (I HAND OUT LIST OF POPULAR CRITERIA)

Criteria must be fair

Each person must be potentially able to win the round using the criterion, bad criterions are for example on the economic development V. environmental protection environmental protection on the aff and economic development on the neg. Don’t use a criterion that your opponent is precluded from meeting by the criterion.

Criteria Strategy

Impact to it

Under your criterion analysis make it very clear why your criterion is best and then filter all your arguments through it. For example on the environmental protection case my criterion was human life and c1 was I prevent the biodiversity crisis, which saves human life, c2 I prevent global warming which saves human life, c3 I prevent resource wars that saves human life, c4 I prevent over consumption, which saves human life.

Since I had big impacts if I won one argument I won the round.

Very specific criterions and frame working

One strategy is to have a criterion that is very narrow that only you impact to. For example my friend Sam Kleiner had a case on international law, he spent 4 minutes on what that = a moral obligation then just a little time on why how his case was consistent with international law. He knew no one would talk about international law, and that therefore if he won his criterion he won.

Risks

You lose the criterion you lose the round

You get a judge who doesn’t know how to judge or judges

in a non traditional way you lose.

Advantages

You can ignore parts of your opponents case by saying that

they don’t impact back to your standard.

Issue Selection

If you’ve been spread out of the round this is a good strategy. You’ve already formatted your cases so that each contention proves your criterion so now you can just talk about your criterion and the contention that you’re winning the most. (remember to deal with turns your opponent makes though)

2AR with the the criterion

A way of doing voting issues now is to at the beginning of the 2ar explain

why you win the criterion, or just clarify which is being used in the round

(even if it’s your opponents). Then each voting issue can be ways you get the criterion.

Combining or Agreeing on criterions

If your criterions are similar or you realize that your opponents is better for you strategically you can agree in CX to theirs or a combination of the two of yours. Also, if you accidently drop your criterion you can still in the round by impacting to your opponents.

Ways to win the criterion debate

Just saying that your opponent don’t achieve their criterion is NOT SUFFICIENT,

and there really are only a few arguments that are appropriate for use here.

-Criterion is subjective/inherently ambiguous

- Unclear/vague

- Doesn’t link to value

-Not a weighing mechanism

-Not resolutionally applicable

- Racist/ethnocentric/offensive

- Not something that should be valued or bad in general

-Unfair of unequal

It can be good to add in at the end about even if they win the criterion why you

still meet it.

LIST OF POPULAR CRITERIA

Cultural autonomy

Deontology

Human Life

Human Rights

Security

Safety

Individualism

Community Standards

Communitarianism

Utilitarianism

Pragmatism

Veil of Ignorance

Justice

Soft Power

Free and Fair elections

Democratic Ideals

Democracy

Autonomy

Basic Needs

Security of Person

Societal Welfare

Environmental Protection

Liberty

Equality

Quality of Life

Happiness

Capitalism

Flexibility

Discourse

Market Place of Ideas

Stability

Dignity

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Teleology

Utilitarianism

What is Utilitarianism

Known as the greatest good for the greatest number of people which is based on

Mill’s definition.

It has a number of definitions though. “utilitarianism actually

refers only to “a calculation of the goodness or badness of an act” when used in philosophical works without a clear definition given.

A good basic all encompassing definition is “the rightness or wrongness of actions are determined by the goodness or badness of its consequences” (like teleology)

Kinds of Utilitarianism

There are a number of different kinds of Utilitarianism

Act

Act Utility is the goodness or badness of an act in a given situation

Nearly the same as teleology and consequentialism. If in the end more people are helped then hurt then the action is moral.

Rule

“Rule Utility is the goodness or badness of an act when constrained by a system of moral laws”

Look to the action itself and see if the action were applied as a rule whether the consequence would be good or bad. Very similary to Kants universal maxim.

AN EXAMPLE:

To illustrate, consider the following scenario: A surgeon has six patients: one needs a liver, one needs a pancreas, one needs a gall bladder, and two need kidneys. The sixth just came in to have his appendix removed. Should the surgeon kill the sixth man and pass his organs around to the others? This would obviously violate the rights of the sixth man, but utilitarianism seems to imply that, given a purely binary choice between (1) killing the man and distributing his organs or (2) not doing so and the other five dying, violating his rights is exactly what we ought to do.

A rule utilitarian, however, would look at the rule, rather than the act, that would be instituted by cutting up the sixth man. The rule in this case would be: "whenever a surgeon could kill one relatively healthy person in order to transplant his organs to more than one other person who needs them, he ought to do so." This rule, if instituted in society, would obviously lead to bad consequences. Relatively healthy people would stop going to the hospital, we'd end up performing many risky transplant operations, etc., etc. So a rule utilitarian would say we should implement the opposite rule: don't harvest healthy people's organs to give them to sick people. If the surgeon killed the sixth man, then he would be doing the wrong thing.

Universalistic Utility

Universalistic Utility is the goodness or badness of an act for a larger group or society.

Bascially a decision is moral if it benefits the global community more than I hurts it

Egoistic Utility

Egoistic Utility is the goodness or badness of an act for an individual or a single institution opposed to a larger social order

Basically we should all look to what’s the best possible

thing for ourselves because it’s what people naturally do.

Normative Utility

Normative Utility is the goodness or badness of an act given a system of value judgements or constraints

This system is very similar to Rule Utility, but different in that it might refer to more individualistic assessments of value rather than the universalistic moral rules found in deontology

Objective Utility

Objective Utility is the goodness or badness of an act outside of consideration of social, cultural, or contextual norms; it claims to be unbiased like science

Basically same as act but it takes external factors into account.

The Philosophers

Life of Jeremy Bentham

Bentham was an influential thinker in England during the

Industrial Revolution

Bentham was an odd ball; among other weird things, he founded

a college where his body is brought to every board meeting since

he died over a century ago

Bentham’s philosophy

Bentham was a hedonist; he believed in pursuing pleasure

Bentham’s conception of utility involves pursuing whatever

Maximizes pleasure versus pain.

There are a few sub criteria to see if an action produces pleasure

All categories are equally valuable

Intensity

Duration

Certainty

Propinquity (pro-pink-witty)

Nearness

Fecundity

The chances of there being a repeat of the

positive experience

Purity

The chance of something negative happening

Extent

How many people are affected

Life of J.S. Mill

By age 6 had written and composed a concerto

Can do calculus at 9

Wrote first book at 12

Went crazy at 15

Put in a sanitarium at 20

The son of James Mill, John Stuart was taught (and overworked) by Jeremy Bentham from an early age, leading to a nervous breakdown in his early adult life.

Might Mill have spent his life rebelling against Bentham?

Mill’s philosophy

Utilitarianism, according to Mill, refers to “the greatest good for the greatest number of people”

Deploring the poor quality of life inflicted on the masses by industrialization, Mill became a critic of England’s policies and used utility in his crusade Mill also established a “harm principle”: your liberties end where mine begin.

Freedom of Speech (N)

The Supreme Court

Vocabulary

Per Curium

First Name v. Last Name

Affirmed, Reversed

Certiorari

Stuff the Supreme Court Hates:

Prior Restraint

Restrictions that aren’t “content neutral”

Vagueness, void for; overbroad laws; the chilling effect

Leaving power over legality in hands of a single official

Exceptions to the First Amendment

1. Advocacy of Violence

	2. Captive Audience
	3. Copyrighted Expression
	4. False Statements of Fact
	5. Fighting Words
	6. Fraud
	7. Interference with another fundamental right
	8. Obscenity, Child Pornography
	9. Private Property
	10. Trade Secrets
	11. True Threats

History of The First Amendment

a. National Security and Prior Restraint

-Sedition Act of 1789

United States v. Cruikshank (1875) right of assembly claim, denied; the *first* First Amendment Case

-Espionage Act of 1917

*Schenck v. US

-Sedition Act of 1918

-Smith Act of 1940

*Watts v US – Hey Hey LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?

*Brandenburg v. Ohio – 1969 - KKK meeting

-Vietnam

*NYT v US – Pentagon Papers and National Security, Press Freedom

b. Application of First Amendment to States

-DeJonge v.Oregon (1937) 1st Amend. Assembly clause applied to states; punished person for taking part in group advocating violence even though no violence was committed

-Gitlow v. New York (1925) 1st Amend. Free Speech clause assumed to apply to states; so does 14^th Amendment

-Hague v. C.I.O. (1939) 1st Amend. Petition clause applied to states

-Near v. Minnesota (1931) 1st Amend. Press clause applied to states

-Stromberg v. California (1931) state law struck down on First-Amendment grounds

c. Preferred Position

-**Jones v. City of Opelika (1942)

d. “Compelling State Interest” Test

Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957) first time"compelling" state interest test used in a S. Ct. First Amendment opinion - Frankurrter, J., concurring

e. Time/Place/Manner

-**Cantwell v Connecticut – (1940) first time "time, place, manner" phrase used by S. Ct. in a First Amend. Case; related to state preference for any religion

-**Saia v NY

-**West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943) – Flag salute

-Kovacs v Cooper – loud-speaker in park – speech drowned out

-Kunz v NY – reversed NYC law giving police power to deny licenses arbitrarily for leading worship on city streets

-Walker v City of Birmingham (Segregation Protest Case – 1967)

-**Marsh v Alabama (Traditional public forum?)

-Amalgamated Food Employee's Union v Logan Valley Plaza

-Lloyd Corp v Tanner

-Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000)

f. Fighting Words, Hate Speech

-**Chaplinsky v NH

-Terminiello v Chicago

-Feiner v NY

-Beauharnais v Illinois

-The KKK's right to assemble peaceably was secured by the famous 1977 case of National Socialist Party v. Skokie, in which the American Civil Liberties Union successfully argued that the First Amendment prohibited officials of Skokie, Ill., from banning a march by the National Socialist Party. Skokie is a Chicago suburb that is home to many Holocaust survivors. One federal judge reasoned that "it is better to allow those who preach racial hatred to expend their venom in rhetoric rather than to be panicked into embarking on the dangerous course of permitting the government to decide what its citizens may say and hear."

-Cohen v California (1971 – Four letter words)

-Gooding v Wilson

-RAV v St Paul

g. Symbolic Speech

-US v O'Brien – burning draft cards

-Tinker v Des Moines

-Street v NY - Flag

-Texas v Johnson - Flag

-Buckley v. Valeo (1976)

h. Defamation, Privacy Invasion

-NYTimes v Sullivan – first libel law struck down on first amendment grounds; “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open”

-Hustler Magazine v Falwell; Parody

i. Blasphemy, Obscenity

-Roth v US

-Jacobellis v Ohio (censorship of sexually themed films) (1964); Justice Potter Stewart wrote "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it."

-Miller v California

- A Book Named "John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" v. Attorney General of Massachusetts, 383 U.S. 413 (1966)

- Massachusetts v. Oakes, 491 U.S. 576 (1989) – concerns man who photographed his 14 year old step-daughter nude

j. Broadcasting Rights / Movies

-Times Film Corp. v City of Chicago (1961) – “Chilling effect”

-FCC v Pacifica Foundation

k. School Speech

-Tinker v Des Moines

-Hazelwood v Kuhlmeier

l. Internet Speech

Reno v. ACLU (1997) first Internet law struck down on 1st Amend. Grounds

m. Captive Audience Doctrine:

- Kunz v NY

- Erznoznik v. Jacksonville

- Frisby v. Schultz

- Lehman v. Shaker Heights

- Martin v. Struthers

- Perry v. Perry

- Rowan v. Post Office

- Santa Fe Ind. School District v. Doe (2000) - Whether the state school district's policy permitting student-led, student-initiated prayer at football games violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

** = Jehovah’s Witness Case (12 others heard by Supreme Court)

HISTORY OF THE CAPTIVE AUDIENCE DOCTRINE

Martin v. City of Struthers – 1943, 5/4

City ordinance forbad literature distributors from ringing doorbells or summoning residents to answer the door. The Supreme Court struck down the ordinance on First Amendment grounds.

Kovacs v. Cooper – 1949, 5/4

Ordinance prohibits loud sound trucks from making noise in residential neighborhoods. The Supreme Court upheld the ordinance. It also clarified that the Martin decision did not entitle speakers to invade the private homes of individuals.

Kunz v. New York – 1951, 8/1

Baptist minister obtains one-year permit for speaking outside, but has it revoked for speaking ill of Jews. The minister reapplies twice, but does not receive a new permit. He then proceeds to preach anyway. The Supreme Court reversed the decision citing concerns over the power of a single administrator to decide if the speech was allowed, but Jackson’s dissent extends the captive audience doctrine from the previous case.

Rowan, DBA American Book Service, et al. v. United States Post Office Dept. et al. – 1970, 8/0

Federal postal provision allows individuals to ask the Post Office to stop delivering certain materials. Advertisers sued citing violation of their rights to free speech. The Supreme Court refused to strike down the law.

Cohen v. California – 1971, 5/4

Person wore jacket into courthouse that said, “F*** the draft.” Defendant was arrested under California code prohibiting disturbances with offensive conduct. The Supreme Court struck down the restriction.

Lehman v. City of Shaker Heights et al. – 1974, 5/4

City policy prohibits political advertising in transit vehicles. A candidate for office challenged citing First Amendment rights. The Supreme Court upheld the ordinance at the “risk of imposing upon a captive audience.”

Erznoznik v. City of Jacksonville – 1975, 6/3

Ordinance prohibits showing films containing nudity by drive-in theaters if the screen is visible from a public place. The Supreme Court reversed finding the ordinance in violation of First Amendment rights.

FCC v. Pacifica Foundation et al. – 1978, 5/4

George Carlin’s radio monologue, “Filthy Words,” was prohibited by the FCC. The Supreme Court upheld the restriction finding that individual rights to be left alone outweighed the rights of intruders to exercise free speech.

Perry Education Association v. Perry Local Educator’s Association et al. – 1983, 5/4

Teachers of a school district elect a union to be their representative and restrict access to their mailings from other unions. A rival union files suit under the First Amendment and Equal Protection clause. The Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment was not violated.

Frisby et al. v. Schultz et al. – 1988, 6/3

Town ordinance prohibits picketing or protesting on or near the residence of individuals in the town. The Supreme Court upheld the ban citing the “protection of residential privacy.”

The Perry Doctrine:

Content-based restrictions are ok if:

1. there is a compelling state interest

2. narrowly tailored

3. leave open alternative channels of communication

Totalitarianism (N)

Plato / Sparta

Machiavelli

Hobbes

European “Enlightenment”: systemization of all knowledge, attempt to control the universe through it

*Absolutism: Centralized authority

*Industrialization: invention of economics plus the rise of science; efficiency is the game

The American Civil War

Imperialism in the 19^th Century

World War I

Fascism and Stalinism

A – 20^th Century statism

1 – Totalitarian statism proliferated in the mid-20^th Century

2 – The Great Depression of the 1930s allowed more extreme leaders

to take power in regions where the political situation was

already uncertain

B – Mussolini and Fascism

1 – Fascism is a philosophy of extreme community based within

the state; fascists think that the state is the ultimate

representation of the community and should be protected and

extended at all costs

2 – Benito Mussolini took over in Italy where the depression and

political uncertainty had left the government in shambles

3 – People are mortal, but the state is forever; therefore it is in the

best interests of the people to work for the state

C—Antonio Gramsci

1—Marxist thinker imprisoned by Mussolini; spend most of his life in prison; died young

2—Where is Marx’s revolution?

*Marx said it was inevitable, but no hint so far

*Russia wasn’t a proletariat revolution; it was an intellectual-class revolution

*Why does the proletariat choose fascism over communism? Why slavery over freedom?

3—Hegemony

*authority or power invested in culture, socialization, prestige, and influence

* “false consciousness”: proletariat doesn’t know what’s good for it

*capitalism survives through hegemony

--culture: sports, entertainment, aesthetics, drugs

--socialization: pedagogy, normalization

--prestige: monolithic, sprawling nature of capitalism makes struggle useless

--influence: impossible to unplug, “I sold you and you sold me”

C – The Spanish Civil War

1 – General Francisco Franco’s Fascists defeated the Spanish Republicans

2 – Franco held on to rule through the mid-70s: he didn’t side with the fascists in WWII

3 – Franco feared communism more than anything; staged a military coup

4 – Brilliant military leader, but carpet bombed Basque village Guernica

5 – Managed close relations between state/corporations

6 – Abolished opposition parties; shot thousands of Republicans

7 – Despite supporting Hitler, Mussolini, Franco brought Spain out of isolation in the 50s by supporting the West in the Cold War; Spain secured economic/military aid from the US in exchange for US use of its military bases and naval ports

C – Hitler and Fascism

1 – After World War I, the allies had forced Germany to set up

a democratic government; the new republic was unfamiliar

to many Germans who wished to have their Prussian king

returned to power

2 – Using the depression and xenophobic/anti-Semitic rhetoric, Hitler’s

National socialists captured enough seats in the German

congress to force the president to name him chancellor

3 – Hitler’s position and his party in the German congress allowed him

to grant himself sweeping new powers and become leader of

Germany when the old president was gone

4 – Hitler forged alliances with the military and industrial leaders to

solidify his power; industry became a state economy; the

economy came back to life by building armaments for war

D – Stalin and Communism

1 – The Soviet Union’s government was highly centralized, controlling

the economy and all political institutions; capturing control

would be easy because the communist state was the only

institution with authority

2 – Joseph Stalin used his position as party secretary to promote his

followers; these followers eventually allowed him to take power

3 – Stalin’s policy focused on domestic consolidation of power; some in

the party thought that communism should focus on exporting the

revolution to other countries, but these opponents like Leon

Trotsky were expelled or murdered

4 – Stalin’s regime worsened the lives of many of the people he forced

into industrial work; millions more were killed

5 – Stalin, Mao, and others are not examples of Marx’s vision; they might

be proof that Marx’s dream cannot come true, but they did not

follow his views to the letter and were far more oppressive than

the rulers that Marx opposed

Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism

*Anti-Semitism, Imperialism, Totalitarianism

Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem

*Eichmann made the trains run on time – so why is it that he acts like such a clown in court? He really doesn’t seem to understand that he killed millions of people;

*the kicker: Eichmann says he follows Kant’s philosophy – he legislates his actions as though they were to become universal law

*it occurs to Arendt that if one could twist Kant to support mass murder, one could do so with any philosophical rule – in fact, the very basis of Eichmann’s murders were in his banal approach to rules – rules transcend the need for critical thinking because all one needs to do is follow them

*banality of evil: thoughtless acceptance of rules – thoughtlessness is dangerous because it means that one can convince oneself of the justness of action merely because the rules do not appear to be broken, even if it is obvious that injustice is occurring

*bureaucracy: judgment of political/moral goods depends on individual responsibility; bureaucracy is the most insidious form of governance because it is the rule of nobody, it is a state without actors capable of claiming responsibility

Arendt: The political sphere

*politics is characterized by action: the words and deeds of the individual that relate to others

*power: the actions of individuals working in concert—no government is possible without power, and those governments losing power could fall anytime

*violence: physical force, generally requiring instruments—no violence can take the place of power indefinitely; violence cannot create power, only destroy it

*she idealized the isonomy of the Greeks, civitas of the Romans: equal status of citizens

*more important than any other political question is the decision to form a politics, a space of deliberation among equals

*the political sphere is perpetually threatened by authorities attempting to “trump” politics:

--religion: higher power judging political moves or personal conscience making one act against the political

--moral prioritization of the poor: that’s a French Revolution (“eating its own children”) every time

--science: expertise is used to push out laypersons, “leave governing to the experts”

*enlargementality

Levinas: Totality and Infinity

*Trouble with the Nazis was totality: they had a dogmatic understanding of the universe that placed all things within its power – nothing escaped its understanding

*understanding is oppressive: it draws being into the totality and forces it to conform to its “truth”

*peace can only result from an acceptance of difference beyond understanding: infinity is the beyondness which transcends a capacity for understanding – it is that which one must respect with humility and generosity

*infinite responsibility: the humility, for which one is responsible, toward otherness; responsibility for one’s attitude toward the infinity of non-understanding

**Genocide: attempt to wipe out a whole people by virtue of their national origin, religion, race/ethnicity, etc.

**War crime: excessive warfare, usually against civilians

**Crimes against humanity: mass violence that isn’t necessarily genocidal by virtue of (a) not killing, (b) not raping, and/or (c) being indiscriminate

Prime targets of genocide:

*Physically/mentally handicapped

*Women (dowries, marriage as divider)

*Racial/ethnic/religious minorities

*Political dissidents

*People who live/control valuable turf

Methods:

*starvation

*forced migration

*rape

*killing

*Romans (“decimation” of Corinth, Athens, Jerusalem)

*The Black Holocaust (25 million + enslaved, murdered, raped, tortured; continues to this day)

*Mongol Hordes (eliminated all peoples they conquered except Artists until late in the Khan’s reign)

*The Crusades

* “The Conquest” - American Indians

-Longest war in European history, but not recognized with the political status of “war”

*Armenia

*The Jewish Holocaust

*Dresden

*Nuclear Holocaust

*Stalinist Purges

*Mao?

*Vietnam

*Cambodia (US and Pol Pot)

*East Pakistan

*East Timor

*Chile

*Uganda

*Iraq

*US Sanctions on Iraq

*Yugoslavia and Kosovo

*Rwanda

*Darfur

Civil Rights and Critical Race Theories (N)

I – What is race?

*Skin? (Western v Eastern Europeans)

*Nationality? Shared history? (White v Black Jews)

*Bone/Body Structure? (Indian Americans v Asians v Indians)

II – Where does race come from?

Ancient cultures simply saw “others” as barbarians

1. China: accepted Chinese, but not Mongols, Turks, or Koreans

2. Greece: people who didn’t speak Greek, spoke “babble” (hence “barbarians”); but that wasn’t necessarily a condemnation (though often it was) – Herodotus called Ethiopians “the most beautiful people in the world,” and Greek states generally acknowledged Egyptian, Persian, and Phoenician civilizations as having levels of superiority

Places it didn’t seem to factor in

1. Shakespeare’s Othello

European conquests brought them in contact with

1. “Superior” forces: China

2. “Inferior” forces: American Indians, Africans

Sooner or later, Europeans had to see each other as “conquerors” and religious/national others as “Orientals”

III – Slavery

*Dred Scot v Sanford: Chief Justice Taney declared blacks were “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

IV –Anti-Slavery and Post-Slavery Movements

A. Resistance

a. Celia: faced repeated rape; fought back, killing her master and cremating his body

b. Rebellions:

i. Gabriel Prosser: 1800 plan in Richmond, VA; thousands of slaves were in on it, two betrayed the plot; he and his followers were hanged (important mostly for the waves of fear spread across the South and accompanying brutality)

ii. Nat Turner and a handful of followers went on a rampage, hatchetting entire families from house to house; an army turned out to fight them, but they remained at large for two months

c. Other fronts: Phillis Wheatley wrote and published poetry, inspiring a trial to determine whether or not it was actually hers;

B. Abolitionism

a. Sojourner Truth

b. Harriet Tubman

c. Fredrick Douglas

d. Garrison (white guy)

C. Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction

D. Jim Crow System

a. Plessy v Fergusson

E. Activists

a. Ida B. Wells

b. Mary Church Terrell

c. WEB DuBois: “double consciousness”

d. Booker T. Washington: working for equality

F. “Back to Africa”

G. “Harlem Renaissance”

V – The Civil Rights Movement

A. NAACP (formed in 1890)

*Thurgood Marshall (civil rights lawyer, first black Justice to the Supreme Court)

B. Brown v Board of Education (1954)

*Desegregation is usually taken for granted as a good thing, but not everyone thought so. bell hooks writes, “School was the place where I could forget… and, through ideas, reinvent myself. School changed utterly with racial integration. Gone was the messianic zeal to transform our minds and beings that had characterized teachers and their pedagogical practices in our all-black schools. Knowledge was suddenly about information only. It had no relation to how one lived, behaved. It was no longer connected to antiracist struggle. Bussed to white schools, we soon learned that obedience, and not a zealous will to learn, was what was expected of us. Too much eagerness to learn could easily be seen as a threat to authority…. We black kids had been angry that we had to leave our beloved all-black high school, Crispus Attucks, and be bussed halfway cross town to integrate white schools. We had to make the journey and thus bear the responsibility of making desegregation a reality. We had to give up the familiar and enter a world that seemed cold and strange, not our world, not our school” (Teaching to Transgress)

C. MLK (SCLC), Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Emmett Till, Stokely Carmichael “Black Power” (SNCC)

D. LBJ and the Great Society—“after all we’ve done for you!”

VI – The Devolution of the Movement

*The Hollow Hope:

*Critical Race Theory: Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado

Critical Race Theory (CRT) emerged as a study of legal structure and race in the early 1980s. It is influenced by fields of thought including Marxism, postmodernism, radical feminism, and the Black power movement. Led by thinkers such as Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, and Kimberle Crenshaw, CRT developed to respond to both the Critical Legal Studies movement (CLS), which argued that law was static and useless in bringing about change, and to conservative reactionary shifts that were turning back gains in Black empowerment.

Delgado writes that CRT argues:

1 – Racism is “normal” in America. We are cultured on and around it.

2 – Liberalism has failed to create equality for Blacks.

3 – “Interest-convergence theory.” Advances in Black rights are rare and occur only when

Whites benefit.

4 – Legal “neutrality” tacitly upholds White privilege. Law must use a victim’s perspective on

injustice.

1 – Racism as normal

- “Race is encoded not merely in our laws, but in our cultural symbols such as movies, clothes, language, and music. Our commonsense assumptions about people of color are biased- ‘we are all racists.’” (Litowitz, Notre Dame Law Review, 1997)

- “Black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those Herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary ‘peaks of progress,’ short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance.” (Bell, Howard Law Journal, 1991)

2 – Liberalism’s failure

- “our judicial system does little (and sometimes nothing) to level the playing field of its litigants. In the context of federal pleading this is problematic because even though procedural rules are crafted in neutral and universal language, their applications are decidedly not neutral given the social and political context in which they are invoked. Indeed, our so called ‘objective’ procedural rules end up favoring the socially stronger party because the latter is able to carry his economical and political advantage into the halls of justice” (Brooks, Harvard BlackLetter Journal, 1994)

- “Liberalism has failed to bring about parity between the races, for the simple reason that formal equality cannot eliminate deeply entrenched types of racism (some times called ‘microaggressions’) which are encountered by minorities on a daily basis. Liberal solutions to affirmative action and free speech are white compromises which fail to significantly advance minority interests.” (Litowitz, Notre Dame Law Review, 1997)

3 – Interest-convergence theory

- “The Brown decision, though, was less the long-sought remedy for Plessy than a reinforcement of a more basic, two-part principle of this country’s racial policies. Part One: society is always willing to sacrifice the rights of Black people in order to protect important economic or political interests of Whites. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision represents a prime example of Part One, less because it gave segregation the status of constitutional law, than because it sacrificed Black rights in order to gain the support of Whites for policies that harmed a great many White people. Part Two: the law recognizes the rights of Black people only when such recognition serves some economic or political interests of greater importance to Whites. Lincoln’s reluctant issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation to help the faltering effort to save the Union was an example of Part Two in action. Similarly, after World War II, the United States, the world leader in efforts to win allegiance of mostly non-White, third-world nations, discovered that practicing Jim Crow at home made it tough to advocate democracy abroad. The Brown decision, by promising to close the gap between the country’s ideals and its practices, provided an immediate boost to America’s foreign policy efforts” (Bell, Rutgers Race & the Law Review, 1999)

4 – Myth of Neutrality and the Victim’s perspective

- Frankenberg’s study of white women’s reactions to racism noted that “it is far easier for persons from oppressed communities to recognize the privilege that is invisible to whites. The white women tended to describe racism as something distant. It was something evil happening to others and perpetrated by others. It was not part of their daily experience, nor were they generally responsible for it” (McGinley, Arizona Law Review, Fall 1997)

- “whites tend to favor an absolute position on freedom of speech because they see free speech as a safeguard for the maximum flow of information, whereas blacks are dubious of absolute freedom of speech because they bear the brunt of offensive speech. Similarly, Peggy Davis points out that black jurors are more likely to see the criminal justice system as biased according to race and class, and Sheri Lynn Johnson shows that this perception of bias is rooted in a legacy of racism at the hands of white judges and juries. It stands to reason that if judges and lawyers see minorities in stereotypical and distorted ways (for example, that blacks are violent and overly sexual), then they will misjudge, for example, the degree of force that is ‘reasonable’ when the police arrest a black male” (Litowitz, Notre Dame Law Review, 1997)

Critique of CRT:

1 – The law is white. Western legal institutions developed by and for whites cannot be neutral or objective in pursuit of justice for Blacks or any other so-called “race.” (insert any of the above as appropriate for the case)

2 – The Gov’s attempt to solve racial conflict/problems with white law can never succeed. It will only continue to defend white interests. (insert)

3 – We should reject band-aid legal solutions and reform the basic premises of the legal system to see crime/law/social problems from the perspective of the most disadvantaged classes. Justice cannot be done without representing their voices. (insert)

Theories of Justice (C)

There has been controversy for two years over including/not including Dworkin. The lecture is short, so let me know.

I. Rawls

A. Life

-taught at Harvard

B. Major Works

A Theory of Justice - 1971

Political Liberalism - 1993

C. Distributive Justice

-All people must be afforded equality of opportunity.

-Inequalities must be designed to reverse already existing inequalities in status (i.e. aff action)

-State may intervene to assure equality is upheld.

D. Veil of Ignorance

-imagine not having an idea of where you are in society

-protect most advantaged first

-pizza example

E. Political Liberalism

-overlapping consensus

-must put aside political and religious views to achieve just laws

F. Problems with Rawls

-racism thing

II. Nozick

A. Life

-Died Jan. 23, 2002 at 63

-taught at Harvard

B. Major Works

Anarchy, State and Utopia - 1974

C. Justice

-The individual must be the starting point.

-There must be a minimal state to protect individual rights, but it’s ability to act stops there (fears Machiavellian ethics of a state which tries to gain too much power).

“Individuals have rights... so strong and far-reaching that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do”

D. Acquisition Principle

-Goods are legitimately owned if they are legitimately acquired.

-The state cannot take money from you (even if to give to someone less fortunate).

F. Problems with Nozick

-necessity of community for survival

-more stuff in Individual v. Community Lecture

G. Nozick on Rawls

-A2 State Intervention: Nozick believe economic equality is not, by any means, more important than individual rights.

-A2 Veil: Nozick says that individuals do not have the right to decide society’s principles for other individuals, veil or not.

Robert Nozick, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”

Nozick was a libertarian political philosopher and colleague of Rawls at Harvard. He accepted Rawls’ justice theory as a challenge to the right, and he set out to counter Rawls’ arguments. Nozick’s goal was to describe a social order governed by a structure that governs as little as possible: the minimalist state.

Entitlement Theory

*Nozick wants to establish the conditions under which a person may be called “entitled” to certain resources; he claims that entitlements exist if:

1. The just (mutually consented to) transfer involves resources that were themselves justly acquired

2. The person establishing an initial holding acquired the holding in a just way

3. The person receiving a holding does so out of rectification for a past violation of either of the first two principles

Justice

-The individual must be the starting point.

-There must be a minimal state to protect individual rights, but it’s ability to act stops there (fears Machiavellian ethics of a state which tries to gain too much power).

“Individuals have rights... so strong and far-reaching that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do”

The Protective Association

*Nozick envisions a minimal state being made up of a large series of social contracts that are personally negotiated with businesses and protective agencies

*instead of a state monopolizing agencies like police, firefighters, etc., the individual would be free to negotiate contracts for protection with any number of competing agencies

*protective associations would be minimal states: no single overarching state really exists, but actions formerly held by a state would be privately managed and used according to specific contracts and the exchanges those contracts demand

*when one no longer wished to be bound to a protective association, one could hypothetically activate a clause of the contract that makes the association dissolve

Problems with Nozick

-necessity of community for survival

-more stuff in Individual v. Community Lecture

Nozick on Rawls

-A2 State Intervention: Nozick believe economic equality is not, by any means, more important than individual rights.

-A2 Veil: Nozick says that individuals do not have the right to decide society’s principles for other individuals, veil or not.

Ronald Dworkin

Redistribution
The Auction
Insurance and Rewards

Econ (C)

(This lecture is in power point; the notes below only*look* unorganized because they’re directly transferred from a power point slide outline.)

The Invisible Hand

Individuals motivated solely by self interest would be productive in order to earn wealth.

When left alone the processes of capitalism would result in the best society.

Their combined actions would result in everyone being better off, including the poor.

Division of labor

To spark efficiency jobs should be divided by task. This has several affects.

Increases the workers’ skill

One wastes less time switcing from one task to another

They are more likely to invent specialized machinery.

Not a cold-hearted capitalist

Recommended public education

Wrote of some fears of specialized labor

Argued that his theory of economics most helped the poor.

Progressive Improvement

Society moves in the right direction as long as thiere is little government intervention

He believed most problems would eventually take care of themselves

Problems

Overly optimistic view of human nature

Instability of capitalism

Finite limits to growth

Dialectical Materialism

Described history as a continual struggle between opposing economic forces

Slavery à Feudal system à Capitalism à Socialism

The superstructure

The wealthy control the culture including religion and laws.

The culture allows the subordinate to accept their position in society.

The idea of the “good American worker”

One may feel guilty if not working for money

The poor dream of becoming wealthy by working harder

Rebellion

A rebellion takes place when technology of production changes

The superstructure becomes static and the proletariat becomes begins to rebel

History reshuffles the classes and the struggle begins all over again

Only a classless society can solve this problem

The exploited worker

The value of a product is determined by the amount of labor put into that product

Workers should receive the full value of what they have produced

However, they are not paid as much as the value of their labor

Marx sees the money that comes out of the pay of the worker as stolen capital.

5 laws that point to implosion

Falling profit rates and accumulation of capital

Increasing concentration of economic power

Deepening crises and depressions

Industrial Reserve Army

Increasing Misery of the Proletariat

Ten-point plan

Abolition of property ownership

A graduated income tax

No inheritance rights

Confiscation of property of emigrants

Free education to all children

More equitable distribution of the population

Centralization of credit in the hands of the state through a national bank.

Centralization of communication

Instruments of production owned by the state

Equal obligation to work

Problems

Economic determinism is flawed

Socialism has not seemed to have worked

How does a mixed economy respond to the needs of the proletariat?

Keynes

The government should spend in order to spur economic growth

His theory was in opposition to the monitarians who argued that the Federal Reserve played a major role in spurring growth, not Congress

He influenced US economic policy from the 50’s-70’s.

Malthus

Production potential of Earth is finite.

Population increases faster than food supply unless population is checked.

Attempts to improve life of lower class fail because new funds would be absorbed by the initial boost in population.

Civ Dis, Rev, Anarchy, Violence (C)

Civil Disobedience

I. General Revolutionary Theory

Just War Theories (Aquinas, Augustine)

-A just war can only be waged as a last resort. All non-violent options must be exhausted before the use of force can be justified.

-A war is just only if it is waged by a legitimate authority. Even just causes cannot be served by actions taken by individuals or groups who do not constitute an authority sanctioned by whatever the society and outsiders to the society deem legitimate.

-A just war can only be fought to redress a wrong suffered. For example, self-defense against an armed attack is always considered to be a just cause (although the justice of the cause is not sufficient--see point #4). Further, a just war can only be fought with "right" intentions: the only permissable objective of a just war is to redress the injury.

-A war can only be just if it is fought with a reasonable chance of success. Deaths and injury incurred in a hopeless cause are not morally justifiable.

-The ulimate goal of a just war is to re-establish peace. More specifically, the peace established after the war must be preferable to the peace that would have prevailed if the war had not been fought.

-The violence used in the war must be proportional to the injury suffered. States are prohibited from using force not necessary to attain the limited objective of addressing the injury suffered.

-The weapons used in war must discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. Civilians are never permissable targets of war, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians. The deaths of civilians are justified only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.

II– Civil Disobedience

A. What is Civil Disobedience?

-Civil disobedience is the breaking of the law in protest of its injustice

– Highly regarded philosophers talking about civil disobedience include Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Rawls, and Thoreau

B. Henry David Thoreau

(1817-1862) published a lecture entitled "Resistance to Civil Government" in 1849

- Thoreau was an American transcendentalist who hated slavery and the Mexican war which he saw as an attempt to extend slavery West

- Thoreau refused to pay a new tax established to help pay for the war; he was thrown in jail

- Thoreau’s dilemma: he owes obedience to a social contract, but he also owes obedience to God and his own conscience

- Thoreau figures that his Christian conscience transcends his worldly obligation to the state, so he must break the law

- Civil disobedience is comparable to Christian martyrdom; the protester sacrifices the self in order to adhere to the greater spiritual obligation, possibly influencing others to do the same or to change the law

- Civil disobedience does not break the social contract; the contract says that breaking the law means you must be punished; therefore, the protester using civil disobedience must accept punishment for the breaking of the law

- Civil disobedience cannot be violent; the purpose of the civil disobedience is to adhere to a greater moral law, but violence would nullify that

C. Mohandas Gandhi

- Satyagraha

Gandhi disliked the words and idea of "passive resistance". The term Satyagraha, is a combination of satya (truth-love) and agraha(firmness/force). It is the "the vindication of truth not by infliction of suffering on the opponent but on one's self ." Satyagraha is peaceful, opponents must be converted by a demonstration of purity, humility, and honesty. They are to be converted -- not annihilated. Violence and anger create bitterness in the victim, and brutality in the attacker.

Appealing to the common sense and morality of his adversary was key. "It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honored by humiliation of their fellow human beings." Satyagraha assumes there is a constant dialogue between the opponents with a view to ultimate reconciliation. Insults, threats, and propaganda only serve to obstruct the goal.

- Gandhi’s Innovations

Arabian Sea Salt: Gandhi marched to the sea and pulled a handful of salt from the water (an illegal act; the frail hand mining salt was symbolic of Indian oppression)

Gandhi was influenced heavily by Christianity

Shed multiple capitalist, materialist, modern vices

Burned pass books and led mass marches

D. Martin Luther King Jr.

- stole almost everything from Gandhi

- completed Christian melding with civil disobedience

- love is the answer

- using the Media

- Letter from Birmingham Jail

E. Malcolm X

- “By all means necessary”

he was attacked for criticizing black leaders who wanted to integrate into white society

He led the famous prison debating team that beat the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, arguing against capital punishment by pointing out that English pickpockets often did their best work at public hangings!

- supported pan-Africanism and multiracial counter-movements

- supported anti-colonialism

- planned to present to the UN documentation of HR abuses to African Americans armed self defense; racial pride

- Watts rebellion, Black Power movement just after his death

- Autobiography proved to black nationalists that criminals could become revolutionaries

F. John Rawls

I – We should comply with our Social Contract obligations natural duty not to oppose just and efficient institutions acceptance of institutional benefits obligates us to reciprocate, especially if we expect this activity from others

II – Unjust laws

injustice of the law is not by itself sufficient ground for disobeying it the actions of a democratic majority are not definitively just

III – Civil Disobedience

public action

nonviolent

conscientious

intending to change government policies or law

punishment is expected and accepted

IV – Justifications

usual political channels must have failed first; disobedience is a last resort

must be addressed to the majority’s sense of justice (the two principles)

should be restricted to cases where one is willing to affirm the rights of people similarly subjected to protesting in a similar way (authorizes similar acts: think Kant)

utilitarianism: will protest gain something more than greater repression?

V – Benefits of Civil Disobedience

gives democratic minority a check on the majority

VI – Post-Disobedience

repeated denials of the civil disobedience perspective justifies forceful opposition

this is the case even in a democratic society

G. Plato

In "The Crito", Plato said that someone who broke an unjust law had to accept punishment as part of the bargain.

H. History of Mass Nonviolent Action

Good Examples of Civil Disobedience

1) The Boston Tea Party -- citizens of the colony of Massachusetts trespassed on a British ship and threw its cargo (tea from England) overboard, rather than be forced to pay taxes without representation to Britain. This was one of the many acts of civil disobedience leading to the War for Independence, establishing the United States of America as a sovereign state.

2) Anti-war movements have been a part of U.S. history since Thoreau went to jail for refusing to participate in the U.S. war against Mexico in 1849. More recent examples were the nationwide protests against the war in Viet Nam, U.S. involvement in Nicaragua and Central America, and the Gulf War. Actions have included refusal to pay for war, refusal to enlist in the military, occupation of draft centers, sit-ins, blockades, peace camps, and refusal to allow military recruiters on high school and college campuses.

3) The Women's Suffrage Movement lasted from 1848 until 1920, when thousands of courageous women marched in the streets, endured hunger strikes, and submitted to arrest and jail in order to gain the right to vote.

4) Abolition of slavery -- including Harriet Tubman's underground railway, giving sanctuary, and other actions which helped to end slavery.

5) The introduction of labor laws and unions. Sit-down strikes organized by the IWW, and CIO free speech confrontations led to the eradication of child labor and improved working conditions, established the 40-hour work week and improved job security and benefits.

6) The Civil Rights Movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and others, included sit-ins and illegal marches which weakened segregation in the south.

7) The Anti-Nuclear Movement, stimulated by people like Karen Silkwood and the Three Mile Island nuclear power accident, organized citizens throughout the country into direct action affinity groups, with consensus decision making and Gandhian nonviolence as its core. Massive acts of civil disobedience took place at nuclear power facilities across the country, followed by worldwide protests against first-strike nuclear weapons, occupying military bases, maintaining peace camps, interfering with manufacture and transport of nuclear bombs and devices, marching, sitting in, blockading and otherwise disrupting business as usual at nuclear sites.

8) Environmental and forest demonstrations, with acts of civil disobedience such as sit-ins, blockades, tree sits and forest occupations, have emerged in the last decade, prompted by the continuing mass clear cuts and destruction of the forest ecosystem and widespread environmental consequences.

Feminism (D)

Désirée Weber

August 2005

I. Definitions and Issues

Feminism – the struggle to end sexism (that’s it – lecture over)

TERMS:

Sexism - privileging the male sex to the exclusion of the female

Patriarchy – The structure of oppression against women

Misogyny- hatred of women

Sex - biological classification as male or female, exclusive of other possibilities until recently

Gender - social or cultural construction of two (and only two) categories of people – also, the personal characteristics/stereotypes of someone of a certain gender

Essentialism - idea that some characteristics are essential to being a woman, that all women (by the virtue of being women) share essential features/experiences etc

Heterosexism - prejudice in favor of heterosexuality

Social Concerns – Occupation/harassment/education/GLASS CEILING

Reproductive Rights (abortion, pregnancy, motherhood, girlhood etc)

Views of the Body: Sexualization, exploitation, beauty myth, fasion etc

Oppression: rape, domestic abuse, violence against women

Political Concerns – Political participation/representation, treatment by the law, women’s rights

Economic Rights (inheritance, divorce, wealth/poverty etc)

Both? Public/Private dichotomy: women in home, men at work (domestic vs. economic)

Race and class – how they compound/influence the experiences of women (non-essent.)

Sexual orientation – right to any gender, gay marriage, adoption etc

II. Feminism in its Girlhood

- Mary Wollstonecraft (1700s) Vindication of the Rights of Woman – exposition of why and how women are different and have needs to be respected, rights etc (Anti-Victorian gender norms)

- Suffragettes – equal economic treatment -> right to vote

- Simon de Beauvoir (early 20^th) The Second Sex – about women being defined “against” men as a standard – how that affects life/rights/privileges etc “women are made, not born”

Cult of domesticity – challenged conception of women in the home, men at work

Beginning of liberal/socialist/radical feminist split

III. The Other Two Waves

Second Wave – Bra Burners (mid to late 20^th century) include: Betty Freidan, Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf

- social activism to change social norms – but also inherently political (involved in civil rgts ..)

-women should be recognized as different from men and given their own sets of privileges (like abortion rights and pregnancy leave etc)

Third Wave – NOW? The Age of the Feminism - ism Permutation

IV. They Come in All Shapes and Sizes (Kinds of feminists)

A. Liberal feminists

- advocate expansion/recognition of rights within given framework of rights (and politcs)

- attack public/private divide as contrary to liberal ideas

B. Radical Feminists

- believe women are different from men and should be treated differently – must not just whittle away at patriarchy, must replace it with feminist-influenced politics/culture etc

- essentialist ? – all women share a common thread (of being woman) which = oppression

C. Psychoanalytic Feminists (Luce Irigaray, Helen Cixous, Julia Kristeva)

- use post-Freudian/psychoanalytic concepts to understand/change society

- phallocentrism as a guiding principle in society (law, reason, culture, art, design.. everything)

D. Eco-Feminists (Karen Warren, Mary Mellor)

- metaphor of mother goddess (antiquity/female worship) being violently supplanted by male deity (patriarchy/modernity)

- parallel of pillaging the earth and oppression of women (must solve one to solve the other)

E. Black and Subaltern Feminists (bell hooks, Gayatri Spivak)

- Anti-essentialist ( or rather intersectionalism good )

- focus on experiences of women outside of the assumed white, middle-class, suburban mom etc

Issues: Gender as social concept – oppression/control/rights of that

Even more – social and political concerns are intertwined – nothing is simple anymore.. involved in gay/lesbian activism and civil rights

as well as international relations and how women play a role in that

Evolution: from “men oppress women” to “ideas that assume men are the ideal disempower women” to “these ideas/customs/practices/notions hurt everyone”

Argument (N)

Argument

Arguments have many forms, but all models of arguments include at least these two things:

The Claim: that which one wishes to prove; the claim is a definite statement of fact or conviction, always a complete sentence; i.e. “War against non-aggressors is wrong” is a claim, but “Just War Theory” is not

(claims may also be referred to as “tags” or “slugs”)

The Warrant: that which one uses to demonstrate the legitimacy of the claim

(warrants may also be referred to as “proof,” “evidence,” and “data”)

The most important single word in all argument is “because.” “Because” connects a claim with a warrant demonstrating proof. “War against non-aggressors is wrong BECAUSE it subjects innocent people to violence and tyranny.”

Types of Warrants for Claims:

*analogy: comparison of two things or situations

*analysis: reasoning or logic

*authority: expertise, credibility, or valuable declaration, such as from a scholar

*empiricism: appeals to history or scientifically observed causal patterns (statistics are empirical)

*example: referring to a specific case or situation for illustrative purposes

*experience: understanding of a situation from living through it

*inartistic: immutable records such as laws or contracts (Aristotle calls these things “inartistic proofs”)

*testimony: presentation by a witness or expert (thus relying on authority or experience)

Arguments are sometimes said to have a third component, particularly import in LD debate:

The Impact: the reason why a claim and warrant are important, or the way in which a claim and warrant affect what should be the outcome of the debate. For example, if one were debating the resolution “Aggression should be established fact before a nation conducts a just war,” my argument above would impact the debate by suggesting that AFFIRMATION would defend innocent people and NEGATION would subject innocent people to violence and tyranny.

Argument impacts may be categorized, roughly, into two categories of strength:

Defense: when you show that your case is not as bad as your opponent charges it is, or when you show that your opponent’s case isn’t as good as your opponent says it is, i.e. “National security won’t always preserve our lives.” Defensive arguments can always be restated as “X isn’t as bad as it looks” or “X isn’t as good as it looks.”
Offensive: when you show that your case is better than your opponent claims, or when you show that your opponent’s case is worse than your opponent says it is, i.e. “National security damages civil liberties and expands government surveillance powers to the point of defeating security altogether.” Offensive arguments can always be restated as “X is worse than it looks” or “X is better than it looks.”

The distinction between offensive and defensive impacts is in their differing weight versus an opponent’s impact. Defensive arguments seek to reduce the significance of an opponent’s impact, while offensive arguments seek to overwhelm and reverse an opponent’s impact. Offensive arguments are stronger because they are definitively necessary to show that an opponent is wrong; if you tried to win the debate with defense alone, you would only be showing that an opponent’s case wasn’t as good as an opponent said and not that it was, in fact, bad. Defensive arguments should not, however, be abandoned entirely. When an opponent presents a value like “liberty,” it is highly unlikely that you will be able to show that their value is a bad thing – you will need to make defensive arguments that reduce the value of liberty in the critic’s mind so that you can outweigh it with a value of your own.

Argumentative Fallacies:

Falsifiability: any proposition that cannot be tested for truth/falsehood is not provable – claims not open to falsifiability could only be true as definitions or articles of faith

I won’t lecture on this whole list, but I may offer copies of it, electronic or otherwise

Fallacies of Character:

n Ad Hominem: personal attack

n Ad Antiquitam: “good because it’s old”

n Appeal to Novelty: “good because new”

n Ad Crumenam: “correct because rich”

n Ad lazarum: “correct because poor”

n Appeal to Nature: claiming a natural law as evidence

n Guilt by association: “bad b/c bad people support it”

n Ad Verecundiam: “correct b/c authority says so”

n Appeal to Anonymous Authority: “experts say…”

n Statement of Conversion: using prior experience as evidence for arguing against those who defend such experience

n Poisoning the Well: presenting damaging information about a speaker so as to discredit the speaker’s future claims

Fallacies of Emotion:

n Ad Misericordiam: Substitutes pity for evidence proving a claim

n Apple Polishing: Substitutes flattery for evidence

n Misleading Vividness: weak but dramatic evidence which beats strong evidence

Fallacies of Reasoning:

n Ad Baculum: use of threats to win

n Ad Nauseum: “correct because repeated a lot”

n Ad Numeram: “true b/c lots of people think so”

n Ad Populum: “true b/c lots of people like it”

n Begging the question: circular reasoning (Petitio Principii)

n Plurium Interrogationum: demanding simple answer to complex question

– “Have you stopped beating your spouse?”

n Wishful Thinking: X is true because if people did not accept X as being true then there would be negative consequences

n Reductio ad absurdum: reducing to absurdity

n Reductio ad Hitlerum: reducing to a Hitler comparison or link

n Cliché Thinking: appealing to a cliché as though it is proven wisdom

n Exception Proving the Rule: the exception to a rule demonstrates that a rule is usually true

– Example: “Pawns are white.” (I find a pawn that is orange) “The orange pawn proves that pawns are white.”

n Moderation Fallacy: “the mean between two polarized ideas must be the truth”

n Dogmatism: refusal to accept that an argument is false despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary

n Common Sense: assertion that arguer is abnormal and wouldn’t have access to popularly excepted knowledge

Fallacies of Causality

n Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc: false cause or alternate cause – coincidence is not causation

n Casual Reductionism: assuming a single simple cause instead of many causes or complex causes

n Slippery Slope: a specific action is bad because it would be disastrous if it happened several more times

n Reverse Causality: assuming that ending a cause fixes an effect

– Example: “stopping pollution will clean up our environment”

– False: stopping new pollution doesn’t mean that old pollution disappears

n Denial of the Antecedent: correlation of two elements means that if one is false, the other must also be false

– Santa Claus has never appeared to me personally, and if he did that would prove my parents aren’t liars. Therefore, my parents are liars.

n Appeal to Coincidence: an insistence that two factors appear together only by chance, not by relation

n Conjecture: guesswork, inference from incomplete evidence

n Argument by Scenario: stringing together pieces of evidence which don’t belong together

Fallacies of Obfuscation

n Ad Logicum: faulty argument that arrives at the correct conclusion

– Example: “Socrates is a pig; therefore he is mortal.”

– Tries to gain assent for its premise by distracting you with a true conclusion

n Straw Figure: defeating a weak argument to distract attention from a strong one

n Bifurcation: presuming fewer options than are available, either / or fallacy, false dichotomy, or black and white thinking

n Red Herring: “smoke screen” or irrelevant issue designed to divert attention from a relevant issue

n Amphiboly: purposeful misinterpretation of an argument

n Ignoratio elenchi: adequately proving a wrong or irrelevant claim

n Half-truths: arguing while ignoring or suppressing other important evidence

n Non sequitur: drawing a conclusion from premises not logically connected with it

n Gibberish: “The argument is true because [insert nonsense here]”

– NOT the same as non sequitur: gibberish involves making up words, using words in a nonsensical context, etc – the non sequitur is a logically coherent idea nonsensically applied to an unrelated claim

n Inflation of Conflict: scholars debate over an argument; therefore the scholars know nothing or their field is in crisis

n Appeal to Complexity: “the system is too complex to be understood by anyone; therefore we cannot argue about it”

n Argument by Poetic Language: using snappy language to prove or avoid proving a point

n Argument by Jargon: “The argument is true because it is verbose”

n Euphemism: renaming something in a way that twists its meaning or “weasel wording”

Fallacies of Statistics

n Hasty Generalization: generalizing from insufficient data; jumping to a conclusion

n Gambler’s Fallacy: assuming a departure from the average or from the long term will be corrected in the short term

n Selective Observation: counting the hits, ignoring the misses, “cherry picking”

n Relativist Fallacy: using subjectivity to refute evidence

Fallacies of Analogy

n False Analogy: comparison of two dissimilar things that is weak or misleading

n Extended Analogy: attempting to use the dissimilar parts of an analogy to prove something

Fallacies of Burden

n Ad Ignorantiam: “Correct because no one present knows better,” asserting the claim is true until disproved

n Stacking the Deck: disqualifying or preventing formidable counter-evidence to win an argument (also known as “special pleading”)

n Appeals to Future: insisting that future discoveries will offer evidence proving a claim

n Moving the Goalposts: changing the conditions under which evidence would be acceptable so as to prevent such acceptance

n Argument by Laziness: “You need to do more reading before you engage my argument”

Critiques of Enlightenment (D)

Désirée Weber

August 2005

I. Dawn of Western Philosophy

A. Socrates -> Plato -> Aristotle

Concerns about Ideas (Idealism) – Platonic Forms

Abstract Concepts of Truth, Beauty, Justice, Wisdom etc

Plato's Parable of the Cave (In/Out = Perception/Reality)

Resurgence of Ideas in Renaissance -> Enlightenment

A. Descartes – Mind/Body Problem (verification of external world)

B. Nietzsche – "God is Dead" -> MODERNITY

II. Enlightenment Ideas/Philosophers

A. European/Continental – political changes (monarch -> nation-state etc)

B. Rationalist/Empiricist (knowing: through reason/ through experience)

Both agree on transcendent/ultimate reality "out there"

C. Hobbes/Locke/Rousseau etc (political: politics/life around search for meaning/Truth)

Theorized ideal political systems

D. Voltaire etc (cultural: emphasis on sublime, transcendent beauty)

Common Thread: Belief in reason, rationality, science, knowledge-gathering -> Truth

III. Critiques of Enlightenment

1914-WWII, questioning of politics/philosophy that allowed wars

"What are we fighting for?"

A. Structuralists/Anthropologists/Linguistic Turn

Saussure – modern analysis of structure of language (instead of historical analysis of real languages)

systematic – sum greater than parts

relational – entities defined in relation/combination to one another

defined by use – not inherent qualities

Sapir – Whorf – language as relative – language/words depend on what there IS (Eskimo – snow ex)

IV. Existentialism/Phenomenologists

Believe that the existence of the world IS all there is - no outside world (independent of us)

A. Sartre – existence precedes essence

absurdism – there is no underlying logic to be rationally figured out – must embrace absurd events and build an ethic from those circumstances

“existential angst” – not like “teen angst” but close..

B. Heidegger – being vs. Being

Q:“who are you?”A: a student, my name is ____, etc = being

A: a person.. but what does that mean? = Being

Narcissus example – separates Being into himself and his reflection (= violence of Being)

against tech (= violence).. Nazi supporter (National Socialist ideology <-> Being?)

V. Post-Modernists

A. Michel Foucault – first post-structuralist – questioned underlying structure of language

Historical/Philosophical/Sociological studies of Western society’s institutions (schools, hospitals, prisons..)

Studies of Power and Knowledge – how society is controlled and constructed (P/K are real(ity))

PANOPTICON: Prison model (but metaphor for society) .. centrally supervised, individualized, control

Production of the self – before “modern” time/ideas, the notion of “man” did not exist

Mechanisms of control – uncertainty about being watched = self-discipline

Later: Idea of biopower (= mechanisms of control) – how the contemp. State organizes/controls citizens

Influence of Power studies – on feminism (power of sexuality/gender construction etc) – Butler

Changed historical analysis/sociology/philosophy…

B. Jacques Derrida – deconstruction (of texts/life/the world/ reality)

Draws on language theory – how we use words/what words there are = reality

Deconst. draws out the hidden/subtext/underlying assumption/contradiction etc

Even “meaning” is an idealistic “Truth” to be discovered or unearthed (he goes further..)

Ex: “Woman without man her man is nothing” = “Woman, without her man, is nothing” OR “Woman! Without her, man is nothing” .. Interp. Depends upon the reader – interplay btwn author/reader, intent etc

Political implications: The “truth” (meaning) is worth fighting for .. and that’s exactly the problem!

Later: Influenced Subaltern/Post-Colonial Studies (Spivak) .. about reinterpreting colonial history

C. Jean Baudrillard – post-marxist -> his own brand of “hypereal”

Draws on linguistic theory – meanings/signs/signifiers

Economy of signs – McDonalds appropriates hip-hop to sell more burgers to urban youth (or suburban white kids that are trying to be cool by looking poor), while employing people at a low socioeconomic level

Signifiers get traded/appropriated/mixed/replaced/translated (like hip-hop.. used to be rebelling, now = $)

Ex: The Matrix –

1^st the world Neo has known is presented as real

Then the world he “wakes up” in is real (what is the “other” world? Or is it the same?)

Then in the second movie, he stops the squiddies.. maybe the “real” isn’t real after all.. or maybe it’s all the same?

Questions meaning/reality/reason etc

D. Jean-Francois Lyotard – first used the term “post-modern”

Impact of modern technologies on how/what we know – major advancements are linguisticly-based (computers, theories of algebra, digitization..)

Shows influence of “linguistic turn” in philosophy

E. Jurgen Habermas – disciple of Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Arendt, etc)

The term/analysis of “public sphere”

Perfect speech act – replicates community forum where everyone is invited, can come, is informed and comes to a consensus at the end = perfect democracy

Maintains rationalism/reason (so, modernism) to reconcile contemporary problems (see above – control)

F. Richard Rorty – American (the first)

Influenced by Pragmatists (Peirce, Percy, James etc)

No-pie-in-the-sky.. because life still has to be lived. For everyday purposes, it doesn’t matter if “the world” is “really” there.. or whether we simply interact with it as if it were… hence, pragmatism

Balance of the two: politics/philosophy should be aware of how violence/control happens, but shouldn’t abandon all ‘rational’ pursuits…

G. Giles Deleuze (and Feliz Guattari) – the next stage???

Influenced by Foucault (knowledge/power.. how society controls etc)

Try to establish new system of knowledge – instead of tree-like structures of knowledge (deduction, induction, reasoning, Western logic) they propose rhizomatic knowledge (not a tree but a potato sprout)

…Like entropy theory for philosophy (everything gets less and less ordered.. not more)

Deontology Lecture

Rebecca Sivitz

The Origin of Ethics

European thinking-

Descartes convinced all of Europe of the existence of stable human

identity: this is the idea that people have personalities that are

closed, definable, and can be placed in categories

People are thought to have agency: this is the ability to make a moral

calculation given situations and decide on action causing a proper

outcome

Calculations

Ethics are systems of thinking that provide ways for human agents to

decide courses of action

Ethics will determine what rules to obey, what variables to calculate,

and other factors in coming to a moral decision

Immanuel Kant and Deontology

Life of Kant

Son of a German minister, Kant obsesses over universalistic laws

Had a long but boring life, although the king of Prussia did ban some

of his writings for a short while

His philosophy

Deontology

What are means and ends? Means are what you do to get something. For example my means to getting to camp was driving, and the end was getting to camp.

The philosophy of deontology

The means justify the ends

If the initial action you take is moral, even if the result is bad, the action is considered moral

Additional notes

Ends are not connected to moral culpability; you cannot know the effects of an action (because you cannot predict the future) and you are not in control of those effects (because you aren’t a god)

You are not responsible for the means of other actors

People cannot be treated as means alone, but must be treated as ends in

themselves “kingdom of ends” (i.e. you cannot kill anyone to get what

you want)

To lie to Nazi soldiers would be wrong because it would use them as a means to your own ends. The categorical imperative test would say that it is wrong to use people universally.

Problems with deontology

Deontology is unrealistically limiting

Choices do not always allow us to act morally; we will often

be confronted with situations where there is no moral option, and deontology leaves us helpless in those situations

Utility is preferable because it can provide guidance for decision making in any situation; it is not limited by moral rules although it can still be influenced by them

Ends can be known

We can use probability; we are reasonably certain that turning over a Jewish friend to a group of Nazi soldiers is a bad idea

Deontology is sacrificial

It makes us so consumed with our own moral

culpability that we do not act against injustices

General Ways to defeat deontology

Deontology isn’t really a means to any value other than morality

Not a weighing mechanism, you either are moral meeting deontology or you aren’t you can’t use it to decide who wins the round.

It doesn’t take into account modern situational ethics

The Categorical Imperative

Definition: Act as though the MAXIM of your action were, through your will, to become universal law.” – Example

this is a test for a categorically imperative action. Using the universalizing test allows us to see what would happen if our maxim where the universal law; that stops moral agents from acting in exception to universal laws; for example, I might test the decision to lie by imagining what would happen if everyone lied when they wished or needed to, and that causes me to avoid lying because I can see that it would be bad to apply that maxim universally

Additional Notes

Universal laws are legitimate because they are universal; if there is ever a situation in which they do not apply, then they are not actually laws; laws cannot have exceptions and still be laws

Problems with the categorical imperative

A person wishes to commit suicide, but because of universal law, cannot will that everyone should do the same – this sacrifices autonomy

A beggar needs to borrow money to eat, s/he knows they cannot pay it back.

Contradiction: cannot will to have others take loans they cannot repay, and yet

cannot allow oneself to starve to death as suicide cannot be allowed either.

Deontology relies on ends

The categorical imperative can only prove that certain actions are bad by making you picture a universe in which the action’s maxim is universalized

We picture the end result of universalizing the maxim; Kant’s principle relies on showing us how bad the ends are to prove that certain means are wrong

Works:

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

Critique of Pure Reason

Alan Gewirth

Basic Philosophy

Autonomous beings are moral agents

There are certain general rights that must be respected in all moral agents.

2 levels of autonomy:

the right to life and physical integrity

right not to be lied to, self-respect, and purpose (the ability to improve one’s own position)

There are certain general rights that must be respected in all moral agents (freedom and safety). Moral agents will recognize the rights of other moral agents.

Does not exactly say what is moral.

Deontological Decision-Making

The Intervening Actor:

Problem: Terrorists are holding your mother captive.

They will kill her unless you detonate an atomic bomb in New York.

Utilitarian Solution: Shoot Mom. Save a million lives.

Gewirth’s Solution: Do *nothing*

Deontological means matter; not ends.

You are not responsible for *intervening actors*; they choose to

bomb New York; you do not choose to kill your mother.

Why this isn’t crazy:

We cannot know the ends

Martin Luther King Jr. example

MLK wants to march through Birmingham

“Bull” Connor has threatened to spray marchers with fire

hoses and beat them to a pulp

MLK chooses to march anyway; is he responsible for the

ensuing violence?

Gewirth says no. Bull is the intervening actor and is solely

responsible for the violence. Gewirth has concocted this

whole argument for the purpose of defending MLK

His Main Works

-- Reason and Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

-- Human rights: essays on justification and applications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)

-- The Community of Rights (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Peter Singer

Theory of moral obligation

Moral Obligation to save a drowning baby

If you can help someone without a comparable harm being imposed upon yourself you are morally obligated to do so.

For example you have a moral obligation to save a drowning baby if you know how to swim.

Basically moral intuition.

STORY: Peter Singer has exstensive writings on how beatiality is moral, and he’s supported by PETA.

How to use singer: Singer is great in topics where you’re obligated to prove that a moral

obligation of some sort exists.

Answers to Singer

If one were to always make sacrifices then everyone would be poor off in society

Peter ignores things like kin selection

Peter Singer admits that this theory has no warrant

Assumes it’s always good

His Works:

Bioethics

Writings on an Ethical Life

Practical Ethics

Criterion and Utilitarianism Lecture

Criterions:

Stress Importance

Stress Difficulty

Purpose/Function

Intermediary step between the value and the case

All arguments are filtered through it. Contentions -> criterion -> value.

What the judge uses to weigh the round

Criterion as a means to the value

Hypothetical example of how this would work

You value people getting presents your criterion would be UPS or bicycles

because those are the means.

LD examples

Human Rights -> Societal Welfare, Preservation of Life ->Human Life, Economic security -> QOL, Free and Fair Elections -> Fulfillment of Democratic Ideals, Safety ->QOL

Criteria as weighing mechanisms

Hypothetical example

LD example

How to decide what criterion to use

Two strategies

Find evidence and make a list of arguments and see what criterion

ties them all, or a lot of them together.

Decide what you want your case to focus around and chose a value and

criterion and then find arguments that prove that you meet the criterion you’ve established

Criteria can be almost anything

You can use anything reasonable as a criterion (I HAND OUT LIST OF POPULAR CRITERIA)

Criteria must be fair

Criteria Strategy

Impact to it

Since I had big impacts if I won one argument I won the round.

Very specific criterions and frame working

Risks

You lose the criterion you lose the round

You get a judge who doesn’t know how to judge or judges

in a non traditional way you lose.

Advantages

You can ignore parts of your opponents case by saying that

they don’t impact back to your standard.

Issue Selection

2AR with the the criterion

A way of doing voting issues now is to at the beginning of the 2ar explain

why you win the criterion, or just clarify which is being used in the round

(even if it’s your opponents). Then each voting issue can be ways you get the criterion.

Combining or Agreeing on criterions

Ways to win the criterion debate

Just saying that your opponent don’t achieve their criterion is NOT SUFFICIENT,

and there really are only a few arguments that are appropriate for use here.

-Criterion is subjective/inherently ambiguous

- Unclear/vague

- Doesn’t link to value

-Not a weighing mechanism

-Not resolutionally applicable

- Racist/ethnocentric/offensive

- Not something that should be valued or bad in general

-Unfair of unequal

It can be good to add in at the end about even if they win the criterion why you

still meet it.

LIST OF POPULAR CRITERIA

Cultural autonomy

Deontology

Human Life

Human Rights

Security

Safety

Individualism

Community Standards

Communitarianism

Utilitarianism

Pragmatism

Veil of Ignorance

Justice

Soft Power

Free and Fair elections

Democratic Ideals

Democracy

Autonomy

Basic Needs

Security of Person

Societal Welfare

Environmental Protection

Liberty

Equality

Quality of Life

Happiness

Capitalism

Flexibility

Discourse

Market Place of Ideas

Stability

Dignity

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Teleology

Utilitarianism

What is Utilitarianism

Known as the greatest good for the greatest number of people which is based on

Mill’s definition.

It has a number of definitions though. “utilitarianism actually

refers only to “a calculation of the goodness or badness of an act” when used in philosophical works without a clear definition given.

A good basic all encompassing definition is “the rightness or wrongness of actions are determined by the goodness or badness of its consequences” (like teleology)

Kinds of Utilitarianism

There are a number of different kinds of Utilitarianism

Act

Act Utility is the goodness or badness of an act in a given situation

Nearly the same as teleology and consequentialism. If in the end more people are helped then hurt then the action is moral.

Rule

“Rule Utility is the goodness or badness of an act when constrained by a system of moral laws”

Look to the action itself and see if the action were applied as a rule whether the consequence would be good or bad. Very similary to Kants universal maxim.

AN EXAMPLE:

Universalistic Utility

Universalistic Utility is the goodness or badness of an act for a larger group or society.

Bascially a decision is moral if it benefits the global community more than I hurts it

Egoistic Utility

Egoistic Utility is the goodness or badness of an act for an individual or a single institution opposed to a larger social order

Basically we should all look to what’s the best possible

thing for ourselves because it’s what people naturally do.

Normative Utility

Normative Utility is the goodness or badness of an act given a system of value judgements or constraints

This system is very similar to Rule Utility, but different in that it might refer to more individualistic assessments of value rather than the universalistic moral rules found in deontology

Objective Utility

Objective Utility is the goodness or badness of an act outside of consideration of social, cultural, or contextual norms; it claims to be unbiased like science

Basically same as act but it takes external factors into account.

The Philosophers

Life of Jeremy Bentham

Bentham was an influential thinker in England during the

Industrial Revolution

Bentham was an odd ball; among other weird things, he founded

a college where his body is brought to every board meeting since

he died over a century ago

Bentham’s philosophy

Bentham was a hedonist; he believed in pursuing pleasure

Bentham’s conception of utility involves pursuing whatever

Maximizes pleasure versus pain.

There are a few sub criteria to see if an action produces pleasure

All categories are equally valuable

Intensity

Duration

Certainty

Propinquity (pro-pink-witty)

Nearness

Fecundity

The chances of there being a repeat of the

positive experience

Purity

The chance of something negative happening

Extent

How many people are affected

Life of J.S. Mill

By age 6 had written and composed a concerto

Can do calculus at 9

Wrote first book at 12

Went crazy at 15

Put in a sanitarium at 20

The son of James Mill, John Stuart was taught (and overworked) by Jeremy Bentham from an early age, leading to a nervous breakdown in his early adult life.

Might Mill have spent his life rebelling against Bentham?

Mill’s philosophy

Utilitarianism, according to Mill, refers to “the greatest good for the greatest number of people”