Tournament: McNeil | Round: 1 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit Hatfield | Judge: Brandon, Chuck
An unconditional right to strike means that there are no limits on when workers may exercise their right to strike or on the justifications workers have for their strike. However, this does not require the AFF to prove that there are no ethical or legal restrictions on the tactics workers can use in carrying out their right to strike. In other words, the AFF does not have the burden of proving that workers are entitled to murder people in the streets as a strike tactic. Holding the AFF to that burden would make it impossible to win.
Ought is defined by dictionary.com as expressing a moral obligation. Thus, the resolution expresses a judgment about the moral obligations of governments.
Part 1: Volition
All moral theories are grounded in the significance of our volition because it is the only thing that we can bear full responsibility over. Volition refers to our ability to freely set and pursue our own goals. Humans have different desires, but unlike animals we are able to choose whether to enforce and act on these desires.
Jaeggi (Rahel Jaeggi is a professor of practical philosophy and social philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Alienation. Columbia University Press. 2014 --- KW)
“On the one hand, self-alienation can be understood, with Frankfurt, as being “delivered over to” our own desires and longings. (We could call this “first order” alienation.) These desires can take on an overwhelming power that presents itself as a “force alien to ourselves.” This is not due to their irresistible character alone: “It is because we do not identify ourselves with them and do not want them to move us.” 29 2. These feelings and passions are the raw material that we relate to evaluatively or with respect to which we form our will. Whether a person identifies himself with these passions, or whether they occur as alien forces that remain outside the boundaries of his volitional identity, depends upon what he himself they themselves wants their his will to be. 30 Hence the volitional attitudes on this level, in contrast to unformed first-order desires, can be shaped and structured and are wholly at our command: they are “entirely up to” us. A crucial implication of this account is the distinction between power and authority . Passions, according to this account, have volitional power but no volitional authority. Frankfurt elaborates: “In fact, the passions do not really make any claims on us at all. . . . Their effectiveness in moving us is entirely a matter of sheer brute force.” 31 3. What we do not freely have at our command, in contrast, is our volitional nature, the deep structure of our will itself. On the level of volitional necessities we are determined; here it is not “entirely up to us” how we determine our will; our volitional nature determines us and. Yet our volitional necessities determine us in a different sense from that in which passions or first-order desires do: they compel us, one could say, not as alien powers but rather to be ourselves. They are not a brute force because they are not an external power but rather the power of what we really want or really are . “It is an element of his established volitional nature and hence of his identity as a person.” 32 For this reason Frankfurt can claim in his adoption example that the mother experiences the limitation of her will—her “not being able to”—as a kind of liberation. Self-alienation, then, means acting against one’s volitional nature. Hence the mother who wants to give up her child has formed a second order volition that conflicts with her volitional nature. If she acted in accordance with this second order volition, she would alienate herself—a “second order” alienation. This means that it would run counter to what constitutes her as a person; it would undermine the conditions of her identity. Self-alienation on this level consists, then, in not being in agreement with one’s own person, with what constitutes oneself as a person. The assumption of a volitional nature appears, then, to solve the problem of finding a criterion for authentic desires and their authorization that I have raised in conjunction with the theme of self-alienation. The standard for the appropriateness or inappropriateness of identifying with a desire is our volitional nature; our desires—our real desires—are authorized in relation to it. In what follows, however, I will explain why this, too, fails to solve the problem raised in our initial example.
Part 2: Appropriation
Appropriation is when one looks at the world around them and includes the world through their will. A drug addict appropriates the world when they choose to quit drugs through their will.
Jaeggi (Rahel Jaeggi is a professor of practical philosophy and social philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Alienation. Columbia University Press. 2014 --- KW)
“The underlying idea of freedom here can be understood by turning to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right . Formulated schematically, the basic thought is that freedom must give itself reality, must determine , concretize, or realize itself as something, and this has two aspects. On the one hand, the merely negated world, as negated, remains external to the individual, hence alien and not subject to her influence. Actual, realized freedom, in contrast, consists not in abstracting from the world but in appropriating it. The important point here is that this appropriation is a transformation. The abstract, negative freedom of withdrawing from the world, in contrast, remains, in its withdrawal, bound to what it withdraws from (or negates); it can reject it but not transform it. Realized, positive freedom in Hegel’s sense refers, then, to an appropria- tive transformation (or transformative appropriation) of the conditions under which it realizes itself. 24 Freedom means being able to make something— namely, the conditions under which one lives—one’s own. And, conversely, an independence that preserves itself only by disregarding the actual world remains abstract. As Allen Wood puts this point: We do not achieve true self-sufficiency in relation to an other by escaping it or separating ourselves from it—as by Stoical aloofness from our external condition, or Kantian detachment from empirical motives. Such a strategy is self-defeating, like the strategy of the neurotic personality that avoids the trauma of failure by precluding from the outset any possibility of success. True independence in relation to an other is achieved rather by struggling with otherness, overcoming it, and making it our own. 25 On the other hand, the person remains unreal because she lacks all specifi c properties. Becoming a person for Hegel means “putting one’s will into something,” and that also means giving oneself specific properties by willing something in the world. In such a relation to the world, the person first realizes herself as a person, and in that her freedom first becomes concrete. Hegel can be understood here as developing a dialectic of freedom and determinacy. If I identify with nothing, then nothing limits me. I can then do anything. The problem, however, is that being able to do anything also means that I elude being “grasped” and that I have no determinate contours. I am not a specific person who wants and is able to do specific things; instead, my freedom remains empty and abstract. As long as I do not put my will into anything determinate, this freedom is not real but only an indeterminate possibility. Hence the individual who locates her freedom in not identifying with anything, in not determining herself as anything and not putting her will into anything, falls prey to an erroneous idea of sovereignty and independence— erroneous, because such a position is grounded in a one-sided and formal idea of freedom or independence. (Thus Hegel and Frankfurt share the idea that a person must commit herself to and identify with something in order to make her freedom concrete.) A will that remains indifferent to its concrete properties is therefore not free in the full sense. It is indeed free to renounce identifications, but at the price of the self’s emptiness and impoverishment. On this basis one could also argue against what Nietzsche would later call the “free spirit.” 26 Freedom of choice, then, is only the formal aspect of freedom. The freedom of indif- ference, of distancing and renouncing identifications, is incomplete, and it becomes complete only when the will determines its content by choosing something determinate or orienting itself positively toward something. Of course, the negative or merely formal side of freedom has for Hegel its own rightful claims (and not merely historically): the “right of indifference” consists in the requirement that in order to be able to determine one- self freely, as something, one must be able to abstract from that very quality. Raymond Geuss has pointed out that in his positive conception of freedom Hegel attempts to integrates both the act of reflection (which depends on the dissolving of attachments) and that of identification. The individual who determines herself must—in agreement with Frankfurt’s theory of identification and wholeheartedness—determine herself as something. She must do this, however, in a reflective act of free choice that presupposes the possibility of distancing herself from what she is at present. Thus for Hegel—in any case one can describe his attempt in this way—negative freedom is a constitutive condition of positive freedom; negative freedom is sublated ( aufgehoben ) into positive freedom. One can sharpen these thoughts even further by returning to the views of Frankfurt discussed in chapter 7: for Hegel commitment is not only (as for Frankfurt) a condition of freedom; it is also the case (in contrast to Frankfurt) that freedom is a condition of having commitments. (This same structure underlies the theme of the free appropriation of self and world that I will contrast in part 3 with the processes of alienation diagnosed here.)
Therefore, the standard for this round is resisting alienation.
Alienation occurs when an agent is not able to appropriate their surroundings. Being able to change their world with their volition allows them to remain true to themselves. One who always intends or wills but doesn’t act upon it isn’t a moral agent because an alienated perspective cannot bring itself to the world that their surroundings are unknown to them.
Jaeggi (Rahel Jaeggi is a professor of practical philosophy and social philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Alienation. Columbia University Press. 2014 --- KW)
“THE CONCEPT OF ALIENATION REFERS to an entire bundle of intertwined topics. Alienation means indifference and internal division, but also powerlessness and relationlessness with respect to oneself and to a world experienced as indifferent and alien. Alienation is the inability to establish a relation to other human beings, to things, to social institutions and thereby also—so the fundamental intuition of the theory of alienation—to oneself. An alienated world presents itself to individuals as insignificant and meaningless, as rigidified or impoverished, as a world that is not one’s own, which is to say, a world in which one is not “at home” and over which one can have no influence. The alienated subject becomes a stranger to itself; it no longer experiences itself as an “actively effective subject” but a “passive object” at the mercy of unknown forces.1 One can speak of alienation “wherever individuals do not find themselves in their own actions”2 or wherever we cannot be master over the being that we ourselves are (as Heidegger might have put it). The alienated person, according to the early Alasdair MacIntyre, is “a stranger in the world that he himself has made.”3”