1ac- US 1nc- spec util t k 1ar- all 2nr- k 2ar- case
Princeton
5
Opponent: Ardrey Kell SG | Judge: Chetan Hertzig
1ac- wages 1nc- kant nurses da cp case 1ar- kant da case 2nr- cp case 2ar- case
Princeton
4
Opponent: La Salle ZW | Judge: Tara Riggs
1ac- kant 1nc- da da case 1ar- all 2nr- da 2ar- case
Princeton
1
Opponent: Stuyvesant HJ | Judge: Rachel Elias
1ac- kant 1nc- k case 1ar- all 2n- k 2ar- perm
Yale
1
Opponent: Unionville MG | Judge: Katy Senner
lay
Yale
6
Opponent: La Salle TP | Judge: Abishek Stanley
1ac- stock 1nc- kant innovation case 1ar- all 2nr- kant 2ar- case
Yale
3
Opponent: Princeton CB | Judge: David Herrera
1ac- evergreening 1nc- spec medicines kant case 1ar- all 2nr- kant 2ar- case
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
Entry
Date
0 - Blake Note
Tournament: any | Round: 9 | Opponent: na | Judge: na my cites on the neg wiki keep deleting themselves, sorry abt that but ill keep trying
12/18/21
0 - Contact Info
Tournament: na | Round: Finals | Opponent: na | Judge: na Hey, I'm Olivia! she/her
fb: Olivia Liu (pls friend request me first) email: olivialiu82@gmail.com Contact me before round if you want me to disclose in any specific way
I will try to provide any content warnings. Let me know before round if you have any specific triggers.
9/26/21
0 - Disclosure Note
Tournament: any | Round: Quads | Opponent: any | Judge: any my wikify button glitches out so I've just been pasting cites in without bolding/first 3 last 3 very sorry for ppl who only look at cites. anyway, pls refer too osource docs serves as an i-meet to violations on cites, i'm trying my best here thanks
9/26/21
0 - Navigation
Tournament: na | Round: Quads | Opponent: na | Judge: na G - Generics NSD - camp SO - September/October ND - November/December JF - January/February
9/26/21
0 - PLEASE READ Princeton Note
Tournament: Princetoon | Round: Quads | Opponent: anyone | Judge: anyoe my cites are once again deleting themselves. idk why or how to fix it. yes ik it is not good. please check os for disclosure edit: managed to get a few of the cites to not implode on themselves
12/5/21
G - AO Distinction
Tournament: Mid America Cup | Round: 5 | Opponent: Strath Haven AM | Judge: James Stuckert There is a distinction between action and omission –
No act/omission distinction is infinitely regressive because it means that you are culpable for everything since you are technically aware of anything. That negates – 1) since omitting is a legitimate action to avoid culpability, you can choose to omit from any ethical action which means the squo is ok 2) even if there is no distinction, it auto-negates since you aren’t doing anything right now to solve any problems which means you are equally as culpable for the aff problems.
10/31/21
G - K - Justifies Moral Atrocities
Tournament: Mid America Cup | Round: 5 | Opponent: Strath Haven AM | Judge: James Stuckert Justifying util is an independent voter –
Tournament: Barkley Forum | Round: 4 | Opponent: Sam Barlow EL | Judge: Nethmin Liyanage Their scholarship is bad and a reason to lose the round—their authors like Gill Peterson and Manning andrely on Deleuze who endorsed pedophilia and actively advocated against the age of consent law. Doezema 18 Marie Doezema (Parisian Journalist). “France, Where Age of Consent Is Up for Debate.” The Atlantic, 10 March 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/03/frances-existential-crisis-over-sexual-harassment-laws/550700/WWDH After May 1968, French intellectuals would challenge the state’s authority to protect minors from sexual abuse. In one prominent example, on January 26, 1977, Le Monde, a French newspaper, published a petition signed by the era’s most prominent intellectuals—including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, André Glucksmann and Louis Aragon—in defense of three men on trial for engaging in sexual acts with minors. “French law recognizes in 13- and 14-year-olds a capacity for discernment that it can judge and punish,” the petition stated, “But it rejects such a capacity when the child's emotional and sexual life is concerned.” Furthermore, the signatories argued, children and adolescents have the right to a sexual life: “If a 13-year-old girl has the right to take the pill, what is it for?” It’s unclear what impact, if any, the petition had. The defendants were sentenced to five years in prison, but did not serve their full sentences. Comes first: 1 Reversibility: once oppressive rhetoric is used it cannot be taken back 2 Norm setting: we are part of a larger debate community with extensive norms – letting bad discourse be rampant kills the community 3 Competition: debate is an educational competition with no place for offensive rhetoric – that kills access to the lasting benefit debate provides
1/29/22
G - Spec Util
Tournament: Princeton | Round: Quarters | Opponent: Strath Haven AM | Judge: micah thode, ethan massa, joshua stpeter Interpretation: If the affirmative defends a consequentialist framework, they must explicitly delineate which theory of the good they defend in the form of a text in the 1ac. Each nuance of the ethic entails different obligations and would exclude different offense – there are 7 different versions. Mastin Luke Mastin, Consequentialism, The basics of philosophy http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_consequentialism.htmlMassa Some consequentialist theories include: Utilitarianism, which holds that an action is right if it leads to the most happiness for the greatest number of people ("happiness" here is defined as the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain). Hedonism, which is the philosophy holds that pleasure is the most important pursuit of mankind, and that individuals should strive to maximise their own total pleasure (net of any pain or suffering). Epicureanism is a more moderate approach (which still seeks to maximize happiness, but which defines happiness more as a state of tranquillity than pleasure). Egoism, which holds that an action is right if it maximizes good for the self. Thus, Egoism may license actions which are good for an individual even if detrimental to the general welfare. Asceticism, in some ways, the opposite of Egoism in that it describes a life characterized by abstinence from egoistic pleasures especially to achieve a spiritual goal. Altruism, which prescribes that an individual take actions that have the best consequences for everyone except for himself, according to Auguste Comte's dictum, "Live for others". Thus, individuals have a moral obligation to help, serve or benefit others, if necessary at the sacrifice of self-interest. Rule Consequentialism, which is a theory (sometimes seen as an attempt to reconcile Consequentialism and Deontology), holds that moral behaviour involves following certain rules, but that those rules should be chosen based on the consequences that the selection of those rules have. Some theorists holds that a certain set of minimal rules are necessary to ensure appropriate actions, while some hold that the rules are not absolute and may be violated if strict adherence to the rule would lead to much more undesirable consequences. Negative Consequentialism, which focuses on minimizing bad consequences rather than promoting good consequences. This may actually require active intervention (to prevent harm from being done), or may only require passive avoidance of bad outcomes. B. Violation: They don’t and maximizing expected well-being doesn’t cut it. Crisp, Roger, "Well-Being", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/well-being/.Massa Well-being is most commonly used in philosophy to describe what is non-instrumentally or ultimately good for a person. The question of what well-being consists in is of independent interest, but it is of great importance in moral philosophy, especially in the case of utilitarianism, according to which the only moral requirement is that well-being be maximized. Significant challenges to the very notion have been mounted, in particular by G.E. Moore and T.M. Scanlon. It has become standard to distinguish theories of well-being as either hedonist theories, desire theories, or objective list theories. According to the view known as welfarism, well-being is the only value. Also important in ethics is the question of how a person’s moral character and actions relate to their well-being. C. Standards:
Shiftiness – They can shift out of my turns based on whatever theory of the good they operate under due to the nature of a vague standard. Especially true because the warrants for their standard could justify different versions of consequentialism as coming first and I wouldn’t know until the 1ar which gives them access to multiple contingent standards. 2. Strat – I lose 6 minutes of time during the AC to generate a strategy because I don't know what turns or strategy I can go for during the 1N absent which proves CX doesn’t check since it would occur after the skew. 3. Resolvability – Makes the round irresolvable since we can’t weigh different mechanisms for the good – Benatar would probably link harder under a hedonistic conception of util – weighing ground is key since it ensures we can compare arguments that clash to access the ballot.
12/5/21
G - T - Implement
Tournament: Barkley Forum | Round: 2 | Opponent: Lincoln East LZ | Judge: Nigel Taylor Ward Interp and Violation: The affirmative must only defend and garner offense off of the hypothetical implementation of a policy that brings about the state of affairs where private appropriation of outer space is outlawed – they don’t. Resolved means a policy Words and Phrases 64 Words and Phrases Permanent Edition. “Resolved”. 1964. Definition of the word “resolve,” given by Webster is “to express an opinion or determination by resolution or vote; as ‘it was resolved by the legislature;” It is of similar force to the word “enact,” which is defined by Bouvier as meaning “to establish by law”.
Vote neg: 1 Preparation – repacking the topic gives the aff a huge edge, they can prepare for months on an issue that catches us by surprise and delink all policy based disads and counterplans which is functionally all the topic lit. Preparation is better than thinking on your feet- research demonstrates pedagogical humility and research skills are the only portable debate training – the process of debate outweighs the content – only our interp generates the argumentative skills needed to rigorously defend their affirmative out of round and create engaged citizens who have the self-reflexivity to advocate for positive change 2 Truth testing – you can’t vote on the case outweighs T because lack of preparation prevents rigorous testing of the AC claims. If we win fairness we don’t have to “outweigh” other impacts 3 read the aff as a TVA solves-
1/29/22
G - Theory - Plan Flaw
Tournament: Mid America Cup | Round: 5 | Opponent: Strath Haven AM | Judge: James Stuckert The aff doesn’t say resolved before the plan-text. That means it doesn’t get enacted into law. Words and Phrases 64 Words and Phrases Permanent Edition (Multi-volume set of judicial definitions). “Resolved”. 1964. Definition of the word “resolve,” given by Webster is “to express an opinion or determination by resolution or vote; as ‘it was resolved by the legislature;” It is of similar force to the word “enact,” which is defined by Bouvier as meaning “to establish by law”. Plan flaw is a voter—
10/31/21
G - Witch
Tournament: Barkley Forum | Round: 2 | Opponent: Lincoln East LZ | Judge: Nigel Taylor Ward The term witch, bewitching, and witchcraft is used to describe how women don’t fit traditional roles. You should drop them for their in round discourse because misogyny creates an unsafe debate space where no one can participate in the benefits of the activity. You can achieve liberation without using the word “witch”, just say “other” Smith 16 Michelle Smith, 1-5-2016, "Witches both mad and bad: a loaded word with an ugly history," Conversation, https://theconversation.com/witches-both-mad-and-bad-a-loaded-word-with-an-ugly-history-52804 Bewitching women Throughout Western history, women have typically been denied the right to own property, become literate or educated, pursue careers, participate in politics, or make decisions independently of their husbands. Within this context of men’s control over women, the one limited power that women possessed was their ability to be sexually attractive to men. It is therefore no surprise that beauty is linked with witchcraft in language. A number of terms that relate to women’s ability to appear desirable have magical connotations. Most obviously, a woman can be “bewitching” in her power to lure men. In addition, the word “glamour”, which we associate with stylish women, originally referred to the occult and a spell that made the viewer see an object or person differently to its actual appearance. Cultural stereotypes of witches as old, ugly, and childless situate the witch as the antithesis of everything a desirable woman should be. Nevertheless Diana Purkiss has shown that the Early Modern witch was not only a patriarchal creation. She explains that women, in some ways like those who are now embracing the “Mad F—king Witches” title, Other women have also sent up Dutton’s text, sharing photos of household brooms on their doorsteps as well as images of witches in popular culture. It even won international attention, with a tweet from the account of American TV superhero Jessica Jones. While Maiden and others have embraced the term “mad witch”, there’s little doubt that it was intended as an insult. Labelling a woman a “mad witch” brings with it unmistakable discomfort and hatred. It is a name that was applied to former Prime Minister Julia Gillard on the infamous “Ditch the witch” placard, providing a clear instance of how the word continues to be evoked for strong women who do not embrace traditional feminine roles in the home.
1/29/22
JF - DA - Innovation
Tournament: Barkley Forum | Round: 6 | Opponent: Woodrow Wilson CO | Judge: Zaid Umar Strong commercial space catalyzes tech innovation – progress at the margins and spinoff tech change global information networks Joshua Hampson 2017, Security Studies Fellow at the Niskanen Center, 1-25-2017, “The Future of Space Commercialization”, Niskanen Center, https://republicans-science.house.gov/sites/republicans.science.house.gov/files/documents/TheFutureofSpaceCommercializationFinal.pdf Innovation is generally hard to predict; some new technologies seem to come out of nowhere and others only take off when paired with a new application. It is difficult to predict the future, but it is reasonable to expect that a growing space economy would open opportunities for technological and organizational innovation. In terms of technology, the difficult environment of outer space helps incentivize progress along the margins. Because each object launched into orbit costs a significant amount of money—at the moment between $27,000 and $43,000 per pound, though that will likely drop in the future —each 19 reduction in payload size saves money or means more can be launched. At the same time, the ability to fit more capability into a smaller satellite opens outer space to actors that previously were priced out of the market. This is one of the reasons why small, affordable satellites are increasingly pursued by companies or organizations that cannot afford to launch larger traditional satellites. These small 20 satellites also provide non-traditional launchers, such as engineering students or prototypers, the opportunity to learn about satellite production and test new technologies before working on a full-sized satellite. That expansion of developers, experimenters, and testers cannot but help increase innovation opportunities. Technological developments from outer space have been applied to terrestrial life since the earliest days of space exploration. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) maintains a website that lists technologies that have spun off from such research projects. Lightweight 21 nanotubes, useful in protecting astronauts during space exploration, are now being tested for applications in emergency response gear and electrical insulation. The need for certainty about the resiliency of materials used in space led to the development of an analytics tool useful across a range of industries. Temper foam, the material used in memory-foam pillows, was developed for NASA for seat covers. As more companies pursue their own space goals, more innovations will likely come from the commercial sector. Outer space is not just a catalyst for technological development. Satellite constellations and their unique line-of-sight vantage point can provide new perspectives to old industries. Deploying satellites into low-Earth orbit, as Facebook wants to do, can connect large, previously-unreached swathes of 22 humanity to the Internet. Remote sensing technology could change how whole industries operate, such as crop monitoring, herd management, crisis response, and land evaluation, among others. 23 While satellites cannot provide all essential information for some of these industries, they can fill in some useful gaps and work as part of a wider system of tools. Space infrastructure, in helping to change how people connect and perceive Earth, could help spark innovations on the ground as well. These innovations, changes to global networks, and new opportunities could lead to wider economic growth. Short innovation cycles mean every contract counts John J. Klein 19, Senior Fellow and Strategist at Falcon Research Inc. and adjunct professor at the George Washington University Space Policy Institute, 1-15-2019, "Rethinking Requirements and Risk in the New Space Age," Center for a New American Security, https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/rethinking-requirements-and-risk-in-the-new-space-age Unfortunately, these variances in models between the MDAP’s lengthy development cycle and the commercial space sector’s 18-month innovation cycle are a result of stark differences in thinking about requirements and risk. Requirements and risk for MDAPs commonly focus on ensuring critical mission capabilities at a given cost. In contrast, the commercial space sector tends to focus more on providing innovation quickly using economies of scale. The commercial sector understands that time dynamically shapes decisions related to requirements and risk because of the relatively short innovation cycle. In a highly competitive space sector with tight profit margins, those unable to innovate quickly will likely be out of business soon. Alternatively, space systems with mission assurance requirements – where failures are detrimental to national security and military operations – often drive DoD’s timelines. Program managers of critical national security space systems commonly require additional time to test and verify that satellites can perform missions with a very low probability of failure. Tech innovation solves every existential threat – cumulative extinction events outweigh the aff Dylan Matthews 18. Co-founder of Vox, citing Nick Beckstead @ Rutgers University. 10-26-2018. "How to help people millions of years from now." Vox. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/26/18023366/far-future-effective-altruism-existential-risk-doing-good If you care about improving human lives, you should overwhelmingly care about those quadrillions of lives rather than the comparatively small number of people alive today. The 7.6 billion people now living, after all, amount to less than 0.003 percent of the population that will live in the future. It’s reasonable to suggest that those quadrillions of future people have, accordingly, hundreds of thousands of times more moral weight than those of us living here today do. That’s the basic argument behind Nick Beckstead’s 2013 Rutgers philosophy dissertation, “On the overwhelming importance of shaping the far future.” It’s a glorious mindfuck of a thesis, not least because Beckstead shows very convincingly that this is a conclusion any plausible moral view would reach. It’s not just something that weird utilitarians have to deal with. And Beckstead, to his considerable credit, walks the walk on this. He works at the Open Philanthropy Project on grants relating to the far future and runs a charitable fund for donors who want to prioritize the far future. And arguments from him and others have turned “long-termism” into a very vibrant, important strand of the effective altruism community. But what does prioritizing the far future even mean? The most literal thing it could mean is preventing human extinction, to ensure that the species persists as long as possible. For the long-term-focused effective altruists I know, that typically means identifying concrete threats to humanity’s continued existence — like unfriendly artificial intelligence, or a pandemic, or global warming/out of control geoengineering — and engaging in activities to prevent that specific eventuality. But in a set of slides he made in 2013, Beckstead makes a compelling case that while that’s certainly part of what caring about the far future entails, approaches that address specific threats to humanity (which he calls “targeted” approaches to the far future) have to complement “broad” approaches, where instead of trying to predict what’s going to kill us all, you just generally try to keep civilization running as best it can, so that it is, as a whole, well-equipped to deal with potential extinction events in the future, not just in 2030 or 2040 but in 3500 or 95000 or even 37 million. In other words, caring about the far future doesn’t mean just paying attention to low-probability risks of total annihilation; it also means acting on pressing needs now. For example: We’re going to be better prepared to prevent extinction from AI or a supervirus or global warming if society as a whole makes a lot of scientific progress. And a significant bottleneck there is that the vast majority of humanity doesn’t get high-enough-quality education to engage in scientific research, if they want to, which reduces the odds that we have enough trained scientists to come up with the breakthroughs we need as a civilization to survive and thrive. So maybe one of the best things we can do for the far future is to improve school systems — here and now — to harness the group economist Raj Chetty calls “lost Einsteins” (potential innovators who are thwarted by poverty and inequality in rich countries) and, more importantly, the hundreds of millions of kids in developing countries dealing with even worse education systems than those in depressed communities in the rich world. What if living ethically for the far future means living ethically now? Beckstead mentions some other broad, or very broad, ideas (these are all his descriptions): Help make computers faster so that people everywhere can work more efficiently Change intellectual property law so that technological innovation can happen more quickly Advocate for open borders so that people from poorly governed countries can move to better-governed countries and be more productive Meta-research: improve incentives and norms in academic work to better advance human knowledge Improve education Advocate for political party X to make future people have values more like political party X ”If you look at these areas (economic growth and technological progress, access to information, individual capability, social coordination, motives) a lot of everyday good works contribute,” Beckstead writes. “An implication of this is that a lot of everyday good works are good from a broad perspective, even though hardly anyone thinks explicitly in terms of far future standards.” Look at those examples again: It’s just a list of what normal altruistically motivated people, not effective altruism folks, generally do. Charities in the US love talking about the lost opportunities for innovation that poverty creates. Lots of smart people who want to make a difference become scientists, or try to work as teachers or on improving education policy, and lord knows there are plenty of people who become political party operatives out of a conviction that the moral consequences of the party’s platform are good. All of which is to say: Maybe effective altruists aren’t that special, or at least maybe we don’t have access to that many specific and weird conclusions about how best to help the world. If the far future is what matters, and generally trying to make the world work better is among the best ways to help the far future, then effective altruism just becomes plain ol’ do-goodery.*
1/30/22
JF - DA - Innovation
Tournament: Barkley Forum | Round: 6 | Opponent: Woodrow Wilson CO | Judge: Zaid Umar Strong commercial space catalyzes tech innovation – progress at the margins and spinoff tech change global information networks Joshua Hampson 2017, Security Studies Fellow at the Niskanen Center, 1-25-2017, “The Future of Space Commercialization”, Niskanen Center, https://republicans-science.house.gov/sites/republicans.science.house.gov/files/documents/TheFutureofSpaceCommercializationFinal.pdf Innovation is generally hard to predict; some new technologies seem to come out of nowhere and others only take off when paired with a new application. It is difficult to predict the future, but it is reasonable to expect that a growing space economy would open opportunities for technological and organizational innovation. In terms of technology, the difficult environment of outer space helps incentivize progress along the margins. Because each object launched into orbit costs a significant amount of money—at the moment between $27,000 and $43,000 per pound, though that will likely drop in the future —each 19 reduction in payload size saves money or means more can be launched. At the same time, the ability to fit more capability into a smaller satellite opens outer space to actors that previously were priced out of the market. This is one of the reasons why small, affordable satellites are increasingly pursued by companies or organizations that cannot afford to launch larger traditional satellites. These small 20 satellites also provide non-traditional launchers, such as engineering students or prototypers, the opportunity to learn about satellite production and test new technologies before working on a full-sized satellite. That expansion of developers, experimenters, and testers cannot but help increase innovation opportunities. Technological developments from outer space have been applied to terrestrial life since the earliest days of space exploration. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) maintains a website that lists technologies that have spun off from such research projects. Lightweight 21 nanotubes, useful in protecting astronauts during space exploration, are now being tested for applications in emergency response gear and electrical insulation. The need for certainty about the resiliency of materials used in space led to the development of an analytics tool useful across a range of industries. Temper foam, the material used in memory-foam pillows, was developed for NASA for seat covers. As more companies pursue their own space goals, more innovations will likely come from the commercial sector. Outer space is not just a catalyst for technological development. Satellite constellations and their unique line-of-sight vantage point can provide new perspectives to old industries. Deploying satellites into low-Earth orbit, as Facebook wants to do, can connect large, previously-unreached swathes of 22 humanity to the Internet. Remote sensing technology could change how whole industries operate, such as crop monitoring, herd management, crisis response, and land evaluation, among others. 23 While satellites cannot provide all essential information for some of these industries, they can fill in some useful gaps and work as part of a wider system of tools. Space infrastructure, in helping to change how people connect and perceive Earth, could help spark innovations on the ground as well. These innovations, changes to global networks, and new opportunities could lead to wider economic growth. Short innovation cycles mean every contract counts John J. Klein 19, Senior Fellow and Strategist at Falcon Research Inc. and adjunct professor at the George Washington University Space Policy Institute, 1-15-2019, "Rethinking Requirements and Risk in the New Space Age," Center for a New American Security, https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/rethinking-requirements-and-risk-in-the-new-space-age Unfortunately, these variances in models between the MDAP’s lengthy development cycle and the commercial space sector’s 18-month innovation cycle are a result of stark differences in thinking about requirements and risk. Requirements and risk for MDAPs commonly focus on ensuring critical mission capabilities at a given cost. In contrast, the commercial space sector tends to focus more on providing innovation quickly using economies of scale. The commercial sector understands that time dynamically shapes decisions related to requirements and risk because of the relatively short innovation cycle. In a highly competitive space sector with tight profit margins, those unable to innovate quickly will likely be out of business soon. Alternatively, space systems with mission assurance requirements – where failures are detrimental to national security and military operations – often drive DoD’s timelines. Program managers of critical national security space systems commonly require additional time to test and verify that satellites can perform missions with a very low probability of failure. Tech innovation solves every existential threat – cumulative extinction events outweigh the aff Dylan Matthews 18. Co-founder of Vox, citing Nick Beckstead @ Rutgers University. 10-26-2018. "How to help people millions of years from now." Vox. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/26/18023366/far-future-effective-altruism-existential-risk-doing-good If you care about improving human lives, you should overwhelmingly care about those quadrillions of lives rather than the comparatively small number of people alive today. The 7.6 billion people now living, after all, amount to less than 0.003 percent of the population that will live in the future. It’s reasonable to suggest that those quadrillions of future people have, accordingly, hundreds of thousands of times more moral weight than those of us living here today do. That’s the basic argument behind Nick Beckstead’s 2013 Rutgers philosophy dissertation, “On the overwhelming importance of shaping the far future.” It’s a glorious mindfuck of a thesis, not least because Beckstead shows very convincingly that this is a conclusion any plausible moral view would reach. It’s not just something that weird utilitarians have to deal with. And Beckstead, to his considerable credit, walks the walk on this. He works at the Open Philanthropy Project on grants relating to the far future and runs a charitable fund for donors who want to prioritize the far future. And arguments from him and others have turned “long-termism” into a very vibrant, important strand of the effective altruism community. But what does prioritizing the far future even mean? The most literal thing it could mean is preventing human extinction, to ensure that the species persists as long as possible. For the long-term-focused effective altruists I know, that typically means identifying concrete threats to humanity’s continued existence — like unfriendly artificial intelligence, or a pandemic, or global warming/out of control geoengineering — and engaging in activities to prevent that specific eventuality. But in a set of slides he made in 2013, Beckstead makes a compelling case that while that’s certainly part of what caring about the far future entails, approaches that address specific threats to humanity (which he calls “targeted” approaches to the far future) have to complement “broad” approaches, where instead of trying to predict what’s going to kill us all, you just generally try to keep civilization running as best it can, so that it is, as a whole, well-equipped to deal with potential extinction events in the future, not just in 2030 or 2040 but in 3500 or 95000 or even 37 million. In other words, caring about the far future doesn’t mean just paying attention to low-probability risks of total annihilation; it also means acting on pressing needs now. For example: We’re going to be better prepared to prevent extinction from AI or a supervirus or global warming if society as a whole makes a lot of scientific progress. And a significant bottleneck there is that the vast majority of humanity doesn’t get high-enough-quality education to engage in scientific research, if they want to, which reduces the odds that we have enough trained scientists to come up with the breakthroughs we need as a civilization to survive and thrive. So maybe one of the best things we can do for the far future is to improve school systems — here and now — to harness the group economist Raj Chetty calls “lost Einsteins” (potential innovators who are thwarted by poverty and inequality in rich countries) and, more importantly, the hundreds of millions of kids in developing countries dealing with even worse education systems than those in depressed communities in the rich world. What if living ethically for the far future means living ethically now? Beckstead mentions some other broad, or very broad, ideas (these are all his descriptions): Help make computers faster so that people everywhere can work more efficiently Change intellectual property law so that technological innovation can happen more quickly Advocate for open borders so that people from poorly governed countries can move to better-governed countries and be more productive Meta-research: improve incentives and norms in academic work to better advance human knowledge Improve education Advocate for political party X to make future people have values more like political party X ”If you look at these areas (economic growth and technological progress, access to information, individual capability, social coordination, motives) a lot of everyday good works contribute,” Beckstead writes. “An implication of this is that a lot of everyday good works are good from a broad perspective, even though hardly anyone thinks explicitly in terms of far future standards.” Look at those examples again: It’s just a list of what normal altruistically motivated people, not effective altruism folks, generally do. Charities in the US love talking about the lost opportunities for innovation that poverty creates. Lots of smart people who want to make a difference become scientists, or try to work as teachers or on improving education policy, and lord knows there are plenty of people who become political party operatives out of a conviction that the moral consequences of the party’s platform are good. All of which is to say: Maybe effective altruists aren’t that special, or at least maybe we don’t have access to that many specific and weird conclusions about how best to help the world. If the far future is what matters, and generally trying to make the world work better is among the best ways to help the far future, then effective altruism just becomes plain ol’ do-goodery.*
1/30/22
JF - DA - US Heg
Tournament: Blake- John Edie Holiday Debates | Round: 6 | Opponent: Minnetonka TR | Judge: Lawrence Zhou Maintaining US space dominance requires a homegrown commercial space industry – private companies offshoring gives China the advantage they need Cahan and Sadat 1/6 (Bruce Cahan, J.D) (Dr. Mir Sadat, ) "US Space Policies for the New Space Age: Competing on the Final Economic Frontier," based on Proceedings from State of the Space Industrial Base 2020 Sponsored by United States Space Force, Defense Innovation Unit, United States Air Force Research Laboratory, 1/6/21, https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000177-9349-d713-a777-d7cfce4b0000 TDI Today, China’s commercial space sector is in its infancy but is set to grow with continued national and provincial support, which have been rapidly increasing over the past three years.64 Since 2004, the United States and China accounted for 74 of the $135.2 billion venture capital (VC) invested in commercial space. 65 The early 2020s are pivotal, as it would be far cheaper for China and Chinese commercial space firms to acquire space technologies from the United States or allied nation companies seeking revenues or facing cashflow constraints, than to build the companies and their teams and technologies from scratch in China. The tight coupling of Chinese military goals and an economy organized to achieve those goals magnifies the economic threats and market disruptions that the United States must immediately address, in order for DoD and national security operations to rely on US commercial space capabilities. 3. ISSUES AND CHALLENGES Peaceful Uses of Space and Space Exploration Space has been primarily a shared, not a warfighting, domain.67 With each passing second of Planck time,68 space enables a modern way of life, provides instantaneous global imagery, assures telecommunications, and captures humanity’s imagination for civil space exploration. As a result, space is a burgeoning marketplace and territory for commercial ventures and investors. Strengthening the US commercial space industrial base is vital to and beyond US national security. Civil space activities are a source of US “soft power” in global commerce, cooperation, and investment. 69 The civil space sector, led by NASA, is fundamental to America’s national security. 70 NASA is on an ambitious critical path to return to the Moon by 2024,71 along with developing the capabilities and infrastructure for a sustained lunar presence. NASA’s lunar plans provide a lunar staging area for missions to Mars and beyond. They offer a strategic and economic presence for the United States on the Moon. Congress, the White House, DoD, and NASA must recognize that economic and strategic dominance in service of national security requires catalyzing and accelerating growth of a vibrant, private US industrial and cultural expansion into the Solar System. Human visitation and eventual settlement beyond the Earth require sustaining visionary leaders, aided by, and aiding, US national security. A recurring theme in US policy is “maintaining and advancing United States dominance and strategic leadership in space” because US global competitors and adversaries are competent and capable of outpacing American space capabilities. 72 The stakes are high: At this historic moment, there is a real race for dominance over cislunar access and resources. Regulations Should Foster US Commercial Space as a National Asset Leveraging the reimagination and disruption of terrestrial industries, the US commercial space industry is pushing the frontiers of the United States and global space economics and capabilities. A pre-COVID19 assessment by the US Chamber of Commerce projected that the US space market will increase from approximately $385 billion in 2020, to at least $1.5 trillion by 2040. 73 This projection represents a seven percent (7) annual compound average growth rate (CAGR), driven largely by expanded business opportunities in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Total addressable market (TAM) for US commercial space companies could be far larger were they to have federal and financial support for initiating cislunar space operations and opportunities. Recent advancements in commercial space technologies and business models have driven down costs and unlocked new areas of economic growth and space capabilities that outpace and de-risk acquiring capabilities through traditional US government economic development, research and development (RandD), procurement and regulatory policies and processes. US regulations must ensure that US companies lead in commercial space. In specific, technological advances that lower access costs and expand space mission capabilities, content, continuity, and redundancies must be fully supported by or incorporated into US government programs, budgets, requirements, and acquisition processes. Until commercial space offerings are fully incorporated, and federal acquisition policies and personnel commit to innovation, US government fiscal buying power, intelligence and program support will lag and remain inadequate in comparison to US private sector companies and the nation’s global competitors and adversaries in space. Addressing COVID-19’s Impact on US Commercial Space The COVID-19 pandemic damaged and still challenges the US space industrial base. US domestic investors’ funding of space RandD remains inconsistent across the lifecycle of New Space companies and the spectrum of technologies necessary to grow the space economy. To date, public RandD, government procurements and visionary space entrepreneurs have played a major role in establishing and funding the New Space industrial base. In the last five years, $11 billion of private capital has been invested.74 Traditional private investors may become reluctant to fund space technologies due to perceptions of higher risk over longer time horizons before receiving profitable returns on their capital. Institutional and long-horizon investors who manage patient capital have an appetite for illiquid, but higher yielding, terrestrial alternative asset investments such as commodities, private equity limited partnerships and real estate.75 The COVID-19 pandemic has created economic uncertainties making the New Space’s funding model unreliable. COVID-19 significantly impacted venture capital (VC)-backed companies: the pace of VC space investments fell 85 between April - June, as compared to January – March, in 2020. 76 Pre-COVID-19, the New Space industrial base confronted multiple challenges in raising later stages of venture capital such as (1) the lag between having an early-stage startup with an idea and commercializing a viable revenue-generating product, (2) the lack of market liquidity for founder and private equity space investments to attract and retain talented teams, and (3) the lack of a market to re-sell contracts for space goods and services when customers buy more capacity than needed. Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, federal financing of US RandD was at a historically minor level, as compared to businesses and universities.77 US government support for basic research has steadily declined as a percent of GDP. The federal government will experience near- to medium-term budget constraints.78 The vibrant venture community in the United States has taken up a portion of this slack by increasing RandD investment in later-stage and applied research. However, founding teams and VC financing rely on government to fund earlier RandD for basic science and engineering. Therefore, government must resume the sustainable and impactful past levels of support for basic research, an essential role in the space economy’s public-private partnership that ensures US leadership in space. Space as Existential Terrain for National Security In this Digital Era, space integrates and drives all elements of US national security. The Cold War may be over, but since the early 2010s, a renewed era of great power competition has emerged across terrestrial land, air, sea, and cyber domains. This competition extends into space, where a great game ensues.79 Space is no longer an uncontested or sanctuary domain. Competent and capable global competitors and peer adversaries are challenging US military, commercial, and civil space interests. The United States, along with its allies and partners, has had to accept and anticipate that space may be a warfighting domain, as suggested primarily by Russian and Chinese counter-space capabilities, military operations, and declarative statements. On December 20, 2019, the bipartisan National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 202080 authorized the creation of the US Space Force, under the Department of the Air Force, to secure US national interests in an increasingly contested domain.81 Back in October 1775, the Continental Congress established the US Navy to ensure that commercial and government fleets could freely navigate the Atlantic coastline - today, that includes the South China Sea. Likewise, the USSF’s mission is to ensure unfettered access to and the freedom to operate in space. The 2017 National Security Strategy considers space to be a “priority domain.”82 Freedom of navigation is a sovereign right that nations have fought to achieve and defend. 83 The USSF’s main role is to organize, train and equip, as well as to protecting US space interests and supporting terrestrial and joint warfighters (e.g., US Space Command). Thus, USSF must secure US national interests in space, whether military, commercial, scientific, civil, or enhancing US competitiveness for cislunar leadership. US space dominance prevents global war Zubrin 15 (Robert Zubrin, president of Pioneer Energy, a senior fellow with the Center for Security Policy) “US Space Supremacy is Now Critical,” Space News, 1/22/15, https://spacenews.com/op-ed-u-s-space-supremacy-now-critical/ The United States needs a new national security policy. For the first time in more than 60 years, we face the real possibility of a large-scale conventional war, and we are woefully unprepared. Eastern and Central Europe is now so weakly defended as to virtually invite invasion. The United States is not about to go to nuclear war to defend any foreign country. So deterrence is dead, and, with the German army cut from 12 divisions to three, the British gone from the continent, and American forces down to a 30,000-troop tankless remnant, the only serious and committed ground force that stands between Russia and the Rhine is the Polish army. It’s not enough. Meanwhile, in Asia, the powerful growth of the Chinese economy promises that nation eventual overwhelming numerical force superiority in the region. How can we restore the balance, creating a sufficiently powerful conventional force to deter aggression? It won’t be by matching potential adversaries tank for tank, division for division, replacement for replacement. Rather, the United States must seek to totally outgun them by obtaining a radical technological advantage. This can be done by achieving space supremacy. To grasp the importance of space power, some historical perspective is required. Wars are fought for control of territory. Yet for thousands of years, victory on land has frequently been determined by dominance at sea. In the 20th century, victory on both land and sea almost invariably went to the power that controlled the air. In the 21st century, victory on land, sea or in the air will go to the power that controls space. The critical military importance of space has been obscured by the fact that in the period since the United States has had space assets, all of our wars have been fought against minor powers that we could have defeated without them. Desert Storm has been called the first space war, because the allied forces made extensive use of GPS navigation satellites. However, if they had no such technology at their disposal, the end result would have been just the same. This has given some the impression that space forces are just a frill to real military power — a useful and convenient frill perhaps, but a frill nevertheless. But consider how history might have changed had the Axis of World War II possessed reconnaissance satellites — merely one of many of today’s space-based assets — without the Allies having a matching capability. In that case, the Battle of the Atlantic would have gone to the U-boats, as they would have had infallible intelligence on the location of every convoy. Cut off from oil and other supplies, Britain would have fallen. On the Eastern front, every Soviet tank concentration would have been spotted in advance and wiped out by German air power, as would any surviving British ships or tanks in the Mediterranean and North Africa. In the Pacific, the battle of Midway would have gone very much the other way, as the Japanese would not have wasted their first deadly airstrike on the unsinkable island, but sunk the American carriers instead. With these gone, the remaining cruisers and destroyers in Adm. Frank Jack Fletcher’s fleet would have lacked air cover, and every one of them would have been hunted down and sunk by unopposed and omniscient Japanese air power. With the same certain fate awaiting any American ships that dared venture forth from the West Coast, Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand would then have fallen, and eventually China and India as well. With a monopoly of just one element of space power, the Axis would have won the war. But modern space power involves far more than just reconnaissance satellites. The use of space-based GPS can endow munitions with 100 times greater accuracy, while space-based communications provide an unmatched capability of command and control of forces. Knock out the enemy’s reconnaissance satellites and he is effectively blind. Knock out his comsats and he is deaf. Knock out his navsats and he loses his aim. In any serious future conventional conflict, even between opponents as mismatched as Japan was against the United States — or Poland (with 1,000 tanks) is currently against Russia (with 12,000) — it is space power that will prove decisive. Not only Europe, but the defense of the entire free world hangs upon this matter. For the past 70 years, U.S. Navy carrier task forces have controlled the world’s oceans, first making and then keeping the Pax Americana, which has done so much to secure and advance the human condition over the postwar period. But should there ever be another major conflict, an adversary possessing the ability to locate and target those carriers from space would be able to wipe them out with the push of a button. For this reason, it is imperative that the United States possess space capabilities that are so robust as to not only assure our own ability to operate in and through space, but also be able to comprehensively deny it to others. Space superiority means having better space assets than an opponent. Space supremacy means being able to assert a complete monopoly of such capabilities. The latter is what we must have. If the United States can gain space supremacy, then the capability of any American ally can be multiplied by orders of magnitude, and with the support of the similarly multiplied striking power of our own land- and sea-based air and missile forces be made so formidable as to render any conventional attack unthinkable. On the other hand, should we fail to do so, we will remain so vulnerable as to increasingly invite aggression by ever-more-emboldened revanchist powers. This battle for space supremacy is one we can win. Neither Russia nor China, nor any other potential adversary, can match us in this area if we put our minds to it. We can and must develop ever-more-advanced satellite systems, anti-satellite systems and truly robust space launch and logistics capabilities. Then the next time an aggressor commits an act of war against the United States or a country we are pledged to defend, instead of impotently threatening to limit his tourist visas, we can respond by taking out his satellites, effectively informing him in advance the certainty of defeat should he persist. If we desire peace on Earth, we need to prepare for war in space.
1/28/22
JF - NC - Kant
Tournament: Blake- John Edie Holiday Debates | Round: 6 | Opponent: Minnetonka TR | Judge: Lawrence Zhou Ethics must be derived from the constitutive features of agents – ethics based internally fail because they can’t generate universal obligations and ethics based externally fail because they are nonbinding as agents could opt-out and have no motivation to follow them which means they fail to guide action. Constitutivism solves – it allows for universal obligations among all agents but they are binding and cannot be opted out of.
Next, only practical reason is constitutive: Regress – to question why one should reason concedes its authority since it is an act of reasoning itself which proves it’s binding and inescapable That justifies universalizability - insofar as there is no a priori distinction between reasoners, a reason for one agent must also be a reason for another; if all agents cannot set and pursue an end, it is not constitutive of agency. Willing a maxim that violates freedom is a contradiction in conception – you cannot violate someone’s freedom without having your own freedom to do so.
Thus, the standard is consistency with a system of equal and outer freedoms. Impact calc: intentions are the only relevent part of actions to determine contradictions Prefer:
1 Performativity – arguing against my framework presupposes freedom because without freedom to reason you would not be able to make arguments and try to win. – this means that contesting any of my arguments proves my framework true.
2 A posteriori ethics fail: A Is/Ought Gap – experience just describes how the world is but doesn’t indicate how it ought to be which means there must be an a priori conception of good B Inability to know each other’s experience makes it an unreliable basis for ethics because different experiences bring different concepts of truth – only a priori ethics solve since a priori truths are accessible to all agents 3 Consequentialism fails – A Predictions assumes specific causes of past consequences which can’t be verified as the actual cause B Butterfly effect - every action has infinite consequences so it is impossible to evaluate an action; one government policy could end up causing nuclear war in a million years. C Aggregation is impossible – pleasure and pain are subjective
4 Real World Education – an understanding of my fw is key to understanding the law in the real world because states abide by inviolable side-constraints in their constitutions which they value over util calc – Germany proves. Ripstein Ripstein, Arthur. Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2009 Strictly speaking, the right to dignity is not an enumerated right in the German Basic Law says, but the organizing principle under which all enumerated rights—ranging from life and security of the person through freedom of expression, movement, association, and employment and the right to a fair trial to equality before the law—are organized. It appears as Art. I.1: “Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.” Art. I.3 explains that the enumerated rights follow: “The following basic rights shall bind the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary as directly applicable law.” Other, enumerated rights are subject to proportionality analysis, through which they can be restricted in light of each other so as to give effect to a consistent system of rights. The right to dignity is the basis of the state’s power to legislate and so is not subject to any limitation, even in light of the enumerated rights falling under it, because—to put it in explicitly Kantian terms—citizens could not give themselves a law that turned them into mere objects.
Negate, the appropriation of outer space by private entities is just Acquisition of property can never be unjust – to create rights violations, there must already be an owner of the property being violated, but that presupposes its appropriation by another entity. Feser 1, (Edward Feser, 1-1-2005, accessed on 12-15-2021, Cambridge University Press, "THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN UNJUST INITIAL ACQUISITION | Social Philosophy and Policy | Cambridge Core", Edward C. Feser is an American philosopher. He is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-philosophy-and-policy/article/abs/there-is-no-such-thing-as-an-unjust-initial-acquisition/5C744D6D5C525E711EC75F75BF7109D1)brackets for gen langphs st There is a serious difficulty with this criticism of Nozick, however. It is just this: There is no such thing as an unjust initial acquisition of resources; therefore, there is no case to be made for redistributive taxation on the basis of alleged injustices in initial acquisition. This is, to be sure, a bold claim. Moreover, in making it, I contradict not only Nozick’s critics, but Nozick himself, who clearly thinks it is at least possible for there to be injustices in acquisition, whether or not there have in fact been any (or, more realistically, whether or not there have been enough such injustices to justify continual redistributive taxation for the purposes of rectifying them). But here is a case where Nozick has, I think, been too generous to the other side. Rather than attempt —unsatisfactorily, in the view of his critics—to meet the challenge to show that initial acquisition has not in general been unjust, he ought instead to have insisted that there is no such challenge to be met in the first place. Giving what I shall call “the basic argument” for this audacious claim will be the task of Section II of this essay. The argument is, I think, compelling, but by itself it leaves unexplained some widespread intu- itions to the effect that certain specific instances of initial acquisition are unjust and call forth as their remedy the application of a Lockean proviso, or are otherwise problematic. (A “Lockean proviso,” of course, is one that forbids initial acquisitions of resources when these acquisitions do not leave “enough and as good” in common for others.) Thus, Section III focuses on various considerations that tend to show how those intuitions are best explained in a way consistent with the argument of Section II. Section IV completes the task of accounting for the intuitions in question by considering how the thesis of self-ownership itself bears on the acqui- sition and use of property. Section V shows how the results of the previ- ous sections add up to a more satisfying defense of Nozickian property rights than the one given by Nozick himself, and considers some of the implications of this revised conception of initial acquisition for our under- standing of Nozick’s principles of transfer and rectification. II. The Basic Argument The reason there is no such thing as an unjust initial acquisition of resources is that there is no such thing as either a just or an unjust initial acquisition of resources. The concept of justice, that is to say, simply does not apply to initial acquisition. It applies only after initial acquisition has already taken place. In particular, it applies only to transfers of property (and derivatively, to the rectification of injustices in transfer). This, it seems to me, is a clear implication of the assumption (rightly) made by Nozick that external resources are initially unowned. Consider the following example. Suppose an individual A seeks to acquire some previously unowned resource R. For it to be the case that A commits an injustice in acquiring R, it would also have to be the case that there is some individual B (or perhaps a group of individuals) against whom A commits the injustice. But for B to have been wronged by A’s acquisi- tion of R, B would have to have had a rightful claim over R, a right to R. By hypothesis, however, B did not have a right to R, because no one had a right to it—it was unowned, after all. So B was not wronged and could not have been. In fact, the very first person who could conceivably be wronged by anyone’s use of R would be, not B, but A himself, since A is the first one to own R. Such a wrong would in the nature of the case be an injustice in transfer—in unjustly taking from A what is rightfully his—not in initial acquisition. The same thing, by extension, will be true of all unowned resources: it is only after some- one has initially acquired them that anyone could unjustly come to possess them, via unjust transfer. It is impossible, then, for there to be any injustices in initial acquisition.7 To own yourself and use your own freedom is to be able to interact with external objects. Anything else makes you unable to exercise your own freedom on other things and creates a contradiction. Feser 2, (Edward Feser, 1-1-2005, accessed on 12-15-2021, Cambridge University Press, "THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN UNJUST INITIAL ACQUISITION | Social Philosophy and Policy | Cambridge Core", Edward C. Feser is an American philosopher. He is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-philosophy-and-policy/article/abs/there-is-no-such-thing-as-an-unjust-initial-acquisition/5C744D6D5C525E711EC75F75BF7109D1)brackets for gen langphs st There is. An alternative, soft-line approach could acknowledge that the initial acquirer who abuses a monopoly over a water hole (or any similar crucial resource) does commit an injustice against those who are disad- vantaged, but such an approach could still hold that the acquirer never- theless has not committed an injustice in acquisition —his acquisition was, as I have said, neither just nor unjust. Nor does he fail to own what he has acquired; he still cannot be said to have stolen the water from anyone. Rather, his injustice is an unjust use of what he owns, on a par with the unjust use I make of my self-owned fist when I wield it, unprovoked, to bop you on your self-owned nose. In what sense does the water-hole owner use his water unjustly, though? He doesn’t try to drown anyone in it, after all— indeed, the whole problem is that he won’t let anybody near it! Eric Mack gives us the answer we need in what he has put forward as the “self-ownership proviso” (SOP).28 This is a proviso not (as the Lock- ean proviso is) on the initial acquisition of property, but rather on how one can use his property in a way that respects others’ self-ownership rights. It is motivated by consideration of the fact that the talents, abilities, capac- ities, energies, etc., that a person rightfully possesses as a self-owner are inherently “world-interactive”; that is, it is of their very essence that they are directed toward the extra-personal environment.29 Your capacity to use your hand, for instance, is just a capacity to grasp and manipulate external objects; thus, what you own in owning your hand is something essentially grasping and manipulating.30 Now if someone were to cut off your hand or invasively keep you from using it (by tying your arm against your body or holding it behind your back), he would obviously be violating your self-ownership rights. But there are, Mack suggests, other, noninvasive ways in which those rights might be violated. If, to use an example of Mack’s, I effectively nullify your ability to use your hand by creating a device that causes anything you reach for to be propelled beyond your grasp, making it impossible for you ever to grasp or manip- ulate anything, I have violated your right to your hand as much as if I had cut it off or tied it down. I have, in any case, prevented your right to your hand from being anything more than a formal right, one that is practically useless. In the interests of guaranteeing respect for substantive, robust rights of self-ownership, then, “the SOP requires that persons not deploy their legitimate holdings, i.e., their extra-personal property, in ways that severely, albeit noninvasively, disable any person’s world-interactive powers.” 31 The SOP follows, in Mack’s view, from the thesis of self-ownership itself; or, at any rate, the considerations that would lead anyone to accept that thesis should also, in his view, lead one to accept the proviso.32 A brief summary of a few of Mack’s thought experiments should suffice to give a sense of why this is so.33 In what Mack calls the Adam’s Island example, Adam acquires a previously uninhabited island and later refuses a shipwrecked Zelda permission to come ashore, as a result of which she remains struggling at sea (and presumably drowns). In the Paternalist Caging example, instead of drowning, Zelda becomes caught offshore in a cage Adam has constructed for catching large sea mammals, and, rather than releasing her, Adam keeps her in the cage and feeds her regularly. In the Knuckle-Scraper Barrier example, Zelda falls asleep on some unowned ground, whereupon a gang of oafish louts encircles her and, using their bodies and arms as barriers, refuses to let her out of the circle (accusing her of assault if she touches them in order to climb over or break through). In the Disabling Property Barrier example, instead of a human barrier, Adam constructs a plastic shield over and around the unowned plot of ground upon which Zelda sleeps, accusing her of trespassing upon his property when she awakens and tries to escape by breaking through the plastic. And in the (similarly named) Disabling Property Barriers example, seem to suggest an Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of natural function, and though this by no means troubles me, it might not be what Mack himself has in mind (nor, of course, is it something every philosopher is going to sympathize with). Mack’s view nevertheless seems to require something like this conception. And something like it —enough like it to do the job Mack needs to be done, anyway—is arguably to be found in Larry Wright’s well- known reconstruction, in modern Darwinian terms, of the traditional notion of natural function. See Larry Wright, “Functions,” Philosophical Review 82, no. 2 (1973): 139–68. Adam, instead of enclosing Zelda in a plastic barrier, encloses in plastic barriers every external object that Zelda would otherwise be able to use — thus, in effect, enclosing her in a larger, all-encompassing plastic barrier of a more eccentric shape. In all of these cases, Mack says, although Zelda’s formal rights of self-ownership have not been violated—no one has invaded the area enclosed by the surface of her skin —her rights over her self-owned powers, and in particular her ability to exercise those powers, have nevertheless been nullified. But a plausible self-ownership- based theory surely cannot allow for this. It cannot, for instance, allow the innocent Zelda justly to be imprisoned in any of the ways described! If Mack is right, then it seems we have, in the SOP, grounds for holding that a water-hole monopolist would indeed be committing an injustice against anyone he refuses water to, or to whom he charges exorbitant prices for access. The injustice would be a straightforward violation of a person’s rights to self-ownership, a case of nullifying a person’s self- owned powers in a way analogous to Adam’s or the knuckle-scrapers’ nullification of Zelda’s self-owned powers. It would not be an injustice in initial acquisition, however. The water-hole monopolist still owns the water hole as much as he ever did; he just cannot use it in a way that violates other individuals’ self-ownership rights (either by drowning them in it or by nullifying their self-owned powers by denying them access to it when there is no alternative way for them to gain access to the water necessary for the use of their self-owned powers). Is Mack right? The hard-liner might dig in his heels and insist that none of Mack’s examples amount to self-ownership-violating injustices; instead, they are merely subtle but straightforward property rights violations or cases of moral failings of various other sorts (cruelty, selfishness, etc.). The Adam’s Island case, for starters, is roughly analogous to the example of the water-hole monopolist, so that it arguably cannot give any non-question- begging support to the SOP, if the SOP is then supposed to show that the water-hole example involves an injustice. The Disabling Property Barriers case might also be viewed as unable to provide any non-question-begging support, since Adam’s encasing everything in plastic might plausibly be interpreted as his acquiring everything, in which case we are back to a water-hole-type monopoly example. The Knuckle-Scraper Barrier and Dis- abling Property Barrier examples might be explained by saying that in falling asleep on the unowned plot of land, Zelda in effect has come (at least temporarily) to acquire it, and (by virtue of walking) to acquire also the path she took to get to it, so that the knuckle-scrapers and Adam violate her property rights (not her self-ownership rights) in not allowing her to escape. The Paternalist Caging example can perhaps be explained by arguing that in building the cage, Adam has acquired the water route leading to it, so that in swimming this route (and thus getting caught in the cage) Zelda has violated his property rights and, therefore, can justly be caged. Accordingly, the hard-liner might insist, we can explain all of these examples in a hard-line way and thus avoid commitment to the SOP. Such a hard-line response would be ingenious (well, maybe), but still, I think, ultimately doomed to failure. Can the Paternalist Caging example, to start with, plausibly be explained away in the manner that I have suggested? Does Adam commit no injustice against Zelda even if he never lets her out? It will not do to write this off merely as a case of excessive punishment (explaining the injustice of which would presumably not require commitment to the SOP). For suppose Adam says, after a mere five minutes of confinement, “I’m no longer punishing you; you’ve paid your debt and are free to go, as far as I’m concerned. But I’m not going to bother exerting the effort to let you out. I never forced you to get in the cage, after all —you did it on your own —and you have no right to the use of my self-owned cage-opening powers to fix your mistake! So teleport out, if you can. Or get someone else —if you can find someone —to let you out.” Adam would be neither violating Zelda’s rights to external property nor excessively punishing her in this case; nor would he be invasively vio- lating her self-ownership rights. But wouldn’t he still be committing an injustice, however noninvasively? Don’t we need something like the SOP to explain why this is so? The barrier examples, for their part, do not require Zelda’s walking and falling asleep on virgin territory, which thus (arguably) becomes her prop- erty. We can, to appeal to the sort of science-fiction scenario beloved of philosophers, imagine instead a bizarre chance disruption of the structure of space-time that teleports Zelda into Adam’s plastic shell or into the midst of the knuckle-scrapers. There is no question now of their violating her property rights; yet don’t they still commit an injustice by nullifying her self-owned powers in refusing to allow her to exit? Consider a parallel example concerning property ownership itself. If your prized $50,000 copy of Captain America Comics number 1, due to another rupture in space-time or just to a particularly strong wind that blows it out of your hands and through my window, suddenly appears on the floor of my living room, do I have the right to refuse to bring it back out to you or to allow you to come in and get it? Suppose I attempt to justify my refusal by saying, “I won’t touch it, and you’re free to have it back if you can arrange another space-time rupture or gust of wind. But I refuse to exert my self-owned powers to bring it out to you, or to allow you on my property to get it. I never asked for it to appear in my living room, after all!” Would anyone accept this justification? Doesn’t your property right in the comic book require me to give it back to you? The hard-liner might suggest that this example transports the SOP advocate out of the frying pan and into the fire. For if the SOP is true, wouldn’t we also have to commit ourselves to a “property-ownership proviso” (POP) that requires us not to nullify anyone’s ability to use his external private property in a way consistent with its “world-interactive powers”? If I build a miniature submarine in my garage, and you have the only swimming pool within one thousand miles, must you allow me the use of your pool lest you nullify my ability to use the sub? If (to take an example of Cohen’s cited by Mack) I own a corkscrew, must I be provided with wine bottles to open lest the corkscrew sadly fail to fulfill its full potential?34 Mack’s response to this line of thought seems basically to amount to a bit of backpedaling on the claim that his proviso really follows from the notion of self-ownership per se —so as to avoid the conclusion that a (rather unlibertarian and presumably redistributionist) POP would also, in par- allel fashion, follow from the concept of property ownership. His response seems, instead, to emphasize the idea that the considerations favoring self-ownership also favor, via an independent line of reasoning, the SOP.35 In my view, however, a better response would be one that took note of some relevant disanalogies between property in oneself and property in external things. Note first that the self-owned world-interactive powers, the possible use of which the SOP is intended to guarantee, are possessed by a living being who is undergoing development, which involves passing through various stages; therefore, these powers are ones that flourish with use and atrophy or even disappear with disuse.36 To nullify these powers even for a limited time, then, is (very often at least) not merely temporarily to inconvenience their owner, but, rather, to bring about a permanent reduc- tion or even disablement of these powers. By contrast, a submarine (or a corkscrew) retains its powers even when left indefinitely in a garage (or a drawer). This difference in the effect that nullification has on self-owned powers versus extra-personal property plausibly justifies a difference in our judgments concerning the acceptability, from the point of view of justice, of such nullification in the two cases; that is, it justifies adoption of the SOP but not of the POP.37 Second, there is an element of choice (and in particular, of voluntary acquisition) where extra-personal property is concerned that is morally relevant here. One’s self-owned powers, along with the SOP-guaranteed right to the non-nullification of those powers, are not something one chooses or acquires; one just has them —indeed, to a great degree one just is the constellation of those powers, abilities, etc.—and owns them fully. By contrast, extra-personal property is something one chooses to acquire or not to acquire, and as we have seen, one always acquires property rights in various degrees, from partial to full ownership—and this would include the rights guaranteed by a POP. If one chooses to acquire a corkscrew under conditions where wine bottles are unavailable, or are even likely at some point to become unavailable, one can hardly blame others if one finds oneself bottle-less. To fail to acquire POP-like rights regarding the corkscrew (by, say, contracting with someone else to provide one with wine bottles in perpetuity) is not the same thing as to have those rights and then have them violated. Someone who buys a corkscrew and then finds that he cannot use it is like the person who acquires only partial property rights in a water hole that others have already acquired partial use rights over. He cannot complain that his co-owners have violated his rights; he never acquired those other rights in the first place. Similarly, the corkscrew owner cannot complain that he has no bottles to open; he never acquired the right to those bottles, only to the corkscrew. If full ownership of a corkscrew requires POP-like rights over it, then all that follows is that corkscrew owners who lack bottles are not full owners of their corkscrews. Thus, self-ownership justifies the appropriation of property – our freedom necessitates being able to set and pursue external things as our ends, including exercising our rights on property. Restricting this arbitrarily limits our freedom which is unjust. Feser 3, (Edward Feser, 1-1-2005, accessed on 12-15-2021, Cambridge University Press, "THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN UNJUST INITIAL ACQUISITION | Social Philosophy and Policy | Cambridge Core", Edward C. Feser is an American philosopher. He is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-philosophy-and-policy/article/abs/there-is-no-such-thing-as-an-unjust-initial-acquisition/5C744D6D5C525E711EC75F75BF7109D1)brackets for gen langphs st V. Some Implications If what I have argued so far is correct, then the way is opened to the following revised case for strongly libertarian Lockean-Nozickian prop-erty rights: We are self-owners, having full property rights to our body parts, powers, talents, energies, etc. As self-owners, we also have a right, given the SOP, not to have our self-owned powers nullified —we have the right, that is, to act within the extra-personal world and thus to acquire rights to extra-personal objects that the use of our self-owned powers requires.39 This might involve the buying or leasing of certain rights or bundles of rights and, correspondingly, the acquiring of lesser or greater degrees of ownership of parts of the external world, but as long as one is able to exercise one’s powers to some degree and is not rendered incapable of acting within that world, the SOP is satisfied. In any case, such rights can only be traded after they are first established by initial acquisition. In initially acquiring a resource, an agent does no one an injustice (it was unowned, after all). Furthermore, they has mixed their labor with the resource, significantly altering it and/or bringing it under his control, and is himself solely responsible for whatever value or utility the resource has come to have. Thus, they has a presumptive right to it, and, if his control and/or alteration (and thus acquisition) of it is (more or less) complete, his own- ership is accordingly (more or less) full. The system of strong private property rights that follows from the acts of initial acquisition performed by countless such agents results, as a matter of empirical fact, in a market economy that inevitably and dramatically increases the number of resources available for use by individuals, and these benefited individuals include those who come along long after initial acquisition has taken place. (Indeed, it especially includes these latecomers, given that they were able to avoid the hard work of being the first to “tame the land” and draw out the value of raw materials.)40 The SOP is thus, in fact, rarely, if ever, violated. The upshot is that a system of Lockean-Nozickian private property rights is morally justified, with a strong presumption against tampering with exist- ing property titles in general. In any case, there is a strong presumption against any general egalitarian redistribution of wealth, and no case what- soever to be made for such redistribution from the general theory of prop- erty just sketched, purged as it is of the Lockean proviso, with all the egalitarian mischief-making the proviso has made possible.
1/28/22
JF - T - All of outer space
Tournament: Blake- John Edie Holiday Debates | Round: 4 | Opponent: Apple Valley KW | Judge: Mark Kivimaki Interp: "The appropriation of outer space " denotes the totality of outer space. The aff may not defend a subset of outer space for which appropriation is unjust. Sharvy 80 Richard Sharvy, philosopher. "A More General Theory of Definite Descriptions on JSTOR," The Philosophical Review, Vol. 89, No. 4, Oct. 1980, accessed 8-22-2021, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2184738 HWIC 3. Definite Plural Descriptions. Phrases like 'the sheep in New Zealand' and 'the people in Auckland' are also ordinary and common definite descriptions, and they do denote. But because their contained predicates are plural predicates like 'are people in Auckland', which apply to more than one object, such expressions are not subject to a Russellian analysis. There is no such thing as (ax * x are people in Auckland), since a number of distinct items satisfy the predicate-the men in Auckland are people in Auckland, and so are the women in Auckland and the children in Auckland. The definite plural description 'the people in Auckland' designates the sum or totality of all the people in Auckland. This is the sum of all that to which the predicate 'are people in Auckland' applies: the sum of all the items such as the women in Auckland, the children in Auckland, etc., that satisfy the plural predicate 'are people in Auckland'. What sort of entity is the denotation of a definite plural description such as 'the children in Auckland'? A first attempt might be to say that such expressions denote sets or classes. Then a sum of such items would be the union of such classes. Russell would insist on calling the people in Auckland a "class as many" (1903, pp. 68-72, 76-77). But if the predicate 'are people in Auckland' is taken to apply to x just if x is a set of people in Auckland,5 then the definite plural description 'the people in Auckland' refers to the union of these sets: U {x: x is a set of people in Auckland). So let us first consider set-theoretic union as a candidate for the sort of sum needed here in the analysis of definite plural descriptions. This might seem more complicated than '{x: x is a person in Auckland)', which refers to the same class. But the former expression has the advantage of preserving the predicate as a plural predicate, as it appeared in the original definite plural description. A standard definition of union is U a = {x: (ay) (x ecy .y E a)) (cf. Quine 1963, p. 53). In my notation this would be written: Ua = {x:xe(Qy yEa)) -the x's that are a member of some member of a. Quine observes 5I do not say 'nonempty' simply because it would be redundant: no class of people is empty. I do include the singletons, so that {Sharvy} are people in Auckland. This might seem odd. However, the instances or instantiations of 'all men are mortal' include sentences like 'Sharvy is mortal' along with sentences like 'the men in Auckland are mortal'; thus, the plural does include the singular. Notice that 'all men are mortal' should be symbolized ' (x are men D x are mortal)'; logic students are generally wrongly taught to write ' (x is a man D x is mortal)', which is more properly a symbolization of 'every man is mortal', which has the singular subject 'every man'. 616 This content downloaded from 92.63.104.30 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 13:35:30 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions DEFINITE DESCRIPTIONS that if everything is a class, this definition implies that the union U {x} of a singleton is its member x; this effect is preserved for an apparent nonclass by identifying it with its own unit class. So with this convention, if G applies to exactly one object, then U {x: Gx} = ( 7x . Gx ). So the Russellian definite singular description again emerges, here as a species of definite plural description.6 This would occur with, e.g., 'the men in this room' if there were exactly one man in the room. Notice also that plural predicates, like mass predicates, are cumulative: any sum of parts which are cats are cats. So 'G(the G)' holds for any instantiated plural predicate when 'the G' is defined as such a sum: the men in Auckland are men in Auckland, the poor are poor, etc. The analysis of definite plural description as union is not entirely satisfactory. One reason is that it explicitly uses the mechanism of class abstraction and the membership relation in a way that requires that such definite plural descriptions do denote classes. Now there is no problem about what 'the people in Auckland' denotes: it denotes the people in Auckland. Whether the people in Auckland are a set or class is an ontological question that should be discussed elsewhere. (Indeed, ontological questions generally should be independent of a theory of descriptions: we should be able to explain phrases like 'the first symphony of Beethoven' without discussing the ontological nature of symphonies.) My aim here is simply to explain plural definite descriptions like 'the people in Auckland' in a way that remains neutral on that ontological question by avoiding explicitly settheoretic notions. Another reason to turn away from the above analysis of 'the C as 'U {x: Gx}' is that it lacks generality. It lets in too much 6 I thank W. V. Quine for calling my attention to this passage. 'one object' means 'one class'. Consider the predicate 'are men and women in this room', and suppose the room contains just one man, m, and one woman, w. Then only one object, {m,w} satisfies that predicate, and U {a: a are men and women in this room) = U {{m,w}} = {m,w} = (7a a are men and women in this room). See note 8 also. Consider the definite description 'the square root of 2'. This is ordinarily used to refer to the positive square root of 2. My theory explains this; if real numbers are defined in the usual way as lower cuts of rationals (cf. Russell 1903, ch. 33), the positive root is the union of the negative and positive roots. 617 This content downloaded from 92.63.104.30 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 13:35:30 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions RICHARD SHARVY when applied to a singular definite description whose contained predicate applies to more than one object: 'the author of PM' would denote {Whitehead, Russell). This was Frege's convention (?1 1), but it is clearly artificial; 'the author of PM' should fail to denote. And finally, 'U {x: Gx)' just doesn't look enough like the analysis given earlier of definite mass descriptions. Mass terms and plural terms are alike in numerous ways, and it would be nice if their uses in forming definite descriptions had analyses that reflected this similarity. Specifically, we should express summation without using the membership relation e, which has no analogue in the semantics of mass terms. The solution is to observe that there is a part of relation available: the men in Auckland are part of the people in Auckland. (This relation looks very much like the relation of being a nonempty subset of.) Writing it as '', we may then define 'the G' for plural predicates as (4) above: sm G that all G are part of. The requirement in (4) that x satisfy G is useful for distinguishing the definite plural description 'the authors of PM' from the definite singular description 'the author of PM'. The former denotes Whitehead and Russell, as it should.7 Without the requirementhat x satisfy G, using (1) or simply union, so would the latter. But although Whitehead and Russell are authors of PM, they are not an author of PM. That requirement also leads to the intuitively correct results for expressions like 'the Wilmington Ten' and 'the five men in this room'. If there are only four men in this toom, the description 'the five men in this room' fails to denote because the predicate 'are five men in this room' applies to nothing. If there are six men in this room, then that description also fails to denote-not because that predicate applies to more than one item (i.e., to every part of the six containing just five men), but because it fails to apply to their sum. A word of caution about part is needed here. I am taking it in what I think is its plain and ordinary sense. However, Goodman, Quine, and other writers on the theory of parts (mereology) have used it in an extended sense which is not appropriate here. 7 But it does not denote Whitehead, and it does not denote Russell. The property of being denoted by an expression is not dissective. I may refer to something without referring to each of its parts. 618 This content downloaded from 92.63.104.30 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 13:35:30 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions DEFINITE DESCRIPTIONS The difference is that these writers combine mereology with a kind of materialism. (An exception is Foradori.) Thus Quine writes, "there are parts of water, sugar, and furniture too small to count as water, sugar, furniture" (1960, p. 99). Here, by 'parts of furniture' he means something like 'spatiotemporally determined parts of the material constituting the world's furniture'; by 'parts of water' he means 'spatiotemporally determined parts of the world's water'. However, in the ordinary sense of 'part', the parts of water are hydrogen and oxygen. In the ordinary sense of part, shrimp is a part of shrimp salad. Here, the words 'shrimp' and 'shrimp salad' refer to types or kinds, and not to the world's shrimp and the world's shrimp salad. Indeed, the world's shrimp is not part of the world's shrimp salad. Now, my furniture is part of the world's furniture, and the chair in my billiard room is part of my furniture. But is a leg of that chair part of my furniture? I doubt it. In a distinguishable sense of 'part', a leg of my chair is a part of that chair and a part of my furniture. In the plural of that same sense, the legs are parts of my furniture. But those legs are not part of my furniture. The matter of the legs is part of the matter of the furniture; also, the chairs in my billiard room are part of my furniture. But the legs of the chairs are not part of the furniture. The men in Auckland are part of the men and women in Auckland, but the arms of the men in Auckland are not part of the men and women in Auckland. The explanation is not that the arms fail to satisfy the contained predicate 'are men and women in Auckland', for the men in Auckland also fail to be men and women in Auckland. Rather, the explanation is that x are part of y in this ordinary sense just if x are some ofy. Notice the difference between 'some' and 'some of. It's true that some of the men and women in Auckland are men, but false that some men and women in Auckland are men. It's true that some of the whiskey-and-water inmy glass is water, but false that some whiskey-and-water inmy glass is water. 'part of' and 'some of' seem to be synonymous here; examples like these occur with mass and plural predicates that are not dissective. The legs of my chair are not part of my furniture, because 619 This content downloaded from 92.63.104.30 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 13:35:30 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions RICHARD SHARVY it's false that they are some of my furniture. Given our understanding of 'part' then, being furniture and being men in Auckland are dissective properties; it is compounds like 'are men and women' that fail to be dissective. So only articles of furniture count as part of my furniture. It is a totally distinct feature of Goodman's system that causes his notion of 'part' to be broader than mine, so that, e.g., the chair legs are also part of my furniture. That feature is a sort of materialism. The set of my tables # the set of my table tops and legs; but the matter of my tables = the matter of my tops and legs. If we remove this materialism from mereology, we have a purer theory of part and whole, and consequently of sum. The mereological sum, then, of my articles of furniture is my furniture, and not the matter of my furniture. With this ordinary and intended sense of 'part', then, the expressions 'the counties of Utah' and 'the townships of Utah' will have distinct denotations, as they should. Without the distinction made above, they might appear to collapse into the same object, since the territory occupied by the counties is identical to that occupied by the townships; (px) (x is territory of (b.y) (y are counties, etc.) ) = etc. What sort of entity is denoted by the definite plural description 'the men in Auckland'? This question contains the mistaken implication that this phrase denotes a single entity. But the phrase 'the men in Auckland' obviously denotes the men in Auckland. One might ask, "What sort of entities are those?" But the answer is easy: they are entities that eat, drink, sleep, and are numerous. The error to avoid is an insistence on the singular. 'the men in Auckland' is not a singular term-it is a plural term. This should hardly need to be said. But some writers have gone astray by failing to see that plurals are plural, and so insisting that they must denote something singular. For example, Richard E. Grandy says that in the sentence 'Lions are widespread', " 'lions' must be a singular sic term denoting the class of lions" (p. 297). Given this, it will follow that a certain class is widespread (which does not seem as odd to me as it might to many). But what seems odd is that Grandy claims that it does not follow from his statement that any class is widespread; apparently 620 This content downloaded from 92.63.104.30 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 13:35:30 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions DEFINITE DESCRIPTIONS he prefers to give up the indiscernibility of identicals rather than the dogma that classes are "abstract." Now the words 'set' and 'class' have uses as dummy nominal measure words whose only function is the syntactic one of turning a plural into an apparent singular: the rational numbers are countable -- the set of rational numbers is countable. But no semantic consequences follow from such a use of the words 'set' and 'class'. The rational numbers are the set of rational numbers; the set of rational numbers is the rational numbers. The people in this room weigh 1000 kilograms; the set of people in this room weighs 1000 kg. The men in this room are not abstract; the set of men in this room is not abstract. We can avoid Grandy's contortions simply by taking the plural seriously as a plural, and abandoning the fetish for the singular that pervades contemporary decadent Western ontology. Along these same lines we can affirm that 'the world's lions are widespread' and (ii) 'the world's lions are mammalian' do have the same logical form. In particular, the form of (ii) is 'Ml' and not '(Lx D Mx)'; this is clear for . Question: how, then, does (ii), along with 'Aslan is a lion' imply 'Aslan is mammalian'? Answer: the implication is not a formal one at all, but depends on the fact that 'are mammalian' is dissective; 'are widespread' is not dissective. This situation is quite familiar: 'Ben weighs less than 60 kg' and 'Ben's nose is part of Ben' imply 'Ben's nose weighs less than 60 kg'. But again, the implication is not formal-it is not due to the logical form of these statements (this is easily seen by putting 'more' for 'less'). Rather, the implication holds because 'weighs less than 60 kg' is dissective. 4. Conclusion. For any given predicate G there is an appropriate part of or some of relation ? on the extension of G.8 Notice that 8The structure {x: Gx},?) is often a mereology, i.e., a model of the so-called calculus of individuals. But it may fail to be a mereology. Idefine a quasi-mereology to be any structure (S, ?) where ? partially orders S (reflexive, transitive, antisymmetric), and where the -least upper bound of a is a member of S for every nonempty subset a of S. One interesting type of quasi-mereology results from taking the algebraic direct product of two 621 This content downloaded from 92.63.104.30 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 13:35:30 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions RICHARD SHARVY for most singular count predicates, is just the identity relation: for 'is a shoe I own' is the identity relation, for the extension of that predicate contains no two objects of which either is part of the other. Regardless of how many shoes I own, x - y only if x = y, for every x and y in that domain. In all such cases, '( px Gx )' defined as (4) comes out as desired, designating the gold in Zurich or the men in Auckland; and if I own just one shoe, '( pxS x is a shoe I own)' designates it, but otherwise that description fails. The analysis of 'the G' as (4) is therefore a general theory of definite descriptions, of which definite mass descriptions, definite plural descriptions, and Russellian definite singular count descriptions are species.9 full mereologies. (This description of the situation is due to Mark Nixon.) For example, (M, ) X W. 5), where M is the set of sets of men and W is the set of sets of women, is isomorphic to (MW, 5), where MW is the set of sets of men and women, i.e., of sets containing at least one man and one woman. (MW, C ) is simply the corresponding quasi-mereology of the predicate 'are men and women'; this predicate is satisfied by the people in Auckland (they are men and women), but not by the men in Auckland. The structure fails to be a mereology because it is not properly closed under subtraction: there are sets a, b, each of which are men and women, and where a - b is not null yet fails to be men and women; a - b might just be men. However, we can combine the mereologies (M, C) and W, 5) so that a mereology results. Add the null element to each, take the direct product, and then remove the null element: ((M U {4}, 5) X (W U {4}, 5))- ((4,4), 5). This is isomorphic to the mereology corresponding to the predicate 'are adults', i.e., to the set of nonempty subsets of the set of all men and women, under subset: V(P(U (M U W)) - {4}, C). 9 We have an account of the generic 'the' along these same lines. The New Zealand Flag is a New Zealand flag to which every New Zealand flag bears a certain relation ?. This seems a little more natural if we add the syllables 'akes' or 'icipates' to the word 'part' in reading '' here: the New Zealand Flag is that New Zealand flag in which every New Zealand flag participates. The fact that it participates in itself does not lead to a "third man" regress, because participation in, as a variant of the part of relation, is not used to explain predication; predication remains primary. Of course, nothing in my discussion requires that there be such an entity (nor does anything here count against it). My theory is quite neutral. If there is such an entity, '( px x is a New Zealand flag)' picks it out. If there is no such entity, but merely a number of flags none of which bears ? to anything but itself, then ? is coextensive with the identity relation on those flags, and the situation is the same as for 'my shoe'. John Bacon, however, claims 622 This content downloaded from 92.63.104.30 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 13:35:30 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions DEFINITE DESCRIPTIONS With this analysis and some thought about examples of definite mass descriptions and definite plural descriptions, we see that the primary use of 'the' is not to indicate uniqueness. Rather, it is to indicate totality; implication of uniqueness is a side effect.
Violation:
1 Semantics outweigh: A Topicality is a constitutive rule of the activity and a basic aff burden, they agreed to debate the topic when they came to the tournament B Jurisdiction -- you can’t vote affirmative if they haven’t affirmed C It’s the only stasis point we know before the round so it controls the internal link to engagement, and there’s no way to use ground if debaters aren’t prepared to defend it.
2 Limits and ground: Quantitative – space is infinite, allowing the aff to spec any subset of space would lead to infite affs– unlimited topics incentivize obscure affs that negs won’t have prep on – limits are key to reciprocal prep burden, even if I am prepped the aff could still pick a non controversial part of space with no neg ground
3 TVA solves – read the aff as advantage – CHM lands as priorty
1/28/22
ND - DA - Reconciliation
Tournament: Princeton | Round: 4 | Opponent: La Salle ZW | Judge: Tara Riggs Reconciliation passes now - Biden PC is key to getting democratic skeptics on board, but it’s tentative Cochrane and Weisman 11/05 Emily Cochrane - correspondent based in Washington. She has covered Congress since late 2018, focusing on the annual debate over government funding and economic legislation, ranging from emergency pandemic relief to infrastructure, Jonathan Weisman - congressional correspondent, veteran Washington journalist and author of the novel “No. 4 Imperial Lane” and the nonfiction book “
Semitism
: Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump.” His career in journalism stretches back 30 years, “Live Updates: House Democrats Push Toward Votes on Biden’s Agenda”, 11-05-2021, https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/11/05/us/biden-spending-infrastructure-bill//pranav At the White House, Mr. Biden called on lawmakers to pass the legislation. “I’m asking every House member, member of the House of Representatives, to vote yes on both these bills right now,” the president said. Spooked by Tuesday’s electoral drubbing, Democrats labored to overcome concerns among moderates about the cost and details of a rapidly evolving, $1.85 trillion social safety net and climate plan and push it through over unified Republican opposition. They also hoped to clear a Senate-passed $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill — the largest investment in the nation’s aging public works in a decade — for Mr. Biden’s signature. Top Democratic officials said they were confident they could complete both measures by day’s end, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and her team continued to haggle with holdouts. Several moderates were pushing for more information about the cost of the sprawling plan, including a nonpartisan analysis from the Congressional Budget Office, the official scorekeeper responsible for calculating the fiscal impact of the 2,135-page legislation. “I think everyone’s waiting for the C.B.O. to do their job,” said Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, speaking to reporters on Friday morning as he left Ms. Pelosi’s office, where White House officials were also meeting on next steps. But Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader, said the cost estimate would not be ready by the end of the day, and a person familiar with the discussions said a score from the budget office was weeks away from completion. “We’re working on it,” Mr. Hoyer said. Ms. Pelosi spent much of the day on Thursday buttonholing lawmakers on the House floor to try to corral support for the social policy bill, which includes monthly payments to families with children, universal prekindergarten, a four-week paid family and medical leave program, health care subsidies and a broad array of climate change initiatives. Mr. Biden and members of his cabinet worked the phones to win over Democratic skeptics. With Republicans united in opposition, Democrats could afford to lose as few as three votes from their side. As Democrats labored to unite their members behind the bill, Republicans sought to wreak procedural havoc on the House floor, forcing a vote to adjourn the chamber that leaders held open for hours to buy time for their negotiations. While the Senate approved the $1 trillion infrastructure bill in August, the measure has stalled as progressives have repeatedly refused to supply their votes for it until there is agreement on the other bill. Business lobbying backlash ensures Sinema flips – empirics prove she doesn’t like similar bills Duda ’21 Jeremy, Prior to joining the Arizona Mirror, he worked at the Arizona Capitol Times, where he spent eight years covering the Governor's Office and two years as editor of the Yellow Sheet Report, “Business groups urge Kelly, Sinema to oppose pro-union PRO Act”, 08-30-2021, https://www.azmirror.com/2021/08/30/business-groups-urge-kelly-sinema-to-oppose-pro-union-pro-act///pranav Business groups publicly called on Democratic U.S. Sens. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema to oppose a sweeping piece of pro-organized labor legislation that would wipe out Arizona’s “right-to-work” law that prohibits mandatory union membership. At a press conference at the office of the Arizona chapter of the Associated General Contractors near the state Capitol on Monday, leaders of several business groups warned that the Protecting the Right to Organize Act — or PRO Act, as it’s more commonly known — would undermine Arizona’s recovery from the economic slump it faced last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, undermine the “gig economy,” jeopardize secret ballots in union organization votes, give unions access to confidential employee information and strip Arizonans of their right not to join a union. The bill would allow unions to override right-to-work laws and collect union dues from non-members who still benefit from collective bargaining. It would also prohibit company-sponsored meetings to urge employees against unionizing, define most independent contractors as employees, protect employees who are attempting to unionize from being fired and allow unions to engage in secondary strikes in support of other striking workers, among other provisions. “We want to thank and tell Senator Sinema and Senator Kelly that we appreciate them for not signing on as co-sponsors to the PRO Act, because if they were to change their opinions, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer will put this up for a vote,” said Danny Seiden, president and CEO of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Kelly and Sinema are two of only three Senate Democrats, along with Virginia’s Mark Warner, who haven’t co-sponsored the bill or thrown their public support behind it. Kelly last month told the Huffington Post that he opposes the independent contractor provision, but that he supports the “overall goals” of the legislation. Sinema is widely known as a holdout on the Democratic side and hasn’t supported the PRO Act, but spokesman Pablo Sierra-Carmona indicated that she hasn’t made up her mind, and that she won’t do so unless and until it comes up for a vote in the Senate. They lash out against Reconciliation – it includes similar provisions FURCHTGOTT-ROTH 10/09 Diana, former acting assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, is adjunct professor of economics at George Washington University, “Democrats can't pass the PRO Act, so it's buried in the reconciliation bill”, 10-09-2021, https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/575992-dems-cant-pass-the-pro-act-so-its-buried-in-the-reconciliation-bill//pranav Union membership has been declining for decades as workers find better uses than union dues for their hard-earned dollars. But union bosses and their supporters are trying to change the law to force hard-working Americans into unions. How? Through the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), a bill that would expand the power of union leaders at the expense of workers. After sailing through the House, the PRO Act now appears stalled in the Senate and Democrats are trying to slip some PRO Act provisions into a massive reconciliation bill. American workers are wise to turn down union membership. Union pension plans are in trouble. In 2020, the Labor Department listed 121 union plans in critical status, defined as less than 65 percent funded, and 61 in endangered status, with less than 80 percent funded. Unions desperately need new workers to join, because they pay contributions for many years without withdrawing money. Most recently, Amazon workers in Alabama resoundingly rejected efforts by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store International Union to organize their plant, with more than 70 percent of workers voting against the union. The union’s plan was in critical status between 2015 and 2019, and the Labor Department informed the plan’s administrators that it had to be reorganized by reducing benefits and increasing contributions. Union leaders and their allies on Capitol Hill believe the way to increase membership after decades of decline is to pass elements of the PRO Act through reconciliation. Unlike the PRO Act, which needs 60 votes in the Senate to enable it to move to President Biden’s desk for signature, the reconciliation bill, which deals with taxes and spending, needs only a simple majority. So via a massive reconciliation bill, congressional Democrats are trying to move some labor union provisions of the PRO Act by arguing they are actually revenue raisers. Reconciliation is k2 stopping existential climate change – warming is incremental and every change in temperature is vital Higgins 8/16 Trevor, Senior Director, Domestic Climate and Energy, “Budget Reconciliation Is the Key to Stopping Climate Change”, 08-16-2021, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2021/08/16/502681/budget-reconciliation-key-stopping-climate-change///pranav The United States is suffering acutely from the chaotic changes in climate that scientists now directly attribute to the burning of fossil fuels and other human activity. The drought, fires, extreme heat, and floods that have already killed hundreds this summer across the continent and around the world are a tragedy—and a warning of worsening instability yet to come. However, this week, the Senate initiated an extraordinary legislative response that would set the world on a different path. Enacting the full scope of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda would put the American economy to work leading a global transition to clean energy and stabilizing the climate. A look at what’s coming next through the budget reconciliation process reveals a ray of hope that is easy to miss amid the fitful negotiations of recent months: At long last, Congress is on the verge of major legislation that would build a more equitable, just, and inclusive clean energy economy. This is our shot to stop climate change. Building a clean energy future must start now Until the global economy stops polluting the air and instead starts to draw down the emissions of years past, the world will continue to heat up, blundering past perilous tipping points that threaten irreversible and catastrophic consequences. Stemming the extent of warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius rather 2 degrees or worse will reduce the risk of crossing such tipping points or otherwise exceeding the adaptive capacity of human society. Every degree matters. Stabilizing global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius starts with cutting annual greenhouse gas emissions in the United States to half of peak levels by 2030. This isn’t about temporary offsets or incremental gains in efficiency—it’s about the rapid adoption of scalable solutions that will work throughout the world to eliminate global net emissions by 2050 and sustain net-negative emissions thereafter. Building this better future will tackle climate change, deliver on environmental justice, and create good jobs. It will give us a shot to stop the planet from continuously warming. It will alleviate the concentrated burdens of fossil fuel pollution, which are concentrated in systemically disadvantaged, often majority Black and brown communities. It will empower American workers to compete in the global clean energy economy of the 21st century. There is no time to lose in the work of building a clean energy future.
12/5/21
ND - K - Communicative Ecstasy
Tournament: Blue Key | Round: 5 | Opponent: Strake EP | Judge: Arjan Kang Capitalism is accelerating- the rate of physical and knowledge production and growth of capitalistic desires is increasing faster than ever before. At every second, thousands of bits of new information and and products are created. Competing claims make finding truth impossible: everything undergoes reproduction infinitely - copies have copies of copies; the original item is no longer locatable. However, these copies can often contain contradictory or inconsistent info, thus making truth harder to find- means seeking meaning becomes meaningless and impossible. e.g. Trumps’s inaugaration- from one angle, Fox News and his own social accounts depict a huge crowd of over a million, but from a different source like CNN or Vox, there were only 300,000. We have no idea who to trust and what is the full truth. The resulting world is the hyperreality- a place where copies upon copies of the original text exist in the capitalist space devoid of meaning. Binding claims must begin with hyperreality: A Empiricism: subject’s conceptions of the external world are filtered through the lens of accelerated capitalism, wherein the proliferation of images makes truth and falsity increasingly difficult to differentiate between. B Circular: Questioning hyperreality concedes the authority of hyperreality because 1 it displays the radical confusion increased signs inflicts on subjects and 2 exemplifies the detachment between signifier – the very word “hyperreality” – and signified – the world as we believe we know it Next, the relevant feature of late stage capitalism is accelerationism: as production increases, the goal of the very producing has oriented towards production for the sake of production. Clear objectives die as information is disseminated with the goal of merely reproducing, as opposed to reproducing with knowledge intact.
Thus, the standard is to vote for the debater who best ruptures hyperreality. Prefer:
1 Critical Subjectivity: the capacity to reflect is premised upon the view of a cohesive subject, which papers over the way signifiers from flesh – both intrinsic and inflicted – transform the I 2 Academia: contemporary pedagogical sites have been coopted by mindless bureaucrats – ethical subjects have an a priori commitment to dismantle overcoding in spaces of movement building and organization 3 Performativity: debate is premised upon a mutual value ascribed to each agent in the room, which necessitates an understanding of the gap between signifier and signified to comprehend why we value the site itself.
Survival rhetoric organizes around those who can claim they’ve overcame in a consumable form to be marketed and sold as a good in the symbolic economy. The aff steps into the role of the archiver that translates resilience into empty communicative signs that ultimately get coopted. James 15 Robin James is an Associate Professor of Philosophy @ UNC Charlotte. “Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism, Publisher: Zero Books p. 88-92 MRWSaP= early 21st-century globalized Western race/gender/sexuality/capitalist hegemony Resilience must be performed explicitly, legibly, and spectacularly. Overcoming is necessary but insufficient; to count and function as resilience, this overcoming must be accomplished in a visible or otherwise legible and consumable manner. Overcoming is a type of “affective labor” which, as Steven Shaviro puts it, “is productive only to the extent that it is a public performance. It cannot unfold in the hidden depths; it must be visible and audible” (PCA 49n33) In order to tune into feminine resilience and feed it back into its power supply, MRWaSP has to perceive it as such. “Look,! Overcame!” is the resilient subject’s maxim or mantra. Gender and race have always been “visible identities,” to use philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff’s term, identities strongly tied to one’s outward physical appearance. However, gendered/racialized resilience isn’t visible in the same way that conventional gender and racial identities are visible. To clarify these differences, it’s helpful to think of resilience in terms of a “Look, I overcame!” imperative. “Look, I Overcame!” Is easy to juxtapose to Frantz Fanon’s “Look a Negro!”, which is the touch stone for his analysis of gendered racialization in “The Fact of Blackness.” In both cases, looking is a means of crafting race/gender identities and distributing white patriarchal privilege. But, in the same way that resilience discourse “upgrades” traditional methods for crafting identities and distributing privilege, the “looking” in “Look, I Overcame’” is an upgrade on the “looking” in “Look, a Negro” According to Fanon, the exclamation “Look, a Negro!” racializes him as a black man. To be “a Negro” is to be objectified by the white supremacist gaze. This gaze fixes him as an object, rather than an ambiguous transcendence (which is a more nuanced way of describing the existentialist concept of subjectivity). “The black man,” as Fanon argues, “has no ontological resistance for the white man” (BSWM 110) because, as an object and not a mutually-recognized subject, he cannot return the white man’s gaze (“The Look” that is so important to Sartre’s theory of subjectivity in Being and Nothingness). The LIO narrative differs from Fanon’s account in the same way it differs from Iris Young’s account of feminine body comportment: in resilience discourse, objectification isn’t an end but a means, any impediment posed by the damage wrought by the white/male gaze Is a necessary prerequisite for subjectivity, agency, and mutual recognition. In other words, being looked at isn’t an impediment, but a resource. Resilience discourse turns objectification (being looked at) into a means of subjectificatlon (overcoming). It also makes looking even more efficient and profitable than simple objectification could ever be. Recognizing and affirming the affective labor of the resilient performer, the spectator feeds the performer’s individual overcoming Into a second-order therapeutic narrative: our approbation of her overcoming is evidence of our own overcoming of our past prejudices. This spectator wants to be seen by a wider audience as someone who answers the resilient feminine subject’s hail, “Look, I Overcame’. Just as individual feminine subjects use their resilience as proof of their own goodness, MRWaSP uses the resilience of its “good girls” as proof that they’re the “good guys” — that its social and ethical practices are truly just, and that we really mean it this time when we say everyone is equal. For example, the “resilience” of “our” women is often contrasted with the supposed “fragility” of Third-World women of color. Or, in domestic US race-gender politics, the resilience of some African-American women (their bootstraps-style class ascendance) is contrasted to the continued fragility of other African-American women, and thus used to reinforce class distinctions among blacks. There are a million different versions of this general story: “our” women are already liberated — they saved themselves —but, to riff on Gayatri Spivak, “brown women need saving from brown men.” Most mainstream conversations about Third-World women are versions of this story: discussions of “Muslim” veiling, female circumcision, sweatshops, poverty ‘development.” they’re are all white-saviorist narratives meant to display MRWaSP’s own resilience. Look, I Overcame!” upgrades ‘Look, a Negro’ by (a) recycling objectification into overcoming and (b) compounding looking, so that one can profit from others’ resilience, treating their overcoming as one’s own overcoming. This upgrade in white supremacist patriarchy requires a concomitant upgrade in looking.” This shift in looking practices parallels developments in film and media aesthetics. As Steven Shaviro has argued, the values, techniques, and compositional strategies most common in contemporary mainstream Western cinema — like Michael Bay’s Transformers—are significantly different than the ones used in modernist and post-modernist cinema, and that these differences in media production correlate to broader shifts in the means of capitalist and ideological production. Neoliberalism’s aesthetic is, he argues, “post-cinematic.” This post-cinematic aesthetic applies not just to film and media, but to resilience discourse. Its performance practices and looking relations configured by the “Look. I Overcame!” imperative, resilience is, in a way, another type of post-cinematic medium. In the next section I use Shaviro’s theory of post-cinematic media to identify some specific ways in which traditional patriarchal tools are updated to work compatibly with MRWaSP resilience discourse. The looking in the “Look, I Overcame!” narrative is not the same kind of looking described by concepts like “the male gaze” or “controlling images” This looking is a type of deregulated MRWaSP visualization. Illusion of posting thoughts into outside worl- illusion of public eye for affective investments The system requires its participants to be both subjects, to strive for false liberation, and objects, to ultimately submit to the will of the hyperreal. Engaging in “liberatory practices” fuel the system. Baudrillard 81 Jean; Simulacra and Simulation; French Sociologist/Philosopher; 1981; University of Michigan Press; LCA-BP *edited for lang With one caution. We are face to face with this system in a double situation and insoluble double bind - exactly like children faced with the demands of the adult world. Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects. The child resists on all levels, and to a contradictory demand he responds with a double strategy. To the demand of being an object, they opposes all the practices of disobedience, of revolt, of emancipation; in short, a total claim to subjecthood. To the demand of being a subject they opposes, just as obstinately and efficaciously, an object's resistance, that is to say, exactly the opposite: childishness, hyperconformism, total dependence, passivity, idiocy. Neither strategy has more objective value than the other. The subject-resistance is today unilaterally valorized and viewed as positive - just as in the political sphere only the practices of freedom, emancipation, expression, and the constitution of a political subject are seen as valuable and subversive. But this is to ignore the equal, and without a doubt superior, impact of all the object practices, of the renunciation of the subject position and of meaning - precisely the practices of the masses - that we bury under the derisory terms of alienation and passivity. The liberating practices respond to one of the aspects of the system, to the constant ultimatum we are given to constitute ourselves as pure objects, but they do not respond at all to the other demand, that of constituting ourselves as subjects, of liberating ourselves, expressing ourselves at whatever cost, of voting, producing, deciding, speaking, participating, playing the game - a form of blackmail and ultimatum just as serious as the other, even more serious today. To a system whose argument is oppression and repression, the strategic resistance is the liberating claim of subjecthood. But this strategy is more reflective of the earlier phase of the system, and even if we are still confronted with it, it is no longer the strategic terrain: the current argument of the system is to maximize speech, the maximum production of meaning. Thus the strategic resistance is that of the refusal of meaning and of the spoken word - or of the hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is a form of refusal and of non-reception. It is the strategy of the masses: it is equivalent to returning to the system its own logic by doubling it, to reflecting meaning, like a mirror, without absorbing it. This strategy (if one can still speak of strategy) prevails today, because it was ushered in by that phase of the system which prevails. To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter. All the movements that only play on liberation, emancipation, on the resurrection of a subject of history, of the group, of the word based on "consciousness raising," indeed a "raising of the unconscious" of subjects and of the masses, do not see that they are going in the direction of the system, whose imperative today is precisely the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of speech.
The intensity with which information is disseminated leads to chronic cynicism – issues seem too complex to be helped, so the public doesn’t undertake change Gao Liyan; prof @ Monash; “Ideological cynicism in the modern information age with Sloterdijk and Zizek”; Eras Journal vol18no1; LCA-BP In our information-obsessed society, people are bombarded with more information than they can process and comprehend. Paul Virilio identifies two aspects to the way the public consumes information that are peculiar to new media. First, the sheer speed at which we receive information diminishes the time for digestion, contemplation and reflection. Secondly, the immense diffusion of viewpoints creates a kind of mass aporia that debilitates our ability to act in any particular direction. Virilio argues just as the military may deliberately plant multiple viewpoints within the public sphere to crush potential dissent, the public can become overwhelmed with information and push the issue aside as something too complex to understand: they are unable or unwilling to form an oppositional stance. The function of new media is the same. 29 Given the multitude of problems facing modern society, we need to prioritise how to spend our limited energies and resources as when the task looks too enormous and too difficult there are overwhelming feelings of disempowerment. Zizek compares the reporting of the Gulf War with that of the Bosnian War. In the former, the employment of ‘evil versus good’ framing was used to demonise Saddam Hussein and to justify the war. In the latter, journalists focused on the complexities of the issue including the long history of conflict in the region.30 Though this approach informs people of more facts, it clouds the brute reality that ethnic cleansing and genocide was rife during the war. By painting the Bosnian War as too complex for both citizens and politicians of the West to understand, people were absolved from the responsibility of intervening in the crisis. Cynicism is this aporia raised to the level of a psychological barrier: new media can present world problems as too complicated, too extensive, too global, beyond the control and understanding of any one individual, and thus, as problems we cannot hope to intervene in or politically organise to oppose. Merely being more knowledgeable about the complexity of the problems in our society does not dispel ideology nor is it necessarily empowering. When we feel overwhelmed and disempowered to change the current situation and condition, we learn to adapt and accept them. Subsequently, numbness and apathy comes from paradoxically caring.
Thus, the alternative is to embrace radical nihilism. Capitalism engages in unending reproduction, so a drainage of excess solves. A society that maintains capitalist production is contingent upon subjects that are forced to labor under hyperreality – so we let the system collapse in on itself. Baudrillard 4 Jean; Simulacra and Simulation; Sociologist/Philosopher, cool dude; 1981; University of Michigan Press; LCA-BP Nihilism no longer wears the dark, Wagnerian, Spenglerian, fuliginous colors of the end of the century. It no longer comes from a Weltanschauung of decadence nor from a metaphysical radicality born of the death of God and of all the consequences that must be taken from this death. Today's nihilism is one of transparency, and it is in some sense more radical, more crucial than in its prior and historical forms, because this transparency, this irresolution is indissolubly that of the system, and that of all the theory that still pretends to analyze it. When God died, there was still Nietzsche to say so - the great nihilist before the Eternal and the cadaver of the Eternal. But before the simulated transparency of all things, before the simulacrum of the materialist or idealist realization of the world in hyperreality (God is not dead, he has become hyper-real), there is no longer a theoretical or critical God to recognize his own. The universe, and all of us, have entered live into simulation, into the malefic, not even malefic, indifferent, sphere of deterrence: in a bizarre fashion, nihilism has been entirely realized no longer through destruction, but through simulation and deterrence. From the active, violent phantasm, from the phantasm of the myth and the stage that it also was, historically, it has passed into the transparent, falsely transparent, operation of things. What then remains of a possible nihilism in theory? What new scene can unfold, where nothing and death could be replayed as a challenge, as a stake? We are in a new, and without a doubt insoluble, position in relation to prior forms of nihilism: Romanticism is its first great manifestation: it, along with the Enlightenment's Revolution, corresponds to the destruction of the order of appearances. Surrealism, dada, the absurd, and political nihilism are the second great manifestation, which corresponds to the destruction of the order of meaning. The first is still an aesthetic form of nihilism (dandyism), the second, a political, historical, and metaphysical form (terrorism). These two forms no longer concern us except in part, or not at all. The nihilism of transparency is no longer either aesthetic or political, no longer borrows from either the extermination of appearances, nor from extinguishing the embers of meaning, nor from the last nuances of an apocalypse. There is no longer an apocalypse (only aleatory terrorism still tries to reflect it, but it is certainly no longer political, and it only has one mode of manifestation left that is at the same time a mode of disappearance: the media - now the media are not a stage where something is played, they are a strip, a track, a perforated map of which we are no longer even spectators: receivers). The apocalypse is finished, today it is the precession of the neutral, of forms of the neutral and of indifference. I will leave it to be considered whether there can be a romanticism, an aesthetic of the neutral therein. I don't think so - all that remains, is the fascination for desertlike and indifferent forms, for the very operation of the system that annihilates us. Now, fascination (in contrast to seduction, which was attached to appearances, and to dialectical reason, which was attached to meaning) is a nihilistic passion par excellence, it is the passion proper to the mode of disappearance. We are fascinated by all forms of disappearance, of our disappearance. Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary transparency. I am a nihilist. I observe, I accept, I assume the immense process of the destruction of appearances (and of the seduction of appearances) in the service of meaning (representation, history, criticism, etc.) that is the fundamental fact of the nineteenth century. The true revolution of the nineteenth century, of modernity, is the radical destruction of appearances, the disenchantment of the world and its abandonment to the violence of interpretation and of history. I observe, I accept, I assume, I analyze the second revolution, that of the twentieth century, that of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning, equal to the earlier destruction of appearances. He who strikes with meaning is killed by meaning. The dialectic stage, the critical stage is empty. There is no more stage. There is no therapy of meaning or therapy through meaning: therapy itself is part of the generalized process of indifferentiation. The stage of analysis itself has become uncertain, aleatory: theories float (in fact, nihilism is impossible, because it is still a desperate but determined theory, an imaginary of the end, a weltanschauung of catastrophe).*1 Analysis is itself perhaps the decisive element of the immense process of the freezing over of meaning. The surplus of meaning that theories bring, their competition at the level of meaning is completely secondary in relation to their coalition in the glacial and four-tiered operation of dissection and transparency. One must be conscious that, no matter how the analysis proceeds, it proceeds toward the freezing over of meaning, it assists in the precession of simulacra and of indifferent forms. The desert grows. Implosion of meaning in the media. Implosion of the social in the masses. Infinite growth of the masses as a function of the acceleration of the system. Energetic impasse. Point of inertia. A destiny of inertia for a saturated world. The phenomena of inertia are accelerating (if one can say that). The arrested forms proliferate, and growth is immobilized in excrescence. Such is also the secret of the hypertelie, of what goes further than its own end. It would be our own mode of destroying finalities: going further, too far in the same direction - destruction of meaning through simulation, hypersimulation, hypertelie. Denying its own end through hyperfinality (the crustacean, the statues of Easter Island) - is this not also the obscene secret of cancer? Revenge of excrescence on growth, revenge of speed on inertia. The masses themselves are caught up in a gigantic process of inertia through acceleration. They are this excrescent, devouring, process that annihilates all growth and all surplus meaning. They are this circuit short-circuited by a monstrous finality. It is this point of inertia and what happens outside this point of inertia that today is fascinating, enthralling (gone, therefore, the discreet charm of the dialectic). If it is nihilistic to privilege this point of inertia and the analysis of this irreversibility of systems up to the point of no return, then I am a nihilist. If it is nihilistic to be obsessed by the mode of disappearance, and no longer by the mode of production, then I am a nihilist. Disappearance, aphanisis, implosion, Fury of Verschwindens. Transpolitics is the elective sphere of the mode of disappearance (of the real, of meaning, of the stage, of history, of the social, of the individual). To tell the truth, it is no longer so much a question of nihilism: in disappearance, in the desertlike, aleatory, and indifferent form, there is no longer even pathos, the pathetic of nihilism - that mythical energy that is still the force of nihilism, of radicality, mythic denial, dramatic anticipation. It is no longer even disenchantment, with the seductive and nostalgic, itself enchanted, tonality of disenchantment. It is simply disappearance. The trace of this radicality of the mode of disappearance is already found in Adorno and Benjamin, parallel to a nostalgic exercise of the dialectic. Because there is a nostalgia of the dialectic, and without a doubt the most subtle dialectic is nostalgic to begin with. But more deeply, there is in Benjamin and Adorno another tonality, that of a melancholy attached to the system itself, one that is incurable and beyond any dialectic. It is this melancholia of systems that today takes the upper hand through the ironically transparent forms that surround us. It is this melancholia that is becoming our fundamental passion. It is no longer the spleen or the vague yearnings of the fin-de-siecle soul. It is no longer nihilism either, which in some sense aims at normalizing everything through destruction, the passion of resentment (ressentiment).*2 No, melancholia is the fundamental tonality of functional systems, of current systems of simulation, of programming and information. Melancholia is the inherent quality of the mode of the disappearance of meaning, of the mode of the volatilization of meaning in operational systems. And we are all melancholic. Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems. Once the hope of balancing good and evil, true and false, indeed of confronting some values of the same order, once the more general hope of a relation of forces and a stake has vanished. Everywhere, always, the system is too strong: hegemonic. Against this hegemony of the system, one can exalt the ruses of desire, practice revolutionary micrology of the quotidian, exalt the molecular drift or even defend cooking. This does not resolve the imperious necessity of checking the system in broad daylight. This, only terrorism can do. It is the trait of reversion that effaces the remainder, just as a single ironic smile effaces a whole discourse, just as a single flash of denial in a slave effaces all the power and pleasure of the master. The more hegemonic the system, the more the imagination is struck by the smallest of its reversals. The challenge, even infinitesimal, is the image of a chain failure. Only this reversibility without a counterpart is an event today, on the nihilistic and disaffected stage of the political. Only it mobilizes the imaginary. If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us. But such a sentiment is Utopian. Because it would be beautiful to be a nihilist, if there were still a radicality - as it would be nice to be a terrorist, if death, including that of the terrorist, still had meaning. But it is at this point that things become insoluble. Because to this active nihilism of radicality, the system opposes its own, the nihilism of neutralization. The system is itself also nihilistic, in the sense that it has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference. In this system, death itself shines by virtue of its absence. (The Bologna train station, the Oktoberfest in Munich: the dead are annulled by indifference, that is where terrorism is the involuntary accomplice of the whole system, not politically, but in the accelerated form of indifference that it contributes to imposing.)
10/31/21
ND - K - Communicative Ecstasy v2
Tournament: Princeton | Round: Quarters | Opponent: Strath Haven AM | Judge: micah thode, ethan massa, joshua stpeter Capitalism is accelerating- the rate of physical and knowledge production and growth of capitalistic desires is increasing faster than ever before. At every second, thousands of bits of new information and and products are created. Competing claims make finding truth impossible: everything undergoes reproduction infinitely - copies have copies of copies; the original item is no longer locatable. However, these copies can often contain contradictory or inconsistent info, thus making truth harder to find- means seeking meaning becomes meaningless and impossible. e.g. Trumps’s inaugaration- from one angle, Fox News and his own social accounts depict a huge crowd of over a million, but from a different source like CNN or Vox, there were only 300,000. We have no idea who to trust and what is the full truth. The resulting world is the hyperreality- a place where copies upon copies of the original text exist in the capitalist space devoid of meaning. Binding claims must begin with hyperreality: A Empiricism: subject’s conceptions of the external world are filtered through the lens of accelerated capitalism, wherein the proliferation of images makes truth and falsity increasingly difficult to differentiate between. B Circular: Questioning hyperreality concedes the authority of hyperreality because 1 it displays the radical confusion increased signs inflicts on subjects and 2 exemplifies the detachment between signifier – the very word “hyperreality” – and signified – the world as we believe we know it Next, the relevant feature of late stage capitalism is accelerationism: as production increases, the goal of the very producing has oriented towards production for the sake of production. Clear objectives die as information is disseminated with the goal of merely reproducing, as opposed to reproducing with knowledge intact.
Thus, the standard is to vote for the debater who best ruptures hyperreality. Prefer:
1 Critical Subjectivity: the capacity to reflect is premised upon the view of a cohesive subject, which papers over the way signifiers from flesh – both intrinsic and inflicted – transform the I 2 Academia: contemporary pedagogical sites have been coopted by mindless bureaucrats – ethical subjects have an a priori commitment to dismantle overcoding in spaces of movement building and organization 3 Performativity: debate is premised upon a mutual value ascribed to each agent in the room, which necessitates an understanding of the gap between signifier and signified to comprehend why we value the site itself.
Survival rhetoric organizes around those who can claim they’ve overcame in a consumable form to be marketed and sold as a good in the symbolic economy. The aff steps into the role of the archiver that translates resilience into empty communicative signs that ultimately get coopted. That means we never achieve labor reform James 15 Robin James is an Associate Professor of Philosophy @ UNC Charlotte. “Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism, Publisher: Zero Books p. 88-92 MRWSaP= early 21st-century globalized Western race/gender/sexuality/capitalist hegemony Resilience must be performed explicitly, legibly, and spectacularly. Overcoming is necessary but insufficient; to count and function as resilience, this overcoming must be accomplished in a visible or otherwise legible and consumable manner. Overcoming is a type of “affective labor” which, as Steven Shaviro puts it, “is productive only to the extent that it is a public performance. It cannot unfold in the hidden depths; it must be visible and audible” (PCA 49n33) In order to tune into feminine resilience and feed it back into its power supply, MRWaSP has to perceive it as such. “Look,! Overcame!” is the resilient subject’s maxim or mantra. Gender and race have always been “visible identities,” to use philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff’s term, identities strongly tied to one’s outward physical appearance. However, gendered/racialized resilience isn’t visible in the same way that conventional gender and racial identities are visible. To clarify these differences, it’s helpful to think of resilience in terms of a “Look, I overcame!” imperative. “Look, I Overcame!” Is easy to juxtapose to Frantz Fanon’s “Look a Negro!”, which is the touch stone for his analysis of gendered racialization in “The Fact of Blackness.” In both cases, looking is a means of crafting race/gender identities and distributing white patriarchal privilege. But, in the same way that resilience discourse “upgrades” traditional methods for crafting identities and distributing privilege, the “looking” in “Look, I Overcame’” is an upgrade on the “looking” in “Look, a Negro” According to Fanon, the exclamation “Look, a Negro!” racializes him as a black man. To be “a Negro” is to be objectified by the white supremacist gaze. This gaze fixes him as an object, rather than an ambiguous transcendence (which is a more nuanced way of describing the existentialist concept of subjectivity). “The black man,” as Fanon argues, “has no ontological resistance for the white man” (BSWM 110) because, as an object and not a mutually-recognized subject, he cannot return the white man’s gaze (“The Look” that is so important to Sartre’s theory of subjectivity in Being and Nothingness). The LIO narrative differs from Fanon’s account in the same way it differs from Iris Young’s account of feminine body comportment: in resilience discourse, objectification isn’t an end but a means, any impediment posed by the damage wrought by the white/male gaze Is a necessary prerequisite for subjectivity, agency, and mutual recognition. In other words, being looked at isn’t an impediment, but a resource. Resilience discourse turns objectification (being looked at) into a means of subjectificatlon (overcoming). It also makes looking even more efficient and profitable than simple objectification could ever be. Recognizing and affirming the affective labor of the resilient performer, the spectator feeds the performer’s individual overcoming Into a second-order therapeutic narrative: our approbation of her overcoming is evidence of our own overcoming of our past prejudices. This spectator wants to be seen by a wider audience as someone who answers the resilient feminine subject’s hail, “Look, I Overcame’. Just as individual feminine subjects use their resilience as proof of their own goodness, MRWaSP uses the resilience of its “good girls” as proof that they’re the “good guys” — that its social and ethical practices are truly just, and that we really mean it this time when we say everyone is equal. For example, the “resilience” of “our” women is often contrasted with the supposed “fragility” of Third-World women of color. Or, in domestic US race-gender politics, the resilience of some African-American women (their bootstraps-style class ascendance) is contrasted to the continued fragility of other African-American women, and thus used to reinforce class distinctions among blacks. There are a million different versions of this general story: “our” women are already liberated — they saved themselves —but, to riff on Gayatri Spivak, “brown women need saving from brown men.” Most mainstream conversations about Third-World women are versions of this story: discussions of “Muslim” veiling, female circumcision, sweatshops, poverty ‘development.” they’re are all white-saviorist narratives meant to display MRWaSP’s own resilience. Look, I Overcame!” upgrades ‘Look, a Negro’ by (a) recycling objectification into overcoming and (b) compounding looking, so that one can profit from others’ resilience, treating their overcoming as one’s own overcoming. This upgrade in white supremacist patriarchy requires a concomitant upgrade in looking.” This shift in looking practices parallels developments in film and media aesthetics. As Steven Shaviro has argued, the values, techniques, and compositional strategies most common in contemporary mainstream Western cinema — like Michael Bay’s Transformers—are significantly different than the ones used in modernist and post-modernist cinema, and that these differences in media production correlate to broader shifts in the means of capitalist and ideological production. Neoliberalism’s aesthetic is, he argues, “post-cinematic.” This post-cinematic aesthetic applies not just to film and media, but to resilience discourse. Its performance practices and looking relations configured by the “Look. I Overcame!” imperative, resilience is, in a way, another type of post-cinematic medium. In the next section I use Shaviro’s theory of post-cinematic media to identify some specific ways in which traditional patriarchal tools are updated to work compatibly with MRWaSP resilience discourse. The looking in the “Look, I Overcame!” narrative is not the same kind of looking described by concepts like “the male gaze” or “controlling images” This looking is a type of deregulated MRWaSP visualization. Illusion of posting thoughts into outside worl- illusion of public eye for affective investments
The intensity with which information is disseminated leads to chronic cynicism – issues seem too complex to be helped, so the public doesn’t undertake change Gao Liyan; prof @ Monash; “Ideological cynicism in the modern information age with Sloterdijk and Zizek”; Eras Journal vol18no1; LCA-BP In our information-obsessed society, people are bombarded with more information than they can process and comprehend. Paul Virilio identifies two aspects to the way the public consumes information that are peculiar to new media. First, the sheer speed at which we receive information diminishes the time for digestion, contemplation and reflection. Secondly, the immense diffusion of viewpoints creates a kind of mass aporia that debilitates our ability to act in any particular direction. Virilio argues just as the military may deliberately plant multiple viewpoints within the public sphere to crush potential dissent, the public can become overwhelmed with information and push the issue aside as something too complex to understand: they are unable or unwilling to form an oppositional stance. The function of new media is the same. 29 Given the multitude of problems facing modern society, we need to prioritise how to spend our limited energies and resources as when the task looks too enormous and too difficult there are overwhelming feelings of disempowerment. Zizek compares the reporting of the Gulf War with that of the Bosnian War. In the former, the employment of ‘evil versus good’ framing was used to demonise Saddam Hussein and to justify the war. In the latter, journalists focused on the complexities of the issue including the long history of conflict in the region.30 Though this approach informs people of more facts, it clouds the brute reality that ethnic cleansing and genocide was rife during the war. By painting the Bosnian War as too complex for both citizens and politicians of the West to understand, people were absolved from the responsibility of intervening in the crisis. Cynicism is this aporia raised to the level of a psychological barrier: new media can present world problems as too complicated, too extensive, too global, beyond the control and understanding of any one individual, and thus, as problems we cannot hope to intervene in or politically organise to oppose. Merely being more knowledgeable about the complexity of the problems in our society does not dispel ideology nor is it necessarily empowering. When we feel overwhelmed and disempowered to change the current situation and condition, we learn to adapt and accept them. Subsequently, numbness and apathy comes from paradoxically caring.
Thus, the alternative is to embrace radical nihilism. Capitalism engages in unending reproduction, so a drainage of excess solves. A society that maintains capitalist production is contingent upon subjects that are forced to labor under hyperreality – so we let the system collapse in on itself. Baudrillard 4 Jean; Simulacra and Simulation; Sociologist/Philosopher, cool dude; 1981; University of Michigan Press; LCA-BP Nihilism no longer wears the dark, Wagnerian, Spenglerian, fuliginous colors of the end of the century. It no longer comes from a Weltanschauung of decadence nor from a metaphysical radicality born of the death of God and of all the consequences that must be taken from this death. Today's nihilism is one of transparency, and it is in some sense more radical, more crucial than in its prior and historical forms, because this transparency, this irresolution is indissolubly that of the system, and that of all the theory that still pretends to analyze it. When God died, there was still Nietzsche to say so - the great nihilist before the Eternal and the cadaver of the Eternal. But before the simulated transparency of all things, before the simulacrum of the materialist or idealist realization of the world in hyperreality (God is not dead, he has become hyper-real), there is no longer a theoretical or critical God to recognize his own. The universe, and all of us, have entered live into simulation, into the malefic, not even malefic, indifferent, sphere of deterrence: in a bizarre fashion, nihilism has been entirely realized no longer through destruction, but through simulation and deterrence. From the active, violent phantasm, from the phantasm of the myth and the stage that it also was, historically, it has passed into the transparent, falsely transparent, operation of things. What then remains of a possible nihilism in theory? What new scene can unfold, where nothing and death could be replayed as a challenge, as a stake? We are in a new, and without a doubt insoluble, position in relation to prior forms of nihilism: Romanticism is its first great manifestation: it, along with the Enlightenment's Revolution, corresponds to the destruction of the order of appearances. Surrealism, dada, the absurd, and political nihilism are the second great manifestation, which corresponds to the destruction of the order of meaning. The first is still an aesthetic form of nihilism (dandyism), the second, a political, historical, and metaphysical form (terrorism). These two forms no longer concern us except in part, or not at all. The nihilism of transparency is no longer either aesthetic or political, no longer borrows from either the extermination of appearances, nor from extinguishing the embers of meaning, nor from the last nuances of an apocalypse. There is no longer an apocalypse (only aleatory terrorism still tries to reflect it, but it is certainly no longer political, and it only has one mode of manifestation left that is at the same time a mode of disappearance: the media - now the media are not a stage where something is played, they are a strip, a track, a perforated map of which we are no longer even spectators: receivers). The apocalypse is finished, today it is the precession of the neutral, of forms of the neutral and of indifference. I will leave it to be considered whether there can be a romanticism, an aesthetic of the neutral therein. I don't think so - all that remains, is the fascination for desertlike and indifferent forms, for the very operation of the system that annihilates us. Now, fascination (in contrast to seduction, which was attached to appearances, and to dialectical reason, which was attached to meaning) is a nihilistic passion par excellence, it is the passion proper to the mode of disappearance. We are fascinated by all forms of disappearance, of our disappearance. Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary transparency. I am a nihilist. I observe, I accept, I assume the immense process of the destruction of appearances (and of the seduction of appearances) in the service of meaning (representation, history, criticism, etc.) that is the fundamental fact of the nineteenth century. The true revolution of the nineteenth century, of modernity, is the radical destruction of appearances, the disenchantment of the world and its abandonment to the violence of interpretation and of history. I observe, I accept, I assume, I analyze the second revolution, that of the twentieth century, that of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning, equal to the earlier destruction of appearances. He who strikes with meaning is killed by meaning. The dialectic stage, the critical stage is empty. There is no more stage. There is no therapy of meaning or therapy through meaning: therapy itself is part of the generalized process of indifferentiation. The stage of analysis itself has become uncertain, aleatory: theories float (in fact, nihilism is impossible, because it is still a desperate but determined theory, an imaginary of the end, a weltanschauung of catastrophe).*1 Analysis is itself perhaps the decisive element of the immense process of the freezing over of meaning. The surplus of meaning that theories bring, their competition at the level of meaning is completely secondary in relation to their coalition in the glacial and four-tiered operation of dissection and transparency. One must be conscious that, no matter how the analysis proceeds, it proceeds toward the freezing over of meaning, it assists in the precession of simulacra and of indifferent forms. The desert grows. Implosion of meaning in the media. Implosion of the social in the masses. Infinite growth of the masses as a function of the acceleration of the system. Energetic impasse. Point of inertia. A destiny of inertia for a saturated world. The phenomena of inertia are accelerating (if one can say that). The arrested forms proliferate, and growth is immobilized in excrescence. Such is also the secret of the hypertelie, of what goes further than its own end. It would be our own mode of destroying finalities: going further, too far in the same direction - destruction of meaning through simulation, hypersimulation, hypertelie. Denying its own end through hyperfinality (the crustacean, the statues of Easter Island) - is this not also the obscene secret of cancer? Revenge of excrescence on growth, revenge of speed on inertia. The masses themselves are caught up in a gigantic process of inertia through acceleration. They are this excrescent, devouring, process that annihilates all growth and all surplus meaning. They are this circuit short-circuited by a monstrous finality. It is this point of inertia and what happens outside this point of inertia that today is fascinating, enthralling (gone, therefore, the discreet charm of the dialectic). If it is nihilistic to privilege this point of inertia and the analysis of this irreversibility of systems up to the point of no return, then I am a nihilist. If it is nihilistic to be obsessed by the mode of disappearance, and no longer by the mode of production, then I am a nihilist. Disappearance, aphanisis, implosion, Fury of Verschwindens. Transpolitics is the elective sphere of the mode of disappearance (of the real, of meaning, of the stage, of history, of the social, of the individual). To tell the truth, it is no longer so much a question of nihilism: in disappearance, in the desertlike, aleatory, and indifferent form, there is no longer even pathos, the pathetic of nihilism - that mythical energy that is still the force of nihilism, of radicality, mythic denial, dramatic anticipation. It is no longer even disenchantment, with the seductive and nostalgic, itself enchanted, tonality of disenchantment. It is simply disappearance. The trace of this radicality of the mode of disappearance is already found in Adorno and Benjamin, parallel to a nostalgic exercise of the dialectic. Because there is a nostalgia of the dialectic, and without a doubt the most subtle dialectic is nostalgic to begin with. But more deeply, there is in Benjamin and Adorno another tonality, that of a melancholy attached to the system itself, one that is incurable and beyond any dialectic. It is this melancholia of systems that today takes the upper hand through the ironically transparent forms that surround us. It is this melancholia that is becoming our fundamental passion. It is no longer the spleen or the vague yearnings of the fin-de-siecle soul. It is no longer nihilism either, which in some sense aims at normalizing everything through destruction, the passion of resentment (ressentiment).*2 No, melancholia is the fundamental tonality of functional systems, of current systems of simulation, of programming and information. Melancholia is the inherent quality of the mode of the disappearance of meaning, of the mode of the volatilization of meaning in operational systems. And we are all melancholic. Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems. Once the hope of balancing good and evil, true and false, indeed of confronting some values of the same order, once the more general hope of a relation of forces and a stake has vanished. Everywhere, always, the system is too strong: hegemonic. Against this hegemony of the system, one can exalt the ruses of desire, practice revolutionary micrology of the quotidian, exalt the molecular drift or even defend cooking. This does not resolve the imperious necessity of checking the system in broad daylight. This, only terrorism can do. It is the trait of reversion that effaces the remainder, just as a single ironic smile effaces a whole discourse, just as a single flash of denial in a slave effaces all the power and pleasure of the master. The more hegemonic the system, the more the imagination is struck by the smallest of its reversals. The challenge, even infinitesimal, is the image of a chain failure. Only this reversibility without a counterpart is an event today, on the nihilistic and disaffected stage of the political. Only it mobilizes the imaginary. If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us. But such a sentiment is Utopian. Because it would be beautiful to be a nihilist, if there were still a radicality - as it would be nice to be a terrorist, if death, including that of the terrorist, still had meaning. But it is at this point that things become insoluble. Because to this active nihilism of radicality, the system opposes its own, the nihilism of neutralization. The system is itself also nihilistic, in the sense that it has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference. In this system, death itself shines by virtue of its absence. (The Bologna train station, the Oktoberfest in Munich: the dead are annulled by indifference, that is where terrorism is the involuntary accomplice of the whole system, not politically, but in the accelerated form of indifference that it contributes to imposing.)
12/5/21
ND - NC - Kant
Tournament: Blue Key | Round: 2 | Opponent: Neenah SH | Judge: Matthew Berhe Ethics must be derived from the constitutive features of agents – ethics based internally fail because they can’t generate universal obligations and ethics based externally fail because they are nonbinding as agents could opt-out and have no motivation to follow them which means they fail to guide action. Constitutivism solves – it allows for universal obligations among all agents but they are binding and cannot be opted out of.
Next, only practical reason is constitutive: 1 Regress – to question why one should reason concedes its authority since it is an act of reasoning itself which proves it’s binding and inescapable 2 action theory - Any action can be split into infinite smaller actions. For example, when I’m taking a bite of food, I am making infinite movements of my hand and mouth – only the intention unifies the action. If we can’t unify action, we can’t call actions moral or immoral because they are made up of infinite parts.
That justifies universalizability - insofar as there is no a priori distinction between reasoners, a reason for one agent must also be a reason for another. Willing a maxim that violates freedom is a contradiction in conception – you cannot violate someone’s freedom without having your own freedom to do so.
Thus, the standard is consistency with the categorical imperative– actions that terminate in contradictions when universalized are bad, so only our restrictions can solve Impact calc: Intentions first – only the intention in pursuing a certain end is relevant when considering whether or not it is universalizable
Also Prefer Additionally –
1 We must value freedom insofar as we value our ends which justifies valuing the freedom of agents setting and pursuing ends since anything else would be contradictory. Gewirth ’84 Alan Gewirth, “The Ontological Basis of Natural Law: A Critique and an Alternative,” The American Journal of Jurisprudence, Vol. 29, No. 1 (1984), Pg. 95–121. Gewirth was professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. CHSTM Brackets for gendered language/grammar BHHS AK recut Let me briefly sketch the main line of argument that leads to this conclusion. As I have said, the argument is based on the generic features of human action. To begin with, every agent acts for purposes he they regards as good. Hence, he they must regard as necessary goods the freedom and well-being that are the generic features and necessary conditions of his action and successful action in general. From this, it follows that every agent logically must hold or accept that he has they have rights to these conditions. For if he were to deny that he has they have these rights, then he they would have to admit that it is permissible for others persons to remove from him the very conditions of freedom and well-being that, as an agent, he they must have. But it is contradictory for him to hold both that he must have these conditions and also that he may not have them. Hence, on pain of self-contradiction, every agent must accept that he has rights to freedom and well-being. Moreover, every agent must further admit that all other agents also have those rights, since all other actual or prospective agents they have the same general characteristics of agency on which they must ground his their own right-claims.¶ What I am saying, then, is that every agent, simply by virtue of being an agent, must regard his freedom and well being as necessary goods and must hold that he and all other actual or prospective agents have rights to these necessary goods. Hence, every agent, on pain of self-contradiction, must accept the following principle: Act in accord with the generic rights of your recipients as well as of yourself. The generic rights are rights to the generic features of action, freedom, and well-being. I call this the Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC), because it combines the formal consideration of consistency with the material consideration of the generic features and rights of action
2 Performativity – arguing against my framework presupposes freedom because without freedom to reason you would not be able to make arguments and try to win. – this means that contesting any of my arguments proves my framework true.
3 A posteriori ethics fail: a Problem of induction Vickers 14, John Vickers, 2014, The Problem of Induction, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/ The original problem of induction can be simply put. It concerns the support or justification of inductive methods; methods that predict or infer, in Hume's words, that “instances of which we have had no experience resemble those of which we have had experience” (THN, 89). Such methods are clearly essential in scientific reasoning as well as in the conduct of our everyday affairs. The problem is how to support or justify them and it leads to a dilemma: the principle cannot be proved deductively, for it is contingent, and only necessary truths can be proved deductively. Nor can it be supported inductively—by arguing that it has always or usually been reliable in the past—for that would beg the question by assuming just what is to be proved. b Is/Ought Gap – experience just describes how the world is but doesn’t indicate how it ought to be which means there must be an a priori conception of good c Inability to know each other’s experience makes it an unreliable basis for ethics because different experiences bring different concepts of truth – only a priori ethics solve since a priori truths are accessible to all agents 4 Consequentialism fails – A Predictions assumes specific causes of past consequences which can’t be verified as the actual cause B Butterfly effect - every action has infinite consequences so it is impossible to evaluate an action; one government policy could end up causing nuclear war in a million years. C Aggregation is impossible – pleasure and pain are subjective
Offense
1 Strikes fail to fulfill duty Fourie 17 Johan Fourie 11-30-2017 "Ethicality of Labor-Strike Demonstrates by Social Workers" https://www.otherpapers.com/essay/Ethicality-of-Labor-Strike-Demonstrates-by-Social-Workers/62694.html (Johan Fourie is professor of Economics and History at Stellenbosch University.) JG Kantian Ethics Kantian ethics suggest that actions are morally permissible based on whether it fulfils a person's duty (Banks, 2006). To further the concept of duty, Kantian ethics held the notion of Categorical Imperatives which is believed to determine the morality of duties as it enforces and commands adherence, complicity and application. The Categorical Imperatives consist of three formulas. Once such a formula is to "act only on the maximum whereby at the same time you can will that it become a universal law" (Parrott, 2006, p. 51). Through this perspective, Kant held that persons are to engage in actions that they are willing to allow others to engage in as well without conditions and exceptions. Applying this formula to the ethicality of social workers participating in labor strike demonstrations, it becomes evident that such an action is not morally permissible or executing its duty. Arguably, as much as social workers are trained professionals and rendering services that are crucial to the functioning and well-being of society, they remain ordinary citizens who also at some point will require crucial services. Examples of these crucial services that may cause significant harm because of its absence due to labor strike action are medical personnel, suicide watch centers, mental health care professionals, law enforcement, court systems, municipal service delivery, etc. With these services not available, social workers will experience suffering, frustration, unhappiness, harm as the clients will do with their absence from the office. To this regard, participating and demonstrating labor strike action is not adhering to duty or morally permissible. adhering to duty or morally permissible. 2 Workers promise in contracts not to strike, these contracts grant employers the right to fire people if they strike and has been upheld by the state. "Employer Sanctions for Violation of No-Strike Clause: Union Busting through Mass Discharge and Rescission." Yale Law Journal, digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=8323andcontext=ylj. Accessed 23 June 2021. EMPLOYERS often secure no-strike clauses 1 in collective bargaining contracts 2 with their employees' unions, 3 in order to ensure greater union responsibility for the maintenance of stable production schedules.4 Under such clauses, the union promises not to authorize or sanction any strike during the term of its contract.' The employer is usually given power to discipline or discharge all the individual union members who strike in violation of the no-strike clause.0 When confronted with a union-sponsored strike in violation of a no-strike clause, the employer may be forced to accede to the union's demands because of production requirements or the scarcity of replacement workers. 7 Alternatively, he may shut down his plant and wait out the strike, disciplining the strikers when they return to work, subject to an arbitrator's review.8 However, if he believes his bargaining position to be strong, he may discharge all the strikers, rescind the contract, and refuse thereafter to deal with the union.0 The National Labor Relations Board has upheld such employer actions on the grounds that they are justified by the union's prior material breach of the contract,' ° and that strikers in violation of contract are not protected by the National Labor Relations Act."1 Promise breaking is bad
10/31/21
ND - NC - Kant v2
Tournament: Princeton | Round: 5 | Opponent: Ardrey Kell SG | Judge: Chetan Hertzig Ethics must be derived from the constitutive features of agents – ethics based internally fail because they can’t generate universal obligations and ethics based externally fail because they are nonbinding as agents could opt-out which means they fail to guide action. 1) Empiricism could also change, meaning external fw are arbitrary. 2) past experiences have no effect on causality or internal link to continuity, i.e. raining yesterday doesn’t mean rain today. 3) Is/Ought Gap – experience just describes how the world is but doesn’t indicate how it ought to be which means there must be an a priori conception of good
Constitutivism solves – it allows for universal obligations among all agents but they are binding and cannot be opted out of.
Next, only practical reason is constitutive: 1 Regress – to question why one should reason concedes its authority since it is an act of reasoning itself which proves it’s binding and inescapable That means we must universally will maxims— any non-universalizable norm justifies someone’s ability to impede on your ends. Thus, the value criterion is consistency with the categorical imperative. Prefer additionally: 1 Performativity—freedom is the key to the process of justification of arguments. Willing that we should abide by their ethical theory presupposes that we own ourselves in the first place 2 Consequentialism fails - a induction fails: the logic of looking into the past to predict the future is predicated on past experiences, meaning it’s circular, b butterfly effect: every consequence is infinitely cascading so we don’t know the true extent of our actions, meaning we cannot predict consequences
Negate a) The right to strike necessarily involves violating the right to property and contract – it’s coercive, Gourevitch 16: Gourevitch, A.. “Quitting Work but Not the Job: Liberty and the Right to Strike.” Perspectives on Politics 14 (2016): 307 - 323. LHP AV Accessed 7/4/21 A second problem follows on the first. If workers have rights to the jobs they are striking then they must have some powers to enforce those rights. Such powers might include mass picketing, secondary boycotts, sympathy strikes, coercion and intimidation of replacement workers, even destruction or immobilization of property – the familiar panoply of strike actions. While workers have sometimes defended such actions without using the specifically juridical language of ‘rights,’ in many cases they have used that kind of appeal.3 Even when they have not employed rights-discourse, they have invoked some related notion of demanding fair terms to their job (Frow, Frow and Katanka 1971). Each and any of the above listed activities of a strike – pickets, boycotts, sympathy actions – are part of the way workers not only press their demands but claim their right to 3 See James Gray Pope’s (1997) remarkable reconstruction of the way, in the 1920s, rights-discourse helped organize and sustain a ‘constitutional strike’ against attempts to curtail and outlaw the strike. the job. Strikers regularly implore other workers not to cross picket lines and take struck jobs. These are more than speech-acts. At the outer edges, they amount to intimidation and coercion. Or at least, workers claim the right to intimidate and coerce if the state will not itself enforce this aspect of their right to strike. Liberal societies rarely permit a group of individuals powers that come close and even cross over into rights of private coercion. It is no surprise that regulation and repression of these strike-related activities have been the source of some of the most serious episodes of strike-related violence in US and European history (Brecher 2014; Lambert 2005; Forbath 1991; Adamic 1971; Taft and Ross 1969; Liebknecht 1917). So, alongside the unclear basis for the strikers’ rights to their jobs, the problem for a liberal society is that this right seems to include private rights of coercion or at least troubling forms of social pressure. Yet there is more. The standard strike potentially threatens the fundamental freedoms of three specific groups. • Freedom of contract It conflicts with the freedom of contract of those replacement workers who would be willing to take the job on terms that strikers will not. Note, this is not a possible conflict but a necessary one. Strikers claim the job is theirs, which means replacements have no right to it. But replacements claim everyone should have the equal freedom to contract with an employer for a job. • Property rights A strike seriously interferes with the employer’s property rights. The point of a strike is to stop production. But the point of a property right is that, at least in the owner’s core area of activity, nobody else has the right to interfere with his use of that property. The strikers, by claiming the employer has no right to hire replacements and thus no way of employing his property profitably, effectively render the employer unfree to use his property as he sees fit. To be clear, strikers claim the right not just to block replacement workers, but to prevent the employer from putting his property to work without their permission. For instance, New Deal ‘sit-down’ strikes made it impossible to operate factories, which was one reason why the courts claimed it violated employer property rights (Atleson 1983, 46-48). Similarly, during the Seattle general strike in 1919, the General Strike Committee forced owners to ask permission to engage in certain productive activities – permission it often denied (Brecher 2014, 106-111). • Freedom of association Though the conceptual issues here are complicated, a strike can seriously constrain a worker’s freedom of association. It does so most seriously when the strike is a group right, in which only authorized representatives of the union may call a strike. In this case, the right to strike is not the individual’s right in the same way that, say, the freedom to join a church or volunteer organization is. Moreover, the strike can be coercively imposed even on dissenting members, especially when the dissenters work in closed or union shops. That is because refusal to follow the strike leads to dismissal from the union, which would mean loss of the job in union or closed shops. The threat of losing a job is usually considered a coercive threat. So not only might workers be forced to join unions – depending on the law – but also they might be forced to go along with one of the union’s riskiest collective actions. Note that each one of these concerns follows directly from the nature of the right to strike itself. Interference with freedom of contract, property rights, and the freedom of association are all part and parcel of defending the right that striking workers claim to the ‘their’ jobs. These are difficult forms of coercive interference to justify on their own terms and they appear to rest on a claim without foundation. Just what right do workers have to jobs that they refuse to perform?
b) All agents have the right to give up certain manifestations of other rights through things like contracts by virtue of their being. This is a subset of the innate right to freedom- thus, workers may only have the conditional right to strike, as an unconditional right would bar workers from accessing their freedom. Turns any potential aff offense because it’s a direct freedom violation Ripstein 09 Ripstein, Arthur (2009). _Force and Freedom: Kant's Legal and Political Philosophy_. Harvard University Press. You cannot consent to your own murder or enslavement because it lies beyond your normative power for uniting your will with that of another. For the transactional account of consent, consent is important against the background of a more general idea that private persons are free and equal to each other in the sense that each is entitled to pursue whatever purposes he or she might have, provided that this can be done in a way that is consistent with a like freedom for others to pursue their purposes. Within such a regime of equal freedom, people are independent, and able to do as they please. As a result, they are able to do as they please when it comes to interactions with others. Consent is fundamental to this picture, because it enables people to modify the boundaries that make their equal freedom with others possible, in light of their particular purposes. That is why consent serves as a defense. It enables one person to permit another to do what would otherwise be forbidden. In so doing, it lets each person determine the boundaries of his or her interactions with others. More- over, it lets each person determine those boundaries in consultation or coordination with particular people, one at a time. So I can decide to consent to have you visit my home without thereby inviting everyone into my home; conversely (subject to antidiscrimination laws) I can invite the public into my business premises, but make an exception so as not to let you in. Not every arrangement that two people might wish to make is consis- tent with this background of mutual freedom, because the background is structured by each person’s innate right of humanity, which, as we have seen, is a right to independence of the choice of another. Kant’s emphasis on the distinction between persons and things reflects the normative priority of the innate right of humanity. Thus in the Division of Rights in the Introduction to the Doctrine of Right, Kant notes that we cannot con- ceive of “the relation in terms of rights of human beings towards beings that have only duties but no rights.”28 He notes that this category is empty, for these would be “human beings without personality (serfs, slaves).” In the division of Acquired Rights, he notes that there are only three possi- ble categories, rights to things, rights against persons, and rights to per- sons (“akin to” rights to things), because the fourth category, rights against things, is necessarily empty.29 The distinction between person and thing is not put forward as a conceptual claim, but rather as an implication of the moral nature of rights. Rights always govern the interactions of free persons. Among the rights that free persons can have is the right to vary their rights as against other persons by contract. As we saw in Chapter 3, contract belongs in the class of acquired rights, because if it is possible to do something for another person, it would be an arbitrary limit on free- dom were people unable to have entitlements to performances by others. The power to contract thus constitutes an extension of innate right. At the same time, however, it is constrained by the duty of rightful honor, so that a contract cannot turn a person into a thing. If consent is represented as a way in which one person through a uni- lateral act of choice becomes responsible for something, then the decision to become the slave of another might appear to be no different from any other decision. Provided that there was neither force nor fraud, it is just something someone decided to do. Kant’s objection to slave contracts rests on his broader understand- ing of contract, and in turn on his broader conception of the right to free- dom under universal law. The possibility of two people uniting their wills presupposes each person’s capacity for taking responsibility for actions. Thus the terms on which you unite your will with another’s cannot pre- suppose the legal irrelevance of one of the two wills. Others can acquire your property or particular deeds, but not your person, because your per- son, understood as your entitlement to set your own purposes, forms the background against which you can take responsibility for deeds, whether yours or those of others. Put differently, two people can only act together in a way that is consistent with their freedom provided that they unite their purposes while preserving their separate purposiveness. From this perspective, the problem with slave contracts is that slavery is the annihilation of legal personality: the slave becomes an object, fully subject to the master’s choice. As such, the slave is incapable of under- taking obligations, because she has no rightful power to bind herself. Only the master has that power. Having purportedly transferred her ca- pacity to be bound, however, she is no longer capable of being legally bound, and so has no contractual duties at all, so none to the master. A contract creates new rights and duties as between the parties to it; a slave contract purports to bind the slave, and at the same time dissolve her legal personality, so that she cannot be bound in her own right. Thus the slave who disobeys does not wrong her master, and so, although the master may be able to coerce her, the master could not be entitled to do so by way of enforcing a right. The slave has not deprived the master of any- thing, because a contract to transfer everything can transfer nothing. The same argument can be stated in the vocabulary of the duty of rightful honor. As we saw in Chapter 2, like all duties relating to right, the “internal duty” of rightful honor restricts the ways in which a person can exercise his or her freedom to be consistent with the Universal Prin- ciple of Right. No rightful act on your part can bind you to a condition in which you are subject to another person’s choice. So the limit on the ex- ercise of your freedom must be the preservation of that freedom. This argument for the incoherence of slavery contracts parallels the familiar Kantian “contradiction in conception” test in ethics in one way, but differs from it in another. When Kant argues in the Groundwork that the making of a lying promise could not be a universal law, his point is that such a law would require that all promises both be kept and not be kept.30 The difficulty with slave contracts, however, lies not in the possi- bility of their universalization, but rather in the form of relation that they presuppose. You can only vary your rights and obligations in relation to another insofar as you are a being entitled to set your own purposes; a slavery contract both presupposes and rejects that entitlement. As Kant remarks, the moment you close such a contract, you are no longer bound by it.31 Kant’s point is not that you will be unable to meet such a contrac- tual obligation; people who undertake contractual obligations they can- not meet are still bound by them. The problem instead is that a slave can have no legal obligations whatsoever, and so cannot have the obligation of obedience that is a supposed term of the contract. The master may think otherwise, as, indeed, may the slave. But the fact that the parties wish to create such a relationship does not show that they can make one, because their contract has inconsistent terms, and so cannot be the object of an agreement. The idea that your right to freedom is inalienable follows from the relation between each person’s innate right of humanity and the normative structure of contract. A slave contract is incoherent because the slave is both a person and a thing, subject to an obligation to do the master’s bid- ding, yet not a being capable of rights. The inconsistency between some- thing’s being both a person and a thing is not logical but normative. Kant does not try to ground the inalienability of each person’s right to his or her own person in a conceptual claim that the concept of ownership can- not be reflexive; he shows that transferring your person is inconsistent with each person’s innate entitlement to be independent of the choice of all others, which is a precondition of anyone’s having the power to trans- fer rights. This analysis does not depend upon any substantive concerns about the vices of servility. Kant gives powerful expression to such concerns in his Doctrine of Virtue, but, as he remarks in the Naturrecht Feyerabend lectures, as a matter of right you can do as you want with your own person as far as right is concerned.33 The servile person who always does the bidding of another may well suffer from self-inflicted immaturity, but is always nonetheless entitled to grow up.34 The person who signs a slave contract is in a fundamentally different situation, having given up the enti- tlement to set and pursue his own purposes and to meet his own obliga- tions, including those incurred under the contract. The slave contract gives up on the right to purposiveness, while the servile character is an exercise of that right, even if it is a debased and pathetic one. The idea that people are entitled to set and pursue their own purposes includes the entitlement to set and pursue them in pointless ways. Slave contracts are sometimes said to be void on grounds of “public policy,” but properly understood, that formulation simply underscores Kant’s point. The relevant concept of policy here is not consequentialist. It focuses instead on the broader presuppositions of a regime of contract, according to which you can only alienate by contract what civilian legal systems call your “patrimony.”35 As we saw in Chapter 3, acquired rights always have a “mine and yours” structure such that, although a particular person has this right, it could coherently have belonged to another per- son. Property is the most obvious example of this structure: it is my horse, but if you had been the one who acquired it, you would have the same set of rights in relation to it. Actions have the same “mine and yours” struc- ture: if I cut your hair, I might just as well have cut somebody else’s hair, or you have had someone else cut yours. The structure of rights involved would have been the same. By contrast, your right in your own person could not belong to any other person. As we saw in Chapter 2, it is innate because it does not require an affirmative act to establish it; your right in your own person is something you enjoy simply in virtue of your hu- manity. It could not coherently require an affirmative act to establish it, because affirmative acts sufficient to establish rights presuppose persons capable of performing them antecedent to those acts. Your person, then, is the precondition of any entitlement you might give to anyone else, be- cause it is your ability to give others rights in relation to your person, your deeds, and your property. The most you can do is to give another person a right to a particular use of your person or a particular deed. It is no accident, then, that any attempt to alienate it must fail, because you can only unite your will with another provided that your personality survives the union.36 Kant’s brief discussion of slave contracts represents them in their pur- est form. Many historical instances of slavery and serfdom permitted slaves some legal powers. For example, under Roman law slaves could inherit, and enter into contracts that bound their masters. These differ- ences do not render Kant’s analysis irrelevant to these examples. Kant re- marks that although you can give another person a right to a particular performance, and so to a use of one of your powers, you cannot alienate those powers. This restriction on alienating your powers is parallel to the restriction on alienating your person. Suppose I wanted to give you a right, not to have me do this or that service for you, but rather the right to permanently control the use of my arms. The difficulty with any such agreement is that it would limit my entitlement to exercise any other rights. So I could not sign a contract without your permission, or move (my arms) from one place to another. That in turn means that I am not al- lowed to do anything inconsistent with your directing my arms, and so my entire person is a mere object, even though I retain a variety of other legal powers, since you are entitled to determine whether I will exercise them or not. More generally, a form of slavery that reserved certain rights to the slave would give the master the right to determine whether the slave could exercise those rights by determining what the slave could do with his body. Since the slave is not entitled to decide whether to exercise his rights, the limited slave contract has an incoherent term. Gerrymandering the terms of such an imagined contract cannot solve this problem, be- cause the underlying problem is that others can only assert a claim of right against you, that is, can only restrict your freedom, insofar as you are a free being, that is, your own master. This brings us to consensual murder. Slavery is not the same as death, but it has been characterized as a form of social death.37 From the stand- point of a system of equal freedom, the converse point is more relevant. Death is just a biological fact; murder, by contrast, is a form of biological slavery, since the murderer decides whether the victim will continue to exist. The reason that consent is not a defense to murder is the same rea- son that you cannot contract your way into slavery. In both cases, the possibility of people acting together in a way that is consistent with their respective freedom presupposes that they are able to maintain their sep- arateness through that unity.38 That is what makes the united will an exer- cise of their freedom. Thus the terms of the interaction and agreement must be consistent with the preservation of their separateness. The difficulty for consent as a defense to murder thus turns on the distinction between murder (as biological slavery) and death as a mere biological fact. Consensual murder requires that one person taking the life of another is a term of the agreement, and so that one person relin- quish any claim to resist with right the force that the other uses. As we saw, you can only agree to some action by another person by giving an- other person a right to do that thing, which is equivalent to undertaking an obligation to permit the other to do it. Victim cannot undertake an obligation to permit himself to be treated as an object; if he is an object, he can have no obligations. Thus the victim is both a person and a thing, which is normatively impossible. This focus on the right that victim would have to give to aggressor un- derwrites the contrast between cases in which someone consents to being killed and those in which someone consents to participate in an activity that carries risk of death, even a significant risk, such as extreme skiing or freefall skydiving. In that sort of case, the terms of the united will do not presuppose the violation of their respective separateness. Even in sports where the risk is not merely of injury or death, but injury or death through the actions of an opponent, the parties consent not to one person doing something to another, but rather to two persons interacting in a way that foreseeably injures one or both of them, and from which one or both could die. Perhaps a consensual boxing match is more brutal than this description suggests. I do not mean to suggest otherwise, but only to note that the only way that it can be treated as a case of a consensual activity that results in injury is if it can be represented as a contest of strength, in which each boxer makes himself available as a target while trying to over- power the other, but neither grants the other the right to hit him when he is down. A consensual fight to the death—Kristol’s gladiatorial contest—is dif- ferent. It cannot be represented as a consensual contest that carries with it a significant risk. Each of the gladiators in the example gives the other the power of life and death, and the winner is not declared when the loser gives up. Thus it is an arrangement in which the victim is turned into a mere thing, and so one to which the parties cannot agree.39 This may seem to be a misrepresentation of the gladiatorial contest, in which the entitlement to resist might appear to be a term of their agree- ment. But if one person cannot consent to being killed by another, then two cannot each consent to being killed by the other. Contrary to appear- ances, the gladiators do not have a right to defend themselves; the terms of the imagined contract would need to require that each agrees to be turned into a thing, and then the two things fight to the death, in the man- ner of animals that are sometimes made to fight to the death to entertain spectators. In contrasting boxing matches with gladiatorial contests, I do not mean to be offering a brief in favor of boxing, or commenting on the best way to classify a consensual fight to the death in a less spectacular setting. The Kantian theory at the level at which I have sought to develop and defend it is abstract, and speaks only to the factors relevant to classify particulars, without classifying any of them. The important contrast is between con- senting to something that carries a risk of death, even a significant one, and consenting to death. The latter guarantees that the consenting party cannot be bound; the terms of the agreement provide the guarantee, so the agreement is not binding even if the victim survives. The contrast between your person, which lacks the “mine or yours” structure of your deeds and possessions, also provides a framework for thinking about other cases in which consent is sometimes said not to be a defense, such as mutilation, including Wright’s Case, involving the beg- gar who asked to be maimed so as to improve his earning prospects. Few would want to claim that consent was not a defense in many cases of one person permanently changing the structure of another’s body. In addition to the obvious medical cases, cosmetic procedures including ear piercing and tattooing are wrongful if nonconsensual, but unobjectionable if con- sensual. Consensual mutilation looks different through something like the following chain of reasoning: your body simply is your person; the “members” of the human body are not parts, but form an essential unity,40 so that depriving a person of a body part deprives her of part of her gen- eral purposiveness. There is something appealing about this chain of rea- soning, though perhaps also something implausible. Both the appeal and the implausibility reflect different considerations that might be brought to bear in determining whether maiming is, like tattooing, simply a way of decorating a person according to her highly unusual tastes, or whether instead, it is, like murder, a removal of purposiveness. At the level of ab- straction at which the idea of consent as a united will operates, it provides no particular resolution of such questions, although it does show what is at issue in them. The bar to consent as a defense to murder differs from the moral pro- hibition on suicide in the same way that the argument against slave con- tracts differs from the moral prohibition of servility.41 Kant famously argues in the Groundwork that a rational being could not adopt a maxim of self-love according to which a person makes it “my principle to shorten my life when its longer duration threatens more troubles than it promises agreeableness.”42 Kant argues that such a maxim could not be conceived as a universal law because it would violate its own presuppositions. What- ever its successes or limitations, this ethical argument against suicide has no bearing on rights, since it concerns only the relation between the end to be pursued and the means being used in pursuit of it. As Kant makes clear in the Introduction to the Doctrine of Right, the relation between an agent’s ends and the means he or she uses doesn’t matter for right; only the form of interaction with others does. So the wrongfulness of suicide does not enter the argument.43
12/5/21
ND - T - ESpec
Tournament: Blue Key | Round: 2 | Opponent: Neenah SH | Judge: Matthew Berhe nterpretation: Debaters must specify how they enforce the unconditional right of workers to strike. Violation: you didn’t’ 1 Topic lit – enforcement is the core question of the topic and there's no consensus on normal means so you must spec- also proves this specific interp isn’t infinitely regressive bc it is grounded in topic lit Weiss Marley S. Weiss Professor of Law, University of Maryland School of Law, 2000, "The Right To Strike In Essential Services Under United States Labor Law", https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2189andcontext=fac'pubs 2. Strikes, Lockouts, and Other Lawful Primary Weapons under the NLRA The
AND
to which bargaining is required over the decisions themselves have been hotly contested.
This acts as a resolvability standard. Debate has to make sense and be comparable for the judge to make a decision which means it's an independent voter and outweighs. 2 Stable advocacy – 1AR clarification delinks neg positions that prove why enforcement in a certain instance is bad by saying it isn't their method of enforcement – wrecks neg ballot access and kills in depth clash – CX doesn't check since it kills 1NC construction pre-round since I don't know advocacy till in round, and judges do not flow cross ex so its not verifiable. 3 Prep skew – I don't know what they will be willing to clarify until CX which means I could go 6 minutes planning to read a disad and then get screwed over in CX when they spec something else.
10/31/21
ND - T - Government
Tournament: Princeton | Round: Quarters | Opponent: Strath Haven AM | Judge: micah thode, ethan massa, joshua stpeter Interpretation: the affirmative debater must not specify what just government they defend. The article “a” implies a nonspecific or generic reading of the word “government”. Grammar: Articles, Walden University, Feb 8, 2016 https://academicguides.waldenu.edu/writingcenter/grammar/articles What is an article? Articles ("a," "an," and "the") are determiners or noun markers that function to specify if the noun is general or specific in its reference. Often the article chosen depends on if the writer and the reader understand the reference of the noun. The articles "a" and "an" are indefinite articles. They are used with a singular countable noun when the noun referred to is nonspecific or generic. The article "the" is a definite article. It is used to show specific reference and can be used with both singular and plural nouns and with both countable and uncountable nouns. Many languages do not use articles ("a," "an," and "the"), or if they do exist, the way they are used may be different than in English.
Semantics OW 1 Semantics outweigh -- A Topicality is a constitutive rule of the activity and a basic aff burden, they agreed to debate the topic when they came to the tournament B It’s the only stasis point we know before the round so it controls the internal link to engagement, and there’s no way to use ground if debaters aren’t prepared to defend it.
1 Textuality – The use of an indefinite article in the resolution means the topic includes all states, not a subset.
“Government” is a generic indefinite singular. Leslie 12 Leslie, Sarah-Jane. “Generics.” In Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Language, edited by Gillian Russell and Delia Fara 2012. https://www.princeton.edu/~sjleslie/RoutledgeHandbookEntryGenerics.pdf GENERICS VS. EXISTENTIALS The interpretation of sentences containing bare plurals, indefinite singulars, or definite singulars can be either generic as in (1) respectively or existential/specific as in (2): (1) Tigers are striped A tiger is striped The tiger is striped. (2) Tigers are on the front lawn A tiger is on the front lawn The tiger is on the front lawn. The subjects in (1) are prima facie the same as in (2), yet their interpretations in (1) are intuitively quite different from those in (2). In (2) we are talking about some particular tigers, while in (1) we are saying something about tigers in general. There are some tests that are helpful in distinguishing these two readings. For example, the existential interpretation is upward entailing, meaning that the statement will always remain true if we replace the subject term with a more inclusive term. For example, if it is true that tigers are on the lawn, then it will also be true that animals are on the lawn. This is not so if the sentence is interpreted generically. For example, it is true that tigers are striped, but it does not follow that animals are striped (Lawler 1973 Laca 1990; Krifka et al 1995). Another test concerns whether we can insert an adverb of quantification (in the sense of Lewis 1975) with minimal change of meaning (Krifka et al 1995). For example, inserting “usually” in the sentences in (1) (e.g. “tigers are usually striped”) produces only a small change in meaning, while inserting “usually” in (2) dramatically alters the meaning of the sentence (e.g. “tigers are usually on the front lawn). (For generics such as “mosquitoes carry malaria”, the adverb “sometimes” is perhaps better used than “usually”.) This applies to the res – fails upward entailment test – “A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike” doesn’t imply that “A just political body ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike.”
Violation: the aff specified US
1 precision – the counter-interp justifies them arbitrarily doing away with random words in the resolution which decks negative ground and preparation because the aff is no longer bounded by the resolution. Independent voter for jurisdiction – the judge doesn’t have the jurisdiction to vote aff if there wasn’t a legitimate aff. 2 limits – the UN says there are 193 governments as of today – explodes limits since there are tons of independent affs plus functionally infinite combinations, all with different advantages in different political situations. Kills neg prep and debatability since there are no DAs that apply to every aff – i.e. reasons why the right to strike is good in Russia differ from that in Pakistan – means the aff is always more prepared and wins just for speccing. 3 TVA solves - you could’ve read your plan as an advantage under a whole res advocacy, that way neg generics would still apply
12/5/21
SO - DA - Innovation
Tournament: Yale | Round: 6 | Opponent: La Salle TP | Judge: Abishek Stanley intellectual property protections are fundamental to motivating companies to take the risk to make new drugs. The research and development of new drugs takes billions of dollars and a huge time investment only for the smallest fraction of these drugs to make it to market. Intellectual property protection is necessary to motivate companies to endure this process. Grabowski 15 (Henry, Professor of Economics, member of the faculty for the Health Sector Management Program, and Director of the Program in Pharmaceuticals and Health Economics at Duke University) “The Roles of Patents and Research And Development Incentives In Biopharmaceutical Innovation,” Health Affairs, 2/2015 JL
The essential rationale for patent protection for biopharmaceuticals is that long-term benefits in the form of continued future innovation by pioneer or brand-name drug manufacturers outweigh the relatively short-term restrictions on imitative cost competition associated with market exclusivity. Regardless, the entry of other branded agents remains an important source of therapeutic competition during the patent term. Several economic characteristics make patents and intellectual property protection is particularly important to innovation incentives for the biopharmaceutical industry. 5 The RandD process often takes more than a decade to complete, and according to a recent analysis by Joseph DiMasi and colleagues, per new drug approval (including failed attempts), it involves more than a billion dollars in out-of-pocket costs. 6 Only approximately one in eight drug candidates survive clinical testing. As a result of the high risks of failure and the high costs, research and development must be funded by the few successful, on-market products (the top quintile of marketed products provide the dominant share of RandD returns). 7,8 Once a new drug’s patent term and any regulatory exclusivity provisions have expiresd, competing manufacturers are allowed to sell generic equivalents that require the investment of only several million dollars and that have a high likelihood of commercial success. Absent intellectual property protections that allow marketing exclusivity, innovative firms would be unlikely to make the costly and risky investments needed to bring a new drug to market. Patents confer the right to exclude competitors for a limited time within a given scope, as defined by patent claims. However, they do not guarantee demand, nor do they prevent competition from nonidentical drugs that treat the same diseases and fall outside the protection of the patents. New products may enter the same therapeutic class with common mechanisms of action but different molecular structures (for example, different statins) or with differing mechanisms of action (such as calcium channel blockers and angiotensin receptor blockers). 9 Joseph DiMasi and Laura Faden have found that the time between a first-in-class new drug and subsequent new drugs in the same therapeutic class has been dramatically reduced, from a median of 10.2 years in the 1970s to 2.5 years in the early 2000s. 10 Drugs in the same class compete through quality and price for preferred placement on drug formularies and physicians’ choices for patient treatment. Patents play an essential role in the economic “ecosystem” of discovery and investment that has developed since the 1980s. Hundreds of start-up firms, often backed by venture capital, have been launched, and a robust innovation market has emerged. 11 The value of these development-stage firms is largely determined by their proprietary technologies and the candidate drugs they have in development. As a result, the strength of intellectual property protection plays a key role in funding and partnership opportunities for such firms. b a statistical analysis of multiple studies confirms that intellectual property protections are key to productive research and development. We warrant exactly how patent rights have a direct relationship to research and development. Cory ‘19 Stephen Ezell, vice president and global innovation policy @ ITIF, BS Georgetown School of Foreign Service. Nigel Cory, associate director covering trade policy @ ITIF, MA public policy @ Georgetown. "The Way Forward for Intellectual Property Internationally," Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, 4-25-2019, accessed 8-25-2021, https://itif.org/publications/2019/04/25/way-forward-intellectual-property-internationally HWIC IPRs Strengthen Innovation Intellectual property rights power innovation. For instance, analyzing the level of intellectual property protections (via the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness reports) and creative outputs (via the Global Innovation Index) shows that counties with stronger IP protection have more creative outputs (in terms of intangible assets and creative goods and services in a nation’s media, printing and publishing, and entertainment industries, including online), even at varying levels of development.46 IPR reforms also introduce strong incentives for domestic innovation. Sherwood, using case studies from 18 developing countries, concluded that poor provision of intellectual property rights deters local innovation and risk-taking.47 In contrast, IPR reform has been associated with increased innovative activity, as measured by domestic patent filings, albeit with some variation across countries and sectors.48 For example, Ryan, in a study of biomedical innovations and patent reform in Brazil, found that patents provided incentives for innovation investments and facilitated the functioning of technology markets.49 Park and Lippoldt also observed that the provision of adequate protection for IPRs can help to stimulate local innovation, in some cases building on the transfer of technologies that provide inputs and spillovers.50 In other words, local innovators are introduced to technologies first through the technology transfer that takes place in an environment wherein protection of IPRs is assured; then, they may build on those ideas to create an evolved product or develop alternate approaches (i.e., to innovate). Related research finds that trade in technology—through channels including imports, foreign direct investment, and technology licensing—improves the quality of developing-country innovation by increasing the pool of ideas and efficiency of innovation by encouraging the division of innovative labor and specialization.51 However, Maskus notes that without protection from potential abuse of their newly developed technologies, foreign enterprises may be less willing to reveal technical information associated with their innovations.52 The protection of patents and trade secrets provides necessary legal assurances for firms wishing to reveal proprietary characteristics of technologies to subsidiaries and licensees via contracts. Counties with stronger IP protection have more creative outputs (in terms of intangible assets and creative goods and services in a nation’s media, printing and publishing, and entertainment industries, including online), even at varying levels of development. The relationship between IPR rights and innovation can also be seen in studies of how the introduction of stronger IPR laws, with regard to patents, copyrights, and trademarks, affect RandD activity in an economy. Studies by Varsakelis and by Kanwar and Evenson found that RandD to GDP ratios are positively related to the strength of patent rights, and are conditional on other factors.53 Cavazos Cepeda et al. found a positive influence of IPRs on the level of RandD in an economy, with each 1 percent increase in the level of protection of IPRs in an economy (as measured by improvements to a country’s score in the Patent Rights Index) equating to, on average, a 0.7 percent increase in the domestic level of RandD.54 Likewise, a 1 percent increase in copyright protection was associated with a 3.3 percent increase in domestic RandD. Similarly, when trademark protection increased by 1 percent, there was an associated RandD increase of 1.4 percent. As the authors concluded, “Increases in the protection of the IPRs carried economic benefits in the form of higher inflows of FDI, and increases in the levels of both domestically conducted RandD and service imports as measured by licensing fees.”55 As Jackson summarized, regarding the relationship between IPR reform and both innovation and RandD, and FDI, “In addition to spurring domestic innovation, strong intellectual property rights can increase incentives for foreign direct investment which in turn also leads to economic growth.”56 Innovation is crucial 1. Increasing accessibility of medicines around the world and increase their effectiveness 2. to respond to future health crises 3. increasing life expectancy for diseases without treatments yet ow on timeframe, scope and magnitude Jenner ’16 Jenner, Andrew. “Value of Innovation.” IFPMA, IFPMA, 23 Feb. 2016, www.ifpma.org/subtopics/value-of-innovation/. Many lower and middle-income countries are making important investment in developing their healthcare infrastructure as part of their commitment to achieving Universal Health Coverage. Increasing access to new medicines and vaccines can help sustain such investment by reducing the need for costly surgical interventions and hospitalization. In many cases, the use of innovative medicines by health systems can pay for themselves several times over. One study found that a reduction in the age of drugs used reduces non-drug spending 7.2 times as much as it increases drug expediture, with most of the savings coming from reduced hospitalization and physician office-visit expenditures. Vaccines, for instance, have proven to be one of the most effective preventative technologies in the fight against infectious diseases with an almost unparalleled impact on public health, saving the lives of over 2.5 million children each year. Estimates show that increasing access to six vaccines (including new vaccines for rotavirus and malaria) could save USD 6.2 billion in treatment costs globally. Increased productivity due to averted illness could gain the world an additional $145bn. The upfront cost of procuring vaccines is dwarfed by these benefits. In addition to these economic benefits, the innovation we bring along has transformed the lives of millions of patients all over the world. For instance, improvements in existing cancer treatments have cut annual death rates by half in the United States. High cholesterol and other heart diseases, which required extensive treatment in the 1970s, can now be easily managed with oral therapy. Our industry has played a crucial role in researching and developing the medicines that have contributed to this. The mission of the life sciences industry – in New Jersey, across the United States and around the world – is as ambitious as it is straightforward: to research and develop new medicines, therapies, medical devices, technologies and diagnostics to detect, treat and cure disease and improve the quality of life for patients. Driven to improve global human health, for more than 100 years, the life sciences industry – which includes biopharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical technology, device and diagnostics companies – has helped people live longer, more productive and fulfilling lives. Medical innovation has consistently responded to the challenge in times of crisis and is currently at the forefront of the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic as it has been through so many other health emergencies. Discovering and developing new medicines, therapies, medical devices and technologies is a complex, time-consuming, expensive and risk-laden process that life sciences companies willingly undertake, spending more than $100 billion annually in search of alleviating human suffering. The societal value of new medical innovation lies not only in improving human health, but in doing so in a cost-effective manner that brings efficiency to the delivery of health care. When medical breakthroughs can cure a disease rather than requiring an organ transplant, or when chemotherapy can be administered orally rather than by infusion, the patient, the health care system and the economy all benefit. MEDICAL INNOVATION: EXTENDING LIFE – SAVING LIVES Collectively, new therapies have been among the greatest contributors to increased life expectancy over the past century. U.S. life expectancy at birth has risen from 47 years at the turn of the 20th century to 78 years today. New therapies accounted for 73 percent of the increased life expectancy in 30 developing and high-income countries between 2000-09. U.S. cancer survivorship alone has more than tripled since 1970, with nearly 16.9 million cancer survivors alive in the country as of January 1, 2019. This number is expected to increase to 22.2 million by 2030. As of 2018, the cancer death rate for men and women combined had fallen 31 percent from its peak in 1991. This decline translates to 3.2 million deaths avoided. Biopharmaceutical innovation, through improvements in treatment, has contributed to 76 percent of the improvements in mortality rates for HIV/AIDS patients and 60 percent of improvements in life expectancy for breast cancer patients. Heart disease mortality has been improved by 52 percent due to advancements in medicines. MEDICAL INNOVATION’S ADDED VALUE – COST SAVINGS AND ECONOMIC PRODUCTIVITY In addition to improving patient outcomes, medical innovation offers other, often underappreciated benefits – reducing costs in the health care system and increasing economic productivity. With new technologies and therapies that can detect and treat a disease earlier in its onset, and medicines to manage chronic disease, the cost of health care can be significantly reduced. Less than 10 cents of the U.S. health care dollar was spent on prescription medicines in 2019. This percentage has remained unchanged since the 1960’s. In 2013, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) started to incorporate the savings from prescription medicines into the cost of Medicare policies. For every 1 percent increase in the number of prescriptions, the CBO incorporates a 0.2 percent decrease in spending on medical services. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, improved medication adherence can save $100-$300 billion annually in direct health care costs. Between 1980 and 2010, advanced medical technology helped cut the number of days patients spent in hospitals by 58 percent. Treating people with chronic disease (e.g., heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, obesity, arthritis) (about half of all U.S. adults) accounts for 86 percent of our nation’s health care costs. By investing in prevention and treatment of the most common chronic diseases, the cost of treatment in the U.S. could decrease by $218 billion per year, and the impact of disease on the economy would be reduced by $1.1 trillion annually. MEDICATION ADHERENCE – KEY TO IMPROVED OUTCOMES AND REDUCING HEALTH CARE COSTS Medication adherence is a critical factor in improving patient outcomes and bringing efficiency and cost savings to the health care system. Of the approximately 187 million Americans who take one or more prescription medications, it is estimated that up to one-half do not take their medications as prescribed, with more than 1 in 5 new prescriptions not being filled. Non-adherence in the U.S. is estimated to result in approximately 125,000 deaths and at least 10 percent of hospitalizations. Medication non-adherence costs the U.S. roughly $330 billion annually in unnecessary medical expenses, as estimated by Express Scripts in 2015. An extra $1 spent on medicines for adherent patients with congestive heart failure, high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol can generate $3-$10 in savings on emergency room visits and inpatient hospitalizations. Adherence to medications for congestive heart failure could result in $22.4 billion saved in the U.S. over a 10-year period. Nearly 1 million hospitalizations could be avoided with better adherence to, and treatment with, hypertensive medicines. LIFE SCIENCES RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT – RESOURCES AND RISK IN SEARCH OF THE NEXT TREATMENT Thousands of scientists go to their labs every day in search of the next treatment, therapy or technology to improve human health and alleviate the suffering of patients. With the odds heavily against success, life sciences companies invest billions of dollars annually to support the work of these dedicated scientists in their quest to discover the next medical breakthrough. America’s biopharmaceutical industry in total invested $102 billion in U.S. research and development in 2018. The biopharmaceutical industry is responsible for 17 percent of RandD spending by U.S. businesses, the single largest share of any industry. 91 percent of drugs are developed by the private sector with no direct government role. On average, it costs $2.6 billion and takes 10-15 years to discover, develop and bring a new medicine to market. Only 5 of 5,000 compounds that enter preclinical testing will enter a clinical trial, and only one will be commercialized. Only 12 percent of new molecular entities that enter clinical trials eventually receive FDA approval. Only 2 of 10 new medicines that come to market will be deemed a commercial success – meaning they will produce revenues that exceed the average RandD cost. More than 7,000 medicines currently are in development around the world for cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, immunological disorders, infectious disease and other disease states. Of these 7,000 treatments, 70 percent are potential first-in-class therapies, meaning they use a completely new approach to fighting disease.
10/31/21
SO - NC - Hegel
Tournament: Mid America Cup | Round: 5 | Opponent: Strath Haven AM | Judge: James Stuckert Ethics must be based on accounts of subjectivity The only constitutive feature of the subject is appropriation where they are able to interpret their world and shape it with desires. Non-human objects are incapable of confirming subject’s normative status because they have no concept of it. The key to self certainty is mutual recognition Wood 90 Allen W. Wood, (Ruth Norman Halls Professor of Philosophy, Indiana University) "Hegel's Ethical Thought" Cambridge University Press, 1990, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/hegels-ethical-thought/D409B1F04527F36C32227799D0B303E5, DOA:3-2-2019 OL For Hegel, the "object" of a desire is never merely a subjective mental state, such as pleasure or the absence of pain. Hegel interprets desire as a function of self-conscious, spiritual being - an embodied being situated in a world of external objects toward which its desires are directed. Further, Hegel interprets this desire in accordance with his theory of spirit as selfactualization through the overcoming of otherness. The fundamental desire that Hegel attributes to self-consciousness is a desire for self-worth or "selfcertainty." As spirit, the self engages in an activity of positing an object and then interpreting itself in terms of it. Self-certainty is gained only through 84 RECOGNITION something external, which is brought into harmony with the self, an objectivity whose independence is done away with or "negated." This negation of the object refers to my using it up or consuming it (as when I literally eat it up), but also includes my shaping or forming it. Even more broadly, it covers any sort of integration of it into my plans and projects. In the most abstract form, it occurs when I assert my dominion over the object in the social forms suitable to property ownership (PR §§ 54-70). The attempt to achieve self-certainty through the appropriation of things proves inadequate. Satisfaction taken in external objects merely leads to a new desire for a new object. This result only points to the fact that the desiring self-consciousness is always dependent on a new object, whereas its aim was rather to establish its own independence, and the nothingness of the object (EG § 428). What self-consciousness needs is an object that brings about this negation within itself without ceasing to be an object. But only a self-consciousness is able to endure the "contradiction" of negating itself or being its own other (PhG 11162). In other words, "self-consciousness reaches its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness" (PhG 1 175). From the standpoint of self-certainty, the fundamental problem with nonhuman objects of desire is that they can contribute to my self-worth only secondarily or indirectly, by confirming an image of myself that I already have independently of them. Even animals, which are living and conscious objects, cannot provide me directly with a sense of my self-worth, since they possess no conception of a free self, and so I can never find in them a confirming perspective on myself. The only "other" that can form a conception of me as a free self is another free self. Self-consciousness can find satisfaction for its desire for self-certainty only when it comes "outside itself," so that its object becomes "another self" (PhG K 179; EG § 429,A). "Self-consciousness has an existence only through being recognized by another self-consciousness" (NP 78); "Self-consciousness is in and for itself insofar and through the fact that it is in and for itself for another, i.e., it is only as something recognized" (PhG 1f 178). When I see my free selfhood reflected back to me out of another self, I actualize my self-consciousness in the form of "spirit," as a "self-restoring sameness." It is only in relation to another free self that I can be truly free, "with myself in another" as regards my self-certainty. Thus the full actualization of spirit is possible only through the relation between selves that recognize each other. This is why Hegel even goes so far as to say that the essence of spirit itself lies in recognition, in a community of selves, "the I that is a we and the we that is an I" (PhG 1 177; cf. EG § 436).
Property and legal contracts are the only medium of recognition and intersubjectivity, Schroeder 2: *bracketed for gendered language* Schroeder, Jeanne L. "Unnatural rights: Hegel and intellectual property." U. Miami L. Rev. 60 (2005): 453. Contract solves this problem. To reiterate, Hegel believes that subjectivity is created not by possession per se, but by intersubjective recognition by other subjects. Property is only a medium for this purpose. This regime of recognition is abstract right-the rule of law. Subjectiv- ity is the capacity to bear legal rights and duties recognized by, and enforceable against, other subjects. To concentrate on the specific object of property is to conflate subject with object-the opposite of recognizing the person's unique subjectivity. This is in sharp contradis- tinction to Radin's proposition that the merging of owner with her per- sonal property furthers human flourishing. Hegel, looking forward to psychoanalysis, considers such a relationship to be destructive-an addiction, or more technically, fetishism. In contract, each party remains identifiable as a rights-bearing sub- ject through object relations because the object hethey gives up in contract is simultaneously replaced by a new object. That is, the contracting parties recognize each other as rights-bearing subjects, or persons having the capacity not only to own property, but to respect the property rights of others, and to live up to his contractual obligations. In Hegel's words: Contract contains the implication that each party, in accordance with his own and the other party's will, ceases to be an owner of property, remainsone, and becomes one. This is the mediation of the will to give up a property (an individual property) and the will to accept such a property (and hence the property of someone else). The context of this mediation is one of identity, in that the one voli- tion comes to a decision only in so far as the other volition is present.74 Hegel went so far as to assert that "tihe whole issue can also be viewed in such a way that alienation is regarded as a true mode of taking posses- sion. 75 That is, possession is the recognition by others that a specific object belongs to a specific subject. Paradoxically, this recognition only expressly occurs retroactively when the owner contracts to sell that object to another person. In other words, the identification of subject to object in possession is only effectively recognized at the moment when another subject pays the first subject to release the object from her possession. Once again, one must remember Hegel's radical definition of objects as anything that is not the individual herself. This includes not only intangibles, but also an individual's own labor is an object separate from her personhood. Consequently, service contracts, whereby the individual alienates part of her productive capacity in exchange for wages is, to the Hegelian analysis, a contract for the exchange of prop- erty. In fact, the service contract is an excellent example of the logic of Hegel's dialectic of recognition. In our modem capitalistic society, a primary way we recognize each other is through our occupations. The mutual intersubjectivity of contract is necessary because, according to Hegel, one becomes a subject (eine Person)only when one is recognized as such by another subject. Subjectivity (the capacity to bear legal rights and duties) exists only insofar as rights are enforceable. Since all persons logically begin as abstract individuals (not subjects), in order to achieve subjectivity, each individual must first make other indi- viduals into subjects by recognizing them as such. This means that it is impossible to create rights by unilaterally claiming them for oneself. Since rights are intersubjective they can only be created intersubjec- tively. This is one reason why the Lockean attempt to justify claims of property through first-appropriation fails. The conundrum should be obvious. How does anyone become a subject recognized by other subjects when there are no subjects in the state of nature? Where does thefirst subject come from? The Hegelian answer is that multiple subjects must come into existence simultaneously. This is the alchemy that Lacan calls "love"-the relationship in which each lover sees in his beloved more than she has, that empowers the beloved to live up to the lover's expectations and become more than she once was.76 Contract is the most primitive form of eroticism-albeit a pathetic, and unromantic one. Each individual,by admitting that another individ- ual has legal rights (i.e., the right to possess and contract to exchange the object to be acquired), makes that individual into more than she once was-she is no longer an individual, but a subject. 3. FORMALITY AND RECOGNITION The Hegelian logic of alienation confuses many commentators because they do not recognize the purely formal nature of subjectivity and abstractright. Here, object relations are purely instrumental and subordinate to the goal of recognition. Hegel, like Kant, defines a free individual as an end in and for her self, and not the means to the end of another. In contrast, an object is something that is the means to the ends of something else. In abstract right, each individual paradoxically wants both-that other individuals help him reach his end of becoming a subject, and that other individuals remain an end in and to themselves rather than merely a means to the first person's ends. Subjectivity is only created through recognition as such by a person that one recognizes as another subject. To treat another person as one's means, rather than as his own ends, is to fail to recognize him as an individual or a subject. The question then becomes, how can one accomplish one's own ends (which requires action by another person) without impinging on the ends of that other person or treating her like a means (an object)? The Hegelian answer is that subjects can mediate their relationship through objects. Both subjects mutually exploit the objects of exchange as means of recognizing each other-each fulfills her own ends (becom- ing a subject) while respecting the ends of the other (also to become a subject). The two subjects are united in a common will, in the sense that each wills his own ends, but these potentially competing ends tempora- rily coincide in the meeting of minds known as contract. This means that, as a logical matter, one does not enter into object relations for the sake of the object itself or for the "natural" or other concrete functions they might serve. The specific characteristics of any object of a property claim is irrelevant and should be a matter of indifference to the subjects, from a logical standpoint. Right is something utterly sacre dfor the simple reason that it is the existence of the absolute concept, of self-conscious freedom. But the formalism of right-and also of duty-arises out of the dif- ferent stages in the development of the concept of freedom. In oppo- sition to the more formal, i.e. more abstractand hence more limited kind of right, that the sphere and stage of the spirit in which the spirit has determined and actualized within itself the further moments con- tained in its Idea possesses a higher right, for it is the more concrete sphere, richer within itself and more truly universal. Each stage in the development of the Idea of freedom has its distinctive right, because it is the existence of freedom in one of its own determinations. When we speak of the opposition between morality or ethics and right, the right in question is merely the initial and formal right of abstract personality. Morality, ethics, and the interest of the state-each of these is a distinct variety of right, because each of them gives determinate shape and existence to freedom.77 In other words, a full concrete personality requires the entire regime that Hegel calls Recht, which includes not only abstract right (property and contract), but morality and ethics. Abstract right is the most primitive form of right that only creates the form necessary for freedom-the empty vessel of legal subjectivity understood as the mere ability to accept legal rights and duties imposed by others. The content of person- ality will be added by morality and ethics. Consequently, Hegel states with respect to the legal subject: Since particularity, in the person i.e. what I am calling the subject, is not yet present as freedom, everything which depends on particu- larity is here a matter of indifference. If someone is interested only in his formal right, this may be pure stubbornness, such as is often encountered in emotionally limited people; for uncultured people insist most strongly on their rights, whereas those of nobler mind seek to discover what other aspects there are to the matter in ques- tion. Thus abstract right is initially a mere possibility, and in that respect is formal in character as compared with the whole extent of the relationship. Consequently, a determination of right gives me a warrant, but it is not absolutely necessary that I should pursue my rights, because this is only one aspect of the whole relationship. For possibility is being, which also has the significance of not being. 78 Indeed, it is precisely the function of the element of alienation to make this irrelevance and indifference manifest. Nevertheless, even as subtle an analyst as Hughes, who expressly recognizes that the fact that object relations can also serve natural functions (food and shelter) is irrelevant to a Hegelian analysis, 79 misses this point. Hughes finds alienation "incoherent"80 because the subject loses the object that supposedly makes the subject recognizable.8' He finds this particularly problematic in Hegel's discussion of copyright, because the objects of copyright, being the author's creations, seem intrinsically linked to the author's personality.82 Consequently, he infers that the objects of copyright uniquely serve the goal of differentiating and identifying the author and concludes that complete alienation of artistic works might defeat the goal of the creation of personality. Consequently, he sees the Hegelian analysis of property as supporting certain restraints on alienation of copyrightable material, such as in the droit morale under which an artist retains some control over her creations after sale.83 But this critique is based on the misimpression that, to Hegel, the legal right of property relates to the creation of the full complex per- sonhood of empirical human beings situated in relations of family, civil society, and state.84 But legal relationships relate only to the creation of legal subjects-persons capable of bearing rights and duties. The legal subjectivity mutually constituted with abstract right is, therefore, equally abstract and formal. Moreover, it is precisely abstractness and formality that enable abstract right and legal subjectivity to serve as the substra- tum for the concrete freedom of citizenship. Above, I mentioned in passing an analysis that I have developed extensively elsewhere: Hegel's property jurisprudence is essentially erotic because contract is a primitive type of "love."8 5 My goal in doing so was to break down the dichotomy between rationality and passion that implicitly underlies both utilitarianism and romanticism. To Hegel's jurisprudence, rationality and passion are two sides of the same coin.86 Reason tells the autonomous individual that he must actualize his freedom and to do so requires recognition by other subjects. Conse- quently, the free individual rationally decides that he must give way to the desire for others. Because abstract right is created in order to enable the interrelationship of mutual recognition to occur, it is erotic. The "love" and desire that exist at the level of abstract right are only a pale shadow of the passions we feel towards our family, lovers, and friends. Consequently, I have argued vociferously that although utilitarians like Posner are right in seeing a parallel between economic activity and sexuality, they are wrong in trying to reduce the latter to a form of the former.87 Rather, from the Hegelian position, the former (economics) is merely a step that makes the latter (eroticism) possible. That is, contract establishes the form of love, not its content. Conversely, Hughes and Radin are equally mistaken in trying to argue that property can perform a direct function in the creation of the full, loving artistic personality. Although Hegel was a great defender of legalism and capitalistic markets, he also insisted that they be limited to their appropriate sphere. To analyze more complex interrelationships in terms of abstract right (property) is not merely erroneous. Never one to mince words, Hegel called it "crude" and shameful.88 Consequently, only the most base persons stand on their rights.8 9 The noble person accords rights to others. This is why Hegel condemns the classical lib- eral concept of government as social contract-citizenship is Hegel's most highly developed level of personality, and therefore, unlike the subject, cannot be comprised solely by legal categories. A corollary of this is that it is equally incorrect, indeed shameful, to adopt the romantic position towards copyright that conflates the legal relationship of property with the flowering of personality in artistic expression. From a Lacanian point of view, to do so is literally per- verse. Specifically it is fetishistic-the identification of objects with subjects.90 The specific content of objects of copyright has nothing to do with their status as a legal concept. To Hegel, saying copyright is "property" is not to say that society must or should establish a copyright regime. This decision can only be made by pragmatic reasoning. In this sense, Hegel's theory has a surprising utilitarian twist. Society's desire to further creativity may, however, be a good pragmatic argument in favor of such a regime. Actor Specificity: explains the legitimacy of the state since the citizens must recognize its authority for it to coerce them—this also implies the NC is a side constraint on state action since it’s necessary for a state to be constituted. Pensky 95 Max Pensky, (MAX PENSKY is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Binghamton University.) "Universalism And The Situated Critic" In S. White (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion To Habermas (Cambridge Companions To Philosophy, Pp. 67-94), 1995, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-habermas/3B448B1C9FEC698C747242C8E3618D84, DOA:3-1-2019 WWBW recut OL The universalist kernel of Habermas's moral and political writing has been the object of more criticism than any other aspect of his work. The central claim that there is always a preexistent intersubjective context for any morally relevant question translates the moment of universality in collective political life to the basic attributions and expectations of reasonableness that speakers and hearers in modern, rationalized societies can make of each other's discursive conduct, in situations when needs and problems have to be collectively settled. "Universalism" is itself not so much a concrete political value as it is a collectively shared mentality; a sense of solidarity inhabiting a public space that is distinct from political or economic institutions. It is a locationless network of competencies; the ability to approach one's own situated needs and interests reflectively; to take the position of the other at least is to the extent that one is willing to recognize that the other's needs are at least potentially legitimate; that one attributes value and comprehensibility to the other's needs and interest. A universalistic mentality cannot adjudicate questions of the good life, for such questions are inextricably particular. But a collectively shared universalist mentality does enforce the principle that norms are only just insofar as they can meet with the considered approval of all those who will be affected by their implementation. For Habermas, universalism is the only formal criterion of the rightness or justice of collective norms that is available, and hence the only recourse that modem societies have for opening up a sphere in which particular questions of the good life can even be addressed. In this sense, "universalism" means something like the basic shared mentality that allows individuals to conceive of themselves as citizens of a democratic state, one in which citizenship consists of a constellation of interlocking duties and rights that together form an abstract level of popular sovereignty subsisting below - and making possible - the spectrum of particularistic kinds of identity operating within a diverse society. In democratic societies, the capacity for mutual recognition and the generalization of norms must install itself as an attitude that can reflectively separate from the particular fabric of their own interests. Thus, the standard is consistency with abstract right. Impact Calc- reject naturally derived moral facts- 1 Debate - we are always in the structures of recognition – i.e. you recognize me as your opponent and that is what allows of the round to happen; contestation of my fw proves my standards validity 2 Consequentialism fails - a induction fails: the logic of looking into the past to predict the future is predicated on past experiences, meaning it’s circular, b butterfly effect: every consequence is infinitely cascading so we don’t know the true extent of our actions, meaning we cannot predict consequences C Aggregation is impossible – pleasure and pain are subjective and qualitative 1 Intellectual property protections are justified for enabling self-actualization. Moore and Hinma 18 Moore, Adam and Ken Himma, "Intellectual Property", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/intellectual-property// lm Personality theorists such as Hegel maintain that individuals have moral claims to their own talents, feelings, character traits, and experiences. We are self-owners in this sense. Control over physical and intellectual objects is essential for self-actualization—by expanding our selves outward beyond our own minds and mixing these selves with tangible and intangible items, we both define ourselves and obtain control over our goals and projects. For Hegel, the external actualization of the human will requires property (Hegel 1821). Property rights are important in two ways according to this view. First, by controlling and manipulating objects, both tangible and intangible, our will takes form in the world and we obtain a measure of freedom. Individuals may use their physical and intellectual property rights, for example, to shield their private lives from public scrutiny and to facilitate life-long project pursuit. Second, in some cases our personality becomes fused with an object—thus moral claims to control feelings, character traits, and experiences may be expanded to intangible works (Humboldt 1792; Kohler 1969). Even if we acknowledge the force of these objections, there does seem to be something intuitively appealing about personality-based theories of intellectual property rights. Suppose, for example, that Mr. Friday buys a painting at a garage sale—a long-lost Crusoe original. Friday takes the painting home and alters the painting with a marker, drawing horns and mustaches on the figures in the painting. The additions are so clever and fit so nicely into the painting that Friday hangs it in a window on a busy street. There are at least two ethical worries to consider in this case. First, the alterations by Friday may cause unjustified economic damage to Crusoe. Second, and independent of the economic considerations, Friday’s actions may damage Crusoe’s reputation. The integrity of the painting has been violated without the consent of the author, perhaps causing long-term damage to his reputation and community standing. If these claims are sensible, then it appears that we are acknowledging personality-based moral “strings” attaching to certain intellectual works. By producing intellectual works, authors and inventors put themselves on display, so-to-speak, and incur certain risks. Intellectual property rights afford authors and inventors a measure of control over this risk. To put the point a different way, it is the moral claims that attach to personality, reputation, and the physical embodiments of these individual goods that justify legal rules covering damage to reputation and certain sorts of economic losses. Moreover, personality-based theories of intellectual property often appeal to other moral considerations. Hegel’s personality-based justification of intellectual property rights included an incentive-based component as well—he asserts that protecting the sciences promotes them, benefiting society (Hegel 1821). Perhaps the best way to protect these intuitively attractive personality-based claims to intangible works is to adopt a more comprehensive system designed to promote progress and social utility.
10/31/21
SO - NC - Kant
Tournament: Yale | Round: 3 | Opponent: Princeton CB | Judge: David Herrera Permissibility and presumption negate – a the resolution indicates the aff has to prove an obligation, and permissibility would deny the existence of an obligation b Statements are more often false than true because any part can be false. This means you negate if there is no offense because the resolution is probably false.
Ethics must be derived from the constitutive features of agents – ethics based internally fail because they can’t generate universal obligations and ethics based externally fail because they are nonbinding as agents could opt-out which means they fail to guide action. 1)Empiricism could also change, meaning external fw are arbitrary. 2)past experiences have no effect on causality or internal link to continuity, i.e. raining yesterday doesn’t mean rain today. 3)Is/Ought Gap – experience just describes how the world is but doesn’t indicate how it ought to be which means there must be an a priori conception of good 4)Transcendental idealism – what we see is not what is, but our representations of reality – only a priori knowledge is a lane to truth as perception is the lane to truth insofar as a lack of the subject removes material constitution and abstracts sensibility as it is then unknown.
Constitutivism solves – it allows for universal obligations among all agents but they are binding and cannot be opted out of.
Next, only practical reason is constitutive: 1 Regress – to question why one should reason concedes its authority since it is an act of reasoning itself which proves it’s binding and inescapable That means we must universally will maxims— any non-universalizable norm justifies someone’s ability to impede on your ends. Thus, the standard is consistency with the categorical imperative. Prefer additionally: 1 Performativity—freedom is the key to the process of justification of arguments. Willing that we should abide by their ethical theory presupposes that we own ourselves in the first place 2 Consequentialism fails - a induction fails: the logic of looking into the past to predict the future is predicated on past experiences, meaning it’s circular, b butterfly effect: every consequence is infinitely cascading so we don’t know the true extent of our actions, meaning we cannot predict consequences 3 A posteriori ethics fail: a Problem of induction Vickers 14, John Vickers, 2014, The Problem of Induction, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/ The original problem of induction can be simply put. It concerns the support or justification of inductive methods; methods that predict or infer, in Hume's words, that “instances of which we have had no experience resemble those of which we have had experience” (THN, 89). Such methods are clearly essential in scientific reasoning as well as in the conduct of our everyday affairs. The problem is how to support or justify them and it leads to a dilemma: the principle cannot be proved deductively, for it is contingent, and only necessary truths can be proved deductively. Nor can it be supported inductively—by arguing that it has always or usually been reliable in the past—for that would beg the question by assuming just what is to be proved. b Is/Ought Gap – experience just describes how the world is but doesn’t indicate how it ought to be which means there must be an a priori conception of good c Inability to know each other’s experience makes it an unreliable basis for ethics because different experiences bring different concepts of truth – only a priori ethics solve since a priori truths are accessible to all agents
negate 1 Intellectual property is an inalienable personal right of economic use Pozzo 6 Pozzo, Riccardo. “Immanuel Kant on Intellectual Property.” Trans/Form/Ação, vol. 29, no. 2, 2006, pp. 11–18., doi:10.1590/s0101-31732006000200002. SJDA recut SJKS recut Cookie JX Corpus mysticum, opus mysticum, propriété incorporelle, proprietà letteraria, geistiges Eigentum. All these terms mean intellectual property, the existence of which is intuitively clear because of the unbreakable bond that ties the work to its creator. The book belongs to whomever has written it, the picture to whomever has painted it, the sculpture to whomever has sculpted it; and this independently from the number of exemplars of the book or of the work of art in their passages from owner to owner. The initial bond cannot change and it ensures the author authority on the work. Kant writes in section 31/II of the Metaphysics of Morals: “Why does unauthorized publishing, which strikes one even at first glance as unjust, still have an appearance of being rightful? Because on the one hand a book is a corporeal artifact (opus mechanicum) that can be reproduced (by someone in legitimate possession of a copy of it), so that there is a right to a thing with regard to it. On the other hand a book is also a mere discourse of the publisher to the public, which the publisher may not repeat publicly without having a mandate from the author to do so (praestatio operae), and this is a right against a person. The error consists in mistaking one of these rights for the other” (Kant, 1902, t.6, p.290). The corpus mysticum, the work considered as an immaterial good, remains property of the author on behalf of the original right of its creation. The corpus mechanicum consists of the exemplars of the book or of the work of art. It becomes the property of whoever has bought the material object in which the work has been reproduced or expressed. Seneca points out in De beneficiis (VII, 6) the difference between owning a thing and owning its use. He tells us that the bookseller Dorus had the habit of calling Cicero’s books his own, while there are people who claim books their own because they have written them and other people that do the same because they have bought them. Seneca concludes that the books can be correctly said to belong to both, for it is true they belong to both, but in a different way The peculiarity of intellectual property consists thus first in being indeed a property, but property of an action; and second in being indeed inalienable, but also transferable in commission and license to a publisher. The bond the author has on his work confers him a moral right that is indeed a personal right. It is also a right to exploit economically his work in all possible ways, a right of economic use, which is a patrimonial right. Kant and Fichte argued that moral right and the right of economic use are strictly connected, and that the offense to one implies inevitably offense to the other. In eighteenth-century Germany, the free use came into discussion among the presuppositions of a democratic renewal of state and society. In his Supplement to the Consideration of Publishing and Its Rights, Reimarus asked writers “instead of writing for the aristocracy, to write for the tiers état of the reader’s world.” (Reimarus, 1791b, p.595). He saluted with enthusiasm the claim of disenfranchising from the monopoly of English publishers expressed in the American Act for the Encouragement of Learning of May 31, 1790. Kant, however, was firm in embracing intellectual property. Referring himself to Roman Law, he asked for its legislative formulation not only as patrimonial right, but also as a personal right. In Of the Illegitimity of Pirate Publishing, he considered the moral faculties related to intellectual property as an “inalienable right (ius personalissimum) always himself to speak through anyone else, the right, that is, that no one may deliver the same speech to the public other than in his (the author’s) name” (Kant, 1902, t.8, p.85). Fichte went farther in the Demonstration of the Illegitimity of Pirate Publishing. He saw intellectual property as a part of his metaphysical construction of intellectual activity, which was based on the principle that thoughts “are not transmitted hand to hand, they are not paid with shining cash, neither are they transmitted to us if we take home the book that contains them and put it into our library. In order to make those thoughts our own an action is still missing: we must read the book, meditate – provided it is not completely trivial – on its content, consider it under different aspects and eventually accept it within our connections of ideas” (Fichte, 1964, t.I/1, p.411). At the center of the discussion was the practice of reprinting books in a pirate edition after having them reset word after words after an exemplar of the original edition. Given Germany’s division in a myriad of small states, the imperial privilege was ineffective against pirate publishing. Kant and Fichte spoke for the acceptance of the right to defend the work of an author by the usurpations of others so that he may receive a patrimonial advantage from those who utilize the work acquiring new knowledge and/or an aesthetic experience. In particular, Fichte declared the absolute primacy of the moral faculties within the corpus mysticum. He divided the latter into a formal and a material part. “This intellectual element must be divided anew into what is material, the content of the book, the thoughts it presents; and the form of these thoughts, the manner in which, the connection in which, the formulations and the words by means of which the book presents them” (Fichte, 1964, t.I/1, p.411). Fichte’s underlining the author’s exclusive right to the intellectual content of his book – “the appropriation of which through another is physically impossible” (ibid.) – brought him to the extreme of prohibiting any form of copy that is not meant for personal use. In Publishing Considered anew, Reimarus considered on the contrary copyright in its patrimonial aspects as a limitation to free trade: “What would not happen were a universal protection against pirate publishing guaranteed? Monopoly and safer sales certainly do not procure convenient price; on the contrary, they are at the origin of great abuses. The only condition for convenient price is free-trade, and one cannot help noticing that upon the appearance of a private edition, publishers are forced to substantially lower the price of a book” (Reimarus, 1791a, pp.402-3). Reimarus admitted of being unable to argue in terms of justice. Justice was of no bearing, he said, for whom, like himself, considered undemonstrated the author’s permanent property of his work (herein supported by the legislative vacuum of those years). What mattered, he said, was equity. In sum, Reimarus anticipated today’s stance on free use by referring to the principle that public interest on knowledge ought to prevail on the author’s interest and to balance the copyright. Moreover, Reimarus extended his argument beyond the realm of literary production to embrace, among others, the today vital issue of pharmaceutical production on patented receipts. “Let us suppose that at some place a detailed description for the preparation of a good medicine or of any other useful thing be published, why may not somebody who lives in places that are far away from that one copy it to use it for his own profit and but must instead ask the original publisher for the issue of each exemplar?” (Reimarus, 1791b, t.2, pp.584). To sum up, Reimarus’s stance does not seem respondent to rule of law. For in all dubious case the general rule ought to prevail, fighting intellectual property with anti-monopolistic arguments in favor of free trade brings with itself consequences that are not tranquilizing also for the ones that are expected to apply the law. By resetting literary texts, one could obviously expurgate some errors. More frequently, however, some were added, given the exclusively commercial objectives of the reprints. The valid principle was, thus, that reprints were less precise than original editions, but they were much cheaper for the simple reason that the pirate publisher had a merely moral obligation against the author and the original publisher. In fact, he was not held to pay any honorarium to the author upon handling over the manuscript, nor to paying him royalties, nor to pay anything to the original publisher. The only expense in charge of the pirate publisher was buying the exemplar of the original edition out of which he was to make, as we say today, a free use.
2 The aff violates the categorical imperative and is non-universalizable- governments have a binding obligation to protect creations Van Dyke 18 Raymond Van Dyke, 7-17-2018, "The Categorical Imperative for Innovation and Patenting," IPWatchdog, https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/07/17/categorical-imperative-innovation-patenting/id=99178/ SJDA recut SJKS As we shall see, applying Kantian logic entails first acknowledging some basic principles; that the people have a right to express themselves, that that expression (the fruits of their labor) has value and is theirs (unless consent is given otherwise), and that government is obligated to protect people and their property. Thus, an inventor or creator has a right in their own creation, which cannot be taken from them without their consent. So, employing this canon, a proposed Categorical Imperative (CI) is the following Statement: creators should be protected against the unlawful taking of their creation by others. Applying this Statement to everyone, i.e., does the Statement hold water if everyone does this, leads to a yes determination. Whether a child, a book or a prototype, creations of all sorts should be protected, and this CI stands. This result also dovetails with the purpose of government: to protect the people and their possessions by providing laws to that effect, whether for the protection of tangible or intangible things. However, a contrary proposal can be postulated: everyone should be able to use the creations of another without charge. Can this Statement rise to the level of a CI? This proposal, upon analysis would also lead to chaos. Hollywood, for example, unable to protect their films, television shows or any content, would either be out of business or have robust encryption and other trade secret protections, which would seriously undermine content distribution and consumer enjoyment. Likewise, inventors, unable to license or sell their innovations or make any money to cover RandD, would not bother to invent or also resort to strong trade secret. Why even create? This approach thus undermines and greatly hinders the distribution of ideas in a free society, which is contrary to the paradigm of the U.S. patent and copyright systems, which promotes dissemination. By allowing freeriding, innovation and creativity would be thwarted (or at least not encouraged) and trade secret protection would become the mainstay for society with the heightened distrust.
10/31/21
SO - NC - Kant v2
Tournament: Mid America Cup | Round: 1 | Opponent: Boise WS | Judge: Spencer Orlowski I value morality. Ethics must be derived from the constitutive features of agents – ethics based internally fail because they can’t generate universal obligations and ethics based externally fail because they are nonbinding as agents could opt-out and have no motivation to follow them which means they fail to guide action. Constitutivism solves – it allows for universal obligations among all agents but they are binding and cannot be opted out of. Thus, the meta ethic is constitutivism.
Next, only practical reason is constitutive: 1 Regress – practical reason is inescapable because when you question why you should use practical reason, you are using reason itself. Anything else is infinitely regressive and nonbinding because you can always ask “why should I do that” continuously without any terminal justification. Bindingness is required in morality; otherwise people could opt out of it and have no moral guidance. 2 Action Theory – Every action can be broken down to infinite amounts of movements, i.e. me moving my arm can be broken down to the infinite moments of every state my arm is in. Only reason can unify these movements because we use practical reason to achieve our goals, means all actions collapse to reason
Morality must be grounded in a priori truth to guide action, otherwise everyone would have different ethical codes and different rules. And, truth exists independent of human experience since certain things can be self-proving, i.e. a triangle has three sides. This is the difference between a priori and a posteriori. Reject a posteriori truth since they are just arbitrary states of being, not constitutive of ethics. Next, practical reason means we all have a unified perspective: What can be justified to me can be justified to everyone who is a practical reasoner. If I can conclude that 2+2 is 4, then I understand not only that I know 2+2 is 4, but that everyone around me can arrive at the same conclusion A priori truth has to apply to everyone: A) absent universal ethics, morality becomes arbitrary and fails to guide action, which means that ethics is rendered useless, B) otherwise it creates a contradiction in which you justify your freedom while limiting others’ Thus the standard is consistency with the categorical imperative.
Prefer additionally: 1 Performativity—freedom is the key to the process of justification of arguments. Willing that we should abide by their ethical theory presupposes that we own ourselves in the first place
2 Consequentialism fails -, a Problem of induction Vickers 14, John Vickers, 2014, The Problem of Induction, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/ The original problem of induction can be simply put. It concerns the support or justification of inductive methods; methods that predict or infer, in Hume's words, that “instances of which we have had no experience resemble those of which we have had experience” (THN, 89). Such methods are clearly essential in scientific reasoning as well as in the conduct of our everyday affairs. The problem is how to support or justify them and it leads to a dilemma: the principle cannot be proved deductively, for it is contingent, and only necessary truths can be proved deductively. Nor can it be supported inductively—by arguing that it has always or usually been reliable in the past—for that would beg the question by assuming just what is to be proved. b butterfly effect: every consequence is infinitely cascading so we don’t know the true extent of our actions, meaning we cannot predict consequences c Inability to know each other’s experience makes it an unreliable basis for ethics because different experiences bring different concepts of truth – only a priori ethics solve since a priori truths are accessible to all agents
3 Frameworks are an interpretation of the word “ought” in the resolution, which means they are a topicality interpretation and thus should be theoretically justified. Prefer my framework bc of Resource disparities—a focus on evidence and statistics privileges debaters with the most prep which excludes lone-wolfs who lack huge files. A Kantian debate can easily be won without any prep since only analytics are required. That controls the internal link to other voters because a pre-req to debating is access to the activity
1NC – Offense 1 Intellectual property is an inalienable personal right of economic use Pozzo 6 Pozzo, Riccardo. “Immanuel Kant on Intellectual Property.” Trans/Form/Ação, vol. 29, no. 2, 2006, pp. 11–18., doi:10.1590/s0101-31732006000200002. SJDA recut SJKS recut Cookie JX recut OL Corpus mysticum, opus mysticum, propriété incorporelle, proprietà letteraria, geistiges Eigentum. All these terms mean intellectual property, the existence of which is intuitively clear because of the unbreakable bond that ties the work to its creator. The book belongs to whomever has written it, the picture to whomever has painted it, the sculpture to whomever has sculpted it; and this independently from the number of exemplars of the book or of the work of art in their passages from owner to owner. The initial bond cannot change and it ensures the author authority on the work. Kant writes in section 31/II of the Metaphysics of Morals: “Why does unauthorized publishing, which strikes one even at first glance as unjust, still have an appearance of being rightful? Because on the one hand a book is a corporeal artifact (opus mechanicum) that can be reproduced (by someone in legitimate possession of a copy of it), so that there is a right to a thing with regard to it. On the other hand a book is also a mere discourse of the publisher to the public, which the publisher may not repeat publicly without having a mandate from the author to do so (praestatio operae), and this is a right against a person. The error consists in mistaking one of these rights for the other” (Kant, 1902, t.6, p.290). The corpus mysticum, the work considered as an immaterial good, remains property of the author on behalf of the original right of its creation. The corpus mechanicum consists of the exemplars of the book or of the work of art. It becomes the property of whoever has bought the material object in which the work has been reproduced or expressed. Seneca points out in De beneficiis (VII, 6) the difference between owning a thing and owning its use. He tells us that the bookseller Dorus had the habit of calling Cicero’s books his own, while there are people who claim books their own because they have written them and other people that do the same because they have bought them. Seneca concludes that the books can be correctly said to belong to both, for it is true they belong to both, but in a different way The peculiarity of intellectual property consists thus first in being indeed a property, but property of an action; and second in being indeed inalienable, but also transferable in commission and license to a publisher. The bond the author has on his work confers him a moral right that is indeed a personal right. It is also a right to exploit economically his work in all possible ways, a right of economic use, which is a patrimonial right. Kant and Fichte argued that moral right and the right of economic use are strictly connected, and that the offense to one implies inevitably offense to the other. In eighteenth-century Germany, the free use came into discussion among the presuppositions of a democratic renewal of state and society. In his Supplement to the Consideration of Publishing and Its Rights, Reimarus asked writers “instead of writing for the aristocracy, to write for the tiers état of the reader’s world.” (Reimarus, 1791b, p.595). He saluted with enthusiasm the claim of disenfranchising from the monopoly of English publishers expressed in the American Act for the Encouragement of Learning of May 31, 1790. Kant, however, was firm in embracing intellectual property. Referring himself to Roman Law, he asked for its legislative formulation not only as patrimonial right, but also as a personal right. In Of the Illegitimity of Pirate Publishing, he considered the moral faculties related to intellectual property as an “inalienable right (ius personalissimum) always himself to speak through anyone else, the right, that is, that no one may deliver the same speech to the public other than in his (the author’s) name” (Kant, 1902, t.8, p.85). Fichte went farther in the Demonstration of the Illegitimity of Pirate Publishing. He saw intellectual property as a part of his metaphysical construction of intellectual activity, which was based on the principle that thoughts “are not transmitted hand to hand, they are not paid with shining cash, neither are they transmitted to us if we take home the book that contains them and put it into our library. In order to make those thoughts our own an action is still missing: we must read the book, meditate – provided it is not completely trivial – on its content, consider it under different aspects and eventually accept it within our connections of ideas” (Fichte, 1964, t.I/1, p.411). At the center of the discussion was the practice of reprinting books in a pirate edition after having them reset word after words after an exemplar of the original edition. Given Germany’s division in a myriad of small states, the imperial privilege was ineffective against pirate publishing. Kant and Fichte spoke for the acceptance of the right to defend the work of an author by the usurpations of others so that he may receive a patrimonial advantage from those who utilize the work acquiring new knowledge and/or an aesthetic experience. In particular, Fichte declared the absolute primacy of the moral faculties within the corpus mysticum. He divided the latter into a formal and a material part. “This intellectual element must be divided anew into what is material, the content of the book, the thoughts it presents; and the form of these thoughts, the manner in which, the connection in which, the formulations and the words by means of which the book presents them” (Fichte, 1964, t.I/1, p.411). Fichte’s underlining the author’s exclusive right to the intellectual content of his book – “the appropriation of which through another is physically impossible” (ibid.) – brought him to the extreme of prohibiting any form of copy that is not meant for personal use. In Publishing Considered anew, Reimarus considered on the contrary copyright in its patrimonial aspects as a limitation to free trade: “What would not happen were a universal protection against pirate publishing guaranteed? Monopoly and safer sales certainly do not procure convenient price; on the contrary, they are at the origin of great abuses. The only condition for convenient price is free-trade, and one cannot help noticing that upon the appearance of a private edition, publishers are forced to substantially lower the price of a book” (Reimarus, 1791a, pp.402-3). Reimarus admitted of being unable to argue in terms of justice. Justice was of no bearing, he said, for whom, like himself, considered undemonstrated the author’s permanent property of his work (herein supported by the legislative vacuum of those years). What mattered, he said, was equity. In sum, Reimarus anticipated today’s stance on free use by referring to the principle that public interest on knowledge ought to prevail on the author’s interest and to balance the copyright. Moreover, Reimarus extended his argument beyond the realm of literary production to embrace, among others, the today vital issue of pharmaceutical production on patented receipts. “Let us suppose that at some place a detailed description for the preparation of a good medicine or of any other useful thing be published, why may not somebody who lives in places that are far away from that one copy it to use it for his own profit and but must instead ask the original publisher for the issue of each exemplar?” (Reimarus, 1791b, t.2, pp.584). To sum up, Reimarus’s stance does not seem respondent to rule of law. For in all dubious case the general rule ought to prevail, fighting intellectual property with anti-monopolistic arguments in favor of free trade brings with itself consequences that are not tranquilizing also for the ones that are expected to apply the law. By resetting literary texts, one could obviously expurgate some errors. More frequently, however, some were added, given the exclusively commercial objectives of the reprints. The valid principle was, thus, that reprints were less precise than original editions, but they were much cheaper for the simple reason that the pirate publisher had a merely moral obligation against the author and the original publisher. In fact, he was not held to pay any honorarium to the author upon handling over the manuscript, nor to paying him royalties, nor to pay anything to the original publisher. The only expense in charge of the pirate publisher was buying the exemplar of the original edition out of which he was to make, as we say today, a free use.
Unauthorized publication and usage of text is wrongful and infringes on inalienable moral rights Barron ’11. Barron, Anne (2011) Kant, copyright and communicative freedom. Law and philosophy . pp. 1-48. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/37521/1/Kant_Copyright_and_Communicative_Freedom_28lsero29.pdf NChu My claim in this article is that a significantly different, and arguably richer, conception of what a free culture entails and how the rights of authors relate to it emerges from a direct engagement with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.15 The immediate justification for turning to Kant in this context is that he dealt very directly with the issue of authors’ rights – first in an essay published in 178516 (hereinafter ‘1785 Essay’) and again briefly in a section – entitled “What is a Book” – of his late work of political philosophy, Part I of The Metaphysics of Morals. 17 Moreover, he theorized these rights as speech rights, and not as rights of property in works considered as crystallizations of their authors’ communications.18 The most wellknown of the arguments contained in these writings can be briefly outlined. Kant’s premise is that a book considered as a material object must be distinguished from a book considered as the vehicle for an activity of authorial speech. On the one hand, an author’s manuscript, and every printed copy of it, is an ordinary object of property attracting an ordinary right of property vested in whomever is legitimately in possession of the object. This right would include the right to use the object, to sell the object and indeed to copy the object. On the other hand, a published book (considered as the vehicle of its author’s speech) is also a communication from publisher to public in the name of the author. Hence it is also an action, and as such it has its existence in a person – the person of the author. For Kant, it follows that unauthorized publication of copies of the author’s text – though not unauthorized reproduction as such – is wrongful. By selling copies of an author’s text to the public, the unauthorized publisher is not just dealing with commodities – printed books – in his own name, but is disseminating an author’s speech, thus compelling the author to speak against his will,19 to acknowledge the book as his own and be responsible for it.20 Actions “belong exclusively to the person of the author, and the author has in them an inalienable right always himself to speak through anyone else, the right, that is, that no one may deliver the same speech to the public other than in his (the author’s) name”21 or deliver a fundamentally altered speech in his name.22 However if the work is indeed so altered that it would be wrong to attribute it to the author, it can rightfully be published in the modifier’s name.23 These remarks on authors’ rights have not gone unnoticed by copyright lawyers. On the contrary, Kant’s 1785 Essay is often cited as inspiration for the theory – now institutionalized in international copyright law – that authors ought to have inalienable ‘moral’ rights in relation to their works.24 These are enforceable legal rights which are ‘moral’ in the sense that they concern authors’ non-pecuniary interests in relation to their works (such as the interest in being identified as author, and in ensuring that one’s works are published only in the form in which they were created); and they contrast with the economic rights (e.g. to control the reproduction and distribution of copies) which protect authors’ pecuniary interests in the commercial exploitation of their works. Yet moral rights in practice afford far less protection to authors than the theory would suggest, and transferable economic rights to the most commercially valuable works are more often than not held by corporate investors. And since it is economic rights which are the focus of concerns about copyright expansionism and its implications for the public domain, the formal recognition of a doctrine of moral rights has done little to allay these concerns.
2 The aff violates the categorical imperative and is non-universalizable- governments have a binding obligation to protect creations Van Dyke 18 Raymond Van Dyke, 7-17-2018, "The Categorical Imperative for Innovation and Patenting," IPWatchdog, https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/07/17/categorical-imperative-innovation-patenting/id=99178/ SJDA recut SJKS As we shall see, applying Kantian logic entails first acknowledging some basic principles; that the people have a right to express themselves, that that expression (the fruits of their labor) has value and is theirs (unless consent is given otherwise), and that government is obligated to protect people and their property. Thus, an inventor or creator has a right in their own creation, which cannot be taken from them without their consent. So, employing this canon, a proposed Categorical Imperative (CI) is the following Statement: creators should be protected against the unlawful taking of their creation by others. Applying this Statement to everyone, i.e., does the Statement hold water if everyone does this, leads to a yes determination. Whether a child, a book or a prototype, creations of all sorts should be protected, and this CI stands. This result also dovetails with the purpose of government: to protect the people and their possessions by providing laws to that effect, whether for the protection of tangible or intangible things. However, a contrary proposal can be postulated: everyone should be able to use the creations of another without charge. Can this Statement rise to the level of a CI? This proposal, upon analysis would also lead to chaos. Hollywood, for example, unable to protect their films, television shows or any content, would either be out of business or have robust encryption and other trade secret protections, which would seriously undermine content distribution and consumer enjoyment. Likewise, inventors, unable to license or sell their innovations or make any money to cover RandD, would not bother to invent or also resort to strong trade secret. Why even create? This approach thus undermines and greatly hinders the distribution of ideas in a free society, which is contrary to the paradigm of the U.S. patent and copyright systems, which promotes dissemination. By allowing freeriding, innovation and creativity would be thwarted (or at least not encouraged) and trade secret protection would become the mainstay for society with the heightened distrust. 3 No aff offense IP is considered a form of property under the fw Pozzo 06 (POZZO, R. Immanuel Kant sobre propriedade intelectual. Trans/Form/Ação, (São Paulo), v.29(2), 2006, p.11-18.) The peculiarity of intellectual property consists thus first in being indeed a property, but property of an action; and second in being indeed inalienable, but also transferable in commission and license to a publisher. The bond the author has on his work confers him a moral right that is indeed a personal right. It is also a right to exploit economically his work in all possible ways, a right of economic use, which is a patrimonial right. Kant and Fichte argued that moral right and the right of economic use are strictly connected, and that the offense to one implies inevitably offense to the other. In eighteenth-century Germany, the free use came into discussion among the presuppositions of a democratic renewal of state and society. In his Supplement to the Consideration of Publishing and Its Rights, Reimarus asked writers “instead of writing for the aristocracy, to write for the tiers état of the reader’s world.” (Reimarus, 1791b, p.595). He saluted with enthusiasm the claim of disenfranchising from the monopoly of English publishers expressed in the American Act for the Encouragement of Learning of May 31, 1790. Kant, however, was firm in embracing intellectual property. Referring himself to Roman Law, he asked for its legislative formulation not only as patrimonial right, but also as a personal right. In Of the Illegitimity of Pirate Publishing, he considered the moral faculties related to intellectual property as an “inalienable right (ius personalissimum) always himself to speak through anyone else, the right, that is, that no one may deliver the same speech to the public other than in his (the author’s) name” (Kant, 1902, t.8, p.85). Fichte went farther in the Demonstration of the Illegitimity of Pirate Publishing. He saw intellectual property as a part of his metaphysical construction of intellectual activity, which was based on the principle that thoughts “are not transmitted hand to hand, they are not paid with shining cash, neither are they transmitted to us if we take home the book that contains them and put it into our library. In order to make those thoughts our own an action is still missing: we must read the book, meditate – provided it is not completely trivial – on its content, consider it under different aspects and eventually accept it within our connections of ideas” (Fichte, 1964, t.I/1, p.411). At the center of the discussion was the practice of reprinting books in a pirate edition after having them reset word after words after an exemplar of the original edition. Given Germany’s division in a myriad of small states, the imperial privilege was ineffective against pirate publishing. Kant and Fichte spoke for the acceptance of the right to defend the work of an author by the usurpations of others so that he may receive a patrimonial advantage from those who utilize the work acquiring new knowledge and/or an aesthetic experience. In particular, Fichte declared the absolute primacy of the moral faculties within the corpus mysticum. He divided the latter into a formal and a material part. “This intellectual element must be divided anew into what is material, the content of the book, the thoughts it presents; and the form of these thoughts, the manner in which, the connection in which, the formulations and the words by means of which the book presents them” (Fichte, 1964, t.I/1, p.411). Fichte’s underlining the author’s exclusive right to the intellectual content of his book – “the appropriation of which through another is physically impossible” (ibid.) – brought him to the extreme of prohibiting any form of copy that is not meant for personal use.
Kant justifies a fundamental right to property Merges 11 (Robert, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati Professor of Law and Technology, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law) “Justifying Intellectual Property,” Harvard University Press, 2011 JL recut OL Kant believed that any object onto which a person projects his or her will may come to be owned. Kant seemed to consider ownership as a primitive concept whose roots run very deep in human consciousness. This is evident from the language he uses. The origin of property, he says, is in a deep and abiding sense of “Mine and Yours.” “That is rightfully mine,” he writes, “if I am so bound to it that anyone who uses it without my consent would thereby injure me.”15 But what is the point of this? Why do people want to be bound to things? In essence, Kant says, to expand their range of freedom— their autonomy.16 People have a desire to carry out projects in the world. Sometimes, those projects require access to and control over external objects. The genesis of property is the desire of an individual to carry out personal projects in the world, for which various objects are necessary. For Kant, this desire must be given its broadest scope, to promote the widest range of human choice, and therefore human projects. Kant accordingly refuses to accept any binding legal rule that makes some objects strictly unownable, because the rationale for such a rule would conflict with the basic need for maximal freedom of action. Freedom to appropriate is so basic, so tied to matters of individual will and personal choice, that Kant finds it unthinkable to rule out large categories of things from the domain of the potentially ownable. As Kant scholar Paul Guyer says, for Kant, “The fundamental principle of morality dictates the protection of the external use of freedom or freedom of action, as a necessary expression of freedom of choice and thus as part of autonomy as a whole. . . .”17 This captures it in a nutshell: freedom of action, including the right to possess, as a necessary expression of freedom of choice, or autonomy. IP is property Schultz 14 (Mark, Chair in Intellectual Property Law and the Director of the Intellectual Property and Technology Law Program at the University of Akron School of Law and co-founder and a leader of the Center for Intellectual Property x Innovation Policy at George Mason University) “A free market perspective on intellectual property rights,” American Enterprise Institute, 2/23/2014 JL recut OL
Point 1. Intellectual property secures the same values as physical property As an institution, property secures rights in what we create through our work. In this regard, there’s no cause or need to distinguish intellectual property from any other forms of property. In all cases, a person employs his intellect and talents to impose his plan and will on his environment to bring something new into the world. This is the essence of productive labor, the fruits of which property protects. Distinguishing between physical and intellectual labor, as some would, is misguided, because both are, at heart, the same activity. Whether it is a carpenter building a house, a farmer planting a field, an author writing a book, a director filming a movie, or an inventor developing a new drug, the activity is, ultimately, productive labor.
10/31/21
SO - NC - Kant v3
Tournament: Yale | Round: 6 | Opponent: La Salle TP | Judge: Abishek Stanley I value morality. Ethics must be derived from the constitutive features of agents – ethics based internally fail because they can’t generate universal obligations and ethics based externally fail because they are nonbinding as agents could opt-out and have no motivation to follow them which means they fail to guide action. Constitutivism solves – it allows for universal obligations among all agents but they are binding and cannot be opted out of. Thus, the meta ethic is constitutivism.
Next, only practical reason is constitutive: 1 Regress – practical reason is inescapable because when you question why you should use practical reason, you are using reason itself. Anything else is infinitely regressive and nonbinding because you can always ask “why should I do that” continuously without any terminal justification. Bindingness is required in morality; otherwise people could opt out of it and have no moral guidance. 2 Action Theory – Every action can be broken down to infinite amounts of movements, i.e. me moving my arm can be broken down to the infinite moments of every state my arm is in. Only reason can unify these movements because we use practical reason to achieve our goals, means all actions collapse to reason
Morality must be grounded in a priori truth to guide action, otherwise everyone would have different ethical codes and different rules. And, truth exists independent of human experience since certain things can be self-proving, i.e. a triangle has three sides. This is the difference between a priori and a posteriori. Reject a posteriori truth since they are just arbitrary states of being, not constitutive of ethics. Next, practical reason means we all have a unified perspective: What can be justified to me can be justified to everyone who is a practical reasoner. If I can conclude that 2+2 is 4, then I understand not only that I know 2+2 is 4, but that everyone around me can arrive at the same conclusion A priori truth has to apply to everyone: A) absent universal ethics, morality becomes arbitrary and fails to guide action, which means that ethics is rendered useless, B) otherwise it creates a contradiction in which you justify your freedom while limiting others’ Thus the standard or value criterion is consistency with the categorical imperative.
Prefer additionally: 1 Performativity—freedom is the key to the process of justification of arguments. Willing that we should abide by their ethical theory presupposes that we own ourselves in the first place, ow ur perf on spec
2 Consequentialism fails - a induction fails: the logic of looking into the past to predict the future is predicated on past experiences, meaning it’s circular, b butterfly effect: every consequence is infinitely cascading so we don’t know the true extent of our actions, meaning we cannot predict consequences
3resource disparities – a lone wolf debater from Idaho can defeat a Harvard-Westlake debater in a Kant debate as it doesn’t require loads of prep that big schools inevitably have more of; analytics are all that’s required. This controls the internal link to all other voters as we can’t debate without accessibility.
1 The aff violates the categorical imperative and is non-universalizable- governments have a binding obligation to protect creations Van Dyke 18 Raymond Van Dyke, 7-17-2018, "The Categorical Imperative for Innovation and Patenting," IPWatchdog, https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/07/17/categorical-imperative-innovation-patenting/id=99178/ SJDA recut SJKS As we shall see, applying Kantian logic entails first acknowledging some basic principles; that the people have a right to express themselves, that that expression (the fruits of their labor) has value and is theirs (unless consent is given otherwise), and that government is obligated to protect people and their property. Thus, an inventor or creator has a right in their own creation, which cannot be taken from them without their consent. So, employing this canon, a proposed Categorical Imperative (CI) is the following Statement: creators should be protected against the unlawful taking of their creation by others. Applying this Statement to everyone, i.e., does the Statement hold water if everyone does this, leads to a yes determination. Whether a child, a book or a prototype, creations of all sorts should be protected, and this CI stands. This result also dovetails with the purpose of government: to protect the people and their possessions by providing laws to that effect, whether for the protection of tangible or intangible things. However, a contrary proposal can be postulated: everyone should be able to use the creations of another without charge. Can this Statement rise to the level of a CI? This proposal, upon analysis would also lead to chaos. Hollywood, for example, unable to protect their films, television shows or any content, would either be out of business or have robust encryption and other trade secret protections, which would seriously undermine content distribution and consumer enjoyment. Likewise, inventors, unable to license or sell their innovations or make any money to cover RandD, would not bother to invent or also resort to strong trade secret. Why even create? This approach thus undermines and greatly hinders the distribution of ideas in a free society, which is contrary to the paradigm of the U.S. patent and copyright systems, which promotes dissemination. By allowing freeriding, innovation and creativity would be thwarted (or at least not encouraged) and trade secret protection would become the mainstay for society with the heightened distrust.
Kant justifies a fundamental right to property Merges 11 (Robert, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati Professor of Law and Technology, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law) “Justifying Intellectual Property,” Harvard University Press, 2011 JL Kant believed that any object onto which a person projects his or her will may come to be owned. Kant seemed to consider ownership as a primitive concept whose roots run very deep in human consciousness. This is evident from the language he uses. The origin of property, he says, is in a deep and abiding sense of “Mine and Yours.” “That is rightfully mine,” he writes, “if I am so bound to it that anyone who uses it without my consent would thereby injure me.”15 But what is the point of this? Why do people want to be bound to things? In essence, Kant says, to expand their range of freedom— their autonomy.16 People have a desire to carry out projects in the world. Sometimes, those projects require access to and control over external objects. The genesis of property is the desire of an individual to carry out personal projects in the world, for which various objects are necessary. For Kant, this desire must be given its broadest scope, to promote the widest range of human choice, and therefore human projects. Kant accordingly refuses to accept any binding legal rule that makes some objects strictly unownable, because the rationale for such a rule would conflict with the basic need for maximal freedom of action. Freedom to appropriate is so basic, so tied to matters of individual will and personal choice, that Kant finds it unthinkable to rule out large categories of things from the domain of the potentially ownable. As Kant scholar Paul Guyer says, for Kant, “The fundamental principle of morality dictates the protection of the external use of freedom or freedom of action, as a necessary expression of freedom of choice and thus as part of autonomy as a whole. . . .”17 This captures it in a nutshell: freedom of action, including the right to possess, as a necessary expression of freedom of choice, or autonomy. IP is property Schultz 14 (Mark, Chair in Intellectual Property Law and the Director of the Intellectual Property and Technology Law Program at the University of Akron School of Law and co-founder and a leader of the Center for Intellectual Property x Innovation Policy at George Mason University) “A free market perspective on intellectual property rights,” American Enterprise Institute, 2/23/2014 JL
Point 1. Intellectual property secures the same values as physical property As an institution, property secures rights in what we create through our work. In this regard, there’s no cause or need to distinguish intellectual property from any other forms of property. In all cases, a person employs his intellect and talents to impose his plan and will on his environment to bring something new into the world. This is the essence of productive labor, the fruits of which property protects. Distinguishing between physical and intellectual labor, as some would, is misguided, because both are, at heart, the same activity. Whether it is a carpenter building a house, a farmer planting a field, an author writing a book, a director filming a movie, or an inventor developing a new drug, the activity is, ultimately, productive labor.
10/31/21
SO - NC - Kant v4
Tournament: Mid America Cup | Round: 4 | Opponent: Harker NA | Judge: Sam Anderson Ethics must be derived from the constitutive features of agents – ethics based internally fail because they can’t generate universal obligations and ethics based externally fail because they are nonbinding as agents could opt-out which means they fail to guide action. 1)Empiricism could also change, meaning external fw are arbitrary. 2)past experiences have no effect on causality or internal link to continuity, i.e. raining yesterday doesn’t mean rain today. 3)Is/Ought Gap – experience just describes how the world is but doesn’t indicate how it ought to be which means there must be an a priori conception of good
Constitutivism solves – it allows for universal obligations among all agents but they are binding and cannot be opted out of.
Next, only practical reason is constitutive: 1 Regress – to question why one should reason concedes its authority since it is an act of reasoning itself which proves it’s binding and inescapable That means we must universally will maxims— any non-universalizable norm justifies someone’s ability to impede on your ends. Thus, the standard is consistency with the categorical imperative. Prefer additionally: 1 Performativity—freedom is the key to the process of justification of arguments. Willing that we should abide by their ethical theory presupposes that we own ourselves in the first place 2 Consequentialism fails - a induction fails: the logic of looking into the past to predict the future is predicated on past experiences, meaning it’s circular, b butterfly effect: every consequence is infinitely cascading so we don’t know the true extent of our actions, meaning we cannot predict consequences C Aggregation is impossible – pleasure and pain are subjective and qualitative 1NC – Offense 1 Intellectual property is an inalienable personal right of economic use Pozzo 6 Pozzo, Riccardo. “Immanuel Kant on Intellectual Property.” Trans/Form/Ação, vol. 29, no. 2, 2006, pp. 11–18., doi:10.1590/s0101-31732006000200002. SJDA recut SJKS recut Cookie JX Corpus mysticum, opus mysticum, propriété incorporelle, proprietà letteraria, geistiges Eigentum. All these terms mean intellectual property, the existence of which is intuitively clear because of the unbreakable bond that ties the work to its creator. The book belongs to whomever has written it, the picture to whomever has painted it, the sculpture to whomever has sculpted it; and this independently from the number of exemplars of the book or of the work of art in their passages from owner to owner. The initial bond cannot change and it ensures the author authority on the work. Kant writes in section 31/II of the Metaphysics of Morals: “Why does unauthorized publishing, which strikes one even at first glance as unjust, still have an appearance of being rightful? Because on the one hand a book is a corporeal artifact (opus mechanicum) that can be reproduced (by someone in legitimate possession of a copy of it), so that there is a right to a thing with regard to it. On the other hand a book is also a mere discourse of the publisher to the public, which the publisher may not repeat publicly without having a mandate from the author to do so (praestatio operae), and this is a right against a person. The error consists in mistaking one of these rights for the other” (Kant, 1902, t.6, p.290). The corpus mysticum, the work considered as an immaterial good, remains property of the author on behalf of the original right of its creation. The corpus mechanicum consists of the exemplars of the book or of the work of art. It becomes the property of whoever has bought the material object in which the work has been reproduced or expressed. Seneca points out in De beneficiis (VII, 6) the difference between owning a thing and owning its use. He tells us that the bookseller Dorus had the habit of calling Cicero’s books his own, while there are people who claim books their own because they have written them and other people that do the same because they have bought them. Seneca concludes that the books can be correctly said to belong to both, for it is true they belong to both, but in a different way The peculiarity of intellectual property consists thus first in being indeed a property, but property of an action; and second in being indeed inalienable, but also transferable in commission and license to a publisher. The bond the author has on his work confers him a moral right that is indeed a personal right. It is also a right to exploit economically his work in all possible ways, a right of economic use, which is a patrimonial right. Kant and Fichte argued that moral right and the right of economic use are strictly connected, and that the offense to one implies inevitably offense to the other. In eighteenth-century Germany, the free use came into discussion among the presuppositions of a democratic renewal of state and society. In his Supplement to the Consideration of Publishing and Its Rights, Reimarus asked writers “instead of writing for the aristocracy, to write for the tiers état of the reader’s world.” (Reimarus, 1791b, p.595). He saluted with enthusiasm the claim of disenfranchising from the monopoly of English publishers expressed in the American Act for the Encouragement of Learning of May 31, 1790. Kant, however, was firm in embracing intellectual property. Referring himself to Roman Law, he asked for its legislative formulation not only as patrimonial right, but also as a personal right. In Of the Illegitimity of Pirate Publishing, he considered the moral faculties related to intellectual property as an “inalienable right (ius personalissimum) always himself to speak through anyone else, the right, that is, that no one may deliver the same speech to the public other than in his (the author’s) name” (Kant, 1902, t.8, p.85). Fichte went farther in the Demonstration of the Illegitimity of Pirate Publishing. He saw intellectual property as a part of his metaphysical construction of intellectual activity, which was based on the principle that thoughts “are not transmitted hand to hand, they are not paid with shining cash, neither are they transmitted to us if we take home the book that contains them and put it into our library. In order to make those thoughts our own an action is still missing: we must read the book, meditate – provided it is not completely trivial – on its content, consider it under different aspects and eventually accept it within our connections of ideas” (Fichte, 1964, t.I/1, p.411). At the center of the discussion was the practice of reprinting books in a pirate edition after having them reset word after words after an exemplar of the original edition. Given Germany’s division in a myriad of small states, the imperial privilege was ineffective against pirate publishing. Kant and Fichte spoke for the acceptance of the right to defend the work of an author by the usurpations of others so that he may receive a patrimonial advantage from those who utilize the work acquiring new knowledge and/or an aesthetic experience. In particular, Fichte declared the absolute primacy of the moral faculties within the corpus mysticum. He divided the latter into a formal and a material part. “This intellectual element must be divided anew into what is material, the content of the book, the thoughts it presents; and the form of these thoughts, the manner in which, the connection in which, the formulations and the words by means of which the book presents them” (Fichte, 1964, t.I/1, p.411). Fichte’s underlining the author’s exclusive right to the intellectual content of his book – “the appropriation of which through another is physically impossible” (ibid.) – brought him to the extreme of prohibiting any form of copy that is not meant for personal use. In Publishing Considered anew, Reimarus considered on the contrary copyright in its patrimonial aspects as a limitation to free trade: “What would not happen were a universal protection against pirate publishing guaranteed? Monopoly and safer sales certainly do not procure convenient price; on the contrary, they are at the origin of great abuses. The only condition for convenient price is free-trade, and one cannot help noticing that upon the appearance of a private edition, publishers are forced to substantially lower the price of a book” (Reimarus, 1791a, pp.402-3). Reimarus admitted of being unable to argue in terms of justice. Justice was of no bearing, he said, for whom, like himself, considered undemonstrated the author’s permanent property of his work (herein supported by the legislative vacuum of those years). What mattered, he said, was equity. In sum, Reimarus anticipated today’s stance on free use by referring to the principle that public interest on knowledge ought to prevail on the author’s interest and to balance the copyright. Moreover, Reimarus extended his argument beyond the realm of literary production to embrace, among others, the today vital issue of pharmaceutical production on patented receipts. “Let us suppose that at some place a detailed description for the preparation of a good medicine or of any other useful thing be published, why may not somebody who lives in places that are far away from that one copy it to use it for his own profit and but must instead ask the original publisher for the issue of each exemplar?” (Reimarus, 1791b, t.2, pp.584). To sum up, Reimarus’s stance does not seem respondent to rule of law. For in all dubious case the general rule ought to prevail, fighting intellectual property with anti-monopolistic arguments in favor of free trade brings with itself consequences that are not tranquilizing also for the ones that are expected to apply the law. By resetting literary texts, one could obviously expurgate some errors. More frequently, however, some were added, given the exclusively commercial objectives of the reprints. The valid principle was, thus, that reprints were less precise than original editions, but they were much cheaper for the simple reason that the pirate publisher had a merely moral obligation against the author and the original publisher. In fact, he was not held to pay any honorarium to the author upon handling over the manuscript, nor to paying him royalties, nor to pay anything to the original publisher. The only expense in charge of the pirate publisher was buying the exemplar of the original edition out of which he was to make, as we say today, a free use.
1 The aff violates the categorical imperative and is non-universalizable- governments have a binding obligation to protect creations Van Dyke 18 Raymond Van Dyke, 7-17-2018, "The Categorical Imperative for Innovation and Patenting," IPWatchdog, https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/07/17/categorical-imperative-innovation-patenting/id=99178/ SJDA recut SJKS As we shall see, applying Kantian logic entails first acknowledging some basic principles; that the people have a right to express themselves, that that expression (the fruits of their labor) has value and is theirs (unless consent is given otherwise), and that government is obligated to protect people and their property. Thus, an inventor or creator has a right in their own creation, which cannot be taken from them without their consent. So, employing this canon, a proposed Categorical Imperative (CI) is the following Statement: creators should be protected against the unlawful taking of their creation by others. Applying this Statement to everyone, i.e., does the Statement hold water if everyone does this, leads to a yes determination. Whether a child, a book or a prototype, creations of all sorts should be protected, and this CI stands. This result also dovetails with the purpose of government: to protect the people and their possessions by providing laws to that effect, whether for the protection of tangible or intangible things. However, a contrary proposal can be postulated: everyone should be able to use the creations of another without charge. Can this Statement rise to the level of a CI? This proposal, upon analysis would also lead to chaos. Hollywood, for example, unable to protect their films, television shows or any content, would either be out of business or have robust encryption and other trade secret protections, which would seriously undermine content distribution and consumer enjoyment. Likewise, inventors, unable to license or sell their innovations or make any money to cover RandD, would not bother to invent or also resort to strong trade secret. Why even create? This approach thus undermines and greatly hinders the distribution of ideas in a free society, which is contrary to the paradigm of the U.S. patent and copyright systems, which promotes dissemination. By allowing freeriding, innovation and creativity would be thwarted (or at least not encouraged) and trade secret protection would become the mainstay for society with the heightened distrust.
Kant justifies a fundamental right to property Merges 11 (Robert, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati Professor of Law and Technology, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law) “Justifying Intellectual Property,” Harvard University Press, 2011 JL Kant believed that any object onto which a person projects his or her will may come to be owned. Kant seemed to consider ownership as a primitive concept whose roots run very deep in human consciousness. This is evident from the language he uses. The origin of property, he says, is in a deep and abiding sense of “Mine and Yours.” “That is rightfully mine,” he writes, “if I am so bound to it that anyone who uses it without my consent would thereby injure me.”15 But what is the point of this? Why do people want to be bound to things? In essence, Kant says, to expand their range of freedom— their autonomy.16 People have a desire to carry out projects in the world. Sometimes, those projects require access to and control over external objects. The genesis of property is the desire of an individual to carry out personal projects in the world, for which various objects are necessary. For Kant, this desire must be given its broadest scope, to promote the widest range of human choice, and therefore human projects. Kant accordingly refuses to accept any binding legal rule that makes some objects strictly unownable, because the rationale for such a rule would conflict with the basic need for maximal freedom of action. Freedom to appropriate is so basic, so tied to matters of individual will and personal choice, that Kant finds it unthinkable to rule out large categories of things from the domain of the potentially ownable. As Kant scholar Paul Guyer says, for Kant, “The fundamental principle of morality dictates the protection of the external use of freedom or freedom of action, as a necessary expression of freedom of choice and thus as part of autonomy as a whole. . . .”17 This captures it in a nutshell: freedom of action, including the right to possess, as a necessary expression of freedom of choice, or autonomy. IP is property Schultz 14 (Mark, Chair in Intellectual Property Law and the Director of the Intellectual Property and Technology Law Program at the University of Akron School of Law and co-founder and a leader of the Center for Intellectual Property x Innovation Policy at George Mason University) “A free market perspective on intellectual property rights,” American Enterprise Institute, 2/23/2014 JL
Point 1. Intellectual property secures the same values as physical property As an institution, property secures rights in what we create through our work. In this regard, there’s no cause or need to distinguish intellectual property from any other forms of property. In all cases, a person employs his intellect and talents to impose his plan and will on his environment to bring something new into the world. This is the essence of productive labor, the fruits of which property protects. Distinguishing between physical and intellectual labor, as some would, is misguided, because both are, at heart, the same activity. Whether it is a carpenter building a house, a farmer planting a field, an author writing a book, a director filming a movie, or an inventor developing a new drug, the activity is, ultimately, productive labor.
10/31/21
SO - T - Spec Medicines
Tournament: Yale | Round: 3 | Opponent: Princeton CB | Judge: David Herrera Interp: The affirmative debater must specify and separately delineate the types of medicines the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for. Violation: they did not Distinct patents and IP protections apply for different medicines Walker, Anthony “Pharmaceutical Patents: an overview” Alacrita https://www.alacrita.com/blog/pharmaceutical-patents-an-overview There are many different types of pharmaceutical patents, depending on the drug they are protecting. The exclusivity of each patent can be extended by various lengths because drug discovery, validation, and marketing can take more than 10 years. By extending the patent exclusivity, it encourages companies to study and develop new drugs by derisking the extended time and effort expended during development. This is especially important for drugs in understudied areas, such as rare diseases, antibiotics, and pediatric populations. Because a large portion (up to 80 percent) of pharmaceutical company’s revenue comes from their patents, they want to extend their patents for as long as possible. Once a patent expires, other companies can manufacture and sell the drug, which is where generic competitors come into play. Patents for new chemical entities (drugs that contain a portion that has never been FDA-approved) can be extended for five years under the FDA and European Medicines Agency (EMA). Sponsors may also receive up to 11 years of exclusivity for new drugs (eight years of data exclusivity, two years of market exclusivity, and a one-year extension). Patents for new methods of use (a new use for a drug or drug reformulation via extended-release drug versions, reduced dosing, or increased ease of use) can be extended for three years under the FDA and ten years under the EMA. Patents for drugs with orphan designation (drugs to treat rare diseases) have an extra seven years of exclusivity on drug sales under the FDA and ten extra years under the EMA. Patents for drugs with pediatric exclusivity (ones that include pediatric data) can enjoy an additional six months of exclusivity under the FDA and EMA. Patents for certain new antibiotics can have an extra five years of exclusivity under the FDA. Standards 1 Real world ed – 2 Stable advocacy –
10/31/21
SO - T - WTO
Tournament: Mid America Cup | Round: 4 | Opponent: Harker NA | Judge: Sam Anderson Interpretation: The aff must defend all member nations of the WTO reduce IP protections, they can’t specify
Standards: 1 Pecision – “The” indicates reference to a noun as a whole Webster’s 5 (Merriam Webster’s Online Dictionary, http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary) 4 -- used as a function word before a noun or a substantivized adjective to indicate reference to a group as a whole Anything else justifies the aff arbitrarily jettisoning words from the resolution which means it kills the strongest link to pragmatics Semantics first – A key to predictability since the res is the only stable stasis point for pre round prep, B the only brightline for affs is topical or not and their model allows affs to be completely non-T which judges can’t vote on due to jurisdictional boundaries C pragmatics collapses to semantics cuz our interp of the res is based on the textbook definition
2 Limits and Ground – Their model allows them to defend any of 164 states and their INFINITE permutations. Kills neg prep and debatability since there are no DAs that apply to every aff, e.g. the effects of IP protections in the US differ from those in India - unlimited topics incentivize obscure affs that negs won’t have prep on. Generics don’t work since each has its own political situation and the aff will always be ahead. Leads to random state of the week affs which destroys reciprocal prep burden.
3 TVA Solves – read the aff as an advantage and defend whole res. PICs don’t matter cuz they have built in asymmetry solvency deficits.
Voters
10/31/21
SO - Theory - CSA
Tournament: Mid America Cup | Round: 5 | Opponent: Strath Haven AM | Judge: James Stuckert Interpretation: If the affirmative defends anything other than “Resolved: The member nations of the World Trade Organization ought to reduce intellectual property protections for medicines.” then they must provide a linked counter-solvency advocate for their specific advocacy in the 1AC. Violation: its not whole res – only covid and they have no csa Standards: Standards: a) Limits – b) Shiftiness- c) Research –