1ac-consistency with the universal freedom 1nc-util cp 1ar-case 1nc-cp case 2ar-case
Ridge Debate
2
Opponent: Montville HB | Judge: Probir Dhara
1AC-structural violence class inequality climate change democracy public sector workers 1NC-util south africa violent strikes 1AR-All 2NC-south africa 2AR-class inequality public sector
Ridge Debate
3
Opponent: Bridgewater Raritan NS | Judge: Tom Speaker
larp
Ridge Debate
5
Opponent: Montville KC | Judge: Maximilian Dittgen
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Cites
Entry
Date
Contacts and Formatting Request
Tournament: NA | Round: 1 | Opponent: NA | Judge: NA Hi I am David Wang. He/Him pronouns. My email is dwang23@scarsdaleschools.org and my number is 9146082019
Formatting Request PLS READ please have an enter space between your analytic arguments. it is hard to read and flow, and if you don't accommodate i'll be possibly reading theory
how to format:
argument a. subpoint
b. subpoint
2. argument
a. subpoint
b. subpoint
how not to format part 1
argument a. subpoint b. subpoint 2. argument a. subpoint b. subpoint how not to format part 2
argument a. subpoint b. subpoint 2. argument a. subpoint b. subpoint
1/15/22
Existentialism aff case
Tournament: Ridge Debate | Round: 5 | Opponent: Montville KC | Judge: Maximilian Dittgen Framing existence precedes essence – agents do not have essence when they enter the world. There is no human nature, so ethics begins with a projection of the self. Sartre ((bracketed for gendered language) Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism., "Existentialism is a Humanism", http://homepages.wmich.edu/~baldner/existentialism.pdf) SHS AK shs bs Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. .... What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that human first of all exists, encounters themself, surges up in the world – and defines themself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. Hethey will not be anything until later, and then they will be what they makes of themselves himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Human simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what they wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism. And this is what people call its “subjectivity,” using the word as a reproach against us. But what do we mean to say by this, but that man is of a greater dignity than a stone or a table? For we mean to say that man primarily exists – that human is, before all else, something which propels itself towards a future and is aware that it is doing so. Human is, indeed, a project which possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus or a cauliflower. Before that projection of the self nothing exists; not even in the heaven of intelligence: man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be. Not, however, what he may wish to be. For what we usually understand by wishing or willing is a conscious decision taken – much more often than not – after we have made ourselves what we are. I may wish to join a party, to write a book or to marry – but in such a case what is usually called my will is probably a manifestation of a prior and more spontaneous decision.
The agent constructs ethics and normativity through its actions and decisions – external principles fail because of an agent’s individuality. Sartre 2 (Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism., No Date, "Existentialism is a Humanism", http://homepages.wmich.edu/~baldner/existentialism.pdf) SHS AK shs bs The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. .... For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism – man is free, Human is freedom. Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimize our behavior. Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. – We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he one is thrown into this world he is they are responsible for everything they does. .... As an example by which you may the better understand this state of abandonment, I will refer to the case of a pupil of mine, who sought me out in the following circumstances. His father was quarreling with his mother and was also inclined to be a “collaborator”; his elder brother had been killed in the German offensive of 1940 and this young man, with a sentiment somewhat primitive but generous, burned to avenge him. His mother was living alone with him, deeply afflicted by the semi-treason of his father and by the death of her eldest son, and her one consolation was in this young man. But he, at this moment, had the choice between going to England to join the Free French Forces or of staying near his mother and helping her to live. He fully realized that this woman lived only for him and that his disappearance – or perhaps his death – would plunge her into despair. He also realized that, concretely and in fact, every action he performed on his mother’s behalf would be sure of effect in the sense of aiding her to live, whereas anything he did in order to go and fight would be an ambiguous action which might vanish like water into sand and serve no purpose. .... Consequently, he found himself confronted by two very different modes of action; the one concrete, immediate, but directed towards only one individual; and the other an action addressed to an end infinitely greater, a national collectivity, but for that very reason ambiguous – and it might be frustrated on the way. At the same time, he was hesitating between two kinds of morality; on the one side the morality of sympathy, of personal devotion and, on the other side, a morality of wider scope but of more debatable validity. He had to choose between those two. What could help him to choose? Could the Christian doctrine? No. Christian doctrine says: Act with charity, love your neighbor, deny yourself for others, choose the way which is hardest, and so forth. But which is the harder road? To whom does one owe the more brotherly love, the patriot or the mother? Which is the more useful aim, the general one of fighting in and for the whole community, or the precise aim of helping one particular person to live? Who can give an answer to that a priori? No one. Nor is it given in any ethical scripture. .... If values are uncertain, if they are still too abstract to determine the particular, concrete case under consideration, nothing remains but to trust in our instincts. That is what this young man tried to do; and when I saw him he said, “In the end, it is feeling that counts; the direction in which it is really pushing me is the one I ought to choose. If I feel that I love my mother enough to sacrifice everything else for her – my will to be avenged, all my longings for action and adventure then I stay with her. If, on the contrary, I feel that my love for her is not enough, I go.” But how does one estimate the strength of a feeling? The value of his feeling for his mother was determined precisely by the fact that he was standing by her. I may say that I love a certain friend enough to sacrifice such or such a sum of money for him, but I cannot prove that unless I have done it. I may say, “I love my mother enough to remain with her,” if actually I have remained with her. I can only estimate the strength of this affection if I have performed an action by which it is defined and ratified. But if I then appeal to this affection to justify my action, I find myself drawn into a vicious circle. In other words, feeling is formed by the deeds that one does; therefore I cannot consult it as a guide to action. And that is to say that I can neither seek within myself for an authentic impulse to action, nor can I expect, from some ethic, formulae that will enable me to act. You may say that the youth did, at least, go to a professor to ask for advice. But if you seek counsel – from a priest, for example you have selected that priest; and at bottom you already knew, more or less, what he would advise.
Freedom for subject formation necessitates letting others engage in self-creation simultaneously. Manzi 13 (Yvonne Manzi, 1-23-2013, accessed on 11-6-2020, E-International Relations, "Jean-Paul Sartre: Existential “Freedom” and the Political", https://www.e-ir.info/2013/01/23/jean-paul-sartre-existential-freedom-and-the-political/) SHS AK shs bs Having acknowledged Sartre’s focus on subjectivity, and having noted that his focus is entirely on the individual and the ‘wrongness’ of the imposition of outside values upon the individual, one wonders how it is possible for society to continue and for a community to maintain itself. In Existentialism and Humanism,25 Sartre seems to introduce a vague idea of community. “In willing freedom we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others” and he adds that “I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim” (2007, 62). This seems to allow the idea that therefore humans will act in solidarity with each other in spite of a lack of transcendental26 values. In Being and Nothingness he explains this further and states that we have a responsibility towards our freedom and the freedom of others. By responsibility, he means “consciousness of being the incontestable author of an event or of an object” (1943, 553). Because an individual is absolutely free, when he makes a choice he becomes that choice and that choice becomes him. The changes he makes in the world because of that choice also become him. In Sartre’s words, “what happens to me happens through me”27 and as a for-itself, I must “wholly assume the situation with the proud consciousness of being the author of it” (Ibid, 554). An example of this is war – if I am born into a war, I am born into a situation and this situation is what I am. I then have to make choices which I am wholly responsible for. If I choose to fight in the war as opposed to desertion or suicide, I have chosen to continue this war, and this war becomes mine.28 This is what Sartre means when he claims that humans are responsible for both their own and others’ freedom.
Thus the standard is consistency with existential freedom. Impact calc: because normativity is generated internally, agents must have the freedom to self-create unimpeded – promotion of self-creation is good and the opposite isn’t.
Prefer additionally:
1 Performativity – only freedom is constitutive to human subjecthood and any moral theory because the act of adopting an ethical framework or developing and making arguments presupposes the ability to radically choose.
2 External theories fail because we cannot guide actions without understanding the particular circumstance of every agent. Benhabib. Benhabib, Seyla. "The Generalized and the Concrete Other: The Kohlberg-Gilligan Controversy and Feminist Theory." Praxis International. 1986. Pg. 38-60. SHS ZS. It is no longer plausible to maintain that such a standpoint can universalize adequately. Kohlberg views the veil of ignorance not only as exemplifying reversibility but universalizability as well. This is the idea that “we must be willing to live with our judgment or decision when we trade places with others in the situation being judged” (Kohlberg, 1981: 197). But the question is, which situation? Can moral situations be individuated independently of our knowledge of the agents involved in these situations, of their histories, attitudes, characters, and desires? Can I describe a situation as one of arrogance or hurt pride without knowing something about you as a concrete other? Can I know how to distinguish between a breach of confidence and a harmless slip of the tongue, without knowing your history and your character? Moral situations, like moral emotions and attitudes, can only be individuated if they are evaluated in light of our knowledge of the history of the agents involved in them. While every procedure of universalizability presupposes that “like cases ought to be treated alike” or that I should act in such a way that I should also be willing that all others in a like situation act like me, the most difficult aspect of any such procedure is to know what constitutes a “like” situation or what it would mean for another to be exactly in a situation like mine. Such a process of reasoning, to be at all viable, must involve the viewpoint of the concrete other, for situations, to paraphrase Stanley Cavell, do not come like “envelopes and golden finches,” ready for definition and description, “nor like apples ripe for grading.”29 When we morally disagree, for example, we do not only disagree about the principles involved; very often we disagree because what I see as a lack of generosity on your part you construe as your legitimate right not to do something; we disagree because what you see as jealousy on my part I view as my desire to have more of your attention. Universalistic moral theory neglects such everyday, interactional morality and assumes that the public standpoint of justice, and our quasi-public personalities as right-bearing individuals, are the center of moral theory. Kohlberg emphasizes the dimension of ideal role-taking or taking the viewpoint of the other in moral judgment. Because he defines the other as the generalized other, however, he perpetrates one of the fundamental errors of Kantian moral theory. Kant’s error was to assume that I, as a pure rational agent reasoning for myself, could reach a conclusion that would be acceptable for all at all times and places.31 In Kantian moral theory, moral agents are like geometricians in different rooms who, reasoning alone for themselves, all arrive at the same solution to a problem. Following Habermas, I want to name this the “monological” model of moral reasoning. Insofar as he interprets ideal role-taking in the light of Rawls’s concept of a “veil of ignorance,” Kohlberg as well sees the silent thought process of a single self who inaginatively puts himself in the position of the other as the most adequate form of moral judgment. I conclude that a definition of the self that is restricted to the standpoint of the generalized other becomes incoherent and cannot individuate among selves. Without assuming the standpoint of the concrete other, no coherent universalizability test can be carried out, for we lack the necessary epistemic information to judge my moral situation to be “like” or “unlike” yours.
3 Inescapability – attempting to not engage in self-creation is an action of self-creation, as all actions continuously construct one’s identity. Moral theories require bindingness – otherwise they could be opted out of and would fail to generate obligations.
4 Compatibility – All theories are compatible with and concede the validity of existentialism insofar as the choice to follow a theory is a commitment to radical freedom. Sartre 3 ((bracketed for gendered language) Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism., "Existentialism is a Humanism", http://homepages.wmich.edu/~baldner/existentialism.pdf) SHS AK Our point of departure is, indeed, the subjectivity of the individual, and that for strictly philosophic reasons. .... And at the point of departure there cannot be any other truth than this, I think, therefore I am, which is the absolute truth of consciousness as it attains to itself. Every theory which begins with man, outside of this moment of self-attainment, is a theory which thereby suppresses the truth, for outside of the Cartesian cogito, all objects are no more than probable, and any doctrine of probabilities which is not attached to a truth will crumble into nothing. In order to define the probable one must possess the true. Before there can be any truth whatever, then, there must be an absolute truth, and there is such a, truth which is simple, easily attained and within the reach of everybody; it consists in one’s immediate sense of one’s self. In the second place, this theory alone is compatible with the dignity of human, it is the only one which does not make man into an object. All kinds of materialism lead one to treat every human including oneself as an object – that is, as a set of pre- determined reactions, in no way different from the patterns of qualities and phenomena which constitute a table, or a chair or a stone. Our aim is precisely to establish the human kingdom as a pattern of values in distinction from the material world. .... .... What is at the very heart and center of existentialism, is the absolute character of the free commitment, by which every human realizes hithemself in realizing a type of humanity – a commitment always understandable, to no matter whom in no matter what epoch – and its bearing upon the relativity of the cultural pattern which may result from such absolute commitment.
5 Consequentialism fails – A Induction fails – 1. saying that induction works relies on induction itself because it assumes that past trends will continue, which means it’s circular and unjustified 2. It assumes specific causes of past consequences which can’t be verified as the actual cause B Butterfly effect - every action has infinite stemming consequences so it is impossible to evaluate an action based off them; one government policy could end up causing nuclear war in a million years. C Aggregation is impossible – pleasure and pain vary from person to person; we have no idea how many headaches equal a migraine
6 Motivation – people are internally motivated to follow an existentialist theory – which means they will understand the basis behind their actions compared to other transcendent principles. De Beauvoir (bracketed for gendered language) Simon de Beauvoir. “The Ethics of Ambiguity.” Lyle stuart Inc. 1948. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. SHS ZS/AK recut The first implication of such an attitude is that the genuine human will not agree to recognize any foreign absolute. When a man projects into an ideal heaven that impossible synthesis of the for-itself and the in-itself that is called God, it is because he wishes the regard of this existing Being to change his existence into being; but if he agrees not to be in order to exist genuinely, he will abandon the dream of an inhuman objectivity. He will understand that it is not a matter of being right in the eyes of a God, but of being right in his one’s own eyes. Renouncing the thought of seeking the guarantee for his existence outside of oneself himself, he one will also refuse to believe in unconditioned values which would set themselves up athwart his freedom like things. Value is this lacking-being of which freedom makes itself a lack; and it is because the latter makes itself a lack that value appears. It is desire which creates the desirable, and the project which sets up the end. It is human existence which makes values spring up in the world on the basis of which it win be able to judge the enterprise in which it will be engaged. But first it locates itself beyond any pessimism, as beyond any optimism, for the fact of its original springing forth is a pure contingency. Before existence there is no more reason to exist than not to exist. The lack of existence can not be evaluated since it is the fact on the basis of which all evaluation is defined. It can not be compared to anything for there is nothing outside of it to serve as a term of comparison. This rejection of any extrinsic justification also confirm the rejection of an original pessimism which we posited at the beginning. Since it is unjustifiable from without, to declare from without that it is unjustifiable is not to condemn it. And the truth is that outside of existence there is nobody. Man exists. For him human it is not a question of wondering whether his presence in the world is useful, whether life is worth the trouble of being lived. These questions make no sense. It is a matter of knowing whether they wants to live and under what conditions. Offense I defend the resolution as a general principle to promote existential freedom. PICs don’t negate because general principles tolerate exceptions.
First, core existential values emphasize radical freedom which materializes in the form of commitment to a cause. Nurbudhiati 05 Yoan Nurbudhiati, 2015, http://jurnalvivid.fib.unand.ac.id/index.php/vivid/article/view/38 Existentialism is one of philosophical schools which mainly focus on an individual as the master of himself, resisting the outside pressure of mass society which attempts in creating standardize human being. The concept of Freedom and Authenticity by Jean Paul Sartre is able to explain the constant attempt of Scout’s rebellion to the strict authorities. In Being and Nothingness Sartre presents his notion of freedom as the act of making choices, and indeed not being able to avoid making choices. Sartre’s conception of choice can best be understood by reference to an individual’s original choice. He asserts in his book Existentialism is a Humanism that "...there is no determinism— man is free, man is freedom." (2007:29). Freedom in Sartre’s opinion is not merely freedom to do something. One is free when they he succeeded in acknowledging his consciousness that something is lacking in their his life, which triggered him to make a strong purpose of himself and choose to commit something regarding to that matter. A Workers’ strikes provide a sense of radical freedom from the ability to create meaning via a commitment to a movement. A strike may be the commitment of the worker to the thing that is lacking in their life. B Government endorsement of the strike is thus good, because it encourages conditions for radical freedom.
Second, discouraging strikes limits the worker to being only defined as one, putting limits on the capability of workers to self-create. Strikes allow an identity of the self because workers are able to distinguish themselves from companies that try to categorize them as laborers.
Third, strikes challenge the dynamic of the workplace when employers take control of the worker, limiting their ability to self-create. Gourevitch 16: Gourevitch, Alex. "Quitting work but not the job: Liberty and the right to strike." Perspectives on Politics 14.2 (2016): 307. Yoaks shs bs So the point about structural domination was that workers might be forced to make a variety of explicit concessions on any number of issues—wages, hours, conditions, stultifying jobs. But the point about personal domination in the workplace is that the contract also seems to involve the tacit concession of generic control over a further set of unknown issues. The problem from the standpoint of contract theory is that the contract itself cannot adequately explain why this power is assumed to devolve to the employer nor why law should support this assumption. At most, we can only say that the worker agreed to give up this control, not that she in any way agreed to the various decisions about her work. Usually, however, we do not think a human being has a right to such blanket alienation of her liberty. In the case of work, the only reason supporting that worker’s alienation of control as authoritative seems to be that the worker sold her property—her labor-power—and therefore has no right to control that property for the duration of the work (within the reasonable boundaries of protective labor legislation) or that she owes obligations of deference to the employer. As we have seen, workers resist these accounts on the grounds that their capacity to labor is not a commodity at all. Or at least, labor-power cannot operate as a commodity in this case because a crucial feature of the sale of property —separability of the seller’s will from the commodity sold —is impossible. Therefore whatever the status the labor contract has, the authority relations of the workplace itself cannot legitimately be derived from the contract—at least not from the contract conceived as a sale of property. Workers nevertheless find themselves in a world in which employers do legally possess this arbitrary authority. The strike is, again, one way of challenging this authority by attacking the idea that, since they appear like sellers of their capacity to labor, workers may be treated as subordinates. The strike is a way of pressing the claim that workers, too, should exercise control rather than submit passively to managerial prerogatives. There are many historical examples of resistance to this kind of personal domination, such as “control strikes,” strikes over the introduction of new technology, and even strikes over seemingly lesser issues like “abolition of the luncheon privilege.” 74 The general point being that strikes that target decisions usually falling under the domain of “core of entrepreneurial control” are not just about instrumental considerations regarding compensation and conditions but about resisting the very logic of contract and property that supports the manager’s authority in the first place.75
UV 1 1AR Theory – a the aff gets it because otherwise the 1NC could engage in unchecked, infinite abuse which outweighs anything else, b it’s drop the debater because the 2AR is too short to win a shell AND substance so theory can only check abuse for the aff if it’s a win condition, c no neg RVI because otherwise they could dump on the shell for 6 minutes and get away with anything by sheer brute force, d) Aff theory first – it’s a much larger strategic loss because 1min is ¼ of the 1AR vs 1/7 of the 1NC which means there’s more abuse if I’m devoting a larger fraction of time. 2 Permissibility affirms: A Dictionary.com defines “ought”: as a verb “used to express justice, moral rightness, or the like” and “wrong” as “not in accordance with what is morally right or good” – proving something isn’t wrong means it’s right. B We don’t have to justify doing morally neutral things like drinking water
4 Presumption affirms: A We always default to assuming something true until proven false – if I told you my name is David, you would believe me. B Affirming is harder. Prefer an empirical analysis – it accounts for all possible factors Shah 20 Sachin Shah debater who analyzes topic stats February 13, 2020, “A Statistical Analysis of Side-Bias on the 2020 January-February Lincoln Douglas Debate Topic by Sachin Shah” http://nsdupdate.com/2020/a-statistical-analysis-of-side-bias-on-the-2020-january-february-lincoln-douglas-debate-topic-by-sachin-shah/?fbclid=IwAR2P0AZqQtSiwMZlCpia-Fy1zFOdHn6JrGtcYgGulqeimd-V0a1xbaIMYYs This analysis is statistically rigorous and relevant in several aspects: (A) The p-value is less than the alpha. (B) The data is on the current January-February topic, meaning it’s relevant to rounds these months 2. (C) The data represents a diversity of debating and judging styles across the country. (D) This analysis accounts for disparities in debating skill level. (E) Multiple tests validate the results. It is also interesting to look at the trend over multiple topics. In the rounds from 142 TOC bid-distributing tournaments (September 2017 – 2020 YTD), the negative won 52.75 of ballots (p-value 0.0001, 95 confidence interval 52.3, 53.2). This suggests the bias might be structural, and not topic specific, as this data spans nine different topics 3. Given a structural advantage for the negative, the affirmative may be justified in being granted a substantive advantage to compensate for the structural skew. This could take various forms such as granting the affirmative presumption ground, tiny plans, or framework choice. Whatever form chosen should be tested to ensure the skew is not unintentionally reversed.
12/20/21
Structural violence class domination, democracy, climate change, public sector workers case
Tournament: Ridge Debate | Round: 2 | Opponent: Montville HB | Judge: Probir Dhara I affirm resolved: A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike. Plan inclusive counterplans don’t negate, I defend the resolution as a general principle to be followed so it tolerates exceptions to the general principle I value morality due to the resolution’s use of ought, which is defined as a moral obligation
Merriam webster strike:
a work stoppage by a body of workers to enforce compliance with demands made on an employer
a temporary stoppage of activities in protest against an act or condition
Unconditional means preventing from adding additional exceptions to international law. Chow and Schoenbaum 17 Daniel Chow and Thomas Schoenbaum; 2017; Professor Chow served as a law clerk to the Honorable Constance Baker Motley, chief judge for the Southern District of New York, following graduation from law school, and then became an associate with Debevoise and Plimpton in New York. He came to Ohio State in 1985 and teaches International Law, International Transactions, Jurisprudence, Asian Law, and Property. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Thomas J. Schoenbaum is presently the Harold S. Shefelman Professor of Law at the University of Washington in Seattle. He received his Juris Doctor degree from the University of Michigan and his PhD degree from Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge (UK). He is also Research Professor of Law at George Washington University in Washington DC. He is a practicing lawyer, admitted in several U.S. states and before the Bar of the Supreme Court of the United States. He has been a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was Associate Dean at Tulane University in New Orleans, “International Trade Law: Problems, Cases, and Materials,” Aspen Casebook Study Justin
Belgian Family Allowances helped to establish two basic principles of GATT jurisprudence: MFN applies to internal measures (in this case the 7.5 percent levy), and the same treatment extended to France and others (foregoing of the levy) must be extended unconditionally to all other WTO members. The unconditional extension of MFN must occur even if Norway or Denmark did not have a system of family allowances. While Belgian Family Allowances interprets the unconditional extension of MFN to mean without any conditions, it is also possible to interpret this requirement to prohibit any additional conditions beyond what is required of the original recipient of the benefit or privilege. See Matsushita, Schoenbaum, Mavroidis and Hahn The World Trade Organization: Law, Practice and Policy 167-177 (3d ed. 2015).
The value criterion is minimizing oppression, defined as promoting the material conditions necessary for inclusion.
Oppression is created by social systems so only a focus on material conditions can solve. Johnson Allan Johnson (PhD in sociology, he joined the sociology department at Wesleyan University) http://www.cabrillo.edu/~lroberts/AlanJohnsonWhatCanWeDO001.pdf. RW Privilege is a feature of social systems, not individuals. People have or don't have privilege depending on the system they're in and the social categories other people put them in. To say, then, that I have race privilege says less about me personally than it does about how the society we all live in and how it is organized to assign privilege on the basis of a socially defined set of racial categories that change historically and often overlap. The challenge facing me as an individual has more to do with how I participate in society as a recipient of race privilege and how those choices oppose or support the system itself. In dealing with the problem of privilege, we have to get used to being surrounded by paradox. Very often those who have privilege don't know it, for example, which is a key aspect of privilege. Also paradoxical is the fact that privilege doesn't necessarily lead to a "good life," which can prompt people in privileged groups to deny resentfully that they even have it. But privilege doesn't equate with being happy. It involves having what others don't have and the struggle to hang on to it at their expense, neither of which is a recipe for joy,personal fulfillment, or spiritual contentment.... To be an effective part of the solution, we have to realize that privilege and oppression are not a thing of the past. It's happening right now. It isn't just a collection of wounds inflicted long ago that now need to be healed. The wounding goes on as I write these words and as you read them, and unless people work to change the system that promotes it, personal healing by itself cannot be the answer. Healing wounds is no more a solution to the oppression that causes the wounding than military hospitals are a solution to war. Healing is a necessary process, but it isn't enough.... Since privilege is rooted primarily in systems—such as families, schools, and workplaces—change isn't simply a matter of changing people. People, of course, will have to change in order for systems to change, but the most important point is that changing people isn't enough. The solution also has to include entire systems, such as capitalism, whose paths of least resistance that shape how we feel, think, and behave as individuals, how we see ourselves and one another.
Contention – Class Domination The right to strike is the right to resist oppression – it allows workers to check the unilateral nature of the bargaining process Lim ’19: Woojin Lim. “The Right to Strike”. December 11th, 2019. The Harvard Crimson. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/12/11/lim-right-to-strike/. FD On April 9, 1969, roughly 500 student activists took over University Hall to protest Harvard’s role in the Vietnam War. City and state police armed with riot gear, clubs, and mace were called to remove all protesters who had vowed nonviolent resistance. In the early morning hours of April 10, over 400 police officers stormed University Hall, between 250 and 300 arrests were made, and 75 students were injured. In response, by April 11, thousands of Harvard students, teaching fellows, and faculty had gathered in Harvard Stadium to strike. Fifty years later, the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Automobile Workers declared a strike, fighting for increased compensation, health benefits, and neutral third-party arbitration for sexual harassment and discrimination. On December 3, over 500 demonstrators, wearing on their shoulders large blue-and-white “UAW on Strike” placards, marched routes throughout the Yard. In the strike of 1969, strikers fought for social justice; in the HGSU-UAW strike of 2019, strikers press on the fight for fair wages and working conditions. The right to strike is a right to resist oppression. The strike (and the credible threat of a strike) is an indispensable part of the collective bargaining procedure. Collective bargaining (or “agreement-making”) provides workers and employees with the opportunity to influence the establishment of workplace rules that govern a large portion of their lives. The concerted withdrawal of labor allows workers to promote and defend their unprotected economic and social interests from employers’ unilateral decisions, and provide employers with pressure and incentives to make reasonable concessions. Functionally, strikes provide workers with the bargaining power to drive fair and meaningful negotiations, offsetting the inherent inequalities of bargaining power in the employer-employee relationship. Striking is a human right and is only invoked when one’s right is endanger – it’s key to resisting the worst aspects of neoliberalism Ewing ’10: Keith Ewing. “Yes, Striking is a Human Right”. The Guardian. March 26th, 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/mar/26/ba-strike-human-rights. FD. It begins with the International Labour Organisation's convention on the right to organise and bargain collectively of 1948, which a British Labour government was the first to ratify; followed by the Council of Europe's social charter of 1961, which a British Tory government was the first to ratify; followed, in turn, by the UN's international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights of 1966. The British government has been told by the international human rights community that it must relax the existing legal restrictions and stop treating a lawful strike as a breach (rather than a suspension) of the worker's contract of employment. If our law met our international obligations, it would not be possible for bully boy Willie Walsh unilaterally to withdraw the travel perksof BA crew, as announced this week. But more than that – international law requires us to allow workers and their unions to take solidarity and sympathy action to help fellow workers in dispute. It is, after all, one of the purposes of joining a union – mutual aid in times of need, though not in Britain. Just as Walsh is allowed to engage in secondary action by using other companies to carry his passengers, so (says the international human rights community) the union should have the right to call on other unions to put real economic pressure on BA by refusing to handle its planes. Labour, of course, is paralysed by its neoliberal love of the free market, which it places above its weak commitment to the rule of law. But help may be at hand. The European court of human rights has recently ruled that the right to freedom of association in article 11 of that treaty must include the right to strike, and has suggested that the scope and content of that right must reflect as a minimum the standards set by the ILO. This opens the possibility of British unions recovering from the Strasbourg court the rights lost in the political process. So let us say it loudly, and let us say it clearly: the right to strike is a human right; it should be better protected than it is; and the British government should take steps now to comply with its international obligations. The exercise of the right to strike is the mark of free society, where discord is accepted as normal, and conflict regarded as healthy. The real question we should be asking is not why do people strike, but why they do not do so more often? To respond by saying that workers are all happy bunnies compared with their forebears would not be the right answer. Strikes may be inconvenient and they may be frustrating. So is the exercise of other human rights. But if you don't want strikes, it is up to you to provide a better answer to the problem of the bully employer who can tear up contracts and impose unilateral changes to working conditions knowing that workers have no option but to accept, and no meaningful legal redress in the courts. In the meantime, where is the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and where is the rest of the human rights brigade (Liberty and Justice)? It's about time you put your weight behind workers who exercise their human rights, and do so against the ugly background of the rightwing press in full spate. freedoms over property rights.
Class domination results in oppression and causes poverty – this impact has uniqueness Gourevitch ’12: Alex Gourevitch. “A Radical Defense of the Right to Strike”. Jacobin. July 12th, 2018. https://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/right-to-strike-freedom-civil-liberties-oppression. FD. Class-based oppression is inextricable from liberal capitalism. While meaningful variation exists across capitalist societies, one of the fundamental unifying facts is this: the majority of able-bodied people are forced to work for members of a relatively small group, who dominate control over productive assets and who, thereby, enjoy control over the activities and products of those workers. There are workers, and then there are owners and their managers. Workers are pushed into the labor market because they have no reasonable alternative to looking for a job. They cannot produce the goods they need for themselves, nor can they rely on the charity of others, nor can they count on adequate state benefits. Depending on how we measure income and wealth, about 60 to 80 percent of Americans fall into this category for most of their adult lives. This structural compulsion is not symmetric. A significant minority of the population has enough wealth — whether inherited or accumulated or both — that they can avoid entering the labor market. They might happen to work, but they are not forced to do so. The oppression, then, stems not from the fact that some are forced to work. After all, if socially necessary work were shared equally, then it might be fair to force each to do their share. The oppression stems from the fact that the forcing is unequal —that only some are made to work for others, producing whatever employers pay them to produce. This structural inequality feeds into a second, interpersonal dimension of oppression. Workers are forced to join workplaces typically characterized by large swathes of uncontrolled managerial power and authority. This oppression is interpersonal because it is power that specific individuals (employers and their managers) have to get other specific individuals (employees) to do what they want. We can distinguish between three overlapping forms that this interpersonal, workplace oppression takes: subordination, delegation, and dependence. Subordination: Employers have what are sometimes called “managerial prerogatives” — legislative and judicial grants of authority to owners and their managers to make decisions about investment, hiring and firing, plant location, work process, and the like. Managers may change working speeds and assigned tasks, the hours of work, or, as Amazon currently does, force employees to spend up to an hour going through security lines after work without paying them. They can fire workers for Facebook comments, their sexual orientation, for being too sexually appealing, or for not being appealing enough. They can give workers more tasks than can be performed in the allotted time, lock employees in the workplace overnight, require employees to labor in extreme heat and other physically hazardous conditions, or punitively isolate workers from other coworkers. They can pressureemployees to take unwanted political action, or, in the case of nurses, force employees to work for twenty-two different doctors. What unifies these seemingly disparate examples is that, in all cases, managers are exercising legally permitted prerogatives. The law does not require that workers have any formal say in how those powers are exercised. In fact, in nearly every liberal capitalist country (including social democracies like Sweden), employees are defined, in law, as “subordinates.” This is subordination in the strict sense: workers are subject to the will of the employer. Delegation: There are additional discretionary legal powers that managers enjoy not by legal statute or precedent but because workers have delegated these powers in the contract. For instance, workers might sign a contract that allows managers to require employees to submit to random drug testing or unannounced searches. In the United States, 18 percent of current employees and 37 percent of workers in their lifetime work under noncompete agreements. These clauses give managers the legal power to forbid employees from working for competitors, in some cases reducing these workers to near indentured service. The contract that the Communications Workers of America had with Verizon until 2015 included a right for managers to force employers to perform from ten to fifteen hours of overtime per week and to take some other day instead of Saturday as an off-day. While workers have granted these prerogatives to employers voluntarily, in many cases it’s only technically voluntary because of the compulsion to work. This is especially true if workers can only find jobs in sectors where these kinds of contracts proliferate. Which leads to the third face of oppression: the distributive effects of class inequality. The normal workings of liberal capitalism elevate a relatively small group of owners and highly paid managers to the pinnacle of society, where they accumulate most of the wealth and income. Meanwhile, most workers do not earn enough to both meet their needs and to save such that they can employ themselves or start their own businesses. The few that do rise displace others or take the structurally limited number of opportunities available. The rest remain workers. Dependence: Finally, managers might have the material power to force employees to submit to commands or even to accept violations of their rights because of the worker’s dependence on the employer. A headline example is wage theft, which affects American workers to the tune of $8 to $14 billion per year. Employers regularly break labor law, by disciplining, threatening, or firing workers who wish to organize, strike, or otherwise exercise supposedly protected labor rights. In other cases, workers have been refused bathroom breaks and resorted to wearing diapers, denied legally required lunch breaksor pressured to work through them, forced to keep working after their shift, or denied the right to read or turn on air conditioning during break. In particularly egregious examples, employers have forced their workers to stay home rather than go out on weekends or to switch churches and alter religious practices on pain of being fired and deported. There are also the many cases of systematic sexual harassment, in those wide regions of the economy where something more than a public shaming is needed to control bosses. In all these instances, employers are not exercising legal powers to command. Instead they are taking advantage of the material power that comes with threatening to fire or otherwise discipline workers. This material power to get workers to do things that employers want is in part a function of the class structure of society, both in the broad sense of workers being unequally dependent on owners, and in the narrower sense of workers being legally subordinate to employers. The oppression lies not just in the existence of these powers, nor in some capitalist bad apples, but in how these powers are typically used. Managers tend to use these powers “rationally,” to exploit workers and extract profits. Each of these different faces of oppression — structural, interpersonal, and distributive — is a distinct injustice. Together they form the interrelated and mutually reinforcing elements of class domination that are typical of capitalist societies. Defenders of liberal capitalism insist that it provides the fairest way of distributing work and the rewards of social production. They often speak in the idiom of freedom. Yet liberal capitalism fundamentally constrains workers’ liberty, generating the exploitation of one class by another. It is this oppression that explains why workers have a right to strike and why that right is best understood as a right to resist oppression. Poverty is the worst form of structural violence and kills as many people as a nuclear war Abu Jamal ’98: Abu-Jamal, prominent social activist and author, ’98, A Quiet and Deadly Violence, Sept 19, http://www.flashpoints.net/mQuietDeadlyViolence.html. FD. The deadliest form of violence is poverty. --Ghandi It has often been observed that America is a truly violent nation, as shown by the thousands of cases of social and communal violence that occurs daily in the nation. Every year, some 20,000 people are killed by others, and additional 20,000 folks kill themselves. Add to this the nonlethal violence that Americans daily inflict on each other, and we begin to see the tracings of a nation immersed in a fever of violence. But, as remarkable, and harrowing as this level and degree of violence is, it is, by far, not the most violent features of living in the midst of the American empire. We live, equally immersed, and to a deeper degree, in a nation that condones and ignores wide-ranging "structural' violence, of a kind that destroys human life with a breathtaking ruthlessness. Former Massachusetts prison official and writer, Dr. James Gilligan observes; By "structural violence" I mean the increased rates of death and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, as contrasted by those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least a demonstrably large proportion of them) are a function of the class structure; and that structure is itself a product of society's collective human choices, concerning how to distribute the collective wealth of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting "structural" with "behavioral violence" by which I mean the non-natural deaths and injuries that are caused by specific behavioral actions of individuals against individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide, soldiers in warfare, capital punishment, and so on. --(Gilligan, J., MD, Violence: Reflections On a National Epidemic (New York: Vintage, 1996), 192.) This form of violence, not covered by any of the majoritarian, corporate, ruling-class protected media, is invisible to us and because of its invisibility, all the more insidious. How dangerous is it--really? Gilligan notes: Every fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed in a nuclear war that caused 232 million deaths; and every single year, two to three times as many people die from poverty throughout the world as were killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world. Gilligan, p. 196 Worse still, in a thoroughly capitalist society, much of that violence becomesame internalized, turned back on the Self, because, in a society based on the priority of wealth, those who own nothing are taught to loathe themselves, as if something is inherently wrong with themselves, instead of the social order that promotes this self-loathing. This intense self-hatred was often manifested in familial violence as when the husband beats the wife, the wife smacks the son, and the kids fight each other.
Contention – Democracy Strikes increase democratic participation which reinvigorates democracy. McElwee 15 Sean; Research Associate at Demos; “How Unions Boost Democratic Participation,” The American Prospect; 9/16/15; https://prospect.org/labor/unions-boost-democratic-participation/ Labor organizer Helen Marot once observed, "The labor unions are group efforts in the direction of democracy." What she meant is that more than simply vehicles for the economic interests of workers (which they certainly are), labor unions also foster civic participation for workers. And nowhere is this clearer than in voter turnout, which has suffered in recent years along with union membership. Indeed, new data from the Census Bureau and a new analysis of American National Election Studies data support the case that unions' declining influence has also deeply harmed democracy. In 2014, voter turnout was abysmal, even for a midterm. Census data suggest that only 41.9 percent of the citizen population over 18 turned out to vote. However, as I note in my new Demos report Why Voting Matters, there are dispiriting gaps in turnout across class, race, and age. To examine how unions might affect policy, I performed a new analysis of both Census Bureau and American National Election Studies data. The data below, from the 2014 election, show the differences in voter turnout between union and non-union workers (the sample only includes individuals who were employed, and does not include self-employed workers). While only 39 percent of non-union workers voted in 2014, fully 52 percent of union workers did. As part of ongoing research, James Feigenbaum, an economics PhD candidate at Harvard, ran a regression using American National Election Studies data suggesting that union members are about 4 percentage points more likely to vote and 3 points more likely to register (after controlling for demographic factors) and individuals living in a union household are 2.5 points more likely to vote and register. This is largely in line with the earlier estimates of Richard Freeman. These numbers may appear modest, but in a close national election they could be enough to change the result. Other research has found an even stronger turnout effect from unions. Daniel Stegmueller and Michael Becher find that after applying numerous demographic controls, union members are 10 points more likely to vote. What's particularly important is that unions boost turnout among low- and middle-income individuals. In a 2006 study, political scientists Jan Leighley and Jonathan Nagler found that, "the decline in union membership since 1964 has affected the aggregate turnout of both low and middle-income individuals more than the aggregate turnout of high-income individuals." In 2014, the gap between unions and non-union workers shrunk at the highest rung of the income ladder. There was a 15-point gap among those earning less than $25,000 (40 percent turnout for union workers, and 25 percent turnout for non-union workers). Among those earning more than $100,000, the gap was far smaller (49 percent for non-union workers and 52 percent for union workers). Individuals living in union households are also more progressive than those in non-union households. I examined 2012 ANES data and find that union households aren't largely different from non-union households on many issues regarding government spending, but they are more likely to have voted for Obama, identify as Democratic, and support a robust role for the government in reducing income inequality. When looking at union members specifically, the gaps become slightly larger. More upscale union members are far more progressive than their non-union counterparts. Non-union households with an income above $60,000 oppose government intervention to reduce inequality by 11 points, with 32.2 percent in favor and 43.4 percent against. But richer union households support government intervention, with 42.5 percent in favor and 29.9 percent opposed. As Richard B. Freeman has pointed out, "union members are more likely to vote for a Democrat for the House or Presidency than demographically comparable nonunion voters." He similarly finds that "unionism moves members to the left of where they would be given their socioeconomic status," in line with the data I examined from 2012. A 2013 study by Jasmine Kerrissey and Evan Schofer finds that union members are not only more likely to vote, but also more likely to belong to other associations, and to protest. They also find that these effects are strongest among people with lower levels of education, suggesting that unions may help mobilize the least politically active groups. A recent study of European countries finds union members vote more and identifies those aspects of union membership that contribute to the higher turnout. The strongest factor is that workers who engage in democratic organizations in the workplace (via collective bargaining) are more likely to engage in democracy more broadly by, for instance, voting. Other studies support the idea that civic participation creates a feedback loop that leads to higher voting rates. Another factor is that union members make more money, and higher income is correlated with voting behavior. Finally, union members are encouraged by peers and the union to engage in politics, which also contributes to higher levels of turnout. It's not entirely surprising that politicians who savage unions often share a similar contempt for the right to vote. Democracy in the workplace leads to democracy more broadly throughout society. Workers with more democratic workplaces are more likely to democratically engage in in society. Further, when unions and progressives demonstrate that government can benefit them, Americans are more likely to want to participate in decision-making. For all these reasons, unions play a unique and indispensable role in the progressive project. As Larry Summers, certainly not a leftist, recently argued, "the weakness of unions leaves a broad swath of the middle class largely unrepresented in the political process."
Independently, our coordinated civic engagement is key to comprehensive climate action globally. Fisher and Nasrin 20 Dana R; Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Program for Society and the Environment at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on questions related to democracy, activism, and environmentalism — most recently studying climate activism, protests, and the American Resistance. Her research employs a mixed-methods approach that integrates data collected through open-ended semi-structured interviews and participant observation with various forms of survey data; Sohana; University of Maryland, College Park, UMD, UMCP, University of Maryland College Park · Philip Merrill College of Journalism Master of Arts; “Climate activism and its effects,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Review; October 2020; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345455893_Climate_activism_and_its_effects As coordinated school strikes have taken place around the world to draw attention to the climate crisis, they have mobi-lized an increasing number of participants in a growing number of locations. This type of activism involves particularforms of civic engagement that specifically aim to and pressures governments to take action that addresses the issue of cli-mate change. Civic engagement is the term used to describe the manifold ways that citizens participate in their societieswith the intention of influencing communities, politics, and the economy. Forms of engagement range from tactics thatinvolve citizens working directly to change their individual behaviors, along with those that involve indirect efforts tobring about change through the political and economic systems (like school strikes). Tactics run the gamut and rangefrom those that work within these systems to those that work outside of them (Meyer and Tarrow, 1997). Collectiveefforts are mediated by various organizational forms (Anheier and Themudo, 2002), which can either create or remove obstacles to participation (Fisher and Green, 2004; for more general discussion, see Gamson, 1975; McAdam, 1983). Ashas been noted by numerous studies, civic engagement is much higher in democratic countries where citizens areafforded rights to participate and to voice their opinions (DeBardeleben and Pammett, 2009; see also Putnam, Leonardi, andNanetti, 1994; Schofer and Longhofer, 2011; Skocpol and Fiorina, 1999; de Tocqueville, 2002; see particularly Verba,Schlozman, and Brady, 1995). At the same time, digital technologies have been found to facilitate the spread of variousforms of activism while they connect countries and cultures (Bennett, 2013; Theocharis, Vitoratou, and Sajuria, 2017) This paper reviews the specific ways that citizens have engaged civically around the issue of climate change, paying particular attention to the documented effects of these efforts on climate change itself. Our discussion provides a review of the range of direct and indirect forms of climate activism (for a general overview of the direct and indirect effects of social movements, see Snow and Soule, 2010). After this review, we present the case of school strikes as a specific tactic that has gained attention in recent years. In this section, we review the limited research that presents data collected from participants of climate strikes in 2019 to understand trends in the expansion of this popular tactic. As the world responds to the COVID-19 outbreak and activism (including climate strikes) move increasingly online, we discuss the potential implications of the pandemic on climate activism and engagement. The conclusion of this paper emphasizes that future research must pay more attention to the relationship between climate-related civic engagement and measurable environmental outcomes. It highlights the methodological challenges facing scholars who take on the difficult analytical task of assessing the outcomes of climate activism in a way that is scalable for a global movement aiming to stop a global crisis. 2 | ACTIVISM WITH DIRECT EFFECTS ON CLIMATE CHANGE There are limited forms of civic engagement that involve efforts to have a direct effect on individual greenhouse gas emissions. For example, some environmental movements and environmental groups encourage their members to make lifestyle changes that reduce their individual carbon footprints. These efforts focus on changing consumer behaviors, such as reducing car-use, flying, shifting to nonfossil fuel-based sources of electricity, and eating less dairy or meat (Büchs, Saunders, Wallbridge, Smith, and Bardsley, 2015; Cherry, 2006; Cronin, McCarthy, and Collins, 2014; Ergas, 2010; Haenfler, Johnson, and Jones, 2012; Middlemiss, 2011; Salt and Layzell, 1985; Saunders, Büchs, Papafragkou, Wallbridge, and Smith, 2014; Stuart, Thomas, Donaghue, and Russell, 2013; Wynes, Nicholas, Zhao, and Donner, 2018; for an overview on these measures, see Wynes and Nicholas, 2017). So far, there are only a limited number of case studies that measure the direct effect of participation in these types of movements as it relates to climate outcomes. In their study of the electricity use of 72 households in southern England, for example, Saunders and colleagues find an association between low levels of electricity use and contact with environmental organizations (Saunders et al., 2014). Similarly, in a longitudinal ethnographic study of a small number of participants in an environmental campaign in Sweden, Vestergren and colleagues conclude that participants in an environmental campaign sustained reductions in plastic use and meat consumption over the period of their study (Vestergren, Drury, and Chiriac, 2018, 2019). There is a clear need for research on the material outcomes of these movements that aim to have direct effects on consumption patterns that goes beyond single case studies. At the same time, measuring direct effects of these efforts in a way that scales up is extremely challenging, especially when crossing cultural and institutional contexts. 3 | ACTIVISM WITH INDIRECT EFFECTS ON CLIMATE CHANGE Most types of activism, however, do not aim to have direct effects on greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, they work to pressure economic and political actors to change policies and behaviors in a way that will lead to reductions in emissions. In other words, their goals are indirect: these forms of engagement target nodes of power—policymakers, regulators, and businesses—to change their behaviors and/or accelerate their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These forms of civic engagement involve providing the labor and political will needed to pressure political and economic actors to enact the kinds of emission-reducing policies recommended by scientists working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Edenhofer, 2014, pt. IV). Much of the research in this area looks at the role of internationally focused environmental Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), which tend to target international environmental negotiation processes (Betsill and Corell, 2008; Boli and Thomas, 1999; Fox and Brown, 1998). Within this research area, there are numerous studies that analyze 2 of 11 FISHER AND NASRIN quantitative data sets to understand the relationship between NGOs and a country's environmental impact comparatively (see also Frank, Hironaka, and Schofer, 2000; Grant, Jorgenson, and Longhofer, 2018; Jorgenson, Dick, and Shandra, 2011; Longhofer and Jorgenson, 2017; Schofer and Hironaka, 2005). Other studies focus specifically on the relationship between NGOs and environmental impact within nations (Dietz, Frank, Whitley, Kelly, and Kelly, 2015; Grant and Vasi, 2017; Shwom, 2011). In their quantitative analysis of the effects of world society on environmental protection outcomes in countries around the world, Schofer and Hironaka find clear evidence that the rise of an “international environmental regime,” which includes environmental NGOs, is associated with lower levels of environmental degradation, including reduced carbon dioxide emissions (Schofer and Hironaka, 2005). More recently, scholars have worked to understand this relationship within the context of development. For example, Longhofer and Jorgenson conclude that nations with the highest levels of membership in international environmental NGOs experience a moderate “decoupling” in the assocaition between economic development and carbon emissions (Grant et al., 2018; see also Jorgenson et al., 2011; Longhofer and Jorgenson, 2017) Although these studies provide a good first step in understanding this connection, more research is needed about how exactly the existence of NGOs bring about lower emissions. Beyond these studies that explicitly analyze the relationship between NGOs and carbon emissions, there is a small but growing literature that assesses the broader consequences of activism, which aims to pressure policymakers to take action across a range of issues (Amenta, Caren, Chiarello, and Su, 2010; Giugni, McAdam, and Tilly, 1999; Soule and Olzak, 2004). This research focuses specifically on the outcome of specific forms of engagement, or tactics (for an overview, see Caren, Ghoshal, and Ribas, 2011). Some of the most common tactics that activists are employing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions indirectly are summarized in the sections that follow. 3.1 | Activism through litigation Litigation is one of the tactics that citizens, local governments, NGOs, and even corporations are using to pressure governments. This tactic aims to work through the judicial system to take action or enforce existing legislation (McCormick et al., 2017; Peel and Lin, 2019; Peel and Osofsky, 2015; Setzer and Vanhala, 2019; see also Pfrommer et al., 2019). In May 2017, UN Environment reported that climate change-related cases had been filed in 24 countries plus the European Union (UN Environment, 2017). In some cases, this tactic is being used to pressure businesses and governments to meet their policy commitments (Setzer and Vanhala, 2019; UN Environment, 2017). So far, however, there remains insufficient evidence regarding what effect these judicial efforts are having on greenhouse gas emissions. 3.2 | Activism targeting business actors At the same time, some groups focus their attention on targeting the economic sector and specific businesses. These efforts employ shareholder activism and cooperative board stewardship, as well as protest (King and Soule, 2007; M.-D. P. Lee and Lounsbury, 2011; McDonnell, King, and Soule, 2015; Szulecki, 2018; Yildiz et al., 2015). Shareholder activism focuses on investors' response to corporate activities and performances (Gillan and Starks, 2007). It involves investors who are dissatisfied with the company's management or operation taking advantage of their role as shareholders to pressure the company to change (Bratton and Mccahery, 2015; Gillan and Starks, 2007). Cooperative board stewardship, in contrast, involves “jointly owned and democratically controlled businesses” that support renewable energy (Viardot, 2013, p. 757; see also Yildiz et al., 2015). Some of this business-focused activism involves working through transnational advocacy networks, which have been documented to target governments and corporations (Hadden and Jasny, 2017; Keck and Sikkink, 2014; McAteer and Pulver, 2009). In their comparative study of shareholder activism in the Amazon region, McAteer and Pulver come to mixed conclusions, finding that one of the shareholder advocacy networks in Ecuador was successful in limiting oil development, while the other was not (McAteer and Pulver, 2009). Other types of activism that target business practices involve environmental groups working as part of a campaign to pressure institutional investors and universities to divest from fossil fuels. Groups employ “a range of strategies to shame, pressure, facilitate, and encourage investors in general, and large institutional investors in particular, to relinquish their holdings of fossil fuel stocks in favour of climate-friendly alternatives” (Ayling and Gunningham, 2017, p. 131; Franta, 2017; Grady-Benson and Sarathy, 2016; Hestres and Hopke, 2019). Although research has yet to conclude FISHER AND NASRIN 3 of 11 that these efforts have a substantial effect on fossil fuel funding or greenhouse gas emissions (Tollefson, 2015; but see Bergman, 2018), a recent study of fossil fuel divestment and green bonds provides some evidence of success. In it, Glomsrød and Wei model green investment scenarios that include funding allocation constraints due to divestment around the world. The authors find that these efforts yield notable emissions reductions (Glomsrød and Wei, 2018, p. 7). 3.3 | Activism working within the political system Activism also frequently involves citizens working individually or in groups to take advantage of opportunities to pressure governmental actors from within the political system. These tactics involve lobbying elected officials or working to change political representation through democratic elections of candidates (for an overview, see Clemens, 1997; Schlozman, Verba, and Brady, 2012). Turning first to lobbying, there is some evidence that these efforts by civic groups have a positive effect on environmental outcomes. In their 2016 study, Olzak and colleagues find that the number of environmental lobbyist organizations has a positive effect on the enactment of environmental legislation (Olzak, Soule, Coddou, and Muñoz, 2016). Although the authors do not specifically document the effects of the legislation on material outcomes, more recent research has found climate laws to reduce carbon emissions (Eskander and Fankhauser, 2020). Even though groups representing both the general public and businesses engage in lobbying, research has found business groups have (and spend) more financial and human resources, which affords them “privileged access” to policymakers and policymaking (Freudenburg, 2005). In his study of the “climate lobby,” Brulle compares the amounts spent by different groups for lobbying around the climate issue in the U.S. Congress. He finds that the “major sectors involved in lobbying were fossil fuel and transportation corporations, utilities, and affiliated trade associations. Expenditures by these sectors dwarf those of environmental organizations and renewable energy corporations” (Brulle, 2018, p. 289; see also Farrell, 2016). In some cases, representatives from business interests that have been lobbying against environmental policies are given opportunities to join the government. This process leads to “Regulatory Capture” by the specific business interest and is found to be associated with substantial negative public and environmental health consequences (for a recent example, see Dillon et al., 2018). Activism within the political system also involves citizens working through the electoral process to affect all sorts of social change (for a discussion of engagement in electoral politics as activism, see Fisher, 2012, 2019a). In some cases, elections focus on the differences between candidates who are supportive of policies that include more aggressive climate change mitigation strategies. Although research has yet to analyze extensively the relationship between this type of election-related civic engagement and climate outcomes, there is already some evidence. For example, a 2019 study finds that individuals in the United States who installed solar panels participate more in elections (Mildenberger, Howe, and Miljanich, 2019). At the same time, other research has documented various forms of electoral backlash against climate policies, both individually (Stokes, 2016, 2020), as well as in combination with other progressive agenda items (Muradian and Pascual, 2020). In their study of the success of “far-right movements” around the world and the concurrent election of “far-right” candidates, Muradian and Pascual note that far-right-leaning elected officials tend to have low concern for environmental issues and to deny climate change and disregard scientific evidence (Muradian and Pascual, 2020). Although they do not specifically look at the environmental outcomes of these officials holding office, given their common values and the empirical evidence coming out of the early years of the Trump Administration (Bomberg, 2017; Fisher and Jorgenson, 2019), it is likely that these officials will contribute to the passage of policies that limit the effectiveness of climate-related plans, reduce enforcement of these plans, or block them outright. 3.4 | Activism outside the economic and political system At the same time, there is expansive research on the ways citizens with less access to resources and power participate by challenging the economic and political system from outside it (for an overview, see Meyer and Tarrow, 1997). These efforts include a range of more confrontational tactics, such as boycotting, striking, protesting, and direct action that target politics, policymakers, and businesses. Many studies have explained this type of activism using climate change as a case (Fisher, 2010; Hadden, 2015; Saunders, Grasso, Olcese, Rainsford, and Rootes, 2012; Swim, Geiger, and Lengieza, 2019; Wahlström, Wennerhag, and Rootes, 2013; see also Fisher, Stanley, Berman, and Neff, 2005; Walgrave, 4 of 11 FISHER AND NASRIN Wouters, Van Laer, Verhulst, and Ketelaars, 2012). So far, however, only a handful of studies have explored the effect of these tactics on climate-related outcomes (but see Muñoz, Olzak, and Soule, 2018; Olzak et al., 2016). In their research on the success of environmental legislation in the U.S. Congress, Olzak and colleagues find that some civic tactics have a more positive effect than others: while they conclude that the number of environmental lobbyist organizations is positively associated with the enactment of environmental legislation, which can lead to carbon emissions reductions, they also find that protest by constituents has no effect (Olzak et al., 2016; see also Olzak and Soule, 2009). In a 2018 piece, which uses more recent data to analyze the relationship between protest, policy, and greenhouse gas emissions across states in the United States, the authors come to different conclusions. They find that emissions in states decline when there is more pro-environmental protest (Muñoz et al., 2018). A good deal of research has concluded that activism, including tactics such as protests or strikes played a large role in pressuring governments to create environmental laws and environmental agencies tasked with enforcing those laws around the world (Brulle, 2000; see also Longhofer, Schofer, Miric, and Frank, 2016; McCloskey, 1991; Rucht, 1999; Schreurs, 1997; Steinhardt and Wu, 2016; Wong, 2018). Moreover, research has documented how coalitions of activists achieved a degree of success when they protested environmentally damaging projects, including the Narmada Dam development in India (Khagram, 2004), and environmentally harmful nuclear power plants, dams, and airports in Japan (Aldrich, 2010). In her study of the campaign against coal mining and burning in South Africa, Cock finds that the campaign challenged inequality and generated solidarity (Cock, 2019). 4 | CLIMATE STRIKES AS A GROWING TACTIC Climate strikes are a particular outsider tactic that aims to pressure both the political and economic system. On August 20, 2018, Greta Thunberg decided not to attend school and sit on the steps of the Swedish parliament to demand that the government take steps to address climate change (Gessen, 2018). Inspired by the national school walkout against gun violence in the United States that was organized after the Parkland School Shooting in Florida, the 15-year-old has spent her Fridays sitting with a hand-written sign protesting ever since. Fridays for Future—the name of the group coordinating this tactic of skipping school on Fridays to protest inaction on climate change—flourished due to its usage of digital technologies to engage young people and the tactic has spread. In March 2019, the first global climate strike took place, turning out more than 1 million people around the world. Six months later in September 2019, young people and adults responded to a call by young activists to participate in climate strikes as part of the “Global Week for Future” surrounding the UN Climate Action Summit.1 The number of participants in this event globally jumped to an estimated 7.6 million people (Rosane, 2019). Figure 1 presents the growth in the tactic of climate strikes in terms of the numbers of nations where strikes have taken place and the total number of participants involved. Even before this movement had mobilized millions to strike, a narrative synthesis of studies that focused on youth perceptions of climate change from 1993 to 2018 documented how youth voices on climate change had become much more prominent and more widely publicized (K. Lee, Gjersoe, O'Neill, and Barnett, 2020). Specific research on this movement and its consequences has yet to be published in peer-reviewed publications (but see Evensen, 2019; Fisher, 2019b; Wahlström et al., 2013). However, in a series of pieces published in the Washington Post, Fisher presents analyses of data collected from participants in climate strikes during 2019 to understand how this tactic and the movement have grown in the United States (Fisher, 2019c, 2019d). As an striking is an outsider tactic by school-aged children that aims to pressure governments to implement more radical climate policies that will lead to emissions reductions, school strikes are a popular example of activism with the goal of having an indirect effect on climate change. Measuring the outcomes of these efforts, in terms of political outcomes and emissions reductions is extremely challenging given the indirect nature of this activism. Such calculations are made even more challenging given the scale and scope of the activism, which has mobilized millions of people to act locally to pressure governments at the local, national, and international levels. Although the overall numbers are large, most of these strikes involve relatively small proportions of overall populations.
Climate change is a major threat to marginalized communities and causes extinction. Specktor 19 Brandon; writes about the science of everyday life for Live Science, and previously for Reader's Digest magazine, where he served as an editor for five years; "Human Civilization Will Crumble by 2050 If We Don't Stop Climate Change Now, New Paper Claims," livescience, 6/4/19; https://www.livescience.com/65633-climate-change-dooms-humans-by-2050.html The current climate crisis, they say, is larger and more complex than any humans have ever dealt with before. General climate models — like the one that the United Nations' Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used in 2018 to predict that a global temperature increase of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) could put hundreds of millions of people at risk — fail to account for the sheer complexity of Earth's many interlinked geological processes; as such, they fail to adequately predict the scale of the potential consequences. The truth, the authors wrote, is probably far worse than any models can fathom. How the world ends What might an accurate worst-case picture of the planet's climate-addled future actually look like, then? The authors provide one particularly grim scenario that begins with world governments "politely ignoring" the advice of scientists and the will of the public to decarbonize the economy (finding alternative energy sources), resulting in a global temperature increase 5.4 F (3 C) by the year 2050. At this point, the world's ice sheets vanish; brutal droughts kill many of the trees in the Amazon rainforest (removing one of the world's largest carbon offsets); and the planet plunges into a feedback loop of ever-hotter, ever-deadlier conditions. "Thirty-five percent of the global land area, and 55 percent of the global population, are subject to more than 20 days a year of lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold of human survivability," the authors hypothesized. Meanwhile, droughts, floods and wildfires regularly ravage the land. Nearly one-third of the world's land surface turns to desert. Entire ecosystems collapse, beginning with the planet's coral reefs, the rainforest and the Arctic ice sheets. The world's tropics are hit hardest by these new climate extremes, destroying the region's agriculture and turning more than 1 billion people into refugees. This mass movement of refugees — coupled with shrinking coastlines and severe drops in food and water availability — begin to stress the fabric of the world's largest nations, including the United States. Armed conflicts over resources, perhaps culminating in making nuclear war, are likely. The result, according to the new paper, is "outright chaos" and perhaps "the end of human global civilization as we know it."
Two of the leading progressive Democrats in the House joined with union officials, teachers and other public employees on Tuesday to push for the repeal of a state law that bans public sector workers from going on strike. Rep. Mike Connolly and Rep. Erika Uyterhoeven testified to the Joint Committee on Labor about legislation they filed that would lift the ban on work stoppages for all public employees, including teachers, police and firefighters. Uyterhoeven, of Somerville, called the withholding of labor a "fundamental human right," and Connolly, of Cambridge, said strikes, or even the threat of going on strike, are an "indispensable part of the collective bargaining process." Supporters of the bill (H 1946), which has five co-sponsors, said 11 or 12 other states have eliminated their bans on public employee work stoppages. While the law against public employee strikes was meant to guard against the disruption of critical services, Connolly said the COVID-19 pandemic has proven that many workers in the private sector with the right to strike also perform indispensable roles in communities. "It's not fair to turn to a public educator or a firefighter and say to that worker they shouldn't be afforded the same fundamental rights in the workplace as all workers," Connolly said. Dozens of labor leaders, teachers and other union workers turned up to testify remotely in support of the bill on Tuesday at a hearing focused on employee rights and benefits. State law stipulates that "no public employee or employee organization shall engage in a strike, and no public employee or employee organization shall induce, encourage or condone any strike, work stoppage, slowdown or withholding of services by such public employees."Massachusetts Teachers Association President Merrie Najimy said repealing that law would "provide equilibrium and fairness to our collective bargaining process.""With the onset of COVID, health and safety of educators, students and families is an unfortunate and an additional reason we must have the right to strike," Najimy said. During the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers in Andover were determined by the Commonwealth Employee Relations Board to have gone on an illegal strike when they refused to enter the school building for professional development ahead of the start of the 2020 school year. Instead, the teachers set up with laptops in the parking lot of the school to protest what they considered to be poor and unsafe ventilation in the school and attempted to participate in the training from outside. Gov. Charlie Baker at the time said he supported the decision to force teachers to return to work inside the school building, and Najimy said the episode highlighted the importance of the Connolly-Uyterhoeven bill. "Last year in too many districts educators and students were compelled to put their health, safety, and, yes, even their lives on the line by being forced to return to their schools in spite of poor ventilation and other safety concerns," Najimy said. "This was something that was never expected. They had no recourse." Many who testified noted the gains made by workers over centuries through the use of strikes, including the famous "Bread and Roses" strike by women and immigrant workers at a textile mill in Lawrence. Others said that teachers in other states have been able to use work stoppages to win concessions for students in their contracts, such as more green spaces. Sen. Becca Rausch, a Needham Democrat, testified in support of allowing teachers to strike, but offered up her own bill as a potential compromise.Rausch's bill would amend state law to allow public sector workers to strike under what she described as "limited circumstances," including a failure by management to bargain in good faith, and it would not apply to police, fire protection employees or jail, prison or other correctional facility workers.
Public unions with strike power are a way to combat workplace inequities Myall 19 (James is MECEP’s lead on the inclusive economy, including research on labor issues, gender and racial equity, and health care policy. James conducts research and impact analyses, writes educational materials, and collaborates with partners. He is skilled in data collection, research, and statistical and policy analysis. He studied public policy and management at the University of Southern Maine and holds a master’s degree in ancient history and archaeology from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. /“Right to strike would level the playing field for public workers, with benefits for all of us”/April 17, 2019/Accesed: 11-1-21/https://www.mecep.org/blog/right-to-strike-would-level-the-playing-field-for-public-workers-with-benefits-for-all-of-us/ )(SPHS,SO)
The right of workers to organize and bargain with their employer benefits all Mainers. Collective bargaining leads to better wages, safer workplaces, and a fairer and more robust economy for everyone — not just union members. The right to strike is critical to collective organizing and bargaining. Without it, Maine’s public employees are unable to negotiate on a level playing field. Maine’s Legislature is considering a bill that would give public-sector workers the right to strike. MECEP supports the legislation, and is urging legislators to enact it. The right to strike would enable fairer negotiations between public workers and the government. All of us have reason to support that outcome. Research shows that union negotiations set the bar for working conditions with other employers. And as the largest employer in Maine, the state’s treatment of its workers has a big impact on working conditions in the private sector. Unions support a fairer economy. Periods of high union membership are associated with lower levels of income inequality, both nationally and in Maine. Strong unions, including public-sector unions, have a critical role to play in rebuilding a strong middle class. Unions help combat inequities within work places. Women and people of color in unions face less wage discrimination than those in nonunion workplaces. On average, wages for nonunionized white women in Maine are 18 percent less than of those of white men. Among unionized workers, that inequality shrinks to just 9 percent. Similarly, women of color earn 26 percent less than men in nonunionized jobs; for unionized women of color, the wage gap shrinks to 17 percent.i All of us have a stake in the success of collective bargaining. But a union without the right to strike loses much of its negotiating power. The right to withdraw your labor is the foundation of collective worker action. When state employees or teachers are sitting across the negotiating table from their employers, how much leverage do they really have when they can be made to work without a contract? It’s like negotiating the price of a car when the salesman knows you’re going to have to buy it — whatever the final price is. Research confirms that public-sector unions are less effective without the right to strike. Public employees with a right to strike earn between 2 percent and 5 percent more than those without it.ii While that’s a meaningful increase for those workers, it also should assuage any fears that a right to strike would lead to excessive pay increases or employees abusing their new right. LD 900, “An Act to Expand the Rights of Public Employees Under the Maine Labor Laws,” ensures that Maine’s public-sector workers will have the same collective bargaining rights as other employees in Maine. The bill would strengthen the ability of Maine’s public-sector workers to negotiate, resulting in higher wagers, a more level playing field, and a fairer economy for all of us.
Public workers are uniquely key — they’re the most effective at creating social change because they often fight for the people they serve as well as themeslves
New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon released her labor platform last week. It contains support for a safe-staffing law, a perennial demand of nurses unions that mandates nurse-to-patient ratios that are high enough to ensure nurses aren’t run ragged and patient safety is strong, as well as provisions for increased safety and apprenticeship programs in the building trades —a group of workers Nixon previously upset with remarks suggesting they would have to take pay cuts to help lower the cost of subway construction. Arguably more important are the broader, more ambitious, and more difficult proposals: support for universal just-cause protections, which would shield all workers from arbitrary firings and discipline (standard in union contracts), and a $15 minimum wage across the whole state, not just the New York City metropolitan area. Especially important, though, is Nixon’s call to establish the legal right to strike for public sector workers in New York state. While New York is legally favorable to worker organizing in many ways, it has some of the most draconian anti-public sector labor laws in the country, most of which are compiled in the Public Employees Fair Employment Act, commonly known as the Taylor Law or the Taylor Act. Public sector worker strikes have been critical in raising class consciousness in the United States, both in 2018 and historically. They can reveal the anti-working-class outlook of the Democratic Party — and even some union officials. Even if the law doesn’t change any time soon, simply raising the issue, as Nixon has, could raise the level of worker militancy in New York and around the country. The Left should make public sector right-to-strike laws the next “litmus test” for progressive candidates, similar to current demands like supporting Medicare for All and rejecting corporate campaign donations. Kale Chips and Pinkertons The media and the Right immediately seized on Nixon’s right to strike proposal. “That would be really bad for all New Yorkers, especially poor New Yorkers. The more you depend on public services, the more you’ll have at risk if public employees are allowed to strike,” E.J. McMahon, of the anti-union Empire Center For Public Policy told the New York Daily News. No one should be surprised that anti-union hacks would pit elements of the working class against each other. But it was more surprising to watch union-endorsed Democrats like Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio publicly declare their opposition to Nixon’s proposal. “I don’t agree with changing the Taylor Law. The Taylor Law serves an important public purpose and at the same time there are lots of ways for workers’ rights to be acknowledged and their voices to be heard. I think we have the right law now,” the New York City mayor said. Even more disturbing was watching union officials attack Nixon for saying their members should have the right to strike. Civil Service Employee Association president Danny Donohue said, “It is incredibly naïve for Cynthia Nixon to propose that all public sector workers be able to strike. Clearly, she does not have the experience needed to be governor of New York.” CSEA represents more than 300,000 New York state workers and local government workers outside New York City. John Samuelsen, the international president of the Transport Workers Union (TWU), went even further, entering the realm of self-parody by telling the Chief-Leader, “I am extremely skeptical of her newfound support of striking. I believe that she will cut and run when we shut the subway down. As soon as her hipster Williamsburg supporters can’t take public transit to non-union Wegman’s to buy their kale chips, she will call in the National Guard and the Pinkertons.” Samuelsen’s statement was especially out of touch (and not just because there are no Wegmans grocery stores in New York City). TWU’s largest local, which represents transit-system workers in New York City, faced severe penalties under the Taylor Law as a result of the union’s 2005 strike. The union as a whole and individual workers faced heavy fines; the union was forbidden from collecting dues by automatic checkoff for six months, and local president Roger Touissant was sentenced to prison. As recently as 2011, TWU issued press releases declaring New York’s blanket ban on public sector strikes a human-rights violation. One struggles to find a motivation for Samuelsen’s acerbic comments toward Nixon for suggesting the state do away with the ban, other than shortsighted support for Governor Cuomo’s reelection. Ironically, the ban on public sector strikes makes this sort of calculation rational, if craven. Most unions would not dream of cozying up to the boss this way. But with public sector workers denied some of the most powerful tools other workers have, being on the boss’s good side is seen by many union leaders as the easiest way to settle a contract. A Demand Worth Making After decades with very few strikes in the public sector, 2018 has seen public school teacher strikes in Arizona, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, all states where it is illegal for public workers to strike. Teachers also struck in Colorado, where public workers may legally strike. And in California, where public strikes are also legal, 24,000 University of California workers represented by AFSCME 3299 recently went on strike. The other two major public sector strikes of the last two decades were the Chicago Teachers Union strike in 2011 — legal — and the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority strike of 2005 — illegal, with severe consequences for the union. Public sector workers have shown a recent willingness to go on strike even when it’s illegal. So why should the Left make legalizing public strikes a core demand? First, by pushing candidates to back this demand, the Left can isolate them from the Democratic establishment, who make up a large portion of bosses in the public sector and are therefore unlikely to support giving their workers the right to strike. We saw this theory play out in real time last week. Cynthia Nixon and Julia Salazar, who is running for New York State Senate, have made this plank a central demand and have shown a willingness to confront the party’s centrist leadership. But by pushing candidates to make the legalization of public sector strikes a central part of their labor platform, the Left can force more candidates to develop power from the grassroots to make up for whatever funding and other means of support they lose from the party. Second, the prohibition on strikes contributes to the sad state of many public sector unions — especially in New York. There are many reasons for the decline of militancy and workplace organizing in public sector unions, and many of those factors are beyond unions’ control. But if job action is off the table, one of the few ways public sector unions can defend their interests is to make political deals with officeholders. Such unions are then put in a position where they are afraid to anger the boss, the incumbent politician, by supporting challengers who often advocate more pro-worker policies. Again, we saw this dynamic play out with Samuelsen’s and Donohue’s comments, as well as less colorful comments to the same effect by other union officials. Because their unions are in such precarious positions, these leaders are terrified to get on Cuomo’s bad side. A union that’s afraid to piss off the employer is already fighting with both hands behind its back. By raising this issue, the Left create a clarifying situation where union officials are forced to explain to their members why they support politicians who want to deny them rights. In New York, this situation is exacerbated by the Triborough Amendment, a provision in the Taylor Law mandating that when public sector collective-bargaining agreements expire without a new contract settled, the terms of the previous contract continue. This disincentivizes both sides from conducting difficult and potentially unpopular negotiations and gives union officials little incentive to organize their membership during a contract campaign. This, in part, explains officials like Donohue’s hostility to the idea of giving their members the right to strike. If members could conduct a strike without severe legal repercussions, union officials might have to organize one — or be exposed as unable to do so. However, the Triborough Amendment also gives workers the protections of a union contract during bargaining impasses and prevents the boss from unilaterally dictating new terms. In New York and states with similar provisions, we should be clear that we are demanding the right to strike in addition to and not in lieu of the Triborough Amendment. Even if there is little hope of changing the law in the short term, simply seeing politicians and the media raise the issue may give workers more confidence to break the law and strike anyway. Ultimately what makes a strike successful is not the degree to which it follows the law. Much more important is workers’ enthusiasm, unity, and confidence in their actions. And there is evidence that political campaigns can make a real difference. When Public Workers Strike Politicians have plenty to fear from striking public workers. The public sector remains a comparative bastion of union strength, with unions representing about 38 percent of public sector workers nationwide, compared to about 7 percent of workers in the private sector. In New York state, about 72 percent of public sector workers are in unions, versus 15 percent in the private sector. This year alone, in Arizona, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, striking teachers won major concessions from hostile, right-wing state governments. Reactionary politicians and capitalists from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to the forces behind the Janus case understand the potential power of public unions to advance progressive causes — that is precisely why they have attacked them so viciously. Public sector workers occupy a strategic place in the labor market because so many of their jobs are critical to society’s functioning. That means the potential power of withdrawing their labor is magnified beyond their immediate job site. The recent teachers’ strikes were so effective because school closures forced thousands of parents to significantly alter their routines. The New York City transit strike of 2005 lasted only three days, but because it made transportation across the city extremely difficult, it was estimated to cost the city and businesses hundreds of millions of dollars in lost fares and revenue. And while conditions vary, public sector strikes generally have a lot of public support. One reason for that is from nurses to teachers to welfare workers, better conditions for the people they serve are often among public workers’ core demands. Even when strikes are not linked directly to social demands, a majority of Americans do not support weakening public sector unions. However, for unions, a comparison between the West Virginia teachers’ strike and the New York City transit strike is instructive. West Virginia teachers organized parents and community members for months ahead of the strike. They tied their working conditions to children’s learning conditions, making clear how their demands would benefit virtually everyone. Transit workers did not make such arguments, and support for their strike was nowhere near as high as that of the teachers. Public sector unions have to make clear that when they walk off the job, they are striking to benefit the people they serve as much as themselves. When schools are closed, when buses don’t run, when trash goes uncollected and mail undelivered, it affects not just the employer, but nearly everyone. The pressure on government bosses to settle is therefore extremely high. And when public sector workers strike, they have the power to win transformative victories. From both elected officials’ and union heads’ reaction to Nixon’s right-to-strike proposal, we can see that neither side wants to face this prospect. We should make them.
12/11/21
consistency with the universal freedom v2
Tournament: Lexington | Round: 2 | Opponent: Byram Hills AK | Judge: Dandu, Keshav I affirm. Spikes are at the bottom. Brackets are for clarity.
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 Agents can shift between different identities but doing so requires reason - it unifies the subject and is the only enterprise agents cannot escape Ferrero 09 (Luca Ferrero, Luca Ferrero is a Philosophy professor at University of California, Riverside. His areas of interest are Agency Theory, including Intentionality and Personal identity; Practical Reasoning; and Meta-Ethics, “Constitutivism and the Inescapability of Agency”. Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. IV, Jan 12, 2009. https://philarchive.org/archive/FERCATv1 BHHS AK recut Agency is special in two respects. First, agency is the enterprise with the largest jurisdiction.¹² All ordinary enterprises fall under it. To engage in any ordinary enterprise is ipso facto to engage in the enterprise of agency. In addition, there are instances of behavior that fall under no other enterprise but agency. First, intentional transitions in and out of particular enterprises might not count as moves within those enterprises, but they are still instances of intentional agency, of bare intentional agency, so to say. Second, agency is the locus where we adjudicate the merits and demerits of participating in any ordinary enterprise. Reasoning whether to participate in a particular enterprise is often conducted outside of that enterprise, even while one is otherwise engaged in it. Practical reflection is a manifestation of full-fledged intentional agency but it does not necessarily belong to any other specific enterprise. Once again, it might be an instance of bare intentional agency. In the limiting case, agency is the only enterprise that would still keep a subject busy if she were to attempt a ‘radical re-evaluation’ of all of her engagements and at least temporarily suspend her participation in all ordinary enterprises.
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 the universal freedom– 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.
Prefer for 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.
*Indexicals: Also, proving an obligation under any index is sufficient to affirm because there isn’t a higher-up framework to weigh theories under which means that you can only disprove a framework from the perspective of another and an obligation under one framework isn’t incompatible with a possibly stronger obligation under another framework.
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. This means we can’t treat others as a mere means to an end 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
5 Parameters A Accessibility – Other frameworks like Util require massive amounts of research that under resourced kids can’t access – encouraging research heavy debates always favors big schools. My framework solves - is super easy to understand and you only need to think of analytic arguments in round
B Real World Education – an understanding of my fw is key to understanding the law in the real world because most states abide by inviolable side-constraints in their constitutions – 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.
Thus, I defend the resolution as a general principle: Resolved: The appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust.
Private entities are entities that are not owned or control by nations.
Offense 1 Humans have an obligation to respect potential ET life and their property. They may exist beyond recognition of a rationalist, meaning colonization entails using them as a mere means Brian Patrick Green 2014, Santa Clara University, "Ethical Approaches to Astrobiology and Space Exploration: Comparing Kant, Mill, and Aristotle," https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/markkula/5/ SHSOL More than that, Kant not only allowed that extraterrestrial intelligences might exist, he believed that if they did not yet exist, that someday they would,5 and that some of these ETIs would be inferior and some superior to humans in intelligence.6 One might wonder if the young Kant’s belief in ETIs continued into his older years, when he was writing on ethics. There is good evidence that it does. Writing his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, 30 years after his work on the nebular hypothesis, Kant is explicit – he is not just discussing humans, but “all rational beings.” 7 So with respect deontology and extraterrestrial intelligent life, Case 1) on the chart, Kant would extend the same full dignity and respect to ETIs which humans owe to each other, in accord with his categorical imperative, which requires the universalizability of moral norms8 and treating all rational beings as ends in themselves.9 For deontology and non-intelligent life, Case 2), Kant argues that animals, as non-rational beings, are of only relative worth. They are not as ends in themselves, not persons, but things.10 If humans discovered non-intelligent life on other worlds (most likely microbes, but if larger then we would have to carefully evaluate what it means to be intelligent, and make sure the discovered life does not qualify), according to Kant, we could do with it as we pleased. While some contemporary moral philosophers have tried to reinterpret or rehabilitate Kant on animals, these works are developments of Kant’s philosophy; they are not his philosophy itself.11 So while Kantianism might be modifiable into a system which is more friendly towards the rest of the living world, without these modifications it is not. For non-life and Kantian deontology, Case 3), there is likewise a simple answer: nonliving things are just things. Non-living things are not a moral concern, they are merely instrumental, and as such intelligent creatures can treat these things as they wish. However, there is an odd exception to this conclusion which is worth mentioning (and which I note with a star in the table). Kant believed that if other planets were not yet inhabited, they someday would be. If this is the case, then what of planets currently without intelligent life but which may someday have ETIs it? Ought we ought to anticipate these intelligent creatures and therefore respect them proactively by respecting their prospective goods? Kant does not say (perhaps because he was not interested in speculating or because humans were, in his time, far from being in a position to affect the futures of these planets). However, given the importance of rational beings in Kant’s system (rationality, teleology, and morality are the purpose of universe) the answer is possibly, or even probably, yes.
2 private appropriation is not justified a) Private entities are incapable of making omnilateral decisions as privatization entails that they withhold information which limits deliberation over making maxims. Chiara Cordelli 2016, University of Chicago, Political Science https://www.law.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/What-is-Wrong-With-Privatization_UCB.pdfDulles VN The intrinsic wrong of privatization, I will suggest, rather consists in the creation of an institutional arrangement that, by its very constitution, denies those who are subject to it equal freedom. I understand freedom as an interpersonal relationship of reciprocal independence. To be free is not to be subordinated to another person’s unilateral will. By building on an analytical reconstruction of Kant’s Doctrine of Right, I will argue that current forms of privatization reproduce (to a different degree) within a civil condition the very same defects that Kant attributes to the state of nature, or to a pre-civil condition, thereby making a rightful condition of reciprocal independence impossible. Importantly, this is so even if private actors are publicly authorized through contract and subject to regulations, and even if they are committed to reason in accordance with the public good. The reason for this, as I will explain, derives from the fact that private agents are constitutionally incapable of acting omnilaterally, even if their actions are omnilaterally authorized by government through some delegation mechanism, e.g. a voluntary contract. Omnilateralness, I will suggest, must be understood as a function of 1) rightful judgment and 2) unity. By rightful judgment I mean the capacity to reason publicly and to make universal rules that are valid for everyone, according to a juridical ideal of right, as necessary to solve the problem of the unilateral imposition of private wills on others. By unity I mean the capacity to make rules and decisions that change the normative situation of others, as a part of a unified system of decision-making. The condition of unity is crucial, as I shall later explain, insofar as there might be multiple interpretations compatible with rightful judgment, which would still problematically leave the definition of people’s rightful entitlements indeterminate. Further, the practical realization of the juridical idea of an omnilateral will, I will contend, requires embeddedness within a shared collective practice of decision-making. In practice, rightful judgment can only obtain when certain shared background frameworks that structure practical reasoning and confer unity to that reasoning are in place. The rules of public administration and the authority structure of bureaucracy should be understood as playing this essential function of giving empirical and practical reality to the omnilateral will, as far as the execution of rules and the concrete definition of entitlements are concerned. Together, these two requirements are necessary, (whether they are also sufficient is a different question), to make an action the omnilateral action of a state, which has the moral power to change the normative situation of citizens, by fixing the content of their rights and duties in accordance with the equal freedom of all. The phenomenon of privatization thus raises the fundamental questions of why we need political institutions to begin with, and what makes an action an action of the state. Insofar as private agents make decisions that fundamentally alter the normative situation (the rights and duties) of citizens, and insofar as, by definition, private agents are not public officials embedded in that shared collective practice, their decisions, even if well intentioned and authorized through contract, cannot count as omnilateral acts of the state. They rather and necessarily remain unilateral acts of men. Hence, I will conclude, for the very same reasons that we have, following Kant, a duty to exit the state of nature so as to solve the twofold problems of the unilateral imposition of will on others and the indeterminacy of rights, we also have a duty to limit privatization and to support, on normative grounds, a case for the re-bureaucratization of certain functions. Therefore, my paper provides foundational reasons to agree with Richard Rorty’s nonfoundational defense of bureaucracy as stated in the opening epigraph, since only agents who are appropriately embedded within a bureaucratic structure, properly understood, are, in many cases, capable of acting omnilaterally. The “bosses” I am here concerned with are not primarily those who 5 can unilaterally impose their will on us in their capacity as private employers, but rather any private actor who acts unilaterally while in the garb of the state. b) 1 An exclusive and permanent right to property is not entailed by the categorical imperative. Only conditional use is universalizable Westphal 97 (Kenneth R., Professor of Philosophy at Boðaziçi Üniversitesi, PhD in Philosophy from Wisco) “Do Kant’s Principles Justify Property or Usufruct?” Jahrbuch für Recht und Ethik/Annual Review of Law and Ethics 5 (1997):141–94. RE The compatibility of possession with the freedom of everyone according to universal laws is not a trivial assumption even for the case of detention or “empirical” possession. Under conditions of extreme scarcity, anyone’s use of some vital thing precludes someone else’s equally vital use of that thing or of anything of its kind (given the condition of extreme relative scarcity). This is not quite to agree with Hume, that conditions of justice exclude both extreme scarcity and superabundance.32 But it is to recognize that he came close to an important insight: legitimate action requires sufficient abundance so that one person’s use (benefit) is not (at least not directly) someone else’s vital injury (deprivation). This is not merely to say that property is psychologically impossible in extreme scarcity because no one could respect it (per Hume); the point is that possession and perhaps even use are not, at least not obviously, legitimate under such conditions. (How Kant would propose to resolve the conflicting grounds of obligation in such circumstances, the duty to self-preservation versus the duty not to harm others’ life or liberty, I do not understand.) The assumption that possession is compatible with the freedom of everyone according to universal laws 5 is even less trivial for the case of “intelligible” or “noumenal” possession, that is, possession without physical detention. The compatibility of intelligible possession with the freedom of everyone according to universal laws requires both sufficient resources so that the free use of something by one person is not as such the infringement of like freedom of another, and it requires that mere empirical or physical possession does not suffice to secure the innate right to freedom of overt (äußere) action. If physical possession did suffice to secure the innate right to overt action, Kant’s main ground of proof would entail no conclusion stronger than that rights of physical possession (detention) are legitimate. Furthermore, by assuming that noumenal possession is compatible with the freedom of everyone according to universal laws 5, Kant assumes rather than proves that possession without detention is permissible. However, this is precisely the point that needs to be proven! This issue remains central throughout the remainder of §2 and is addressed again in §3 below. 2.2.6 The previous section raises a very serious question about Kant’s justification of intelligible rights to possess and use (possessio). The questions about Kant’s supposed justification of property rights, the possibility of having things as one’s own (Eigentum, dominium), are even more acute. To derive such strong rights from Kant’s argument requires at least one of three assumptions. The first assumption would be that the sole relevant condition of use is proprietary ownership of things (cf. RL §1 ¶1); this assumption requires interpreting “Besitz” broadly. The second assumption would involve conflating the ownership of a right – viz., a right to use – with a right to property ownership. However, the legitimacy of neither of these assumptions is demonstrated by Kant’s argument in RL §2. Or it may be assumed, third, that Kant’s argument in §2 aims to prove, not merely rights to possession, but rights to property, insofar as it aims to prove a right to “arbitrary” (beliebigen) use, that is, the right to do whatever one pleases with something (10; cf. RL §7, 253.25–27), where this can include any of the rights involved in the further incidents of proprietary ownership. Reading Kant’s text in this way assimilates possessio to dominium by stressing Kant’s term “beliebigen”. So far as Kant’s literal statement is concerned, it is equally plausible to stress Kant’s term “Gebrauch” (use), which would restrict Kant’s argument to justifying possessio. Kant’s reductio ad absurdum argument assumes the contrapositive thesis that it is not altogether ... rightly in my power, i.e. it is not ... compatible with the freedom of everyone according to a universal law (it is wrong), to make use of something which is physically within my power to use. (2, 1) His argument then purports to derive a contradiction from this assumption. From this contradiction follows the negation of this assumption by disjunctive syllogism. Strictly speaking, what Kant’s argument (at best) proves is that it is indeed rightful to make use of things which in principle are within one’s power, provided (“obgleich ...”) that one ’s use is compatible with the freedom of everyone in accord with a universal law 5. As mentioned, Kant’s argument assumes rather than proves that this assumption is correct. Kant must prove that this assumption is correct in order to prove his conclusion. This requires showing that possession and use of things (in their narrow, strict senses) is consistent with the freedom of everyone in accord with universal laws. That would justify rights to possessio. To justify the stronger rights to dominium requires showing that holding things in accord with the rights involved in the further incidents of property ownership is also consistent with the freedom of everyone in accord with universal laws. Because the rights involved in property ownership are not analytically, indeed are not necessarily, related, justifying dominium requires separate justification of each component right. But it also requires more than this. Insofar as these rights are supposed to be proven as a matter of natural right, these further rights cannot be instituted solely by convention. However, there are alternative packages of rights, both for kinds of property as well as for various weaker sets of rights to use, any of which can be formulated in ways that are consistent with the like freedom of everyone according to universal laws. Consequently, merely demonstrating the consistency of one or another of these sets of rights with the freedom of everyone according to universal laws suffices only to justify the permissibility of that set of rights. It does not suffice to justify the obligation to respect that set of rights instead of any other such set of rights. This is to say, once alternative sets of rights are possible or permissible because they meet the sine qua non of consistency with the like freedom of everyone according to universal laws 5, Kant’s natural law grounds of proof do not suffice to justify an obligation to respect one particular set of rights among the range of possible, permissible alternatives. Consequently, interpreting Kant’s statement 10 by stressing “beliebigen”, using it to specify the scope of “Gebrauch”, can only lead to fallacious, question-begging interpretations of Kant’s argument. Consequently, it is strongly preferable to interpret Kant’s statement by stressing “Gebrauch”, and using it in its strict, narrow sense to specify the scope of “beliebigen”. (This parallels the case for interpreting “Besitz” narrowly instead of broadly.) In sum, to use something legitimately it suffices to have a right to use it. That, in brief, is “possession” strictly speaking; in the narrow sense of the term, “possession” involves only the right of a qualified chose in possession. Since this condition suffices to fulfill the condition specified by Kant’s reduction argument, no stronger condition follows from Kant’s argument. One can have or “own” a right to use something without, of course, having property in that thing. Recall Honoré’s point that possession involves two claims: being in exclusive control and remaining in control by being free of unpermitted interference of others. Insofar as possession persists despite subsequent and continuing disuse, Kant’s proof does not demonstrate even a narrow right to possession. (This is why I speak of qualified choses in possession; one key qualification justified by Kant’s argument is that one’s right to use persists only so long as one’s legitimate need to use and regular use continue.) Moreover, aside from the prohibition on harmful use, Kant’s argument does not even address the other incidents of property ownership. If Kant’s primary assumption 5 can be justified, then Kant’s proof demonstrates at most three important conclusions: one has the right to use things one currently detains, one has the right to use any usable thing not previously (and hence currently) detained by others (provided one’s use does not infringe the like freedom of others), and one has the right to continue to use things so long as one’s need to use them and actions of using them continue. These are not trivial theses! However, because it does not prove the indefinite duration of possession, in the narrow sense, Kant’s proof of the (first version of the) Postulate of Practical Reason regarding Right is unsound. Kant’s further considerations in RL §6 suffer analogous weaknesses (see §§2.4f.). That implies that private appropriation is unjust. Westphal 97 (Kenneth R., Professor of Philosophy at Boðaziçi Üniversitesi, PhD in Philosophy from Wisco) “Do Kant’s Principles Justify Property or Usufruct?” Jahrbuch für Recht und Ethik/Annual Review of Law and Ethics 5 (1997):141–94. RE 6.2 One right that is not justified by the Kantian defense of rights to use developed above is the exclusion of others from the use of something to which one has a right on those occasions when one does not need and is not likely to need to use the item in question. Property rights involve such an exclusion. To the extent that I have shown that qualified choses in possession suffice to fulfill the desiderata established by Kant’s own principles and strategy for justifying possession (in the narrow sense), I have shown that property rights cannot be justified by Kant’s metaphysical principles. This is because there are alternative sets of rights to things which meet both Kant’s sine qua non of being consistent with the freedom of all in accord with universal laws 5 and Kant’s metaphysical grounds of proof concerning freedom of overt action. Neither Kant’s own argument nor my reconstruction of it address most of the incidents of property ownership. (Though I have suggested that Kant’s principles can justify the prohibition on harmful use and very likely some version of the liability to execution.) Indeed, Kant’s sole Innate Right to Freedom, Universal Law of Right, and Permissive Law of Practical Reason appear to entail that it is illegitimate to exclude others’ use of something to which one has a qualified chose in possession provided that their use does not interfere with one’s own regular and reliable use of the item in question. Moreover, Kant’s principles give priority to use over first acquisition, and indeed they justify first acquisition only in view of legitimate and needful use. To this extent, Kant’ s principles undermine and repudiate one of the cherished hallmarks of the liberal conception of private property, namely, that first acquisition as such secures a right over the disposition of a thing, regardless of subsequent disuse (cf. §3.10).
3 Space is not subject to property rights – a). It has no physical manifestation as space is by definition the absence of matter which means it cannot be measured, bordered, or divided, thus it cannot be owned b). Owning unexplored planets/space is incoherent – there could be other agents there, and it can’t be deemed an agents property lest agents have a rational conception of it. C) The International Institute of Space Law proves Sean Blair 2011 is a space journalist and is currently working for the European Space Agency, 08-01-2011, "Space property: who owns it?," BBC Science Focus Magazine, span class="skimlinks-unlinked"https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/space-property-who-owns-it/span/ Dulles VN While the deep-sea salvage claim here on Earth appears to show that possession will be sufficient, we’re still to discover exactly what will happen when someone lands a craft on a celestial body with the intention of claiming it, or at least part of it. There are some who believe that regardless of what’s happened on Earth, you simply can’t own something in space. “For us it is clear that private property rights over parts of outer space are not permitted,” says Tanja Masson-Zwaan, President of the International Institute of Space Law. “There is no consensus on property rights in space, as there will always be people who continue to challenge what the law says.”
4 Libertarianism turns don’t apply: A Privatization of space inherently relies on an anti-libertarian state-based model Shammas and Holen 19 (Victor L. Oslo Metropolitan University, Tomas B. Independent scholar) “One giant leap for capitalistkind: private enterprise in outer space,” Palgrave Communications, 1-29-19, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0218-9 TDI recut Dulles VN But the entrepreneurial libertarianism of capitalistkind is undermined by the reliance of the entire NewSpace complex on extensive support from the state, ‘a public-private financing model underpinning long-shot start-ups' that in the case of Musk’s three main companies (SpaceX, SolarCity Corp., and Tesla) has been underpinned by $4.9 billion dollars in government subsidies (Hirsch, 2015). In the nascent field of space tourism, Cohen (2017) argues that what began as an almost entirely private venture quickly ground to a halt in the face of insurmountable technical and financial obstacles, only solved by piggybacking on large state-run projects, such as selling trips to the International Space Station, against the objections of NASA scientists. The business model of NewSpace depends on the taxpayer’s dollar while making pretensions to individual self-reliance. The vast majority of present-day clients of private aerospace corporations are government clients, usually military in origin. Furthermore, the bulk of rocket launches in the United States take place on government property, usually operated by the US Air Force or NASA.Footnote13 This inward tension between state dependency and capitalist autonomy is itself a product of neoliberalism’s contradictory demand for a minimal, “slim” state, while simultaneously (and in fact) relying on a state reengineered and retooled for the purposes of capital accumulation (Wacquant, 2012). As Lazzarato writes, ‘To be able to be “laissez-faire”, it is necessary to intervene a great deal' (2017, p. 7). Space libertarianism is libertarian in name only: behind every NewSpace venture looms a thick web of government spending programs, regulatory agencies, public infrastructure, and universities bolstered by research grants from the state. SpaceX would not exist were it not for state-sponsored contracts of satellite launches. Similarly, in 2018, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—the famed origin of the World Wide Web—announced that it would launch a ‘responsive launch competition', meaning essentially the reuse of launch vehicles, representing an attempt by the state to ‘harness growing commercial capabilities' and place them in the service of the state’s interest in ensuring ‘national security' (Foust, 2018b). UV
1 1AR Theory – a the aff gets it because otherwise the 1NC could engage in unchecked, infinite abuse which outweighs anything else, b it’s drop the debater because the 2AR is too short to win a shell AND substance so theory can only check abuse for the aff if it’s a win condition, c no neg RVI because otherwise they could dump on the shell for 6 minutes and get away with anything by sheer brute force, d) competing interps – 1AR interps aren’t bidirectional and the neg should have to defend their norm since they have more time. e) Aff theory first – it’s a much larger strategic loss because 1min is ¼ of the 1AR vs 1/7 of the 1NC - Prefer structural weighing args about aff vs. neg since they apply to each round so are most likely to establish communal norms
2 Fairness is a voter – it’s an intrinsic aspect of a competitive activity like debate. Education is a voter – it’s the only portable skill from debate.
3 Permissibility affirms: A Dictionary.com defines “ought”: as a verb “used to express justice, moral rightness, or the like” and To negate is defined as “to deny the existence, evidence, or truth of”, therefore minus offense denying the truth of the resolution, we must affirm. B We don’t have to justify doing morally neutral things like drinking water C there’s nothing proactively stopping the aff so just do it
4 Presumption affirms: A We always default to assuming something true until proven false – if I told you my name , you would believe me. B Presuming obligations is logically safer since it’s better to be supererogatory than fail to meet an obligation. C Affirming is harder. Prefer an empirical analysis – it accounts for all possible factors Shah 20 Sachin Shah debater who analyzes topic stats February 13, 2020, “A Statistical Analysis of Side-Bias on the 2020 January-February Lincoln Douglas Debate Topic by Sachin Shah” http://nsdupdate.com/2020/a-statistical-analysis-of-side-bias-on-the-2020-january-february-lincoln-douglas-debate-topic-by-sachin-shah/?fbclid=IwAR2P0AZqQtSiwMZlCpia-Fy1zFOdHn6JrGtcYgGulqeimd-V0a1xbaIMYYs This analysis is statistically rigorous and relevant in several aspects: (A) The p-value is less than the alpha. (B) The data is on the current January-February topic, meaning it’s relevant to rounds these months 2. (C) The data represents a diversity of debating and judging styles across the country. (D) This analysis accounts for disparities in debating skill level. (E) Multiple tests validate the results. It is also interesting to look at the trend over multiple topics. In the rounds from 142 TOC bid-distributing tournaments (September 2017 – 2020 YTD), the negative won 52.75 of ballots (p-value 0.0001, 95 confidence interval 52.3, 53.2). This suggests the bias might be structural, and not topic specific, as this data spans nine different topics 3. Given a structural advantage for the negative, the affirmative may be justified in being granted a substantive advantage to compensate for the structural skew. This could take various forms such as granting the affirmative presumption ground, tiny plans, or framework choice. Whatever form chosen should be tested to ensure the skew is not unintentionally reversed.
1/28/22
consistency with universal freedom case
Tournament: Newark Invitational | Round: 3 | Opponent: Ridge MS | Judge: Chen, Victor I affirm. Spikes are at the bottom. Brackets are for clarity. 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 Agents can shift between different identities but doing so requires reason - it unifies the subject and is the only enterprise agents cannot escape Ferrero 09 (Luca Ferrero, Luca Ferrero is a Philosophy professor at University of California, Riverside. His areas of interest are Agency Theory, including Intentionality and Personal identity; Practical Reasoning; and Meta-Ethics, “Constitutivism and the Inescapability of Agency”. Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. IV, Jan 12, 2009. https://philarchive.org/archive/FERCATv1 BHHS AK recut Agency is special in two respects. First, agency is the enterprise with the largest jurisdiction.¹² All ordinary enterprises fall under it. To engage in any ordinary enterprise is ipso facto to engage in the enterprise of agency. In addition, there are instances of behavior that fall under no other enterprise but agency. First, intentional transitions in and out of particular enterprises might not count as moves within those enterprises, but they are still instances of intentional agency, of bare intentional agency, so to say. Second, agency is the locus where we adjudicate the merits and demerits of participating in any ordinary enterprise. Reasoning whether to participate in a particular enterprise is often conducted outside of that enterprise, even while one is otherwise engaged in it. Practical reflection is a manifestation of full-fledged intentional agency but it does not necessarily belong to any other specific enterprise. Once again, it might be an instance of bare intentional agency. In the limiting case, agency is the only enterprise that would still keep a subject busy if she were to attempt a ‘radical re-evaluation’ of all of her engagements and at least temporarily suspend her participation in all ordinary enterprises.
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 the universal freedom– 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. Prefer for 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.
*Indexicals: Also, proving an obligation under any index is sufficient to affirm because there isn’t a higher-up framework to weigh theories under which means that you can only disprove a framework from the perspective of another and an obligation under one framework isn’t incompatible with a possibly stronger obligation under another framework.
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. This means we can’t treat others as a mere means to an end 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
5 Parameters A Accessibility – Other frameworks like Util require massive amounts of research that under resourced kids can’t access – encouraging research heavy debates always favors big schools. My framework solves - is super easy to understand and you only need to think of analytic arguments in round B Real World Education – an understanding of my fw is key to understanding the law in the real world because most states abide by inviolable side-constraints in their constitutions – 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.
Thus, I defend the resolution as a general principle: Resolved: The appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust.
Offense 1 Humans have an obligation to respect potential ET life and their property. They may exist beyond recognition of a rationalist, meaning colonization entails using them as a mere means Brian Patrick Green 2014, Santa Clara University, "Ethical Approaches to Astrobiology and Space Exploration: Comparing Kant, Mill, and Aristotle," https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/markkula/5/ SHSOL More than that, Kant not only allowed that extraterrestrial intelligences might exist, he believed that if they did not yet exist, that someday they would,5 and that some of these ETIs would be inferior and some superior to humans in intelligence.6 One might wonder if the young Kant’s belief in ETIs continued into his older years, when he was writing on ethics. There is good evidence that it does. Writing his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, 30 years after his work on the nebular hypothesis, Kant is explicit – he is not just discussing humans, but “all rational beings.” 7 So with respect deontology and extraterrestrial intelligent life, Case 1) on the chart, Kant would extend the same full dignity and respect to ETIs which humans owe to each other, in accord with his categorical imperative, which requires the universalizability of moral norms8 and treating all rational beings as ends in themselves.9 For deontology and non-intelligent life, Case 2), Kant argues that animals, as non-rational beings, are of only relative worth. They are not as ends in themselves, not persons, but things.10 If humans discovered non-intelligent life on other worlds (most likely microbes, but if larger then we would have to carefully evaluate what it means to be intelligent, and make sure the discovered life does not qualify), according to Kant, we could do with it as we pleased. While some contemporary moral philosophers have tried to reinterpret or rehabilitate Kant on animals, these works are developments of Kant’s philosophy; they are not his philosophy itself.11 So while Kantianism might be modifiable into a system which is more friendly towards the rest of the living world, without these modifications it is not. For non-life and Kantian deontology, Case 3), there is likewise a simple answer: nonliving things are just things. Non-living things are not a moral concern, they are merely instrumental, and as such intelligent creatures can treat these things as they wish. However, there is an odd exception to this conclusion which is worth mentioning (and which I note with a star in the table). Kant believed that if other planets were not yet inhabited, they someday would be. If this is the case, then what of planets currently without intelligent life but which may someday have ETIs it? Ought we ought to anticipate these intelligent creatures and therefore respect them proactively by respecting their prospective goods? Kant does not say (perhaps because he was not interested in speculating or because humans were, in his time, far from being in a position to affect the futures of these planets). However, given the importance of rational beings in Kant’s system (rationality, teleology, and morality are the purpose of universe) the answer is possibly, or even probably, yes.
2 private appropriation is not justified a) Private entities are incapable of making omnilateral decisions as privatization entails that they withhold information which limits deliberation over making maxims. Chiara Cordelli 2016, University of Chicago, Political Science https://www.law.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/What-is-Wrong-With-Privatization_UCB.pdfDulles VN The intrinsic wrong of privatization, I will suggest, rather consists in the creation of an institutional arrangement that, by its very constitution, denies those who are subject to it equal freedom. I understand freedom as an interpersonal relationship of reciprocal independence. To be free is not to be subordinated to another person’s unilateral will. By building on an analytical reconstruction of Kant’s Doctrine of Right, I will argue that current forms of privatization reproduce (to a different degree) within a civil condition the very same defects that Kant attributes to the state of nature, or to a pre-civil condition, thereby making a rightful condition of reciprocal independence impossible. Importantly, this is so even if private actors are publicly authorized through contract and subject to regulations, and even if they are committed to reason in accordance with the public good. The reason for this, as I will explain, derives from the fact that private agents are constitutionally incapable of acting omnilaterally, even if their actions are omnilaterally authorized by government through some delegation mechanism, e.g. a voluntary contract. Omnilateralness, I will suggest, must be understood as a function of 1) rightful judgment and 2) unity. By rightful judgment I mean the capacity to reason publicly and to make universal rules that are valid for everyone, according to a juridical ideal of right, as necessary to solve the problem of the unilateral imposition of private wills on others. By unity I mean the capacity to make rules and decisions that change the normative situation of others, as a part of a unified system of decision-making. The condition of unity is crucial, as I shall later explain, insofar as there might be multiple interpretations compatible with rightful judgment, which would still problematically leave the definition of people’s rightful entitlements indeterminate. Further, the practical realization of the juridical idea of an omnilateral will, I will contend, requires embeddedness within a shared collective practice of decision-making. In practice, rightful judgment can only obtain when certain shared background frameworks that structure practical reasoning and confer unity to that reasoning are in place. The rules of public administration and the authority structure of bureaucracy should be understood as playing this essential function of giving empirical and practical reality to the omnilateral will, as far as the execution of rules and the concrete definition of entitlements are concerned. Together, these two requirements are necessary, (whether they are also sufficient is a different question), to make an action the omnilateral action of a state, which has the moral power to change the normative situation of citizens, by fixing the content of their rights and duties in accordance with the equal freedom of all. The phenomenon of privatization thus raises the fundamental questions of why we need political institutions to begin with, and what makes an action an action of the state. Insofar as private agents make decisions that fundamentally alter the normative situation (the rights and duties) of citizens, and insofar as, by definition, private agents are not public officials embedded in that shared collective practice, their decisions, even if well intentioned and authorized through contract, cannot count as omnilateral acts of the state. They rather and necessarily remain unilateral acts of men. Hence, I will conclude, for the very same reasons that we have, following Kant, a duty to exit the state of nature so as to solve the twofold problems of the unilateral imposition of will on others and the indeterminacy of rights, we also have a duty to limit privatization and to support, on normative grounds, a case for the re-bureaucratization of certain functions. Therefore, my paper provides foundational reasons to agree with Richard Rorty’s nonfoundational defense of bureaucracy as stated in the opening epigraph, since only agents who are appropriately embedded within a bureaucratic structure, properly understood, are, in many cases, capable of acting omnilaterally. The “bosses” I am here concerned with are not primarily those who 5 can unilaterally impose their will on us in their capacity as private employers, but rather any private actor who acts unilaterally while in the garb of the state. b) 1 An exclusive and permanent right to property is not entailed by the categorical imperative. Only conditional use is universalizable Westphal 97 (Kenneth R., Professor of Philosophy at Boðaziçi Üniversitesi, PhD in Philosophy from Wisco) “Do Kant’s Principles Justify Property or Usufruct?” Jahrbuch für Recht und Ethik/Annual Review of Law and Ethics 5 (1997):141–94. RE The compatibility of possession with the freedom of everyone according to universal laws is not a trivial assumption even for the case of detention or “empirical” possession. Under conditions of extreme scarcity, anyone’s use of some vital thing precludes someone else’s equally vital use of that thing or of anything of its kind (given the condition of extreme relative scarcity). This is not quite to agree with Hume, that conditions of justice exclude both extreme scarcity and superabundance.32 But it is to recognize that he came close to an important insight: legitimate action requires sufficient abundance so that one person’s use (benefit) is not (at least not directly) someone else’s vital injury (deprivation). This is not merely to say that property is psychologically impossible in extreme scarcity because no one could respect it (per Hume); the point is that possession and perhaps even use are not, at least not obviously, legitimate under such conditions. (How Kant would propose to resolve the conflicting grounds of obligation in such circumstances, the duty to self-preservation versus the duty not to harm others’ life or liberty, I do not understand.) The assumption that possession is compatible with the freedom of everyone according to universal laws 5 is even less trivial for the case of “intelligible” or “noumenal” possession, that is, possession without physical detention. The compatibility of intelligible possession with the freedom of everyone according to universal laws requires both sufficient resources so that the free use of something by one person is not as such the infringement of like freedom of another, and it requires that mere empirical or physical possession does not suffice to secure the innate right to freedom of overt (äußere) action. If physical possession did suffice to secure the innate right to overt action, Kant’s main ground of proof would entail no conclusion stronger than that rights of physical possession (detention) are legitimate. Furthermore, by assuming that noumenal possession is compatible with the freedom of everyone according to universal laws 5, Kant assumes rather than proves that possession without detention is permissible. However, this is precisely the point that needs to be proven! This issue remains central throughout the remainder of §2 and is addressed again in §3 below. 2.2.6 The previous section raises a very serious question about Kant’s justification of intelligible rights to possess and use (possessio). The questions about Kant’s supposed justification of property rights, the possibility of having things as one’s own (Eigentum, dominium), are even more acute. To derive such strong rights from Kant’s argument requires at least one of three assumptions. The first assumption would be that the sole relevant condition of use is proprietary ownership of things (cf. RL §1 ¶1); this assumption requires interpreting “Besitz” broadly. The second assumption would involve conflating the ownership of a right – viz., a right to use – with a right to property ownership. However, the legitimacy of neither of these assumptions is demonstrated by Kant’s argument in RL §2. Or it may be assumed, third, that Kant’s argument in §2 aims to prove, not merely rights to possession, but rights to property, insofar as it aims to prove a right to “arbitrary” (beliebigen) use, that is, the right to do whatever one pleases with something (10; cf. RL §7, 253.25–27), where this can include any of the rights involved in the further incidents of proprietary ownership. Reading Kant’s text in this way assimilates possessio to dominium by stressing Kant’s term “beliebigen”. So far as Kant’s literal statement is concerned, it is equally plausible to stress Kant’s term “Gebrauch” (use), which would restrict Kant’s argument to justifying possessio. Kant’s reductio ad absurdum argument assumes the contrapositive thesis that it is not altogether ... rightly in my power, i.e. it is not ... compatible with the freedom of everyone according to a universal law (it is wrong), to make use of something which is physically within my power to use. (2, 1) His argument then purports to derive a contradiction from this assumption. From this contradiction follows the negation of this assumption by disjunctive syllogism. Strictly speaking, what Kant’s argument (at best) proves is that it is indeed rightful to make use of things which in principle are within one’s power, provided (“obgleich ...”) that one ’s use is compatible with the freedom of everyone in accord with a universal law 5. As mentioned, Kant’s argument assumes rather than proves that this assumption is correct. Kant must prove that this assumption is correct in order to prove his conclusion. This requires showing that possession and use of things (in their narrow, strict senses) is consistent with the freedom of everyone in accord with universal laws. That would justify rights to possessio. To justify the stronger rights to dominium requires showing that holding things in accord with the rights involved in the further incidents of property ownership is also consistent with the freedom of everyone in accord with universal laws. Because the rights involved in property ownership are not analytically, indeed are not necessarily, related, justifying dominium requires separate justification of each component right. But it also requires more than this. Insofar as these rights are supposed to be proven as a matter of natural right, these further rights cannot be instituted solely by convention. However, there are alternative packages of rights, both for kinds of property as well as for various weaker sets of rights to use, any of which can be formulated in ways that are consistent with the like freedom of everyone according to universal laws. Consequently, merely demonstrating the consistency of one or another of these sets of rights with the freedom of everyone according to universal laws suffices only to justify the permissibility of that set of rights. It does not suffice to justify the obligation to respect that set of rights instead of any other such set of rights. This is to say, once alternative sets of rights are possible or permissible because they meet the sine qua non of consistency with the like freedom of everyone according to universal laws 5, Kant’s natural law grounds of proof do not suffice to justify an obligation to respect one particular set of rights among the range of possible, permissible alternatives. Consequently, interpreting Kant’s statement 10 by stressing “beliebigen”, using it to specify the scope of “Gebrauch”, can only lead to fallacious, question-begging interpretations of Kant’s argument. Consequently, it is strongly preferable to interpret Kant’s statement by stressing “Gebrauch”, and using it in its strict, narrow sense to specify the scope of “beliebigen”. (This parallels the case for interpreting “Besitz” narrowly instead of broadly.) In sum, to use something legitimately it suffices to have a right to use it. That, in brief, is “possession” strictly speaking; in the narrow sense of the term, “possession” involves only the right of a qualified chose in possession. Since this condition suffices to fulfill the condition specified by Kant’s reduction argument, no stronger condition follows from Kant’s argument. One can have or “own” a right to use something without, of course, having property in that thing. Recall Honoré’s point that possession involves two claims: being in exclusive control and remaining in control by being free of unpermitted interference of others. Insofar as possession persists despite subsequent and continuing disuse, Kant’s proof does not demonstrate even a narrow right to possession. (This is why I speak of qualified choses in possession; one key qualification justified by Kant’s argument is that one’s right to use persists only so long as one’s legitimate need to use and regular use continue.) Moreover, aside from the prohibition on harmful use, Kant’s argument does not even address the other incidents of property ownership. If Kant’s primary assumption 5 can be justified, then Kant’s proof demonstrates at most three important conclusions: one has the right to use things one currently detains, one has the right to use any usable thing not previously (and hence currently) detained by others (provided one’s use does not infringe the like freedom of others), and one has the right to continue to use things so long as one’s need to use them and actions of using them continue. These are not trivial theses! However, because it does not prove the indefinite duration of possession, in the narrow sense, Kant’s proof of the (first version of the) Postulate of Practical Reason regarding Right is unsound. Kant’s further considerations in RL §6 suffer analogous weaknesses (see §§2.4f.). That implies that private appropriation is unjust. Westphal 97 (Kenneth R., Professor of Philosophy at Boðaziçi Üniversitesi, PhD in Philosophy from Wisco) “Do Kant’s Principles Justify Property or Usufruct?” Jahrbuch für Recht und Ethik/Annual Review of Law and Ethics 5 (1997):141–94. RE 6.2 One right that is not justified by the Kantian defense of rights to use developed above is the exclusion of others from the use of something to which one has a right on those occasions when one does not need and is not likely to need to use the item in question. Property rights involve such an exclusion. To the extent that I have shown that qualified choses in possession suffice to fulfill the desiderata established by Kant’s own principles and strategy for justifying possession (in the narrow sense), I have shown that property rights cannot be justified by Kant’s metaphysical principles. This is because there are alternative sets of rights to things which meet both Kant’s sine qua non of being consistent with the freedom of all in accord with universal laws 5 and Kant’s metaphysical grounds of proof concerning freedom of overt action. Neither Kant’s own argument nor my reconstruction of it address most of the incidents of property ownership. (Though I have suggested that Kant’s principles can justify the prohibition on harmful use and very likely some version of the liability to execution.) Indeed, Kant’s sole Innate Right to Freedom, Universal Law of Right, and Permissive Law of Practical Reason appear to entail that it is illegitimate to exclude others’ use of something to which one has a qualified chose in possession provided that their use does not interfere with one’s own regular and reliable use of the item in question. Moreover, Kant’s principles give priority to use over first acquisition, and indeed they justify first acquisition only in view of legitimate and needful use. To this extent, Kant’ s principles undermine and repudiate one of the cherished hallmarks of the liberal conception of private property, namely, that first acquisition as such secures a right over the disposition of a thing, regardless of subsequent disuse (cf. §3.10).
3 Space Exploration is non universalizable - a). Entails that everyone leaves Earth which means that no one would be around to create the means to leave earth b). Assumes all agents have access to the resources to fund a space trip, and is thus exclusionary. Benjamin Segobaetso 2018, Project Officer at United Nations Association in Canada “Ethical Implications of the Colonization, Privatization and Commercialization of Outer Space.” https://ruor.uottawa.ca/bitstream/10393/38318/1/Benjamin_Segobaetso_2018.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2yROoOf_np9HL97WmBB-xDUGSZnQrRPbvs2Gmo6V5NlyEFBoSLWxQFuV0Dulles VN It can be argued through Kantian ethics that our record here on Earth paints a picture of neoliberal and capitalist policies with tendencies to favour the highest bidder at the exclusion of the under privileged and puts profit first at the expense of the environment. For Kantians, there are two questions that we must ask ourselves whenever we decide to act: Can I rationally will that everyone act as I propose to act? If the answer is no, then we must not perform the action. (ii) Does my action respect the goals of human beings? Again, if the answer is no, then we must not perform the action. Kantian ethicists would argue that extending to space neoliberal and capitalist policies is immoral because these systems create economic disparities and life threatening environmental injustices; therefore, they are set up in a way that we could 16 not rationally will everyone to act the way they act either here on Earth or in space. Also, Kantian ethicists would ask whether the action of extending neoliberal and capitalist policies to space would respect the goals of extra-terrestrial intelligent life if any rather than merely using them for humans’ own purposes? If the answer is no, then the participating agent must not perform the action. Kant wrote on the possible existence of extra-terrestrial intelligent species in the final pages of the last book that he published, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1978). In this publication, Kant hinted that the highest concept of the Alien species may be that of a terrestrial rational being eines irdischen vernünftigen ; however, he argued that it will be difficult to describe its characteristics because there is no knowledge available of a non-terrestrial rational being nicht irdischen Wesen which could be used as a reference in regards to its properties and ultimately classify that terrestrial being as rational. This dilemma will continue until extraterrestrial intelligent life is discovered because comparing two species of rational beings has to be on the basis of experience, but that experience has not been possible yet (Kant, 237-238). 4 Space is not subject to property rights – a). It has no physical manifestation as space is by definition the absence of matter which means it cannot be measured, bordered, or divided, thus it cannot be owned b). Owning unexplored planets/space is incoherent – there could be other agents there, and it can’t be deemed an agents property lest agents have a rational conception of it. C) The International Institute of Space Law proves Sean Blair 2011 is a space journalist and is currently working for the European Space Agency, 08-01-2011, "Space property: who owns it?," BBC Science Focus Magazine, span class="skimlinks-unlinked"https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/space-property-who-owns-it/span/ Dulles VN While the deep-sea salvage claim here on Earth appears to show that possession will be sufficient, we’re still to discover exactly what will happen when someone lands a craft on a celestial body with the intention of claiming it, or at least part of it. There are some who believe that regardless of what’s happened on Earth, you simply can’t own something in space. “For us it is clear that private property rights over parts of outer space are not permitted,” says Tanja Masson-Zwaan, President of the International Institute of Space Law. “There is no consensus on property rights in space, as there will always be people who continue to challenge what the law says.”
5 Libertarianism turns don’t apply: A Privatization of space inherently relies on an anti-libertarian state-based model Shammas and Holen 19 (Victor L. Oslo Metropolitan University, Tomas B. Independent scholar) “One giant leap for capitalistkind: private enterprise in outer space,” Palgrave Communications, 1-29-19, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0218-9 TDI recut Dulles VN But the entrepreneurial libertarianism of capitalistkind is undermined by the reliance of the entire NewSpace complex on extensive support from the state, ‘a public-private financing model underpinning long-shot start-ups' that in the case of Musk’s three main companies (SpaceX, SolarCity Corp., and Tesla) has been underpinned by $4.9 billion dollars in government subsidies (Hirsch, 2015). In the nascent field of space tourism, Cohen (2017) argues that what began as an almost entirely private venture quickly ground to a halt in the face of insurmountable technical and financial obstacles, only solved by piggybacking on large state-run projects, such as selling trips to the International Space Station, against the objections of NASA scientists. The business model of NewSpace depends on the taxpayer’s dollar while making pretensions to individual self-reliance. The vast majority of present-day clients of private aerospace corporations are government clients, usually military in origin. Furthermore, the bulk of rocket launches in the United States take place on government property, usually operated by the US Air Force or NASA.Footnote13 This inward tension between state dependency and capitalist autonomy is itself a product of neoliberalism’s contradictory demand for a minimal, “slim” state, while simultaneously (and in fact) relying on a state reengineered and retooled for the purposes of capital accumulation (Wacquant, 2012). As Lazzarato writes, ‘To be able to be “laissez-faire”, it is necessary to intervene a great deal' (2017, p. 7). Space libertarianism is libertarian in name only: behind every NewSpace venture looms a thick web of government spending programs, regulatory agencies, public infrastructure, and universities bolstered by research grants from the state. SpaceX would not exist were it not for state-sponsored contracts of satellite launches. Similarly, in 2018, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—the famed origin of the World Wide Web—announced that it would launch a ‘responsive launch competition', meaning essentially the reuse of launch vehicles, representing an attempt by the state to ‘harness growing commercial capabilities' and place them in the service of the state’s interest in ensuring ‘national security' (Foust, 2018b). UV
1 1AR Theory – a the aff gets it because otherwise the 1NC could engage in unchecked, infinite abuse which outweighs anything else, b it’s drop the debater because the 2AR is too short to win a shell AND substance so theory can only check abuse for the aff if it’s a win condition, c no neg RVI because otherwise they could dump on the shell for 6 minutes and get away with anything by sheer brute force, d) competing interps – 1AR interps aren’t bidirectional and the neg should have to defend their norm since they have more time. e) Aff theory first – it’s a much larger strategic loss because 1min is ¼ of the 1AR vs 1/7 of the 1NC - Prefer structural weighing args about aff vs. neg since they apply to each round so are most likely to establish communal norms
2 Fairness is a voter – it’s an intrinsic aspect of a competitive activity like debate. Education is a voter – it’s the only portable skill from debate.
3 Permissibility affirms: A Dictionary.com defines “ought”: as a verb “used to express justice, moral rightness, or the like” and To negate is defined as “to deny the existence, evidence, or truth of”, therefore minus offense denying the truth of the resolution, we must affirm. B We don’t have to justify doing morally neutral things like drinking water C there’s nothing proactively stopping the aff so just do it
4 Presumption affirms: A We always default to assuming something true until proven false – if I told you my name , you would believe me. B Presuming obligations is logically safer since it’s better to be supererogatory than fail to meet an obligation. C Affirming is harder. Prefer an empirical analysis – it accounts for all possible factors Shah 20 Sachin Shah debater who analyzes topic stats February 13, 2020, “A Statistical Analysis of Side-Bias on the 2020 January-February Lincoln Douglas Debate Topic by Sachin Shah” http://nsdupdate.com/2020/a-statistical-analysis-of-side-bias-on-the-2020-january-february-lincoln-douglas-debate-topic-by-sachin-shah/?fbclid=IwAR2P0AZqQtSiwMZlCpia-Fy1zFOdHn6JrGtcYgGulqeimd-V0a1xbaIMYYs This analysis is statistically rigorous and relevant in several aspects: (A) The p-value is less than the alpha. (B) The data is on the current January-February topic, meaning it’s relevant to rounds these months 2. (C) The data represents a diversity of debating and judging styles across the country. (D) This analysis accounts for disparities in debating skill level. (E) Multiple tests validate the results. It is also interesting to look at the trend over multiple topics. In the rounds from 142 TOC bid-distributing tournaments (September 2017 – 2020 YTD), the negative won 52.75 of ballots (p-value 0.0001, 95 confidence interval 52.3, 53.2). This suggests the bias might be structural, and not topic specific, as this data spans nine different topics 3. Given a structural advantage for the negative, the affirmative may be justified in being granted a substantive advantage to compensate for the structural skew. This could take various forms such as granting the affirmative presumption ground, tiny plans, or framework choice. Whatever form chosen should be tested to ensure the skew is not unintentionally reversed.
D) To negate is defined as “to deny the existence, evidence, or truth of”, therefore minus offense denying the truth of the resolution, we must affirm. 7) The aff advocacy is limited to the text of the resolution, while the neg has multiple ways to prove the resolution false, meaning that absent offense, the aff has done a better job. 8) Presuming neg is faulty to the argument from personal incredulity fallacy – absent offense, it is fallacious to assume a statement is false because you are unable to believe it.
9) Presuming statements true is key to education since it promotes more open mindedness and encourages learning new things and exploring new fields of knowledge.
10) All statements of truth rest upon other assumptions, so if we presume everything false, then we can never prove anything true
12) To affirm is defined by Dictionary.com as “to express agreement with or commitment to uphold; support” meaning that we affirm if there is no negative offense because it can still be upheld.
13) Presuming neg commits the fallacy of ignorance; assuming the resolution is false because we don’t have evidence to prove it true. 5 Reject spec shells – a) infinitely regressive – you can ask me to spec infinite different things which means I will always violate and will never spec enough b) CX checks – I told you in the doc I am willing to spec in CX which means you can still prep how you want and it prevents friv theory which kills topic ed c) pre-round checks – you can contact me before the round for spec which solves all your offense
1 AFF theory is no RVI, Drop the debater, competing interps, and the highest layer of the round under an interp that aff theory is legit regardless of voters a) infinite abuse since otherwise it would be impossible to check NC abuse b) it would justify the aff never getting to read theory which is a reciprocity issue c) Time crunched 1ar means it becomes impossible to justify paradigm issues and win the shell. d) the 2n can dump on a script to a CI and go for RVI’s making it impossible to check abuse e) The 1ar is too short to win theory and substance f) The 2n can always create infinite reasonability arguments the 2ar can’t get through 2 AFF fairness issues come prior to NC arguments a) The 1ar can’t engage on multiple layers if there is a skew since the speech is already time-crunched b) Sets up an invincible 2n since there are a million of unfair things you can collapse to to win every round. 3 No 2n theory arguments and paradigm issues. a) overloads the 2AR with a massive clarification burden b) it becomes impossible to check NC abuse if you can dump on reasons the shell doesn't matter in the 2n. 4 Presumption and Permissibility affirm- a – Freezes action: requiring pro-active justification for all our actions would make it impossible to make morally neutral claims like ‘I ought to drink water’ which means we always assume we can take an action absent a proactive reason not to. b – Epistemics: We could never start a strand of reasoning if we had to question that reasoning. c – If I told you my name was Vishnu you’d believe me
1/15/22
util egypt plan case
Tournament: Ridge Debate | Round: 3 | Opponent: Bridgewater Raritan NS | Judge: Tom Speaker My value is Morality My Value Criterion is maximizing expected wellbeing
Pleasure and pain are intrinsic values that we desire Death is the worst pain as death results in the preclusion of future pleasure and itself is the most painful process advantage Plan: The government of the Arab Republic of Egypt ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike. 1 New anti-strike laws worsen unemployment, the poverty crisis, threaten the sanctity of unions, and will collapse Egypt Boukhari 10/11 — (Jamal Boukhari, Jamal Boukhari is an Egyptian journalist., “A dangerous new law in Egypt allows for the dismissal of any public employee who opposes the regime“, 10-11-2021, https://www.equaltimes.org/a-dangerous-new-law-in-egypt?lang=en#.YZQnPL3MJ6d, accessed 11-16-2021, HKR-AR) On 1 August, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi approved a law, previously approved by parliament, allowing for the non-disciplinary dismissal of public employees. Referred to in the media as the ‘Law on the Dismissal of Employees Belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood’, the new legislation allows public administrations to dismiss any civil servant suspected of belonging to groups classified as ‘terrorist’ in Egypt, as well as those who ‘harm public services or the economic interests of the state’. It began with a series of fatal railway accidents. On 26 March 2021, a train collision in the Sohag Governorate in Upper Egypt killed 20 people and injured 165. Twenty-two days later, another accident occurred in the north of the country, killing 11 and injuring 98. Faced with criticism of his management following the accidents, the minister of transport and former army general Kamel al-Wazir accused “extremist and rebel elements” allegedly belonging to terrorist groups including the Muslim Brotherhood, banned in the country since 2013, of being behind the “sabotage.” As proof of his charges, the Minister announced that he had identified 268 Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated “elements” within the transport sector, whom he could not sack as Egyptian law did not allow the dismissal of civil servants or employees of state-owned companies except for disciplinary reasons. On 5 May 2021, a member of parliament from the pro-regime Mostaqbal Watan party introduced the new law before parliament. While characterised in the media as primarily aimed at the dismissal of employees with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the law’s ambiguous and wide-ranging provisions are raising fears that any slightly critical voice within the public sector could be targeted. “The dismissal of employees belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood is just the tip of the iceberg. This law targets any public employee who opposes the regime, regardless of their affiliation. The government is well aware that most of the Muslim Brotherhood are either in prison or in exile,” Kamal Abu Aita, the former minister of manpower, tells Equal Times. He argues that the law is being presented as anti-Muslim Brotherhood in order to gain public approval. While the text of the law does not explicitly mention the Muslim Brotherhood, its second article authorises the dismissal of any public servant whose name appears on the terrorist list. But as Abu Aita argues, in a country where any opponent or trade unionist who is arrested can be charged without hesitation with belonging to a terrorist group or sharing the objectives of a terrorist group, “the circle of public employees targeted by the legislation exceeds those who belong to the Muslim Brotherhood. “I know several trade unionists and liberal labour activists who appear on the list of terrorist organisations due to their political affiliation, including the architect Mamdouh Hamza who was placed on the list for criticising the regime’s policies on social networks, and Yehia Hussein Abdel Hadi, who has been detained without trial since January 2019 for participating in an event commemorating the 8th anniversary of the 25 January Revolution. They could be targeted by this law,” adds the former minister. More than 60,000 political prisoners are currently behind bars in Egypt, including 30,000 in pre-trial detention, according to NGOs. According to Ahmed al-Naggar, former editor-in-chief of the government-owned daily Al-Ahram, the law aims to dismiss any official whom the regime finds undesirable, as it judges employees by “their political intentions and positions, not by their actions”. As al-Naggar warned in statements made to the local news website Daaarb: “The law constitutes a return of the inquisition in the public sector and will have very dangerous social consequences.” The new law could further increase workplace monitoring of employees’ political affiliations. “The law would turn employees of public authorities and administrations into informers who help the security apparatus to hunt down any opponent, as well as any honest employee who criticises corruption in the institution where he or she works,” Ammar Ali Hassan, professor of political science at Helwan University, tells Equal Times. After the law came into effect on 1 August, the government sent a copy to all state institutions in order to begin reviewing employee profiles, an unnamed official source told Sky News Arabia on 10 August. On 22 August, the ministry of transport announced that it had transferred 190 public servants allegedly belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood to positions unrelated to the operation of the railways, pending an investigation into their political affiliation, with a view to dismissing them. In a statement issued the same day the law came into force, the supreme council of universities announced that it had begun to draw up a list of university professors and staff who “belong to terrorist groups and who try in various ways to prevent universities from carrying out their educational mission”. Targeting workers who call for strikes But according to activists and members of opposition parties, article 1 of the law presents even greater danger. It stipulates that all public employees who have “failed to meet their duties, as part of a bid to harm public services or the economic interests of the state” will be dismissed. “This article represents a trap for employees. It paves the way for any public servant to be punished for calling for or participating in a strike or in any independent trade union activities. According to this law, they would be failing in their duties and hindering production or the functioning of state services,” warns Wael Tawfik, a member of the workers’ committee at the Socialist Popular Alliance Party (SPAP). While the law provides the state with a means for keeping in check the highly politicised working class, which has always been a key player in and even the driving force behind most of the uprisings in modern Egypt, it will also be a significant instrument for reducing the number of employees in the public sector, which the regime and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) consider to be bloated. According to official figures, the public sector and related services employ around six million people (not including the armed forces). “This new legislation gives the state new reasons to reduce the number of public sector employees. This is in line with the demands of the IMF, which granted Egypt a US$12 billion loan at the end of 2016,” adds Elhami al-Merghani, vice president of SPAP. Since 2020, thousands of employees have organised sit-ins in protest of the government’s policy of closing large companies and factories that it deems to be in debt. Seven thousand workers and employees of the Egyptian Iron and Steel Co took part in the most recent sit-in in January 2021 following the government’s decision to close the company and turn its six million square metre site into a residential development. According to certain analyses, this policy is also aimed at paving the way for the economic ambitions of the army, which is increasingly expanding its presence in civilian production. “The regime has adopted a policy that is hostile to the working class. It has closed several companies and dismissed thousands of workers in recent years on the pretext that these companies are not profitable,” says al-Merghani. While the government may be pleased with its hostile policy towards opponents and redundant public sector employees, this policy could have disastrous long-term effects as it risks increasing unemployment and unrest in a country where a large part of the population has long depended on the public sector for its income. As al-Merghani warns: “The government can use the machinery of repressive laws to silence employees, but this oppression always leads to disaster.” 2 No RTS provides the sole legal impetus for mass incarceration, intimidation lawsuits, cancelled wages, detentions, and arrests FLD 19 — (Front Line Defenders, Front Line Defenders was founded in Dublin in 2001 with the specific aim of protecting human rights defenders at risk (HRDs), people who work, non-violently, for any or all of the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Front Line Defenders addresses the protection needs identified by HRDs themselves., 1-14-2019, Available Online at https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/sites/default/files/frontline_defenders_egypt_english_online.pdf, accessed 11-18-2021, pages 28-30, HKR-AR) Egyptian workers who organise labour rights movements in factories, hospitals, oil companies and transportation centres have been arrested, interrogated, and often charged with criminal offences related to their peaceful labour rights activism. The most common accusations and charges include instigating a strike, halting or obstructing production, and membership in a banned group – widely understood to be the Muslim Brotherhood. Arrests have occurred before, during, and after planned sit-ins and strikes, at which large numbers of workers and HRDs are often usually detained at once. In several instances, security forces have raided HRDs’ work dormitories and family homes at night. The independent Egyptian initiative DemoMeter, which tracks popular movements and mobilisations across the country, documented at least 151 workers and unionists arrested, prosecuted or referred to trial between Labour Day (1 May) 2016 and Labour Day 2017.45 While the vast majority of arrests and detentions occurred in connection to a strike or sit-in, Front Line Defenders spoke with one WHRD who was violently detained while attempting to enter a union meeting and distribute legal information packets related to labour rights. After arrests, authorities often pressure detained HRDs and workers into resigning from their jobs in exchange for release on bail. In several cases, State Security officials and military officers have threatened detainees’ families to persuade the workers and HRDs to resign. Resignations often lead to release, but in several cases criminal charges were not dropped and HRDs remain on civilian or military trial even after leaving their jobs. Instances of mass arrest, detention, or prosecution of workers related to their labour rights activism occurring from June 2016 to October 2018 include: June 2016: 26 workers at Alexandria Shipyard company were prosecuted by a military court for staging peaceful protests, several were detained for up to five months, and all remain on trial as of November 2018. See section IV. December 2016: 55 workers from two privately owned fertilizer companies in Suez were arrested in dawn raids for organizing and participating in a strike. All were released except five well-known labour rights defenders, who were remanded in custody for 15 days and investigated on accusation of instigating a strike and obstructing work. The HRDs were tried for inciting strikes and obstructing production, and acquitted by the Suez Misdemeanour Court on 25 February 2017. 46 January 2017: Authorities charged 19 workers and trade union leaders from an oil company in Suez with halting production and inciting a strike at an oil products factory, following a peaceful sit-in in December 2016. A Suez Court found them innocent, but 17 – including the president, vice president and secretary general of a local trade union – were prevented from returning to work and had “damage” deductions taken from their salaries. February 2017: Five WHRDs and female workers were arrested at the El-Ghazl factory in Mahalla, one of the biggest textile companies in Egypt where over 20,000 workers are employed in eight factories. The labour rights defenders were arrested after approximately 3,000 workers (mostly women) were on strike for two days to demand payment of withheld benefits.47 The strike ended after the arrest of the five women and threats to others. April 2017: Using Egypt’s anti-protest legislation, 16 workers from a telecom company in Cairo and Giza were arrested for peacefully demonstrating to demand unpaid wages and an increase in salaries. At least nine more workers in Suez Canal were arrested for protesting in front of the company’s officers in Ramses against the continued detention of their colleagues. One known HRD and strike leader was interrogated and accused of using social media to incite a strike and harm public interest, before all workers were released following solidarity protests at dozens of telecommunications hubs across the country. June 2017: 32 workers from a cement company in were sentenced to three years in prison after being charged with obstructing justice, assaulting a police captain, and using violence to resist authorities. They were arrested after police dispersed a sit-in on 22 May demanding full-time contracts and retroactive pay for more than a decade of partially unpaid wages. The trial was delayed several times in May when police failed to transport the detained workers to court. Families, independent observers, and journalists were barred from entering the court room. Two weeks after the three year sentence was issued, and following a large national and international labour rights campaign in solidarity with the workers, a Cairo appeals court reduced the sentence to two months. The appeals court found them innocent of all charges except “resisting authorities,” ruling that they obstructed police by assisting a wanted worker to escape the premises. July 2017: Three workers died at an Aswan cement plant when an unidentified substance spilled into a worker area and burned them to death. Workers went on strike to demand an investigation into the deaths and the plant’s safety procedures. Police raided the workers' dorms and arrested 25 people. When other workers tried to follow them to the station in solidarity and for protection, the company threatened that anyone leaving the factory campus would be fired. Authorities later released 17 detainees. Eight remained on trial for nearly one year on charges of obstructing means of production, inciting strike, using violence and threatening public employees. Charges were dropped in May 2018. September 2017: A leading HRD and labour organiser from the Public Transportation Authority was detained and questioned along with five of his colleagues, among them strike organizers. All six were later interrogated and accused of membership of a banned group. October 2018: Eight nurses, including WHRD and labour rights activist Sayda Fayed, were arrested at night and detained at Helwan station in Cairo without access to a lawyer or their families, who were not able to speak with them until more than two days after their arrest. Sayda was charged with membership in a banned group and distributing false information, an allegation she has faced repeatedly in the past related to her distributing articles on labour rights, trade unions and freedom of association. The nurses were released and charged dropped in November 2018. 3 Strikes and the labor movement’s effectiveness have quantitatively decreased during Sisi’s attacks on strike rights – our evidence is casual Charbel 17 — (Jano Charbel, Jano has been a journalist for the last eight years. He took to journalism his passion for labor issues, which he has studied academically, becoming an authority in the field. He is also drawn to environmental issues, which he has also covered., “State responds to recent labor protests with heightened repression and exceptional legal measures“, 1-24-2017, Available Online at https://www.madamasr.com/en/2017/01/24/feature/politics/state-responds-to-recent-labor-protests-with-heightened-repression-and-exceptional-legal-measures/, accessed 11-18-2021, HKR-AR) Recent nationwide labor protests have found themselves confronted by extraordinary measures of repression as the country continues to weather economic struggles, austerity measures and rising inflation. The Egyptian government has deployed security forces to quash any suggestion of labor action in the public or private sector, arresting workers and subsequently imposing exceptional legal measures to punish those detained. Since 2016, the state has increasingly moved toward suppressing labor protests. According to an annual report published by the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights (ECESR), there were 726 labor protests over workplace demands, claims of administrative mismanagement and corruption in 2016. These protests have particularly been driven by grievances over working conditions and demands for increased wages and bonuses in light of recent economic reform policies. However, the ECESR report also noted that 2016 saw a decline in the total number of labor protests compared to 2015, in which there were 933 labor protests. In 2014, there were 1,609 labor protests, while, in 2013, there were 2,239. The latest ECESR report states that the 726 labor protests in 2016 made up the majority of the 1,736 protests witnessed throughout the year. This report attributes the decrease in the total number of protests to restrictive legislation regulating the right to demonstrate and security crackdowns on dissent. 4 A strong labor movement and RTS is the only preventative measure to halt large-scale authoritarianism, state collapse, and statewide social inequality that will hurl Egypt into violent conflict Hamzawy 17 — (Amr Hamzawy, Amr Hamzawy studied political science and developmental studies in Cairo, The Hague, and Berlin. He was previously a senior associate in the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace between 2005 and 2009. Between 2009 and 2010, he served as the research director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, Lebanon. He has also served on the faculty at the American University in Cairo, Cairo University, and Stanford University., “Egypt’s Resilient and Evolving Social Activism“, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 4-5-2017, https://carnegieendowment.org/2017/04/05/egypt-s-resilient-and-evolving-social-activism-pub-68578, accessed 11-18-2021, HKR-AR) Despite security surveillance, forced dismissals of labor activists, and referrals of labor activists and protesters to military trials, labor activism remains at the forefront of societal resistance to authoritarian policies and practices. Unionized workers in public and private industrial facilities, as well as civil servants in the state bureaucracy and local government, continue to demonstrate and organize strikes to articulate their economic and social demands and to defend workers’ rights to freedoms of expression and association.150 Protests by labor activists have even impacted key service sectors, such as public transportation and healthcare. Over the last several years, labor activism has primarily focused on Egypt’s growing economic and social crises and the ongoing deterioration of living conditions for a majority of Egyptians.151 Workers and civil servants have been using different tactics to make their voices heard: formal complaints, gatherings and rallies, protest vigils, media campaigns, sit-ins, work strikes, and hunger strikes. Work strikes and protest vigils remain the most widely used tactics.152 While the total number of protests declined from 1,655 in 2014 to 933 in 2015, the frequency will likely hold steady, given that 493 were recorded between January and April 2016.153 Economic and social demands were at the center of the majority of protests in all three time periods: 49 percent in 2014, 27 percent in 2015, and 27 percent between January and April 2016. These protests called for the payment of workers in public and private facilities who have had their salaries withheld, wage increases to balance the rising inflation rate, improvements in working conditions and safety benchmarks, and safeguards for the rights of temporary workers and civil servants. Other protests called for ending punitive measures (especially dismissals and arbitrary transfers), improving transparency and accountability standards and introducing systemic anticorruption measures in the workplace, increasing efficiency and productivity standards, and recognizing the right to enjoy freedoms of expression and association without fear of intimidation or repression.154 In response, the regime has used various administrative, security, legislative, and judicial tools to reject most of the protesters’ demands and to punish protest leaders. While the Ministry of Manpower and Immigration has settled some formal complaints and requests filed by workers and civil servants, most cases have been referred to labor courts in the absence of acceptable settlements with public and private employers. In the first quarter of 2016, the ministry settled 1,392 of 5,322 individual complaints and 303 of 1,561 collective complaints, referring the rest to courts.155 This equates to low rates of settlement for individual and collective complaints: 26 percent and 19 percent, respectively. Furthermore, in line with common governmental practices in Egypt, the ministry has resorted to providing temporary financial assistance and other short-term benefits to appease some workers and civil servants during times of frequent labor protests.156 Since 2013, authorities have arrested dozens of workers and civil servants for demonstrating and have enabled the arbitrary transfers and dismissals of dozens of others involved in protests in both public and private facilities.157 The government has co-opted the General Union of Egyptian Workers, which has helped the regime attack labor activists and suppress their protests. In 2015, the security services–controlled leadership of the union asked the president to issue a decree that criminalizes all work strikes for a year.158 Several union leaders also announced their intent to form so-called committees of workers to resist sit-ins and strikes and to participate in counter-protest activities aimed at safeguarding the stability and security of the nation.159 No presidential decree criminalizing strikes was issued, so in 2016, the union’s leadership reinforced its anti-labor-activism position. Union leaders continued to ignore the well-founded economic and social grievances of workers and civil servants.160 Of particular note, the union backed the government’s decision and various court rulings161—and later the Labor Unions’ Act162—that banned the formation of independent labor and trade unions and ordered the dissolution of existing independent unions. All of these unions have helped organize labor activism since 2011.163 Since 2015, the new authoritarian government has been undermining labor activism, using the same legislative and judicial tools it has used against professional associations and student movements. In 2015, the government built on the legislative prerogatives of the president to pass a new Civil Service Law, which significantly changes the employment conditions of civil servants. The law, approved in 2016 by Parliament after the insertion of a few minor amendments, makes civil servants’ jobs easier to terminate and undermines their right to regular wage increases.164 It affects more than 5 million Egyptians within the state bureaucracy and local government. The judiciary, like Parliament, has enabled the regime to surveil, repress, and punish protesting workers and civil servants. Reportedly, criminal courts have handed down various prison sentences for labor activists, and administrative courts have issued rulings that allow workers and civil servants who participate in protests to be forcibly retired.165 The government has also used the security services to disperse vigils, demonstrations, sit-ins, and work strikes; and the security forces have occasionally resorted to excessive force, using live ammunition and rubber bullets. Instead of holding them accountable, the general prosecutor has issued arrest warrants for protesters and referred them to criminal trials with ambiguous charges that include violent bullying, blocking public roads, disrupting public and private transportation, refraining from work, demonstrating without formal authorization, preventing public and private facilities from carrying out their work, and disrupting public security.166 For example, in September 2014, a workers’ vigil that was protesting management practices in the government-owned Alexandria Spinning and Weaving Company and demanding the payment of late salaries ended in clashes with the security services. Fourteen workers were arrested, and some of them were injured due to the excessive use of force by the police.167 Similar protests have continued to happen elsewhere in government-owned companies across the country, either inspired by economic and social demands or in response to the termination of workers’ contracts and their subsequent dismissal.168 5 Strikes still have revolutionary democratic potential – government suppression nulls collective organizing Beninin 8/8 — (Joel Beinin, Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan professor of history and professor of Middle East history at Stanford University. His latest book is Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2016)., 8-8-2021, Available Online at https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/08/arab-working-class-uprisings-middle-east-2011-trade-union-federation-tunisia-egypt-joel-beinin-interview, accessed 11-18-2021, HKR-AR) Joel Beinin is the interviewee. Daniel Finn, who is the features editor at Jacobin and the author of One Man’s Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA, is the interviewer. All of this was nearly totally repressed in the wake of the military coup of July 3, 2013, which ultimately installed the head of the armed forces, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, in power. He is now the president of Egypt. There was a wave of strikes in the six months after Sisi came to power. But due to censorship, there has been hardly any news of any labor activity at all in Egypt since late 2015. Looking at all of what happened in Egypt over the last fifteen years, what we see is a very impressive social movement of workers from below, that appeared to have a lot of democratic and even revolutionary potential, that has been completely repressed. That has to do with the inability of workers — and this is not through any fault of “misleadership” or anything like that; the circumstances were very, very difficult — to coordinate beyond a single workplace. For example, there were efforts to set up a coordinating committee for the ten textile factories in the Nile Delta, and it simply couldn’t be done. Workers had one day off a week, travel was difficult and expensive and inconvenient. People were going to be surveilled by the internal security apparatus. It was just too big a task. So that’s where we are now in Egypt. Scenario 1 is Terror: 1 Suppression and incarceration causes mass ISIL recruitment and ME instability HRF 7/15 — (Human Rights First, Human Rights First is an independent advocacy and action organization that challenges America to live up to its ideals. We believe American leadership is essential in the global struggle for human rights, so we press the U.S. government and private companies to respect human rights and the rule of law. When they fail, we step in to demand reform, accountability and justice. Around the world, we work where we can best harness American influence to secure core freedoms., 7-15-21, Available Online at https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/sites/default/files/Time20Bombs20Egypt20Final.pdf, accessed 11-19-2021, pages 4-6, HKR-AR) The stakes of this decision are extraordinarily high. The testimonies from former prisoners that Human Rights First has collected are frightening evidence that ISIS benefits directly from Egypt’s policies, including the routine and horrific abuse and torture of its prisoners. Human Rights First has for decades reported on human rights violations in Egypt, perpetrated by a succession of Egyptian governments. This report is based on interviews conducted over several months in 2021 with former prisoners. For security reasons, some names of former detainees have been changed in this report. Egypt’s prison system has a long history of incubating extremist violence. Al Qaeda leader Ayman Al Zawahiri is believed to have been radicalized while being tortured and humiliated in Egyptian jails in the 1980s. Those interviewed for this report agreed that the Egyptian government’s policies today are strengthening ISIS, and the accounts of those who witnessed radicalization first-hand in detention demonstrate striking similarities across the period from 2015 to 2021. All of the former prisoners interviewed by Human Rights First for this report said they had personally witnessed the successful recruitment of prisoners inside jails by ISIS. Malek said: I have an example that I know personally. He was with me in prison – a 19-year-old young man. When he went to al-Natrun prison, he was greatly affected by the ISIS group, and when he returned, he began to say that the Muslim Brotherhood are infidels and that peaceful change is not feasible, and that change must be made by force of arms. The moderate prisoners tried to talk to him rationally and argue with him to change his thoughts, but he was very fierce and did not listen to anyone.4 Mahmoud told Human Rights First: I saw groups of men in Al Aqrab prison join ISIS after being abused – not just one or two but several. They were just normal prisoners but then they joined ISIS. Young men who used to explain their views in a peaceful way were persuaded to find another, not peaceful, way.5 “It is a crisis,” one prisoner released in 2021 told Human Rights First. “Young, uneducated prisoners are getting an ideology presented as outwardly religious but is really about violence and hatred.”6 Another recounted: The authorities are creating ticking time bombs by allowing this. I know of three guys who when they arrived in prison weren’t radical. They would smoke cigarettes with us, joked with us; one of them came from a wealthy background and had been mistakenly arrested when he was leaving his university campus. They joined ISIS in prison. When they were released, two went to fight for ISIS in Sinai and one was killed fighting in Syria.7 Another prisoner released in 2020 told Human Rights First: Unfortunately, they ISIS convinced some men, who after some time adopted their ways of violent thinking, and began to prefer a violent way of thinking. I had a friend in prison who they convinced. I found out that he joined ISIS and he was not even greeting people who did not agree with his newfound ideology.8 Those interviewed identified the main motivations for joining ISIS as revenge against the authorities and the protection and better treatment that come with belonging to ISIS in the penal system. Former prisoner Mahmoud emphasized the abusive conditions. Prisoners face many kinds of violence - physical and psychological. There are electrocutions, or you can be hanged from the ceiling by your arms or legs for days. Sometimes they bring members of your family to where you are interrogated, a prisoner’s sister or mother or daughter and threaten them and make the prisoner confess to things he hasn’t done. I know where wives were brought to the investigation offices and the prisoner was told that the officers would ‘do things’ to their wives if they didn’t confess.9 Another former prisoner described the arc of abuse and recruitment as he witnessed it: When I was first arrested, I was tortured for 60 days by state security. I was beaten, kept naked, and electrocuted, including on my genitals. I needed surgery afterwards. After that I was transferred to the prison and put in a cell for new arrivals. Prisoners are usually kept there for between 11 and 30 days, depending on when the officer in charge moves them to a more permanent cell. During that time in the new arrivals cell a prisoner from the Muslim Brotherhood encouraged me to put my faith in God and trust his ways, telling me that ‘I should pray, and God will give me my rights on Judgement Day.’ But an ISIS prisoner offered me a different proposition. He said ‘We will help you get justice now. We will fight against the forces that did this to you and make them pay.’ After 60 days of torture in which they break your mind, body, and soul – What side would someone choose?10 The interviewed former prisoners emphasized that ISIS prisoners often enjoy ready access to other prisoners. “What is a catastrophe is that authorities have not separated the prisoners connected to real cases of terrorism from those who simply oppose the regime on political grounds. So, ordinary political prisoners, especially the younger ones who are unjustly detained become prey to the terrorists inside the jails,” said Youssef, who was released from jail earlier this year. “I have never seen the prison authorities interfere to prevent this from happening.”11 Another former prisoner, Amr, said “The ISIS leaders in prison can get easy access to other prisoners. Even guys arrested for petty crimes, guys selling hashish, are exposed to the ISIS recruiting in prisons.”12 Others gave similar accounts of how ISIS approaches and grooms younger prisoners. Nino told Human Rights First he was released in October 2020 after spending four years in various prisons: I was in Wadi Natron and Ataqa prisons. I saw ISIS inside prison in 2020. They were still trying to recruit other prisoners. It starts with a cup of tea or coffee for hospitality, and they sit to talk with the person…. At first the authorities segregated people who had these ideologies into separate cells, but by the end of 2017, they began to mix those with extremist ideologies with the rest of us. The government is the reason that these ideologies have spread within the prisons to ruin the minds of younger political prisoners.13 Malek told Human Rights First he was released from Wadi Natron prison in April 2019, and that he, too, saw ISIS there. “It is a huge prison with thousands of prisoners. Extremist groups would search for men who are younger, in their twenties. The ISIS prisoners had some special privileges that made other prisoners wish to stay in the same cells as them.”14 Other testimonies speak to how ISIS factions in prison enjoy better treatment and privileges than those afforded to other prisoners. “ISIS prisoners got four hours of recreation a day compared to two hours for the rest of the prisoners,” said Amr. His testimony continued: ISIS prisoners were allowed mobile phones, and medical care, and their family visits would last 90 minutes. Other prisoners weren’t allowed mobile phones, didn't get proper medical care and had visits of 20 minutes. It’s attractive to prisoners to want to join them. ISIS prisoners could access any books that they wanted - even those promoting extremist ideology - whilst university students could not even get their textbooks. Some prison officers are just scared of ISIS and give them privileges. One officer in Istaqbil Tora prison was too scared to go into their cell. 2 Egypt is key – Sinai Peninsula is a terrorist hotspot that risks global escalation and war with Israel Kane and Braniff 15 — (Sheehan Kane and William Braniff, Sheehan Kane is a faculty research assistant for the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) at START. She holds an M.A. in Middle East Studies from the American University in Cairo and a B.A. in Political Science and International Studies from Elon University. William Braniff is the executive director of START. Braniff is a graduate of the United States Military Academy where he received his bachelor’s degree. Following his Company Command as an Armor Officer in the U.S. Army, Braniff attended the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) where he received a master’s degree in international relations., “Taking the Sinai Province of the Islamic State seriously without helping it destabilize Egypt“, No Publication, 11-10-2014, Available Online at https://www.start.umd.edu/news/taking-sinai-province-islamic-state-seriously-without-helping-it-destabilize-egypt, accessed 11-19-2021, HKR-AR) On November 10, 2014, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis1 pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), subsequently changing the group’s name to the Sinai Province of the Islamic State. Following this affiliation, ISIL began marketing the Sinai Peninsula as an ideal location for jihadist activity.2 In an article entitled, “Come to the Sinai to Elevate the Foundations of Your State,”3 an ISIL member, Abu Musab al Gharib, stressed that the establishment of a state in the Sinai Peninsula would not only unify jihadists in “Libya, Egypt, and the Levant,” but would also be a stepping stone toward activity in Jerusalem.4 It is not uncommon for jihadist groups to organize within Egypt or for a jihadist group to invoke the specter of attacks in Jerusalem, but to do both while waging an accelerating campaign of violence warrants more attention than the Sinai Province of the Islamic State is currently receiving. According to the Global Terrorism Database (GTD),5 there were 346 incidents of terrorism in Egypt in 2014, 52 of which were either claimed by or attributed to Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis and 17 of which were either claimed by or attributed to the Sinai Province of the Islamic State.6 According to preliminary GTD data, there have already been 248 incidents of terrorism in Egypt from January - March 2015, 27 of which were either claimed by or attributed to the Sinai Province of the Islamic State; 52 of these Sinai Province affiliated attacks targeted either the Egyptian military or police. Clearly there has been a significant increase in not only attacks carried out in Egypt, but also incidents affiliated with the Sinai Province of the Islamic State. Since the Sinai Province of the Islamic State’s allegiance to ISIL, the group has attempted to gain popularity by distributing funds and food supplies to those affected by fighting in the area.7 For example, on January 7, 2015 the group provided financial resources to those affected by military operations carried out in an effort to construct a “buffer zone” with the Gaza border.8 The Sinai Province of the Islamic State stands to benefit from a large pool of disenfranchised and disillusioned Islamists at the national level following the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood led government, and from a local population in the northern Sinai that does not favor the government. The group is attacking Egyptian military and police presence in the Sinai Peninsula and appealing to local constituencies to carve out an operational safe-haven, but for what purpose? Beyond serving as a recruitment outpost for ISIL in Iraq and Syria and evidencing ISIL’s propaganda that the Caliphate is “remaining and expanding,”9 there are two potential goals which the Sinai Province of the Islamic State may be trying to pursue: The Sinai Province of the Islamic State is attempting to destabilize Egypt. The Sinai Province of the Islamic State is attempting to carry out a cross-border campaign against the state of Israel. Both of these scenarios carry severe consequences for Egypt and the region as a whole, and either would constitute a success for ISIL and its associated movement that al-Qa’ida and its associated movement have thus far failed to achieve. Following the toppling of the Mubarak and Morsi regimes, the Sinai Province of the Islamic State may smell blood and replicate the destabilization strategy played out in Iraq and Syria over the last decade. While it is easy to assume that Egypt’s long history of suppressing Islamist violence would triumph in this instance as well, popular discontent and recent demonstrations of the government’s vulnerability challenge that assumption. If the Sinai Province of the Islamic State can withstand a heavy-handed response from the Sisi government and continue to attack both government and civilian targets, it could undermine the Sisi government’s security-centric rationale for its repressive tactics, helping the Sinai Province propagandize and recruit.10 Without Egypt playing its traditional regional role as a “stabilizing force,” the nation-state system in the modern Middle East could be threatened as well.11 If a direct assault against the Egyptian government proves too daunting, it is possible that the Sinai Province may seek an indirect approach to destabilizing Egypt. The Sinai Province of the Islamic State’s potential to carry out a cross-border campaign in Israel also holds severe implications for the region, as inciting a cross-border response from Israel would jeopardize a long-standing peace between the two neighboring nations and serve as a rallying cry for Egyptian Islamists to line up with the ISIL affiliate. On July 3, 2015 the Sinai Province of the Islamic State claimed to have launched rockets into southern Israel and stated that the attack was carried out in revenge for Israel’s support of the Egyptian military.12 Prior to this attack, ISIL had indicated the group’s desire to establish a “fiefdom” in the Gaza Strip with the intention of eradicating Israel.13 According to preliminary GTD data, there have been 10 attacks affiliated with the Sinai Province of the Islamic State on civilians from January - March 2015, some of which have been motivated by the belief that the targeted civilians were working with the Israeli military. Therefore, it appears that the Sinai Province of the Islamic State may be attempting to draw Israel into the Sinai Peninsula. Drawing Israel into a battle with ISIL plays into the group’s fascination with internecine conflict and al-Malehem, the final apocalyptical battle between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. Jean-Pierre Filiu, a scholar of Middle East Studies, describes this fascination as a means to “foster recruitment and propaganda.”14 By establishing a province on the border of Israel, ISIL creates the potential to declare offensive jihad against the Jewish state, outpacing al-Qa’ida’s defensive narrative and outbidding the “resistance” orientation of Hezbollah and Hamas while baiting an invasion of Egyptian sovereignty. 3 That causes nuclear war with Israel that goes global Beres 15 — (Louis René Beres, Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971), and is the author of many major books and articles dealing with Israeli nuclear strategy. For over forty years, he has lectured on this topic at senior Israeli and United States military institutions, and at leading Israeli centers for strategic studies. In 2003, he served as Chair of Project Daniel (Israel)., “Israeli deterrence in the eye of the hurricane“, The Jerusalem Post | JPost, 7-12-2015, Available Online at https://www.jpost.com/opinion/israeli-deterrence-in-the-eye-of-the-hurricane-408747, accessed 11-19-2021, HKR-AR) Left to themselves, especially as more “normal” hostilities dissolve into a full-blown regional chaos, Israel’s adversaries could drive the Jewish state toward an unconventional war. This fateful endangerment could be produced singly or collaboratively, by deliberate enemy intent or by the “collateral damage” of sectarian strife. Militarily, these Islamic adversaries of Israel, both Sunni and Shi’ite, could be either non-nuclear, or, in the future, nuclear. They might also include certain wellarmed sub-state or terrorist forces. Already, Iranian-backed Hezbollah may have more usable missiles than all NATO countries combined. To most effectively deal with such interpenetrating threats – including reasonably expected “synergies” and “force multipliers” – Israel’s leaders will first need to consider some largely-opaque factors. These include: 1) probable effects of regional chaos upon enemy rationality; 2) disruptive implications of impending Palestinian statehood; and 3) re-emergence of a corrosively Cold War-style polarity between Russia and the United States. Apropos of a “Cold War II,” there is already evidence of growing contact between Russia and Saudi Arabia, the world’s two largest oil producers. In essence, Jerusalem must take all necessary steps to successfully manage an expectedly unprecedented level of adversarial complexity and weaponization. Israel’s leaders, in this connection, must take proper measures to ensure that any conceivable failures of its national deterrent would not spark biological or nuclear forms of regional conflict. To accomplish this indispensable goal, the IDF, inter alia, must continue to plan carefully around the core understanding that nuclear deterrence and conventional deterrence are inherently interrelated and meaningfully “seamless.” Sometimes, in strategic matters, seeing requires distance. A nuclear war in the Middle East is not beyond possibility. This is a sensible assessment even if Israel were to remain the only nuclear weapons state in the region. How is this possible? A bellum atomicum could come to Israel not only as a “bolt from the blue” enemy nuclear attack (either by a state or by a terrorist group), but also as the result, intended or otherwise, of certain uncontrolled military escalations. Needed prudence in such narratives calls for additional specificity and precision. If particular Arab/Islamic enemy states were to launch conventional attacks upon Israel, Jerusalem could then respond, sooner or later, with calculated and more-or-less calibrated nuclear reprisals. Alternatively, if some of these enemy states were to launch large-scale conventional attacks, Jerusalem’s own still-conventional reprisals could then be met, perhaps even in the not-too-distant future, with enemy nuclear counterstrikes. How should Israel prepare for such perilous contingencies? More than likely, Israel has already rejected any doctrinal plans for fielding a tactical/theater nuclear force, and for assuming any corollary nuclear war fighting postures. It would follow further from any such well-reasoned rejection that Israel should do whatever is needed to maintain a credible conventional deterrent. By definition, such a measured threat option could then function reliably across the entire foreseeable spectrum of non-nuclear threats. Still, any such strategy would need to include an appropriately complementary nuclear deterrent, a distinctly “last resort” option that could display a “counter-value” (counter-city) mission function. Si vis pacem, para bellum atomicum: “If you want peace, prepare for atomic war.” A persuasive Israeli conventional deterrent, at least to the extent that it might prevent a wide range of enemy conventional attacks in the first place, could reduce Israel’s growing risk of escalatory exposure to nuclear war. In the always arcane lexicon of nuclear strategy, a complex language that more-or-less intentionally mirrors the tangled coordinates of atomic war, Israel will need to maintain firm control of “escalation dominance.” Otherwise, the Jewish state could find itself engaged in an elaborate but ultimately lethal pantomime of international bluster and bravado. The reason for Israel’s obligation to control escalatory processes is conspicuous and unassailable. It is that Jerusalem’s main enemies possess something that Israel can plainly never have: Mass. At some point, as nineteenth century Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz asserts in On War: “Mass counts.” Today, this is true even though Israel’s many enemies are in chaotic disarray. Now, amid what Clausewitz had famously called “friction” and the “fog of war,” it could become harder for Israel to determine real and pertinent differences between its allies, and its adversaries. As an example, Jordan could soon become vulnerable to advancing IS forces. Acknowledging this new vulnerability, an ironic question will come immediately to mind: Should Israel support the Jordanian monarchy in such a fight? And if so, in what specific and safe operational forms? Similarly ironic questions may need to be raised about Egypt, where the return to military dictatorship in the midst of surrounding Islamist chaos could eventually prove both fragile and transient. Should President Abdel Fattah Sisi fail to hold things together, the ultimate victors could be not only the country’s own Muslim Brotherhood, but also, in nearby Gaza, Palestinian Hamas. Seemingly, however, Hamas is already being targeted by Islamic State, a potentially remorseless opposition suggesting, inter alia, that the principal impediment to Palestinian statehood is not really Israel, but another Sunni Arab terrorist organization. Of course, it is not entirely out of the question that IS’s Egyptian offshoot, the so-called “Sinai Province of Islamic State,” could sometime decide to cooperate with Hamas – the Islamic Resistance Movement – rather than plan to it. To further underscore the area’s multiple and cross-cutting axes of conflict, it is now altogether possible that if an IS conquest of Sinai should spread to Gaza, President Sisi might then “invite” the IDF to strike on Egypt’s behalf. Among other concerns, Egypt plainly fears that any prolonged inter-terrorist campaign inside Gaza could lead to a literal breaking down of border fences, and an uncontrolled mass flight of Palestinians into neighboring Sinai. 4 Sinai escalates global security crises – nuclear war Clingan 18 (Bruce Clingan is former Commander of U.S. Naval Forces Europe and U.S. Naval Forces Africa) "Commentary: The U.S. is right to restore aid to Egypt," U.S., 7-31-2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-clingan-egypt-commentary/commentary-the-u-s-is-right-to-restore-aid-to-egypt-idUSKBN1KK1YE, accessed 11-18-21 Egypt’s internal security is threatened by a relentless IS-affiliated insurgency in Sinai. In November the group attacked a Sinai mosque, killing more than 300 people. Egypt also faces the ever-present challenge of preventing the conflict in Libya from spilling over its western border. (While Cairo and Washington both want a stable Libya, the Sisi government is backing Gen. Khalifa Haftar, a military strongman who was once a CIA asset; the United States is supporting his rival and UN-backed Libyan government.) Further instability in Egypt would be disastrous for its nearly 100 million citizens, the region and the United States. Regardless of which might come first – the collapse of Egypt’s economy or the spread of Islamist insurgency – the other would surely follow. The result would be new extremist Safe Havens, millions of desperate Egyptians seeking to flee to Europe, an existential threat to Israel, the disruption of the Suez Canal upon which global economic stability depends and the potential for the United States to get involved in yet another Middle East quagmire. 5 Nuke war causes extinction – won’t stay limited Edwards 17 Paul N. Edwards, CISAC’s William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Being interviewed by EarthSky. How nuclear war would affect Earth’s climate. September 8, 2017. earthsky.org/human-world/how-nuclear-war-would-affect-earths-climate, accessed 10-15-17 Note, we are only reading parts of the interview that are directly from Paul Edwards -- MMG In the nuclear conversation, what are we not talking about that we should be? We are not talking enough about the climatic effects of nuclear war. The “nuclear winter” theory of the mid-1980s played a significant role in the arms reductions of that period. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reduction of U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, this aspect of nuclear war has faded from view. That’s not good. In the mid-2000s, climate scientists such as Alan Robock (Rutgers) took another look at nuclear winter theory. This time around, they used much-improved and much more detailed climate models than those available 20 years earlier. They also tested the potential effects of smaller nuclear exchanges. The result: an exchange involving just 50 nuclear weapons — the kind of thing we might see in an India-Pakistan war, for example — could loft 5 billion kilograms of smoke, soot and dust high into the stratosphere. That’s enough to cool the entire planet by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.25 degrees Celsius) — about where we were during the Little Ice Age of the 17th century. Growing seasons could be shortened enough to create really significant food shortages. So the climatic effects of even a relatively small nuclear war would be planet-wide. What about a larger-scale conflict? A U.S.-Russia war currently seems unlikely, but if it were to occur, hundreds or even thousands of nuclear weapons might be launched. The climatic consequences would be catastrophic: global average temperatures would drop as much as 12 degrees Fahrenheit (7 degrees Celsius) for up to several years — temperatures last seen during the great ice ages. Meanwhile, smoke and dust circulating in the stratosphere would darken the atmosphere enough to inhibit photosynthesis, causing disastrous crop failures, widespread famine and massive ecological disruption. The effect would be similar to that of the giant meteor believed to be responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. This time, we would be the dinosaurs. Many people are concerned about North Korea’s advancing missile capabilities. Is nuclear war likely in your opinion? At this writing, I think we are closer to a nuclear war than we have been since the early 1960s. In the North Korea case, both Kim Jong-un and President Trump are bullies inclined to escalate confrontations. President Trump lacks impulse control, and there are precious few checks on his ability to initiate a nuclear strike. We have to hope that our generals, both inside and outside the White House, can rein him in. North Korea would most certainly “lose” a nuclear war with the United States. But many millions would die, including hundreds of thousands of Americans currently living in South Korea and Japan (probable North Korean targets). Such vast damage would be wrought in Korea, Japan and Pacific island territories (such as Guam) that any “victory” wouldn’t deserve the name. Not only would that region be left with horrible suffering amongst the survivors; it would also immediately face famine and rampant disease. Radioactive fallout from such a war would spread around the world, including to the U.S. It has been more than 70 years since the last time a nuclear bomb was used in warfare. What would be the effects on the environment and on human health today? To my knowledge, most of the changes in nuclear weapons technology since the 1950s have focused on making them smaller and lighter, and making delivery systems more accurate, rather than on changing their effects on the environment or on human health. So-called “battlefield” weapons with lower explosive yields are part of some arsenals now — but it’s quite unlikely that any exchange between two nuclear powers would stay limited to these smaller, less destructive bombs. Scenario 2 is Autocracy: 1 Egyptian autocracy locks-in instability and accelerates regional security concerns Tamara Cofman Wittes, PhD, 14 PhD Government Georgetown, Director, Center for Middle East Policy @ Brookings, "Why Democracy in Egypt Still Matters," Brookings, 3-18-2014, https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/why-democracy-in-egypt-still-matters/ accessed 11-19-21 C.VC Three years after the hopeful scenes of the Arab Spring, the situation in places like Syria and Libya looks more like a tragic mess. The most dramatic reversal of fortune, perhaps, is in Egypt, whose Tahrir (Freedom) Square came to symbolize the hopes of 2011. Egypt under longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak was an anchor of stability in the region, in large part because of its close ties to Washington and its historic peace treaty with Israel. But Egypt today is in turmoil: Its third post-revolutionary government, installed by the military, is cracking down on basic rights while facing an upsurge in violence from Islamist militants, an economic crisis and vicious anti-Americanism stoked by the media. The decimated Muslim Brotherhood rejects any hint of compromise and talks to its followers of martyrdom. Many outside analysts worry that the zero-sum confrontation now underway in Egypt is dragging the country over a cliff into further violence. In the face of these troubling developments, some are ready to conclude that Egypt “isn’t ready” for democracy, or that the Arab Spring was just an opening for extremists to pursue an “Islamist winter.” It’s understandable why American Jews in particular wonder if Egypt’s tumultuous politics spell trouble for Israel, and ask whether the old Egyptian regime wasn’t better for stability. But the days of one-man rule in Egypt are gone forever. The future of the Middle East is now up for grabs—a future that matters deeply to both Israel and the United States—and real stability will come only from resisting the urge to clamp down. For a half-century, the United States worked with a set of regional powers—mainly Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt—to protect a stable regional order. But since Mubarak’s fall, Washington policy has been on a roller coaster of its own. The one consistent element of Washington’s approach has been to stay engaged with Egypt and work with whoever is in power. There’s a simple reason for that: The United States has strong interests in Egypt, no matter who is in charge of the country. Even if the United States didn’t import Arab oil anymore, Egypt’s Suez Canal would still be a vital lifeline. The U.S.-Egypt security partnership is valuable for targeting violent extremists and containing Iran. U.S.-Egyptian-Israeli cooperation is crucial to combating terrorists along the Sinai border and from the Gaza Strip. And Egypt’s peace with Israel is a cornerstone of regional—not to mention Israeli—security. But the old prescriptions for regional stability are not going to work with a new generation. The Egyptian revolution, like the other Arab uprisings, was sparked by a rising young population, empowered by education and technology but constrained by corruption, inequality and leaders who didn’t listen. Nearly two-thirds of Egyptians are now under 30. They learned in school that their nation was a post-colonial leader alongside Indonesia and India, but then they saw how young Indonesians and Indians were thriving in a world of open markets and open societies, while Egypt was left behind. In 2011, they rose up to try and join that world, which my colleague Robert Kagan calls “The World America Made.” Since then, Egyptians have overthrown three successive leaderships in attempts to bring the change they seek. Each had tried to impose on Egypt a political system that would privilege his allies and contain or exclude his enemies. None has succeeded. Thirty-year dictator Mubarak resigned when his army refused to put down mass protests with brute force. His successor, Field Marshal Mohamad Hussein Tantawi, was forced by public pressure to respect the outcome of free presidential balloting that elected the military’s worst nightmare—a leader from the long-banned Muslim Brotherhood. That Muslim Brotherhood leader, Mohamed Morsi, declared his actions above judicial review and pushed through a constitution written almost exclusively by Islamists. He faced angry mass demonstrations last summer and was ousted by a military coup on July 3. The crackdown since then has been brutal. With more than 2,000 dead and 20,000 in jail, Field Marshal Abdel-Fattah El Sisi now presides over an Egypt more repressive than that of Mubarak. And yet many Egyptians who supported the revolution in 2011 now support El Sisi for president, hoping he can bring security and stability after three years of chaos. The United States wants Egyptian stability too—the question is how to get there. El Sisi and his allies see themselves locked in an existential battle with the Muslim Brotherhood for control of the country; they seek U.S. support for a crackdown that includes a draconian anti-protest law and arrests of journalists and peaceful political dissenters. The Egyptian government deserves support in combating terrorist violence, but it must also learn from the failures of Mubarak, Tantawi and Morsi that Egyptians will no longer submit to being ruled through repression by a single man or movement. Many Israeli analysts I talk to argue that El Sisi can get Egypt under control if given a chance—but then, they said the same about Mubarak. To marginalize the extremists and stabilize the country, Egypt’s current leaders must allow greater freedom and find a way to bring more of Egypt’s diverse population—Islamists, secularists and Christians; young activists and entrepreneurs; textile workers and farmers—into new governing institutions. The Obama Administration’s emphasis on stability is understandable, and so is Israel’s; both need a government of Egypt that can be an effective partner in regional security. But only an open, pluralist system will bring Egyptians together to make the big decisions the country needs and to reform its politics and economics. Egypt’s youth may not love the United States or Israel, but they want their nation to be part of the globalized world these two countries exemplify. Washington’s task is to stay aligned with that vision for Egypt—one that will advance stability, security and U.S. interests. 2 That escalates – conflicting regional interests ensure war goes global Larry Goodson 18. Professor of Middle East Studies at the U.S. Army War College. 02-02-18. “Five Enduring Barriers to Peace in the Middle East.” Army War College. https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/five-enduring-barriers-to-peace-in-the-middle-east/ More importantly, America’s position has changed in the world, allowing a resurgent Russia, rising China, and awakening India to challenge each other and American hegemony. The Middle East has become an important arena of their competition, especially because of oil. Half of China’s oil comes out of the Persian Gulf to fuel the economic rise of what is now the world’s largest oil importer. India, the world’s third-leading oil importer, gets more than half of its oil from the region, and India is also the world’s leading recipient of labor remittances from overseas workers, primarily from laborers employed in the Persian Gulf. The second-leading oil exporter in the world, Russia is interested in Middle Eastern oil primarily for what its availability and pricing do to the market for Russian oil. Other Russian interests in the Middle East include arms sales, base access (its only bases outside of the traditional Soviet zone are in Syria), and the creation and expansion of an anti-access/area-denial zone in the Black Sea region. Meanwhile, this is happening as the global position of the United States has slipped during an Obama Administration that struggled to “lead from behind” and a Trump Administration marked by erratic swings from foreign policy adventurism to “America First” neo-isolationism. Powerful nations with competing interests often find that the collision of those interests leads to war. Having so many great power interests converge in a part of the world that has historically been an active arena of conflict is worrisome. Since the late 1970s, the region has had the highest number of fatalities due to war. Three of the world’s top five countries in military spending per capita are Middle Eastern (Saudi Arabia is first, Israel is third, and Kuwait is fifth). Middle Eastern countries have also developed or pursued weapons of mass destruction, with Israel widely known to have nuclear weapons and a robust delivery capability, while seven Middle Eastern countries have or have had biological or chemical weapons. Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq currently occupy the bottom three spots on the Global Peace Index. As great power competition resurfaces and now takes place in a conflict-prone, unstable Middle East, the question seems not to be if great power conflict will occur, but when. 3 Egyptian autocracy is long-term unsustainable Kaldas 1/26 — (Timothy Kaldas, Timothy Kaldas is an independent risk adviser and nonresident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. , “Arab Spring Showed Autocracy is Anything But Stable“, Bloomberg, 1-27-2021, Available Online at https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-27/arab-spring-showed-autocracy-is-anything-but-stable, accessed 11-19-2021, HKR-AR) It has been 10 years since Egyptians first filled Cairo’s iconic Tahrir Square for a series of protests that would, in less than a month, end the 30-year dictatorship of President Hosni Mubarak. Their success turbo-charged an Arab people-power movement that had already toppled an autocrat in Tunisia, inspiring millions throughout the Middle East and North Africa to rise against authoritarian regimes. Two more tyrants would fall, in Yemen and Libya, and other regimes would be shaken to their core. A decade on, the promise of the Arab Spring persists in Tunisia, and in more recent developments Sudan. But in much of the region there has been a retrenchment of authoritarian rule, or state failure and civil war. Economies have collapsed, tens of millions have been displaced, and in many corners, violent conflict rages on, fueled by the interventions of competing authoritarian regimes. The region’s autocrats argue that the lesson from the chaos and violence is that the Arab world is simply not suited for democracy. Many Western governments are at least sympathetic to this line of thinking: They embrace autocrats and theories of authoritarian stability, expressing only the faintest murmurs of concern over repression and other excesses all while financing and arming many of the worst violators. This tendency was most recently on display when French President Emmanuel Macron, playing host to President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, rejected calls to condition arms sales to Egypt on human rights, arguing untenably that such conditions could add to political fragility. But the Arab Spring actually demonstrated that the opposite is true. The chaotic, unpredictable and uneven fashion in which regimes entered into crisis and collapsed, along with the societies they ruled for decades, shows that authoritarianism is both highly fragile and a major source of violent turmoil. In 2011, the rulers of Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya were overthrown while Syria fell into civil war and Bahrain had to invite foreign military forces to quash its massive uprising against the monarchy. This is not to say any particular authoritarian government has an expiration date. But even when they endure, but they face a persistent risk of violent turmoil and sudden collapse. The turmoil is the product of authoritarianism. The most common cause of violence is the autocrat’s attempt to impede democratic transitions by brute force. This is best exemplified by Bashar al Assad’s repression of the Arab Spring uprising in Syria, with the backing of fellow tyrants in Iran and Russia. The second source of turmoil is the weakness of states, kept that way by despots who fear strong, credible and diffuse governing institutions. When dictators are overthrown, the absence of such institutions can lead to state failure, as was the case in Libya and Yemen. In the case of Egypt, regime elites regrouped during the transition from dictatorship, rallied popular opinion and launched a coup d’etat in 2013 against the country’s first democratically elected president. They were able to count on the support of Gulf monarchs who were alarmed by the uprisings that had spread across the region. Following the coup, protestors were subject to alarming levels of repression and brutality, they faced mass arrests, torture in detention and massacre on the streets. Western governments looked away, convinced these outrages were necessary to reestablish stability. If Western officials believe in authoritarian stability, autocrats themselves are all too aware of how precarious their position really is. Consider the sequence of events that played out in Egypt starting in Sept. 2019, when a former civilian contractor to the military began broadcasting videos on Facebook from his self-imposed exile in Spain, accusing President Sisi and his allies of spending state funds to build themselves lavish palaces and hotels. On Sept. 19, only a few thousand Egyptians heeded his call for protests. And yet, this was enough to cause conniptions in the government with statements from the presidency, parliament and the defense ministry. Initially, Sisi insisted the new palaces were part of the new state he was building. Following the protests, he struck a conciliatory tone, promising to add more Egyptians to subsidy rolls. At the same time, thousands were arrested to quash the risk of protests snowballing into 2011 proportions. All this, remember, in response to some Facebook videos and a few thousand protestors scattered across a country of 100 million people. The government’s response speaks not to stability but to paranoia, stemming from the knowledge that authoritarian rulers can fall quickly. Solvency: 1 An unconditional RTS is key—it gives workers adequate leverage and has precedent Pratt 01 — (Nicola Pratt, Professor of International Politics of the Middle East at Warwick, “Maintaining the Moral Economy: Egyptian State-Labor Relations in an Era of Economic Liberalization“, Available Online at https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/pratt/publications/n_pratt_maintaining_the_moral_economy.pdf, accessed 11-13-2021, page 123 in book, HKR-AR) Labor activists and leftists are also calling for an unconditional right to strike as workers’ only weapon for securing their rights within a liberalized economy. Current legislation criminalizes any type of workers’ collective action, while the emergency law, in force since 1981, prevents gatherings and meetings without official permission. Unlike many other democratic rights, the government does not even pay lip service to the right to strike. This is despite the fact that there exists judicial backing for the legalization of strikes. On 16 April 1987, the Egyptian Higher State Security Court ruled that striking railway workers were innocent because strikes were legal according to international human rights treaties signed by Egypt. Egyptian workers urgently need the right to form an independent union and the right to strike in order to protect their interests in the era of a liberalized economy. The logic of action of the moral economy can no longer reap any benefits for workers. Instead, they face increased repression and coercion by a regime that has failed to create new institutions of governance in these new times. However, the continued existence of the institutions of the postcolonial hegemonic project represent an obstacle to the formation of new institutions and logics of action that could serve as effective weapons for workers in protecting their interests. 2 Ensuring the right to strike solves democracy and inequality Kiai 17 Mr. Maina Kiai, Special Rapporteur on freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, took up his functions as the first Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association in May 2011. He is appointed in his personal capacity as an independent expert by the UN Human Rights Council. "UN rights expert: “Fundamental right to strike must be preserved”." https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=21328andLangID=E The right to strike is also an intrinsic corollary of the fundamental right of freedom of association. It is crucial for millions of women and men around the world to assert collectively their rights in the workplace, including the right to just and favourable conditions of work, and to work in dignity and without fear of intimidation and persecution. Moreover, protest action in relation to government social and economic policy, and against negative corporate practices, forms part of the basic civil liberties whose respect is essential for the meaningful exercise of trade union rights. This right enables them to engage with companies and governments on a more equal footing, and Member States have a positive obligation to protect this right, and a negative obligation not to interfere with its exercise. Moreover, protecting the right to strike is not simply about States fulfilling their legal obligations. It is also about them creating democratic and equitable societies that are sustainable in the long run. The concentration of power in one sector – whether in the hands of government or business – inevitably leads to the erosion of democracy, and an increase in inequalities and marginalization with all their attendant consequences. The right to strike is a check on this concentration of power. I deplore the various attempts made to erode the right to strike at national and multilateral levels. In this regard, I welcome the positive role played by the ILO’s Government Group in upholding workers’ right to strike by recognizing that ‘without protecting a right to strike, freedom of association, in particular the right to organize activities for the purpose of promoting and protecting workers’ interests, cannot be fully realized.’ I urge all stakeholders to ensure that the right to strike be fully preserved and respected across the globe and in all arenas”, the expert concluded.
Public workers are uniquely key — they’re the most effective at creating social change because they often fight for the people they serve as well as themeslves
New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon released her labor platform last week. It contains support for a safe-staffing law, a perennial demand of nurses unions that mandates nurse-to-patient ratios that are high enough to ensure nurses aren’t run ragged and patient safety is strong, as well as provisions for increased safety and apprenticeship programs in the building trades —a group of workers Nixon previously upset with remarks suggesting they would have to take pay cuts to help lower the cost of subway construction. Arguably more important are the broader, more ambitious, and more difficult proposals: support for universal just-cause protections, which would shield all workers from arbitrary firings and discipline (standard in union contracts), and a $15 minimum wage across the whole state, not just the New York City metropolitan area. Especially important, though, is Nixon’s call to establish the legal right to strike for public sector workers in New York state. While New York is legally favorable to worker organizing in many ways, it has some of the most draconian anti-public sector labor laws in the country, most of which are compiled in the Public Employees Fair Employment Act, commonly known as the Taylor Law or the Taylor Act. Public sector worker strikes have been critical in raising class consciousness in the United States, both in 2018 and historically. They can reveal the anti-working-class outlook of the Democratic Party — and even some union officials. Even if the law doesn’t change any time soon, simply raising the issue, as Nixon has, could raise the level of worker militancy in New York and around the country. The Left should make public sector right-to-strike laws the next “litmus test” for progressive candidates, similar to current demands like supporting Medicare for All and rejecting corporate campaign donations. Kale Chips and Pinkertons The media and the Right immediately seized on Nixon’s right to strike proposal. “That would be really bad for all New Yorkers, especially poor New Yorkers. The more you depend on public services, the more you’ll have at risk if public employees are allowed to strike,” E.J. McMahon, of the anti-union Empire Center For Public Policy told the New York Daily News. No one should be surprised that anti-union hacks would pit elements of the working class against each other. But it was more surprising to watch union-endorsed Democrats like Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio publicly declare their opposition to Nixon’s proposal. “I don’t agree with changing the Taylor Law. The Taylor Law serves an important public purpose and at the same time there are lots of ways for workers’ rights to be acknowledged and their voices to be heard. I think we have the right law now,” the New York City mayor said. Even more disturbing was watching union officials attack Nixon for saying their members should have the right to strike. Civil Service Employee Association president Danny Donohue said, “It is incredibly naïve for Cynthia Nixon to propose that all public sector workers be able to strike. Clearly, she does not have the experience needed to be governor of New York.” CSEA represents more than 300,000 New York state workers and local government workers outside New York City. John Samuelsen, the international president of the Transport Workers Union (TWU), went even further, entering the realm of self-parody by telling the Chief-Leader, “I am extremely skeptical of her newfound support of striking. I believe that she will cut and run when we shut the subway down. As soon as her hipster Williamsburg supporters can’t take public transit to non-union Wegman’s to buy their kale chips, she will call in the National Guard and the Pinkertons.” Samuelsen’s statement was especially out of touch (and not just because there are no Wegmans grocery stores in New York City). TWU’s largest local, which represents transit-system workers in New York City, faced severe penalties under the Taylor Law as a result of the union’s 2005 strike. The union as a whole and individual workers faced heavy fines; the union was forbidden from collecting dues by automatic checkoff for six months, and local president Roger Touissant was sentenced to prison. As recently as 2011, TWU issued press releases declaring New York’s blanket ban on public sector strikes a human-rights violation. One struggles to find a motivation for Samuelsen’s acerbic comments toward Nixon for suggesting the state do away with the ban, other than shortsighted support for Governor Cuomo’s reelection. Ironically, the ban on public sector strikes makes this sort of calculation rational, if craven. Most unions would not dream of cozying up to the boss this way. But with public sector workers denied some of the most powerful tools other workers have, being on the boss’s good side is seen by many union leaders as the easiest way to settle a contract. A Demand Worth Making After decades with very few strikes in the public sector, 2018 has seen public school teacher strikes in Arizona, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, all states where it is illegal for public workers to strike. Teachers also struck in Colorado, where public workers may legally strike. And in California, where public strikes are also legal, 24,000 University of California workers represented by AFSCME 3299 recently went on strike. The other two major public sector strikes of the last two decades were the Chicago Teachers Union strike in 2011 — legal — and the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority strike of 2005 — illegal, with severe consequences for the union. Public sector workers have shown a recent willingness to go on strike even when it’s illegal. So why should the Left make legalizing public strikes a core demand? First, by pushing candidates to back this demand, the Left can isolate them from the Democratic establishment, who make up a large portion of bosses in the public sector and are therefore unlikely to support giving their workers the right to strike. We saw this theory play out in real time last week. Cynthia Nixon and Julia Salazar, who is running for New York State Senate, have made this plank a central demand and have shown a willingness to confront the party’s centrist leadership. But by pushing candidates to make the legalization of public sector strikes a central part of their labor platform, the Left can force more candidates to develop power from the grassroots to make up for whatever funding and other means of support they lose from the party. Second, the prohibition on strikes contributes to the sad state of many public sector unions — especially in New York. There are many reasons for the decline of militancy and workplace organizing in public sector unions, and many of those factors are beyond unions’ control. But if job action is off the table, one of the few ways public sector unions can defend their interests is to make political deals with officeholders. Such unions are then put in a position where they are afraid to anger the boss, the incumbent politician, by supporting challengers who often advocate more pro-worker policies. Again, we saw this dynamic play out with Samuelsen’s and Donohue’s comments, as well as less colorful comments to the same effect by other union officials. Because their unions are in such precarious positions, these leaders are terrified to get on Cuomo’s bad side. A union that’s afraid to piss off the employer is already fighting with both hands behind its back. By raising this issue, the Left create a clarifying situation where union officials are forced to explain to their members why they support politicians who want to deny them rights. In New York, this situation is exacerbated by the Triborough Amendment, a provision in the Taylor Law mandating that when public sector collective-bargaining agreements expire without a new contract settled, the terms of the previous contract continue. This disincentivizes both sides from conducting difficult and potentially unpopular negotiations and gives union officials little incentive to organize their membership during a contract campaign. This, in part, explains officials like Donohue’s hostility to the idea of giving their members the right to strike. If members could conduct a strike without severe legal repercussions, union officials might have to organize one — or be exposed as unable to do so. However, the Triborough Amendment also gives workers the protections of a union contract during bargaining impasses and prevents the boss from unilaterally dictating new terms. In New York and states with similar provisions, we should be clear that we are demanding the right to strike in addition to and not in lieu of the Triborough Amendment. Even if there is little hope of changing the law in the short term, simply seeing politicians and the media raise the issue may give workers more confidence to break the law and strike anyway. Ultimately what makes a strike successful is not the degree to which it follows the law. Much more important is workers’ enthusiasm, unity, and confidence in their actions. And there is evidence that political campaigns can make a real difference. When Public Workers Strike Politicians have plenty to fear from striking public workers. The public sector remains a comparative bastion of union strength, with unions representing about 38 percent of public sector workers nationwide, compared to about 7 percent of workers in the private sector. In New York state, about 72 percent of public sector workers are in unions, versus 15 percent in the private sector. This year alone, in Arizona, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, striking teachers won major concessions from hostile, right-wing state governments. Reactionary politicians and capitalists from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to the forces behind the Janus case understand the potential power of public unions to advance progressive causes — that is precisely why they have attacked them so viciously. Public sector workers occupy a strategic place in the labor market because so many of their jobs are critical to society’s functioning. That means the potential power of withdrawing their labor is magnified beyond their immediate job site. The recent teachers’ strikes were so effective because school closures forced thousands of parents to significantly alter their routines. The New York City transit strike of 2005 lasted only three days, but because it made transportation across the city extremely difficult, it was estimated to cost the city and businesses hundreds of millions of dollars in lost fares and revenue. And while conditions vary, public sector strikes generally have a lot of public support. One reason for that is from nurses to teachers to welfare workers, better conditions for the people they serve are often among public workers’ core demands. Even when strikes are not linked directly to social demands, a majority of Americans do not support weakening public sector unions. However, for unions, a comparison between the West Virginia teachers’ strike and the New York City transit strike is instructive. West Virginia teachers organized parents and community members for months ahead of the strike. They tied their working conditions to children’s learning conditions, making clear how their demands would benefit virtually everyone. Transit workers did not make such arguments, and support for their strike was nowhere near as high as that of the teachers. Public sector unions have to make clear that when they walk off the job, they are striking to benefit the people they serve as much as themselves. When schools are closed, when buses don’t run, when trash goes uncollected and mail undelivered, it affects not just the employer, but nearly everyone. The pressure on government bosses to settle is therefore extremely high. And when public sector workers strike, they have the power to win transformative victories. From both elected officials’ and union heads’ reaction to Nixon’s right-to-strike proposal, we can see that neither side wants to face this prospect. We should make them.
12/20/21
util space war debris climate change case
Tournament: Newark Invitational | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harrison AC | Judge: Randall, Chris ADVANTAGE 1: SPACE WAR SUBPOINT A: DEBRIS
Space debris can be defined as non-purposeful man-made objects that reside in space; made up of inactive parts from former space operations and fragmentations of spacecraft, there are nearly 30,000 pieces of debris in the Earth’s orbit (Pellegrino and Stang, 2016: 25). Despite most debris being centimetres or millimetres in size satellites often travel at the speed of a bullet, meaning that a collision between the two could be catastrophic in terms of environmental, mechanical and financial damage (Black and Butt, 2010: 1). Since the development of the Kessler Syndrome thesis in 1978 – which predicted that space debris may become so dense as to trigger a chain reaction of major collisions – space debris is considered more of a threat to security operations in the near-term than military space activity (Quintana, 2017: 95). Difficulty over determining whether a collision was accidental or a purposeful act further exacerbates this problem, given that “every object in orbit is a threat to everything else in orbit, regardless of its intended function” (Faith, 2012: 86). Such developments have led to the US administration increasingly adopting a securitisation discourse around orbital debris (Bowen, 2014: 47), which may cause concerns as to whether policymakers may react to future American satellite collisions in a militarised manner. A number of NewSpace actors are likely to complicate these worries even further through recent satellite proposals. Whilst Boeing is proposing a constellation of up to 3,000 satellites, SpaceX has even grander goals of creating a constellation consisting of 4,425 satellites, eventually expanding to 12,000 satellites in the near-future (Kosiak, 2019: 7). Putting this into context, there are currently just around 1,400 active satellites in orbit around the Earth, highlighting the scale of these projects. The collision between a single US privately-owned Iridium satellite and state-owned Russian Cosmos satellite in 2009 underscored not only the sheer amount of debris caused by these collisions – over 1,500 pieces – but also foreshadowed the possible geopolitical tensions that may arise from them (Wang, 2010: 87-88). Given the number of various commercial satellite constellations possibly going into orbit in the near-future, this raises questions over the possibly devastating security hazards they could pose once in orbit or when they eventually become defunct.
Space conflict goes nuclear – misperceptions and lack of established norms Skibba 20. Ramin Skibba - a writer based in San Diego. His work has appeared in Undark magazine, New Scientist, and Nature. “The Ripple Effects of a Space Skirmish.” The Atlantic. July 12, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/07/space-warfare-unregulated/614059/
So far, there are relatively few international policies or norms about what’s allowed in modern-day space and what’s not. The SWF report notes that an incident or misunderstanding could escalate tensions if it’s perceived as an attack. The lack of guidance has left room for a range of activities. Weeden said that in December 2019, the Trump administration signaled its intention to strengthen the United States’ space weaponry and protect its spacecraft from possible attacks by Russia and China by transforming the Air Force Space Command into the U.S. Space Force. That shift “brought a full-time operational focus to the space domain, which was a needed change,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Christina Hoggatt, a Space Force spokesperson, in a statement to Undark. With these forces, the Defense Department seeks to “strengthen deterrence” and improve capabilities to “defend our vital assets in space,” she wrote. This emphasis, Burbach said, likely means that the U.S. military will focus on making satellites more resilient to attack, rather than developing offensive weapons. Compared with the U.S., smaller space powers have fewer satellites and therefore less to lose, the U.N.’s Porras said. He argues that tense regional relationships could be particularly unpredictable. For example, he said, if North Korean leaders found themselves in a standoff with South Korea and the U.S., they might launch and detonate a nuclear weapon in space; its dangerous radiation would disable most satellites. The U.N. and other international groups—including SWF and the Outer Space Institute, a global research organization based in British Columbia—are working to avoid such scenarios. Weeden said that as long as countries don’t launch destructive space weapons near other countries’ spacecraft, conduct overtly provocative tests, or disable critical satellites, peaceful space activities should continue. For now, he points out, countries have only tested missiles on their own defunct satellites, and exercises against other nations’ spacecraft have remained nondestructive. Existing international laws offer little guidance for modern military technology in space. While these rules—including the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 and the U.N.’s Outer Space Treaty of 1967—prohibit weapons of mass destruction in space, they don’t explicitly limit other kinds of space weapons, tests, or military space forces. Weeden points out that space diplomats could create new guidelines by developing something like the Incidents at Sea agreement, which the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed during the Cold War to maintain safe distances between ships and avoid maneuvers in heavy traffic. But until similar rules involving space weaponry are hammered out, he said, unexpected satellite tests will inevitably fuel speculation and paranoia. “Any time you have militaries operating near each other without a lot of transparency or clarity,” he added, “you always have the opportunity for misperceptions that could lead to something very bad.”
Even limited nuclear war causes extinction Starr 14—Steven, Senior Scientist for Physicians for Social Responsibility, Director of the Clinical Laboratory Science Program (Missouri), commentator in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Strategic Arms Reduction, Associate member of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, “The Lethality of Nuclear Weapons: Nuclear War has No Winner,” Global Research: Centre for Research on Globalization, 6/5, http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-lethality-of-nuclear-weapons-nuclear-war-has-no-winner/5385611 Nuclear war has no winner. Beginning in 2006, several of the world’s leading climatologists (at Rutgers, UCLA, John Hopkins University, and the University of Colorado-Boulder) published a series of studies that evaluated the long-term environmental consequences of a nuclear war, including baseline scenarios fought with merely 1 of the explosive power in the US and/or Russian launch-ready nuclear arsenals. They concluded that the consequences of even a “small” nuclear war would include catastrophic disruptions of global climatei and massive destruction of Earth’s protective ozone layerii. These and more recent studies predict that global agriculture would be so negatively affected by such a war, a global famine would result, which would cause up to 2 billion people to starve to death. iii¶ These peer-reviewed studies – which were analyzed by the best scientists in the world and found to be without error – also predict that a war fought with less than half of US or Russian strategic nuclear weapons would destroy the human race.iv In other words, a US-Russian nuclear war would create such extreme long-term damage to the global environment that it would leave the Earth uninhabitable for humans and most animal forms of life.¶ A recent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “Self-assured destruction: The climate impacts of nuclear war”,v begins by stating:¶ “A nuclear war between Russia and the United States, even after the arsenal reductions planned under New START, could produce a nuclear winter. Hence, an attack by either side could be suicidal, resulting in self-assured destruction.”¶ In 2009, I wrote an articlevi for the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament that summarizes the findings of these studies. It explains that nuclear firestorms would produce millions of tons of smoke, which would rise above cloud level and form a global stratospheric smoke layer that would rapidly encircle the Earth. The smoke layer would remain for at least a decade, and it would act to destroy the protective ozone layer (vastly increasing the UV-B reaching Earthvii) as well as block warming sunlight, thus creating Ice Age weather conditions that would last 10 years or longer.¶ Following a US-Russian nuclear war, temperatures in the central US and Eurasia would fall below freezing every day for one to three years; the intense cold would completely eliminate growing seasons for a decade or longer. No crops could be grown, leading to a famine that would kill most humans and large animal populations.¶ Electromagnetic pulse from high-altitude nuclear detonations would destroy the integrated circuits in all modern electronic devicesviii, including those in commercial nuclear power plants. Every nuclear reactor would almost instantly meltdown; every nuclear spent fuel pool (which contain many times more radioactivity than found in the reactors) would boil-off, releasing vast amounts of long-lived radioactivity. The fallout would make most of the US and Europe uninhabitable. Of course, the survivors of the nuclear war would be starving to death anyway. Once nuclear weapons were introduced into a US-Russian conflict, there would be little chance that a nuclear holocaust could be avoided. Theories of “limited nuclear war” and “nuclear de-escalation” are unrealistic.ix In 2002 the Bush administration modified US strategic doctrine from a retaliatory role to permit preemptive nuclear attack; in 2010, the Obama administration made only incremental and miniscule changes to this doctrine, leaving it essentially unchanged. Furthermore, Counterforce doctrine – used by both the US and Russian military – emphasizes the need for preemptive strikes once nuclear war begins. Both sides would be under immense pressure to launch a preemptive nuclear first-strike once military hostilities had commenced, especially if nuclear weapons had already been used on the battlefield.
The aff solves – restricting the appropriation of outer space decreases private companies’ activity in space Babcock, 15 -- Jonathan’s practice involves assisting clients in a range of national security matters, including economic sanctions compliance, export controls compliance, and national security reviews before the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Prior to joining Morrison and Foerster, Jonathan practiced in the International Trade and National Security practice groups of a major D.C. law firm. Jonathan Babcock, "The Space Review: Encouraging private investment in space: does the current space law regime have to be changed? (part 1)," The Space Review, 1-5-2015, https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2669/1, accessed 6-25-2021
Space law, derived mainly from the Outer Space Treaty and the Moon Treaty (the latter’s principles carry weight despite having a few signatory states), prohibits national appropriation in space and states that space is a domain for the “common heritage of mankind.” The meaning of these documents, particularly pertaining to their applicability to private actors in space, is ambiguous and contentious, as will be shown in the following section. In any industry, legal uncertainty hinders private investment. Accordingly, a cloudy legal regime in space has hampered the ability of private individuals and firms to raise the capital necessary to fund space activities.16 Moreover, private actors hold that the absence of a legal regime clearly defining the scope of property rights in space deprives them of the assurance that they will reap benefits that will outweigh the capital they invested.17 They argue that the main impediment to further private action in space is that the current legal regime jeopardizes the ability of private actors to make a profit in space. This is a discouraging climate for private innovation, and will surely discourage future investment in space. The legal regime governing space must be clarified, added to, altered, or changed entirely to encourage private investment in space by allowing actors to realize financial rewards.18 The question then becomes how to accomplish this. In order to better understand the inadequacies of the current legal regime, it is necessary to analyze what exactly the Outer Space Treaty and Moon Treaty state, and how they dictate the climate in which private actors are operating in space.
Since the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, the lower orbit around the Earth has become an increasingly congested environment with more than 2,200 satellite launches to date. Those satellites – along with launch vehicle components and debris from mechanical disintegration, collisions and explosions – now fill this region with a “fog” of space debris. And it’s getting busier. In the last few weeks, SpaceX has launched 60 new satellites as part of its Starlink programme. This brings the total to currently around 400 Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit as part of a programme that aims to bring cheap, satellite-based internet access to everyone. Eventually, this programme could place nearly 12,000 satellites in orbit around the Earth. With Amazon, Canada’s Telesat and others planning satellite constellations of similar scale, low Earth orbit is becoming ever more crowded. The debris ranges in size from a few microns to many metres. Stuart Grey, an aerospace engineer at the University of Strathclyde, has produced a stunning visualisation that highlights the more than 20,000 objects over 10cm in size now orbiting the Earth (see video above). But there are many millions of particles 1mm in size and smaller. Closing our window on the universe? Amateur astronomers are already expressing concern over the increasing number of bright, moving objects in the night sky. But the worry is perhaps much greater for the professionals. Crowding in low Earth orbit has inevitable consequences for ground-based astronomers. Bright surfaces on satellites can reflect rays from the sun – giving rise to a burst of sunlight directed towards the surface of the Earth. Such intense bursts of light are much stronger than the weak light sources typically being observed by astronomers and will impede observations of distant objects in space. Billions have already been spent on existing optical telescopes, and many more billions will be poured into new platforms in the next decade, such as the European Extremely Large Telescope being built on the Atacama plateau in Chile. There is intense competition for observing time on such resources, so any potential threat from satellite reflections must be taken seriously as they may making some of the observations driving our understanding of the evolution of the universe impossible. SpaceX has assured the public that Starlink will not contribute to this problem and says it has been taking steps to mitigate the impacts of its satellites on observational astronomy – even to the extent of testing whether a black coating on its satellites can reduce visibility, and adjusting some of the satellites’ orbits if necessary. With some 3 of its planned constellation launched, SpaceX is at least responding to the concerns raised by astronomers. Hopefully other agencies planning satellite constellation launches will also be upfront with their plans to reduce this serious problem to astronomical observation. But crowding in low Earth orbit also has consequences for satellites and other space vehicles, including those designed to carry humans. To achieve orbit, satellites seek a balance between their speed and the effect of Earth’s gravity on them. The speed with which a satellite must travel to achieve this balance depends on its altitude above Earth. The nearer to Earth, then the faster the required orbital speed. At an altitude of 124 miles (200km), the required orbital velocity is a little more than 17,000 miles per hour (about 7.4 km/s). Any object shed by a satellite or other vehicle in orbit will maintain the same orbital speed. Collisions between such objects can therefore occur at combined speeds of potentially up to 34,000 mph at 124 miles (if it is head-on). The effects of such impacts can be serious for astronauts and space stations – as the dramatic opening scenes of the 2013 movie Gravity depict. There is impact shielding on satellites and space vehicles which is designed to stop objects smaller than 1cm crashing into them. At best, the shielding will do so – though the electromagnetic impulse created may interfere with electronic systems. At worst, larger pieces of space junk could penetrate the vehicles. This could result in internal damage and disintegration that threaten the safety of the mission. Space agencies such as NASA and ESA have therefore established orbital debris research programmes to observe such debris and develop strategies to control its effects. There is little doubt that, with the increasing use and commercialisation of space, we boost the risk of catastrophic events associated with orbital debris. Agencies, both state and commercial, must recognise this and support efforts to reduce the likelihood of such events by taking steps to remove existing debris and reduce the potential for further debris by removing redundant satellites and other space vehicles. For example the RemoveDEBRIS satellite uses an on-board harpoon to capture junk. Only when we resolve the problem of space junk will our window on, and pathway to, space be truly fully open.
Next is the warming advantage. Rocket launches negatively impact the ecosystem and cause warming J.A.Dallas et al.: 20 Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research, UNSW, Sydney, Australia School of Minerals and Energy Resources Engineering, UNSW, Sydney, Australia “The environmental impact of emissions from space launches: A comprehensive review,” Journal of Cleaner Production (2020) Dallas and her colleagues reviewed more than 40 studies that considered a range of rocket and propellant types, and the resulting impacts on climate, stratospheric ozone, ecosystems and human health. While the effects of different rocket and propellant types varied, all had the potential to cause stratospheric ozone depletion. Ozone in the stratosphere forms a layer that prevents the sun’s damaging ultraviolet rays from reaching the surface. The discovery of a hole in the ozone layer caused by refrigerant chemicals in 1982 caused a ban on these chemicals, so anything that may cause renewed ozone depletion is of global concern. Rocket launches are the only source of ozone-depleting chemicals that are deposited directly into the stratosphere, meaning increased numbers of launches could cause significant damage. As well as stratospheric ozone, launch emissions have the potential to impact climate change through the release of black carbon into the stratosphere. They also can impact ecosystem and human health through the release of toxic chemicals that can enter surface waters and persist in the soil. Launch emissions can cause direct effects, from the combustion of the propellant, and indirect effects, from the mixing of ambient air into the exhaust plume, which can cause different reactions at different altitudes. The team discovered that the quantity and type of propellant used had the biggest effect on the nature and magnitude of the environmental impacts associated with space launches. While solid rocket boosters were the best studied, due to their use in NASA’s space shuttle programme, liquid propellants are now most commonly used, and require further study. “I’m excited about the prospects for humankind’s future in space and I want to ensure that future is a long one, brought about through sustainable space travel,” says Dallas .
And, increased rocket launches cause warming – 2 warrants Joe McCarthy, 02-08-18, "The SpaceX Launch Was Actually Really Bad for the Environment," Global Citizen, https://www.globalcitizen.org/fr/content/space-x-bad-for-the-environment/ Joe McCarthy is a Staff Writer at Global Citizen. He studied creative writing at Southern Connecticut State University and now writes about environmental issues and global events. The astrophysicist Ian Whittaker wrote that the SpaceX rocket that launched from the Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida, on Wednesday burned a massive amount of fuel. The rocket held 440 tons of jet fuel, which has a high carbon content, meaning it releases a lot of carbon dioxide into the air when burned. If SpaceX meets its target of launching a rocket every two weeks, then the company will be releasing roughly 4,000 tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year, Whittaker calculated. That’s nothing compared to annual carbon output around the world, but if more rocket companies come to market, as is expected, then space travel could rapidly account for a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. More pressing, Whittaker argues, is the problem of space debris. Just as the oceans are becoming cesspools of plastic and other garbage, outer space is becoming riddled with space debris. There are now around 150 million objects floating in space because of human-launched expeditions and experiments. All of this debris can interrupt and even destroy critical satellite infrastructure that perform functions like measuring climate change and enabling GPS, Whittaker says, and could ultimately make it harder for legitimate scientific expeditions to take place.
Climate change leads to extinction in multiple ways Pascus 19 Brian Pascus, 6-4-2019, "Human civilization faces "existential risk" by 2050 according to new Australian climate change report," CBS News, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-climate-change-report-human-civilization-at-risk-extinction-by-2050-new-australian-climate/ A new report by Australian climate experts warns that "climate change now represents a near- to mid-term existential threat" to human civilization. In this grim forecast — which was endorsed by the former chief of the Australian Defense Force — human civilization could end by 2050 due to the destabilizing societal and environmental factors caused by a rapidly warming planet. The report, entitled "Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach," lays out a future where society could collapse due to instability set off by migration patterns of billions, of people affected by drought, rising sea levels, and environmental destruction. "Climate-change impacts on food and water systems, declining crop yields and rising food prices driven by drought, wildfire and harvest failures have already become catalysts for social breakdown and conflict across the Middle East, the Maghreb and the Sahel, contributing to the European migration crisis," the report said. The report was written by David Spratt, research director for Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration in Melbourne, and Ian T. Dunlop, formerly an international oil, gas and coal industry executive and chair of the Australian Coal Association. Retired Admiral Chris Barrie, former defense forces chief of Australia, endorsed the report and wrote a forward to it. "After nuclear war, human induced global warming is the greatest threat to human life on the planet," Barrie wrote. Using a worst-case scenario existential risk analysis, Spratt and Dunlop depict humanity fallsing into ruin under an additional 2 degrees Celsius of warming — a threshold scientists say the world is heading towards if current trends continue. In their scenario, "tipping points" occur when humanity fails to institute carbon emission reforms in the 2020s and 2030s. This creates a "hothouse" effect on Earth, leading to rapidly rising sea levels set off by melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and "widespread permafrost loss and large-scale Amazon drought and dieback." In this scenario, the "hothouse Earth" effect causes "35 percent of the global land area, and 55 percent of the global population, (to be) subject to more than 20 days a year of lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold of human survivability." Ecosystems collapse, including coral reef systems, the Amazon rainforest and the Arctic, along with a massive die-off of the insect population. As a result, the authors say, some of the world's most populated cities — Mumbai, Jakarta, Guangzhou, Tianjin, Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh City, Shanghai, Lagos, Bangkok and Manila — would have to be abandoned due to their location in the tropical zone. The assessment ends with a harrowing conclusion: "More than a billion people may need to be relocated and in high-end scenarios, the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model, with a high likelihood of human civilization coming to an end." The report also paints a grim picture in terms of national security, with extreme climate conditions and the disruption of huge populations placing "the internal cohesion of nations ... under great stress." "The flooding of coastal communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China, has the potential to challenge regional and even national identities," the report warns. "Armed conflict between nations over resources, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely and nuclear war is possible. The social consequences range from increased religious fervor to outright chaos."
Next advantage is inequality. Inequality is bad now, but it’s getting better Jeanna Smialek and Jim Tankersley April 23 2021 “One Thing America Might Buy With All the Spending? Less Inequality.” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/business/economy/biden-inequality-monetary-policy.html Jeanna Smialek writes about the Federal Reserve and the economy for The New York Times. Jim Tankersley is a White House correspondent for The New York Times, with a focus on economic policy. Over more than a decade covering politics and economics in Washington, he has written extensively about the stagnation of the American middle class and the decline of economic opportunity in wide swaths of the country.
The coronavirus pandemic has threatened to rapidly expand yawning gaps between the rich and the poor, throwing lower-earning service workers out of jobs, costing them income, and limiting their ability to build wealth. But by betting on big government spending to pull the economy back from the brink, United States policymakers could limit that fallout. The $1.9 trillion economic aid package President Biden signed into law last month includes a wide range of programs with the potential to help poor and middle-class Americans to supplement lost income and save money. That includes monthly payments to parents, relief for renters and help with student loans. Now, the administration is rolling out additional plans that would go even further, including a $2.3 trillion infrastructure package and about $1.5 trillion in spending and tax credits to support the labor force by investing in child care, paid leave, universal prekindergarten and free community college. The measures are explicitly meant to help left-behind workers and communities of color who have faced systemic racism and entrenched disadvantages — and they would be funded, in part, by taxes on the rich. Forecasters predict that the government spending — even just what has been passed so far — will fuel what could be the fastest annual economic growth in a generation this year and next, as the country recovers and the economy reopens from the coronavirus pandemic. By jump-starting the economy from the bottom and middle, the response could make sure the pandemic rebound is more equitable than it would be without a proactive government response, analysts said.
Extraction of resources in space increases inequality by exclusively benefiting wealthy American shareholders at an unprecedented level Shammas and Holen 19. Victor L. Shammas (Oslo Metropolitan University, Work Research Institute (AFI), Oslo, Norway) and Tomas B. Holen (Independent scholar, Oslo, Norway). One giant leap for capitalistkind: private enterprise in outer space. Palgrave Commun 5, 10 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0218-9
But how are we to understand NewSpace? In some ways, NewSpace signals the emergence of capitalism in space. The production of carrier rockets, placement of satellites into orbit around Earth, and the exploration, exploitation, or colonization of outer space (including planets, asteroids, and other celestial objects), will not be the work of humankind as such, a pure species-being (Gattungswesen), but of particular capitalist entrepreneurs who stand in for and represent humanity. Crucially, they will do so in ways modulated by the exigencies of capital accumulation. These enterprising capitalists are forging a new political-economic regime in space, a post-Fordism in space aimed at profit maximization and the apparent minimization of government interference. A new breed of charismatic, starry-eyed entrepreneurs, including Musk’s SpaceX, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, and Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, to name but a selection, aim at becoming ‘capitalists in space' (Parker, 2009) or space capitalists. Neil Armstrong’s famous statement will have to be reformulated: space will not be the site of ‘one giant leap for mankind', but rather one giant leap for capitalistkind. Footnote5 With the ascendancy of NewSpace, humanity’s future in space will not be ‘ours', benefiting humanity tout court, but will rather be the result of particular capitalists, or capitalistkind,Footnote6 toiling to recuperate space and bring its vast domain into the fold of capital accumulation: NewSpace sees outer space as the domain of private enterprise, set to become the ‘first-trillion dollar industry', according to some estimates, and likely to produce the world’s first trillionaires (see, e.g., Honan, 2018)—as opposed to Old Space, a derisive moniker coined by enthusiastic proponents of capitalism-in-space, widely seen to have been the sole preserve of the state and a handful of giant aerospace corporations, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, in Cold War-era Space Age. Under Donald Trump’s presidency, the adherents of NewSpace have found a ready political partner. The commercialization of outer space was already well under way with Obama’s 2010 National Space Policy, which emphasized ‘promoting and supporting a competitive U. S. commercial space sector', which was ‘considered vital to…continued progress in space' (Tronchetti, 2013, p. 67–68). But the Trump administration has aggressively pursued the deregulation of outer space in the service of profit margins. Wilbur Ross, President Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, has eagerly supported the private space industry by pushing the dismantling of regulatory frameworks. As Ross emphatically stated, ‘The rate of regulatory change must accelerate until it can match the rate of technological change!' (Foust, 2018a). Trump has proposed privatizing the provision of supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) while re-establishing the Cold War-era National Space Council, which includes members from Lockheed Martin, Boeing, ULA, and a series of NewSpace actors, such as SpaceX and Blue Origin. Ross was visibly enthusiastic about SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launch in February 2018 and seemed to embrace Musk’s marketing ploy. ‘It was really quite an amazing thing', Ross said. ‘At the end of it, you have that little red Tesla hurdling sic off to an orbit around the sun and the moon' (Bryan, 2018). That same month, Ross spoke before the National Space Council, commenting appreciatively that ‘space is already a $330 billion industry' that was set to become a ‘multitrillion-dollar one in coming decades'. He noted that private corporations needed ‘all the help we can give them' and said it was ‘time to unshackle business activity in space' (Department of Commerce, 2018).
Inequality decreases investment in the economy and slows growth Baker and Salop 15. Jonathan B. Baker and Steven C. Salop. “Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Inequality.” The Georgetown Law Journal Online, Vol. 104:1. Georgetown University Law Center. (Jonathan B. Baker, a former Director of the Bureau of Economics at the Federal Trade Commission, is a Research Professor of Law at American University. Steven C. Salop is an American economist and academic who is a Professor of Economics and Law at the Georgetown University Law Center.) Some inequality is a natural byproduct of a market economy: the market generates winners and losers, and the prospect of economic success helps foster effort, investment, and innovation. But these positive effects on innovation and entrepreneurship do not automatically benefit everyone, as demonstrated by the fact that over the past quarter century labor productivity has increased steadily while hourly worker compensation has stagnated.23 More importantly, this observation does not automatically justify whatever inequality the market happens to produce. Inequality also involves social costs. Interpersonal utility comparisons are beyond the scope of standard economic models. However, individuals generally and policy makers in particular do make such comparisons. We suspect that many people consider a wide economic gap between rich and poor to be objectionable.24 Using the language of economics, in terms of purchasing goods and services, one would say that a dollar of marginal income spent by a less wealthy person is generally more valuable socially than that marginal dollar of income spent by a very wealthy person.25 In populist lay terms, we expect most people would agree that it is more valuable to give an extra thousand dollars to a poor mother to spend on dental care and food for her children than to give it to an investment banker and his partners to spend on a fine dinner and wine. In addition, inequality may undermine the legitimacy of our social order.26 The trend toward greater economic success at the very top while most households lose ground threatens to undermine the American Dream and erode the sense that our society gives everyone a fair opportunity to succeed and an equal voice in the nation’s future.27 By undermining that sense, inequality may harm the morale and work effort of those left behind.28 Another problem is political. The wealthiest have a disproportionate influence on public policy. 29 This gives them an ability and incentive to skew public investments and government policies to favor themselves.30 These policies also may harm others.31 For example, the fundamental short-run policy tradeoff faced by the Federal Reserve is balancing the harms from unemployment against the risks of inflation. The rich have less incentive to favor policies that tilt towards reductions in unemployment relative to prevention of inflation. They are unlikely to become unemployed. And as creditors with some assets denominated in nominal terms, their real wealth is reduced by inflation.32 While unemployment reduces demand for the products sold by the firms they own, that harm to the firms is mitigated somewhat by the fact that high unemployment reduces the wage demands of workers.33 The middle class and poor, by contrast, are far more likely to experience unemployment or lower wages as the result of a higher unemployment rate. They also are more likely debtors that benefit from inflation. This political effect can make inequality self-reinforcing: the economic power of those at the top gives the wealthy political power, which can be used to entrench and enhance their economic power, further increase their political power, and so on. This vicious cycle creates the possibility that inequality could threaten our democracy.34 This concern is exacerbated by the growing trend to greater social separation by the top earners, through gated communities, private schools, and other privileges. For example, it has long been suggested that private schools reduce political support for larger public school budgets. The same point might be made with respect to public health care and transportation when concierge doctors and express lanes cater to the rich. Inequality also can reduce economic growth. The economic literature has reached a “tentative consensus” that inequality “tends to reduce the pace and durability of growth.”35 Even a small reduction in the long-term rate of growth makes a substantial difference to economic well-being from one generation to the next. 36 Inequality can slow economic growth for several reasons. Workers in families experiencing financial hardship may find it difficult to invest in education and training because they lack the necessary savings and because financial market imperfections limit their ability to borrow against their future prospects.37 Their incentives to change jobs, learn new skills, or start new businesses also can be reduced. Poverty makes it harder for students to learn, and a majority of the students in public schools today are from low-income families. 38 Moreover, the disproportionate influence on public policy by those at the very top can lead to insufficient provision of public goods that would disproportionately benefit others, even when those programs foster overall economic growth. These same factors also can contribute to creating a vicious cycle of widening inequality. We are not claiming that concerns about inequality are ignored in our society. Social insurance programs provide benefits to people who are unemployed, poor, retired and disabled. Government programs support public goods such as health care, education, job training, and housing. While certain redistributive policies may impede growth,39 redistribution has generally not done so in practice. 40 Instead, these programs have been found to encourage economic growth, even when they are funded in ways that redistribute resources away from those at the top.41 Despite these benefits from redistribution, existing programs do not appear to have offset the growing inequality in our economy.
Inequality causes extinction. Liu 18 – Qian Liu, Managing Director, Greater China, The Economist Group – (Qian Liu, November 13th, 2018) – “The next economic crisis could cause a global conflict. Here's why” – https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/the-next-economic-crisis-could-cause-a-global-conflict-heres-why The next economic crisis is closer than you think. But what you should really worry about is what comes after: in the current social, political, and technological landscape, a prolonged economic crisis, combined with rising income inequality, could well escalate into a major global military conflict. The 2008-09 global financial crisis almost bankrupted governments and caused systemic collapse. Policymakers managed to pull the global economy back from the brink, using massive monetary stimulus, including quantitative easing and near-zero (or even negative) interest rates. But monetary stimulus is like an adrenaline shot to jump-start an arrested heart; it can revive the patient, but it does nothing to cure the disease. Treating a sick economy requires structural reforms, which can cover everything from financial and labor markets to tax systems, fertility patterns, and education policies. Policymakers have utterly failed to pursue such reforms, despite promising to do so. Instead, they have remained preoccupied with politics. From Italy to Germany, forming and sustaining governments now seems to take more time than actual governing. And Greece, for example, has relied on money from international creditors to keep its head (barely) above water, rather than genuinely reforming its pension system or improving its business environment. The lack of structural reform has meant that the unprecedented excess liquidity that central banks injected into their economies was not allocated to its most efficient uses. Instead, it raised global asset prices to levels even higher than those prevailing before 2008. In the United States, housing prices are now 8 higher than they were at the peak of the property bubble in 2006, according to the property website Zillow. The price-to-earnings (CAPE) ratio, which measures whether stock-market prices are within a reasonable range, is now higher than it was both in 2008 and at the start of the Great Depression in 1929. As monetary tightening reveals the vulnerabilities in the real economy, the collapse of asset-price bubbles will trigger another economic crisis – one that could be even more severe than the last, because we have built up a tolerance to our strongest macroeconomic medications. A decade of regular adrenaline shots, in the form of ultra-low interest rates and unconventional monetary policies, has severely depleted their power to stabilize and stimulate the economy. If history is any guide, the consequences of this mistake could extend far beyond the economy. According to Harvard’s Benjamin Friedman, prolonged periods of economic distress have been characterized also by public antipathy toward minority groups or foreign countries – attitudes that can help to fuel unrest, terrorism, or even war. For example, during the Great Depression US President Herbert Hoover signed the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, intended to protect American workers and farmers from foreign competition. In the subsequent five years, global trade shrank by two-thirds. Within a decade, World War II had begun. To be sure, WWII, like World War I, was caused by a multitude of factors; there is no standard path to war. But there is reason to believe that high levels of inequality can play a significant role in stoking conflict. According to research by the economist Thomas Piketty, a spike in income inequality is often followed by a great crisis. Income inequality then declines for a while, before rising again, until a new peak – and a new disaster. Though causality has yet to be proven, given the limited number of data points, this correlation should not be taken lightly, especially with wealth and income inequality at historically high levels. This is all the more worrying in view of the numerous other factors stoking social unrest and diplomatic tension, including technological disruption, a record-breaking migration crisis, anxiety over globalization, political polarization, and rising nationalism. All are symptoms of failed policies that could turn out to be trigger points for a future crisis. Voters have good reason to be frustrated, but the emotionally appealing populists to whom they are increasingly giving their support are offering ill-advised solutions that will only make matters worse. For example, despite the world’s unprecedented interconnectedness, multilateralism is increasingly being eschewed, as countries – most notably, Donald Trump’s US – pursue unilateral, isolationist policies. Meanwhile, proxy wars are raging in Syria and Yemen. Against this background, we must take seriously the possibility that the next economic crisis could lead to a large-scale military confrontation. By the logic of the political scientist Samuel Huntington , considering such a scenario could help us avoid it, because it would force us to take action. In this case, the key will be for policymakers to pursue the structural reforms that they have long promised, while replacing finger-pointing and antagonism with a sensible and respectful global dialogue. The alternative may well be global conflagration.
Advocacy
Resolved: The appropriation of outer space by private entities is unjust.
framing
The standard is maximizing well-being Util is intrinsic, so we can’t avoid it Nagel 86: Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere, HUP, 1986: 156-168. I shall defend the unsurprising claim that sensory pleasure is good and pain bad, no matter whose they are. The point of the exercise is to see how the pressures of objectification operate in a simple case. Physical pleasure and pain do not usually depend on activities or desires which themselves raise questions of justification and value. They are just sensory experiences in relation to which we are fairly passive, but toward which we feel involuntary desire or aversion. Almost Everyone takes the avoidance of his {their} own pain and the promotion of his own pleasure as subjective reasons for action in a fairly simple way; they are not backed up by any further reasons.
Prefer for three reasons: 1) Utilitarianism avoids fixation on one value, which leads to a more holistic analysis of impacts since it allows us to take many factors into consideration when making decisions. 2) It acknowledges the intrinsic value of humans the best—respecting persons’ equal worth requires that we quantify consequences so that we can promote the lives and liberties of the greatest number of individuals possible. 3) Weighing ground: consequences lets us weigh the probability of a scenario, its risk, scope, severity, etc. and we can even weigh between these standards. Resolvability because if we can’t weigh, then we don’t know what offense matters. The judge needs to know how to make a decision.
Extinction comes first under any framework Pummer 15 Theron, Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at St. Anne's College, University of Oxford. “Moral Agreement on Saving the World” Practical Ethics, University of Oxford. May 18, 2015 AT There appears to be lot of disagreement in moral philosophy. Whether these many apparent disagreements are deep and irresolvable, I believe there is at least one thing it is reasonable to agree on right now, whatever general moral view we adopt: that it is very important to reduce the risk that all intelligent beings on this planet are eliminated by an enormous catastrophe, such as a nuclear war. How we might in fact try to reduce such existential risks is discussed elsewhere. My claim here is only that we – whether we’re consequentialists, deontologists, or virtue ethicists – should all agree that we should try to save the world. According to consequentialism, we should maximize the good, where this is taken to be the goodness, from an impartial perspective, of outcomes. Clearly one thing that makes an outcome good is that the people in it are doing well. There is little disagreement here. If the happiness or well-being of possible future people is just as important as that of people who already exist, and if they would have good lives, it is not hard to see how reducing existential risk is easily the most important thing in the whole world. This is for the familiar reason that there are so many people who could exist in the future – there are trillions upon trillions… upon trillions. There are so many possible future people that reducing existential risk is arguably the most important thing in the world, even if the well-being of these possible peopl`e were given only 0.001 as much weight as that of existing people. Even on a wholly person-affecting view – according to which there’s nothing (apart from effects on existing people) to be said in favor of creating happy people – the case for reducing existential risk is very strong. As noted in this seminal paper, this case is strengthened by the fact that there’s a good chance that many existing people will, with the aid of life-extension technology, live very long and very high quality lives. You might think what I have just argued applies to consequentialists only. There is a tendency to assume that, if an argument appeals to consequentialist considerations (the goodness of outcomes), it is irrelevant to non-consequentialists. But that is a huge mistake. Non-consequentialism is the view that there’s more that determines rightness than the goodness of consequences or outcomes; it is not the view that the latter don’t matter. Even John Rawls wrote, “All ethical doctrines worth our attention take consequences into account in judging rightness. One which did not would simply be irrational, crazy.” Minimally plausible versions of deontology and virtue ethics must be concerned in part with promoting the good, from an impartial point of view. They’d thus imply very strong reasons to reduce existential risk, at least when this doesn’t significantly involve doing harm to others or damaging one’s character. What’s even more surprising, perhaps, is that even if our own good (or that of those near and dear to us) has much greater weight than goodness from the impartial “point of view of the universe,” indeed even if the latter is entirely morally irrelevant, we may nonetheless have very strong reasons to reduce existential risk. Even egoism, the view that each agent should maximize her own good, might imply strong reasons to reduce existential risk. It will depend, among other things, on what one’s own good consists in. If well-being consisted in pleasure only, it is somewhat harder to argue that egoism would imply strong reasons to reduce existential risk – perhaps we could argue that one would maximize her expected hedonic well-being by funding life extension technology or by having herself cryogenically frozen at the time of her bodily death as well as giving money to reduce existential risk (so that there is a world for her to live in!). I am not sure, however, how strong the reasons to do this would be. But views which imply that, if I don’t care about other people, I have no or very little reason to help them are not even minimally plausible views (in addition to hedonistic egoism, I here have in mind views that imply that one has no reason to perform an act unless one actually desires to do that act). To be minimally plausible, egoism will need to be paired with a more sophisticated account of well-being. To see this, it is enough to consider, as Plato did, the possibility of a ring of invisibility – suppose that, while wearing it, Ayn could derive some pleasure by helping the poor, but instead could derive just a bit more by severely harming them. Hedonistic egoism would absurdly imply she should do the latter. To avoid this implication, egoists would need to build something like the meaningfulness of a life into well-being, in some robust way, where this would to a significant extent be a function of other-regarding concerns (see chapter 12 of this classic intro to ethics). But once these elements are included, we can (roughly, as above) argue that this sort of egoism will imply strong reasons to reduce existential risk. Add to all of this Samuel Scheffler’s recent intriguing arguments (quick podcast version available here) that most of what makes our lives go well would be ndermined if there were no future generations of intelligent persons. On his view, my life would contain vastly less well-being if (say) a year after my death the world came to an end. So obviously if Scheffler were right I’d have very strong reason to reduce existential risk. We should also take into account moral uncertainty. What is it reasonable for one to do, when one is uncertain not (only) about the empirical facts, but also about the moral facts? I’ve just argued that there’s agreement among minimally plausible ethical views that we have strong reason to reduce existential risk – not only consequentialists, but also deontologists, virtue ethicists, and sophisticated egoists should agree. But even those (hedonistic egoists) who disagree should have a significant level of confidence that they are mistaken, and that one of the above views is correct. Even if they were 90 sure that their view is the correct one (and 10 sure that one of these other ones is correct), they would have pretty strong reason, from the standpoint of moral uncertainty, to reduce existential risk. Perhaps most disturbingly still, even if we are only 1 sure that the well-being of possible future people matters, it is at least arguable that, from the standpoint of moral uncertainty, reducing existential risk is the most important thing in the world. Again, this is largely for the reason that there are so many people who could exist in the future – there are trillions upon trillions… upon trillions. (For more on this and other related issues, see this excellent dissertation). Of course, it is uncertain whether these untold trillions would, in general, have good lives. It’s possible they’ll be miserable. It is enough for my claim that there is moral agreement in the relevant sense if, at least given certain empirical claims about what future lives would most likely be like, all minimally plausible moral views would converge on the conclusion that we should try to save the world. While there are some non-crazy views that place significantly greater moral weight on avoiding suffering than on promoting happiness, for reasons others have offered (and for independent reasons I won’t get into here unless requested to), they nonetheless seem to be fairly implausible views. And even if things did not go well for our ancestors, I am optimistic that they will overall go fantastically well for our descendants, if we allow them to. I suspect that most of us alive today – at least those of us not suffering from extreme illness or poverty – have lives that are well worth living, and that things will continue to improve. Derek Parfit, whose work has emphasized future generations as well as agreement in ethics, described our situation clearly and accurately: “We live during the hinge of history. Given the scientific and technological discoveries of the last two centuries, the world has never changed as fast. We shall soon have even greater powers to transform, not only our surroundings, but ourselves and our successors. If we act wisely in the next few centuries, humanity will survive its most dangerous and decisive period. Our descendants could, if necessary, go elsewhere, spreading through this galaxy…. Our descendants might, I believe, make the further future very good. But that good future may also depend in part on us. If our selfish recklessness ends human history, we would be acting very wrongly.” (From chapter 36 of On What Matters)