September/October 2008: Resolved: It is morally permissible to kill one innocent person to save the lives of more innocent people.
A few wise words from Rohan, the now-gone debate dude, concerning the topic:
Hey,
By the way, this is reallllly long fyi.
Well, I'm in Randolph for only a couple more days so I felt like making one last contribution to the team considering your lack of a coach (not like the coach we had was any good to begin with). Thus, I decided to give yall a topic briefing of this really shitty topic:
Resolved: It is morally permissible to kill one innocent to save the lives of more innocent people.
Overview: Remember all those brief discussions about means-based vs. ends-based (Deontology vs. Utility) arguments? Well, take that idea and make it the central point on this topic. Fortunately, this means that it won't take much to understand this topic because there is nothing complex about it. Unfortunately, expect advanced philosophical argumentation on both sides. The thing to remember about this topic is that there is absolutely no real-world context unlike the Nuclear Weapons topic so you will have to read up philosophy rather than empirical examples.
For those of you who do not understand the dichotomy between Deontology vs. Utilitarianism:
Every action taken has a means as to how it was taken and an effect (end result). For example, let's say my goal is to sell clothes so that I can gain billions of dollars of profit. This goal of mine is what we call an "end". In order for me to obtain those clothes for profit, let's say I open up a sweatshop in Mexico where the working conditions are abysmal while the pay is atrocious. This little scenario is what we call the "means". To summarize, the means to the end of getting a profit involves dehumanizing Mexican workers in a sweatshop.
Deontology (Means-Based): Xiaoqi Zhu puts this best: Individual rights are sacrosanct, and that violation of an individual's human worth irrespective of the intent is categorically immoral. This will be the basic concept behind ALL negative cases.
Utility (Ends-Based): More commonly known as, the ends justify the means. The morality of an action based on a utilitarian calculus is determined by how much happiness an end obtains compared to the harm it generates. This will be the basic concept behind ALL affirmative cases.
Values:
1. Morality (or some variation of Morality) - Its explicit in the resolution. This should be the value of choice.
2. Justice - I do not recommend you use this value but I believe it can be used on this topic. Be careful though.
Criteria: This topic is going to necesitate criterial debates and I believe the criterial debates are going to be crucial to winning the round. This is true mainly because the only criteria I can conceptualize are those that are either heavily skewed towards the affirmative or the negative. I doubt there are any criteria out there which is capable of appealing to both sides but I may be wrong.
Aff Criteria:
1. Utility.
Neg Criteria:
1. Deontology
You don't have much to work with, unless I'm wrong.
Case positions - You don't have much to work with on either side. Your case positions are already iterated up above.
Strategies: There's not much I can say. If any of you had blocks to Deontology or blocks to Utility, now would be the time to use them and improve them dramatically. I believe that this topic is slightly skewed Neg if both sides are not equal.
Aff Strategies:
There will usually only be 1 position the Aff can run (unless you think of something I haven't yet). Thus, your best AC will have to be a Stacked AC. However, the structure of the case is going to be very different from the past topics. I see one strategy being 5:45 minutes of framework and 15 seconds of contention. Basically, its the criterion of Utility and like 10 reasons why Utility is the best conception of Morality and the last 15 seconds being the one contention which explains how affirming meets Utility.
Neg Strategies:
The NC will probably be the same format as the AC except much shorter and with unique arguments. But there is one thing to note. It is NOT necessary to write an NC for this topic. Straight refutation of the AC is a very plausible strategy but please only do this if you are strong in rebuttals.
You can use your Utility Bad blocks as a massive overview to the AC to give the aff some more problems while moving on to responding to the line by line afterwards.
There is one really interesting observation which can preclude the Aff. Note that the resolution is very specific when it mentions "one person". Thus, you can force the Affirmative to prove why killing only 1 person is morally permissible. This means if they talk about sacrificing 2+ people instead of 1, you can deem that as non-topical. Also, it might harm there Utility Good cases, which are normally very generic and non-specific.
Other shit:
I'm not sure if I have blocks to Deontology anymore but I know I have some blocks to Utility (not many). Here are 2 generic responses to Utility:
Utility has no rational consideration of the goals or the intentions of the individuals. This is exemplified in the fact that we always forgive people who make mistakes. They never had the intention to commit the wrong but the wrong occured due to a human error. Without evaluating the intention, there is no way to determine if people are actually due the end result.
Turn, Utility subsumes individuals in its desire to maximize goals: doesn't even consider what people are intrinsically due. (This one is really shitty).
I have the packet from last year's NDF session which has topic briefings for all of the 2008 topics. There is a topic briefing for this topic written by Xiaoqi Zhu (formerly from Walt Whitman HS, attends Harvard now) with some more stuff and Sohum will pick it up from me.
Some Sources (taken directly from the NDF packet):
Glover, Jonathan, ed. Utilitarianism and Its Critics. New York: Macmillan, 1990.
Haber, Joram Graf. Absolutism and its Consequentialist Critics. Rowman & Littlefield, 1994.
Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. 1863. Reprint, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957.
Sen, Amartya, and Bernard Williams. Utilitarianism and Beyond.
Ashby, Warren. "Teleology and Deontology in Ethics."
Alumni: Please add in anything else I forgot.
Feel free to e-mail me to ask any questions at this email address or at rsunder@gwu.edu. But if you want to, please do so BEFORE August 24 because I leave Randolph on that day and if you send anything to me after that date, it would take me awhile to get to it.
There is a lot of topic literature so continue reading. If you want more philosophically advanced arguments, you kinda have to read.
Good Luck,
-Rohan
Also, blocks to the AC that less people die:
1. Just a restatement of topic.
2. Conditionalizes rights (our rights only exist when others’ aren’t in danger).
3. Encourages more violence (turn).
a. encourages reactive violence
b. first act of violence is hardest to commit, after that it gets easier
c. by making violence permissible, it leads to the mindset where violence as a whole is permissible
2008 September Topic Resolved: That the United States should implement a military draft.