Tournament: Lexington RR | Round: 4 | Opponent: Delbarton RT | Judge: Eric Melin, Devin Kasinki

Ryan Teehan and I agreed to ACC before the round. He read seven minutes of deon.

The standard is maximizing happiness.

First, the traditional Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics holds that light waves instantaneously collapse into particles, which is a finite length over zero time, which is impossible. Only the Many-Worlds Interpretation escapes this dilemma and is thus more consistent with the rest of physics. Vaidman 02
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2002. "Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics."
The reason for adopting the Many-Worlds Interpretation MWI is that it avoids the collapse of the quantum wave. (Other non-collapse theories are not better than MWI for various reasons, e.g., nonlocality of Bohmian mechanics; and the disadvantage of all of them is that they have some additional structure.) The collapse postulate is a physical law that differs from all known physics in two aspects: it is genuinely random and it involves some kind of action at a distance. According to the collapse postulate the outcome of a quantum experiment is not determined by the initial conditions of the Universe prior to the experiment: only the probabilities are governed by the initial state. Moreover, Bell 1964 has shown that there cannot be a compatible local-variables theory that will make deterministic predictions. There is no experimental evidence in favor of collapse and against the MWI. We need not assume that Nature plays dice. The MWI is a deterministic theory for a physical Universe and it explains why a world appears to be indeterministic for human observers.

MWI undermines the notion of personal identity. Vaidman 02
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2002. "Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics."
"I" am an object, such as Earth, cat, etc. "I" is defined at a particular time by a complete (classical) description of the state of my body and of my brain. "I" and "Lev" do not name the same things (even though my name is Lev). At the present moment there are many different me's "Lev"s in different worlds (not more than one in each world), but it is meaningless to say that now there is another "I". I have a particular, well defined past: I correspond to a particular "Lev" in 2002, but I do not have a well defined future: I correspond to a multitude of me's "Lev"s in 2010. In the framework of the MWI it is meaningless to ask: Which Lev in 2010 will I be? I will correspond to them all. Every time I perform a quantum experiment (with several possible results) it only seems to me that I obtain a single definite result. Indeed, Lev who obtains this particular result thinks this way. However, this Lev cannot be identified as the only Lev after the experiment. Lev before the experiment corresponds to all "Lev"s obtaining all possible results. Although this approach to the concept of personal identity seems somewhat unusual, it is plausible in the light of the critique of personal identity by Parfit 1986. Parfit considers some artificial situations in which a person splits into several copies, and argues that there is no good answer to the question: Which copy is me? He concludes that personal identity is not what matters when I divide. 

Independently, brain studies prove reductionism. Parfit 84 writes
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).
Some recent medical cases provide striking evidence in favour of the Reductionist View. Human beings have a lower brain and two upper hemispheres, which are connected by a bundle of fibres. In treating a few people with severe epilepsy, surgeons have cut these fibres. The aim was to reduce the severity of epileptic fits, by confining their causes to a single hemisphere. This aim was achieved. But the operations had another unintended consequence. The effect, in the words of one surgeon, was the creation of ‘two separate spheres of consciousness.’
This effect was revealed by various psychological tests. These made use of two facts. We control our right arms with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. And what is in the right halves of our visual fields we see with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. When someone’s hemispheres have been disconnected, psychologists can thus present to this person two different written questions in the two halves of his visual field, and can receive two different answers written by this person’s two hands.

In the absence of personal identity, only end states can matter. Shoemaker 99
Shoemaker, David (Dept of Philosophy, U Memphis). “Utilitarianism and Personal Identity.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 33: 183–199, 1999. http://www.csun.edu/~ds56723/jvipaper.pdf
Extreme reductionism might lend support to utilitarianism in the following way. Many people claim that we are justified in maximizing the good in our own lives, but not justified in maximizing the good across sets of lives, simply because each of us is a single, deeply unified person, unified by the further fact of identity, whereas there is no such corresponding unity across sets of lives. But if the only justification for the different treatment of individual lives and sets of lives is the further fact, and this fact is undermined by the truth of reductionism, then nothing justifies this different treatment. There are no deeply unified subjects of experience. What remains are merely the experiences themselves, and so any ethical theory distinguishing between individual lives and sets of lives is mistaken. If the deep, further fact is missing, then there are no unities. The morally significant units should then be the states people are in at particular times, and an ethical theory that focused on them and attempted to improve their quality, whatever their location, would be the most plausible. Utilitarianism is just such a theory.

Second, happiness is objectively good. Its denial is epistemologically impossible.
Nagel 86
Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere, HUP, 1986: 156-168.
There is nothing self-contradictory in this proposal the proposal that pleasure and pain have no value, but it seems nevertheless insane. Without some positive reason to think there is nothing in itself good or bad about having an experience you intensely like or dislike, we can't seriously regard the common impression to the contrary as a collective illusion. Such things are at least good or bad for us, if anything is. What seems to be going on here is that we cannot from an objective standpoint withhold a certain kind of endorsement of the most direct and immediate subjective value judgments we make concerning the contents of our own consciousness. We regard ourselves as too close to those things to be mistaken in our immediate, nonideological evaluative impressions. No objective view we can attain could possibly overrule our subjective authority in such cases. There can be no reason to reject the appearances here.

Third, consistency requires we extend our own desire for happiness to others. Sayre McCord writes
Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey, “Mill's "Proof" of the Principle of Utility: A More than Half-Hearted Defense.” UNC/Chapel Hill: Social Philosophy and Policy, vol. 18, no. 2; Spring 2001, p. 330-360.

According to the second argument, the evaluative starting point is again each person thinking "my own happiness is valuable," but this fact about each person is taken as evidence, with respect to each bit of happiness that is valued, that that bit is valuable. Each person is seen as hasving reason to think that the happiness she enjoys is valuable, and reason to think of others -- given that they are in a parallel situation with respect to the happiness they enjoy -- that each person's happiness is such that there is the same evidence available to each for the value of the happiness that another person enjoys as there is for the value of one's own happiness. If happiness is such that every piece of it happiness is desired by someone, then it seems as if, in taking ourselves to have reason to seeing the bit we value as valuable, we are committed to acknowledging the value of all the rest.

Fourth, respect for human worth would justify util.
A. Only util gives all people due weight. Cummiskey 90
Cummiskey, David. Associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. “Kantian Consequentiaism.” Ethics 100 (April 1990), University of Chicago. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract “social entity.” It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive “overall social good.” Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that “to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has.” But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the principle that “rational nature exists as an end in itself”. Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have an equal value, then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many rational beings as possible. In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a non- value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kant’s normative theory is based on an unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have “dignity, that is, an unconditional and incomparable worth” that transcends any market value, but persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others. The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others.

B. If we respect others, it follows that we should respect their desire for happiness.
Cummiskey 90
Cummiskey, David. “Kantian Consequentiaism.” Ethics 100 (April 1990), University of Chicago. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810
Now, according to Kant, the formula of the end-in-itself generates both negatives and positive duties. In the negative sense we treat persons as ends when we do not interfere with their pursuit of their (legitimate) ends. In the positive sense we treat persons as ends when we endeavor to help them realize their (legitimate) ends. Kant describes the positive interpretation of the second formulation of the categorical imperative as a duty to make others’ ends my own.
Since, if one wills an end, on also wills the necessary means, it follows that the positive interpretation requires that we do those acts which are necessary to further the permissible ends of others. Since Kant also maintains that “to be happy is necessarily the desire of every rational but finite being”, we have a positive duty to promote the happiness of others. Thus, in addition to any constraints on action which Kant’s principle might generate, it also provides a rationale for a moral goal that we are obligated to pursue.

Fifth, there’s no act-omission distinction.

A. Act-omission isn’t morally relevant. Gewirth 82 writes
Gewirth (Department of Philosophy, Univ. of Chicago) 82 Alan, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications pg 183
To be responsible for inflicting lethal harms, a person need not intend or desire to produce such harms, either as an end or a means. It is sufficient if the harms come about as an unintended but foreseeable and controllable effect of what he does. For since he knows or has good reasons to believe what actions or policies under his control will lead to the harms in question he can control whether the harms will occur, so that it is within his power to prevent or at least lessen the probability of their occurrence by ceasing to engage in these actions. Thus, just as all persons have the right to informed control, so far as possible, over the conditions relevant to their incurring cancer and other serious harms, so the causal and moral responsibility for inflicting cancer can be attributed to persons who have informed control over other persons’ suffering the lethal harms of cancer.

B. The act-omission distinction is incoherent. Rachels 01 writes
James Rachels (U Alabama Professor). “Killing and Letting Die.” Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2nd edition, ed. Lawrence Becker and Charlotte Becker (New York: Routledge, 2001), vol. 2, pp. 947-50. http://www.jamesrachels.org/killing.pdf
So what is the difference between causing and allowing? What real difference is marked by those words? The most obvious ways of attempting to draw the distinction won’t work. For example, suppose we say it is the difference between action and inaction--when we cause an outcome, we do something, but when we merely allow it to happen, we passively stand by and do nothing. This won’t work because, when we allow something to happen, we do perform at least one act: the act of allowing it to happen. The problem is that the distinction between doing something and not doing something is relative to the specification of what is or is not done--if I allow someone to die, I do not save him, but I do let him die. It is tempting to say the difference between action and inaction is the difference between moving one’s body or and not moving one’s body; but that does not help. When we allow something to happen, we are typically moving our bodies in all sorts of ways. If I allow you to die by running away, I may be moving my body very rapidly.

C. The act-omission distinction does not apply to governments.
Sunstein and Vermuele 05
Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermuele, “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life?Life Tradeoffs,” Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper No. 85 (March 2005), p. 17.
The most fundamental point is that unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice between or among possible policies for regulating third parties. The distinction between acts and omissions may not be intelligible in this context, and even if it is, the distinction does not make a morally relevant difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do anything or refusing to act. Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized private action – for example, private killing – becomes obscure when government formally forbids private action but chooses a set of policy instruments that does not adequately or fully discourage it.

D. The act-omission distinction is paradoxical. Persson 04 writes
Ingmar Persson, “The Two Act?Omission Paradox,” 2004. Jul. 2004.
There are two ways in which the act?omission doctrine, which implies that it may be permissible to let people die or be killed when it is wrong to kill them, gives rise to a paradox. First, it may be that when you let a victim be killed, you let yourself kill this victim. On the assumption that, if it would be wrong of you to act in a certain fashion, it would be wrong of you let yourself act in this fashion, this yields the paradox that it is both permissible and impermissible to let yourself act in this fashion. Second, you may let yourself kill somebody by letting an action you have already initiated cause death, e.g., by not lending a helping hand to somebody you have pushed. This, too, yields the paradox that it is both permissible and impermissible to let yourself kill if you are in a situation in which killing is impermissible but letting be killed permissible. 

This means side constraint-based theories reduce to util because any reason not to violate a side constraint oneself is an equally good reason to minimize side constraint violations.

Revisionary intuitionism is true and leads to util.
Yudkowsky 8 writes
Eliezer Yudkowsky (research fellow of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute; he also writes Harry Potter fan fiction). “The ‘Intuitions’ Behind ‘Utilitarianism.’” 28 January 2008. LessWrong. http://lesswrong.com/lw/n9/the_intuitions_behind_utilitarianism/
I haven't said much about metaethics - the nature of morality - because that has a forward dependency on a discussion of the Mind Projection Fallacy that I haven't gotten to yet. I used to be very confused about metaethics. After my confusion finally cleared up, I did a postmortem on my previous thoughts. I found that my object-level moral reasoning had been valuable and my meta-level moral reasoning had been worse than useless. And this appears to be a general syndrome - people do much better when discussing whether torture is good or bad than when they discuss the meaning of "good" and "bad". Thus, I deem it prudent to keep moral discussions on the object level wherever I possibly can. Occasionally people object to any discussion of morality on the grounds that morality doesn't exist, and in lieu of jumping over the forward dependency to explain that "exist" is not the right term to use here, I generally say, "But what do you do anyway?" and take the discussion back down to the object level. Paul Gowder, though, has pointed out that both the idea of choosing a googolplex dust specks in a googolplex eyes over 50 years of torture for one person, and the idea of "utilitarianism", depend on "intuition". He says I've argued that the two are not compatible, but charges me with failing to argue for the utilitarian intuitions that I appeal to. Now "intuition" is not how I would describe the computations that underlie human morality and distinguish us, as moralists, from an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness and/or a rock. But I am okay with using the word "intuition" as a term of art, bearing in mind that "intuition" in this sense is not to be contrasted to reason, but is, rather, the cognitive building block out of which both long verbal arguments and fast perceptual arguments are constructed. I see the project of morality as a project of renormalizing intuition. We have intuitions about things that seem desirable or undesirable, intuitions about actions that are right or wrong, intuitions about how to resolve conflicting intuitions, intuitions about how to systematize specific intuitions into general principles. Delete all the intuitions, and you aren't left with an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness, you're left with a rock. Keep all your specific intuitions and refuse to build upon the reflective ones, and you aren't left with an ideal philosopher of perfect spontaneity and genuineness, you're left with a grunting caveperson running in circles, due to cyclical preferences and similar inconsistencies. "Intuition", as a term of art, is not a curse word when it comes to morality - there is nothing else to argue from. Even modus ponens is an "intuition" in this sense - it's just that modus ponens still seems like a good idea after being formalized, reflected on, extrapolated out to see if it has sensible consequences, etcetera. So that is "intuition". However, Gowder did not say what he meant by "utilitarianism". Does utilitarianism say... That right actions are strictly determined by good consequences? That praiseworthy actions depend on justifiable expectations of good consequences? That probabilities of consequences should normatively be discounted by their probability, so that a 50 probability of something bad should weigh exactly half as much in our tradeoffs? That virtuous actions always correspond to maximizing expected utility under some utility function? That two harmful events are worse than one? That two independent occurrences of a harm (not to the same person, not interacting with each other) are exactly twice as bad as one? That for any two harms A and B, with A much worse than B, there exists some tiny probability such that gambling on this probability of A is preferable to a certainty of B? If you say that I advocate something, or that my argument depends on something, and that it is wrong, do please specify what this thingy is... anyway, I accept 3, 5, 6, and 7, but not 4; I am not sure about the phrasing of 1; and 2 is true, I guess, but phrased in a rather solipsistic and selfish fashion: you should not worry about being praiseworthy. Now, what are the "intuitions" upon which my "utilitarianism" depends? This is a deepish sort of topic, but I'll take a quick stab at it. First of all, it's not just that someone presented me with a list of statements like those above, and I decided which ones sounded "intuitive". Among other things, if you try to violate "utilitarianism", you run into paradoxes, contradictions, circular preferences, and other things that aren't symptoms of moral wrongness so much as moral incoherence. After you think about moral problems for a while, and also find new truths about the world, and even discover disturbing facts about how you yourself work, you often end up with different moral opinions than when you started out. This does not quite define moral progress, but it is how we experience moral progress. As part of my experienced moral progress, I've drawn a conceptual separation between questions of type Where should we go? and questions of type How should we get there? (Could that be what Gowder means by saying I'm "utilitarian"?) The question of where a road goes - where it leads - you can answer by traveling the road and finding out. If you have a false belief about where the road leads, this falsity can be destroyed by the truth in a very direct and straightforward manner. When it comes to wanting to go to a particular place, this want is not entirely immune from the destructive powers of truth. You could go there and find that you regret it afterward (which does not define moral error, but is how we experience moral error). But, even so, wanting to be in a particular place seems worth distinguishing from wanting to take a particular road to a particular place. Our intuitions about where to go are arguable enough, but our intuitions about how to get there are frankly messed up. After the two hundred and eighty-seventh research study showing that people will chop their own feet off if you frame the problem the wrong way, you start to distrust first impressions. When you've read enough research on scope insensitivity - people will pay only 28 more to protect all 57 wilderness areas in Ontario than one area, people will pay the same amount to save 50,000 lives as 5,000 lives... that sort of thing... Well, the worst case of scope insensitivity I've ever heard of was described here by Slovic: Other recent research shows similar results. Two Israeli psychologists asked people to contribute to a costly life-saving treatment. They could offer that contribution to a group of eight sick children, or to an individual child selected from the group. The target amount needed to save the child (or children) was the same in both cases. Contributions to individual group members far outweighed the contributions to the entire group. There's other research along similar lines, but I'm just presenting one example, 'cause, y'know, eight examples would probably have less impact. If you know the general experimental paradigm, then the reason for the above behavior is pretty obvious - focusing your attention on a single child creates more emotional arousal than trying to distribute attention around eight children simultaneously. So people are willing to pay more to help one child than to help eight. Now, you could look at this intuition, and think it was revealing some kind of incredibly deep moral truth which shows that one child's good fortune is somehow devalued by the other children's good fortune. But what about the billions of other children in the world? Why isn't it a bad idea to help this one child, when that causes the value of all the other children to go down? How can it be significantly better to have 1,329,342,410 happy children than 1,329,342,409, but then somewhat worse to have seven more at 1,329,342,417? Or you could look at that and say: "The intuition is wrong: the brain can't successfully multiply by eight and get a larger quantity than it started with. But it ought to, normatively speaking." And once you realize that the brain can't multiply by eight, then the other cases of scope neglect stop seeming to reveal some fundamental truth about 50,000 lives being worth just the same effort as 5,000 lives, or whatever. You don't get the impression you're looking at the revelation of a deep moral truth about nonagglomerative utilities. It's just that the brain doesn't goddamn multiply. Quantities get thrown out the window. If you have $100 to spend, and you spend $20 each on each of 5 efforts to save 5,000 lives, you will do worse than if you spend $100 on a single effort to save 50,000 lives. Likewise if such choices are made by 10 different people, rather than the same person. As soon as you start believing that it is better to save 50,000 lives than 25,000 lives, that simple preference of final destinations has implications for the choice of paths, when you consider five different events that save 5,000 lives. (It is a general principle that Bayesians see no difference between the long-run answer and the short-run answer; you never get two different answers from computing the same question two different ways. But the long run is a helpful intuition pump, so I am talking about it anyway.) The aggregative valuation strategy of "shut up and multiply" arises from the simple preference to have more of something - to save as many lives as possible - when you have to describe general principles for choosing more than once, acting more than once, planning at more than one time. Aggregation also arises from claiming that the local choice to save one life doesn't depend on how many lives already exist, far away on the other side of the planet, or far away on the other side of the universe. Three lives are one and one and one. No matter how many billions are doing better, or doing worse. 3 = 1 + 1 + 1, no matter what other quantities you add to both sides of the equation. And if you add another life you get 4 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. That's aggregation. When you've read enough heuristics and biases research, and enough coherence and uniqueness proofs for Bayesian probabilities and expected utility, and you've seen the "Dutch book" and "money pump" effects that penalize trying to handle uncertain outcomes any other way, then you don't see the preference reversals in the Allais Paradox as revealing some incredibly deep moral truth about the intrinsic value of certainty. It just goes to show that the brain doesn't goddamn multiply. The primitive, perceptual intuitions that make a choice "feel good" don't handle probabilistic pathways through time very skillfully, especially when the probabilities have been expressed symbolically rather than experienced as a frequency. So you reflect, devise more trustworthy logics, and think it through in words. When you see people insisting that no amount of money whatsoever is worth a single human life, and then driving an extra mile to save $10; or when you see people insisting that no amount of money is worth a decrement of health, and then choosing the cheapest health insurance available; then you don't think that their protestations reveal some deep truth about incommensurable utilities. Part of it, clearly, is that primitive intuitions don't successfully diminish the emotional impact of symbols standing for small quantities - anything you talk about seems like "an amount worth considering". And part of it has to do with preferring unconditional social rules to conditional social rules. Conditional rules seem weaker, seem more subject to manipulation. If there's any loophole that lets the government legally commit torture, then the government will drive a truck through that loophole. So it seems like there should be an unconditional social injunction against preferring money to life, and no "but" following it. Not even "but a thousand dollars isn't worth a 0.0000000001 probability of saving a life". Though the latter choice, of course, is revealed every time we sneeze without calling a doctor. The rhetoric of sacredness gets bonus points for seeming to express an unlimited commitment, an unconditional refusal that signals trustworthiness and refusal to compromise. So you conclude that moral rhetoric espouses qualitative distinctions, because espousing a quantitative tradeoff would sound like you were plotting to defect. On such occasions, people vigorously want to throw quantities out the window, and they get upset if you try to bring quantities back in, because quantities sound like conditions that would weaken the rule. But you don't conclude that there are actually two tiers of utility with lexical ordering. You don't conclude that there is actually an infinitely sharp moral gradient, some atom that moves a Planck distance (in our continuous physical universe) and sends a utility from 0 to infinity. You don't conclude that utilities must be expressed using hyper-real numbers. Because the lower tier would simply vanish in any equation. It would never be worth the tiniest effort to recalculate for it. All decisions would be determined by the upper tier, and all thought spent thinking about the upper tier only, if the upper tier genuinely had lexical priority. As Peter Norvig once pointed out, if Asimov's robots had strict priority for the First Law of Robotics ("A robot shall not harm a human being, nor through inaction allow a human being to come to harm") then no robot's behavior would ever show any sign of the other two Laws; there would always be some tiny First Law factor that would be sufficient to determine the decision. Whatever value is worth thinking about at all, must be worth trading off against all other values worth thinking about, because thought itself is a limited resource that must be traded off. When you reveal a value, you reveal a utility. I don't say that morality should always be simple. I've already said that the meaning of music is more than happiness alone, more than just a pleasure center lighting up. I would rather see music composed by people than by nonsentient machine learning algorithms, so that someone should have the joy of composition; I care about the journey, as well as the destination. And I am ready to hear if you tell me that the value of music is deeper, and involves more complications, than I realize - that the valuation of this one event is more complex than I know.  But that's for one event. When it comes to multiplying by quantities and probabilities, complication is to be avoided - at least if you care more about the destination than the journey. When you've reflected on enough intuitions, and corrected enough absurdities, you start to see a common denominator, a meta-principle at work, which one might phrase as "Shut up and multiply." Where music is concerned, I care about the journey. When lives are at stake, I shut up and multiply. It is more important that lives be saved, than that we conform to any particular ritual in saving them. And the optimal path to that destination is governed by laws that are simple, because they are math. And that's why I'm a utilitarian - at least when I am doing something that is overwhelmingly more important than my own feelings about it - which is most of the time, because there are not many utilitarians, and many things left undone.

Constructivism justifies util. Bagnoli 11 writes
Bagnoli, Carla, "Constructivism in Metaethics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/constructivism-metaethics/.
While constructivism does not mandate any specific normative ethics and is often found combined with contractualism, as on the Scanlonian and Hobbesian models, some have suggested that Utilitarianism is a natural candidate for being paired with constructivism (cf. Rawls 1971, 251 fn. 29; O'Neill 2009, §2; Timmons 2003, §1). R.M. Hare is probably the Utilitarian philosopher whose view most deserves the label “Utilitarian Constructivism” (Richards 1988). Hare recognizes that his theory about the constructive justification of moral judgments is structurally similar to Rawls', though it arrives at utilitarian results. He objects that Rawls' approach escapes utilitarianism by “a very liberal use of intuitions” and that the appeal to intuitions has no credibility (Hare 1989, 214; Hare 1983, 147–148). To objectively ground moral obligations, one must deploy a deliberative procedure free from intuitions. Hare's ambition is to ground Kant's insight about universalization on the logical grammar of moral language (Hare 1952, 1963, 1981, 1997). The Kantian requirement of impartiality, according to Hare, can be justified by considerations about the meaning of the concepts, rather than a moral assumption. Moral constraints about deliberation are constructed out of a formal procedure, more precisely, what Hare describes as a form of moral reasoning, that combines the semantic feature of universality with another semantic feature, which Hare calls “prescriptivity,” that is, the tendency of moral judgments to prescribe or express a preference for a certain course of action. While this procedure of construction is morally neutral, it is nonetheless of practical importance in that it generates utilitarianism. On the basis of semantic considerations, plus criteria for selecting morally relevant features of the situation, the moral agent is led to considerations about how all sentient beings are affected by his action. In his early work, Hare held that utilitarian arguments can solve conflicts between preferences, which concern people's interests, but have not power to decide conflicts between ideals, which concern human excellences rather than human interests; thus, they have no power to convince the “fanatic,” the person who clings to an ideal regardless of its effects on people's interests, anymore than they can convince the immoralist (Hare 1963, 157–185). To this extent, Hare agrees with Humean constructivists that fictional Caligula cannot be forced to enter morality on pain of inconsistency. In his later works, however, Hare defends a more ambitious view, which purports to solve all moral conflicts, including conflicts between ideals, by treating conflicts of ideals as simply another kind of conflict among preferences, which moral reasoning can resolve (Hare 1981).

Science shows moral realism is true and justifies util. Harris 10 writes
Sam Harris (NYT Bestselling author, BA in phil from Stanford, PhD in neuroscience from UCLA). The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. 5 October 2010. p3. http://notabenoid.com/book/22437/73890?Orig_page=3
I believe that we will increasingly understand good and evil, right and wrong, in scientific terms, because moral concerns translate into facts about how our thoughts and behaviors affect the well-being of conscious creatures like ourselves. If there are facts to be known about the well-being of such creatures—and there are—then there must be right and wrong answers to moral questions. Students of philosophy will notice that this commits me to some form of moral realism (viz. moral claims can really be true or false) and some form of consequentialism (viz. the rightness of an act depends on how it impacts the well-being of conscious creatures). While moral realism and consequentialism have both come under pressure in philosophical circles, they have the virtue of corresponding to many of our intuitions about how the world works. Here is my (consequentialist) starting point: all questions of value (right and wrong, good and evil, etc.) depend upon the possibility of experiencing such value. Without potential consequences at the level of experience—happiness, suffering, joy, despair, etc. —all talk of value is empty. Therefore, to say that an act is morally necessary, or evil, or blameless, is to make (tacit) claims about its consequences in the lives of conscious creatures (whether actual or potential).I am unaware of any interesting exception to this rule. Needless to say, if one is worried about pleasing God or His angels, this assumes that such invisible entities are conscious (in some sense) and cognizant of human behavior. It also generally assumes that it is possible to suffer their wrath or enjoy their approval, either in this world or the world to come. Even within religion, therefore, consequences and conscious states remain the foundation of all values. 

Util is axiomatic. Harris 10 writes
Harris, Sam (NYT Bestselling author, BA in phil from Stanford, PhD in neuroscience from UCLA). Toward a Science of Morality. HuffPo. 7 May 2010. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/a-science-of-morality_b_567185.html
So, while it is possible to say that one can't move from "is" to "ought," we should be honest about how we get to "is" in the first place. Scientific "is" statements rest on implicit "oughts" all the way down. When I say, "Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen," I have uttered a quintessential statement of scientific fact. But what if someone doubts this statement? I can appeal to data from chemistry, describing the outcome of simple experiments. But in so doing, I implicitly appeal to the values of empiricism and logic. What if my interlocutor doesn't share these values? What can I say then? What evidence could prove that we should value evidence? What logic could demonstrate the importance of logic? As it turns out, these are the wrong questions. The right question is, why should we care what such a person thinks in the first place? So it is with the linkage between morality and well-being: To say that morality is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal), because we must first assume that the well-being of conscious creatures is good, is exactly like saying that science is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal), because we must first assume that a rational understanding of the universe is good. We need not enter either of these philosophical cul-de-sacs. 

#Tomasiswag justifies util. I run util all the time, and I have swag. You should hear my raps.

Thus the plan: Eric Melin and Devin Kasinki should adopt util. It’s T since developing countries is plural.

Advantage 1 is Empiricism

Morality must be based in experience. A priori reason is impossible.
Schwartz 7
Stephen P. Schwartz. “A Defense of Naïve Empiricism: It is Neither Self-Refuting Nor Dogmatic.” Ithaca College. 2007. pp.1-14.
The empirical support for the fundamental principle of empiricism is diffuse but salient. Our common empirical experience and experimental psychology offer evidence that humans do not have any capacity to garner knowledge except by empirical sources. The fact is that we believe that there is no source of knowledge, information, or evidence apart from observation, empirical scientific investigations, and our sensory experience of the world, and we believe this on the basis of our empirical a posteriori experiences and our general empirical view of how things work. For example, we believe on empirical evidence that humans are continuous with the rest of nature and that we rely like other animals on our senses to tell us how things are. If humans are more successful than other animals, it is not because we possess special non-experiential ways of knowing, but because we are better at cooperating, collating, and inferring. In particular we do not have any capacity for substantive a priori knowledge. There is no known mechanism by which such knowledge would be made possible. This is an empirical claim.

All moral deliberations are based on experiential reasoning. We can’t escape our desire for happiness. Blackburn 99
Simon Blackburn. “Ruling Passions.” Oxford University Press. 1999.
What is true is that we ‘find ourselves’ with this or that concern, and if the experience is unpleasant, as when we find ourselves shamefully addicted to something, or obsessed by something or someone, or for that matter guiltily ceasing to care for things or people we once did care for, then it can feel as if we are assailed from outside, a victim of forces not of our own making. But, after all, it is always forces not of our own making that are responsible for who we are in the first place: in my case, they have made me into a middle-aged white male of a certain education and class: in your case, probably something not too dissimilar, by historical and global standards. Kant’s aim was to present the true self, the deliberator, as free from all that. He (or she) is not an embodiment of a social view, or religion, or class, or gender, butsimply of reason and morality. But nothing on this earth that makes deliberations is free of his or her natural and acquireddispositionsas they do so. You, when you deliberate, are whatever you are: a person of tangled desires, conflicting attitudes to your parents, inchoate ambitions, preferences, and ideals, with an inherited ragbag of attitudes to different actions, situations, and characters. You do not manage, ever, to stand apart from all that. Once more, the Kantian fantasy remains seductive. There is an emotional pressure to think we can transcend these given facts about ourselves. Christine Korsgaard maintains that the ‘reflective structure of human consciousness’ gives us a necessary distance from our desires and impulses. But the claim is ambiguous, and right only in a sense which does not help the Kantian. In the sense in which it is right, it means only that one can stand back from a particular desire or impulse, and accept or reject its pressure on one. Certainly we can do this, in the light of other desires and concerns. What is not thereby given is that we can do it from a standpoint independent of any desire or concern: independent of a desire for our own good, or for the happiness of humanity, or respect for this or that, or the myriad of other passions that make up our individual profiles of concern and care.

All moral theories devolve to util. Mill 63 writes
John Stuart Mill (Member of Parliament, godfather of Bertrand Russell). Utilitarianism. 1863.
To inquire how far the bad effects of this deficiency have been mitigated in practice, or to what extent the moral beliefs of mankind have been vitiated or made uncertain by the absence of any distinct recognition of an ultimate standard, would imply a complete survey and criticism, of past and present ethical doctrine. It would, however, be easy to show that whatever steadiness or consistency these moral beliefs have, attained, has been mainly due to the tacit influence of a standard not recognised. Although the non-existence of an acknowledged first principle has made ethics not so much a guide as a consecration of men’s people’s actual sentiments, still, as men’s sentiments, both of favour and of aversion, are greatly influenced by what they suppose to be the effects of things upon their happiness, the principle of utility, or as Bentham latterly called it, the greatest happiness principle, has had a large share in forming the moral doctrines even of those who most scornfully reject its authority. Nor is there any school of thought which refuses to admit that the influence of actions on happiness is a most material and even predominant consideration in many of the details of morals, however unwilling to acknowledge it as the fundamental principle of morality, and the source of moral obligation. I might go much further, and say that to all those a priori moralists who deem it necessary to argue at all, utilitarian arguments are is indispensable. 

The ultimate human good is happiness. Darwish 09
“Rethinking Utilitarianism,” Bahaa Darwish (Qatar University). Teaching Ethics 10 (1):87-109 (2009). http://www.uvu.edu/ethics/seac/Darwish20-20Rethinking20Utilitarianism.pdf
Let’s start with knowledge. It is clear that those who value knowledge for its own sake (for instance, highly motivated professionals) find pleasure in both the pursuit and attainment of knowledge, however  exhausted they become in either case. So, granted that knowledge, for  them, is a value that has intrinsic worth in itself, and is thus sought for  itself, because it is a value that yields their pleasure or happiness. The same can be said about the other values. Let’s take autonomy in the sense expressed  by Hooker as “control over one’s own life” as another example. Here one  needs to say no more than that the mere fact that people seek autonomy  explains the satisfaction or the pleasure autonomy brings. Those who  value autonomy, thus seek it for itself, cannot feel happy when their decisions are not in their hands, or when they do not have control over their  own life. In short, they cannot be happy otherwise. Moore, who explicitly differs from the classical utilitarians in holding that pleasure is not the  sole good,  20   says that “the most valuable things… are pleasures of human  intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects,”  21   which seems to mean  that such things are valued for  the pleasures and the enjoyment they  bring. These examples clearly show that though these values have intrinsic worth, they bring or constitute our pleasure.  

Happiness is objectively good. Sidgwick 01
The Methods of Ethics. Henry Sidgwick (utilitarian). Sixth Edition. 1901.
A similar view may be plausibly taken of many rules prescribing what are sometimes called " duties to oneself " : it may be said that they are given on the assumption that a man regards his own Happiness as an ultimate end : that if any one should be so exceptional as to disregard it, he does not come within their scope : in short, that the ' ought ' in such formula^ is still implicitly relative to an ojotioncd end. It does not, however, seem to me that this account of the matter is exhaustive. We do not all look with simple indifference on a man who declines to take the right means to attain his own happiness, on no other ground than that he does not care about happiness. Most men would regard such a refusal as irrational, with a certain disapprobation; they would thus implicitly assent to Butler's statement that "interest, one's own happiness, is a manifest obligation." In other words, they would think that a man ought to care for his own happiness. The word ' ought ' thus used is no longer relative : happiness now appears as an ultimate end, the pursuit of which at least within the limits imposed by other duties appears to be prescribed by reason ' categorically,' as Kant would say, i.e. without any tacit assumption of a still ulterior end. And it has been widely held by even orthodox moralists that all morality rests ultimately on the basis of " reasonable self-love " ; " i.e. that its rules are ultimately binding on any important part of duty or virtue in general. Common moral opinion recognises and inculcates other fundamental rules e.g. those of Justice, Good Faith, Veracity which, in its ordinary judgments on particular cases, it is inclined to treat as binding without qualification and without regard to ulterior consequences. And, in the ordinary form of the Intuitional view of Ethics, the " categorical " prescription of such rules is maintained explicitly and definitely, as a result of philosophical reflection : and the realisation of Virtue in act at least in the case of the virtues just mentioned is held to consist in strict and unswerving conformity to such rules. On the other hand it is contended by many Utilitarians that all the rules of conduct which men prescribe to one another as moral rules are really though in part unconsciously prescribed as means to the general happiness of mankind, or of the whole aggregate of sentient beings ; and it is still more widely held by Utilitarian thinkers that such rules, however they may originate, are only valid so far as their observance is conducive to the general happiness. This contention I shall hereafter examine with due care. Here I wish only to point out that, if the duty of aiming at the general happiness is thus taken to include all other duties, as subordinate applications of it, we seem to be again led to the notion of Happiness as an ultimate end categorically pre- scribed, only it is now General Happiness and not the private happiness of any individual. 

Philosophical consensus is that simplicity, consistency, and explanatory depth are epistemic priorities.  Setiya 10
Kieran Setiya, “Does Moral Theory Corrupt Youth?” PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS?, VOL. 38, NO. 1, SPRING 2010. University of Pittsburgh.
While there are variations within the family of moral theorists, as for instance in their conception of moral intuitions and the nature and degree of deference owed to them—matters to be examined shortly—they share an epistemic commitment to theoretical virtues of simplicity, power, consistency, and explanatory depth. The aspiration of moral thought, for moral theorists, is the construction of a relatively simple consistent body of moral principles on the basis of which we can justify a wide range of verdicts about particular cases. “Justify” may but need not mean “deduce”: it is a matter of explaining why certain verdicts or subsidiary principles are correct, and an answer to the question “why?” does not always take the form of a valid proof. Explanatory depth in moral theory is measured by the extent to which it provides such justi?cations. Even though the principles that justify are no different in kind from the principles and verdicts justi?ed, in that they are further moral claims, and even though justi?cations must come to an end, the point at which they do so can be more or less super?cial. It counts in favor of a moral theory, other things being equal, that its purported justi?cations are deep.

Util is most simple, consistent, and broad – even critics agree. Setiya 10
Kieran Setiya, “Does Moral Theory Corrupt Youth?” PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS?, VOL. 38, NO. 1, SPRING 2010. University of Pittsburgh.
In what follows, I use the term “coherence” as shorthand for the theoretical virtues described above, passing over differences in the weight assigned to each of them by different moral theorists. In the limiting case, a theorist might give very 207minimal weight to simplicity or power, accepting complex explanations without attempting to extend them into novel ground. 6 Still, even theorists of this kind try to avoid gratuitous complexity. More commonly, appeals to simplicity and power are allowed to put pressure on our intuitive beliefs. We could illustrate this phenomenon with various examples, of which I give three. The ?rst is both simple and familiar: even critics act-of utilitarianism often concede that its elegance and scope are attractive, that they are reasons to accept it even if, on balance, the cost to moral intuition is too high. The second example is more complicated: debates about the allegedly paradoxical character of “agent-centered restrictions”—roughly, moral principles that forbid us from acting in certain ways even to prevent more actions of the very same kind—rest on the apparent  dif?culty of assimilating these restrictions to a coherent system of principles. What is the rationale for prohibiting action of a certain kind if not to minimize its occurrence, which agent-centered restrictions perversely rule out? Disputes about this question, even those which stress the force of moral intuition, typically give weight to considerations of explanatory power. Finally, a less familiar example: in proposing an account of right action as action motivated by moral virtue, Michael Slote (2001, 28) argues, on grounds of simplicity or theoretical uni?cation, that benevolence is the only virtue there is. His argument is meant to provide defeasible support for the reduction of other putative virtues, like justice or courage, to “good or virtuous motivation involving benevolence or caring” (Slote 2001, 38). If this seems odd to you, as it does to me, you should ask how it differs from claims about the appeal of act-utilitarianism that many are given to accept.

Tournament: Sunvite | Round: 3 | Opponent: Lake Highland NN | Judge: Rodrigo Quirch
Plan: Developing countries in Africa should prioritize environmental protection over resource extraction. I reserve the right to clarify, so no theory violations until he checks in cross-ex. No legal violations link because affirming means amending the laws to make the aff world consistent with them.

Contention 1 is African Wars

Prioritizing environmental protection over resource extraction is key to solving African wars.
UNEP 9 writes
United Nations Environment Programme. “From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment.” 2009. http://www.unep.org/pdf/pcdmb_policy_01.pdf
Since 1990 at least eighteen violent conflicts have been fuelled by the exploitation of natural resources. In fact, recent research suggests that over the last sixty years at least forty percent of all intrastate conflicts have a link to natural resources. Civil wars such as those in Liberia, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo have centred on “high-value” resources like timber, diamonds, gold, minerals and oil. Other conflicts, including those in Darfur and the Middle East, have involved control of scarce resources such as fertile land and water. As the global population continues to rise, and the demand for resources continues to grow, there is significant potential for conflicts over natural resources to intensify in the coming decades. In addition, the potential consequences of climate change for water availability, food security, prevalence of disease, coastal boundaries, and population distribution may aggravate existing tensions and generate new conflicts. Environmental factors are rarely, if ever, the sole cause of violent conflict. Ethnicity, adverse economic conditions, low levels of international trade and conflict in neighbouring countries are all significant drivers of violence. However, the exploitation of natural resources and related environmental stresses can be implicated in all phases of the conflict cycle, from contributing to the outbreak and perpetuation of violence to undermining prospects for peace. In addition, the environment can itself fall victim to conflict, as direct and indirect environmental damage, coupled with the collapse of institutions, can lead to environmental risks that threaten people’s health, livelihoods and security. Because the way that natural resources and the environment are governed has a determining influence on peace and security, these issues can also contribute to a relapse into conflict if they are not properly managed in post-conflict situations. Indeed, preliminary findings from a retrospective analysis of intrastate conflicts over the past sixty years indicate that conflicts associated with natural resources are twice as likely to relapse into conflict in the first five years. Nevertheless, fewer than a quarter of peace negotiations aiming to resolve conflicts linked to natural resources have addressed resource management mechanisms. The recognition that environmental issues can contribute to violent conflict underscores their potential significance as pathways for cooperation, transformation and the consolidation of peace in war-torn societies. Natural resources and the environment can contribute to peacebuilding through economic development and the generation of employment, while cooperation over the management of shared natural resources provides new opportunities for peacebuilding. These factors, however, must be taken into consideration from the outset. Indeed, deferred action or poor choices made early on are easily “locked in,” establishing unsustainable trajectories of recovery that can undermine the fragile foundations of peace. Integrating environment and natural resources into peacebuilding is no longer an option – it is a security imperative. The establishment of the UN Peacebuilding Commission provides an important chance to address environmental risks and capitalize on potential opportunities in a more consistent and coherent way. In this context, UNEP recommends that the UN Peacebuilding Commission and the wider international community consider the following key recommendations for integrating environment and natural resource issues into peacebuilding interventions and conflict prevention: 1. Further develop UN capacities for early warning and early action: The UN system needs to strengthen its capacity to deliver early warning and early action in countries that are vulnerable to conflicts over natural resources and environmental issues. At the same time, the effective governance of natural resources and the environment should be viewed as an investment in conflict prevention. 2. Improve oversight and protection of natural resources during conflicts: The international community needs to increase oversight of “high-value” resources in international trade in order to minimize the potential for these resources to finance conflict. International sanctions should be the primary instrument dedicated to stopping the trade in conflict resources and the UN should require Member States to act against sanctions violators. At the same time, new legal instruments are required to protect natural resources and environmental services during violent conflict. 3. Address natural resources and the environment as part of the peacemaking and peacekeeping process: During peace mediation processes, wealth-sharing is one of the fundamental issues that can “make or break” a peace agreement. In most cases, this includes the sharing of natural resources, including minerals, timber, land and water. It is therefore critical that parties to a peace mediation process are given sufficient technical information and training to make informed decisions on the sustainable use of natural resources. Subsequent peacekeeping operations need to be aligned with national efforts to improve natural resource and environmental governance. 4. Include natural resources and environmental issues into integrated peacebuilding strategies: The UN often undertakes post-conflict operations with little or no prior knowledge of what natural resources exist in the affected country, or of what role they may have played in fuelling conflict. In many cases it is years into an intervention before the management of natural resources receives sufficient attention. A failure to respond to the environmental and natural resource needs of the population can complicate the task of fostering peace and even contribute to conflict relapse. 5. Carefully harness natural resources for economic recovery: Natural resources can only help strengthen the post-war economy and contribute to economic recovery if they are managed well. The international community should be prepared to help national authorities manage the extraction process and revenues in ways that do not increase risk of further conflict, or are unsustainable in the longer term. This must go hand in hand with ensuring accountability, transparency, and environmental sustainability in their management. 6. Capitalize on the potential for environmental cooperation to contribute to peacebuilding: Every state needs to use and protect vital natural resources such as forests, water, fertile land, energy and biodiversity. Environmental issues can thus serve as an effective platform or catalyst for enhancing dialogue, building confidence, exploiting shared interests and broadening cooperation between divided groups, as well as between states.

Scenario 1 is Terrorism

Oil is exacerbating South Sudan conflict now, risking civil war.
Doki and Straziuso 13 write
Charlton Doki and Jason Straziuso (staff writers). “South Sudan conflict spreading ‘rapidly.’” Associated Press. December 21st, 2013. http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/africa/9543459/South-Sudan-conflict-spreading-rapidly
Armed rebels are said to be in control of some of South Sudan's oil fields, raising questions of how long the country's oil will flow and whether Sudan could enter the conflict. President Salva Kiir implored his country to turn away from ethnic violence and met on Friday (local time) with foreign ministers from neighbouring states, including Kenya and Ethiopia, who flew into Juba, the capital, to help calm tensions after a week of ethnic strife that is estimated to have killed hundreds. Kiir did not speak publicly, but the government's Twitter feed attributed this quote to him: "Those who may want to take the law into their hands, the long arm of the government will get them." Fighting continued to spread on Friday in two states, Unity - an oil area - and Jonglei, as armed groups opposed to the nation's military emerged, said a South Sudan expert communicating with combatants and UN officials in strife-torn regions outside the capital. "We've seen the conflict expand quite rapidly and quite dramatically in recent days. We've seen the emergence of different armed groups under different commands, and we've seen the former vice president say he's not interested in talks that don't end in Salva Kiir stepping down," said Casie Copeland, South Sudan analyst for the International Crisis Group. She added that the arrival of regional foreign ministers in Juba "is genuinely a good thing." Armed opposition groups appeared to be in control of some oil fields in Unity state, she said. South Sudan's oil fields have historically been a target for rebel movements. "The potential for oil wealth to exacerbate the current power struggle should not be underestimated," said Emma Vickers of Global Witness, a London-based group that investigates and campaigns to prevent natural resource related conflict. "If rebel forces were to capture the oil fields, they could effectively hold the government to ransom." The United Nations said on Friday that 35,000 people continue to seek refuge at UN bases in three locations across the country, including 20,000 at two bases in the capital. The US Embassy had a fifth emergency evacuation flight on Friday to move Americans out of the country. British, German and Dutch planes were also scheduled to fly out. Hundreds of foreigners, including aid workers, have hurriedly left South Sudan this week at the urging of foreign embassies concerned about the possibility of out-of-control violence. Forty-five US troops were dispatched to Juba earlier this week to protect US citizens and property. A top UN official in the country, Toby Lanzer, said Friday that "difficulties" continued in Jonglei state, including the province capital, Bor, where a top military commander loyal to Machar defected from the army this week, taking his troops with him. South Sudan gets nearly 99 per cent of its government budget from oil revenues. The country reportedly earned US$1.3 billion in oil sales in just five months this year, Global Witness said. South Sudan, the world's newest country, peacefully broke away from Sudan in 2011 after decades of war and years of negotiations that former US President George W Bush invested heavily in. The south's oil flows north through Sudan's pipelines, and a rebel takeover of southern oil fields could invite Sudan into the conflict. . Ethnic violence broke out among South Sudan's presidential guard late on Sunday night, and fighting spread across the country over the next several days, leading to fears of a civil war between ethnic groups. Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, earlier this week said an attempted coup had triggered the violence, and the blame was placed on fired Vice President Riek Machar, an ethnic Nuer. But officials have since said a fight between Dinka and Nuer members of the presidential guard triggered the violence. Machar's ouster from the country's No. 2 political position earlier this year had stoked ethnic tensions. 

South Sudan civil war increases terrorism.
All Africa 13 writes
AllAfrica.com. “South Sudan Fighting Endangers Many.” Press Release from the Office of Rep. Chris Smith, US Congress. December 24th, 2013. http://allafrica.com/stories/201312240126.html
Washington, DC — The expanding fighting in the Republic of South Sudan has killed more than 500 people in recent days and injured four U.S. military personnel who were evacuating Americans and other foreigners from the country. The conflict endangers not only citizens of that country but threatens to negatively impact the country’s neighbors and the international community, said Congressman Chris Smith (N.J.-04), Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations. “Already more than 500 people are reported dead,” said Smith. “More could be killed or injured, and not only in South Sudan—the conflict may spread, threatening people in neighboring countries. The escalating fighting in South Sudan could likely lead to more terrorist activities in an already-volatile region. The Administration’s call for a Christmas season cease-fire must be augmented by intense diplomacy with both sides.” South Sudan, the world’s newest nation, borders countries already troubled with terrorist activity by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and various Islamic radical and other militia groups in the Central African Republic, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Analysts fear that a South Sudan distracted and divided by civil war would provide an easier operating ground for terrorist groups. The LRA terrorist group, notorious for kidnapping children and forcing them to serve as child soldiers, still operates in the region and poses a danger to the lives of civilians in all four countries. Meanwhile, Islamic radicals have infiltrated countries in the region, most notably Somalia, but also Ethiopia and even Uganda. An unstable South Sudan will only further empower them by providing the kind of chaos in which the radicals thrive. The entire Sahel region of north-central Africa has been targeted, with Mali having been torn apart by their violent activities and nations such as Niger, Chad and Central African Republic continuing to be adversely affected by their militant and terroristic actions. 

Africa resource extraction independently fuels al Qaeda influence and Africa is key.
Dehez 5 writes
Dustin, spokesmen on Defense of the CDU/CSU in the German parliament, Senior Research Fellow at the Düsseldorf Institute for Foreign and Security Policy and the Institute's Director for North-East African Studies, research focuses on the Horn of Africa, Military in Africa) “Why Africa matters: Terrorism in Africa - the forgotten continent once more?” World Security Network Foundation Dec 14
One of the reasons why Africa deserves international attention is actually the war on terror. For international terrorist networks Africa is a main target; it serves as a safe haven and provides an effective financial basis with its large networks of informal economies. Africa has furthermore slowly emerged as one of the key strategic fields of international resources. The oil in the Gulf of Guinea is of major interest to the United States and Europe alike. The U.S. currently imports some 16 of its total oil imports from the African continent, Nigeria being one of its five most important oil suppliers. During the next four or five years these figures will rise substantially to some 25. Its not only oil that is driving the interests of nations and corporations, its also other raw materials like coltan for relatively new industrial products, like mobile phones. The rising importance of African resources for the United States and Europe is particularly worrying as Africa had become what some have called the “underbelly for transnational terrorism”.2 Largely unnoticed major parts of Africa have been the scene for Islamisation since the late 1970s. It is this mixture of strategic resources, Islamisation, and state weakness that makes Africa so an inviting target for terrorism and terrorist networks. Terrorism in Africa The fact that terrorism has emerged as one of the most dangerous threats to the West was by no means a surprise. Back in 1995 the NATO Secretary General Willy Claes warned: The threat by fundamental Islam in Africa has to be taken seriously. “Islamic militancy has emerged as perhaps the single gravest threat to the NATO alliance and to Western Security.”3 In sub-Saharan Africa Islam has advanced significantly in the last couple of years. Some analysts fear that Niger may break up; into a Muslim dominated North and a Christian dominated South. Ethiopia, Nigeria and Senegal also have strong Muslim minorities.4 Some analysts go as far as claiming that there are already centres of Islam in Africa, considering the tropical zone along the Gulf of Guinea, the Sudanese Nile region and the East African coastal strip as such centres of Islam.5 There are strong Muslim minorities in Mocambique, Uganda, the Central African Republic (CAR), Liberia, Burkina, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Cameroon and Côte d'Ivoire. In some other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa Islam is already a majority religion: Djibouti, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Somalia.6 In Nigeria for instance some twelve provinces introduced the Shari’a as basic law and Osama bin Laden called it one of the countries he wanted to “liberate”. Somalia serves a safe haven for terrorist groups like Al-Itihaad al-Islamyia, which is linked to Al-Qaeda. This particular terrorist cell is held responsible for the attacks on U.S. soldiers during the U.N. mission Restore Hope, which left 18 U.S. soldiers dead and about 75 wounded.8 Islam is one index of identity, alongside ethnicity and regional loyalties and so far African Islam has been relatively moderate. But as David McCormack recently pointed out, African Islam is slowly turning into Islamism in Africa.9 In West Africa one of the major reasons for the instability of the coastal strip and its countries like Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Côte d'Ivoire, and Liberia is the divison into a Christian dominated South and a Muslim dominated North. More aggressive interpretations of Islam are promoted by Saudi Arabia and Iran, through building of mosques, financial support for the hajj and the provision of education. The presence of the Muslim World League and the World Assembly of Muslim Youths in East Africa has had a radicalising influence on the local population.10 The threat by fundamentalist Islam in Africa has to be taken seriously. Three years before 9/11, Africa was targeted by Al-Qaeda. The attacks on the U.S. embassies in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi caused 224 casualties, including 12 Americans. Since 1996 the number of international terrorist incidents in Africa increased dramatically. While in 1996 eleven incidents had been reported, the number exploded to fifty-five incidents in 2000.11 Although Africa is comparatively less effected by international terrorism (although it experienced some of the bloodiest attacks)12 that does not indicate that it deserves less attention. Quite on the contrary, it should be one of the major focuses in the struggle against terrorism. The core problems the international community has to face on the African continent are: ungoverned parts of Africa, especially in failed states, which often serve as safe haven for terrorists and other states that serve as transit hubs to the Middle East, like Kenya, conditions of conflict that may lead to more alienation from traditional identities and thus providing breeding ground for more radical forms of Islam, that nearly 40 of Africa's total population are already Muslim, while a more fundamentalist version of Islam is promoted with financial backing from Saudi Arabia and Iran, that widespread guerilla warfare might turn into urban terrorism,13 that informal economic structures might serve as an ideal environment to money laundering,14 and finally that Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs), donors, and other western institutions might provide an easy and inviting target for international terrorism.15 Given this background one might wonder, why Africa did not experience more terrorist attacks in the past.16 The main reason is that failing states provide a suitable environment for sub-national terrorism. But sub-national terrorism does not count as international terrorism, that has, per defintionem, to affect more than one country.17 While weak and failed states with their lack of territorial control make it easier for opposition movements or potential terrorist organisations to seize power. Groups that do not have the ability to control territory – as is the case in most countries in the Middle East – tend to terrorist strategies. But as long as these opposition groups maintain territorial areas of control they do not tend to terrorist attacks; they prefer what some analysts label guerilla warfare.18 Guerilla warfare is by no means less brutal than other forms of terrorism, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone proved that their guerilla warfare is indeed yet another form of terrorism. The African Union's regional instrument to counter terrorism is the Algiers Convention on the Prevention and Combating of Terrorism established in 1999.19 It defines terrorism as a form of international crime: a result of the fact that Africa serves as a suitable and ideal environment to finance terror. African states realised back to two years before 9/11 that terrorism exploits the differences in governance, porous borders, and illegal and informal trade networks.20After the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon the United Nations Security Council adopted resolution 1373.21 This resolution was binding and called for the suppression of the recruitment, financing and supply of terrorist networks (although many African governments committed themselves to the war on terror, they lack the means to effectively do so). In the same resolution the United Nations Security Council was aware that one of the major problems is the connection between terrorism and international organised crime. This especially concerned Africa, where drugs and arms trafficking and informal economic structures are prelevant.22 Strategic Resources and International Terrorism Africa with its huge networks of informal economy is furthermore a suitable environment for terrorist groups to finance themselvs. There are rumours that Al-Qaeda profited from the informal economic structures in Africa. Although there is not yet enough evidence, many analysts think its plausible that Al-Qaeda was involved in the diamonds trade in Sierra Leone and in gems trafficking in Tanzania, thus prolonging tensions and conflicts.23 Some observers even argue that Al-Qaeda owned up to nearly 15 vessels for any kind of transport, using Somalia as an operational basis. Additionally there are also reports that Al-Qaeda was involved in Gold smuggling from Pakistan to Sudan.24 What makes Africa so attractive and vulnerable to terrorists and international crime is its resources. Especially in West Africa and in the Gulf of Guinea are vast amounts of oil. Gold, iron ore, bauxite, diamonds, and uranium attract not only big western companies but also illegal and informal entrepreneurs. In Central Africa gold, iron, oil, diamonds do the same; coltan is also available, which is especially important for those industries producing mobile phones and other electronic equipment.25 As the United States want to increase the African part of their oil supplies, more attention will be drawn to Nigeria, Chad, Congo (Brazzaville), Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Sao Tomé e Principe.26 Some 25 of overall U.S. oil imports will come from Africa within the next four or five years.27 But the security sector in Africa is weak and on-shore as well as off-shore oil production is a very inviting target, especially in Nigeria. In the past mineral resources played a key role in financing civil war and different militias. Illegal diamond trade was a major source to finance the war between the Angolan government and the UNITA.28 The instability in the Democratic Reublic of Congo is largely due to the attractiveness of a vast amount of mineral resources in the region. Their illegal exploitation is a central way of financing for different milita groups in the whole country. One central precondition of illegal expoliatiation are porous borders. The smuggling of diamonds and other raw materials across the borders in central Africa is a key obstacle to freedom and peace in the region. As long as illegal trade is that simple providing stability in the region will be very difficult even for democratic states; and missions to provide stability in the region are designated to fail, as attacks on MONUC soldiers in the province of Ituri in early 2005 showed. It therefore must be of a key priority to Europeans and Americans alike to maintain more control over Africa's economy and to promote more border control by the African state authorities. A Change in Policies? After 9/11 the United States reviewed its foreign and development policy. One basic conclusion was that despite all international aid and financial injections most development countries in Africa simply did not experience development. The National Security Strategy set up in 2002 was the first attempt to counter that challenge. No development in development countries however did not suggest that development aid was futile, but rather that development aid had to be conducted in a different way. The new National Security Strategy marked the first time, when the United States began to take the threat of failed and weak states serious. The U.S. tried to tackle the issue and committed itself to more development aid but at the same time made it part of their National Security Agenda. Development policy since has a goal: Improving security for the United States and their allies. It was no longer a senseless expenditure to prove the selflessness of Western nations but was turned into an important mean of foreign and security affairs and thereby giving it a much higher priority in overall political affairs. However until now this change has only been rhetoric. State failure and state weakness in Africa is still a widespread problem. Somalia is an outstanding case in this regard. It experienced a military coup d’etat in the early postcolonial period, was an ally to both the Soviet Union and the United States, entered a bloody civil war, followed by international intervention and withdrawal and the secession of a major part of the country, of what is now called Somaliland. But renewed efforts by the African Union and the regional body, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) go without significant support of the United States. State failure is an imminent threat in other African countries as well, as in Nigeria and Eritrea.29 There is a whole volatile region from Liberia to Nigeria in the Gulf of Guinea where state failure is a common threat, thus preparing a potential breeding ground for terrorism in the medium future. But despite the rising significance of these regions for their natural resources initiatives to promote peace, stability and democracy have been limited. Although after 9/11 the United States released a new doctrine– the U.S. now considers Kenya, Nigeria, Sudan and Ethiopia as key countries of their interest in Africa – in the very same doctrine the United States stated that no U.S. troops will be dispatched to the African continent in peacekeeping missions.30 The same goes for the G8 countries: Although they have recognised that “Sustained and better co-ordinated support for the African Peace and Security Architecture and for post-conflict is required”31, they have not yet allocated the necessary financial support nor have they increased their diplomatic activity. 

Terrorism is the most likely existential threat. Rhodes 9
RICHARD RHODES He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard and MIT, and currently he is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Rhodes is the author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), which won the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award. It was the first of four volumes he has written on the history of the nuclear age. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995), Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (2007), and The Twilight of the Bombs (forthcoming in autumn 2010) are the others. Reducing the nuclear threat: The argument for public safety 14 DECEMBER 2009
The response was very different among nuclear and national security experts when Indiana Republican Sen. Richard Lugar surveyed PDF them in 2005.
This group of 85 experts judged that the possibility of a WMD attack against a city or other target somewhere in the world is real and increasing over time. The median estimate of the risk of a nuclear attack somewhere in the world by 2010 was 10 percent. The risk of an attack by 2015 doubled to 20 percent median. There was strong, though not universal, agreement that a nuclear attack is more likely to be carried out by a terrorist organization than by a government. The group was split 45 to 55 percent on whether terrorists were more likely to obtain an intact working nuclear weapon or manufacture one after obtaining weapon-grade nuclear material. "The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is not just a security problem," Lugar wrote in the report's introduction. "It is the economic dilemma and the moral challenge of the current age. On September 11, 2001, the world witnessed the destructive potential of international terrorism. But the September 11 attacks do not come close to approximating the destruction that would be unleashed by a nuclear weapon. Weapons of mass destruction have made it possible for a small nation, or even a sub-national group, to kill as many innocent people in a day as national armies killed in months of fighting during World War II. "The bottom line is this," Lugar concluded: "For the foreseeable future, the United States and other nations will face an existential threat from the intersection of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction." It's paradoxical that a diminished threat of a superpower nuclear exchange should somehow have resulted in a world where the danger of at least a single nuclear explosion in a major city has increased (and that city is as likely, or likelier, to be Moscow as it is to be Washington or New York). We tend to think that a terrorist nuclear attack would lead us to drive for the elimination of nuclear weapons. I think the opposite case is at least equally likely: A terrorist nuclear attack would almost certainly be followed by a retaliatory nuclear strike on whatever country we believed to be sheltering the perpetrators. That response would surely initiatinge a new round of nuclear armament and rearmament in the name of deterrence, however illogical. Think of how much 9/11 frightened us; think of how desperate our leaders were to prevent any further such attacks; think of the fact that we invaded and occupied a country, Iraq, that had nothing to do with those attacks in the name of sending a message. 

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Scenario 2 is AIDS

Studies confirm. Resource extraction causes African war and poverty.
Hoeffler 8 writes
Anke Hoeffler (from the Center for the Study of African Economics, Oxford University). “Dealing with the Consequences of Violent Conflicts in Africa.” 2008.
Within Figure 1 the number of wars in Africa is highlighted. The trend of rising prevalence throughout the Cold War and a decrease thereafter is similar for African countries. There are two peaks in the African series, 1991/1992 with eight and 1989 with nine wars. Since then the number of wars has fallen to two in 2006. If one takes into consideration that only about 12 percent of the global population live in Africa1 , it seems that Africa has experienced more violent conflict than other continents. African wars have also lasted longer, on average they lasted about eight years while the global average is about six and a half years.2   The question why Africa has seen more wars has been examined by a number of scholars. Colonial history and proxy wars throughout the Cold War are often at the core of the argument. Most of this amounts to an African ‘exceptionalism’, in other words Africa’s troubled past is Africa specific and cannot be analysed in the same way as wars in other parts  1 Based on population data for 2000, data source: WDI 2007, author’s calculation. 2 Data source: Uppsala/PRIO Armed Conflict Data Set, author’s calculation. of the world. However, a global statistical analysis of the onset of civil wars suggests that Africa has experienced more civil wars mainly because the economic circumstances, low income, low growth and high dependence on natural resources, have made war feasible (Collier and Hoeffler, 2002). Taking these factors into consideration Africa has not experienced more wars than the continent’s characteristics would predict. In addition the wars in Africa have also resulted in making the continent poorer and preventing development in many countries. This cycle of poverty and war has been described as a ‘conflict trap’ (see for example Collier, 2007). If colonial and Cold War history are the main causes of this trap there is not much hope for the future since we cannot change history. If on the other hand economic factors are important determinants of conflict risk (Fearon and Laitin, 2003, Collier and Hoeffler, 2004a, Collier, Hoeffler and Rohner, 2007) there is hope that the future will not look like the past. Since the 1990s Africa has seen a reduction in the prevalence of civil war and countries with long and devastating civil wars are now at peace. Angola, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Rwanda are such examples.  Countries suffer from many different consequences of civil war. Wars kill people in many different ways: civilians and soldiers are killed in combat, people die because there is a higher prevalence of preventable communicable diseases and during wars people are killed due to increased violent crime. Wars force mass migration. Post-war economies are in a worse shape than before the war and far from bringing an improvement to the political system, in general post-war societies are less democratic (Collier and Hoeffler, 2007a). Countries with a violent past also face a high risk of renewed conflict, about 40 percent of countries experience a new civil war within a decade (Collier, Hoeffler and Söderbom, 2008). Dealing with the consequences of war is not only a humanitarian imperative but dealing with the economic and political consequences is also important because it decreases the risk of the civil war breaking out again. Dealing with the consequences of civil wars is our chance of ‘breaking the conflict trap’. 

African war and poverty cause AIDS spread.
Hoeffler 8 writes
Anke Hoeffler (from the Center for the Study of African Economics, Oxford University). “Dealing with the Consequences of Violent Conflicts in Africa.” 2008.
One disease that affects Africa disproportionately is HIV/AIDS. Buvé, Bishikwabo-Nsarhaza and Mutangadura (2002) provide an overview of the spread and effect of HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa.4 By the end of 2001 the HIV prevalence rate in adults in the region was estimated at 8.4 percent. Estimated prevalence rates for other regions were much lower, the Caribbean region has the second highest prevalence rate of 2.2 percent and all other regions have prevalence rates of less than 1 percent. The discussion of why Africa is more severely affected than any other region focuses on two explanations: war and poverty. Wars are conducive to the rapid spread of HIV. Soldiers are facing the risk of losing their lives and weigh up the risk of contracting HIV by stressful situations and dangers related to war. Civilians are often subjected to human rights abuses, including sexual violence. In Rwanda in 1995 the prevalence of HIV in pregnant women from rural areas was 24 percent which was attributed to rape during the genocide. Some women find themselves in abject poverty that may lead them to use commercial sex to survive. In general displacement during war weakens social cohesion and relationships which may lead to promiscuity and commercial sex. Poverty is also cited as a reason for the high prevalence rates. Sexual behaviour patterns are more risky when people are poor. Poverty also seems to increase the gender imbalance. Although women are more at risk of contracting HIV it seems that they cannot demand condom use from their partners. Buvé, Bishikwabo-Nsarhaza and Mutangadura (2002) conclude that populations in many part of Africa are becoming trapped in a vicious HIV-poverty cycle. HIV/AIDS leads to high mortality rates among the young and economically productive, thus leading to further impoverishment. Until the problem of economic development is tackled and socio-economic circumstances for young people change, it is difficult to persuade them to adapt their sexual behaviour to secure their future. In addition to physical diseases war leaves people traumatised. Most of the victims of civil war are civilians and they are subjected to or witness war-related traumatic events such as shootings, killings, rape, torture and loss of family members. A random household survey of residents and internally displaced persons in Freetown in 1999 showed that almost every respondent was exposed to conflict. Fifty percent of the respondents lost someone to whom they were very close, 41 percent actually witnessed their death. Torture was witnessed by 54 percent, executions by 41 percent, amputations by 32 percent and public rape by 14 percent. The witnessing of such events can lead to serious psychological stress. The health services in post-conflict countries are poorly functioning. Medical staff are facing huge problems of physical diseases they have no or very little resources to address post-traumatic stress disorder.5 War ruins a country’s economy, including the health sector. Devastated by the war the post-conflict government has got insufficient revenues to spend on the health sector which faces enormous demand. At the same time donors are often reluctant to fund improvements in the health sector before they can be certain that peace can be sustained. Wakabi (2007) provides an overview of Burundi’s health sector post-conflict. Maternal mortality rates are at 1,000 per 100,000 live births and infant mortality at 114 per live births. These rates are among the highest in Africa. Other diseases, such as malaria, diarrhoea, pneumonia and HIV/AIDS have claimed 300,000 lives since 2003. Less than half the population have access to safe drinking water. 

AIDS spread in Africa goes global, risking nuclear civil wars.  
USAID 6 writes
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), ACTION TODAY, A FOUNDATION FOR TOMORROW: SECOND ANNUAL REPORT TO CONGRESS ON PEPFAR, 2006, p. http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/60950.pdf
As Atwood notes, HIV is much more than a social or developmental threat — it is a concrete threat to stability and security. Nelson Mandela, in a speech before the World Economic Forum in 1997, hinted of the potential for conflict and instability to emerge when a people realize that their government is unable to meet their needs when he noted that, “South Africans are beginning to understand the cost of HIV/AIDS … observing with growing dismay its impact on the efforts of our new democracy to achieve the goals of reconstruction and development.” In addition to eroding the link between people and their government, infectious epidemics have a more pernicious ability to pit people against each other within societies. As the resource base begins to shrink, competition among surviving groups for access to and control over the levers of power and influence increases. This competition often results in social and political fragmentation and ethnic, racial or socio-economic conflict. David Gordon of the United States National Intelligence Council, one of the first policy analysts to recognize the connection between health and security, noted in his ground-breaking 2000 “National Intelligence Estimate” the potential for intra-state conflict resulting from epidemic disease. Gordon noted that, “the severe social and economic impact of infectious diseases … and the infiltration of these diseases into ruling political and military elites and middle classes of developing countries are likely to intensify the struggle for political power to control scarce state resources.” The global nature of the threat HIV/AIDS represents becomes immediately clear when we pause to remember how interconnected and mobile we all are. Richard Holbrooke, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, warned members of the Security Council in 2000 that, “if it HIV/AIDS is not dealt with, it will clearly wreck the economies of Africa and the subcontinent. AIDS will spread; you can’t draw a wall around Africa and commit continental triage.” Indeed, HIV is spreading daily — hourly — reaching epidemic levels of infection throughout the developing world. While currently concentrated primarily in sub- Saharan Africa, the disease is already emerging as a security threat in other countries, including some thought of as economically well-developed. Peter Piot, director of UNAIDS, has commented: “We have every reason to assume that the epidemic in Southeast Asia will soon be just as widespread as it is in Africa, and that East Africa’s experience — a slowdown of its economy — will be replicated in Eastern Europe and the developing countries of Asia and Latin America.” UNAIDS, the main advocate for global action on the epidemic, is tasked with preventing transmission of HIV, providing care and support, reducing the vulnerability of individuals and communities to HIV/AIDS, and alleviating the impact of the epidemic. A recent study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies identified five nations as the “Next Wave,” ripe for an explosion of HIV infection rates rivaling those of sub-Saharan Africa: Nigeria and Ethiopia (together representing over a quarter of that already ravaged continent’s population), Russia, China and India. The last three nations, which collectively contain close to a third of the Earth’s population, are all nuclear-armed countries beset with ethnic and social strife and burdened by economic and political pressures that threaten to erupt into internal conflict. The addition of HIV/AIDS, with its demonstrated ability to disrupt society at all levels, will only increase the potential for regional conflict and instability.

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Scenario 3 is the Congo River Basin

African resource wars cause destruction of the Congo River Basin.
Sites 4 writes
Kevin Sites (Conflict Studies Expert @ World Wildlife Fund). "Conflict in the Green Heart of Africa." http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/where_we_work/congo_basin_forests/problems/conflict/
In the Congo River Basin, conflict has been a recurring nuisance for the development of several countries. Natural resources play a significant role in feeding conflicts, many of which involve securing control and access to natural resources. Communities and forests pay the price. Wars in the Congo River Basin involve groups of combatants that are always on the move, gaining temporary control over towns and settlements, but who are almost never able to subdue the surrounding areas.  The constant movement of militias and the unpredictability of their actions have a devastating impact on human lives.  Estimates of war-related deaths in eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) range from 3.3 million to 4.5 million. To avoid conflict, refugees and displaced rural populations avoid major roads and move into the forests and protected areas, where they are less likely to encounter soldiers and rebels.1  How natural resources fuel war Natural resources such as timber, as well as other commodities such as diamonds, all play roles in motivating these wars because of their characteristics (accessibility, weight-to-value ratios and the ability to loot, conceal and sell them later)2.  In the DRC, rebel groups, government troops and their foreign allies have used the country’s diamonds, gold, timber, ivory, coltan and cobalt to pay for their war-related expenses.3  Perpetuating conflict… A United Nations panel of experts on the illegal exploitation of natural resources of the DRC recently stated that "illegal exploitation remains one of the main sources of funding for groups involved in perpetuating conflict".  According to the panel, neighbouring countries such as Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi and Zimbabwe have all helped themselves to the DRC's gold, diamonds, timber and coltan; systematically stripping factories, farms and banks in the process.4  What are the impacts of conflict? A breakdown in the rule of law and other controls during and immediately after conflicts.  Mass movements of people and human rights abuses.  Decline in agricultural production, trade and food availability as conditions become unsafe to carry out such activities and transport is disrupted.  Increased dependence on wild natural resources (such as bushmeat) for survival when other livelihoods are made impossible: As refugees seek means to sustain themselves away from their home areas and hold their families together, they often invade poorly protected areas in search of housing materials, bush foods and products that they can sell.  Protected areas also often contain more wildlife than other areas and can thus provide a ready supply of meat for rebels or small armies.  Moreover, when it becomes too dangerous for the staff in protected zones to continue patrols, the frequency of illegal mining of gold and diamonds, hunting for ivory and bushmeat, felling of timber and agricultural encroachment often increases.5

The Congo River Basin is extremely vital to the environment, and its destruction ensures extinction.
Boukongou 5 writes
Jean Didier Boukongou (Professor at Central African Catholic University, Cameroon). “The Protection of the Congo basin: A Multilateral Challenge.” 2005. www.african-geopolitics.org/show.aspx?ArticleId=3836#_ftn1
This is not a revival of “good savage” ideology which is useful for the “civilized world,” but it is simply a matter of understanding that the forests of the Congo basin is the entire humanity’s precious “lung.” Beyond the traditional quarrels1 of the sycophants of environmental protection and the relevance of advocated public programs2, one notices the intensification of multilateral initiatives, which try to respond both to the stakes of protecting the Congo basin as well as to the challenge of preserving life on Earth. Nevertheless, even the advocates of sustainable development cannot forget that “bio-humanity” is a naturally complex vision of society. As far as one can go back in time, and on the principle of the divine message, man will always return to nature. This implies an organization and structuralization of spaces, which cannot be strictly limited to the protection of the fauna and flora. Consequently, international concern about the ecosystem of the Congo basin is neither the result of sudden philanthropy, nor the outcome of triumphant environmentalism. The region is a dynamic geopolitical area, where forests are a source of oil and conflicts. I think that it is fundamental not to separate the issue of forests from the less media-covered question of the rich oil and mineral resources in the hinterland and maritime zones of Central Africa. The predators are in the forests and on the political scene, and they are searching for democratic legitimacy3. Thus, I’m calling for combining the “green” debate with the “political” debate in order to promote better governance of the geopolitical basin of the Congo, give rise to concrete and multilateral awareness of the problems of Central Africa which aren’t only environmental but also political. It is a matter of emphasizing political and civil implications, on one hand, and legal instruments and institutional frameworks, on the other, in order to assure a better progressive transition in Central Africa from “Black governance” (in other words, oil-based governance) to “green governance”. A Geopolitical Basin The geographic entity called the “Congo basin” includes territories extending from the end of the Sahelian areas of Chad and Sudan and the edge of the plains along the Zambezi. The voluntarily extensive vision of this basin challenges the thesis that this forest area is confined to narrow post-colonial zones in Central African States, which doesn’t challenge the principles of international law relating to boundaries. This basin is a vast forest area that covers approximately 2,300,000 sq. km., or 26 percent of the world’s rainforests4. The forests are well known for their exceptional biodiversity and contribute, in an important way, to countering the greenhouse effect by absorbing the carbon dioxide which is emitted into the atmosphere5. This is the natural environment of more than half of the world’s wildlife and vegetable species. Some consider it the compost of numerous diseases, such as the terrible Ebola fever.The Congo basin regroups several countries (Cameroon, the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Burundi, Rwanda, Angola and Chad), which form (with Sao Tome e Principe) the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS). On the one side, one may identify the Congo basin area itself to the ECCAS, and on the other, consider it as the logical construction of a regional area where sustainable governance of ecosystems should contribute, via the mobility of people, to economic links and ecological flows, to restoring and strengthening peace. One must remember that during the Millenium Summit held in New York in 2000 the Heads of State and Government declared their intention not to spare “any effort in order to assure that the entire humanity, and especially our children and grandchildren, will not live on a planet irreversibly degraded by human activities whose resources can no longer meet their requirements6.” This appeal is in line with the dynamics of building the concept of sustainable development, advocated by the UICN7 in 1980 and resumed in the Bundtland report in 19878. States have to cooperate in a spirit of world partnership in order to preserve, protect and restore the integrity of the ecosystem. Of course, according to Resolutions 1803 (XVII) and 1514 (XV)9 of the United Nations General Assembly and Principle 2 of the Rio Declaration, “States have the sovereign right to exploit their own resources according to their environment and development policies.” In other words, they can implement their proper environmental policies. But these actions do not produce concrete effects. The degradation of the environment and certain natural or industrial disasters directly affect the Earth as a continuous portion of space. It is only on this scale that adequate initiatives can be taken in order to obtain durable and adequate results.  International CooperationActually, environmental protection has become one of the most important issues in contemporary world relations. International cooperation is necessary to protect humanity’s common heritage. No country can do it on its own, because this is a common responsibility. Therefore, the quality of air and the atmosphere depends on world coordination in many domains. The protection of the quality of the waters of a boundary river, or of a lake common to several countries, requires international coordination and cooperation. As the International Court of Justice reminded in the case Gabcikovo-Nagymaros: “During ages, man did not stop influencing nature for economic and other purposes. In the past it often accomplished this without taking into account the effects on the environment. Due to the new horizons opened by science and the increasing awareness of the risks of these interventions for humanity – whether it is for the present or for future generations – new standards and requirements have been put in place, enounced in a substantial number of instruments over the past two decades. These new standards must be taken in consideration and these new requirements appropriately appreciated, not only when States envisage launching new activities, but also when they pursue projects that have already been launched. The concept of sustainable development expresses the need for reconciling economic development and environmental protection10.” Since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 the pressure exercised by NGOs and the international financial backers prompted governments to adjust their institutional frameworks and to work out coherent policies, in particular environmental action plans relating to the national, regional and international dimension. At the sub-regional level, such initiatives led to setting up mechanisms and processes such as the Conference of Ministers for Forests of Central Africa (COMIFAC)11, Conference on Central Africa’s Moist Forest Ecosystem (CEFDHAC) and the Africa Forest Law Enforcement and Governance Process (AFLEG)12. Organized in March, 1999 in Yaoundé, the summit of leaders of Central African States on the conservation and sustainable management of rain forests confirmed the Rio commitment to lead common policies for sustainable management of forested ecosystems. This regional dynamics led to the elaboration and adoption of a “convergence plan” for the Congo basin, whose main objective is the “conservation, restoration, development and durable use of biologic resources in the framework of management adapted to the social and cultural economic development of populations and the protection of the global environment13.” This convergence plan covers a ten-year period (2004-2013 and will globally cost an estimated US$ 1.5 billion, or 840 billion CFA Francs14. Regional dynamics led to international participation in efforts to respond to this universal concern, and the Johannesburg summit on sustainable development in September 200215 paved the way to a multilateral initiative: the United States of America and South Africa inspired, along with many other actors, the idea of a multilateral partnership for the protection of forests in the Congo basin. Considered as the left lung of the earth, these forests are a vegetable and wildlife reserve inextricably bound to human life16. According to Walter Kansteiner, they are a “world treasure,” a “world lung” necessary for preserving biologic diversity.

Infinite values don’t paralyze calculation. Lauwers and Vallentyne 04 write
Luc Lauwers (Center for Economic Studies, K.U.Leuven) Peter Vallentyne (Department of Philosophy, University of Missouri-Columbia). “Infinite Utilitarianism: More Is Always Better*.” Economics and Philosophy 20 (2004): 307-330.
Zero Independence holds that the ranking of two worlds is determined by the pattern of differences in local value. This, we claim, is highly plausible in the context of finitely additive value theories. In the finite case, finitely additive value theories always satisfy Zero Independence. Although they typically get expressed as judging a world as at least as good as another (having the same locations) if and only if its total value is at least as great, the reference to the total is not needed. An equivalent statement is that one world as at least as good as the second if and only if the sum of the differences in value is at least as great as zero. Only the pattern of differences matters. Even in the infinite case, Zero Independence is “partially” implied by Sum and Loose Pareto. Sum ranks U as at least as good as V if and only if Sum ranks U-V as at least as good as its zero world. Moreover, if two worlds U and V satisfy the antecedent clause of Loose Pareto, then Loose Pareto ranks U as at least as good as V if and only if it ranks U-V above its zero world. Zero Independence is thus, we claim, highly plausible for finitely additive theories.
Zero Independence is equivalent to a condition in social choice theory known as Translation Scale Invariance when it is restricted to the case where locations are the same.  This latter condition holds that interlocational comparisons of zero points are irrelevant to the ranking of worlds. The zero point for value at each location, that is, can be set independently of how it is set for other locations (although, of course, when comparing two worlds, the zero point used for a given location in one world must also be used for that location in the second world). For example, if a location has values of 10 in world U and 5 in world V, both measured on the basis of some particular zero point (the same for both worlds), those values could be changed to 7 and 2 (by making the zero point 3 units higher for that location), and this, according to Translation Scale Invariance, would not alter how the two worlds are ranked.
Zero Independence is equivalent to Translation Scale Invariance (restricted to the case where locations are the same), since any change in the zero points for the locations in worlds U and V can, for some W, be represented by U+W and V+W. (For example, if there are just two people, and the first person’s zero point is decreased by two units, and the second person’s zero point is increased by one unit, then the resulting two representations of the value of U and V are simply U+W and V+W, where W is 2,-1.) Zero Independence and Translation Scale Invariance thus each hold that U ? V if and only if U+W ? V+W.
Translation Scale Invariance (and hence, Zero Independence) is highly plausible for finitely additive value theories. (Recall that our goal is to defend a particular extension of finite additivity, not to defend finite additivity against non-additive theories.) If there is no natural zero point that separates positive from negative value (if there is just more or less value with no natural separating point), then any particular zero point is arbitrary (not representing a real aspect of value). In this case, interlocational comparisons of zero-points are uncontroversially irrelevant. If, on the other hand, there is a natural zero for value, it is still plausible for finitely additive value theories to hold that it is irrelevant for ranking worlds. What matters (e.g., from a utilitarian perspective), as argued above, are the differences in value at each location between two worlds—not the absolute level of values at locations. No interlocational comparison of zero points is needed for this purpose.

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Cost-benefit analysis is feasible. Ignore any util calc indicts. Hardin 90 writes
Hardin, Russell (Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences @ NYU). May 1990. Morality within the Limits of Reason. University Of Chicago Press. pp. 4. ISBN 978-0226316208.
One of the cuter charges against utilitarianism is that it is irrational in the following sense. If I take the time to calculate the consequences of various courses of action before me, then I will ipso facto have chosen the course of action to take, namely, to sit and calculate, because while I am calculating the other courses of action will cease to be open to me. It should embarrass philosophers that they have ever taken this objection seriously. Parallel considerations in other realms are dismissed with eminently good sense. Lord Devlin notes, “If the reasonable man ‘worked to rule’ by perusing to the point of comprehension every form he was handed, the commercial and administrative life of the country would creep to a standstill.” James March and Herbert Simon escape the quandary of unending calculation by noting that often we satisfice, we do not maximize: we stop calculating and considering when we find a merely adequate choice of action. When, in principle, one cannot know what is the best choice, one can nevertheless be sure that sitting and calculating is not the best choice. But, one may ask, How do you know that another ten minutes of calculation would not have produced a better choice? And one can only answer, You do not. At some point the quarrel begins to sound adolescent. It is ironic that the point of the quarrel is almost never at issue in practice (as Devlin implies, we are almost all too reasonable in practice to bring the world to a standstill) but only in the principled discussions of academics.

Underview – Environment impacts come first.
Environmentalism precedes ethics. 3 reasons.

A. Western ethics can’t escape the tragedy of the commons. Elliott 3 writes
Herschel Elliott (Penn State Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering
Fate And Control Of Pollutants In Soils And Water), “Tributes to Garrett Hardin The Revolutionary Import of Garrett Hardin's Work.” The Garrett Hardin Society. July, 2003. http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/tributes/tr_elliot_2003jul.html
As I pointed out in A General Statement of Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons (Vol.18, No.6, July, 1997 of Population and Environment), Hardin's essay is not making factual claims. It is not recommending any specific moral theory. Rather it is a thought experiment. And the purpose of a thought experiment is to bring to light the contradictions within a system of thought. Hardin's thought experiment proves that if people do what is right or good according to established moral principles, they can in fact cause great harm; they can destroy the commons - the environment - that sustains moral life. In this seminal essay, Hardin proves the tragic error implicit both in individualism and in the philanthropic, human-centered ethics which people in the Western nations commonly assume to be the final moral truth.
The fact that a tragedy of the commons is possible proves that a factual state-of-affairs can refute a moral theory. In effect, it proves the falsity of the methodological assumptions on which Western ethics is founded, namely, that reason and valid a priori arguments and/or the infallible revelations of God justify moral laws and principles. Consequently a priori reasoning and non-empirical arguments do not suffice to justify moral beliefs. Knowledge of moral laws and principles is not a priori knowledge. It cannot be certain; it cannot be universal in scope; it cannot be invariant under changing circumstances. Henceforth the rules of correct moral conduct must pass environmental and factual tests. Nature can veto moral beliefs and theories.

B. Ecology is a prerequisite to ethics. Elliott 3 writes
Herschel Elliott (Penn State Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering
Fate And Control Of Pollutants In Soils And Water), “Tributes to Garrett Hardin The Revolutionary Import of Garrett Hardin's Work.” The Garrett Hardin Society. July, 2003. http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/tributes/tr_elliot_2003jul.html

An ethics capable of being practiced in a finite world must be founded on the moral obligation never to cause the environment to break down. This obligation stipulates a necessary condition for moral life. It can be stated as the environmental principle, namely, to preserve the endurance and the resilience of the earth's system of living things. This principle cannot be justified by appeals to reason or the infallible revelations of God. It cannot be justified by valid inferences from human-centered definitions and universal moral principles. And it is not subject to scholarly rebuttal by professionals in moral philosophy. Rather, it is a factual necessity. Any ethics which denies the environmental principle is doomed to fail. People who live by an ethics which denies it simply die out. In effect, the moral certainty of the environmental principle is proved by the absurdity of its denial.

C. A priori reason fails; it’s premised on a speciesist bias. Elliott 3 writes
Herschel Elliott (Penn State Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering
Fate And Control Of Pollutants In Soils And Water), “Tributes to Garrett Hardin The Revolutionary Import of Garrett Hardin's Work.” The Garrett Hardin Society. July, 2003. http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/tributes/tr_elliot_2003jul.html
A priori thinking in ethics is a kind of species narcissism. It is an instance of the hubris of rationalism to believe that the human mind creates or determines moral reality. By contrast, the contingent character of empirical knowledge requires that human beings be humble before the facts. People can only rearrange events in the world according to the laws and limits of nature. The empirical constraints that apply to engineering and architecture apply to ethics as well. People can only make ethical proposals; nature either tolerates or denies their proposals.

But, if ethics comes first, adopt a parliamentary model to account for moral uncertainty. This entails minimizing existential risks.
Bostrom 9 writes
Bostrom, Nick (Existentialist of a different sort). “Moral uncertainty – toward a solution?” 1 January 2009. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/moral-uncertainty-towards-a-solution.html
It seems people are overconfident about their moral beliefs.  But how should one reason and act if one acknowledges that one is uncertain about morality – not just applied ethics but fundamental moral issues? if you don't know which moral theory is correct?
It doesn't seem you can’t simply plug your uncertainty into expected utility decision theory and crank the wheel; because many moral theories state that you should not always maximize expected utility.
Even if we limit consideration to consequentialist theories, it still is hard to see how to combine them in the standard decision theoretic framework.  For example, suppose you give X probability to total utilitarianism and (100-X) to average utilitarianism.  Now an action might add 5 utils to total happiness and decrease average happiness by 2 utils.  (This could happen, e.g. if you create a new happy person that is less happy than the people who already existed.)  Now what do you do, for different values of X?
The problem gets even more complicated if we consider not only consequentialist theories but also deontological theories, contractarian theories, virtue ethics, etc.  We might even throw various meta-ethical theories into the stew: error theory, relativism, etc.
I'm working on a paper on this together with my colleague Toby Ord.  We have some arguments against a few possible "solutions" that we think don't work.  On the positive side we have some tricks that work for a few special cases.  But beyond that, the best we have managed so far is a kind of metaphor, which we don't think is literally and exactly correct, and it is a bit under-determined, but it seems to get things roughly right and it might point in the right direction:
The Parliamentary Model.  Suppose that you have a set of mutually exclusive moral theories, and that you assign each of these some probability.  Now imagine that each of these theories gets to send some number of delegates to The Parliament.  The number of delegates each theory gets to send is proportional to the probability of the theory.  Then the delegates bargain with one another for support on various issues; and the Parliament reaches a decision by the delegates voting.  What you should do is act according to the decisions of this imaginary Parliament.  (Actually, we use an extra trick here: we imagine that the delegates act as if the Parliament's decision were a stochastic variable such that the probability of the Parliament taking action A is proportional to the fraction of votes for A.  This has the effect of eliminating the artificial 50 threshold that otherwise gives a majority bloc absolute power.  Yet – unbeknownst to the delegates – the Parliament always takes whatever action got the most votes: this way we avoid paying the cost of the randomization!)
The idea here is that moral theories get more influence the more probable they are; yet even a relatively weak theory can still get its way on some issues that the theory think are extremely important by sacrificing its influence on other issues that other theories deem more important.  For example, suppose you assign 10 probability to total utilitarianism and 90 to moral egoism (just to illustrate the principle).  Then the Parliament would mostly take actions that maximize egoistic satisfaction; however it would make some concessions to utilitarianism on issues that utilitarianism thinks is especially important.  In this example, the person might donate some portion of their income to existential risks research and otherwise live completely selfishly.
I think there might be wisdom in this model.  It avoids the dangerous and unstable extremism that would result from letting one’s current favorite moral theory completely dictate action, while still allowing the aggressive pursuit of some non-commonsensical high-leverage strategies so long as they don’t infringe too much on what other major moral theories deem centrally important.

Ignore permissibility and presumption because moral uncertainty means we’ll always have a non-zero credence in the existence of morality, so there’s always a risk of offense in favor of one action.

Tournament: Lexington RR | Round: 7 | Opponent: Hockaday CN | Judge: Monisha Reginald, Peter Chocolate
“Developing countries” is defined as countries with low per capita GDP, as per the World Bank. 

Plan: Developing countries in Africa should prioritize environmental protection over resource extraction. I reserve the right to clarify, so no theory violations until she checks in cross-ex. No legal violations link because affirming means amending the laws to make the aff world consistent with them.

Neg burden is to defend a competitive post-fiat policy. Offense-defense is key to fairness and real world education. This means ignore skepticism.
Nelson 8 writes
Adam F. Nelson, J.D.1. Towards a Comprehensive Theory of Lincoln-Douglas Debate. 2008.
And the truth-statement model of the resolution imposes an absolute burden of proof on the affirmative: if the resolution is a truth-claim, and the af?rmative has the burden of proving that claim, in so far as intuitively we tend to disbelieve truthclaims until we are persuaded otherwise, the af?rmative has the burden to prove that statement absolutely true. Indeed, one of the most common theory arguments in LD is conditionality, which argues it is inappropriate for the af?rmative to claim only proving the truth of part of the resolution is suf?cient to earn the ballot. Such a model of the resolution also gives the negative access to a range of strategies that many students, coaches, and judges ?nd ridiculous or even irrelevant to evaluation of the resolution.
If the negative need only prevent the affirmative from proving the truth of the resolution, it is logically sufficient to negate to deny our ability to make truth-statements or to prove normative morality does not exist or to deny the reliability of human senses or reason. Yet, even though most coaches appear to endorse the truth-statement model of the resolution, they complain about the use of such negative strategies, even though they are a necessary consequence of that model. And, moreover, such strategies seem fundamentally unfair, as they provide the negative with functionally in?nite ground, as there are a nearly in?nite variety of such skeptical objections to normative claims, while continuing to bind the af?rmative to a much smaller range of options: advocacy of the resolution as a whole.
Instead, it seems much more reasonable to treat the resolution as a way to equitably divide ground: the affirmative advocating the desirability of a world in which people adhere to the value judgment implied by the resolution and the negative advocating the desirability of a world in which people adhere to a value judgment mutually exclusive to that implied by the resolution. By making the issue one of desirability of Under competing world-views rather than of truth, the affirmative gains access to increased flexibility regarding how he or she chooses to defend that world, while the negative retains equal flexibility while being denied access to those skeptical arguments indicted above. Our ability to make normative claims is irrelevant to a discussion of the desirability of making two such claims. Unless there is some significant harm in making such statements, some offensive reason to reject making them that can be avoided by an advocacy mutually exclusive with that of the affirmative such objections are not a reason the negative world is more desirable, and therefore not a reason to negate. Note this is precisely how things have been done in policy debate for some time: a team that runs a kritik is expected to offer some impact of the mindset they are indicting and some alternative that would solve for that impact. A team that simply argued some universal, unavoidable, problem was bad and therefore a reason to negate would not be very successful. It is about time LD started treating such arguments the same way.
Such a model of the resolution has additional benefits as well. First, it forces both debaters to offer offensive reasons to prefer their worldview, thereby further enforcing a parallel burden structure. This means debaters can no longer get away with arguing the resolution is by definition true of false. The “truth” of the particular vocabulary of the resolution is irrelevant to its desirability. Second, it is intuitive. When people evaluate the truth of ethical claims, they consider their implications in the real world. They ask themselves whether a world in which people live by that ethical rule is better than one in which they don’t. Such debates don’t happen solely in the abstract. We want to know how the various options affect us and the world we live in.

Aff gets RVIs on I meets and counter-interps because
(a) 1AR timeskew means I can’t cover theory and still have a fair shot on substance.
(b) no risk theory would give neg a free source of no risk offense which allows her to moot the AC.

The neg must defend one unconditional advocacy. Conditionality is bad because it makes the neg a moving target which kills 1AR strategy. She’ll kick it if I cover it and extend it if I undercover it, meaning I have no strategic options. Also, it’s unreciprocal because I can’t kick the AC.

Contention 1 is African Wars

Prioritizing environmental protection over resource extraction is key to solving African wars.
UNEP 9 writes
United Nations Environment Programme. “From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment.” 2009. http://www.unep.org/pdf/pcdmb_policy_01.pdf
Since 1990 at least eighteen violent conflicts have been fuelled by the exploitation of natural resources. In fact, recent research suggests that over the last sixty years at least forty percent of all intrastate conflicts have a link to natural resources. Civil wars such as those in Liberia, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo have centred on “high-value” resources like timber, diamonds, gold, minerals and oil. Other conflicts, including those in Darfur and the Middle East, have involved control of scarce resources such as fertile land and water. As the global population continues to rise, and the demand for resources continues to grow, there is significant potential for conflicts over natural resources to intensify in the coming decades. In addition, the potential consequences of climate change for water availability, food security, prevalence of disease, coastal boundaries, and population distribution may aggravate existing tensions and generate new conflicts. Environmental factors are rarely, if ever, the sole cause of violent conflict. Ethnicity, adverse economic conditions, low levels of international trade and conflict in neighbouring countries are all significant drivers of violence. However, the exploitation of natural resources and related environmental stresses can be implicated in all phases of the conflict cycle, from contributing to the outbreak and perpetuation of violence to undermining prospects for peace. In addition, the environment can itself fall victim to conflict, as direct and indirect environmental damage, coupled with the collapse of institutions, can lead to environmental risks that threaten people’s health, livelihoods and security. Because the way that natural resources and the environment are governed has a determining influence on peace and security, these issues can also contribute to a relapse into conflict if they are not properly managed in post-conflict situations. Indeed, preliminary findings from a retrospective analysis of intrastate conflicts over the past sixty years indicate that conflicts associated with natural resources are twice as likely to relapse into conflict in the first five years. Nevertheless, fewer than a quarter of peace negotiations aiming to resolve conflicts linked to natural resources have addressed resource management mechanisms. The recognition that environmental issues can contribute to violent conflict underscores their potential significance as pathways for cooperation, transformation and the consolidation of peace in war-torn societies. Natural resources and the environment can contribute to peacebuilding through economic development and the generation of employment, while cooperation over the management of shared natural resources provides new opportunities for peacebuilding. These factors, however, must be taken into consideration from the outset. Indeed, deferred action or poor choices made early on are easily “locked in,” establishing unsustainable trajectories of recovery that can undermine the fragile foundations of peace. Integrating environment and natural resources into peacebuilding is no longer an option – it is a security imperative. The establishment of the UN Peacebuilding Commission provides an important chance to address environmental risks and capitalize on potential opportunities in a more consistent and coherent way. In this context, UNEP recommends that the UN Peacebuilding Commission and the wider international community consider the following key recommendations for integrating environment and natural resource issues into peacebuilding interventions and conflict prevention: 1. Further develop UN capacities for early warning and early action: The UN system needs to strengthen its capacity to deliver early warning and early action in countries that are vulnerable to conflicts over natural resources and environmental issues. At the same time, the effective governance of natural resources and the environment should be viewed as an investment in conflict prevention. 2. Improve oversight and protection of natural resources during conflicts: The international community needs to increase oversight of “high-value” resources in international trade in order to minimize the potential for these resources to finance conflict. International sanctions should be the primary instrument dedicated to stopping the trade in conflict resources and the UN should require Member States to act against sanctions violators. At the same time, new legal instruments are required to protect natural resources and environmental services during violent conflict. 3. Address natural resources and the environment as part of the peacemaking and peacekeeping process: During peace mediation processes, wealth-sharing is one of the fundamental issues that can “make or break” a peace agreement. In most cases, this includes the sharing of natural resources, including minerals, timber, land and water. It is therefore critical that parties to a peace mediation process are given sufficient technical information and training to make informed decisions on the sustainable use of natural resources. Subsequent peacekeeping operations need to be aligned with national efforts to improve natural resource and environmental governance. 4. Include natural resources and environmental issues into integrated peacebuilding strategies: The UN often undertakes post-conflict operations with little or no prior knowledge of what natural resources exist in the affected country, or of what role they may have played in fuelling conflict. In many cases it is years into an intervention before the management of natural resources receives sufficient attention. A failure to respond to the environmental and natural resource needs of the population can complicate the task of fostering peace and even contribute to conflict relapse. 5. Carefully harness natural resources for economic recovery: Natural resources can only help strengthen the post-war economy and contribute to economic recovery if they are managed well. The international community should be prepared to help national authorities manage the extraction process and revenues in ways that do not increase risk of further conflict, or are unsustainable in the longer term. This must go hand in hand with ensuring accountability, transparency, and environmental sustainability in their management. 6. Capitalize on the potential for environmental cooperation to contribute to peacebuilding: Every state needs to use and protect vital natural resources such as forests, water, fertile land, energy and biodiversity. Environmental issues can thus serve as an effective platform or catalyst for enhancing dialogue, building confidence, exploiting shared interests and broadening cooperation between divided groups, as well as between states.

Scenario 1 is Growth

African civil wars kill growth and are worse than other wars. Hoeffler 8 writes
Anke Hoeffler (from the Center for the Study of African Economics, Oxford University). “Dealing with the Consequences of Violent Conflicts in Africa.” 2008.
Taking the national level first, one clear cost of civil war is a reduction in economic growth. Using a panel data estimate, one year of conflict reduces a country’s growth rate by 2.2 percent. Since, on average, each civil conflict lasts for about seven years, the economy will be 15 percent smaller at the end of the war than if the war had not taken place. During the post-war recovery, even though the economy on average grows at an annual rate of more than 1 percent above the norm, it will take roughly ten years to return to its pre-war growth rates (that is, 17 years after the conflict started). 21 years after the start of the original war, the GDP has returned to the level it would have achieved if no war had occurred. The total economic cost, expressed as a present value at the start of the war (using a 5 percent discount rate), is 105 percent of the GDP at that point. The welfare of a country’s population is further reduced because of increased military spending during and after the war. It is estimated that military spending increases by about 1.8 percent during the war, and only falls back by 0.5 percent once the conflict has ended. Assuming that this higher level of spending lasts for only ten years after the conflict, the additional cost (expressed again as present value when the conflict started) is 18 percent of GDP. In addition, conflict has a severe effect on human health. One way of summarising this effect is to express the cost in terms of Disability Affected Life Years (DALYs): a measure of the total number of people affected and the period for which their disability lasts. An average war causes an estimated 0.5 million DALYs each year. Assuming they decline smoothly to zero in the 21st year and discounting them at 5 percent as for the direct economic costs gives a figure of 5 million DALYs as the net present value of health costs when hostilities start. If each DALY is valued at $1,000 (roughly the per capita income in many at-risk countries), the economic cost of harm to human health in a typical war is around $5 billion. Regional Costs What are the effects at the regional level? Regression analysis suggests that the growth rate of neighbouring countries not directly involved in the conflict is reduced by 0.9 percent during the war. If they subsequently recover at the same rate as the conflict country, the additional cost (as a present value at the start of the conflict) is 43 percent of initial GDP. On average, each country has 2.7 neighbours, so the direct effect of a typical civil war on neighbouring countries is 115 percent of the initial GDP of one country: greater than the direct effect in the conflict country itself. There is also an effect on military spending in adjoining countries: a neighbourhood arms race often ensues. In the average case considered so far, a 1 percent rise in military expenditure in the country at war would increase the average spending of bordering countries by 0.23 percent. In a typical conflict, that means military spending will increase by 0.4 percent of GDP during the war, and by 0.3 percent during the post-conflict period: a total net present value of 4.3 percent of the country’s initial GDP. On average, there are 2.7 neighbouring countries; thus the total extra cost of the regional arms race is about 12 percent of one country’s GDP. Other costs which are too difficult to quantify are incurred both in the country at war and in the region as a whole, including forced migration and increased disease. With the proviso that the figures so far are therefore underestimated to some degree, the total benefit of averting a single “typical” civil war can be calculated. The various national and regional costs covered so far amount to 250 percent of initial GDP. The average GDP of conflict-affected low-income countries just prior to war is $19.7 billion. Therefore, the cost of a single war is around $49 billion. To this we must add $5 billion of health costs, giving a total cost of $54 billion for a single low-income country. Legacy Effect This is already a significant figure, but in addition there is the “conflict trap”: countries that have just experienced a civil war are more likely to have further conflict. Looking at the 21 countries in which wars started and ended in the period 1965-99, the risk of conflict over the five years before the war averaged 22.3 percent, but this rose to 38.6 percent post-war. Over the 15 year period needed for the risk to reach the pre-war level again, the additional discounted cost are estimated at $10.2 billion. Thus the total national and regional cost of a single war is more than $64 billion. There are additional, global impacts of civil wars, massive in scale but difficult to assign a cost to. For example three world scourges over the last 30 years have had civil conflicts as contributory factors: hard drug production, AIDS and international terrorism. Thus, since the global cost are not included in the $64 billion it should be treated as a conservative estimate. This cost calculation of about $64bn is based on global data. Is this estimate relevant for Africa? Africa’s economies are smaller and the average GDP figure is lower, hence the loss of GDP would be lower if only African countries were to be considered. On the other hand African wars are longer and caused more loss of life, thus increasing the cost of war. African countries also have on average more neighbours and thus an Africa specific estimate of the regional effects of war would be higher.

Resource extraction doesn’t benefit developing economies.
Singh and Bourgouin 13 write
Jewellord Nem Singh and France Bourgouin (editors of this book). “Resource Governance and Developmental States in the Global South.” Palgrave Macmillan. November 2013. http://www.palgrave.com/PDFs/9781137286789.pdf
Natural resource capital represents a particular type of capital. Most obviously, it is cyclically prone to windfall booms and busts. Historically, resource commodities have been subjected to external shocks and sharp flux in commodity prices, as was seen with the severe contraction of demands for certain minerals in the wakes of the two World Wars and the Great Depression (Bulmer, 1994). With global market integration, commodity prices have increasingly become susceptible to speculation in the international minerals markets, which adversely affect the production processes (Webb, 1999). From both an economic as well as a policy viewpoint, extractive resources’ relative absence of value added together with their price volatility on world markets make them an unreliable source of income for national governments (Auty, 1993; Humphreys et al., 2007; Sachs and Warner, 1997, 2001). Moreover, booming resource sectors are believed to draw capital and labour away from a country’s manufacturing and agricultural sectors, thereby raising their production costs (Ross, 2001: 305) and leading to the appreciation of real exchange rates caused by the sharp rise in commodity exports, an observation referred to as the Dutch Disease . Hence, resource-led development is considered unlikely as booms fail to bring investments into the more stable and dynamic sectors of the economy, such as manufacturing, but instead, direct investment and factor inputs towards the resource sector. Similarly, the open access exploitation hypothesis suggests that not only does extraction under open access conditions generate few resource rents to be reinvested but it also leads to over-exploitation of natural capital in the long run, thus curbing the development potential of the resource sector. For others, unfavourable environmental conditions may directly inhibit the efficient generation of natural resource rents and sustainable returns through the reinvestment of rents into other productive assets, as well as indirectly through a long-lasting influence on patterns of political and legal institutional development (Auty, 2001, 1993; Barbier, 2005, 2003; Easterly and Levine, 2003). The observed inability of developing states to transform resource wealth into productive capital over past decades has become the central preoccupation of economists and political scientists alike, not to mention of scholars of development. The dominant view is that the revenues generated from natural capital are not comparable to income that can be reinvested as profits. Unlike in the productive sectors of the economy, windfall profits from extraction do not multiply and as the resources upon which they are based are de facto depletable, extractive industries are unsustainable over the long run (Humphreys et al., 2007; Karl, 2007 ). In this regard, the recent tendency of turning resource revenues into sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) that cannot be spent in the domestic economy has become the prescriptive response of the World Bank to reduce the deleterious effects of uncertainty in the resource sector. 

Scenario 2 is Terrorism

Oil is exacerbating South Sudan conflict now, risking civil war.
Doki and Straziuso 13 write
Charlton Doki and Jason Straziuso (staff writers). “South Sudan conflict spreading ‘rapidly.’” Associated Press. December 21st, 2013. http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/africa/9543459/South-Sudan-conflict-spreading-rapidly
Armed rebels are said to be in control of some of South Sudan's oil fields, raising questions of how long the country's oil will flow and whether Sudan could enter the conflict. President Salva Kiir implored his country to turn away from ethnic violence and met on Friday (local time) with foreign ministers from neighbouring states, including Kenya and Ethiopia, who flew into Juba, the capital, to help calm tensions after a week of ethnic strife that is estimated to have killed hundreds. Kiir did not speak publicly, but the government's Twitter feed attributed this quote to him: "Those who may want to take the law into their hands, the long arm of the government will get them." Fighting continued to spread on Friday in two states, Unity - an oil area - and Jonglei, as armed groups opposed to the nation's military emerged, said a South Sudan expert communicating with combatants and UN officials in strife-torn regions outside the capital. "We've seen the conflict expand quite rapidly and quite dramatically in recent days. We've seen the emergence of different armed groups under different commands, and we've seen the former vice president say he's not interested in talks that don't end in Salva Kiir stepping down," said Casie Copeland, South Sudan analyst for the International Crisis Group. She added that the arrival of regional foreign ministers in Juba "is genuinely a good thing." Armed opposition groups appeared to be in control of some oil fields in Unity state, she said. South Sudan's oil fields have historically been a target for rebel movements. "The potential for oil wealth to exacerbate the current power struggle should not be underestimated," said Emma Vickers of Global Witness, a London-based group that investigates and campaigns to prevent natural resource related conflict. "If rebel forces were to capture the oil fields, they could effectively hold the government to ransom." The United Nations said on Friday that 35,000 people continue to seek refuge at UN bases in three locations across the country, including 20,000 at two bases in the capital. The US Embassy had a fifth emergency evacuation flight on Friday to move Americans out of the country. British, German and Dutch planes were also scheduled to fly out. Hundreds of foreigners, including aid workers, have hurriedly left South Sudan this week at the urging of foreign embassies concerned about the possibility of out-of-control violence. Forty-five US troops were dispatched to Juba earlier this week to protect US citizens and property. A top UN official in the country, Toby Lanzer, said Friday that "difficulties" continued in Jonglei state, including the province capital, Bor, where a top military commander loyal to Machar defected from the army this week, taking his troops with him. South Sudan gets nearly 99 per cent of its government budget from oil revenues. The country reportedly earned US$1.3 billion in oil sales in just five months this year, Global Witness said. South Sudan, the world's newest country, peacefully broke away from Sudan in 2011 after decades of war and years of negotiations that former US President George W Bush invested heavily in. The south's oil flows north through Sudan's pipelines, and a rebel takeover of southern oil fields could invite Sudan into the conflict. . Ethnic violence broke out among South Sudan's presidential guard late on Sunday night, and fighting spread across the country over the next several days, leading to fears of a civil war between ethnic groups. Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, earlier this week said an attempted coup had triggered the violence, and the blame was placed on fired Vice President Riek Machar, an ethnic Nuer. But officials have since said a fight between Dinka and Nuer members of the presidential guard triggered the violence. Machar's ouster from the country's No. 2 political position earlier this year had stoked ethnic tensions. 

South Sudan civil war increases terrorism.
All Africa 13 writes
AllAfrica.com. “South Sudan Fighting Endangers Many.” Press Release from the Office of Rep. Chris Smith, US Congress. December 24th, 2013. http://allafrica.com/stories/201312240126.html
Washington, DC — The expanding fighting in the Republic of South Sudan has killed more than 500 people in recent days and injured four U.S. military personnel who were evacuating Americans and other foreigners from the country. The conflict endangers not only citizens of that country but threatens to negatively impact the country’s neighbors and the international community, said Congressman Chris Smith (N.J.-04), Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations. “Already more than 500 people are reported dead,” said Smith. “More could be killed or injured, and not only in South Sudan—the conflict may spread, threatening people in neighboring countries. The escalating fighting in South Sudan could likely lead to more terrorist activities in an already-volatile region. The Administration’s call for a Christmas season cease-fire must be augmented by intense diplomacy with both sides.” South Sudan, the world’s newest nation, borders countries already troubled with terrorist activity by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and various Islamic radical and other militia groups in the Central African Republic, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Analysts fear that a South Sudan distracted and divided by civil war would provide an easier operating ground for terrorist groups. The LRA terrorist group, notorious for kidnapping children and forcing them to serve as child soldiers, still operates in the region and poses a danger to the lives of civilians in all four countries. Meanwhile, Islamic radicals have infiltrated countries in the region, most notably Somalia, but also Ethiopia and even Uganda. An unstable South Sudan will only further empower them by providing the kind of chaos in which the radicals thrive. The entire Sahel region of north-central Africa has been targeted, with Mali having been torn apart by their violent activities and nations such as Niger, Chad and Central African Republic continuing to be adversely affected by their militant and terroristic actions. 

Africa resource extraction independently fuels al Qaeda influence and Africa is key.
Dehez 5 writes
Dustin, spokesmen on Defense of the CDU/CSU in the German parliament, Senior Research Fellow at the Düsseldorf Institute for Foreign and Security Policy and the Institute's Director for North-East African Studies, research focuses on the Horn of Africa, Military in Africa) “Why Africa matters: Terrorism in Africa - the forgotten continent once more?” World Security Network Foundation Dec 14
One of the reasons why Africa deserves international attention is actually the war on terror. For international terrorist networks Africa is a main target; it serves as a safe haven and provides an effective financial basis with its large networks of informal economies. Africa has furthermore slowly emerged as one of the key strategic fields of international resources. The oil in the Gulf of Guinea is of major interest to the United States and Europe alike. The U.S. currently imports some 16 of its total oil imports from the African continent, Nigeria being one of its five most important oil suppliers. During the next four or five years these figures will rise substantially to some 25. Its not only oil that is driving the interests of nations and corporations, its also other raw materials like coltan for relatively new industrial products, like mobile phones. The rising importance of African resources for the United States and Europe is particularly worrying as Africa had become what some have called the “underbelly for transnational terrorism”.2 Largely unnoticed major parts of Africa have been the scene for Islamisation since the late 1970s. It is this mixture of strategic resources, Islamisation, and state weakness that makes Africa so an inviting target for terrorism and terrorist networks. Terrorism in Africa The fact that terrorism has emerged as one of the most dangerous threats to the West was by no means a surprise. Back in 1995 the NATO Secretary General Willy Claes warned: The threat by fundamental Islam in Africa has to be taken seriously. “Islamic militancy has emerged as perhaps the single gravest threat to the NATO alliance and to Western Security.”3 In sub-Saharan Africa Islam has advanced significantly in the last couple of years. Some analysts fear that Niger may break up; into a Muslim dominated North and a Christian dominated South. Ethiopia, Nigeria and Senegal also have strong Muslim minorities.4 Some analysts go as far as claiming that there are already centres of Islam in Africa, considering the tropical zone along the Gulf of Guinea, the Sudanese Nile region and the East African coastal strip as such centres of Islam.5 There are strong Muslim minorities in Mocambique, Uganda, the Central African Republic (CAR), Liberia, Burkina, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Cameroon and Côte d'Ivoire. In some other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa Islam is already a majority religion: Djibouti, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Somalia.6 In Nigeria for instance some twelve provinces introduced the Shari’a as basic law and Osama bin Laden called it one of the countries he wanted to “liberate”. Somalia serves a safe haven for terrorist groups like Al-Itihaad al-Islamyia, which is linked to Al-Qaeda. This particular terrorist cell is held responsible for the attacks on U.S. soldiers during the U.N. mission Restore Hope, which left 18 U.S. soldiers dead and about 75 wounded.8 Islam is one index of identity, alongside ethnicity and regional loyalties and so far African Islam has been relatively moderate. But as David McCormack recently pointed out, African Islam is slowly turning into Islamism in Africa.9 In West Africa one of the major reasons for the instability of the coastal strip and its countries like Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Côte d'Ivoire, and Liberia is the divison into a Christian dominated South and a Muslim dominated North. More aggressive interpretations of Islam are promoted by Saudi Arabia and Iran, through building of mosques, financial support for the hajj and the provision of education. The presence of the Muslim World League and the World Assembly of Muslim Youths in East Africa has had a radicalising influence on the local population.10 The threat by fundamentalist Islam in Africa has to be taken seriously. Three years before 9/11, Africa was targeted by Al-Qaeda. The attacks on the U.S. embassies in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi caused 224 casualties, including 12 Americans. Since 1996 the number of international terrorist incidents in Africa increased dramatically. While in 1996 eleven incidents had been reported, the number exploded to fifty-five incidents in 2000.11 Although Africa is comparatively less effected by international terrorism (although it experienced some of the bloodiest attacks)12 that does not indicate that it deserves less attention. Quite on the contrary, it should be one of the major focuses in the struggle against terrorism. The core problems the international community has to face on the African continent are: ungoverned parts of Africa, especially in failed states, which often serve as safe haven for terrorists and other states that serve as transit hubs to the Middle East, like Kenya, conditions of conflict that may lead to more alienation from traditional identities and thus providing breeding ground for more radical forms of Islam, that nearly 40 of Africa's total population are already Muslim, while a more fundamentalist version of Islam is promoted with financial backing from Saudi Arabia and Iran, that widespread guerilla warfare might turn into urban terrorism,13 that informal economic structures might serve as an ideal environment to money laundering,14 and finally that Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs), donors, and other western institutions might provide an easy and inviting target for international terrorism.15 Given this background one might wonder, why Africa did not experience more terrorist attacks in the past.16 The main reason is that failing states provide a suitable environment for sub-national terrorism. But sub-national terrorism does not count as international terrorism, that has, per defintionem, to affect more than one country.17 While weak and failed states with their lack of territorial control make it easier for opposition movements or potential terrorist organisations to seize power. Groups that do not have the ability to control territory – as is the case in most countries in the Middle East – tend to terrorist strategies. But as long as these opposition groups maintain territorial areas of control they do not tend to terrorist attacks; they prefer what some analysts label guerilla warfare.18 Guerilla warfare is by no means less brutal than other forms of terrorism, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone proved that their guerilla warfare is indeed yet another form of terrorism. The African Union's regional instrument to counter terrorism is the Algiers Convention on the Prevention and Combating of Terrorism established in 1999.19 It defines terrorism as a form of international crime: a result of the fact that Africa serves as a suitable and ideal environment to finance terror. African states realised back to two years before 9/11 that terrorism exploits the differences in governance, porous borders, and illegal and informal trade networks.20After the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon the United Nations Security Council adopted resolution 1373.21 This resolution was binding and called for the suppression of the recruitment, financing and supply of terrorist networks (although many African governments committed themselves to the war on terror, they lack the means to effectively do so). In the same resolution the United Nations Security Council was aware that one of the major problems is the connection between terrorism and international organised crime. This especially concerned Africa, where drugs and arms trafficking and informal economic structures are prelevant.22 Strategic Resources and International Terrorism Africa with its huge networks of informal economy is furthermore a suitable environment for terrorist groups to finance themselvs. There are rumours that Al-Qaeda profited from the informal economic structures in Africa. Although there is not yet enough evidence, many analysts think its plausible that Al-Qaeda was involved in the diamonds trade in Sierra Leone and in gems trafficking in Tanzania, thus prolonging tensions and conflicts.23 Some observers even argue that Al-Qaeda owned up to nearly 15 vessels for any kind of transport, using Somalia as an operational basis. Additionally there are also reports that Al-Qaeda was involved in Gold smuggling from Pakistan to Sudan.24 What makes Africa so attractive and vulnerable to terrorists and international crime is its resources. Especially in West Africa and in the Gulf of Guinea are vast amounts of oil. Gold, iron ore, bauxite, diamonds, and uranium attract not only big western companies but also illegal and informal entrepreneurs. In Central Africa gold, iron, oil, diamonds do the same; coltan is also available, which is especially important for those industries producing mobile phones and other electronic equipment.25 As the United States want to increase the African part of their oil supplies, more attention will be drawn to Nigeria, Chad, Congo (Brazzaville), Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Sao Tomé e Principe.26 Some 25 of overall U.S. oil imports will come from Africa within the next four or five years.27 But the security sector in Africa is weak and on-shore as well as off-shore oil production is a very inviting target, especially in Nigeria. In the past mineral resources played a key role in financing civil war and different militias. Illegal diamond trade was a major source to finance the war between the Angolan government and the UNITA.28 The instability in the Democratic Reublic of Congo is largely due to the attractiveness of a vast amount of mineral resources in the region. Their illegal exploitation is a central way of financing for different milita groups in the whole country. One central precondition of illegal expoliatiation are porous borders. The smuggling of diamonds and other raw materials across the borders in central Africa is a key obstacle to freedom and peace in the region. As long as illegal trade is that simple providing stability in the region will be very difficult even for democratic states; and missions to provide stability in the region are designated to fail, as attacks on MONUC soldiers in the province of Ituri in early 2005 showed. It therefore must be of a key priority to Europeans and Americans alike to maintain more control over Africa's economy and to promote more border control by the African state authorities. A Change in Policies? After 9/11 the United States reviewed its foreign and development policy. One basic conclusion was that despite all international aid and financial injections most development countries in Africa simply did not experience development. The National Security Strategy set up in 2002 was the first attempt to counter that challenge. No development in development countries however did not suggest that development aid was futile, but rather that development aid had to be conducted in a different way. The new National Security Strategy marked the first time, when the United States began to take the threat of failed and weak states serious. The U.S. tried to tackle the issue and committed itself to more development aid but at the same time made it part of their National Security Agenda. Development policy since has a goal: Improving security for the United States and their allies. It was no longer a senseless expenditure to prove the selflessness of Western nations but was turned into an important mean of foreign and security affairs and thereby giving it a much higher priority in overall political affairs. However until now this change has only been rhetoric. State failure and state weakness in Africa is still a widespread problem. Somalia is an outstanding case in this regard. It experienced a military coup d’etat in the early postcolonial period, was an ally to both the Soviet Union and the United States, entered a bloody civil war, followed by international intervention and withdrawal and the secession of a major part of the country, of what is now called Somaliland. But renewed efforts by the African Union and the regional body, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) go without significant support of the United States. State failure is an imminent threat in other African countries as well, as in Nigeria and Eritrea.29 There is a whole volatile region from Liberia to Nigeria in the Gulf of Guinea where state failure is a common threat, thus preparing a potential breeding ground for terrorism in the medium future. But despite the rising significance of these regions for their natural resources initiatives to promote peace, stability and democracy have been limited. Although after 9/11 the United States released a new doctrine– the U.S. now considers Kenya, Nigeria, Sudan and Ethiopia as key countries of their interest in Africa – in the very same doctrine the United States stated that no U.S. troops will be dispatched to the African continent in peacekeeping missions.30 The same goes for the G8 countries: Although they have recognised that “Sustained and better co-ordinated support for the African Peace and Security Architecture and for post-conflict is required”31, they have not yet allocated the necessary financial support nor have they increased their diplomatic activity. 

Terrorism is the most likely existential threat. Rhodes 9
RICHARD RHODES He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard and MIT, and currently he is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Rhodes is the author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), which won the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award. It was the first of four volumes he has written on the history of the nuclear age. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995), Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (2007), and The Twilight of the Bombs (forthcoming in autumn 2010) are the others. Reducing the nuclear threat: The argument for public safety 14 DECEMBER 2009
The response was very different among nuclear and national security experts when Indiana Republican Sen. Richard Lugar surveyed PDF them in 2005.
This group of 85 experts judged that the possibility of a WMD attack against a city or other target somewhere in the world is real and increasing over time. The median estimate of the risk of a nuclear attack somewhere in the world by 2010 was 10 percent. The risk of an attack by 2015 doubled to 20 percent median. There was strong, though not universal, agreement that a nuclear attack is more likely to be carried out by a terrorist organization than by a government. The group was split 45 to 55 percent on whether terrorists were more likely to obtain an intact working nuclear weapon or manufacture one after obtaining weapon-grade nuclear material. "The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is not just a security problem," Lugar wrote in the report's introduction. "It is the economic dilemma and the moral challenge of the current age. On September 11, 2001, the world witnessed the destructive potential of international terrorism. But the September 11 attacks do not come close to approximating the destruction that would be unleashed by a nuclear weapon. Weapons of mass destruction have made it possible for a small nation, or even a sub-national group, to kill as many innocent people in a day as national armies killed in months of fighting during World War II. "The bottom line is this," Lugar concluded: "For the foreseeable future, the United States and other nations will face an existential threat from the intersection of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction." It's paradoxical that a diminished threat of a superpower nuclear exchange should somehow have resulted in a world where the danger of at least a single nuclear explosion in a major city has increased (and that city is as likely, or likelier, to be Moscow as it is to be Washington or New York). We tend to think that a terrorist nuclear attack would lead us to drive for the elimination of nuclear weapons. I think the opposite case is at least equally likely: A terrorist nuclear attack would almost certainly be followed by a retaliatory nuclear strike on whatever country we believed to be sheltering the perpetrators. That response would surely initiatinge a new round of nuclear armament and rearmament in the name of deterrence, however illogical. Think of how much 9/11 frightened us; think of how desperate our leaders were to prevent any further such attacks; think of the fact that we invaded and occupied a country, Iraq, that had nothing to do with those attacks in the name of sending a message. 

Ignore permissibility and presumption because moral uncertainty means we’ll always have a non-zero credence in the existence of morality, so there’s always a risk of offense in favor of one action.

The standard is maximizing happiness.

First, revisionary intuitionism is true and leads to util.
Yudkowsky 8 writes
Eliezer Yudkowsky (research fellow of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute; he also writes Harry Potter fan fiction). “The ‘Intuitions’ Behind ‘Utilitarianism.’” 28 January 2008. LessWrong. http://lesswrong.com/lw/n9/the_intuitions_behind_utilitarianism/
I haven't said much about metaethics - the nature of morality - because that has a forward dependency on a discussion of the Mind Projection Fallacy that I haven't gotten to yet. I used to be very confused about metaethics. After my confusion finally cleared up, I did a postmortem on my previous thoughts. I found that my object-level moral reasoning had been valuable and my meta-level moral reasoning had been worse than useless. And this appears to be a general syndrome - people do much better when discussing whether torture is good or bad than when they discuss the meaning of "good" and "bad". Thus, I deem it prudent to keep moral discussions on the object level wherever I possibly can. Occasionally people object to any discussion of morality on the grounds that morality doesn't exist, and in lieu of jumping over the forward dependency to explain that "exist" is not the right term to use here, I generally say, "But what do you do anyway?" and take the discussion back down to the object level. Paul Gowder, though, has pointed out that both the idea of choosing a googolplex dust specks in a googolplex eyes over 50 years of torture for one person, and the idea of "utilitarianism", depend on "intuition". He says I've argued that the two are not compatible, but charges me with failing to argue for the utilitarian intuitions that I appeal to. Now "intuition" is not how I would describe the computations that underlie human morality and distinguish us, as moralists, from an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness and/or a rock. But I am okay with using the word "intuition" as a term of art, bearing in mind that "intuition" in this sense is not to be contrasted to reason, but is, rather, the cognitive building block out of which both long verbal arguments and fast perceptual arguments are constructed. I see the project of morality as a project of renormalizing intuition. We have intuitions about things that seem desirable or undesirable, intuitions about actions that are right or wrong, intuitions about how to resolve conflicting intuitions, intuitions about how to systematize specific intuitions into general principles. Delete all the intuitions, and you aren't left with an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness, you're left with a rock. Keep all your specific intuitions and refuse to build upon the reflective ones, and you aren't left with an ideal philosopher of perfect spontaneity and genuineness, you're left with a grunting caveperson running in circles, due to cyclical preferences and similar inconsistencies. "Intuition", as a term of art, is not a curse word when it comes to morality - there is nothing else to argue from. Even modus ponens is an "intuition" in this sense - it's just that modus ponens still seems like a good idea after being formalized, reflected on, extrapolated out to see if it has sensible consequences, etcetera. So that is "intuition". However, Gowder did not say what he meant by "utilitarianism". Does utilitarianism say... That right actions are strictly determined by good consequences? That praiseworthy actions depend on justifiable expectations of good consequences? That probabilities of consequences should normatively be discounted by their probability, so that a 50 probability of something bad should weigh exactly half as much in our tradeoffs? That virtuous actions always correspond to maximizing expected utility under some utility function? That two harmful events are worse than one? That two independent occurrences of a harm (not to the same person, not interacting with each other) are exactly twice as bad as one? That for any two harms A and B, with A much worse than B, there exists some tiny probability such that gambling on this probability of A is preferable to a certainty of B? If you say that I advocate something, or that my argument depends on something, and that it is wrong, do please specify what this thingy is... anyway, I accept 3, 5, 6, and 7, but not 4; I am not sure about the phrasing of 1; and 2 is true, I guess, but phrased in a rather solipsistic and selfish fashion: you should not worry about being praiseworthy. Now, what are the "intuitions" upon which my "utilitarianism" depends? This is a deepish sort of topic, but I'll take a quick stab at it. First of all, it's not just that someone presented me with a list of statements like those above, and I decided which ones sounded "intuitive". Among other things, if you try to violate "utilitarianism", you run into paradoxes, contradictions, circular preferences, and other things that aren't symptoms of moral wrongness so much as moral incoherence. After you think about moral problems for a while, and also find new truths about the world, and even discover disturbing facts about how you yourself work, you often end up with different moral opinions than when you started out. This does not quite define moral progress, but it is how we experience moral progress. As part of my experienced moral progress, I've drawn a conceptual separation between questions of type Where should we go? and questions of type How should we get there? (Could that be what Gowder means by saying I'm "utilitarian"?) The question of where a road goes - where it leads - you can answer by traveling the road and finding out. If you have a false belief about where the road leads, this falsity can be destroyed by the truth in a very direct and straightforward manner. When it comes to wanting to go to a particular place, this want is not entirely immune from the destructive powers of truth. You could go there and find that you regret it afterward (which does not define moral error, but is how we experience moral error). But, even so, wanting to be in a particular place seems worth distinguishing from wanting to take a particular road to a particular place. Our intuitions about where to go are arguable enough, but our intuitions about how to get there are frankly messed up. After the two hundred and eighty-seventh research study showing that people will chop their own feet off if you frame the problem the wrong way, you start to distrust first impressions. When you've read enough research on scope insensitivity - people will pay only 28 more to protect all 57 wilderness areas in Ontario than one area, people will pay the same amount to save 50,000 lives as 5,000 lives... that sort of thing... Well, the worst case of scope insensitivity I've ever heard of was described here by Slovic: Other recent research shows similar results. Two Israeli psychologists asked people to contribute to a costly life-saving treatment. They could offer that contribution to a group of eight sick children, or to an individual child selected from the group. The target amount needed to save the child (or children) was the same in both cases. Contributions to individual group members far outweighed the contributions to the entire group. There's other research along similar lines, but I'm just presenting one example, 'cause, y'know, eight examples would probably have less impact. If you know the general experimental paradigm, then the reason for the above behavior is pretty obvious - focusing your attention on a single child creates more emotional arousal than trying to distribute attention around eight children simultaneously. So people are willing to pay more to help one child than to help eight. Now, you could look at this intuition, and think it was revealing some kind of incredibly deep moral truth which shows that one child's good fortune is somehow devalued by the other children's good fortune. But what about the billions of other children in the world? Why isn't it a bad idea to help this one child, when that causes the value of all the other children to go down? How can it be significantly better to have 1,329,342,410 happy children than 1,329,342,409, but then somewhat worse to have seven more at 1,329,342,417? Or you could look at that and say: "The intuition is wrong: the brain can't successfully multiply by eight and get a larger quantity than it started with. But it ought to, normatively speaking." And once you realize that the brain can't multiply by eight, then the other cases of scope neglect stop seeming to reveal some fundamental truth about 50,000 lives being worth just the same effort as 5,000 lives, or whatever. You don't get the impression you're looking at the revelation of a deep moral truth about nonagglomerative utilities. It's just that the brain doesn't goddamn multiply. Quantities get thrown out the window. If you have $100 to spend, and you spend $20 each on each of 5 efforts to save 5,000 lives, you will do worse than if you spend $100 on a single effort to save 50,000 lives. Likewise if such choices are made by 10 different people, rather than the same person. As soon as you start believing that it is better to save 50,000 lives than 25,000 lives, that simple preference of final destinations has implications for the choice of paths, when you consider five different events that save 5,000 lives. (It is a general principle that Bayesians see no difference between the long-run answer and the short-run answer; you never get two different answers from computing the same question two different ways. But the long run is a helpful intuition pump, so I am talking about it anyway.) The aggregative valuation strategy of "shut up and multiply" arises from the simple preference to have more of something - to save as many lives as possible - when you have to describe general principles for choosing more than once, acting more than once, planning at more than one time. Aggregation also arises from claiming that the local choice to save one life doesn't depend on how many lives already exist, far away on the other side of the planet, or far away on the other side of the universe. Three lives are one and one and one. No matter how many billions are doing better, or doing worse. 3 = 1 + 1 + 1, no matter what other quantities you add to both sides of the equation. And if you add another life you get 4 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. That's aggregation. When you've read enough heuristics and biases research, and enough coherence and uniqueness proofs for Bayesian probabilities and expected utility, and you've seen the "Dutch book" and "money pump" effects that penalize trying to handle uncertain outcomes any other way, then you don't see the preference reversals in the Allais Paradox as revealing some incredibly deep moral truth about the intrinsic value of certainty. It just goes to show that the brain doesn't goddamn multiply. The primitive, perceptual intuitions that make a choice "feel good" don't handle probabilistic pathways through time very skillfully, especially when the probabilities have been expressed symbolically rather than experienced as a frequency. So you reflect, devise more trustworthy logics, and think it through in words. When you see people insisting that no amount of money whatsoever is worth a single human life, and then driving an extra mile to save $10; or when you see people insisting that no amount of money is worth a decrement of health, and then choosing the cheapest health insurance available; then you don't think that their protestations reveal some deep truth about incommensurable utilities. Part of it, clearly, is that primitive intuitions don't successfully diminish the emotional impact of symbols standing for small quantities - anything you talk about seems like "an amount worth considering". And part of it has to do with preferring unconditional social rules to conditional social rules. Conditional rules seem weaker, seem more subject to manipulation. If there's any loophole that lets the government legally commit torture, then the government will drive a truck through that loophole. So it seems like there should be an unconditional social injunction against preferring money to life, and no "but" following it. Not even "but a thousand dollars isn't worth a 0.0000000001 probability of saving a life". Though the latter choice, of course, is revealed every time we sneeze without calling a doctor. The rhetoric of sacredness gets bonus points for seeming to express an unlimited commitment, an unconditional refusal that signals trustworthiness and refusal to compromise. So you conclude that moral rhetoric espouses qualitative distinctions, because espousing a quantitative tradeoff would sound like you were plotting to defect. On such occasions, people vigorously want to throw quantities out the window, and they get upset if you try to bring quantities back in, because quantities sound like conditions that would weaken the rule. But you don't conclude that there are actually two tiers of utility with lexical ordering. You don't conclude that there is actually an infinitely sharp moral gradient, some atom that moves a Planck distance (in our continuous physical universe) and sends a utility from 0 to infinity. You don't conclude that utilities must be expressed using hyper-real numbers. Because the lower tier would simply vanish in any equation. It would never be worth the tiniest effort to recalculate for it. All decisions would be determined by the upper tier, and all thought spent thinking about the upper tier only, if the upper tier genuinely had lexical priority. As Peter Norvig once pointed out, if Asimov's robots had strict priority for the First Law of Robotics ("A robot shall not harm a human being, nor through inaction allow a human being to come to harm") then no robot's behavior would ever show any sign of the other two Laws; there would always be some tiny First Law factor that would be sufficient to determine the decision. Whatever value is worth thinking about at all, must be worth trading off against all other values worth thinking about, because thought itself is a limited resource that must be traded off. When you reveal a value, you reveal a utility. I don't say that morality should always be simple. I've already said that the meaning of music is more than happiness alone, more than just a pleasure center lighting up. I would rather see music composed by people than by nonsentient machine learning algorithms, so that someone should have the joy of composition; I care about the journey, as well as the destination. And I am ready to hear if you tell me that the value of music is deeper, and involves more complications, than I realize - that the valuation of this one event is more complex than I know.  But that's for one event. When it comes to multiplying by quantities and probabilities, complication is to be avoided - at least if you care more about the destination than the journey. When you've reflected on enough intuitions, and corrected enough absurdities, you start to see a common denominator, a meta-principle at work, which one might phrase as "Shut up and multiply." Where music is concerned, I care about the journey. When lives are at stake, I shut up and multiply. It is more important that lives be saved, than that we conform to any particular ritual in saving them. And the optimal path to that destination is governed by laws that are simple, because they are math. And that's why I'm a utilitarian - at least when I am doing something that is overwhelmingly more important than my own feelings about it - which is most of the time, because there are not many utilitarians, and many things left undone.
Second, my standard controls the link to any practical reason or contract frameworks because rational agents would consent to a universal law to maximize utility to increase the chance of their own interests being satisfied.

Third, reductionism.

Brain studies prove personal identity doesn’t exist. Parfit 84 writes
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).
Some recent medical cases provide striking evidence in favour of the Reductionist View. Human beings have a lower brain and two upper hemispheres, which are connected by a bundle of fibres. In treating a few people with severe epilepsy, surgeons have cut these fibres. The aim was to reduce the severity of epileptic fits, by confining their causes to a single hemisphere. This aim was achieved. But the operations had another unintended consequence. The effect, in the words of one surgeon, was the creation of ‘two separate spheres of consciousness.’ This effect was revealed by various psychological tests. These made use of two facts. We control our right arms with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. And what is in the right halves of our visual fields we see with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. When someone’s hemispheres have been disconnected, psychologists can thus present to this person two different written questions in the two halves of his visual field, and can receive two different answers written by this person’s two hands.

In the absence of personal identity, only end states can matter. Shoemaker 99
Shoemaker, David (Dept of Philosophy, U Memphis). “Utilitarianism and Personal Identity.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 33: 183–199, 1999. http://www.csun.edu/~ds56723/jvipaper.pdf
Extreme reductionism might lend support to utilitarianism in the following way. Many people claim that we are justified in maximizing the good in our own lives, but not justified in maximizing the good across sets of lives, simply because each of us is a single, deeply unified person, unified by the further fact of identity, whereas there is no such corresponding unity across sets of lives. But if the only justification for the different treatment of individual lives and sets of lives is the further fact, and this fact is undermined by the truth of reductionism, then nothing justifies this different treatment. There are no deeply unified subjects of experience. What remains are merely the experiences themselves, and so any ethical theory distinguishing between individual lives and sets of lives is mistaken. If the deep, further fact is missing, then there are no unities. The morally significant units should then be the states people are in at particular times, and an ethical theory that focused on them and attempted to improve their quality, whatever their location, would be the most plausible. Utilitarianism is just such a theory.

Fourth, util is epistemologically necessary. Everyone values happiness whether they want to or not. Even people who claim they’re skeptics wouldn’t shoot themselves in the foot.

Cost-benefit analysis is feasible. Ignore any util calc indicts. Hardin 90 writes
Hardin, Russell (Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences @ NYU). May 1990. Morality within the Limits of Reason. University Of Chicago Press. pp. 4. ISBN 978-0226316208.
One of the cuter charges against utilitarianism is that it is irrational in the following sense. If I take the time to calculate the consequences of various courses of action before me, then I will ipso facto have chosen the course of action to take, namely, to sit and calculate, because while I am calculating the other courses of action will cease to be open to me. It should embarrass philosophers that they have ever taken this objection seriously. Parallel considerations in other realms are dismissed with eminently good sense. Lord Devlin notes, “If the reasonable man ‘worked to rule’ by perusing to the point of comprehension every form he was handed, the commercial and administrative life of the country would creep to a standstill.” James March and Herbert Simon escape the quandary of unending calculation by noting that often we satisfice, we do not maximize: we stop calculating and considering when we find a merely adequate choice of action. When, in principle, one cannot know what is the best choice, one can nevertheless be sure that sitting and calculating is not the best choice. But, one may ask, How do you know that another ten minutes of calculation would not have produced a better choice? And one can only answer, You do not. At some point the quarrel begins to sound adolescent. It is ironic that the point of the quarrel is almost never at issue in practice (as Devlin implies, we are almost all too reasonable in practice to bring the world to a standstill) but only in the principled discussions of academics.

Next is theory preempts.

1. Wiki solves predictability.

2. Err aff on theory. There was a 5 neg side bias at Strake Jesuit and Sunvite based on prelims and elims according to Joy of Tournaments. This also means presume aff if presumption matters.

3. Case outweighs theory. Students’ analyzing environmental issues is critical for sustainable solutions. This must be coupled with policy advocacy to succeed.
Cotgrave and Alkhaddar 06
Alison Cotgrave has a PhD in Sustainability Literacy, she is currently the Deputy Director of the School of the Built Environment and a researcher in construction education, she is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Rafid Alkhaddar has a PhD in Civil Engineering and currently teaches at the School of the Built Environment John Moores University in Liverpool as a Professor of Water and Environmental Engineering (March 2006, “Greening the Curricula within Construction Programmes,” Journal for Education in the Built Environment, Vol.1, Issue 1, March 2006 pp. 3-29, http://131.251.248.49/jebe/pdf/AlisonCotgrave1(1).pdf
Environmental education  Many writers have determined that the main aim of environmental education is to change attitudes, that will in turn change behaviour. As long ago as 1976, Ramsey and Rickson identified that it has long been known that the basis for many environmental problems is irresponsible behaviour. Without a doubt, one of the most important influences on behaviour is attitude, that in turn is influenced by education. Campbell Bradley et al. (1999) stress the need for trying to change young people’s environmental attitudes because young people ultimately will be affected by, and will need to provide, solutions to environmental problems arising from present day actions. As future policymakers, the youth of today will be responsible for ‘fixing’ the environment and they will be the ones who must be persuaded to act now in order to avoid paying a high price to repair damage to the environment in the future, if indeed it is repairable. Therefore it appears that effective environmental education, which changes the attitudes of young people, is crucial. The (then) Department for Education (DFE) report, commonly known as the ‘Toyne Report’ (DFE, 1993), concluded that as education seeks to lead opinion, it will do so more effectively if it keeps in mind the distinctive nature of its mission, which is first and foremost to improve its students’ understanding. Their concern may well be awakened as a result; but it must be a properly informed concern. This does not necessarily mean treating the environment as a purely scientific issue, but does mean that the respective roles of science and ethics need to be distinguished, and the complexities of each need to be acknowledged. Failure to do this may lead all too readily to an ‘environmentalism’ which, by depicting possibilities as certainties, can only discredit itself in the long run and feed the complacency which it seeks to dispel. McKeown-Ice and Dendinger (2000) have identified the fact that scientific knowledge and political intervention will not solve the environmental problem on their own, thus implying that something additional is required to change behaviour. As has already been discussed, behaviour changes can only occur if attitudes change and this can be achieved through education. As Fien (1997) identifies, environmental education can play a key role by creating awareness, and changing people’s values, skills and behaviour. Introducing environmental elements into the curriculum can therefore be seen as a potentially effective way of transferring knowledge. This should in turn improve attitudes that will lead to improvements in environmental behaviour. Graham (2000) believes that it is crucial that building professionals not only participate in the creation of projects that have low environmental impact, but equally it is important that they learn to conceive, nurture, promote and facilitate the kind of paradigm changes seen as necessary to create a sustainable society. There are however limitations as to what education can achieve on its own, for as Jucker (2002) believes, if we do not do everything we can to transform our political, economic and social systems into more sustainable structures, we might as well forget the educational part.

4. Gutcheck against dumb theory. Competing interps leads to a race to the bottom where every round comes down to theory, killing substantive education. Intervention is inevitable in blippy theory debates.

5. Prefer aff interpretations. Key to clash. O’Donnell 4 writes
Timothy M. O’Donnell (Director of Debate University of Mary Washington) “And the Twain Shall Meet: Affirmative Framework Choice and the Future of Debate”  2004.
AFC preserves the value of the first affirmative constructive speech. This speech is the starting point for the debate. It is a function of necessity. The debate must begin somewhere if it is to begin at all. Failure to grant AFC is a denial of the service rendered by the affirmative team’s labor when they crafted this speech. Further, if the affirmative does not get to pick the starting point, renders the opening speech act is essentially rendered meaningless while the rest of the debate becomes a debate about what we should be debating about. 

Africa aff is fair.
CI: Aff may specify Africa.

1. Stable advocacy – clear delineation of countries minimizes aff shiftiness which moots neg ground.

2. The Africa aff is key to predictability, aff ground and in-depth clash. VBT proves.
Kuang and Tartakovsky 14 write
Rebecca Kuang (policy debater at Georgetown, won the TOC in 2013) and Daniel Tartakovsky (Harvard student, TOC 2013 semifinalist). “Plans Bad?” Argument Update: VBT. January 9th, 2014. http://victorybriefs.com/vbd/2014/1/argument-update-vbt
RK The biggest objection against plans, as is on most topics, is that they are difficult to predict and prepare answers to. This topic is especially bad in this regard, since it does not specify an actor and deals with a very broad subject area- most sources agree that there are over a hundred developing countries, home to multiple different resource extraction industries that can be changed with an almost infinite number of policy proposals. This objection might seem silly to policy debaters, who are used to a huge number of affs on every topic; in fact, in policy, whole-res affirmatives are something of a joke. However, policy resolutions are usually worded to narrow down the range of possible affirmatives to a far smaller subset than this resolution does. They typically specify an actor (the United States Federal Government) and clearly define the range of possible actions (substantially increasing economic engagement toward Cuba, Mexico, or Venezuela.) Going into the first tournament of the year, most policy teams have a good idea of what the most common affs will be on the topic, regardless of the resolution’s subject area. That isn’t the case here. Even previous LD resolutions have been much more plan-friendly than this one- all three topics last year were US-specific with clearly defined subject areas. In contrast, this topic has hundreds of possible actors and even more possible policy actions. I'm usually of the opinion that the more plans the better, and that debaters who complain about having to research multiple affs are just being lazy. On this topic, though, even if a squad devoted several hours a day just to research case negs against every possible aff they could think of, they still likely wouldn't have enough prep. DT Perhaps plans on this topic should have a specific solvency advocate who specifies both a topical actor and implementation mechanism. Under this view, someone arguing that an extractive industry is harmful wouldn’t be a solvency advocate. For instance, we might think that it’s bad for Iran to mine uranium, but should affs really be allowed to fiat that Iran stop mining? On any other topic this would be object fiat, and the fact that Iran isn’t technically the object anymore doesn’t make the fiat less abusive. RK “Must read a solvency advocate” was just one of the ways that debaters attempted to deal with hyper-specific plans at VBT. Other interpretations we heard were “must disclose the plan text before the round even if you haven’t broken it yet” and “must defend action by more than one country.” These theory objections are creative, and I appreciate that squads were trying to avoid the classic “plans bad” debate, but I’m not sure if these interpretations really address the problem with plans. Even if plans are permissible only if they have a solvency advocate, there are still over a thousand possible solvency advocates in the literature. The same problem applies to allowing plans as long as they are disclosed before the debate. The interpretation that debaters must defend more than one country led to somewhat absurd debates at VBT where the aff defended unrelated actions by two different countries-i.e., two plans at the same time, which obviously didn’t resolve the predictability problem. DT On the other hand, we shouldn’t be so quick to write off all plans on the topic. A whole-res approach seems to lead to a disingenuous discussion of what developing countries actually should do and makes it confusing to think coherently about offense and solvency. The standard whole-res affirmative at VBT went something along the lines of, “I defend that all countries choose to protect the environment whenever there’s a conflict with resource extraction, so I won’t delink from any disad you run.” While this might seem fine at first (how kind of the aff to let the neg run anything!), is it really that reasonable? First, the whole-res approach seems to either grant debaters automatic solvency or muddle solvency so that it is nearly impossible to compare arguments. There are many ways to restrict resource extraction. Leaving aside questions of topicality, if the aff doesn’t specify whether it imposes a carbon tax on industries that create fossil fuels or bans the industries directly, can the neg indict the tax or the ban or both or neither? If the aff plan were the carbon tax, at least the neg would know what solvency mechanism to indict. If the aff is whole-res, how can the neg indict solvency? Either the neg has no way to do so, since the aff just claims to solve and talks about the harms of extraction, or the neg can do it in any number of contradictory ways because it’s unclear what the aff defends. Neither option seems particularly plausible. Debaters who run framework-heavy affs might think that there’s no reason to specify a solvency mechanism. Who cares about solvency if the aff framework is about intention? Well, from the aff’s perspective, a plan that bans overfishing can turn a food security DA, since sustainable fishing might lead to more food security in the long-run. But without any actual policies specified in the AC, can a whole-res aff turn the DA in the same way by all of a sudden claiming to ban overfishing in the 1AR? Refusing to specify thus impedes aff strategy if the aff framework becomes less relevant later in the debate. Presumably, the aff could run the overfishing plan with any framework; specifying in the AC can give the aff more strategic options later. A potential way to allow for solvency debates under a whole-res approach is to specify various policies under different scenarios, but this still doesn’t address whether the aff can solve for scenarios not in the AC. Second, a whole-res advocacy seems to disadvantage the aff by forcing it to defend radical policies. Presumably all mining has some potential for conflict with the environment, so would a whole-res aff have ban ALL mining? Does anyone think we should actually do that? Whatever the harms from a deteriorating environment, the massive impact of shutting down all extractive industries tomorrow is presumably worse. Even for debates that don’t focus on a cost-benefit analysis, advocacies that seem to ban all extraction are inconsistent with how actual experts consider these policies. If, on the other hand, the aff doesn’t ban all extraction but also doesn’t run a plan, how do we know what the aff is doing and/or how strong the links are to any neg DAs or Ks? I’ve heard many affs respond to DA links by saying, “I don’t ban all extraction, only some of it, so your link isn’t that strong.” But isn’t that also true for the neg with environmental protection? And how do we even know what it means to ban some of something without specifying policies? The whole-res approach also forces judges to choose one policy over another when neither policy impedes the other. What does it matter to Chile’s copper extractors or South Sudan’s oil companies whether we should ban overfishing in the Coral Triangle? An approach that lets debaters just compare thousands of policies that aren’t mutually exclusive sidesteps important nuances in the literature and encourages debaters to just weigh random impacts without engaging each other’s policies. I’m also not sure how proving that one thing in Chile outweighs another thing in South Sudan without narrowing the topic to those countries actually affirms or negates the resolution. RK Finally, plans make a certain group of negative strategies possible. Plan inclusive counterplans, agent counterplans, and disadvantages with specific links do not interact as well against on-balance or philosophical affirmatives. While philosophical debate is well and good, there are also valuable educational benefits from debates involving plans, disads and counterplans. Every debate doesn’t necessarily have to be a comparison of policy options, but debaters should be able to choose whether to engage in that style or not. In conclusion, we are inclined to think that at least some plans should be allowed on this topic, even if it’s hard to draw a clear boundary between which ones should and shouldn’t be read. For example, plans that we think are more theoretically legitimate than others are: - Plans that deal with a large group of countries, such as the African Union or the Coral Triangle Initiative countries - Plans that deal with a diversity of resource extraction industries rather than just one - Plans that ban extraction and have the effect/intent of protection, but not plans that improve protection but have the effect of less extraction At the very least, it would be ridiculous to require every affirmative to defend the resolution as a general principle in every round. Plans can make the topic more interesting and spark nuanced, deeper discussion about areas of the topic we might otherwise brush over. However, there are good theoretical objections against narrowing the topic down too far. The trick over the next few months will be figuring out a reasonable boundary between plans that should and shouldn’t be allowed. 

3. Education – the issues facing Africa, South America, and Asia are distinct, so discussing all of them at once forces us to debate meaningless abstractions about environment rather than specific real world harms.

4. The countries I spec are indicative of the topic as a whole, which means that if her offense doesn’t link to Africa, it probably wasn’t germane to the resolution and it’s not valid neg ground.

5. C’mon. it’s all of Africa.

Tournament: Harrison RR | Round: 3 | Opponent: Harrison KK Kathryn Kenny | Judge: Jonathan Alston and Chris Palmer
Advantage 1 is Synthetic Natural Gas

China SNG plants reverse emissions reductions from wind and solar, and cause water shortages and mercury pollution. Science Daily 13
Science Daily, citing Chi-Jen Yang and Robert Jackson (Duke University researchers) in “China’s synthetic natural gas revolution.” “China’s synthetic gas plants would be greenhouse giants.” September 25th, 2013. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130925092224.htm
Coal-powered synthetic natural gas plants being planned in China would produce seven times more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional natural gas plants, and use up to 100 times the water as shale gas production, according to a new study by Duke University researchers. These environmental costs have been largely neglected in the drive to meet the nation's growing energy needs, the researchers say, and might lock China on an irreversible and unsustainable path for decades to come. "Using coal to make natural gas may be good for China's energy security, but it's an environmental disaster in the making," said Robert B. Jackson, Nicholas Professor of Environmental Sciences and director of the Duke Center on Global Change. "At a minimum, Chinese policymakers should delay implementing their synthetic natural gas plan to avoid a potentially costly and environmentally damaging outcome," said Chi-Jen Yang, a research scientist at Duke's Center on Global Change. "An even better decision would be to cancel the program entirely." Yang is lead author of the new study, which was published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change. As part of the largest investment in coal-fueled synthetic natural gas plants in history, the central Chinese government recently has approved construction of nine large-scale plants capable of producing more than 37 billion cubic meters of synthetic natural gas annually. Private companies are planning to build more than 30 other plants, capable of producing as much as 200 million cubic meters of natural gas each year -- far exceeding China's current natural gas demand. "These plants are coming online at a rapid pace. If all nine plants planned by the Chinese government were built, they would emit 21 billion tons of carbon dioxide over a typical 40-year lifetime, seven times the greenhouse gas that would be emitted by traditional natural gas plants," Jackson said. "If all 40 of the facilities are built, their carbon dioxide emissions would be an astonishing 110 billion tons," Jackson said. The analysis by Yang and Jackson finds that if the gas produced by the new plants is used to generate electricity, the total lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions would be 36 percent to 82 percent higher than pulverized coal-fired power. If the synthetic natural gas made by the plants were used to fuel vehicles, the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions would be twice as large as from gasoline-fueled vehicles. "The increased carbon dioxide emissions from the nine government-approved plants alone will more than cancel out all of the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from China's recent investments in wind and solar electricity," Yang said. "While we applaud China's rapid development in clean energy, we must be cautious about this simultaneous high-carbon leapfrogging." The study notes that the plants would also emit hydrogen sulfide and mercury, which, if not properly scrubbed and treated, are potentially harmful to human health. Excessive water consumption by the plants is also a concern. "Producing synthetic natural gas requires 50 to 100 times the amount of water you need to produce shale gas," Yang said. "The nine plants approved by the government -- most of which are located in desert or semi-desert regions in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia -- will consume more than 200 million tons of water annually and could worsen water shortages in areas that already are under significant water stress." The overall environmental impacts will be severe, Jackson said. "It will lock in high greenhouse gas emissions, water use and mercury pollution for decades. Perhaps there's still time to stop it." 

CO2 emissions release methane into the atmosphere which risks extinction. This is historically confirmed.
Daily Take 13
The Daily Take and the Thom Hartmann Program (Hartman is the #1 progressive radio talk show host in the US and a New York Times bestselling author). “Last Hours of Humanity: Warming the World to Extinction.” http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/19311-last-hours-of-humanity-warming-the-world-to-extinction
If you were standing outdoors looking at the distant and reddening sky 250 million years ago as the Permian Mass Extinction was beginning, unless you were in the region that is known as Siberia you would have no idea that a tipping point had just been passed and soon 95 of all life on earth would be dead. It's almost impossible to identify tipping points, except in retrospect. For example, we have almost certainly already past the tipping point to an ice-free Arctic. And we are just now realizing it, even though that tipping point was probably passed a decade or more ago. This is critically important because in the history of our planet there have been five times when more than half of all life on Earth died. They're referred to as "mass extinctions." One – the one that killed the dinosaurs – was initiated by a meteorite striking the Earth. The rest all appear to have been initiated by tectonic and volcanic activity. In each case, however, what happened was that massive amounts of carbon-containing greenhouse gases – principally carbon dioxide, were released from beneath the Earth's crust and up into the atmosphere. This provoked global warming intense enough to melt billions of tons of frozen methane on the oceans floors. That pulse of methane - an intense greenhouse gas - then brought the extinction to its full of intensity. While in the past it took continental movement or an asteroid to break up the crust of the earth enough to release ancient stores of carbon into the atmosphere, we humans have been doing this very aggressively for the past 150 years by drilling and mining fossil fuels. So the question: Will several centuries of burning fossil fuels release enough carbon into the atmosphere to mimic the effects of past volcanic and asteroid activity and provoke a mass extinction? Geologists who study mass extinctions are becoming concerned. As more and more research is coming out about the massive stores of methane in the Arctic and around continental shelves, climate scientists are beginning to take notice, too. The fossil fuel companies are sitting on roughly 2 trillion tons of underground carbon. That, in and of itself, is enough to warm the earth by 5 or 6°C, and is an amount of carbon consistent with tipping points during past mass extinctions. There are an additional estimated 2 trillion tons of methane stored in the Arctic and probably 2 to 5 times that much around continental shelves all around the Earth. If our burning fossil fuels warms the oceans enough that that methane melts and is quickly released into the atmosphere, the Earth will be in its sixth mass extinction. And make no mistake about it, the animals and plants that are most heavily hit by mass extinctions are those that are largest and at the top of the food chain. That means us. We must stop the carbon madness and move, worldwide, to renewable 21st century energy sources. 

SNG independently contributes to methane emissions.
Zhang 3-9
Tina Zhang (Researcher at ProHR International, East China University of Science and Technology). “China Is Likely to Worsen Water Shortage When Solving Air Pollution.” Liberty Voice. March 9th, 2014. http://guardianlv.com/2014/03/china-is-likely-to-worsen-water-shortage-when-solving-air-pollution/
Coal-fired power plants, which China relies on for most of its energy, are the main cause for the smog. Although China has tried hard to diversify its energy sector and made progress, in the near future, coal consumption is expected to continue rising. China’s solution of cutting air pollution while using coal is to use coal-to-gas process to produce synthetic natural gas (SNG), which is similar to natural gas and is a lot cleaner. Last June, the largest coal-fired furnace within the Fourth-Ring Road of Beijing was shut down and the plant was retrofitted to burn natural gas. New coal-to-gas plants near coal mines and the pipeline connecting them to urban centers are built rapidly. The decision seems reasonable based on the high price of importing natural gas, the vast coal reserve in China and the unbearable air pollution, but the SNG operation will worsen the already existing water shortage in their locations. The national average of water consumed per person per year in China is 450 cubic meters, which is way below the 1,000 cubic meters defined as the threshold of “severe water stress”. Looking under this low national average number, the uneven distribution of water among regions is even more alarming. South China has four-fifths of the water, mainly in the Yangtze River basin. With only 20 percent of the water, north China struggles to support half the population and two-thirds of the farmland, mainly in the Yellow River basin. There is just 100 cubic meters per person per year in Beijing. Underground aquifers in north China are heavily used, way faster than its recharging speed. For example, the water table under Beijing has fallen by 1,000 feet in two decades, and the dropping water table in some parts of Inner Mongolia has worsened soil degradation and expanded the mobile sand area. The perched north in China is also the home to most of the coal reserves. Most of the SNG plants, either existing or under construction, are located in Xinjiang province and Inner Mongolia province. Building SNG plants in these areas will worsen the already existing water shortage. Extreme heat and pressure are needed to turn coal into carbon monoxide and hydrogen, then steam and catalysts are added to convert them to natural gas, methane. Shale gas is criticized as a water-intensive process, but its water usage pales in comparison to SNG, which uses at least 50 times more water. The water-intensive nature of SNG was the reason for the very slow development of this industry—before 2013, there were only four projected approved. But the pace has picked up in recent years promoted by the air pollution. By the end of last year, there are 18 projected approved. The largest one is in Inner Mongolia and has started operation already, it will complete expansion in 2017 and supply almost half of the current gas demand of Beijing. Water treatment plants and recycling plants are badly needed to ease the water shortage. Such operations need energy, adding to the energy-hunger of China. There is a pilot SNG plant in Xinjiang province which uses a new process and only needs half of the water in comparison to the traditional process. Still, the water usage in this best case for SNG is at least 25 times more than that in shale gas. Breakthroughs on technologies are expected to happen and the hope is it can happen fast enough. China won the war on poverty by unprecedented economic growth, which is the root cause for the complex environmental crisis. The war on pollution China declared recently should not create a situation that a short-term gain of air pollution is achieved on the expense of more complicated long-term crisis associated with worsening water shortage. The greenhouse gas emission from SNG is also significantly higher than simply burning coal. Experts advocate diversification of energy sector and improvement of energy efficiency, instead of charging ahead with so many big scale SNG plants so fast. 

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Advantage 2 is China Stability

Environmental hazards are the main source of Chinese instability, and current policies fail. Genuine prioritization of the environment is key.
Stanway 13
David Stanway (Reuters). “To tackle pollution, China to drop pursuit of growth at all costs.” 18 November 2013. http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/18/us-china-reform-environment-idUSBRE9AH07M20131118
Three decades of industrialization and double-digit growth in China have left the country badly polluted. With public anger mounting over a series of scandals involving hazardous smog, contaminated soil and toxic water supplies, China has identified the environment as one of the biggest potential sources of instability. But despite a pledge to create a "beautiful China" over the next decade, Beijing continues to struggle to bring polluting state-owned industrial enterprises and growth-obsessed local governments to heel. The new policy document said China would "correct the bias towards assessing (officials) on the speed of economic growth and increase the weight placed on other indicators such as resource use, environmental damage, ecological benefits, industrial overcapacity, scientific innovation, work safety and newly-added debt." China already assesses local officials on the way they handle the environment, but with the economy still considered the priority, local authorities stress their green credentials by building ostentatious national parks, wetlands or reforestation projects rather than address the cause of pollution and risk revenues and jobs. "Before, they were just using environmental protection as another way of generating economic growth and even if something causes a great deal of immediate environmental damage, they would still consider the short-term economic benefits," said Zhou Lei at Nanjing University, who studies the impact of industry on the environment. 

Environmental strains cause Chinese collapse and extinction.
Yee and Storey 2
Herbert and Ian, Associate Professor of Government @ Hong Kong Baptist University, and Storey, Asian-Pacific Center for Security Studies, China Threat: Perception, Myths, and Reality, 2002
The fourth factor contributing to the perception of a china threat is the fear of political and economic collapse in the PRC, resulting in territorial fragmentation, civil war and waves of refugees pouring into neighbouring countries. Naturally, any or all of these scenarios would have a profoundly negative impact on regional stability. Today the Chinese leadership faces a raft of internal problems, including the increasing political demands of its citizens, a growing population, a shortage of natural resources and a deterioration in the natural environment caused by rapid industrialisation and pollution. These problems are putting a strain on the central government’s ability to govern effectively. Political disintegration or a Chinese civil war might result in millions of Chinese refugees seeking asylum in neighbounng countries. Such an unprecedented exodus of refugees from a collapsed PRC would no doubt put a severe strain on the limited resources of China’s neighbours. A fragmented china could also result in another nightmare scenario — nuclear weapons falling into the hands of irresponsible local provincial leaders or warlords.12 From this perspective, a disintegrating China would also pose a threat to its neighbours and the world.

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Advantage 3 is Politics

Backsliding on environmental reforms undermines the credibility of Chinese president Xi Jinping.
Hilton 13
Isabel Hilton (founder of www.chinadialogue.net, a bilingual Chinese English news site devoted to building a shared approach on environmental issues with China). “China: President Xi Jinping's one-year report card.” CNN. 19 November 2013. http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/19/opinion/china-xi-report-card/

There was not much cheer for environmentalists in the meeting that was billed as the most significant of Xi Jinping's administration. At the close of the Chinese Communist Party's Third Plenum on November 13, China's official news agency, Xinhua, failed even to list the environment among its key points, focusing instead on the promise of economic reform. Xi has recognized that prioritizing economic growth for 30 years has brought China to the edge of environmental collapse and he has promised to give environment the same weight as economic development. But 2013 was a year of dramatically worsening air pollution and mounting public frustration at the government's apparent inability to halt China's deforestation, maritime pollution, desertification and water and soil pollution. Xi said China must build what it calls "ecological civilization" -- a top-level slogan that officials are still struggling to flesh out. He talked of "establishing a complete system" of ecological civilization, promised to improve the management of natural resources, and to establish "red lines" in ecological protection, along with ecological compensation for pollution victims. It is how these and other promises shape up that will decide Xi's environmental legacy. So far, his government has announced plans to clean up lethal air pollution but they will take many years to take effect. In other respects, environmental protection risks clashing with other concerns: a new Environmental Protection Law that is moving slowly through China's parliament threatens serious financial penalties for polluting companies, but has also been heavily criticized for restricting the rights of NGOs to take legal action against polluters, as Xi tightens the state's control of civil society. It also plays a role in the rising incidence of protest and chronic rural poverty, which President Xi has promised to reverse. The environment could benefit from Xi's commitment to a greater role for the market, which might boost China's pilot carbon-trading schemes, and from his promise of a stronger legal system and greater transparency. High-level promises set the policy direction, but Xi's environmental record will be judged by results. Key issues include cleaning up China's Environmental Impact Assessments, boosting the Ministry of Environmental Protection and putting it in charge of the provincial and local bureaus, building a robust, legally enforced system of fines for polluters and lifting restrictions on China's tightly controlled environmental NGOs. 

Xi’s polcap is waning now, but he needs every ounce to pass economic reforms which avert multiple scenarios for Chinese economic crisis.
McElveen and Li 13
Ryan McElveen (researcher at the Brookings Institute, focusing on the Chinese Communist Part) and Cheng Li (director of research and a senior fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings, and a director of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.) “Can Xi Jinping's Governing Strategy Succeed?” Brookings Institute. 26 September 2013. http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2013/09/26-xi-jinping-china-governing-strategy-li-mcelveen
When Xi Jinping assumed his position as the new face of the Chinese leadership in November 2012, the optimism was palpable. Emerging from what some considered to be a “lost decade” under the leadership of Hu Jintao, China was ready for a new approach to steering the Middle Kingdom’s continued global rise. In his first days, Xi earned deserved praise at home and abroad as he embarked on an anti-corruption campaign, called on officials to use plain language and avoid ostentation, proclaimed the ultimate importance of the rule of law, and followed in Deng Xiaoping’s economic reformist footsteps by traveling south to Shenzhen, the site of China’s first special economic zone. As Xi’s honeymoon has progressed, however, the initial deluge of optimism has slowed to a trickle. Many watchers of the Chinese leadership have become dispirited by a lack of substantive progress toward much-needed political reform, while Chinese public intellectuals have been dismayed by orders instructing them not to speak about seven sensitive issues: universal values, freedom of the press, civil society, civil rights, past mistakes by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), crony capitalism, and judicial independence. Media censorship has tightened, and participants in human rights activities have encountered increasing political harassment and even arrest. In an attempt to consolidate his footing among party conservatives, Xi in July traveled to Xibaipo village, the People’s Liberation Army headquarters at the end of the civil war, where he quoted Mao Zedong to bolster Communist spirit. Following his trip, the leadership launched an effort to bar construction of new government buildings for the next five years. As Xi works to revitalize his image, he continues to favor superficial party controls and propaganda over substantive political and judicial reform. Cognizant that his ideas did not fully catch on initially—with officials turning to online shopping and secret dining clubs to avoid being seen consuming in public, and with citizens expressing cynicism about the government’s anti-corruption rhetoric—Xi appears to realize that his political capital is waning and his honeymoon is reaching its end. Equally important, China’s economic slowdown has prompted growing concerns about the ability of the new leadership to deliver on its promises. This climate has roused Xi’s sense of urgency to adopt more liberal economic policies, stimulate China’s weakening growth, and regain the confidence of his wary fellow leaders and the middle class at large. Xi is not the only Chinese leader in recent decades to have entered office facing high expectations in the realms of political and economic reform. His predecessors discovered that economic reforms were easier to pursue than political reforms. Xi now confronts this same reality, yet he also faces deeper and rougher political waters than any Chinese leader since Mao, with the very survival of the party-state resting in his hands. Despite these dire circumstances, the economic reforms wrought by his predecessors have nurtured in Xi and other leaders of his generation great confidence in their economic management skills, as they have helped shape China into the world’s second-biggest economy. Those same reforms have also bred a rapidly growing middle class that now holds greater consumer power and higher levels of education, and makes more political demands, than ever before. As these trends converge at a political crossroads, will Xi be able to utilize his team’s economic skills to implement reforms that both please the middle class and break the political bottleneck? Can further economic reforms succeed without any accompanying political reforms? It is vitally important for the Chinese to explore these questions surrounding Xi’s politically conservative, economically liberal approach to governing while there is still time to change course. ELITISTS AND POPULISTS The leadership transition of 2012–13 brought the promotion and retention of experienced economic reformers, in addition to the exclusion of a couple of political reform–minded heavyweights from top leadership positions. Although this once-a-decade power transfer usually takes place behind closed doors, stained by backroom deal making, the most recent transition was muddied more than usual by major political scandals. Yet, even as uncertainty surrounded the leadership selection and the country’s political trajectory, one policy goal remained clear: Economic reform would endure as a priority. As in any society, the identities of the political players help shape the policies they will implement. China is a one-party state, but this does not necessarily mean that the leadership is monolithic. On the contrary, China’s leadership can be divided into two informal but well-known coalitions: the “elitist coalition,” which emerged during the era of former President Jiang Zemin, and the “populist coalition,” once headed by former President Hu. The top two current leaders, President Xi and Prime Minister Li Keqiang, now head these two coalitions, respectively. This informal division of power is sometimes referred to as the “one party, two coalitions” political mechanism. The two coalitions represent different socioeconomic and geographical constituencies and differ in expertise, credentials, and experience. Most of the top leaders in the elitist coalition, for instance, are “princelings” from families of veteran revolutionaries and high-ranking officials. Princelings often began their careers in rich and economically well-developed coastal cities. The elitist coalition usually represents the interests of China’s business elites, especially the state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and the vast majority of the emerging middle class. Most of the populist coalition’s leading figures, by contrast, come from less-privileged families and tend to have accumulated much of their leadership experience in less-developed inland provinces. Many of these leaders began their climbs up the political ladder through leadership in the Chinese Communist Youth League and are known as tuanpai (League faction). The populists often voice the concerns of vulnerable social groups such as farmers, migrant workers, and the urban poor. More than any other leadership organization, the makeup of the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC), China’s top ruling body, will determine the direction and pace of the next phase of economic reform, as well as the arc of sociopolitical change in the country. In this latest leadership changeover, only one of the seven top leaders in the PSC—Prime Minister Li—represents the populist coalition, while the other six are all protégés of Jiang. However, the balance between the two camps on the Politburo and the Central Military Commission has largely stayed intact, and many of Hu’s people made it onto the 376-member Central Committee. In any case, the dominance of elitists on the PSC reduces the chance for policy deadlock as a result of factional infighting, giving Xi tremendous power to carry out his policy objectives. MARKET FRIENDLY Although the strong presence of princelings in the top leadership likely will reinforce public perceptions of the convergence of power and wealth in the country, the four princeling leaders on the PSC—Xi, Zhang Dejiang, Yu Zhengsheng, and Wang Qishan—all have decades of experience leading China’s major cities and provinces, and are highly competent in economic and financial affairs. Some Chinese analysts argue that, due to their princeling background, these leaders have more political capital and resources than did their predecessors Hu and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao (who came from humble family backgrounds) in terms of running the Chinese economy and coordinating various governmental agencies. Xi has long been known for his market-friendly approach to economic development for domestic and foreign businesses alike. Xi’s experience leading Fujian, Zhejiang, and Shanghai, three economically advanced regions, has prepared him well to promote the development of the private sector, foreign investment and trade, and the liberalization of China’s financial system—all of which experienced serious setbacks under the previous administration. Another example of effective leadership is Wang Qishan, now serving as the anticorruption czar. Over the past few years Wang served as a principal convener in the Sino-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue. Wang, whose nickname is “chief of the fire brigade,” is arguably the most competent policy maker in economic and financial affairs in the Chinese leadership. The public regards him as capable and trustworthy during times of emergency or crisis, whether it be the country’s response to the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis, the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic, or ongoing rampant official corruption. Wang likely will promote the continued development of foreign investment and trade, the liberalization of the financial system, tight control of government spending, and tax revenue reforms, all of which are crucial for maintaining smooth central-local economic relations. The members of this PSC are clearly interested in economic reform, but their views regarding political reform are notably conservative. For proponents of political reform, the exclusion from the PSC of two key liberals, Vice President Li Yuanchao and Vice Prime Minister Wang Yang, was a setback. Wang Yang lost out because many conservative leaders saw him as a threat. His main political rival was Bo Xilai, before Bo’s dramatic fall in 2012. As Bo succumbed to political scandal, the conservatives clearly wanted to exclude Wang. That Li Yuanchao also did not get promoted, however, was surprising to many. An instrumental voice for liberal intellectuals who demand the rule of law, governmental accountability, and intra-party democracy, Li has many supporters. Both of these tuanpai leaders will still meet age eligibility requirements for the next PSC in 2017. TECHNOCRATS IN CHARGE Beyond the PSC, Xi has recruited or retained a capable and well-regarded team to shepherd monetary and fiscal policy reforms at the ministry level. The team includes an impressive mix of experienced economic technocrats, including Zhou Xiaochuan, Lou Jiwei, and Liu He. Zhou has become the longest serving governor of the People’s Bank of China, which he has led since 2002 and to which he was reappointed this year. Zhou has participated in economic reforms since the 1990s and has been an assertive advocate of further liberalizing the financial sector. He has helped transform the struggling state-owned banks into commercial lenders, accelerate the opening of the capital account, and loosen restrictions on the Chinese currency. Lou, appointed finance minister this year, has also been active in economic reform since the 1990s, when he was a critical player in the transformation of China’s tax system and planning for a domestic bond market. A protégé of former Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, Lou served as vice minister of finance from 1998 to 2007, and gained international attention in 2007 when he was appointed chairman and CEO of the start-up China Investment Corporation, becoming one of the most powerful fund managers in the world. In charge of that $200 billion sovereign wealth fund, he was tasked with generating higher returns for the country in the midst of the world economy’s downturn. Finally, Liu, the new deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), will also take on the powerful role of director of the Office of the Central Leading Group on Financial and Economic Affairs. A graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Liu began his work on China’s economic policy in the 1990s, when he helped shape China’s five-year plans at the State Development Planning Commission (today’s NDRC). As one of the most influential economists of his generation and a proponent of financial liberalization, Liu served as a major collaborator in a World Bank report published in 2012 that advocated market-driven change to constrain SOE monopolies. Now, as a key player in financial policy over the coming years, he will help lead the attempted structural transformation from an export-driven economy to a domestic consumption–driven economy. Together, these leaders could combine experience with innovation to help accelerate this transformation, and their patrons on the PSC will support this trajectory. It is particularly encouraging that this team of economic technocrats is planning a comprehensive economic reform agenda that includes financial liberalization, central-local tax reform, pricing reform, greater incentives for private sector development, deregulation, SOE reform, land use rights, and more accommodating policies for rural-urban migration, among other measures. Some of these liberal economic policies have already been adopted, and more likely will be approved at the CCP’s Third Plenary meeting in October. REFORM TENSIONS Such an economic reform–minded and experienced group of policy makers could not have been elevated to positions of power at a more opportune time. It will take such an accomplished team to steer China through the deep, rough waters ahead. From a chaotic urbanization push, a housing bubble, and an impending banking crisis to a falling GDP growth rate and persistent college graduate unemployment, the need for innovative policy making is clear. Over his first year in office, Xi has set the stage for economic reform through his actions and statements, and a growing sense of crisis will compel the leadership to embark on these reforms with a sense of urgency. Nonetheless, the tensions within Xi’s politically conservative, economically liberal approach to governing mirror those confronted by his predecessors, who always seemed to take one step forward economically while taking a step backward politically. During his famous “southern tour” in 1992, Deng called for greater market reform and economic privatization, while continuing to crack down on political dissent. Jiang broadened the CCP’s power base by recruiting entrepreneurs and other new socioeconomic players (a formulation known as the “three represents”), while launching a harsh political campaign against the Falun Gong, an emerging group of religious believers. Hu’s populist appeal for a “harmonious society” sought to reduce economic disparities and social tensions while he tightened censorship over the media and police control of society, especially in ethnic minority regions. In all of these major socioeconomic and political developments, the CCP leadership made a calculated but far reaching ideological and policy move in one area, but resisted political pressure in another. Xi’s recent pronouncement of the “Chinese dream” presented the slogan that will likely encapsulate his time in the leadership and serve as the objective by which he hopes to be judged in history books. In his vague explanation of the Chinese dream, Xi paired nationalistic sentiment (or national rejuvenation) with an economically liberal desire to accommodate the wants and needs of a middle class lifestyle, also implying an equal opportunity for all Chinese to rise to middle class status. When Xi held his first summit with President Barack Obama in June 2013, he expanded on the definition of the Chinese dream, highlighting its similarity to the American dream and calling for “economic prosperity, national rejuvenation, and people’s well-being.” While the official meaning of the Chinese dream has become better defined over time, CCP conservative leaders have strongly rejected the notion it might include dreams of constitutionalism and political democracy. The Chinese people, hearing these ambiguous messages emanating from the leadership and state run media, do not know whom to trust. Forced to turn to social media for unfiltered (albeit often censored) news, they continue to express feelings of deep political uncertainty and fear for their country’s socioeconomic stability. Many wonder how they can realize a Chinese dream when their country is facing declining economic prospects, especially when they have economic statistics to validate their concerns. China’s economic growth rate slowed from 9.3 percent in 2011 to 7.8 percent last year, the lowest growth rate since 1999. In 2013, debates have raged over whether the country will even be able to reach its initial 7.5 percent growth target. At the same time, China’s Gini coefficient, which measures economic inequality (with zero representing perfect equality and 1 representing perfect inequality), continues to far exceed the 0.44 threshold generally thought to indicate potential for social destabilization. Independent estimates have shown the figure rising to 0.47 in 2009 and 0.61 in 2010, significantly surpassing official government estimates. In an attempt to measure official corruption, the Washington-based group Global Financial Integrity has shown that cumulative illicit financial flows from China totaled $3.8 trillion from 2000 to 2011. Facing these dire economic trends, the leadership cannot afford to vacillate: The time has come for bolder, more comprehensive action. CONFLICTING INTERESTS As he seeks to impose his Chinese dream on concerned Chinese citizens (while confronting liberal intellectuals who have become increasingly skeptical of the concept), Xi will also have to navigate a murky political climate. When Xi first took office, Hu’s unpopularity among opinion leaders and the middle class initially enhanced Xi’s public support—giving the sense that he had a new mandate. Furthermore, in the wake of the Bo Xilai scandal, all party elites regardless of factional affiliation united under Xi’s leadership in order to defend CCP rule. But will the leadership remain united and retain the fortitude necessary to enact meaningful economic reforms while balancing the demands of interest groups? Xi’s leadership team has strong incentives to embrace economic reforms. On the one hand, successful reform will greatly enhance the public’s confidence in the CCP, providing the leadership with the political capital to confront many other problems in Chinese society. On the other hand, failure to act will increase the likelihood of domestic instability (and potentially a bottom-up revolution). Despite these incentives, there are many external factors that could come into play and erode the support for Xi’s factional majority on the PSC or the leadership’s inherent interest in economic reform. It remains possible that new political scandals, economic crises, environmental disasters, or public health hazards might emerge and affect China’s political climate. As we learned from the spate of events that preceded the 18th Party Congress last year, including the purge of Bo, the demotion of Hu’s chief of staff, and a New York Times report accusing Wen’s family of corruption, timing is everything. However, beyond unpredictable events and continuing intra-party machinations, the greatest obstacles to economic reform are the companies that are part of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), which accounted for 43 percent of China’s GDP in 2012. The formidable power of this group explains why it took 13 years for China to pass an anti-monopoly law, why the macroeconomic control policy of the past decade was largely ineffective, and why the widely acknowledged property bubble has continued to grow. In each of these cases, corporate and industrial interest groups have encroached on the governmental decision-making process, either by inducing policy deadlock or manipulating policies in their favor. Under the SASAC, various players associated with property development have emerged as one of the most powerful special interest groups in present-day China. According to official state accounts, more than 70 percent of the total of 120 SASAC companies engaged in the real estate business and property development in 2010. In response, the State Council ordered 78 SASAC companies to withdraw their real estate investments. But resistance from these companies made the government order largely ineffective. In the first half of 2013, SASAC companies saw their profits increase by 18.2 percent over 2012. This profitable trend will only increase tensions surrounding new market-oriented policies. Pressure from these powerful and well-connected SASAC companies, however, will not be enough to derail economic reform. Other interest groups—primarily made up of members of the rising middle class who hold a negative impression of SOEs—will also weigh heavily on the minds of the leadership. For example, college graduates, who often come from middle class families, continue to face a high unemployment rate, with nearly two million failing to find work each year. A shrinking private sector has alerted the middle class to the increasingly obvious oligarchic power of SOEs and their inability to innovate. Indeed, a study conducted by Chinese scholars shows that the profits made by China’s 500 largest private companies in 2009 amounted to less than the total revenues of just two SOE firms, China Mobile and Sinopec. With no incentive to innovate, these and other SOE monopolies will continue to hamper China’s economic growth, severely undermining the leadership’s effort to generate an innovation-led and consumption-driven economy. As potent and profitable SOEs push back against reform, and the middle class pushes back against them, the ultimate shape of the economic reforms will reveal which group holds the real economic and sociopolitical upper hand in society: state-owned corporations or the middle class. POLITICAL PERILS Even with varied interest groups holding sway over the eventual outcome, China’s leadership is poised to adopt some economic reforms to promote the private sector. But SOEs are not the only obstacles the country faces. The road ahead is also far from certain because of the leadership’s ambivalence toward—or outright avoidance of—discussions of the political reform that must accompany any successful economic reform effort. Just as past economic reforms bred the need for current economic reforms, economic transformation today will breed the need for political reform tomorrow. Both China’s emerging middle class and its lower class have taken note of the economic problems that arise from a closed political environment. A truly innovation-driven economy requires political openness, just as a service sector–led economy requires a developed legal system, the rule of law, and the ability to contain widespread official corruption. As China’s economy undergoes the transformation from an export-driven to a consumption-driven model, the middle class likely will sit in the driver’s seat of economic development. Adopting political as well as economic policies that please those economic drivers is the key to ensuring a smoother economic transformation. No group in Chinese society better exemplifies the conundrum of the government’s development policies than the middle class. Born from the economic reforms of the past, the middle class believes its interests have been ignored by the government for too long. Even if members of the middle class obtain the resources to consume everything they desire, they will ultimately want a say in what the future holds for them. Recent studies conducted in China have found that the middle class, more than other social groups, tends to be cynical about the policy promises made by authorities, more demanding of policy implementation, and more sensitive when it comes to official corruption. As middle class Chinese realize that their voices are being suppressed, that their access to information is being blocked, and that their space for social action is being unduly confined, increased political dissent may take shape. 

Chinese economic downturn causes World War III
Plate 3
Tom Plate, professor of Policy and Communication Studies at UCLA where he founded the Asia Pacific Media Network, “WHY NOT INVADE CHINA? With allies like the neo-cons, Bush scarcely needs enemies”, June 30, 2003, http://asiamedia.ucla.edu/TomPlate2003/06302003.htm)
But imagine a China disintegrating- on its own, without neo-conservative or Central Intelligence Agency prompting, much less outright military invasion because the economy (against all predictions) suddenly collapses. That would knock Asia into chaos. A massive flood of refugees would head for Indonesia and other places with poor border controls, which don’t’ want them and cant handle them; some in Japan might lick their lips at the prospect of of World War II revisited and look to annex a slice of China. That would send Singapore and Malaysia- once occupied by Japan- into nervous breakdowns. Meanwhile, India might make a grab for Tibet, and Pakistan for Kashmir. Then you can say hello to World War III, Asia style. That’s why wise policy encourages Chinese stability, security and economic growth – the very direction the White House now seems to prefer.

Thus the plan: China should prioritize environmental protection over resource extraction when the two conflict. I reserve the right to clarify.

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Moral uncertainty is high now, but there’s room for improvement. Parfit 84
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). P. 453.
Some people believe that there cannot be progress in Ethics, since everything has been already said. Like Rawls and Nagel, I believe the opposite. How many people have made Non-Religious Ethics their life's work? Before the recent past, very few. In most civilizations, most people have believed in the existence of a God, or of several gods. A large minority were in fact Atheists, whatever they pretended. But, before the recent past, very few Atheists made Ethics their life’s work. Buddha may be among this few, as may Confucius, and a few Ancient Greeks and Romans. After more than a thousand years, there were a few more between the Sixteenth and Twentieth centuries. Hume was an atheist who made Ethics part of his life's work. Sidgwick was another. After Sidgwick, there were several atheists who were professional moral philosophers. But most of these did not do Ethics. They did Meta-Ethics. They did not ask which outcomes would be good or bad, or which acts would be right or wrong. They asked, and wrote about, only the meaning of moral language, and the question of objectivity. Non-Religious Ethics has been systematically studied, by many people, only since the 1960s. Compared with the other sciences, Non-Religious Ethics is the youngest and the least advanced.

Adopt a parliamentary model to account for moral uncertainty. This entails minimizing existential risks. Bostrom 9
Bostrom, Nick (Existentialist of a different sort). “Moral uncertainty – toward a solution?” 1 January 2009. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/moral-uncertainty-towards-a-solution.html
It seems people are overconfident about their moral beliefs.  But how should one reason and act if one acknowledges that one is uncertain about morality – not just applied ethics but fundamental moral issues? if you don't know which moral theory is correct?
It doesn't seem you can’t simply plug your uncertainty into expected utility decision theory and crank the wheel; because many moral theories state that you should not always maximize expected utility.
Even if we limit consideration to consequentialist theories, it still is hard to see how to combine them in the standard decision theoretic framework.  For example, suppose you give X probability to total utilitarianism and (100-X) to average utilitarianism.  Now an action might add 5 utils to total happiness and decrease average happiness by 2 utils.  (This could happen, e.g. if you create a new happy person that is less happy than the people who already existed.)  Now what do you do, for different values of X?
The problem gets even more complicated if we consider not only consequentialist theories but also deontological theories, contractarian theories, virtue ethics, etc.  We might even throw various meta-ethical theories into the stew: error theory, relativism, etc.
I'm working on a paper on this together with my colleague Toby Ord.  We have some arguments against a few possible "solutions" that we think don't work.  On the positive side we have some tricks that work for a few special cases.  But beyond that, the best we have managed so far is a kind of metaphor, which we don't think is literally and exactly correct, and it is a bit under-determined, but it seems to get things roughly right and it might point in the right direction:
The Parliamentary Model.  Suppose that you have a set of mutually exclusive moral theories, and that you assign each of these some probability.  Now imagine that each of these theories gets to send some number of delegates to The Parliament.  The number of delegates each theory gets to send is proportional to the probability of the theory.  Then the delegates bargain with one another for support on various issues; and the Parliament reaches a decision by the delegates voting.  What you should do is act according to the decisions of this imaginary Parliament.  (Actually, we use an extra trick here: we imagine that the delegates act as if the Parliament's decision were a stochastic variable such that the probability of the Parliament taking action A is proportional to the fraction of votes for A.  This has the effect of eliminating the artificial 50 threshold that otherwise gives a majority bloc absolute power.  Yet – unbeknownst to the delegates – the Parliament always takes whatever action got the most votes: this way we avoid paying the cost of the randomization!)
The idea here is that moral theories get more influence the more probable they are; yet even a relatively weak theory can still get its way on some issues that the theory think are extremely important by sacrificing its influence on other issues that other theories deem more important.  For example, suppose you assign 10 probability to total utilitarianism and 90 to moral egoism (just to illustrate the principle).  Then the Parliament would mostly take actions that maximize egoistic satisfaction; however it would make some concessions to utilitarianism on issues that utilitarianism thinks is especially important.  In this example, the person might donate some portion of their income to existential risks research and otherwise live completely selfishly.
I think there might be wisdom in this model.  It avoids the dangerous and unstable extremism that would result from letting one’s current favorite moral theory completely dictate action, while still allowing the aggressive pursuit of some non-commonsensical high-leverage strategies so long as they don’t infringe too much on what other major moral theories deem centrally important.

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I don’t need to win that weighing values is possible. Extinction precludes all values, so it is wrong under any moral code. Seeley 86
Robert A., Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, The Handbook of Non-Violence, p. 269-70
In moral reasoning prediction of consequences is nearly always impossible. One balances the risks of an action against its benefits; one also considers what known damage the action would do. Thus a surgeon in deciding whether to perform an operation weighs the known effects (the loss of some nerve function, for example) and risks (death) against the benefits, and weighs also the risks and benefits of not performing surgery. Morally, however, human extinction is unlike any other risk. No conceivable human good could be worth the extinction of the race, for in order to be a human good it must be experienced by human beings. Thus extinction is one result we dare not-may not-risk. Though not conclusively established, the risk of extinction is real enough to make nuclear war utterly impermissible under any sane moral code.

No theory is so absolute that extinction is irrelevant. Even deon has a threshold.
Korsgaard 02
Christine M. Korsgaard (Professor of Philosophy at Harvard). Internalism and the Sources of Normativity. Constructions of Practical Reason: Interviews on Moral and Political Philosophy, edited by Herlinde Pauer-Studer (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2002) http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~korsgaar/CPR.CMK.Interview.pdf
But actions are also events in the world (or correspond to events in the world, at least), and they too have consequences. There are a number of different ways in which one can deal with worries about what happens to the consequences in Kant’s ethical theory. It is worth pointing out that Kant himself not only did not ignore the consequences, but took the fact that good actions can have bad effects as the starting point for his religious philosophy. In his religious thought, Kant was concerned with the question how the moral agent has to envision the world, how he has to think of its metaphysics in order to cope with the fact that the actions morality demands may have terrible effects that we never intended, or may simply fail to have good ones.  I myself see the development of what Rawls has called “nonideal theory” to be the right way of taking care of a certain class of cases, in which the consequences of doing the right thing just seem too appalling for us to simply wash our hands of. But I do not want to say that just having bad consequences is enough to put an action into the realm of nonideal theory. I think there is a range of bad consequences that a decent person has to be prepared to live with, out of respect for other people’s right to manage their own lives and actions, and to contribute to shared decisions. But I also think that there are cases where our actions go wrong in such a way that they turn out in a sense not to be the actions we intended to do, or to instantiate the values we meant them to instantiate. I think that some of these cases can be dealt with by introducing the kind of double-level structure into moral philosophy that I have described in the essay on “The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing with Evil.” 3 But I also think there are cases that cannot be domesticated even in this way, cases in which, to put it paradoxically, the good person will do something “wrong.” I have written about that sort of case too, in “Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Kant on the Right to Revolution.” 4 

Cost-benefit analysis is feasible. Ignore any util calc indicts. Hardin 90
Hardin, Russell (Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences @ NYU). May 1990. Morality within the Limits of Reason. University Of Chicago Press. pp. 4. ISBN 978-0226316208.
One of the cuter charges against utilitarianism is that it is irrational in the following sense. If I take the time to calculate the consequences of various courses of action before me, then I will ipso facto have chosen the course of action to take, namely, to sit and calculate, because while I am calculating the other courses of action will cease to be open to me. It should embarrass philosophers that they have ever taken this objection seriously. Parallel considerations in other realms are dismissed with eminently good sense. Lord Devlin notes, “If the reasonable man ‘worked to rule’ by perusing to the point of comprehension every form he was handed, the commercial and administrative life of the country would creep to a standstill.” James March and Herbert Simon escape the quandary of unending calculation by noting that often we satisfice, we do not maximize: we stop calculating and considering when we find a merely adequate choice of action. When, in principle, one cannot know what is the best choice, one can nevertheless be sure that sitting and calculating is not the best choice. But, one may ask, How do you know that another ten minutes of calculation would not have produced a better choice? And one can only answer, You do not. At some point the quarrel begins to sound adolescent. It is ironic that the point of the quarrel is almost never at issue in practice (as Devlin implies, we are almost all too reasonable in practice to bring the world to a standstill) but only in the principled discussions of academics.

The standard is maximizing happiness.

First, revisionary intuitionism is true and leads to util.
Yudkowsky 8
Eliezer Yudkowsky (research fellow of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute; he also writes Harry Potter fan fiction). “The ‘Intuitions’ Behind ‘Utilitarianism.’” 28 January 2008. LessWrong. http://lesswrong.com/lw/n9/the_intuitions_behind_utilitarianism/
I haven't said much about metaethics - the nature of morality - because that has a forward dependency on a discussion of the Mind Projection Fallacy that I haven't gotten to yet. I used to be very confused about metaethics. After my confusion finally cleared up, I did a postmortem on my previous thoughts. I found that my object-level moral reasoning had been valuable and my meta-level moral reasoning had been worse than useless. And this appears to be a general syndrome - people do much better when discussing whether torture is good or bad than when they discuss the meaning of "good" and "bad". Thus, I deem it prudent to keep moral discussions on the object level wherever I possibly can. Occasionally people object to any discussion of morality on the grounds that morality doesn't exist, and in lieu of jumping over the forward dependency to explain that "exist" is not the right term to use here, I generally say, "But what do you do anyway?" and take the discussion back down to the object level. Paul Gowder, though, has pointed out that both the idea of choosing a googolplex dust specks in a googolplex eyes over 50 years of torture for one person, and the idea of "utilitarianism", depend on "intuition". He says I've argued that the two are not compatible, but charges me with failing to argue for the utilitarian intuitions that I appeal to. Now "intuition" is not how I would describe the computations that underlie human morality and distinguish us, as moralists, from an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness and/or a rock. But I am okay with using the word "intuition" as a term of art, bearing in mind that "intuition" in this sense is not to be contrasted to reason, but is, rather, the cognitive building block out of which both long verbal arguments and fast perceptual arguments are constructed. I see the project of morality as a project of renormalizing intuition. We have intuitions about things that seem desirable or undesirable, intuitions about actions that are right or wrong, intuitions about how to resolve conflicting intuitions, intuitions about how to systematize specific intuitions into general principles. Delete all the intuitions, and you aren't left with an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness, you're left with a rock. Keep all your specific intuitions and refuse to build upon the reflective ones, and you aren't left with an ideal philosopher of perfect spontaneity and genuineness, you're left with a grunting caveperson running in circles, due to cyclical preferences and similar inconsistencies. "Intuition", as a term of art, is not a curse word when it comes to morality - there is nothing else to argue from. Even modus ponens is an "intuition" in this sense - it's just that modus ponens still seems like a good idea after being formalized, reflected on, extrapolated out to see if it has sensible consequences, etcetera. So that is "intuition". However, Gowder did not say what he meant by "utilitarianism". Does utilitarianism say... That right actions are strictly determined by good consequences? That praiseworthy actions depend on justifiable expectations of good consequences? That probabilities of consequences should normatively be discounted by their probability, so that a 50 probability of something bad should weigh exactly half as much in our tradeoffs? That virtuous actions always correspond to maximizing expected utility under some utility function? That two harmful events are worse than one? That two independent occurrences of a harm (not to the same person, not interacting with each other) are exactly twice as bad as one? That for any two harms A and B, with A much worse than B, there exists some tiny probability such that gambling on this probability of A is preferable to a certainty of B? If you say that I advocate something, or that my argument depends on something, and that it is wrong, do please specify what this thingy is... anyway, I accept 3, 5, 6, and 7, but not 4; I am not sure about the phrasing of 1; and 2 is true, I guess, but phrased in a rather solipsistic and selfish fashion: you should not worry about being praiseworthy. Now, what are the "intuitions" upon which my "utilitarianism" depends? This is a deepish sort of topic, but I'll take a quick stab at it. First of all, it's not just that someone presented me with a list of statements like those above, and I decided which ones sounded "intuitive". Among other things, if you try to violate "utilitarianism", you run into paradoxes, contradictions, circular preferences, and other things that aren't symptoms of moral wrongness so much as moral incoherence. After you think about moral problems for a while, and also find new truths about the world, and even discover disturbing facts about how you yourself work, you often end up with different moral opinions than when you started out. This does not quite define moral progress, but it is how we experience moral progress. As part of my experienced moral progress, I've drawn a conceptual separation between questions of type Where should we go? and questions of type How should we get there? (Could that be what Gowder means by saying I'm "utilitarian"?) The question of where a road goes - where it leads - you can answer by traveling the road and finding out. If you have a false belief about where the road leads, this falsity can be destroyed by the truth in a very direct and straightforward manner. When it comes to wanting to go to a particular place, this want is not entirely immune from the destructive powers of truth. You could go there and find that you regret it afterward (which does not define moral error, but is how we experience moral error). But, even so, wanting to be in a particular place seems worth distinguishing from wanting to take a particular road to a particular place. Our intuitions about where to go are arguable enough, but our intuitions about how to get there are frankly messed up. After the two hundred and eighty-seventh research study showing that people will chop their own feet off if you frame the problem the wrong way, you start to distrust first impressions. When you've read enough research on scope insensitivity - people will pay only 28 more to protect all 57 wilderness areas in Ontario than one area, people will pay the same amount to save 50,000 lives as 5,000 lives... that sort of thing... Well, the worst case of scope insensitivity I've ever heard of was described here by Slovic: Other recent research shows similar results. Two Israeli psychologists asked people to contribute to a costly life-saving treatment. They could offer that contribution to a group of eight sick children, or to an individual child selected from the group. The target amount needed to save the child (or children) was the same in both cases. Contributions to individual group members far outweighed the contributions to the entire group. There's other research along similar lines, but I'm just presenting one example, 'cause, y'know, eight examples would probably have less impact. If you know the general experimental paradigm, then the reason for the above behavior is pretty obvious - focusing your attention on a single child creates more emotional arousal than trying to distribute attention around eight children simultaneously. So people are willing to pay more to help one child than to help eight. Now, you could look at this intuition, and think it was revealing some kind of incredibly deep moral truth which shows that one child's good fortune is somehow devalued by the other children's good fortune. But what about the billions of other children in the world? Why isn't it a bad idea to help this one child, when that causes the value of all the other children to go down? How can it be significantly better to have 1,329,342,410 happy children than 1,329,342,409, but then somewhat worse to have seven more at 1,329,342,417? Or you could look at that and say: "The intuition is wrong: the brain can't successfully multiply by eight and get a larger quantity than it started with. But it ought to, normatively speaking." And once you realize that the brain can't multiply by eight, then the other cases of scope neglect stop seeming to reveal some fundamental truth about 50,000 lives being worth just the same effort as 5,000 lives, or whatever. You don't get the impression you're looking at the revelation of a deep moral truth about nonagglomerative utilities. It's just that the brain doesn't goddamn multiply. Quantities get thrown out the window. If you have $100 to spend, and you spend $20 each on each of 5 efforts to save 5,000 lives, you will do worse than if you spend $100 on a single effort to save 50,000 lives. Likewise if such choices are made by 10 different people, rather than the same person. As soon as you start believing that it is better to save 50,000 lives than 25,000 lives, that simple preference of final destinations has implications for the choice of paths, when you consider five different events that save 5,000 lives. (It is a general principle that Bayesians see no difference between the long-run answer and the short-run answer; you never get two different answers from computing the same question two different ways. But the long run is a helpful intuition pump, so I am talking about it anyway.) The aggregative valuation strategy of "shut up and multiply" arises from the simple preference to have more of something - to save as many lives as possible - when you have to describe general principles for choosing more than once, acting more than once, planning at more than one time. Aggregation also arises from claiming that the local choice to save one life doesn't depend on how many lives already exist, far away on the other side of the planet, or far away on the other side of the universe. Three lives are one and one and one. No matter how many billions are doing better, or doing worse. 3 = 1 + 1 + 1, no matter what other quantities you add to both sides of the equation. And if you add another life you get 4 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. That's aggregation. When you've read enough heuristics and biases research, and enough coherence and uniqueness proofs for Bayesian probabilities and expected utility, and you've seen the "Dutch book" and "money pump" effects that penalize trying to handle uncertain outcomes any other way, then you don't see the preference reversals in the Allais Paradox as revealing some incredibly deep moral truth about the intrinsic value of certainty. It just goes to show that the brain doesn't goddamn multiply. The primitive, perceptual intuitions that make a choice "feel good" don't handle probabilistic pathways through time very skillfully, especially when the probabilities have been expressed symbolically rather than experienced as a frequency. So you reflect, devise more trustworthy logics, and think it through in words. When you see people insisting that no amount of money whatsoever is worth a single human life, and then driving an extra mile to save $10; or when you see people insisting that no amount of money is worth a decrement of health, and then choosing the cheapest health insurance available; then you don't think that their protestations reveal some deep truth about incommensurable utilities. Part of it, clearly, is that primitive intuitions don't successfully diminish the emotional impact of symbols standing for small quantities - anything you talk about seems like "an amount worth considering". And part of it has to do with preferring unconditional social rules to conditional social rules. Conditional rules seem weaker, seem more subject to manipulation. If there's any loophole that lets the government legally commit torture, then the government will drive a truck through that loophole. So it seems like there should be an unconditional social injunction against preferring money to life, and no "but" following it. Not even "but a thousand dollars isn't worth a 0.0000000001 probability of saving a life". Though the latter choice, of course, is revealed every time we sneeze without calling a doctor. The rhetoric of sacredness gets bonus points for seeming to express an unlimited commitment, an unconditional refusal that signals trustworthiness and refusal to compromise. So you conclude that moral rhetoric espouses qualitative distinctions, because espousing a quantitative tradeoff would sound like you were plotting to defect. On such occasions, people vigorously want to throw quantities out the window, and they get upset if you try to bring quantities back in, because quantities sound like conditions that would weaken the rule. But you don't conclude that there are actually two tiers of utility with lexical ordering. You don't conclude that there is actually an infinitely sharp moral gradient, some atom that moves a Planck distance (in our continuous physical universe) and sends a utility from 0 to infinity. You don't conclude that utilities must be expressed using hyper-real numbers. Because the lower tier would simply vanish in any equation. It would never be worth the tiniest effort to recalculate for it. All decisions would be determined by the upper tier, and all thought spent thinking about the upper tier only, if the upper tier genuinely had lexical priority. As Peter Norvig once pointed out, if Asimov's robots had strict priority for the First Law of Robotics ("A robot shall not harm a human being, nor through inaction allow a human being to come to harm") then no robot's behavior would ever show any sign of the other two Laws; there would always be some tiny First Law factor that would be sufficient to determine the decision. Whatever value is worth thinking about at all, must be worth trading off against all other values worth thinking about, because thought itself is a limited resource that must be traded off. When you reveal a value, you reveal a utility. I don't say that morality should always be simple. I've already said that the meaning of music is more than happiness alone, more than just a pleasure center lighting up. I would rather see music composed by people than by nonsentient machine learning algorithms, so that someone should have the joy of composition; I care about the journey, as well as the destination. And I am ready to hear if you tell me that the value of music is deeper, and involves more complications, than I realize - that the valuation of this one event is more complex than I know.  But that's for one event. When it comes to multiplying by quantities and probabilities, complication is to be avoided - at least if you care more about the destination than the journey. When you've reflected on enough intuitions, and corrected enough absurdities, you start to see a common denominator, a meta-principle at work, which one might phrase as "Shut up and multiply." Where music is concerned, I care about the journey. When lives are at stake, I shut up and multiply. It is more important that lives be saved, than that we conform to any particular ritual in saving them. And the optimal path to that destination is governed by laws that are simple, because they are math. And that's why I'm a utilitarian - at least when I am doing something that is overwhelmingly more important than my own feelings about it - which is most of the time, because there are not many utilitarians, and many things left undone.

Second, reductionism.

Brain studies prove personal identity doesn’t exist. Parfit 84
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).
Some recent medical cases provide striking evidence in favour of the Reductionist View. Human beings have a lower brain and two upper hemispheres, which are connected by a bundle of fibres. In treating a few people with severe epilepsy, surgeons have cut these fibres. The aim was to reduce the severity of epileptic fits, by confining their causes to a single hemisphere. This aim was achieved. But the operations had another unintended consequence. The effect, in the words of one surgeon, was the creation of ‘two separate spheres of consciousness.’ This effect was revealed by various psychological tests. These made use of two facts. We control our right arms with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. And what is in the right halves of our visual fields we see with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. When someone’s hemispheres have been disconnected, psychologists can thus present to this person two different written questions in the two halves of his visual field, and can receive two different answers written by this person’s two hands.

In the absence of personal identity, only end states can matter. Shoemaker 99
Shoemaker, David (Dept of Philosophy, U Memphis). “Utilitarianism and Personal Identity.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 33: 183–199, 1999. http://www.csun.edu/~ds56723/jvipaper.pdf
Extreme reductionism might lend support to utilitarianism in the following way. Many people claim that we are justified in maximizing the good in our own lives, but not justified in maximizing the good across sets of lives, simply because each of us is a single, deeply unified person, unified by the further fact of identity, whereas there is no such corresponding unity across sets of lives. But if the only justification for the different treatment of individual lives and sets of lives is the further fact, and this fact is undermined by the truth of reductionism, then nothing justifies this different treatment. There are no deeply unified subjects of experience. What remains are merely the experiences themselves, and so any ethical theory distinguishing between individual lives and sets of lives is mistaken. If the deep, further fact is missing, then there are no unities. The morally significant units should then be the states people are in at particular times, and an ethical theory that focused on them and attempted to improve their quality, whatever their location, would be the most plausible. Utilitarianism is just such a theory.

Third, the ultimate human good is happiness. Darwish 9
“Rethinking Utilitarianism,” Bahaa Darwish (Qatar University). Teaching Ethics 10 (1):87-109 (2009). http://www.uvu.edu/ethics/seac/Darwish20-20Rethinking20Utilitarianism.pdf
Let’s start with knowledge. It is clear that those who value knowledge for its own sake (for instance, highly motivated professionals) find pleasure in both the pursuit and attainment of knowledge, however  exhausted they become in either case. So, granted that knowledge, for  them, is a value that has intrinsic worth in itself, and is thus sought for  itself, because it is a value that yields their pleasure or happiness. The same can be said about the other values. Let’s take autonomy in the sense expressed  by Hooker as “control over one’s own life” as another example. Here one  needs to say no more than that the mere fact that people seek autonomy  explains the satisfaction or the pleasure autonomy brings. Those who  value autonomy, thus seek it for itself, cannot feel happy when their decisions are not in their hands, or when they do not have control over their  own life. In short, they cannot be happy otherwise. Moore, who explicitly differs from the classical utilitarians in holding that pleasure is not the  sole good,  20   says that “the most valuable things… are pleasures of human  intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects,”  21   which seems to mean  that such things are valued for  the pleasures and the enjoyment they  bring. These examples clearly show that though these values have intrinsic worth, they bring or constitute our pleasure.

Tournament: Sunvite RR | Round: 5 | Opponent: Oxbridge NV | Judge: Ross Brown and Ken Posner
Contention 1 is the Reptilian Illuminati

Resource extraction is facilitated by a reptilian Illuminati conspiracy to enslave the world and destroy the environment, culminating in extinction.
Sacks 12 writes
Jared Sacks (anti-fascist and anti-reptile supremacy campaigner based in the ophidian stronghold of Cape Town). “Humanoids of the World Unite.” Written by Ben Fogel (“Jared Sacks” was made up by Fogel for the article.) Amandla. July 24th, 2012. http://www.amandla.org.za/blog/1492-humanoids-of-the-world-unite
As the world continues to go down the road of self-destruction, we, the enslaved humanoids of planet Earth, are slowly realising that we are at a crossroads in history. War, economic collapse, rampant militarism, and a political culture of fear is overshadowed by the environmental crisis. Cementing the hold of the 1 on our lives, global climate change is a deliberate strategy to undermine our liberation movement by killing off our most rebellious and most vulnerable. Yet, 2011 was the year of the humanoid awakening against our enslavement and oppression at the hands of the 1. From Tunisia to Greece to Chile to New York, we rose up to assert our collective humanity. It is important to note that there are two kinds of dictatorships. One is an overt dictatorship, such as that of Ben Ali and Mubarak in Tunisia and Egypt respectively. The other is liberal democracy. As British political philosopher David Icke explains, “that is the ultimate control, because people do not rebel against not being free when they think they are”. But it seems that even within liberal democracies, the masses are beginning to understand that they remain in chains. Still, despite the tens of millions who took to the streets last year, very few of us have a rigorous analysis of who the 1 are and how an increasingly large number of the world's elite are part of a hidden conspiracy to leave our planet in shambles after extracting all its resources and laying waste to the environment. Only those who have nothing to lose would dare risk destroying Earth as we know it, just to get at its raw materials. Bloodlines An increased body of scholarly research suggests that there are two primary bloodlines that control our planet: The Rothschilds and the Windsor dynasties. What began within the construction and maintenance of the banking system oligarchy has spread to other areas of control, including government, manufacturing and technology. For instance, the prestigious Bush family line, when traced back, originates within the Windsor dynasty. In fact, it has been shown that 33 of the 44 US presidents are related to Charlemagne and England's Edward III, both of whom are part of this bloodline. Only the gullible cry coincidence here. More and more people, especially those involved in the Occupy movement are discovering the bloodlines' explicit role in fermenting the recent financial crisis. Insurgent political theories about the so-called Illuminati conspiracy continue to gain credence because these protests have exposed the true nature of the 1. More than just a metaphor, such concepts provide a clear and undeniable model to account for our geo-political malaise. If we are prepared to follow this line of inquiry to its end, as I propose we must, one disturbing truth becomes clear: The Illuminati, the conspiratorial organisation that has controlled the world since at least the 18th century, is in fact a three-dimensional proxy group for the reptilian bloodline, a group of human-like reptoids from the constellation Draco in the lower fourth-dimension. The Reptilians This crucial information has been unearthed by numerous investigators over the past few years. Most prominently, Icke, has revealed through exhaustive interviews with Christine Fitzgerald, close friend of Diana of Wales, that the people's princess was actually killed because she had discovered the truth about the Windsors dynasty: that they are actually shape-shifting reptoids involved in, amongst other things, the global drug trade. Likewise, hip hop revolutionary Tupac Shakur, who also discovered the truth behind the Reptilian Illuminati bloodlines, was assassinated by East Coast Reptilians connected to the villainous hip venture capitalist Sean Combs aka Puff Daddy / P Diddy / Diddy Dirty Money, etc. (Like the Devil in the Christian Bible, the reptoids trade in many names. A cultural overlap that bears more exhaustive study than permitted here). 

Reptilian domination outweighs extinction. It’s a face worse than death.
Bartley 4 writes
Jim Bartley (James Bartley is an Abductee who has been exposed to high levels of Spiritual Warfare. He has studied in England and Germany. He is a student of Military History with an emphasis on Intelligence- Counterintelligence and Special Operations), “UNDERSTANDING THE REPTILIAN MIND”, online, published 2004-05, accessed 4-18-05, http://www.whale.to/b/bartley3.html

The reptilians make full use of what American Military War Colleges refer to as a "Force Multiplier." In this case, it is mayhem, sexual predation, ritual murder and Genocide by PROXY. Rather than go to the trouble of manifesting in full physical density and having to individually rape, torture and perpetrate genocide upon countless humans, the reptilians manipulate individual humans as well as entire societies and nations to do the work for them. This is an important point to understand. The reptilians will manipulate individual males into becoming serial sex offenders and serial murderers and on a macro level, they will inculcate notions of racial purity and racial superiority into entire cultures which then serves as the basis and justification for those same cultures to perpetrate Genocide upon other races and societies deemed "inferior" or "sub-human." If we as a Species ever hope to move beyond the control of the draco-reptilian overlords, we must first recognize the massive deception that has been foisted upon us. We must understand that notions of racial purity and racial superiority are inherently reptilian modalities. These reptilian modalities than that provide the justification for individuals and entire cultures to perpetrate mayhem and slaughter upon their fellow humans. This serves to further the reptilian's ultimate goal of a Global Tyranny because often as not United Nations troops become embroiled in the various regional conflicts. Those of us within the research community must be willing to point out the absurd fallacies of the reptilian propagandist and New Age Globalist. Starry eyed New Agers display the same kind of misplaced enthusiasm that so many young intellectual Communists displayed in the 1920's and 1930's during the worst of the Bolshevik Revolution's excesses. We must come to grips with the fact that the worst atrocities perpetrated by humans throughout history has have been the end result of Reptilian manipulation.

Ignore permissibility and presumption because moral uncertainty means we’ll always have a non-zero credence in the existence of morality, so there’s always a risk of offense in favor of one action.

The standard is maximizing happiness.

First, respect for human worth would justify util. Cummiskey 90
Cummiskey, David. Associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. “Kantian Consequentiaism.” Ethics 100 (April 1990), University of Chicago. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract “social entity.” It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive “overall social good.” Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that “to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has.” But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the principle that “rational nature exists as an end in itself”. Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have an equal value, then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many rational beings as possible. In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a non- value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kant’s normative theory is based on an unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have “dignity, that is, an unconditional and incomparable worth” that transcends any market value, but persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others. The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others.

Second, reductionism.
Brain studies prove personal identity doesn’t exist. Parfit 84 writes
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).
Some recent medical cases provide striking evidence in favour of the Reductionist View. Human beings have a lower brain and two upper hemispheres, which are connected by a bundle of fibres. In treating a few people with severe epilepsy, surgeons have cut these fibres. The aim was to reduce the severity of epileptic fits, by confining their causes to a single hemisphere. This aim was achieved. But the operations had another unintended consequence. The effect, in the words of one surgeon, was the creation of ‘two separate spheres of consciousness.’ This effect was revealed by various psychological tests. These made use of two facts. We control our right arms with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. And what is in the right halves of our visual fields we see with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. When someone’s hemispheres have been disconnected, psychologists can thus present to this person two different written questions in the two halves of his visual field, and can receive two different answers written by this person’s two hands.

In the absence of personal identity, only end states can matter. Shoemaker 99
Shoemaker, David (Dept of Philosophy, U Memphis). “Utilitarianism and Personal Identity.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 33: 183–199, 1999. http://www.csun.edu/~ds56723/jvipaper.pdf
Extreme reductionism might lend support to utilitarianism in the following way. Many people claim that we are justified in maximizing the good in our own lives, but not justified in maximizing the good across sets of lives, simply because each of us is a single, deeply unified person, unified by the further fact of identity, whereas there is no such corresponding unity across sets of lives. But if the only justification for the different treatment of individual lives and sets of lives is the further fact, and this fact is undermined by the truth of reductionism, then nothing justifies this different treatment. There are no deeply unified subjects of experience. What remains are merely the experiences themselves, and so any ethical theory distinguishing between individual lives and sets of lives is mistaken. If the deep, further fact is missing, then there are no unities. The morally significant units should then be the states people are in at particular times, and an ethical theory that focused on them and attempted to improve their quality, whatever their location, would be the most plausible. Utilitarianism is just such a theory.

And third, universalizability justifies util. Singer 93
Peter Singer, “Practical Ethics,” Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 13-14
The universal aspect of ethics, I suggest, does provide a persuasive, although not conclusive, reason for taking a broadly utilitarian position. My reason for suggesting this is as follows. In accepting that ethical judgments must be made from a universal point of view, I am accepting that my own interests cannot, simply because they are my interests, count more than the interests of anyone else. Thus my very natural concern that my own interests be looked after must, when I think ethically, be extended to the interests of others. Now, imagine that I am trying to decide between two possible courses of action – perhaps whether to eat all the fruits I have collected myself, or to share them with others. Imagine, too, that I am deciding in a complete ethical vacuum, that I know nothing of any ethical considerations – I am, we might say, in a pre-ethical stage of thinking. How would I make up my mind? One thing that would be still relevant would be how the possible courses of action will affect my interests. Indeed, if we define ‘interests’ broadly enough, so that we count anything people desire as in their interests (unless it is incompatible with another desire or desires), then it would seem that at this pre-ethical stage, only one’s own interests can be relevant to the decision. Suppose I then begin to think ethically, to the extent of recognizing that my own interests cannot count for more, simply because they are my own, than the interests of others. In place of my own interests, I now have to take into account the interests of all those affected by my decision. This requires me to weigh up all these interests and adopt the course of action most likely to maximize the interests of those affected.

Morality must take the form of a universal rule. Singer 09 writes
Peter Singer Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, Princeton, “The Groundwork of Utilitarian Morals: Reconsidering Hare’s Argument for Utilitarianism,” draft prepared for the Conference on Issues in Modern Philosophy: “The Foundations of Morality,” NYU Philosophy Department, November 7, 2009, 34.
When I prescribe  something, using moral language, my prescription it commits me to a substantive moral judgment about all relevantly similar cases. This includes hypothetical cases in which I am in a different position from my actual one. So to make a moral judgment, I must put myself in the position of the other person affected by my proposed action – or to be more precise, in the position of all those affected by my action. Whether I can accept the judgment – that is, whether I can prescribe it universally – will then depend on whether I could accept it if I had to live the lives of all those affected by the action.

Thus, I affirm that developing countries should prioritize environmental protection over resource extraction.
My interpretation is that the neg must defend that resource extraction is good assuming the Reptilian Illuminati rule the world. 

Imagining conspiracy theories is good. 6 reasons.

First, conspiracy theories reveal the true nature of the world, making them epistemically superior.
Pigden 7 writes
Charles Pigden (professor of philosophy at the University of Otago, New Zealand and is the editor of Russell on Ethics). “Conspiracy Theories and the Conventional Wisdom”,  Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 4.2, 219-232, Project Muse. 2007.
But what is the status of these epistemic "oughts"? Are they categorical imperatives (Requirements of Reason) or hypothetical imperatives pointing out the means to achieve some widely shared but intellectually optional end, such as achieving an adequate understanding of the world? I incline to the latter view, though I suspect it would be a difficult business to specify the ends to which a respectable epistemic "ought" prescribes the means. But whatever the precise status of epistemic "oughts", the claim that we rationally ought to adopt a belief-forming strategy (such as not believing in or not enquiring into conspiracy theories), would appear to presuppose that the strategy in question is conducive to truth and the avoidance of error, at least under a wide range of circumstances. Thus the rationale for the strategy of conspiratorial skepticism is that it is more likely to get it right or less likely to get it wrong than its epistemic rivals. It rests on the presumption that conspiracy theories are unlikely to be true, so unlikely that they are generally not worth discussing. Indeed, it requires something stronger than the simple assumption that conspiracy theories as such are unlikely to be true. The space of possible theories is large; the space of true theories, small. But it would be End Page 221 silly to conclude from this that we ought to abstain from theorizing to avoid the risk of error. The fact that theories in general are more likely to be false than true does not mean that we should give up theorizing or enquiring into theories. By the same token, the fact that conspiracy theories are more likely to be false than true does not mean that we should give up conspiracy theorizing or enquiring into conspiracy theories. For that to be a sensible strategy we would have to suppose that conspiracy theories were much more likely to be false than their non-conspiratorial rivals. And since he seems to think that we ought not to believe or enquire into conspiracy theories, that is, presumably, the opinion of Tony Blair and his allies amongst the punditocracy. 2. the Conventional Wisdom and Its Consequences: History is Bunk But if a conspiracy theory is simply a theory that posits a conspiracy – a secret plan on the part of some group to influence events by partly secret means – and if a conspiracy theorist is someone who subscribes to a conspiracy theory, then the conventional wisdom itself is not just suspect, but obviously absurd. A theory, in my book, is a more or less organized body of propositions designed to explain some alleged facts. Theories can be true or false, well or badly confirmed, and when they are sufficiently well-confirmed, they can rise to the dignity of knowledge. Indeed in common parlance we can even talk about proving theories, though this is a usage that would shock true Popperians. Thus to call something a theory is not to suggest that it is tentative, speculative or unproven, though many theories are, of course, tentative, speculative or unproven. Now, if a conspiracy theory is simply a theory that posits a conspiracy, then every politically and historically literate person is a big-time conspiracy theorist, since every such person subscribes to a vast range of conspiracy theories. That is, historically literate people believe organized bodies of propositions that explain alleged facts by positing conspiracies. For there are many facts that admit of no non-conspiratorial explanation and many conspiracy theories that are sufficiently well-established to qualify as knowledge. It is difficult, if not impossible, to mount a coup without conspiring, a point that is evident to all. Hence anyone who believes there are such things as coups must subscribe to a set of conspiracy theories however vague. Although some assassinations are due to "lone gunmen" many are group efforts, and the efforts of those groups are usually planned in secret. (Had the plans of Brutus and Cassius been public, Caesar could have avoided the Senate House or arrested the potential murderers before they struck.) Thus anyone who knows anything about the Ides of March or the assassinations of Archduke Franz Ferdinand or the Tsar Alexander II is bound to subscribe to a conspiracy theory, and hence to be a conspiracy theorist. But coups and assassinations are not even the half of it. Disappearances are usually conspiratorial affairs, since if you want to disappear someone, you had better not let them know when you are coming. Of course, it can add to the fun if you let your victims know, in a general way, that somebody is out to get them (and many goons End Page 222 indulge this pleasure with threatening phone calls and other such "warnings"), but if you are a member of a goon squad, it is a good idea to conceal your identity as well as your precise plans. And if you are organizing a campaign of disappearances, it is well to keep your activities secret. After all, picking up your political opponents and having them jailed, tortured or executed is generally regarded as not quite nice, particularly for Presidents and Prime Ministers. And you can never be quite sure that some tedious do-gooder from the International Criminal Court won't catch up with you in the end. Much of the same considerations apply if you plan to clean up the city by butchering the local street kids in Brazil, Columbia or Honduras. Indeed, mass killings generally are often planned and partly executed in secret, the Holocaust being the supreme example, though one might also cite Stalin's purges. (It is strange to suppose the massacre of millions of people could be shrouded in secrecy but that is the way it was. Hannah Arendt, a Jewish activist with a passionate interest in politics, and as well informed as a private person was likely to be, did not hear about "Auschwitz" – by which, I presume she means the Nazi extermination program generally – until 1943, and did not regard it as a proven fact until six months later (Arendt 2000, 13).) If, like the "Young Marshal", Zhang Xueliang, in X'ian 1937, you plan to kidnap the Head of State with a view to coercing him into changing his policy (Fenby 2003, 1–18), you had better not let him know in advance, and the operation had better be begun in secret to maximize the chance of success. Even at the everyday level of democratic politics, conspiracies are not uncommon. If my party leader is trailing in the polls and I am planning a leadership "spill", I had best not let her know until I have a substantial number of MPs behind me. There is usually a good deal of secret plotting and furtive feeling out of potential supporters before a leadership challenge erupts into the open. In many countries it is not unknown for politicians and state officials to take bribes and misappropriate public funds. For obvious reasons, these activities are usually planned and executed in secret. Thus if you believe in such things you must be a conspiracy theorist of sorts, even if you are hazy about the details. Even in the small change of commercial life, conspiracies abound, a point acknowledged by Adam Smith, whose belief in the invisible hand of the market did not entail skepticism about the invisible hands of individual conspirators: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices" (Smith 1981, 135). "Masters too sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this actual rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution" (84). But I need not belabor a point that I have argued at length elsewhere.7 History and the nightly news (not to mention common sense) all tell the same tale: people often conspire. Hence there is no reason to think that theories that postulate conspiracies are much more likely to be false than theories that explain the same events without the aid of conspiracies. Indeed there are many events for which there is no sane non-conspiratorial End Page 223 explanation. The Young Marshal's men did not individually decide without prior consultation to kidnap Chiang that day at X'ian in 1937, and if Mary Queen of Scots did not conspire to murder Lord Darnley at Kirk o' Fields in 1567, then somebody else did. 

Second, students must learn about conspiracy theories. This is key to critical thinking and democracy. Rejecting conspiracy theories is empirically self-defeating.
Carnell 10 writes
Yvette Carnell (political analyst for The Atlanta Post). “In Defense of the Conspiracy Theory.” Huffington Post. November 16th, 2010. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yvette-carnell/in-defense-of-the-conspir_b_782305.html
In our modern lives we only have access to tiny slivers of information. Where the government is concerned, that sliver becomes increasingly narrower as information is usually redacted for "security" reasons. All this prompts the question; why do we follow the government's or the corporation's conclusions in lockstep given the massive amount of information that we just don't know? Even worse, we all fall in love and in line with the narrative we create using our ideas, and- inevitably -- our actions follow our most dominant narratives. Many of us never challenge the narratives that we write to fit our own perspective. If we did, we'd find that one narrative is not necessarily any more or less true than any other. But where conspiracy theories are concerned, most people are eager to mock those who adopt an outlook which drastically diverges from the prevailing meaning ascribed by the national mob. It follows that the marginalization of conspiracy theorists is the marginalization of ideas. Somewhere along the way in America we began to discount ideas which were out of line with the majority's thinking. The same Republicans who don't believe in hate crimes because they regulate and punish people for the thoughts behind their actions condescendingly lord themselves over the domain of relevant thought when they dismiss conspiracy theorists as loons and crazies. But again, how can you know what's true if you don't know what's false? Rightly or wrongly, many conspiracy theorists are among a narrowing group of critical thinkers. Where conspiracy theorists diverge from ordinary thinkers is in their cognitive process; they look closely at what they don't know and build a theory around that vast emptiness while more mainstream minds build theories around the little they do know. Conspiracy thinkers understand that what they don't know can be more relevant, and more impactful, than what they do know. They listen to the silence. They hear what's not being said. They are, in a word -- skeptics. And in this era of imaginary WMD's, where handouts to the insurance companies masquerade as health care reform, skeptics are essential to the functioning of our democracy. I would go even further to suggest that it would be a net positive if schools offered classes in conspiratorial thinking where students would be required to create as many scenarios as possible to explain how a particular event could've unfolded. The more flexible and nimble a mind, the better. Followers don't grow up to become investigative reporters or creatives. To teach people to cling to sameness in the depth and variety of their ideas encourages complacency and recycles drone-like behavior. Take for example Peter Schiff who, in the days, months, and years leading up to the current mortgage crisis and recession that followed, was sounding the alarm bell for anyone who'd listen. Schiff, President of Euro Pacific Capital, was ridiculed by market cheerleaders on Fox and CNBC as -- you guessed it -- a conspirator and a dangerously pessimistic thinker. They mocked him, asking him such inconsequential and condescending questions as "are you fun at parties?" or "do you carry blades to cut your own wrist?" Schiff turned out to be right. The peanut gallery was wrong. Knowing that most people are wrong most of the time creates mental space for alternative theories. Going along to get along, or worse, shouting down those who do not share your sense that a dynamic universe produces a set of human events which are utterly predictable, shrinks human thought. And as evidenced by Peter Schiff, sometimes a small, quiet prediction grows into a big and dangerous truth. You'll never notice the tipping point though if you've spent the vast majority of your time and intellectual energy jeering those whose charge it is to warn you. 

Third, conspiracy theories are key to challenging human rights abuses, and rational agents have a right to conspiracies. Pigden 7 writes
Charles Pigden (professor of philosophy at the University of Otago, New Zealand and is the editor of Russell on Ethics). “Conspiracy Theories and the Conventional Wisdom”,  Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 4.2, 219-232, Project Muse. 2007.
Most political crimes, from disappearances and illegal bombing campaigns down to breaking peaceniks' noses or burglarizing the campaign headquarters of End Page 225 the opposition party,9 are the products of conspiracy. Thus if conspiracy theories are theories that posit conspiracies, then if we adopted the principle that we should not believe and should not investigate conspiracy theories, we could not hold anyone responsible for such crimes. For to do so would be to accept some conspiracy theory or other. This would be an epistemic disaster, since our understanding of the political scene would dissolve in a mist of skepticism broken by islands of obvious fact. We could believe in the dead bodies but not that anyone had conspired to kill them; believe in the missing money, but not in the felonious theft. And it would a political disaster, since it would confer immunity on political criminals of all sorts, from the perpetrators of genocide down to bribe-taking congressmen. We could not punish people for crimes that we were not entitled to believe in or investigate. Thus it would be both politically and epistemically irrational to adopt the strategy of not believing in and not investigating conspiracy theories. So the conventional wisdom is wrong, and it is not the case that we ought not to believe and ought not to investigate such theories. When it comes to conspiracy theories, we are within our rights as rational beings not only to investigate them, but actually to believe in them, if that is what the evidence suggests. Again it is worth stressing just how catastrophic the strategy of conspiratorial skepticism would be if we applied it consistently, rather than using it from time to time to get out of political difficulties or to rubbish allegations that we find inconvenient. To begin with, the political world would be largely unintelligible. We would be officially debarred from understanding coups, or the crimes of terrorists as intentional actions, since in both cases the intentions behind the overt acts are formulated in secret. Hence they cannot be understood as intentional acts without resorting to conspiracy. We could all acknowledge that the bombs had gone off, but we could not suppose that someone had planted them, since that would be a conspiracy theory. We could accept that two planes had hit the Twin Towers, but we could not allow ourselves to suppose they had been hijacked and deliberately crashed, since that could not have happened without a conspiracy. The nightly news would be bobbing with islands of unintelligibility, since we would be officially debarred from understanding any action involving secret plans. (I defy anyone to make sense of recent events in Iraq without taking account of the orgy of plotting that undoubtedly goes on. Death squads don't advertise their plans, neither do guerillas, gangsters, terrorists or devious politicians.) We would be allowed to understand natural phenomena and open actions, openly arrived at. And we might even treat ourselves to unintended consequences provided these did not involve secret plotting. But we would be officially blind to covert actions and secret plans. This would not quite be epistemic suicide, since there are some events within the political sphere that we would be allowed to understand. But to adopt the strategy of conspiratorial skepticism would be the epistemic equivalent of self-mutilation and hence not a rational thing to do. But epistemically disastrous as conspiratorial skepticism would be, its political consequences would be catastrophic. For when it comes to conspiracy we would End Page 226 be both officially blind and officially incurious. Under this regime, Woodward and Bernstein would not have been allowed to investigate Watergate, and even if they had, nobody would have been rationally entitled to believe their results. Nixon would have gotten away with his crimes. For if conspiracy theories were taboo, there could be no question of impeaching the President for "high crimes and misdemeanors", since most of those high crimes and misdemeanors were planned and executed in secret. The career of an investigative journalist like Seymour Hersh would stand condemned as one long exercise in irrationality since investigative journalism largely consists of investigating conspiracies and exposing them to the public gaze. If it is irrational to check out conspiracy theories, then the investigative part is a crime against reason, and if it is irrational to believe them, then the journalistic part is a crime against reason too, since it often consists in writing up conspiracy theories so as to encourage belief in the reader. One of the biggest problems with human rights abuses is impunity. Because the goons and their masters can usually get away with murder or worse,10 they have no compelling reason to cease and desist. But since most human rights abuses are the products of conspiracy, if we adopted the strategy of neither investigating nor believing conspiracy theories, impunity would become rationally sacrosanct. We could not investigate human rights abuses since, for the most part, this involves investigating conspiracy theories, and even if we could, we could not condemn their perpetrators, since to do that we would have to accept a conspiracy theory. Conspiratorial skepticism would provide the torturers and killers with a charter of impunity since it would become an epistemic no-no to shine a light into the dark places where they commit their crimes. Terrorists too would be immune from investigation, let alone conviction, since their crimes are usually planned in secret. More generally, it is a platitude of liberal democracy that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. At least part of what this means is that we must beware of power-hungry politicians conspiring to deprive us of our liberties. But if we were not allowed to investigate conspiracy theories then our vigilance would be confined to the public actions of politicians rather than their secret plans. We would have become officially blind to some of the most serious threats to liberty. And even if we somehow discovered such a conspiracy we would not be allowed to act on that discovery, since we could not act on a theory we had debarred ourselves from believing. According to Edmund Burke, "There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men." But if the conventional wisdom is correct, we should not believe in the evil of evil men unless that evil is out in the open! Thus if you hate the freedoms of a democratic society, you should cultivate the opinion that conspiracy theories are unbelievable. Conversely, if you want to strike a blow for liberty (or if you want to be able to see the threats to liberty in order to be capable of striking a blow for it), this is a thesis you that should reject. End Page 227 

Fourth, even if conspiracy theories are likely false, investigating them is key to motivating people to learn about history.
Rogan 13 writes
Tom Rogan (conservative writer who blogs at TomRoganThinks.com). “Why conspiracy theories are good for America.” The Week. April 26th, 2013. http://theweek.com/article/index/243355/why-conspiracy-theories-are-good-for-america
And in the end, history is clear: Conspiracy theories serve the well-being of our country. Consider Apollo 11. It's understandable that Buzz Aldrin doesn't enjoy accusations of being the 20th century's biggest liar. But he shouldn't worry. Bogus theories that America faked the moon landing evoke such fascination that they lead to information discovery. As a result of conspiracy-fueled curiosity, each new class of 10th graders may discuss fluttering flags and secret film sites, but in the end, the desire to know leads to the great majority's acceptance of reality. And in that journey of discovery, this amazing story of human adventure is renewed again and again. The conspiracy becomes the servant of history. Or how about JFK conspiracy theorists? Yes, they've been debunked time and time again. However, by stimulating an enduring public fascination with JFK, conspiracy theorists have also helped foster a corollary fascination for the incredible political history of the 1960s. Civil Rights, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam… in some ways, conspiracy curiosity leads people to learn about America's history. 

Fifth, prima facie rejection of conspiracy theories is academically dishonest. Conspiracy theorizing is key to genuine search for truth.
Kennedy 13 writes
James Kennedy (“Referred to as the “Warped Genius” by BBC Radio 1, James is a Songwriter/Producer, as well as the Singer/Guitarist with Cardiff Alternative Rock band Kyshera. James has done writing and production work for many artists across many different genre’s, as well as writing and producing 2 Kyshera albums and 2 solo albums – released through his own Konic Records”). “In Defense of Conspiracy Theories.” True Activist. December 11th, 2013. http://www.trueactivist.com/in-defence-of-conspiracy-theories/
There is much snobbish dismissal of so called ‘conspiracy theories’ from the scientific, political, academic and journalistic community. I argue that conspiracy theories are a valid and necessary contribution to the discussion of certain events and deserve just as much credibility as those of the ‘experts’. I say this as someone who wholeheartedly subscribes to scientific methodology and sceptical thought as the best means of getting closest to the ‘truth’ of a subject – the need for solid evidence and rigorous testing being the process by which a ‘theory’ becomes an established fact (until proven otherwise). Another facet of that way of thinking is that the pursuit of truth must outweigh any emotional or personal attachment one might have for their ‘theory’ – if their beloved theory is proven to be undeniably incorrect, then the owner of that theory should gladfully dispense of it, in the pursuit of truth. Also, all theories should be treated (and tested) as equal. In light of these sceptical principles, I argue that many ‘conspiracy theories’ are perfectly in line with this spirit and that it is their rebuffers who are the ones adhering to a blind belief system. I can see no reason why a ‘conspiracy theory’ should not be treated with the same level of seriousness as any other theory. How arrogant it is of the self styled ‘know it all’s’ to guffaw and flippantly dismiss a ‘conspiracy theory’ as being absurd or impossible, just because it doesn’t fit their existing world view – that is totally out of step with the spirit of scepticism, scientific methodology, journalism and the pursuit of truth. I think that conspiracy theories bring a valid and defendable contribution to the debate and simply saying ‘oh what a bunch of crack pots’ whilst you smugly pat your ‘oh so clever’ self on the back, just shows not only an intellectual and sceptical flaw but also a questionable interest in the genuine pursuit of truth, no matter how uncomfortable that truth may be. Let us not forget that all ‘facts’ begin as theories and let us also not forget the countless great people throughout history that were once ridiculed (or tortured and killed) for promoting ideas that we all taken as granted today – such as the earth not being flat! I think that when it comes to subjects such as 9/11 and JFK, for example, the conspiracy theorists and the mainstream academic/scientific and journalistic community are on an equal grounds for credibility because neither side really knows for SURE what actually happened – ALL parties are mere theorists on these subjects and the actual truth is only known by the people who were involved. And this is where the cracks in the fibre of the mainstream Scientific, academic and journalistic fields start to show – they end up falling back on ‘belief systems’ (the exact opposite of the values they profess to uphold), they start to utter things like ‘oh they never would have done that’ or ‘they never could have kept that a secret’ or ‘why would they want to do that’, ‘thats absurd’ etc etc. They can’t argue with the conspiracy research because much of it is actually more thorough than their own, so they have to just dismiss it as just being some kind of ‘youtube academia’ – as if that is a good enough response to questions they can’t answer. The reason they can’t argue with the research is because most of these subjects involve secrecy and when you don’t have full access to the tools of the experiment, you are only left with your own judgment in joining the dots as best you can – and this position is the same for BOTH sides of the debate. This is where pre-set belief systems rear their head and also a thing called ‘confirmation bias’ (where a person only see’s the things that confirm what they already think). If you believe that ‘they’re all bastards and are plotting against us’ then you’re only going to see the ‘facts’ that support that but also if you believe that ‘they never would have done that, there must be some other explanation’, you’re going to dismiss information that might be outside of your comfort zone. You might expect such things from layman journalism but not from professional, experienced researchers, scientists and academics. If they were able, like some kind of intellectual superman, to answer all of the ‘naive conspiracy buff’s’ questions with a definite and irrefutable explanation, then we’d all be able to join in the laughter at the preposterous notion of whatever ‘the conspiracy loons’ were saying. But they can’t, they merely laugh and say ‘oh, you’re so naive, how ridiculous, trot along little one’. I know that extreme claims require extreme evidence and it is in the hands of the theorist to bring supporting evidence – but many conspiracy theorists DO and their evidence and research has not actually be credibly refuted. I know it is difficult to disprove something when you don’t have access to all of the facts and again, in areas involving government secrecy etc, this is the main problem, but that is exactly my point, the conspiracy debunkers have no more ‘special inside information’ than anyone else, so they are merely drawing different ‘judgements’ from the scant info that IS available. Just dismissing the NOTION of a conspiracy, is simply just expressing a belief system and is not the same as responding to the questions on an academic level. Also, I am not saying that I necessarily ‘believe’ any of these conspiracy theories – it is not about belief – but as a sceptic, I give equal time to all opinions on a subject – rather than arrogantly dismissing those that don’t fit my existing world view. Those that do that are not seeking truth, they are seeking confirmation of what they already believe. 

And sixth, stigma toward conspiracy theorizing leads individuals to self-limit the ways in which they can express themselves politically.
Husting 13 writes
Ginna Husting (associate professor of sociology at Boise State University). "Once More, With Feeling: Conspiracy Theories, Contempt, and Affective Governmentality (forthcoming)" Ethical Theory and Practice. Ed. Olli Loukola. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 2013. https://www.academia.edu/3021483/Once_More_With_Feeling_Conspiracy_Theories_Contempt_and_Affective_Governmentality
Brackets in original. Some of the best evidence for this is the rise of the disclaimer “I’m not a conspiracy theorist but…” which has become a regular feature in popular political culture (Husting and Orr 2006); a Google search for it in 2011 returns about 182,000 hits. As with most disclaimers, this one functions to distance the utterer from a category that can spoil not just the intended claim, but the personhood of the claimant as well. In Mary Douglas’s terms, such categories are dirty, or ritually polluted. Disclaimers like “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but…” function to inoculate or distance ourselves from that which can spoil our speech/actions, but also our personhood. Once conferred, the identity permanently removes us from the possibility of political speech and action, and forms of human becoming/self-production. Fear of the accusation leads most of us come to govern our own thoughts and speech to ensure we are not so labeled. When we cannot avoid it, the result is shame, as Keller (2011b) illuminates in a recent anti-conspiracy theory article; “Mark Fenster, a law professor and author of ‘Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture,’ says a sense of conspiracy is ‘almost an instinctive response to strange events.’ ‘I admit I was a little drawn to the D.S.K. Dominique Strauss-Kahn plot at first,’ Fenster told me. ‘Then I heard Nina Totenberg explain the case on NPR, and I was ashamed of myself.” Fenster exhibits what most of us experience: shame at the possibility of fitting into the category. The affective politics of conspiracy discourse is such that many of us— good governmentalized subjects—continually manage, reflect on, and monitor ourselves to ensure that we do not come to “fit the label.” Bratich (2008, 140) highlights precisely the encouragement of this governmentalized strategy by the State Department in its online site “How to Identify Misinformation; ‘it is important to note the state’s preferred orientation of detection techniques: of the people by the people. Peer-to-peer suspicion…’ quickly identigies the dangerous theorist among us, but it also turns us into self-managers as we evaluate how far our thoughts are from conspiracy theorizing, and as we try to avoid being shamefully stuck with the condensed assemblage of the label. Conspiracy panics fuse not just ‘reason and politics in a way that promotes the technology of citizen subjectification’ but ‘emotion’ as well. ‘Both affect and reason must become part of the ethos of the self, a work of the self on the self…panics are not just about making people reasonable, but making reason and, we add, contempt a people’s enterprise” (Bratich 2008, 46). 

Self-limiting of the perspectives from which one can think is part and parcel of ontological violence, undermining our ability to understand the self.
Husting 13 writes
Ginna Husting (associate professor of sociology at Boise State University). "Once More, With Feeling: Conspiracy Theories, Contempt, and Affective Governmentality (forthcoming)" Ethical Theory and Practice. Ed. Olli Loukola. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 2013. https://www.academia.edu/3021483/Once_More_With_Feeling_Conspiracy_Theories_Contempt_and_Affective_Governmentality
Making possible this model of democratic political action are two qualities of life in public: natality and plurality. They are sine qua non for Arendtian agonistic democracy. Life in public happens through plurality, in which we are seen and heard by others in a context where we can, through action and speech, affect material and symbolic conditions (Arendt 1958, 57). Life in public arises whenever people engage each other through the agonistic confrontation of identities, opinions, and differences. Indeed, for Arendt the only way we can think for ourselves is through encounters with others, which transforms opinion into thought. Arendt argues that thinking requires a form of “interior” plurality, in which we use the dialogic process of thinking from more than one perspective (our own) to examine our beliefs and actions. As Gordon writes (2002, 137), Even one’s own identity, not only in the sense of what one is, but also who one is, is contingent upon how others interpret one’s words and deeds. Arendt goes so far as to suggest that even “the great forces of intimate life—the passions of the heart, the thought of the mind, the delights of the senses—lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a  shape to fit them for public appearance. Notice here that Arendt deliberately allows room in public life for passion, delight, and emotionality in general, and these are tied to becoming human. For Arendt being seen and heard by others is requisite both to construction of the world in common and to the self interwoven with it. But natality shows us most clearly the damage done when conspiracy discourse catapults selves from the ongoing process of world-making in common. Natality, carrying as it does the resonances of birth and newness, is our capacity to continually re-construct and renegotiate our world in concert with others who are in political contest with us. Through my ability to talk or act in new ways I create who I am; I participate in what can only be a collective, if profoundly conflictual, process of crafting the world Arendt writes that The human being who has lost his place in a community, his political status in the struggle of his time, and the legal personality which makes his actions and part of his destiny a consistent whole is left with those qualities which usually can become articulate only in the sphere of private life and must remain unqualified, mere existence in all matters of public concern…mere existence…(Arendt 1951, 301). To permanently exclude others from this process is to enact a form of violence that in turn forecloses the spaces of democracy. It erodes the condition of plurality, or the inclusion of maximal differences in play in world-making.

Tournament: Lexington | Round: 2 | Opponent: Newark NS | Judge: John Lewis
Resource extraction in developing countries is influenced by neoliberalism. Corporations and states suppress environmentally-focused protest by indigenous groups with violence.
Downey et al. 10 writes
Liam Downey, Eric Bonds, and Katherine Clark (University of Colorado at Boulder). “Natural Resource Extraction, Armed Violence, and Environmental Degradation.” Organ Environ. 2010 December ; 23(4): 417–445. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3169238/pdf/nihms317120.pdf
Of course, transportation technology alone does not ensure access to affordable raw materials, especially when those materials are located in other nations or in areas controlled by other groups. Thus, since World War II and the breakup of Europe’s colonial empires,4 wealthy nations and corporations, which consume the bulk of the world’s natural resources (Hawken, Lovins, and Lovins, 1999; Speth, 2005), have relied on a combination of mechanisms that they control, including ideology (e.g., neoliberalism; Goldman, 2005), debt (Bello et al., 1999; Clark and Foster, 2009), agricultural research institutes (Foster, 1994), export credit (Evans, Goodman, and Lansbury, 2002), political risk insurance (Moody, 2005, 2007), the WTO (Wallach and Woodall, 2004), the World Bank, and the IMF (Bello et al., 1999; Goldman, 2005), to ensure their continued access to and control over vital raw materials. Among other things, these institutions, organizations, and ideologies have worked collectively to open the economies of developing nations to corporate investment, increase the flow of natural resources from developing to developed nations, create new legal structures and government institutions that facilitate foreign involvement in developing nation economies, and garner developing nation support for corporate activities, including resource extraction activities, within their borders (Bello et al., 1999; Goldman, 2005; Harrison, 2004; Moody, 2007; Potter, 2000; Structural Adjustment Participatory Review International Network, 2004; Toussaint, 2005; Vorley, 2004; Wallach and Woodall, 2004). However, nations and societies are not monolithic entities, and regardless of whether a government willingly or unwillingly engages in specific resource extraction activities, whether these activities are organized by local or foreign companies, or whether they occur in developed or developing nations or in nations with strong or weak legal and property rights regimes, it is likely that in many cases individuals and groups will protest, resist, or rebel against these activities. For example, protestors might be worried about local environmental degradation or health problems that result from resource extraction activities, they might be aggrieved by any loss of livelihood that they and their community may experience as a result of these activities, or they may be forced to relocate in order to make way for resource extraction (Structural Adjustment Participatory Review International Network, 2004). Similarly, workers hired by resource extraction firms may protest poor working conditions, local residents may receive few of the benefits but all of the burdens associated with resource extraction activities, or local residents may be indigenous, colonized, or otherwise marginalized people who resent government and outsider intrusion into their lives (Evans et al., 2002; Gedicks, 2001; Moody, 2007). In such instances, local and national governments, resource extraction firms, or rebels who control natural resources may feel that they have no choice but to use violence or the threat of violence to protect their resource extraction activities. Violent actions and threats of violence might include the forced relocation of local residents; the use of police, military, or mercenary forces to break up protests, arrest protestors and provide mine security; and the repression of local indigenous people from whose ranks protestors have emerged or might emerge. Violent actions might also include military conflict with groups that threaten resource extraction activities and foreign military aid and training to local police and military forces. Of course, armed violence may occur even in the absence of protest. For example, forced labor may be used to decrease labor costs or because working conditions are horrendous, and forced removal may occur in the absence of protest to either forestall protest or because there is no way to extract resources with people living on or near the extraction site. In either case, violence or threatened violence will likely be necessary because most people do not want to be forced to work or leave their homes. The use or threatened use of violence to gain or maintain access to vital raw materials may also occur in situations in which a resource that is viewed as being critical to national survival and economic prosperity, such as oil or water, is located in an area controlled by others in which mechanisms such as trade liberalization or structural adjustment have not effectively guaranteed permanent supplies of or control over the resource (see Klare, 2001, 2004, for detailed discussions of this type of situation). In such cases, governments might resort to actions such as militarily enforced trade sanctions, counterterrorism activities, proxy wars, military threats, invasion, or providing military aid and training to local police and military forces. Finally, because land and water transport is potentially subject to piracy or military disruption, governments may devote military resources toward protecting specific resource shipments (such as U.S. protection of Kuwaiti shipping during the Iraq–Iran war in the 1980s) or providing security for roads, railroads, and naval shipping lanes (Klare, 2001, 2004).5

?
The Zapatistas of Mexico rebel against neoliberalism and prioritize environmental protection.
Nail 10 writes
Thomas Nail. “A Post-Neoliberal Ecopolitics? Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo.” Philosophy Today. Summer 2010.
Zapatismo, as a non-representational political event that has brought hundreds of thousands of people together against neoliberalism and for the democratic defense of the earth, without folding to state politics, green capitalism, or environmental bureaucracy, I believe, should be considered as an abstract machine. Like the phenomena of the revolution of 1789, the Paris Commune, and the revolution of 1917, what is singular about this event is its irreducibility to social determinism and deductive causal chains: in 1994, in Mexico, Zapatismo held no resemblance to any recognizable, legal, or legitimate thing within the present “state of affairs,” i.e., no political representation (party), no market representation, linguistic representation (their languages are not spoken or recognized by political representatives), or representation by the local indigenous leaders (Caciques). There was no causal necessity that Zapatismo should have existed, no way it could have been deduced from the domains of “rights” and “commodities” from which it emerged, and yet they “burst upon a world that denied their existence” anyway, as Zapatista scholar John Holloway says.26 From the representational point of view of Mexican politics, the marginalized and unrepresented Zapatistas of Chiapas have no “legitimate” existence. But what is most interesting about the Zapatista communities is that they do not legitimate their revolution strictly by presupposed norms based on identity (prescriptive requests for “rights,” the overthrow of the state, a new market economy, or a new ethnic nationalism), but rather affirm a self-reference or autonomy. Instead of simply valorizing their difference and un-representability as such, as Simon Tormey has argued, the Zapatistas, I am arguing, have created a new form of ecopolitical evaluation that better allows them to realize the (self)management of forest commons.27 Contrary to normative theories of environmental philosophy based on prescription, the Zapatistas practice a form of rotational direct democracy where members take fourteen day shifts deliberating and facilitating communal/environmental matters, where they consider the ecosystem to be inseparable from who they are as Zapatistas. As Subcomadante Marcos puts it, For a long time, this place has existed where men are Zapatistas, the women are Zapatistas, the kids are Zapatistas, the chickens are Zapatistas, the stones are Zapatistas, everything is Zapatista. And in order to wipe out the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, they will have to wipe this piece of territory off the face of the earth- not just destroy it but erase it completely, because there is always the danger of the dead down below.28 If we are to take this passage seriously, what it means to be Zapatista is also to be the stones, trees, and animals of the Zapatista autonomous zones. Participatory (as opposed to representative democracy) and collective (as opposed to personal or moral conscience) decision-making actually is the whole ecological system speaking through (as opposed to for) the proper name of Zapatismo expressively. “Zapatismo” is thus not a thing, or norm, that represents or signifies anything, but rather a singular and constantly renegotiated abstract machine.

Thus, I advocate an embracing of Zapatista ecopolitics in resistance to resource extraction in developing countries. I reserve the right to clarify, so no theory violations until he checks in cross-ex.

Corporations and the state marginalize the ecological worldview of indigenous groups which rejects totality in favor of instinctual knowledge. This is epistemically flawed and causes violence.
Hipwell 4 writes
William Hipwell (Professor of Geography, Kyungpook National University, South Korea). “A Deleuzian critique of resource-use management politics in Industria). The Canadian Geographer 48, no. 3, 2004.
For Deleuze, static identities are dangerous illusions: the real world is, by contrast, always fluid and mobile; reality is ontologically characterised by ‘difference’. This difference is not, as it might seem, difference between things (an identitarian notion) but rather the idea that reality is a continuum of interplay, interpenetration and interconnectedness and that ‘things’ are merely intensities in this continuum, internally constituted by the interplay of different forces, and themselves interacting and interpenetrating with everything around them. In this sense, allegedly separate entities are mutually constitutive and interdependent, and treating them as entirely separate inevitably does intellectual and physical violence to the world. In an ontology of difference, the world is viewed holistically. Differential being is defined on the basis of what it is rather than what it is not. It is dynamic, not static. As Deleuze (1988, 123) puts it, ‘the important thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not as a form, or a development of form, but as a complex relation between different velocities’. While we may, for practical purposes, speak of ‘a tree’, ‘a fish’, ‘the human species’, etc., awareness of ontological difference reminds us that it is a mistake to abstract such things from their dynamic and continuous context. Prior to striation by identitarian forces, the world is made of ‘smooth space’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 474–500), or what Patton (2000, 112) has called ‘the heterogeneous space of qualitative multiplicity’. In smooth space, diverse and unexpected interconnections may appear and reconfigure (‘lines of flight’). Smooth space is continually in flux; it is difficult to know intellectually and (therefore) difficult to control. To know one’s way in the tangle of The Canadian Geographer / Le Ge´ographe canadien 48, no 3 (2004) 360 William T. Hipwell primeval forest or other ‘wild zones’ (Dalby 2001), one must have good instincts. Wisdom of the body Following early-twentieth-century philosopher Henri Bergson, Deleuze calls for the epistemological rehabilitation of intuition. He describes this intuitive epistemology as ‘transcendental empiricism’ or ‘wisdom of the body’. Prior to intellectualisation, our instincts respond to and process the sensory data received by the body as a continuous and multiplicitous flow. Thus, the way humans perceive the world through ‘wisdom of the body’ is better attuned to ontological difference (and therefore better capable of understanding smooth space) than through the intellect. This ‘libidinal epistemology’ provides us with an understanding of a continuous, mobile, fluid and interconnected world (Ford and Hipwell 2001). A shift in focus from identity to difference requires a greater reliance on the unconscious, on instinct and on knowing through the heart. It requires, in many senses, an un-focusing. As an empiricist and materialist, Deleuze does not mean that un-focusing entails abandoning empirical knowledge gained through the representational intellect but rather augmenting it with wisdom of the body. He would argue that researchers—especially in the social realm—must come to recognise that variations and tangential relationships may often be more important than structures and causal relationships. Doel (1996, 430) advises that researchers learn ‘nomad thought’, ‘dwelling on change, becoming and inconsistency, rather than fixity, being and constancy’. Friedrich Nietzsche, a formative influence on Deleuze, made the argument for intuitive routes to knowledge in the nineteenth century. Nietzsche argued that . . . ‘being conscious’ is not in any decisive sense the opposite of what is instinctive: most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided into certain channels by his instinct. (Nietzsche 1966, 11) As Deleuze puts it The great activity is unconscious. . . . Consciousness is essentially reactive; this is why we do not know what a body can do . . .. The real problem is the discovery of active forces without which the reactions themselves would not be forces. (Deleuze 1983, 41) Geographer David Livingstone (1992, 1–2) echoes this sentiment, noting that the myth of science as proceeding solely through ‘experimental analysis and logical rigour’ has been thoroughly dispelled (see also Saul 2001, 5). In sum, reality can only be fully grasped with the aid of wisdom of the body, which is more attuned to difference than to identity. Wisdom of the body is implicitly granted epistemological status in the local–traditional ecological knowledge (Lo-TEK) employed by peripheral communities engaged in the small-scale harvest of natural resources (see Inglis 1993; Acheson and Wilson 1996). As is discussed below, the marginalisation of such knowledge by state and corporate managers is a key cause of many environmental problems. 

Humans are not completely independent of nature, and vice versa. This requires a rethinking of not only the human subject but how we conceive of environmental protection and resource extraction.
Nail 10 writes
Thomas Nail. “A Post-Neoliberal Ecopolitics? Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo.” Philosophy Today. Summer 2010.
Deleuze and Guattari begin their first collective work, Anti-Oedipus, with the rejection of the dualism between the supposedly autonomous spheres of nature and culture. Where industry extracts its raw materials from nature, consumes them, and then returns its refuse to nature, Deleuze and Guattari argue, following Marx, that this is not the operation of relatively separate spheres (production, distribution, consumption), but rather an activity predicated on the common structural relations of the capitalist division of labor and the concept of supposedly “fixed elements” within the overall process of profit generation. Human beings do not autonomously extract raw materials from nature, nor do they autonomously decide to “save nature” from unsustainable extractions or toxic waste disposals. While there are, of course, human agents who speak of the “rights of nature” and “sustainable extraction,” their very ability to conceive of environmental protection in terms of “rights,” “labor,” and “value” is conditioned by an advanced technoscientific coordination of research, organization, and green capitalist industry. For this reason Deleuze and Guattari can say, We make no distinction between man human and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of viewof utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man. Not man human as the king of creation, but rather as the being who is in intimate contact with the profound life of all forms or all types of being. Human activity and “reason” is thus conditioned on an enormous matrix of non-human activities (economic, biological, and technological structures, etc.), just as nature is conditioned by an enormous network of human activity. To assert an independence of one from the other is sheer abstraction. Deleuze and Guattari’s conclusion is thus that there are only processes of mutual production that are neither strictly human, nor strictly natural, but both, that is, artificial. Insofar as artifacts and technology are a mix between human activity and natural objects, Deleuze and Guattari claim that all processes of production (insofar as they too are always natural/human) are machines. And “every machine is a machine connected to another machine,” and the multiplicity of machines connected up with one another forms the “Mechanosphere” of the earth (AO 12/6). As Guattari insists, “We might just as well rename environmental ecology machinic ecology, because Cosmic and human praxis has only ever been a question of machines.”11 

Transcendental ethical norms falsely assume human independence from nature. Ethics must enable a shared condition that facilitates creative expressions of subjectivity in that it can be constantly re-invented. This is Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the abstract machine.
Nail 10 writes
Thomas Nail. “A Post-Neoliberal Ecopolitics? Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo.” Philosophy Today. Summer 2010.
Where one might locate the concept of an ethical “norm,” “law,” or “condition” in environmental philosophy that allows disparate human voices to come to a common prescriptive agreement on a dispute, Deleuze and Guattari instead propose the alternative concept of an “abstract machine.”A norm does not describe the world the way it “is,” but how it “ought” to be. A norm is thus a transcendent element intended by an autonomous form of consciousness or sovereign state unhindered by existential bias. For instance, the prescriptive value of “ecological diversity” is defined in conceptual or legal terms, prior to or independent from any specific thing that might be described as realizing that value. Something either realizes biodiversity and is right or it does not and it is wrong. “Athing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise,” as Aldo Leopold asserts in his land ethic.23 Difference is thus only a difference from the same, e.g., the norm which represents the independent unity of the diverse. Opposed to this, the abstract machine is an event or shared condition for action and evaluation only insofar as it is immanently transformed by the concrete elements that realize and differentiate it . There is thus a “coadaptation” or “reciprocal presupposition” of the two that allows for their participatory transformation.24 The event thus changes in nature each time there are “reconversions subjectives actuelles” (actually occurring subjective redeployments) of it (DRF 217/236). Subsequently, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the abstract machine is absolutely singular and unable to be deduced from either history or introspection. In historical phenomena such as the revolution of 1789, the Commune, the revolution of 1917, there is always one part of the event that is irreducible to any social determinism, or to causal chains. Historians are not very fond of this point: they restore causality after the fact. Yet the event itself is a splitting off from, a breaking with causality; it is a bifurcation, a lawless deviation, an unstable condition that opens up a new field of the possible. (DRF 215/233) The abstract machine is not deducible because it is the condition for deduction, description, and prescription itself: it is a more primary evental commitment. This machine is abstract in the sense that is not a thing among other things, but also real (vrai-abstrait), insofar as it is a condition that allows for the appearance of “new space-times” and new subjectivities antagonistic to representation and power (P 233/172).25 However, while it may not be a thing, the abstract machine is still marked by a singular and asignifying proper name, date, and image, like the names of military operations or the names of hurricanes, as Deleuze and Guattari say (MP 51/28, 322– 323/264). These names do not represent, symbolize, or refer to anything at all. Rather, they are spoken through. As a self-referencing and autonomous event independent from political representation, the abstract machine allows for the shared expression and conjunction of the various heterogenous elements that speak and exist through it (MP 177–178/142). 

?
The Zapatistas are an abstract machine that rejects transcendental norms and view their identity as inseparable from nature, prioritizing sustainability over neoliberal destruction of the environment. Nail 10 writes
Thomas Nail. “A Post-Neoliberal Ecopolitics? Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo.” Philosophy Today. Summer 2010.
The procedure of counting the affects of the situation thus decides what can or will be done in the assemblage. There are no universal ends or values that inhere in things themselves, only their immanent capacities to be assembled and reassembled in a continually renegotiated and expressive machinic assemblage or relation. Insofar as the Zapatistas practice such a continual and affective renegotiation of their ecological assemblage, without drawing on the concepts or practices of state-based or universal environmental rights, they effect a concrete machinic assemblage. That is, the Zapatista communities practice a form of collective valorization that refers back not to the sovereignty of the state, or the intrinsic value of nature, or any other pre-given teleology, but to the immanent act of determining in each case what their collective ecological body is capable of. Assembled in a heterogeneous mix of NGOs, diverse indigenous traditions, and in ternational influence, the Zapatistas have had to learn how to manage the environment. This commitment takes the form of several specific forest management affects: to be able to cultivate the land by the no-till method, to be able to ban slash and burn practices, to be able to take a limited amount of trees from the forest or be penalized by having to plant and care for two more for every one taken in excess, and to be able to ban agrochemical use. As a Montes Azules resident explains, “we have been accused of destroying the jungle. But we as indigenous people are the true guardians of the environment, we live together with the jungle. If the jungle dies, we die with it.”32 The Zapatistas do not speak for the forest, because they are the forest, or rather, their life is an affect of the forest, “to be Zapatista in the Lacandon.” Their political practices express the life of the forest and exist as so many affects within its collection. Even their relations of production are owned in common and practiced sustainably. The workers’ cooperatives (honey, coffee, textiles, etc.) in Zapatista territory are based on collective or common (not private, or public) property, worker control, and self-management. While Zapatismo may have its flaws, the spirit of these institutions (the schools, the hospitals, the homes, the farming, etc.) is, as Guattari would say, to set up structures and devices that establish a totally different kind of contact. A kind of selfmanagement or self-organization of a set of problems which does not start from a central point that arranges elements, inserts them into a control grid, or establishes an agenda, but that, on the contrary, allows the various singular processes to attempt a rhizomatic unfolding. This is very important, even if it doesn’t work.33 Zapatismo is thus a struggle for the creation of a maximum of participation, both human and natural, in achieving an ecological “self-management conceived outside the criteria of a formal democracy that has proven to be sterile,” as Guattari puts it (MRB 391).  

Put away your ecology kritiks.
They rely on transcendental norms which perpetuate a totalizing binary between humans and nature.
Nail 10 writes
Thomas Nail. “A Post-Neoliberal Ecopolitics? Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo.” Philosophy Today. Summer 2010.
Deleuze and Guattari’s environmentalism, according to Bernd Herzogenrath, has the aim of elaborating a “generalized ecology of complex material systems, without falling into the trap of the Cartesian dualism of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ that is still operative in much of the mainstream ecological/ecocritical approaches.” 6 And according to Mark Hasley, the author of Deleuze and Environmental Damage, one of the strengths of this growing literature is that it has been able to, for the most part, avoid some of the typical monolithic approaches found in contemporary environmental philosophy (the irresponsible consumer monolith under liberal ecology, the capitalist monolith under ecomarxism, the patriarchal monolith under ecofeminism, the hierarchical monolith under deep ecology, and the domination monolith under social ecology). Each of these approaches, Halsey claims, shares a certain theoretical drive toward totality, each, “knows the key variables ‘causing’ social and environmental ruin but also has implicit within it the makings of a comprehensive, indeed transcendental solution.”  These modernist environmental projects privilege transcendental unities (subject, object, Nature) over immanent processes (individuals, multiplicities, flows of matter-energy). They seek to establish universal grounds from which to legitimate programs of ecological recuperation (laws of Nature, God, social justice, rational stewardship), posit teleologies for the permanent resolution of environmental conflicts (sustainability, anarchism, ecosocialism), and end up reestablishing binary oppositions (culture/ nature, men/women, science/opinion, capitalism/communism, ecologically significant/ ecologically insignificant).8 

 The universe is rhizomatic. Gough 5 writes
Noel Gough (Faculty of Education, Deakin University, Victoria, Australia). “Postmodernist Perspectives: Key Concepts.” 2005. http://www.corwin.com/upm-data/9737_035889ch36.pdf
Brackets in original Some literary critics see the detective story as the characteristic genre of modernist storytelling. For example, Brian McHale argues that modernist ?ction usually involves ‘a quest for a missing or hidden item of knowledge’ (1992: 146) and that ‘a modernist novel looks like a detective story’, centrally concerned with ‘problems of the accessibility and circulation of knowledge, the individual mind’s grappling with an elusive or occluded reality’ (1992: 147). The detective is the archetypal modernist subject, a quest(ion)ing ‘cognitive hero’, an ‘agent of recognitions . . . reduced synecdochically to the organ of visual perception, the (private) eye’ (1992: 147), seeking to understand a uni?ed and objective world. The postmodern turn in detective ?ction (which may have preceded an analogous transformation of social research) is signalled by the emergence of ‘anti-detective’ stories that evoke the impulse to ‘detect’ in order to frustrate it by refusing to solve the crime. One of the most celebrated anti-detective stories is Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1983) which takes some well-known examples of generic detective ?ction as its intertextual models, but – as Eco himself puts it – ‘is a mystery in which very little is discovered and the detective is defeated’ (1984: 54). In The Name of the Rose, Eco uses the form of detective ?ction to deconstruct, disrupt and undermine the rationality of the models of conjecture conventionally provided by the form – which is why, as Eco writes, his ‘basic story (whodunit?) rami?es into so many other stories, all stories of other conjectures, all linked with the structure of conjecture as such’ (1984: 57). Eco provides a physical model of conjecturality in the abbey’s labyrinthine library but also demonstrates that his detective – William of Baskerville – cannot decipher the complex social milieu of the abbey by assuming that it has a comparably logical (albeit complicated) structure. Following Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Eco likens ‘the structure of conjecture’ to the in?nite networks of a rhizome rather than to the ?nite and hierarchical roots and branches of a tree: The rhizome is so constructed that every path can be connected with every other one. It has no center, no periphery, no exit, because it is potentially in?nite. The space of conjecture is a rhizome space . . . the world in which William realizes he is living already has a rhizome structure: that is, it can be structured but is never structured de?nitively . . . it is impossible for there to be a story. (1984: 57–8) Thus the anti-detective story not only subverts the rationality of the investigatory methods modelled by conventional detective ?ction but also denies the defensibility of the dominant cultural expectations that animate such enquiries, namely ‘the longing for ‘‘one true story’’ that has been the psychic motor for modern Western science’ (Harding, 1986: 193). Eco’s story of William’s ‘failure’ as a (modernist) detective is riddled with implicit and explicit references to postmodernist inquiry strategies, as in the following conversation between William and his ‘Watson’, Adso: ‘What I did not understand was the relation among signs . . . I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.’ ‘But in imagining an erroneous order you still found something . . .’ ‘What you say is very ?ne Adso, and I thank you. The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless . . . The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.’ (1983: 492) The Name of the Rose is itself such an ‘erroneous order’, which Eco emphasizes by using meta?ctional narrative strategies to expose its status as ?ction and draw attention to the processes by which it is constructed both as a world to be explored and the means of its own exploration. Thus the more appropriate models for postmodernist social researchers are not detectives like Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Philip Marlowe or Kate Fansler, but authors like Umberto Eco. Our work is to fathom the mysteries we inscribe. 

The war machine is a key agent against the state. It engages in alternative ways of being. Hipwell 4 writes
William Hipwell (Professor of Geography, Kyungpook National University, South Korea). “A Deleuzian critique of resource-use management politics in Industria). The Canadian Geographer 48, no. 3, 2004.
Patton, the first thinker to coherently link Fourth World or ‘indigenous’ movements with Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, argues that the State apparatus is effectively opposed only by ‘the war machine’. The war machine is a nomadic form of group subject which is ‘outside and hostile to the state’ and has the power to deterritorialise sedentary structures (Patton 2000, 111). In Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation, There are many reasons to believe that the war machine is of a different origin, is a different assemblage, than the State apparatus. It is of nomadic origin and is directed against the State apparatus. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 230) A war machine is revived ‘every time there is an insurgency of some kind against the state, whether this takes the form of revolution, riot, guerrilla warfare or civil disobedience’ (Patton 2000, 111). Patton points out that the concept of war machine has only a synthetic relation to war (he prefers the term ‘metamorphosis machine’) and should not be confused with the more popular use of the term to refer to the military–industrial complex. The war machine is a disruptor, an agent of becoming and difference—inherently unstable—operating ceaselessly against identitarianism. Wherever it is able to act, a war machine deterritorialises State structures, making striated space smoother. Patton cites examples of potential war machines including Fourth-World resistance movements, rural communities and peripheral urban protest groups. However, once a war machine has succeeded in deterritorialising and displacing the State, it tends to quickly become identitarian and frequently evolves into a neo-State apparatus (think of Stalin or Castro . . . ).

Tournament: Lexington RR | Round: 1 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart KH | Judge: Samantha Hom, Matthew Wiggers
GIS tech is low now in developing countries.
Ouma 8 writes
Kambona Oscar Ouna (Department of Ecotourism, Hotel and Institution Management, Maseno University). “Needs and Challenges for the Application of GIS in Developing Countries: The Kenyan experience.” International GIS Summer School Presentation. September 23rd, 2008. http://www.forum-urban-futures.net/files/Oscar_Presentation.pdf
The use and application of GIS in developing countries, particularly continental Africa, is still an exclusive domain of just a few elites. The situation is further exacerbated by the fact that GIS application is a relatively recent technology in the continent. As such, urban planning has largely been done without considering GIS. This paper looks at Kenya’s urban planning in view of the infrastructural pressures exerted by the high number of people who migrate from rural to urban areas. The recent demolition of residential houses and business premises within the country in order to provide space for the expansion of existing roads or construction of new ones are discussed. The paper also points out planning dilemma that face the city council of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city, in the light of rapidly increasing urban population. In view of all these urban planning challenges, the paper discusses the role of GIS application in future urban planning in Kenya. The paper concludes by identifying GIS needs such as participatory GIS planning, a skilled and stable human resource base among others. In an attempt to mainstream GIS application in developing countries such as Kenya, the paper puts emphasis on institutional networking and linkages as being among key areas for future co-operation. 

GIS tech prioritizes environmental protection over resource extraction.
Kuhn 13 writes
Josef Kuhn (consulting ecologist). “Industrial Forestry or Ecoforestry: Alternative Cultures.” Suzuki Elders. November 18th, 2013. http://suzukielders.wordpress.com/2013/11/18/industrial-forestry-or-ecoforestry-alternative-cultures/
Some of the people I most respect and admire for their work in promoting forest conservation and stewardship of all of our natural resources are foresters. They often refer to themselves as forest ecologists as well as foresters, an important distinction that I want to make as clear as I can in this brief essay. There are many foresters who are driven by motives and methods that do not truly respect forest ecology. These industrial foresters have developed a culture much like modern agriculture, asserting that they can replace natural forests with tree crops, thereby increasing economic benefits from harvesting trees from these management units which they refer to as forests. In my view of life, which comes from both western culture and the ancient teachings of many tribal cultures, forests are created by Nature and are a gift from Mother Earth, the Sun and ultimately from the Creator. The natural ecosystems created by this life-giving process over eons of time contain a mix of interacting species best suited to the bio-physical conditions at each unique location. This view makes me and others who respect and value Nature and forest life part of the naturalist culture, which includes ecoforestry. It is very different from the industrial culture which values financial gain above Nature. As a student working on a degree in forest management back in the 1960?s I became disillusioned with the university’s required courses. They were mostly about how to log forests to maximize industrial profits and produce a steady revenue flow to government ministries. There was one course in forest ecology and one in forest soils, but the rest were mostly about forest engineering and various aspects of financial management of timber and pulpwood resources. I had to change majors and get my degrees in geography and ecology in order to pursue the career path that was best for me. Forest aesthetics, biodiversity and soil and watershed protection considerations over the long term (seven generations in First Nations’ culture) are not the focus of most of the forest management plans which are being approved by our government ministries today. Outside ‘consultations’ are supposed to address these concerns, but these inputs are not given equal weight with so called economic development considerations. Ecoforestry on the other hand focuses on watersheds and/or ecological land types, seeking understanding of the interactions taking place in these ecosystems. In our modern information technology world, forest and wildlife ecologists model and monitor natural processes and human impacts in natural resource stewardship/management programs, unless this is precluded by industrial forestry and other ‘development’ interests. The use of ecosystem models such as geographic information systems (GIS) are absolutely essential if true stewardship of the natural resources our children and grandchildren will depend on for their well-being is ever to be accomplished. In addition, we, as citizens and stewards of our environment, must make sure that the cumulative impacts of logging and all resource extraction activities on our forests, wetlands and waters are being monitored and assessed on an ongoing basis to ensure that our ecosystems remain healthy. In my opinion, government ministries upon which we rely to protect our forests and related natural resources should be employing more people educated in biological and earth sciences who demonstrate good ecological intelligence and a good grounding in the land ethic, established by Aldo Leopold in 1948. Along with forest ecology and ecoforestry, as well as a focus on ecosystem and human health, they can provide us with the more complete view needed for good stewardship. 

Thus the plan: Developing countries should adopt geographic information systems regarding agriculture, forestry, mining, oceans, and oil. I reserve the right to clarify, so no theory violations until he checks in cross-ex. No legal violations link because affirming means amending the laws to make the aff world consistent with them.

Aff gets RVIs on I meets and counter-interps because
(a) 1AR timeskew means I can’t cover theory and still have a fair shot on substance.
(b) no risk theory would give neg a free source of no risk offense which allows him to moot the AC.

Neg burden is to defend a competitive post-fiat policy. Offense-defense is key to fairness and real world education. This means ignore skepticism.
Nelson 8 writes
Adam F. Nelson, J.D.1. Towards a Comprehensive Theory of Lincoln-Douglas Debate. 2008.
And the truth-statement model of the resolution imposes an absolute burden of proof on the affirmative: if the resolution is a truth-claim, and the af?rmative has the burden of proving that claim, in so far as intuitively we tend to disbelieve truthclaims until we are persuaded otherwise, the af?rmative has the burden to prove that statement absolutely true. Indeed, one of the most common theory arguments in LD is conditionality, which argues it is inappropriate for the af?rmative to claim only proving the truth of part of the resolution is suf?cient to earn the ballot. Such a model of the resolution also gives the negative access to a range of strategies that many students, coaches, and judges ?nd ridiculous or even irrelevant to evaluation of the resolution.
If the negative need only prevent the affirmative from proving the truth of the resolution, it is logically sufficient to negate to deny our ability to make truth-statements or to prove normative morality does not exist or to deny the reliability of human senses or reason. Yet, even though most coaches appear to endorse the truth-statement model of the resolution, they complain about the use of such negative strategies, even though they are a necessary consequence of that model. And, moreover, such strategies seem fundamentally unfair, as they provide the negative with functionally in?nite ground, as there are a nearly in?nite variety of such skeptical objections to normative claims, while continuing to bind the af?rmative to a much smaller range of options: advocacy of the resolution as a whole.
Instead, it seems much more reasonable to treat the resolution as a way to equitably divide ground: the affirmative advocating the desirability of a world in which people adhere to the value judgment implied by the resolution and the negative advocating the desirability of a world in which people adhere to a value judgment mutually exclusive to that implied by the resolution. By making the issue one of desirability of Under competing world-views rather than of truth, the affirmative gains access to increased flexibility regarding how he or she chooses to defend that world, while the negative retains equal flexibility while being denied access to those skeptical arguments indicted above. Our ability to make normative claims is irrelevant to a discussion of the desirability of making two such claims. Unless there is some significant harm in making such statements, some offensive reason to reject making them that can be avoided by an advocacy mutually exclusive with that of the affirmative such objections are not a reason the negative world is more desirable, and therefore not a reason to negate. Note this is precisely how things have been done in policy debate for some time: a team that runs a kritik is expected to offer some impact of the mindset they are indicting and some alternative that would solve for that impact. A team that simply argued some universal, unavoidable, problem was bad and therefore a reason to negate would not be very successful. It is about time LD started treating such arguments the same way.
Such a model of the resolution has additional benefits as well. First, it forces both debaters to offer offensive reasons to prefer their worldview, thereby further enforcing a parallel burden structure. This means debaters can no longer get away with arguing the resolution is by definition true of false. The “truth” of the particular vocabulary of the resolution is irrelevant to its desirability. Second, it is intuitive. When people evaluate the truth of ethical claims, they consider their implications in the real world. They ask themselves whether a world in which people live by that ethical rule is better than one in which they don’t. Such debates don’t happen solely in the abstract. We want to know how the various options affect us and the world we live in.

Advantage 1 is Warming

GIS is key to solve deforestation which causes warming. The impact is agriculture loss.
Esri 13 writes
Esri (a GIS company). “Clinton Climate Initiative Uses GIS to Preserve and Regrow Forests.” Spring 2013. http://www.esri.com/~/media/Files/Pdfs/library/articles/G60096_Forestry-Clinton20Climate_rep.pdf

The Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI) Forestry Program develops forestry projects and carbon measurement systems that help governments and local communities receive compensation for preserving and regrowing forests. CCI uses GIS technology to helps countries monitor their carbon levels. Global warming is caused by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels, and deforestation accounts for about 15 percent of total carbon dioxide emissions in the world. Scientists predict that if governments and communities don’t take action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, our world will face increasingly drastic consequences ranging from stronger heat waves to more droughts and floods to increasing sea level. All these affect agriculture, food security, viability of coastal cities, and water availability around the world. To reduce emissions, governments and economies must use less fossil fuels and increase the use of energy-efficient and renewable technologies. The CCI Forestry Program focuses on helping developing countries reverse deforestation and plant new trees. By showing that they can monitor and verify the reduction of their carbon dioxide emissions, countries become eligible for funding to manage their forest programs and other lowcarbon economic activities. CCI uses GIS technology as a centerpiece of forest carbon measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems for developing countries. GIS is one of three legs of the platform—data, models, and GIS—that allow countries to determine how much carbon they have, how it is changing, and how the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation can be monitored and adjusted as required.

Destruction of agriculture risks extinction.
FAO 11 writes
Agriculture Key To Addressing Future Water And Energy Needs. Food And Agriculture Organization Of The United Nations. http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/94760/icode/
As pressure on the world's water resources reaches unsustainable levels in an increasing number of regions, a "business-as-usual" approach to economic development and natural resource management will no longer be possible, FAO said today. Agriculture will be key to the implementation of sustainable water management, the Organization told attendees at an international meeting on water, energy and food security being held in Bonn. Speaking on the sidelines at the Bonn 2011 Nexus Conference, FAO Assistant Director-General for Natural Resources, Alexander Mueller, said: "Tackling the challenges of food security, economic development and energy security in a context of ongoing population growth will require a renewed and re-imagined focus on agricultural development. Agriculture can and should become the backbone of tomorrow's green economy." The conference in Bonn has been convened by Germany's Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development as a lead up to the UN's "Rio+20" Conference on Sustainable development in June 2012. It brings together leading actors in economic development, natural resource management and environmental policy and the food and energy sectors to look for new approaches to managing the interconnections between water, energy and food. Holistic vision, sectoral solutions FAO estimates that to feed a world population expected to number around 9 billion people in 2050, global food production will need to be increased by 70 percent. Global energy demand will increase by 36 percent by 2035, and competition for water between farming, cities and industry will continue to intensify as a result. "It's time to stop treating food, water and energy as separate issues and tackle the challenge of intelligently balancing the needs of these three sectors, building on synergies, finding opportunities to reduce waste and identifying ways that water can be shared and reused, rather than competed for," Mueller said. Agriculture at the center of the nexus According to Mueller, agriculture lies at the centre of the "water-energy-food nexus. "When you start looking at the issue of how we are going to provide food, water, light, heat and other services and products for 9 billion people, it becomes quite clear that agriculture is perhaps the linchpin of everything," he said. "If we have the political will and farsightedness, we can make agriculture the engine of tomorrow's green economy. Climate-smart farming systems that make efficient use of resources like water, land, and energy must become the basis of tomorrow's agricultural economy."

Deforestation independently causes extinction.
WWF no date writes
World Wildlife Fund. “Responsible Forestry.” Overview. No date. http://worldwildlife.org/industries/responsible-forestry
Forests are vital to life on Earth. They purify the air we breathe, filter the water we drink, prevent erosion, and act as an important buffer against climate change. Forests offer a home to much of the world’s diverse array of plants and animals and provide essential natural resources from timber and food to medicinal plants. Forests also support the lives of local communities and help them to thrive. But forests around the world are under threat. Despite the key role forests play in the world's environmental and economic health, we continue to lose forests, along with the endangered animals that live in them, at the rate of 36 football fields per minute. Illegal logging, poor forest management practices, and growing demand for forest and agricultural products contribute to their rampant destruction. Deforestation is especially severe in some of the world’s most biologically diverse regions, such as the Amazon, Borneo and Sumatra, the Congo Basin, and the Russian Far East. As a result, nearly half the world’s original forests have been lost. 

The plan allows for selective forestry which is comparatively better for the climate.
Kuhn 13 writes
Josef Kuhn (consulting ecologist). “Industrial Forestry or Ecoforestry: Alternative Cultures.” Suzuki Elders. November 18th, 2013. http://suzukielders.wordpress.com/2013/11/18/industrial-forestry-or-ecoforestry-alternative-cultures/
Stewardship of primarily natural forests doesn’t require ending forest harvesting. Commercial forestry and other extractive enterprises have a role in natural resource stewardship and land use decision-making, but they should not dominate these processes. Selective harvesting of over-crowded and unhealthy trees on an ongoing basis can provide truly sustainable jobs for local people. Industrial foresters have been saying for decades that the only way to harvest the magnificent west coast rain forests is to clearcut them. It just isn’t so! Selective harvesting is practiced in many of the world’s forests and British Columbia’s outstanding ecoforestry pioneer Merv Wilkinson showed us that selection forestry can produce sustainable ecological and economic benefits in our west coast forests. The ecoforestry harvesting approach benefits wildlife by letting more energy from the Sun reach the shrubs, grasses and herbs in the lower canopy levels of a healthy forest. It maintains a healthier soil cover, full of life and holding more water and nutrients than the compacted surface left by clearcut logging. These healthy forests are needed for cleaner water and to capture and store carbon from the atmosphere for a healthy climate. We who care about our forests must insure that our political and business leaders know what kind of stewardship we want – industrial forestry or ecoforestry. 

The standard is maximizing happiness.

First, revisionary intuitionism is true and leads to util.
Yudkowsky 8 writes
Eliezer Yudkowsky (research fellow of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute; he also writes Harry Potter fan fiction). “The ‘Intuitions’ Behind ‘Utilitarianism.’” 28 January 2008. LessWrong. http://lesswrong.com/lw/n9/the_intuitions_behind_utilitarianism/
I haven't said much about metaethics - the nature of morality - because that has a forward dependency on a discussion of the Mind Projection Fallacy that I haven't gotten to yet. I used to be very confused about metaethics. After my confusion finally cleared up, I did a postmortem on my previous thoughts. I found that my object-level moral reasoning had been valuable and my meta-level moral reasoning had been worse than useless. And this appears to be a general syndrome - people do much better when discussing whether torture is good or bad than when they discuss the meaning of "good" and "bad". Thus, I deem it prudent to keep moral discussions on the object level wherever I possibly can. Occasionally people object to any discussion of morality on the grounds that morality doesn't exist, and in lieu of jumping over the forward dependency to explain that "exist" is not the right term to use here, I generally say, "But what do you do anyway?" and take the discussion back down to the object level. Paul Gowder, though, has pointed out that both the idea of choosing a googolplex dust specks in a googolplex eyes over 50 years of torture for one person, and the idea of "utilitarianism", depend on "intuition". He says I've argued that the two are not compatible, but charges me with failing to argue for the utilitarian intuitions that I appeal to. Now "intuition" is not how I would describe the computations that underlie human morality and distinguish us, as moralists, from an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness and/or a rock. But I am okay with using the word "intuition" as a term of art, bearing in mind that "intuition" in this sense is not to be contrasted to reason, but is, rather, the cognitive building block out of which both long verbal arguments and fast perceptual arguments are constructed. I see the project of morality as a project of renormalizing intuition. We have intuitions about things that seem desirable or undesirable, intuitions about actions that are right or wrong, intuitions about how to resolve conflicting intuitions, intuitions about how to systematize specific intuitions into general principles. Delete all the intuitions, and you aren't left with an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness, you're left with a rock. Keep all your specific intuitions and refuse to build upon the reflective ones, and you aren't left with an ideal philosopher of perfect spontaneity and genuineness, you're left with a grunting caveperson running in circles, due to cyclical preferences and similar inconsistencies. "Intuition", as a term of art, is not a curse word when it comes to morality - there is nothing else to argue from. Even modus ponens is an "intuition" in this sense - it's just that modus ponens still seems like a good idea after being formalized, reflected on, extrapolated out to see if it has sensible consequences, etcetera. So that is "intuition". However, Gowder did not say what he meant by "utilitarianism". Does utilitarianism say... That right actions are strictly determined by good consequences? That praiseworthy actions depend on justifiable expectations of good consequences? That probabilities of consequences should normatively be discounted by their probability, so that a 50 probability of something bad should weigh exactly half as much in our tradeoffs? That virtuous actions always correspond to maximizing expected utility under some utility function? That two harmful events are worse than one? That two independent occurrences of a harm (not to the same person, not interacting with each other) are exactly twice as bad as one? That for any two harms A and B, with A much worse than B, there exists some tiny probability such that gambling on this probability of A is preferable to a certainty of B? If you say that I advocate something, or that my argument depends on something, and that it is wrong, do please specify what this thingy is... anyway, I accept 3, 5, 6, and 7, but not 4; I am not sure about the phrasing of 1; and 2 is true, I guess, but phrased in a rather solipsistic and selfish fashion: you should not worry about being praiseworthy. Now, what are the "intuitions" upon which my "utilitarianism" depends? This is a deepish sort of topic, but I'll take a quick stab at it. First of all, it's not just that someone presented me with a list of statements like those above, and I decided which ones sounded "intuitive". Among other things, if you try to violate "utilitarianism", you run into paradoxes, contradictions, circular preferences, and other things that aren't symptoms of moral wrongness so much as moral incoherence. After you think about moral problems for a while, and also find new truths about the world, and even discover disturbing facts about how you yourself work, you often end up with different moral opinions than when you started out. This does not quite define moral progress, but it is how we experience moral progress. As part of my experienced moral progress, I've drawn a conceptual separation between questions of type Where should we go? and questions of type How should we get there? (Could that be what Gowder means by saying I'm "utilitarian"?) The question of where a road goes - where it leads - you can answer by traveling the road and finding out. If you have a false belief about where the road leads, this falsity can be destroyed by the truth in a very direct and straightforward manner. When it comes to wanting to go to a particular place, this want is not entirely immune from the destructive powers of truth. You could go there and find that you regret it afterward (which does not define moral error, but is how we experience moral error). But, even so, wanting to be in a particular place seems worth distinguishing from wanting to take a particular road to a particular place. Our intuitions about where to go are arguable enough, but our intuitions about how to get there are frankly messed up. After the two hundred and eighty-seventh research study showing that people will chop their own feet off if you frame the problem the wrong way, you start to distrust first impressions. When you've read enough research on scope insensitivity - people will pay only 28 more to protect all 57 wilderness areas in Ontario than one area, people will pay the same amount to save 50,000 lives as 5,000 lives... that sort of thing... Well, the worst case of scope insensitivity I've ever heard of was described here by Slovic: Other recent research shows similar results. Two Israeli psychologists asked people to contribute to a costly life-saving treatment. They could offer that contribution to a group of eight sick children, or to an individual child selected from the group. The target amount needed to save the child (or children) was the same in both cases. Contributions to individual group members far outweighed the contributions to the entire group. There's other research along similar lines, but I'm just presenting one example, 'cause, y'know, eight examples would probably have less impact. If you know the general experimental paradigm, then the reason for the above behavior is pretty obvious - focusing your attention on a single child creates more emotional arousal than trying to distribute attention around eight children simultaneously. So people are willing to pay more to help one child than to help eight. Now, you could look at this intuition, and think it was revealing some kind of incredibly deep moral truth which shows that one child's good fortune is somehow devalued by the other children's good fortune. But what about the billions of other children in the world? Why isn't it a bad idea to help this one child, when that causes the value of all the other children to go down? How can it be significantly better to have 1,329,342,410 happy children than 1,329,342,409, but then somewhat worse to have seven more at 1,329,342,417? Or you could look at that and say: "The intuition is wrong: the brain can't successfully multiply by eight and get a larger quantity than it started with. But it ought to, normatively speaking." And once you realize that the brain can't multiply by eight, then the other cases of scope neglect stop seeming to reveal some fundamental truth about 50,000 lives being worth just the same effort as 5,000 lives, or whatever. You don't get the impression you're looking at the revelation of a deep moral truth about nonagglomerative utilities. It's just that the brain doesn't goddamn multiply. Quantities get thrown out the window. If you have $100 to spend, and you spend $20 each on each of 5 efforts to save 5,000 lives, you will do worse than if you spend $100 on a single effort to save 50,000 lives. Likewise if such choices are made by 10 different people, rather than the same person. As soon as you start believing that it is better to save 50,000 lives than 25,000 lives, that simple preference of final destinations has implications for the choice of paths, when you consider five different events that save 5,000 lives. (It is a general principle that Bayesians see no difference between the long-run answer and the short-run answer; you never get two different answers from computing the same question two different ways. But the long run is a helpful intuition pump, so I am talking about it anyway.) The aggregative valuation strategy of "shut up and multiply" arises from the simple preference to have more of something - to save as many lives as possible - when you have to describe general principles for choosing more than once, acting more than once, planning at more than one time. Aggregation also arises from claiming that the local choice to save one life doesn't depend on how many lives already exist, far away on the other side of the planet, or far away on the other side of the universe. Three lives are one and one and one. No matter how many billions are doing better, or doing worse. 3 = 1 + 1 + 1, no matter what other quantities you add to both sides of the equation. And if you add another life you get 4 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. That's aggregation. When you've read enough heuristics and biases research, and enough coherence and uniqueness proofs for Bayesian probabilities and expected utility, and you've seen the "Dutch book" and "money pump" effects that penalize trying to handle uncertain outcomes any other way, then you don't see the preference reversals in the Allais Paradox as revealing some incredibly deep moral truth about the intrinsic value of certainty. It just goes to show that the brain doesn't goddamn multiply. The primitive, perceptual intuitions that make a choice "feel good" don't handle probabilistic pathways through time very skillfully, especially when the probabilities have been expressed symbolically rather than experienced as a frequency. So you reflect, devise more trustworthy logics, and think it through in words. When you see people insisting that no amount of money whatsoever is worth a single human life, and then driving an extra mile to save $10; or when you see people insisting that no amount of money is worth a decrement of health, and then choosing the cheapest health insurance available; then you don't think that their protestations reveal some deep truth about incommensurable utilities. Part of it, clearly, is that primitive intuitions don't successfully diminish the emotional impact of symbols standing for small quantities - anything you talk about seems like "an amount worth considering". And part of it has to do with preferring unconditional social rules to conditional social rules. Conditional rules seem weaker, seem more subject to manipulation. If there's any loophole that lets the government legally commit torture, then the government will drive a truck through that loophole. So it seems like there should be an unconditional social injunction against preferring money to life, and no "but" following it. Not even "but a thousand dollars isn't worth a 0.0000000001 probability of saving a life". Though the latter choice, of course, is revealed every time we sneeze without calling a doctor. The rhetoric of sacredness gets bonus points for seeming to express an unlimited commitment, an unconditional refusal that signals trustworthiness and refusal to compromise. So you conclude that moral rhetoric espouses qualitative distinctions, because espousing a quantitative tradeoff would sound like you were plotting to defect. On such occasions, people vigorously want to throw quantities out the window, and they get upset if you try to bring quantities back in, because quantities sound like conditions that would weaken the rule. But you don't conclude that there are actually two tiers of utility with lexical ordering. You don't conclude that there is actually an infinitely sharp moral gradient, some atom that moves a Planck distance (in our continuous physical universe) and sends a utility from 0 to infinity. You don't conclude that utilities must be expressed using hyper-real numbers. Because the lower tier would simply vanish in any equation. It would never be worth the tiniest effort to recalculate for it. All decisions would be determined by the upper tier, and all thought spent thinking about the upper tier only, if the upper tier genuinely had lexical priority. As Peter Norvig once pointed out, if Asimov's robots had strict priority for the First Law of Robotics ("A robot shall not harm a human being, nor through inaction allow a human being to come to harm") then no robot's behavior would ever show any sign of the other two Laws; there would always be some tiny First Law factor that would be sufficient to determine the decision. Whatever value is worth thinking about at all, must be worth trading off against all other values worth thinking about, because thought itself is a limited resource that must be traded off. When you reveal a value, you reveal a utility. I don't say that morality should always be simple. I've already said that the meaning of music is more than happiness alone, more than just a pleasure center lighting up. I would rather see music composed by people than by nonsentient machine learning algorithms, so that someone should have the joy of composition; I care about the journey, as well as the destination. And I am ready to hear if you tell me that the value of music is deeper, and involves more complications, than I realize - that the valuation of this one event is more complex than I know.  But that's for one event. When it comes to multiplying by quantities and probabilities, complication is to be avoided - at least if you care more about the destination than the journey. When you've reflected on enough intuitions, and corrected enough absurdities, you start to see a common denominator, a meta-principle at work, which one might phrase as "Shut up and multiply." Where music is concerned, I care about the journey. When lives are at stake, I shut up and multiply. It is more important that lives be saved, than that we conform to any particular ritual in saving them. And the optimal path to that destination is governed by laws that are simple, because they are math. And that's why I'm a utilitarian - at least when I am doing something that is overwhelmingly more important than my own feelings about it - which is most of the time, because there are not many utilitarians, and many things left undone.

Second, my standard controls the link to any practical reason or contract frameworks because rational agents would consent to a universal law to maximize utility to increase the chance of their own interests being satisfied.

Third, reductionism.

Brain studies prove personal identity doesn’t exist. Parfit 84 writes
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).
Some recent medical cases provide striking evidence in favour of the Reductionist View. Human beings have a lower brain and two upper hemispheres, which are connected by a bundle of fibres. In treating a few people with severe epilepsy, surgeons have cut these fibres. The aim was to reduce the severity of epileptic fits, by confining their causes to a single hemisphere. This aim was achieved. But the operations had another unintended consequence. The effect, in the words of one surgeon, was the creation of ‘two separate spheres of consciousness.’ This effect was revealed by various psychological tests. These made use of two facts. We control our right arms with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. And what is in the right halves of our visual fields we see with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. When someone’s hemispheres have been disconnected, psychologists can thus present to this person two different written questions in the two halves of his visual field, and can receive two different answers written by this person’s two hands.

In the absence of personal identity, only end states can matter. Shoemaker 99
Shoemaker, David (Dept of Philosophy, U Memphis). “Utilitarianism and Personal Identity.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 33: 183–199, 1999. http://www.csun.edu/~ds56723/jvipaper.pdf
Extreme reductionism might lend support to utilitarianism in the following way. Many people claim that we are justified in maximizing the good in our own lives, but not justified in maximizing the good across sets of lives, simply because each of us is a single, deeply unified person, unified by the further fact of identity, whereas there is no such corresponding unity across sets of lives. But if the only justification for the different treatment of individual lives and sets of lives is the further fact, and this fact is undermined by the truth of reductionism, then nothing justifies this different treatment. There are no deeply unified subjects of experience. What remains are merely the experiences themselves, and so any ethical theory distinguishing between individual lives and sets of lives is mistaken. If the deep, further fact is missing, then there are no unities. The morally significant units should then be the states people are in at particular times, and an ethical theory that focused on them and attempted to improve their quality, whatever their location, would be the most plausible. Utilitarianism is just such a theory.

Fourth, util is epistemologically necessary. Everyone values happiness whether they want to or not. Even people who claim they’re skeptics wouldn’t shoot themselves in the foot.

And fifth, act-omission distinction doesn’t apply to states.
Sunstein and Vermuele 05 write
Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermuele, “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life?Life Tradeoffs,” Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper No. 85 (March 2005), p. 17.
The most fundamental point is that unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice between or among possible policies for regulating third parties. The distinction between acts and omissions may not be intelligible in this context, and even if it is, the distinction does not make a morally relevant difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do anything or refusing to act. Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized private action – for example, private killing – becomes obscure when government formally forbids private action but chooses a set of policy instruments that does not adequately or fully discourage it.

Infinite values don’t paralyze calculation. Lauwers and Vallentyne 04 write
Luc Lauwers (Center for Economic Studies, K.U.Leuven) Peter Vallentyne (Department of Philosophy, University of Missouri-Columbia). “Infinite Utilitarianism: More Is Always Better*.” Economics and Philosophy 20 (2004): 307-330.
Zero Independence holds that the ranking of two worlds is determined by the pattern of differences in local value. This, we claim, is highly plausible in the context of finitely additive value theories. In the finite case, finitely additive value theories always satisfy Zero Independence. Although they typically get expressed as judging a world as at least as good as another (having the same locations) if and only if its total value is at least as great, the reference to the total is not needed. An equivalent statement is that one world as at least as good as the second if and only if the sum of the differences in value is at least as great as zero. Only the pattern of differences matters. Even in the infinite case, Zero Independence is “partially” implied by Sum and Loose Pareto. Sum ranks U as at least as good as V if and only if Sum ranks U-V as at least as good as its zero world. Moreover, if two worlds U and V satisfy the antecedent clause of Loose Pareto, then Loose Pareto ranks U as at least as good as V if and only if it ranks U-V above its zero world. Zero Independence is thus, we claim, highly plausible for finitely additive theories.
Zero Independence is equivalent to a condition in social choice theory known as Translation Scale Invariance when it is restricted to the case where locations are the same.  This latter condition holds that interlocational comparisons of zero points are irrelevant to the ranking of worlds. The zero point for value at each location, that is, can be set independently of how it is set for other locations (although, of course, when comparing two worlds, the zero point used for a given location in one world must also be used for that location in the second world). For example, if a location has values of 10 in world U and 5 in world V, both measured on the basis of some particular zero point (the same for both worlds), those values could be changed to 7 and 2 (by making the zero point 3 units higher for that location), and this, according to Translation Scale Invariance, would not alter how the two worlds are ranked. Zero Independence is equivalent to Translation Scale Invariance (restricted to the case where locations are the same), since any change in the zero points for the locations in worlds U and V can, for some W, be represented by U+W and V+W. (For example, if there are just two people, and the first person’s zero point is decreased by two units, and the second person’s zero point is increased by one unit, then the resulting two representations of the value of U and V are simply U+W and V+W, where W is 2,-1.) Zero Independence and Translation Scale Invariance thus each hold that U ? V if and only if U+W ? V+W.
Translation Scale Invariance (and hence, Zero Independence) is highly plausible for finitely additive value theories. (Recall that our goal is to defend a particular extension of finite additivity, not to defend finite additivity against non-additive theories.) If there is no natural zero point that separates positive from negative value (if there is just more or less value with no natural separating point), then any particular zero point is arbitrary (not representing a real aspect of value). In this case, interlocational comparisons of zero-points are uncontroversially irrelevant. If, on the other hand, there is a natural zero for value, it is still plausible for finitely additive value theories to hold that it is irrelevant for ranking worlds. What matters (e.g., from a utilitarian perspective), as argued above, are the differences in value at each location between two worlds—not the absolute level of values at locations. No interlocational comparison of zero points is needed for this purpose.

Cost-benefit analysis is feasible. Ignore any util calc indicts. Hardin 90 writes
Hardin, Russell (Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences @ NYU). May 1990. Morality within the Limits of Reason. University Of Chicago Press. pp. 4. ISBN 978-0226316208.
One of the cuter charges against utilitarianism is that it is irrational in the following sense. If I take the time to calculate the consequences of various courses of action before me, then I will ipso facto have chosen the course of action to take, namely, to sit and calculate, because while I am calculating the other courses of action will cease to be open to me. It should embarrass philosophers that they have ever taken this objection seriously. Parallel considerations in other realms are dismissed with eminently good sense. Lord Devlin notes, “If the reasonable man ‘worked to rule’ by perusing to the point of comprehension every form he was handed, the commercial and administrative life of the country would creep to a standstill.” James March and Herbert Simon escape the quandary of unending calculation by noting that often we satisfice, we do not maximize: we stop calculating and considering when we find a merely adequate choice of action. When, in principle, one cannot know what is the best choice, one can nevertheless be sure that sitting and calculating is not the best choice. But, one may ask, How do you know that another ten minutes of calculation would not have produced a better choice? And one can only answer, You do not. At some point the quarrel begins to sound adolescent. It is ironic that the point of the quarrel is almost never at issue in practice (as Devlin implies, we are almost all too reasonable in practice to bring the world to a standstill) but only in the principled discussions of academics.

Ignore permissibility and presumption because moral uncertainty means we’ll always have a non-zero credence in the existence of morality, so there’s always a risk of offense in favor of one action.

Next is theory pre-empts.

1. Err aff on theory because of a 5 neg bias at Strake Jesuit and 4 neg bias at Sunvite according to Joy of Tournaments. This also means presume aff if presumption matters.

2. Default to field context to determine T violations. That determines whether the plan is in the lit base. I meet. GIS tech prioritizes environmental protection over resource extraction, that’s Kuhn 13.

3. Prefer aff interpretations. Key to clash. O’Donnell 4 writes
Timothy M. O’Donnell (Director of Debate University of Mary Washington) “And the Twain Shall Meet: Affirmative Framework Choice and the Future of Debate”  2004.
AFC preserves the value of the first affirmative constructive speech. This speech is the starting point for the debate. It is a function of necessity. The debate must begin somewhere if it is to begin at all. Failure to grant AFC is a denial of the service rendered by the affirmative team’s labor when they crafted this speech. Further, if the affirmative does not get to pick the starting point, renders the opening speech act is essentially rendered meaningless while the rest of the debate becomes a debate about what we should be debating about. 

4. Gutcheck against dumb theory. Competing interps leads to a race to the bottom where every round comes down to theory. Intervention is inevitable in blippy theory debates.

Tournament: Harrison RR | Round: 1 | Opponent: Newark Science CQ Christian Quiroz | Judge: Christi Bendi and Ashleigh Collins
I affirm. 

The value is morality, as “should” implies that the resolution is a normative question.

Violating an individual’s freedom disrespects individuality, which morality must uphold.
Quinn 89
Quinn, Warren S. “Actions, Intentions, and Consequences: The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing.” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 98, No. 3, (Jul., 1989), pp. 287-312. JSTOR.
Whether we are speaking of ownership or more fundamental forms of possession, something is, morally speaking, his only if his say over what may be done to it (and thereby to him) can override the greater needs of others. A person is constituted by his body and mind. They are parts or aspects of him. For that very reason, it is fitting that he have primary say over what may be done to them-not because such an arrangement best promotes overall human welfare, but because any arrangement that denied him that say would be a grave indignity. In giving him this authority, morality recognizes his existence as an individual with ends of his own—an independent being. Since that is what he is, he deserves this recognition. Were morality to withhold it, were it to allow us to kill or injure him whenever that would be collectively best, it would picture him not as a being in his own right but as a cell in the collective whole. This last point can be illustrated not by thinking of bodies or minds but of lives. The moral sense in which your mind or body is yours seems to be the same as that in which your life is yours. And if your life is yours then there must be decisions concerning it that are yours to make-decisions protected by negative rights. One such matter is the choice of work or vocation. We think there is something morally amiss when people are forced to be farmers or flute players just because the balance of social needs tips in that direction. Barring great emergencies, we think people's lives must be theirs to lead. Not because that makes things go best in some independent sense but because the alternative seems to obliterate them as individuals. This obliteration, and not social inefficiency, is one of the things that strikes us as appalling in totalitarian social projects for example, in the Great Cultural Revolution. None of this, of course, denies the legitimate force of positive rights. They too are essential to the status we want as persons who matter, and they must be satisfied when it is morally possible to do so. But negative rights, for the reasons I have been giving, define the terms of moral possibility. Their precedence is essential to the moral fact of our lives, minds, and bodies really being ours.

Thus the standard is creating a system of equal freedom.

There are 2 additional warrants.

1. Kant’s categorical imperative states that an action must be universally willed, meaning that it must be possible for all rational agents to will it as an end.
   This aspect of the categorical imperative is essential for mutual recognition of the agency of others. Farr 2
   Arnold Farr (prof of phil @ UKentucky, focusing on German idealism, philosophy of race, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and liberation philosophy). “Can a Philosophy of Race Afford to Abandon the Kantian Categorical Imperative?” JOURNAL of SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, Vol. 33 No. 1, Spring 2002, 17–32.
   One of the most popular criticisms of Kant’s moral philosophy is that it is too formalistic.13 That is, the universal nature of the categorical imperative leaves it devoid of content. Such a principle is useless since moral decisions are made by concrete individuals in a concrete, historical, and social situation. This type of criticism lies behind Lewis Gordon’s rejection of any attempt to ground an antiracist position on Kantian principles. The rejection of universal principles for the sake of emphasizing the historical embeddedness of the human agent is widespread in recent philosophy and social theory. I will argue here on Kantian grounds that although a distinction between the universal and the concrete is a valid distinction, the unity of the two is required for an understanding of human agency. The attack on Kantian formalism began with Hegel’s criticism of the Kantian philosophy.14 The list of contemporary theorists who follow Hegel’s line of criticism is far too long to deal with in the scope of this paper. Although these theorists may approach the problem of Kantian formalism from a variety of angles, the spirit of their criticism is basically the same: The universality of the categorical imperative is an abstraction from one’s empirical conditions. Kant is often accused of making the moral agent an abstract, empty, noumenal subject. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Kantian subject is an embodied, empirical, concrete subject. However, this concrete subject has a dual nature. Kant claims in the Critique of Pure Reason as well as in the Grounding that human beings have an intelligible and empirical character.15 It is impossible to understand and do justice to Kant’s moral theory without taking seriously the relation between these two characters. The very concept of morality is impossible without the tension between the two. By “empirical character” Kant simply means that we have a sensual nature. We are physical creatures with physical drives or desires. The very fact that I cannot simply satisfy my desires without considering the rightness or wrongness of my actions suggests that my empirical character must be held in check by something, or else I behave like a Freudian id. My empiri- cal character must be held in check by my intelligible character, which is the legislative activity of practical reason. It is through our intelligible character that we formulate principles that keep our empirical impulses in check. The categorical imperative is the supreme principle of morality that is constructed by the moral agent in his/her moment of self-transcendence. What I have called self-transcendence may be best explained in the following passage by Onora O’Neill: In restricting our maxims to those that meet the test of the categorical imperative we refuse to base our lives on maxims that necessarily make our own case an exception. The reason why a universilizability criterion is morally signi?cant is that it makes our own case no special exception (G, IV, 404). In accepting the Categorical Imperative we accept the moral reality of other selves, and hence the possibility (not, note, the reality) of a moral community. The Formula of Universal Law enjoins no more than that we act only on maxims that are open to others also.16 O’Neill’s description of the universalizability criterion includes the notion of self-transcendence that I am working to explicate here to the extent that like self-transcendence, universalizable moral principles require that the individ- ual think beyond his or her own particular desires. The individual is not allowed to exclude others as rational moral agents who have the right to act as he acts in a given situation. For example, if I decide to use another person merely as a means for my own end I must recognize the other person’s right to do the same to me. I cannot consistently will that I use another as a means only and will that I not be used in the same manner by another. Hence, the universalizability criterion is a principle of consistency and a principle of inclusion. That is, in choosing my maxims I attempt to include the perspective of other moral agents. 

The categorical imperative also states that one must not treat a human being as a means to someone else’s ends.
Embracing this aspect of the categorical imperative is necessary to challenge racism.
Farr 2
Arnold Farr (prof of phil @ UKentucky, focusing on German idealism, philosophy of race, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and liberation philosophy). “Can a Philosophy of Race Afford to Abandon the Kantian Categorical Imperative?” JOURNAL of SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, Vol. 33 No. 1, Spring 2002, 17–32.
Whereas most criticisms are aimed at the formulation of universal law and the formula of autonomy, our analysis here will focus on the formula of an end in itself and the formula of the kingdom of ends, since we have already addressed the problem of universality. The latter will be discussed ?rst. At issue here is what Kant means by “kingdom of ends.” Kant writes: “By ‘kingdom’ I understand a systematic union of different rational beings through common laws.”32 The above passage indicates that Kant recognizes different, perhaps different kinds, of rational beings; however, the problem for most critics of Kant lies in the assumption that Kant suggests that the “kingdom of ends” requires that we abstract from personal differences and content of private ends. The Kantian conception of rational beings requires such an abstraction. Some feminists and philosophers of race have found this abstract notion of rational beings problematic because they take it to mean that rationality is necessarily white, male, and European.33 Hence, the systematic union of rational beings can mean only the systematic union of white, European males. I ?nd this interpretation of Kant’s moral theory quite puzzling. Surely another interpretation is available. That is, the implication that in Kant’s philosophy, rationality can only apply to white, European males does not seem to be the only alternative. The problem seems to lie in the requirement of abstraction. There are two ways of looking at the abstraction requirement that I think are faithful to Kant’s text and that overcome the criticisms of this requirement. First, the abstraction requirement may be best understood as a demand for intersubjectivity or recognition. Second, it may be understood as an attempt to avoid ethical egoism in determining maxims for our actions. It is unfortunate that Kant never worked out a theory of intersubjectivity, as did his successors Fichte and Hegel. However, this is not to say that there is not in Kant’s philosophy a tacit theory of intersubjectivity or recognition. The abstraction requirement simply demands that in the midst of our concrete differences we recognize ourselves in the other and the other in ourselves. That is, we recognize in others the humanity that we have in common. Recognition of our common humanity is at the same time recognition of rationality in the other. We recognize in the other the capacity for selfdetermination and the capacity to legislate for a kingdom of ends. This brings us to the second interpretation of the abstraction requirement. To avoid ethical egoism one must abstract from (think beyond) one’s own personal interest and subjective maxims. That is, the categorical imperative requires that I recognize that I am a member of the realm of rational beings. Hence, I organize my maxims in consideration of other rational beings. Under such a principle other people cannot be treated merely as a means for my end but must be treated as ends in themselves. The merit of the categorical imperative for a philosophy of race is that it contravenes racist ideology to the extent that racist ideology is based on the use of persons of a different race as a means to an end rather than as ends in themselves. Embedded in the formulation of an end in itself and the formula of the kingdom of ends is the recognition of the common hope for humanity. That is, maxims ought to be chosen on the basis of an ideal, a hope for the amelioration of humanity. This ideal or ethical commonwealth (as Kant calls it in the Religion) is the kingdom of ends.34 Although the merits of Kant’s moral theory may be recognizable at this point, we are still in a bit of a bind. It still seems problematic that the moral theory of a racist is essentially an antiracist theory. Further, what shall we do with Henry Louis Gates’s suggestion that we use the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime to deconstruct the Grounding? What I have tried to suggest is that instead of abandoning the categorical imperative we should attempt to deepen our understanding of it and its place in Kant’s critical philosophy. A deeper reading of the Grounding and Kant’s philosophy in general may produce the deconstruction35 suggested by Gates. However, a text is not necessarily deconstructed by reading it against another. Texts often deconstruct themselves if read properly. To be sure, the best way to understand a text is to read it in context. Hence, if the Grounding is read within the context of the critical philosophy, the tools for a deconstruction of the text are provided by its context and the tensions within the text. Gates is right to suggest that the Grounding must be deconstructed. However, this deconstruction requires much more than reading the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime against the Grounding. It requires a complete engagement with the critical philosophy. Such an engagement discloses some of Kant’s very signi?cant claims about humanity and the practical role of reason. With this disclosure, deconstruction of the Grounding can begin. What deconstruction will reveal is not necessarily the inconsistency of Kant’s moral philosophy or the racist or sexist nature of the categorical imperative, but rather, it will disclose the disunity between Kant’s theory and his own feelings about blacks and women. Although the theory is consistent and emancipatory and should apply to all persons, Kant the man has his own personal and moral problems. Although Kant’s attitude toward people of African descent was deplorable, it would be equally deplorable to reject the categorical imperative without ?rst exploring its emancipatory potential.

2. Human Worth. Reason must be embraced as the starting point for morality.
Hill and Boxill 1
Thomas E. Hill (Professor of philosophy at Chapel Hill) and Bernard Boxill (Professor of African American philosophy at Chapel Hill). Kant and Race. In Race and Racism. March 2001. http://www.faculty.umb.edu/lawrence_blum/courses/465_11/readings/Race_and_Racism.pdf
It may seem that this is mistaken, because there are cases where knowing what is in conformity with duty requires more sophisticated intellectual argumentation than is available to ‘common human reason’. This may or may not be true. In any case, the objection now under consideration maintains that Kant’s remark is mistaken for a different and perhaps more fundamental reason. It can allow that, suitably quali?ed, Kant’s remark is right that ‘common human reason’ can always know what is in conformity with duty. The quali?cation is that to be able to know what is in conformity with duty common human reason must always have the morally relevant facts vividly before it. But, so the objection goes, emotions, passions, and attitudes often make it extremely dif?cult if not impossible for common human rea-son to have the morally relevant facts vividly before it. As Aristotle reminds us, the emotions, passions, and attitudes focus our attention on certain facts and distract our attention from other facts. The con?dent person tends to overlook facts that a fearful person notices; and an angry person tends to overlook facts that a happy person notices. In other words, emotions, passions, and attitudes tend to make certain facts vivid, and to make others obscure. Indeed they often make morally irrelevant facts vivid, and morally relevant facts obscure. But if common human reason must have the morally relevant facts vividly before it to know what is in conformity with duty, the emotions, passions, and attitudes can make it very dif?cult for common human reason to know what is in conformity with duty. We can see this in a case that Kant himself constructs: according to him, a person cannot will that his maxim not to assist others in need be made a law of nature because many cases could occur in which he would need the assistance of others. But this argument depends on the possibility of such cases being sufficiently vivid to the person in question, and we know that they will not be if he is very proud and self-confident. Generally, if the maxims we can will to be universal laws depend on the factual beliefs we have vividly before us, and the maxims we can will to be universal laws determine what we think is right, our emotions, passions, and attitudes can determine what we think is right. The problem is that if our emotions and passions can make morally irrelevant facts vivid, and morally relevant facts obscure, they can mislead us into thinking that what is right is wrong, and that what is wrong is right. If this is correct, con?dent, complacent, well-positioned white people will not only ?nd it difficult to do what they know to be right; they will ?nd it still more dif?cult to know what is right, even when they sincerely claim that they are trying to do so. Indeed, such sincere people are likely to be particularly dangerous for, feeling their own sincerity, they will be unlikely to believe that they can be mistaken. We do not think that Kant was altogether unaware of this problem, for he frequently warned of the dangers of self-deception. His mistake seems to have been to suppose we can always overcome our self-deceptions, and bring the morally relevant facts vividly before us, by a sufficiently strenuous rational self-examination. Still, the solution to this difficulty is not to abandon reliance on reason. On the contrary, we can only solve this difficulty if we rely even more on reason. It was reason that led us to appreciate that the emotions, passions, and attitudes can distort the results of reason’s efforts to determine what is right; and it was reason that led us to see that rational self-examination alone may not always enable us to bring all the morally relevant facts vividly before us. Finally, it is reason that will enable us to solve the problem, which in general is to ?nd some way to bring the morally relevant facts before common human reason. The ?rst step, of course, is to listen to what others are saying. Reason will only lead us to the truth if we listen to what others are saying. But we are not repeating this fact made familiar by every defender of freedom of expression. Listening to others with different viewpoints, different emotions and attitudes, and consequently different blind spots is a beginning, but it is not enough. The con?dent and complacent do not listen sympathetically to those they feel to be their inferiors, even when they invite these inferiors to speak. Somehow we must design institutions that will help us to listen to others sympathetically. Morally relevant facts that are obscure to us may be vivid to others, and if we listen to them sympathetically these facts may become vivid to us too. Rousseau believed that institutions that reduced inequalities and dependencies would help us to listen to others sympathetically. We believe he was right, but that is not the point we want to press now. Our point is that only by rational re?ection together with adequate understanding of the social and psychological roots of racism can we design the institutions that will help us to listen to others sympathetically and consequently to know what is in conformity with duty.
It follows from practical reason that rational beings have inherent value.
Korsgaard 96
Korsgaard, Christine (Prof of Philo @ Harvard). “The Sources of Normativity.” 1996.
This is just a fancy new model of an argument that first appeared in a much simpler form, Kant’s argument for his Formula of Humanity. The form of relativism with which Kant began was the most elementary one we encounter - the relativity of value to human desires and interests. He started from the fact that when we make a choice we must regard its object as good. His point is the one I have been making - that being human we must endorse our impulses before we can act on them. Kant asked what it is that makes these objects good, and, rejecting one form of realism, he decided that the goodness wais not in the objects themselves. Were it not for our desires and inclinations, we would not find their objects good. Kant saw that we take things to be important because they are important to us - and he concluded that we must therefore take ourselves to be important. In this way, the value of humanity itself is implicit in every human choice. If normative skepticism is to be avoided - if there is any such thing as a reason for action - then humanity as the source of all reasons and values must be valued for its own sake.

Only a system of equal freedom respects the right of human beings to set their own purposes.
Ripstein 9
Arthur Ripstein (University of Toronto). “Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy.” 2009.
The same right to be your own master within a system of equal freedom also generates what Kant calls an “internal duty” of rightful honor, which “consists in asserting one’s worth as a human being in relation to others, a duty expressed by the saying do not make yourself into a mere means for others but be at the same time an end for them.”14 Kant says that this duty can be “explained. as obligation from the right of humanity in our own person.” Kant’s characterization of this as an “internal duty” may seem out of place, given his earlier characterization of the Universal Principle of Right in terms of restrictions on each person’s conduct in light of the freedom of others. But the duty of rightful honor is also relational: it is a duty because it is a limit on the exercise of a person’s freedom that is imposed by the Universal Principle of Right. Just as the rights of others restrict your freedom, so that you cannot acquire a right to anything by acting in ways inconsistent with the innate right of another person, so, too, the humanity in your own person restricts the ways in which you can exercise your freedom by entering into arrangements with others. Your innate right prevents you from being bound by others more than you can in turn bind them; your duty of rightful honor prevents you from making yourself bound by others in those ways. Rightful honor does not warn you away from some juridical possibility that would somehow be demeaning or unworthy. You do not wrong yourself if you enter into a binding arrangement inconsistent with the humanity in your own person. Instead, your duty of rightful honor says that no such arrangement can be binding, so no other person could be entitled to enforce a claim of right against you that presupposes that you have acted contrary to rightful honor. Rightful honor does not demand that you behave selfishly, or refrain from helping another person with some particular project, or make another person’s ends your own. To do any of these things is just to adopt some particular purpose, and so is an exercise of your freedom. In later chapters, we will see that rightful honor prevents you from giving up your capacity to set your own purposes, and so prevents others from asserting claims of right that assume that you did. In private right your rightful honor prevents you from entering into an enforceable contract of slavery, even if you were to believe the arrangement to be to your advantage. In public right, it prevents officials from making arrangements on your behalf that are inconsistent with your innate right. Rightful honor also provides the link from private right to public right by imposing a duty on each to leave the state of nature, which Kant characterizes as a condition in which everyone is subject to the choice of others. 

?
I advocate that developing countries accept the Precautionary Principle when environmental protection and resource extraction conflict. 

Tickner et al. 99 defines the Precautionary Principle according to the Wingspread Statement
Joel Tickner (Lowell Center for Sustainable Production), Carolyn Raffensperger and Nancy Meyers (SEHN). “The precautionary principle in action: A handbook.” Science and Environmental Health Network. 1999.
The first major effort in the United States to bring the precautionary principle to the level of day-to-day environmental and public health decision-making at the state or federal level was a January 1998 conference of activists, scholars, scientists, and lawyers at Wingspread, home of the Johnson Foundation in Racine, Wisconsin. Convened by the Science and Environmental Health Network (SEHN), participants discussed methods to implement the precautionary principle and barriers to that implementation.  The Wingspread definition of precaution (see Appendix) has three elements: threats of harm; scientific uncertainty; and preventive, precautionary action. The litmus test for knowing when to apply the precautionary principle is the combination of threat of harm and scientific uncertainty. Some would say the threatened harm must be serious or irreversible, but others point out that this does not allow for the cumulative effects of relatively small insults.  If there is certainty about cause and effect, as in the case of lead and children's health, then acting is no longer precautionary, although it might be preventive. In essence, the precautionary principle provides a rationale for taking action against a practice or substance in the absence of scientific certainty rather than continuing the suspect practice while it is under study, or without study. Instead of asking what level of harm is acceptable, a precautionary approach asks: How much contamination can be avoided? What are the alternatives to this product or activity, and are they safer? Is this activity even necessary? The precautionary principle focuses on options and solutions rather than risk. It forces the initiator of an activity to address fundamental questions of how to behave in a more environmentally sensitive manner. The precautionary principle also serves as a "speed bump" to new technology, ensuring that decisions about new activities are made thoughtfully and in the light of potential consequences. 

The Precautionary Principle challenges environmental racism.
Raffensperger 4
Carolyn Raffensperger (the founding executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network. An environmental lawyer, she specializes in the fundamental changes in law and policy necessary for the protection and restoration of public health and the environment. Raffensperger is co-editor of Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing the Precautionary Principle, the most comprehensive exploration to date of the history, theory and implementation of the Precautionary Principle). “Precautionary Precepts: The Power and Potential of the Precautionary Principle.” 2004.http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2004/09012004/september04interviewraffen.html
MM: How does the Precautionary Principle connect with another rising ecological principle: environmental justice? Raffensperger: It seems to mesh quite well. California's EPA has adopted the Precautionary Principle along with the idea of assessing cumulative impacts to guide the agency's environmental justice policy. What they're saying is: people of color have taken the brunt for all of these various technologies and landfills and other things that have been sited in their neighborhoods. Regulators tend to evaluate them all individually and not look at their cumulative impacts, and we need to apply the Precautionary Principle to address those cumulative impacts. We need to begin preventing harm and looking at it systemically rather than with this kind of piecemeal risk assessment. Environmental justice advocates have also been quite clear about the burden of proof -- for so long they have carried not only the burden of toxic chemicals, but the burden of having to prove that they have been injured. With the Precautionary Principle saying, that's not your job, it really is industry's responsibility to monitor, test and pay for damage and clean-up, it has codified things they have been saying all along. ?
Prioritizing environmental protection treats all people as valuable in themselves and is key to environmental justice for minorities. Hartley 95
Troy Hartley (Research Associate Professor; Director, Virginia Sea Grant Program). “Environmental justice: An environmental civil rights value acceptable to all worldviews.” Environmental Ethics. 1995.
ETHICAL MODELS AND WORLD VIEWS It is helpful to start with a brief discussion of hedonistic utilitarianism, Kantian rights and obligations, and Rawls’ veil of ignorance to appreciate the world views that originate from these ethical models. World views guide and help persons understand the world, including environmental perspectives. Within this ethical structure, how does environmental justice fit in? In this discussion, my aim is to explain environmental justice as a fundamental value axiom that exists in all environmental world views, with the possible exception of hedonistic utilitarianism. UTILITARIAN DOCTRINE Hedonistic, or narrow, utilitarianism bases moral utility on the principles of greatest happiness. Actions are morally right if they promote happiness (or pleasure) and wrong if they don’t. All things desirable are desirable because there is inherent pleasure in them or they promote pleasure and avoid pain.18 A conflict can arise between utility and justice when a discriminatory society produces a higher level of net happiness than a nondiscriminatory society. It is this conflict that produced an environmental justice movement within the civil rights, minority, and low-income communities and challenges the traditional economic analysis of Mill’s utilitarianism. Within mainstream economic principles, the potential compensation criterion assesses the gains to a segment of society relative to the losses to another segment of society. If the gains outweigh the losses, then the action is beneficial to society. In theory, the winners could compensate the losers and society would still be ahead. In practice, compensation rarely occurs.20 Environmental justice rejects an assumption of the potential compensation criterion. The substitutability assumption states that individuals, knowing their preferences, can substitute one set of preferences for others.21 That is, for low-income or minority communities, the preference for economic gains from the siting of polluting industry and jobs in their neighborhoods can be substituted for public health gained from a safer environment. The environmental justice movement and particularly Bullard’s environmental blackmail concept challenges this traditionally held economic principle. Consistent with Taylor’s view that utility and justice are incompatible,22 the environmental blackmail concept questions whether it is just to subject minority or lowincome communities to polluting industries at any level of compensation. One could still argue from a utilitarian viewpoint that jobs in highly polluting industries are often low paying. If the jobs paid more (that is, higher compensation), the community would be willing to put up with the pollution and reduced public health in exchange for greater economic wealth. To assess this presumption, it is helpful to review a siting example from upper New York state. Residents of Yorkshire, a rural, low-income community of 3,850 people in upstate New York (not a predominantly minority community), rejected Browning Ferris Industries’ plan to build a regional landfill for nontoxic wastes. BFI had offered the community an economic development package worth more than $1 million per year. The economic incentive package included the following promises: up to 100 jobs in a town that had been impacted by three recent plant closings; $1.6 million in annual fees to the city, which was enough to cut local taxes by three-quarters for the average family; $100 million in construction expenditures; and $1.15 million in annual grants to promote longterm economic development in Yorkshire (Yorkshire’s annual town budget was only $810,000). During negotiations with the community, BFI offered local officials the authority to determine the source and type of wastes the landfill could accept. Nevertheless, seventy percent of Yorkshire’s registered voters signed a petition opposing the landfill, and the town board voted unanimously to reject BFI’s proposal.23 The potential compensation criterion assumes that a level of compensation (jobs and economic development assistance) can be found that is acceptable to the losers. The Yorkshire example challenges this assumption because an acceptable level of compensation could not be found. Bacow and Milkey came to a similar conclusion while assessing Massachusetts’ efforts to overcome local opposition to hazardous waste facilities.24 They asserted that past compensation experience reveals the social costs of hazardous waste facilities to be uncompensable.25 The environmental justice movement would probably agree that the level of environmental degradation and reduced public health in minority and low-income communities is monetarily uncompensable. Even if a utilitarian accepted an unequal distribution of environmental quality, doing so would not constitute an acceptance of unequal environmental protection under socially acceptable laws. The potential compensation criterion enables economists to justify an unequal distribution of environmental quality. The community with lower quality trades that quality for other preferred goods or is compensated in some other manner.26 However, if socially acceptable rules constrained the economic system, the utilitarian would support the application and enforcement of those rules in an equitable manner.27 For example, economists often site clearly defined and enforced property rights as a mechanism to address environmental problems.28 Utilitarians would not support the inequitable enforcement of property rights, particularly because it could give one party an unfair economic advantage over another. KANTIAN RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS Under a Kantian view, to have moral worth an action must be performed as a duty even to the detriment of one’s inclinations.29 Kantian ethics requires that actions not be aimed at any specific ends (for example, one’s own inclination or utilitarian gains). Instead, moral action should be based on a principle or a moral rule.30 To be a moral rule, the rule must be a categorical imperative. There are three formulations of the categorical imperative: (1) for a rule to be a moral law, it must be a universal law, legislatively valid for everyone; (2) the rule must treat all human beings as an ends and never merely as a means to an end; and (3) a person must recognize the rule as binding upon him or her, and thus, the person must act as if he or she is a member of an organized society of ends.31 Kant held that through reason we know the categorical imperative to be true.32 The environmental justice movement would, most likely, view a safe environment for all, low or high-income and white or minority communities, as a moral law, satisfying the three formulations of a categorical imperative, and based on reason. The Kantian aspects of the environmental justice movement are best demonstrated through the thoughts of some of its academic and political leaders. Bullard views environmental concerns as issues of equity and social justice as well as an issue of public health.33 Bunyan Bryant and Paul Mohai of the University of Michigan consider environmental justice in terms of a “safe and clean environment as a basic right for all, regardless of race or color.”34 That is, a safe, clean environment is a fundamental human right, a moral law. Dorcetta Taylor, formerly of Yale University and now with the University of Michigan, has also noted that minorities participate in the environmental justice movement because it is based on principles of fairness and justice with a strong emphasis on civil rights and social justice.35 The Environmental Justice Transition Group recommended to the Clinton administration’s transition team that an environmental justice model be established that includes “a framework of equal justice and equal protection . . . to ensure every citizen’s right to be free from pollution.”36 This approach need not go beyond an anthropocentric philosophy that views the environment as instrumentally valuable for human health reasons. The Kantian view of environmental justice has allowed the environmental justice movement to challenge the reductionist, utilitarian approach to environmental decision making without embracing more controversial, nonanthropocentric principles. 

Environmental protection is an essential starting point for solidarity with black people.
Cone 7
James Cone (Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary). “Whose Earth is it Anyway?” Sojourners. July 2007. http://sojo.net/magazine/2007/07/whose-earth-it-anyway
Until recently, ecological justice has not been a major theme in the liberation movements in the African-American community. "Blacks don't care about the environment" is a typical comment by white ecologists. Racial and economic justice has been at best only a marginal concern in the mainstream environmental movement. "White people care more about the endangered whale and the spotted owl than they do about the survival of young blacks in our nation's cities" is a well-founded belief in the African-American community. Justice fighters for blacks and the defenders of the earth have tended to ignore each other in their public discourse and practice. Their separation from each other is unfortunate, because they are fighting the same enemy—human beings' domination of each other and nature. The logic that led to slavery and segregation in the Americas, colonization and apartheid in Africa, and the rule of white supremacy throughout the world is the same one that leads to the exploitation of animals and the ravaging of nature. It is a mechanistic and instrumental logic that defines everything and everybody in terms of their contribution to the development and defense of white world supremacy. People who fight against white racism but fail to connect it to the degradation of the earth are anti-ecological, whether they know it or not. People who struggle against ecological injustice but do not incorporate in it a disciplined and sustained fight against white supremacy are racists, whether they acknowledge it or not. The fight for justice cannot be segregated but must be integrated with the fight for life in all its forms. The leaders in the mainstream environmental movement are mostly middle- and upper-class whites who are unprepared culturally and intellectually to dialogue with angry blacks. The leaders in the African-American community are leery of talking about anything with whites that will distract from the menacing reality of racism. What both groups fail to realize is how much they need each other in the struggle for justice, peace, and the integrity of creation. I want to challenge the black freedom movement to take a critical look at itself through the lens of the ecological movement and also challenge the ecological movement to critique itself through a serious and ongoing engagement of racism in American history and culture. Hopefully, we can break the silence and promote genuine solidarity between the two groups and thereby enhance the quality of life for the whole inhabited earth—humankind and otherkind. 

Rational agents have a duty to protect future generations by promoting life-sustaining conditions. Godofsky 10
Jessica Godofsky (student at The College of New Jersey). “FUTURE GENERATIONS AND THE RIGHT TO SURVIVAL: A DEONTOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE MORAL OBLIGATIONS OF PRESENT TO FUTURE PEOPLE.” TCNJ Journal of Student Scholarship. April 2010. http://joss.pages.tcnj.edu/files/2012/04/2010-Godofsky.pdf
While the natural right to life entails a duty not to cause the death of another, the right to survival requires the physical conditions needed to sustain that life. To be a human being is to act and intend to survive, whereas animals and plants survive through instinct, reflex and learned behaviors. By acting and intending to survive through free will, human beings employ reason to preserve their lives. According to Kant, this establishes our infinite worth and our ability to claim rights and possess obligatory duties. Ian Barbour argues that the fundamental equality of persons is derived from the “common nature of persons as rational beings” and the “universality of basic human capacities” which have been established to allow human beings to assert their natural right to survival (2006:113). We can also expect that future human beings will engage in rational, deliberate action to preserve their existence collectively as we currently do. Present people can assume moral responsibility for future people, then, because we are united as a species through our capacity for rational agency, rather than through a contractual, reciprocal relationship. Present people can use rational thought to identify what living conditions are necessary for future survival because we share evident physiological and biological interests as a distinct species. I reject Stephen Gardiner?s claim that “future generations have no control over what the present generation does with that capacity…they could not in principle have any such control. They are not around to present a claim, nor to represent their interests…they have no bargaining power” (Gardiner 2002:403). In fact, Golding claims that “future generations are members of our moral community because…our social ideal is relevant to them, given what they are and their conditions of their life” (1972:361). Therefore, we can tie the natural right to survival to the fact that we can distinguish the basic conditions of living using rational deliberation to realize our present “social ideal,” even if this social ideal becomes more and more obscure as generations become more distant. Although future generations are certainly not able to consent to a social contract, they do have a natural right to survival using rational agency to do so. This establishes the moral obligation of present generations to treat them and their interests with equal consideration. These future people cannot make claims according to a social contract, but as Golding notes, “have a claim…whether or not they make the claim, demands, or are even able to make a claim” because we recognize them as members of our moral community with “an entitlement upon them to receive what is claimed from me” (1972:360). Therefore, while we do not necessarily owe future generations such moral consideration, we are morally obliged to act with regard to them (Hubin 1976:71). Although Golding defines it as “a conception of the good life for man,” in this argument is related to the natural right to survival and the conditions needed to do so (1972:360). That being said, “the potential for agency and autonomy that is attributed to future generations mandates the recognition of their rights to a natural world that is not destroyed and eroded either in the quantum of its resources or in their richness and diversity” (Jayal 2003:301). To ensure this right, present generations must create a social ideal based on physical, life-sustaining circumstances that will provide future generations with the opportunity to live a healthy life and fulfill their central interests. According to John Rawls, “the different temporal position of persons and generations does not in itself justify treating them differently” (1973:295). Thus, we have a duty to ensure the survival of future generations and must act to protect this right.  

Our obligation to protect future generations from environmental destruction is a litmus test for any moral theory. Bickham 81
Stephen Bickham (Professor of Philosophy at Mansfield State College). “Future Generations and Contemporary Ethical Theory.” 1981. http://profs-polisci.mcgill.ca/muniz/intergen/Bickham20-20Future20generations20and20contemporary20ethical20theory.pdf
There exists today in philosophy a question of our ethical obligations to future generations. Several different aspects of this question render it philosophically unusual. For one thing the substantive answer to the question is not in dispute. Were someone to suggest seriously that we have no ethical obligations to future generations and mean by this that we need take no care for what living conditions on the planet will be in a hundred years - that whether there would exist then, say, a lethal level of radioactivity in the atmosphere, it would be no concern of ours - we should regard that individual as lacking one of the most basic of human ethical sensibilities. Of course we have some serious responsibility for the future, though this does not commit us to the more particular position that we have ethical obligations to future generations. The question does not, thus, require an answer at the general level, nor am I prepared here to demarcate specifically the content of our responsibility for the future, though I shall treat of others' attempts to do so. I am interested rather in why this question should seem so mysterious at this time as to generate a dispute or issue within the philosophical community. Thus my focus will be interior to philosophy. I hope to show how the assumptions involved in raising this question in this way make it difficult for us to address the new realities with which the question is concerned. Why is this question a current one in philosophy? From a somewhat sociological perspective it is significant that John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, perhaps the most influential ethical treatise of the seventies, is the first person who seems to have dealt with the question in its current form.' I shall examine Rawls' position in detail later, but basically he treats justice among generations as involving each generation's passing on to the next a suitable accumulation of intellectual, economic, and educational "capital" so that the next can have the werewithal to continue or to establish just institutions, as well as support a reasonable standard of living.2 While the immense philosophical popularity of A Theory of Justice brought the current question to the attention of the philosophical community, most philosophers writing of the issue of ethical obligation to future generations since Rawls have seen the problem in an environmental rather than an economic context? It is clear that our relatively new capacity for possibly permanent devastation of the environment has created a new ethical situation which requires a reassessment of our responsibility to the future. Environmental pollution itself is nothing new. I am sitting a quarter of a mile from a river which has contained no life for about 80 years due to pollution from mine acid waste. In my county virtually every marketable tree was cut down between 1895 and 1915. But until now there just have not been enough people nor an advanced enough technology to threaten a large environment with permanent destruction or impairment. Trees grow back and mine acid waste pollution can be stopped, though it is expensive to do so. But we simply do not know how to render radioactive waste from power plants nonradioactive, or to replace the ozone layer in the atmosphere should this become depleted, or to develop an effective, economical replacement for iron. It is quite simple. We did not have the responsibility for the future that we do now before we had the capacity to destroy it. As I said earlier, our responsibility for the future in a broad sense is well recognized. What is not understood is how this responsibility is to be rationally grounded in an ethical theory. But it is becoming clear to ethicists that the question of our obligations to the future can be seen as a litmus test for an ethical theory. No theory can really be adequate to the contemporary situation which cannot found such obligations on its own principles. The problem is that each of the major, current ethical theories has difficulty doing this. I shall examine briefly the deontological theory and at more length the utilitarian and contractarian theories to illustrate why this is so.

Tournament: Columbia | Round: 2 | Opponent: Regis HK | Judge: Stephanie Odiase

See Delbarton RT, he runs a version of this

Garrett Hardin 68 explains the tragedy of the commons
Garrett Hardin. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” 1968. http://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/v1003/lectures/population/Tragedy20of20the20Commons.pdf
The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy. As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” This utility has one negative and one positive component. 1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly 11. 2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of 21. Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another. . . . But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. Some would say that this is a platitude. Would that it were! In a sense, it was learned thousands of years ago, but natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial (8). The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers. Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed. 

Thus, I affirm today’s resolution…

English Language and Usage defines should as ought to
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4972/difference-between-should-and-ought-to

Thus, I value morality, as “should” is a normative term, establishing what is right or wrong.

Every individual has a right to their own body, which entails respect for property rights. Zev Tractenberg 7 writes
Associate Professor of Philosophy at Oklahoma University.  ““This habitable earth of ours:” Locke on humanity in the environment”
Locke’s solution rests on his “self-ownership” thesis. He holds that there is an exception to the original condition of common ownership of the goods of the earth: each person has an exclusive right to his or her own body. Locke appeals to that exclusive right to explain how individuals can obtain an exclusive right to what begins as a commonly owned item in nature. The key is his observation that people must physically transform nature in order to consume those items they need to survive: the apple must be picked from the tree before it can be eaten. The physical activity of the person—the labor of his or her body—is “mixed” with the item, marking it off as no longer common, but rather as exclusive, private property. We must leave aside the puzzles associated with the mixing metaphor; 4 let us simply note that Locke invests our relationship to certain external objects (our property) with the moral authority of our autonomous selfhood—our right over our own bodies. Note also that, for Locke, both the general entitlement to some property or other, as needed to support survival, and the specific entitlement to one’s own body, hence to the items one appropriates through labor, stem directly from God. Therefore he characterizes property as a natural right, justified in terms of natural law. Locke’s account is particularly vivid with respect to items that are hunted or gathered from nature. But the relatively low-impact harvesting of readily available natural products is short of the fuller sense of habitation his theory provides. For, he uses the labor theory to justify property rights in the habitat itself: beyond spontaneous products that can be foraged, agricultural labor grounds ownership of the transformed land. “As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property” (Locke 2T, § 31).

The right to private property entails a duty to not waste the property we own.
Peter Railton 3 writes
John Stephenson Perrin Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  “Locke, Stock, and Peril: Natural Property Rights, Pollution, and Risk” in Facts, Values, Norms.
A simple, appealing picture of morality informs much contemporary thought and action. On this view, individuals have certain natural rights that give them freedom to act in certain ways and oblige others not to interfere. The archetype of such a right is the right of private property. If Harlan has exclusive ownership of a pumpkin, it is his to do with as he pleases, and no one may rightfully take it from him or hinder him in his enjoyment of it. His right entitles him to exclude others from making any use of his pumpkin to which he does not consent. Of course, Harlan’s property right is limited by similar rights of others. He cannot, without permission, rightfully lob his pumpkin onto another’s porch. He is free to transfer his pumpkin to another, or to give him use of it, and although such contracts or gifts, once made, bring with them new obligations to carry out promises rendered, these further limits are self-imposed. In the classic, Lockean form of this view, individuals have some property rights wholly independent of civil law: property in one’s own body and its capacities, and a right to appropriate common property for one’s own use by mixing one’s own labor with it, so long as one does not waste and “enough and as good” is left in common for others.2 These initial, “natural” property rights form the basis for whatever further property rights individuals may acquire by harvesting the fruits of nature or exchanging goods or labor with others. In the fullness of time, some individuals may acquire more extensive property entitlements than others and may transfer this wealth to whomever they please, but all retain an equal, natural right not to be harmed in person or (other) property.3 From this Lockean view emerges an image of moral space akin to a map at a registrar of deeds. Individual entitlements or rights determine a patchwork of boundaries within which people are free to live as they choose so long as they respect the boundaries of others.4 To learn one’s moral obligations one need only consult the map. Would a given act involve crossing another’s boundary?5 If so, it is prohibited; if not, permitted.6 This Lockean view is often called antipaternalistic because it holds that individuals are entitled to final say over what happens within their own boundaries. It is also often called libertarian, since it is so centrally concerned with preserving a field of individual freedom of choice. It is not, however, equivalent to the view that we should maximize individual freedom of choice: that is an aggregative, social goal, foreign to the Lockean picture. If the choices individuals make within their boundaries, and the mutual arrangements they make across their boundaries, do not result in a social scheme with maximum individual freedom, that is perfectly acceptable. Individual entitlements and decisions define the limits within which any social goal or policy may legitimately be pursued, including the policy of promoting freedom.

Thus the standard is consistency with Lockean property rights.

My first contention is that Locke’s view of property rights entails environmental protection.

To resist the tragedy of the commons, developing countries must prioritize sustainability. Zev Tractenberg 7 writes
Associate Professor of Philosophy at Oklahoma University.  ““This habitable earth of ours:” Locke on humanity in the environment”
Finally, the usufructory character of property points toward the third way Locke can be used to lend support to sustainability—by way of a re-interpretation of his theory of the state. The system of individual appropriation envisioned by the standard reading of Locke leads, via the mechanism of the tragedy of the commons, to unsustainable harvests and eventual resource crashes—as in the over-fishing case just mentioned. But if we take into account the role Locke assigns the state, we can see that he would actually fully support a public management policy aimed at sustainable yield. The standard idea that Locke supports a minimal state dedicated solely to the protection of natural property rights misses two crucial points. On the one hand, it misconstrues Locke’s conception of property, taking it to be absolute instead of usufructory; on the other it ignores Locke’s repeated assertions that the state must act to protect the common (or public) good (2T, §§ 89, 131, 134, 135, 142). Framing individual property as usufructory highlights the interdependence of property rights: each individual’s ability to exercise his or her right relies on the condition of the underlying system that generates the goods in question. Protecting each individual’s property thus requires the maintenance of the underlying system—in a word, requires that the earth be used sustainably. In particular, each individual’s rights must be protected against unsustainable exercises by other individuals of their rights. Thus, Locke licenses the state to coordinate individuals’ exercise of property rights, so that their aggregate affect is not harmful. Though the state may not deprive anyone of his or her property, Locke acknowledges that “the prince, or senate, has power to make laws, for the regulating of property between the subjects one amongst another” (2T, § 139 (my emphasis)). Locke must think that this power may operate to restrain adverse impacts in the future as well as in the present. Because people across time have equal moral footing, that is, the state may regulate individuals so that their actions do not interfere with the rights of people later in time.12 Precisely in virtue of assigning the state the role of preserving property, that is, Locke’s theory can be interpreted as assigning it the role of enforcing a policy of sustainability.

My second contention is that our obligation to protect future generations from environmental destruction is a litmus test for any view of morality.
 Professor Stephen Bickham 81 writes
Stephen Bickham (Professor of Philosophy at Mansfield State College). “Future Generations and Contemporary Ethical Theory.” 1981. http://profs-polisci.mcgill.ca/muniz/intergen/Bickham20-20Future20generations20and20contemporary20ethical20theory.pdf
There exists today in philosophy a question of our ethical obligations to future generations. Several different aspects of this question render it philosophically unusual. For one thing the substantive answer to the question is not in dispute. Were someone to suggest seriously that we have no ethical obligations to future generations and mean by this that we need take no care for what living conditions on the planet will be in a hundred years - that whether there would exist then, say, a lethal level of radioactivity in the atmosphere, it would be no concern of ours - we should regard that individual as lacking one of the most basic of human ethical sensibilities. Of course we have some serious responsibility for the future, though this does not commit us to the more particular position that we have ethical obligations to future generations. The question does not, thus, require an answer at the general level, nor am I prepared here to demarcate specifically the content of our responsibility for the future, though I shall treat of others' attempts to do so. I am interested rather in why this question should seem so mysterious at this time as to generate a dispute or issue within the philosophical community. Thus my focus will be interior to philosophy. I hope to show how the assumptions involved in raising this question in this way make it difficult for us to address the new realities with which the question is concerned. Why is this question a current one in philosophy? From a somewhat sociological perspective it is significant that John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, perhaps the most influential ethical treatise of the seventies, is the first person who seems to have dealt with the question in its current form.' I shall examine Rawls' position in detail later, but basically he treats justice among generations as involving each generation's passing on to the next a suitable accumulation of intellectual, economic, and educational "capital" so that the next can have the werewithal to continue or to establish just institutions, as well as support a reasonable standard of living.2 While the immense philosophical popularity of A Theory of Justice brought the current question to the attention of the philosophical community, most philosophers writing of the issue of ethical obligation to future generations since Rawls have seen the problem in an environmental rather than an economic context? It is clear that our relatively new capacity for possibly permanent devastation of the environment has created a new ethical situation which requires a reassessment of our responsibility to the future. Environmental pollution itself is nothing new. I am sitting a quarter of a mile from a river which has contained no life for about 80 years due to pollution from mine acid waste. In my county virtually every marketable tree was cut down between 1895 and 1915. But until now there just have not been enough people nor an advanced enough technology to threaten a large environment with permanent destruction or impairment. Trees grow back and mine acid waste pollution can be stopped, though it is expensive to do so. But we simply do not know how to render radioactive waste from power plants nonradioactive, or to replace the ozone layer in the atmosphere should this become depleted, or to develop an effective, economical replacement for iron. It is quite simple. We did not have the responsibility for the future that we do now before we had the capacity to destroy it. As I said earlier, our responsibility for the future in a broad sense is well recognized. What is not understood is how this responsibility is to be rationally grounded in an ethical theory. But it is becoming clear to ethicists that the question of our obligations to the future can be seen as a litmus test for an ethical theory. No theory can really be adequate to the contemporary situation which cannot found such obligations on its own principles. The problem is that each of the major, current ethical theories has difficulty doing this. I shall examine briefly the deontological theory and at more length the utilitarian and contractarian theories to illustrate why this is so. 

My third contention is that resource extraction doesn’t benefit developing economies, and environmental damage uniquely harms productive investment.
Singh and Bourgouin 13 write
Jewellord Nem Singh and France Bourgouin (editors of this book). “Resource Governance and Developmental States in the Global South.” Palgrave Macmillan. November 2013. http://www.palgrave.com/PDFs/9781137286789.pdf
Natural resource capital represents a particular type of capital. Most obviously, it is cyclically prone to windfall booms and busts. Historically, resource commodities have been subjected to external shocks and sharp flux in commodity prices, as was seen with the severe contraction of demands for certain minerals in the wakes of the two World Wars and the Great Depression (Bulmer, 1994). With global market integration, commodity prices have increasingly become susceptible to speculation in the international minerals markets, which adversely affect the production processes (Webb, 1999). From both an economic as well as a policy viewpoint, extractive resources’ relative absence of value added together with their price volatility on world markets make them an unreliable source of income for national governments (Auty, 1993; Humphreys et al., 2007; Sachs and Warner, 1997, 2001). Moreover, booming resource sectors are believed to draw capital and labour away from a country’s manufacturing and agricultural sectors, thereby raising their production costs (Ross, 2001: 305) and leading to the appreciation of real exchange rates caused by the sharp rise in commodity exports, an observation referred to as the Dutch Disease . Hence, resource-led development is considered unlikely as booms fail to bring investments into the more stable and dynamic sectors of the economy, such as manufacturing, but instead, direct investment and factor inputs towards the resource sector. Similarly, the open access exploitation hypothesis suggests that not only does extraction under open access conditions generate few resource rents to be reinvested but it also leads to over-exploitation of natural capital in the long run, thus curbing the development potential of the resource sector. For others, unfavourable environmental conditions may directly inhibit the efficient generation of natural resource rents and sustainable returns through the reinvestment of rents into other productive assets, as well as indirectly through a long-lasting influence on patterns of political and legal institutional development (Auty, 2001, 1993; Barbier, 2005, 2003; Easterly and Levine, 2003). The observed inability of developing states to transform resource wealth into productive capital over past decades has become the central preoccupation of economists and political scientists alike, not to mention of scholars of development. The dominant view is that the revenues generated from natural capital are not comparable to income that can be reinvested as profits. Unlike in the productive sectors of the economy, windfall profits from extraction do not multiply and as the resources upon which they are based are de facto depletable, extractive industries are unsustainable over the long run (Humphreys et al., 2007; Karl, 2007 ). In this regard, the recent tendency of turning resource revenues into sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) that cannot be spent in the domestic economy has become the prescriptive response of the World Bank to reduce the deleterious effects of uncertainty in the resource sector. 

My fourth contention is that prioritizing environmental protection over resource extraction is key to solving African wars.
The United Nations Environmental Programme 9 writes
Since 1990 at least eighteen violent conflicts have been fuelled by the exploitation of natural resources. In fact, recent research suggests that over the last sixty years at least forty percent of all intrastate conflicts have a link to natural resources. Civil wars such as those in Liberia, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo have centred on “high-value” resources like timber, diamonds, gold, minerals and oil. Other conflicts, including those in Darfur and the Middle East, have involved control of scarce resources such as fertile land and water. As the global population continues to rise, and the demand for resources continues to grow, there is significant potential for conflicts over natural resources to intensify in the coming decades. In addition, the potential consequences of climate change for water availability, food security, prevalence of disease, coastal boundaries, and population distribution may aggravate existing tensions and generate new conflicts. Environmental factors are rarely, if ever, the sole cause of violent conflict. Ethnicity, adverse economic conditions, low levels of international trade and conflict in neighbouring countries are all significant drivers of violence. However, the exploitation of natural resources and related environmental stresses can be implicated in all phases of the conflict cycle, from contributing to the outbreak and perpetuation of violence to undermining prospects for peace. In addition, the environment can itself fall victim to conflict, as direct and indirect environmental damage, coupled with the collapse of institutions, can lead to environmental risks that threaten people’s health, livelihoods and security. Because the way that natural resources and the environment are governed has a determining influence on peace and security, these issues can also contribute to a relapse into conflict if they are not properly managed in post-conflict situations. Indeed, preliminary findings from a retrospective analysis of intrastate conflicts over the past sixty years indicate that conflicts associated with natural resources are twice as likely to relapse into conflict in the first five years. Nevertheless, fewer than a quarter of peace negotiations aiming to resolve conflicts linked to natural resources have addressed resource management mechanisms. The recognition that environmental issues can contribute to violent conflict underscores their potential significance as pathways for cooperation, transformation and the consolidation of peace in war-torn societies. Natural resources and the environment can contribute to peacebuilding through economic development and the generation of employment, while cooperation over the management of shared natural resources provides new opportunities for peacebuilding. These factors, however, must be taken into consideration from the outset. Indeed, deferred action or poor choices made early on are easily “locked in,” establishing unsustainable trajectories of recovery that can undermine the fragile foundations of peace. Integrating environment and natural resources into peacebuilding is no longer an option – it is a security imperative. The establishment of the UN Peacebuilding Commission provides an important chance to address environmental risks and capitalize on potential opportunities in a more consistent and coherent way. In this context, UNEP recommends that the UN Peacebuilding Commission and the wider international community consider the following key recommendations for integrating environment and natural resource issues into peacebuilding interventions and conflict prevention: 1. Further develop UN capacities for early warning and early action: The UN system needs to strengthen its capacity to deliver early warning and early action in countries that are vulnerable to conflicts over natural resources and environmental issues. At the same time, the effective governance of natural resources and the environment should be viewed as an investment in conflict prevention. 2. Improve oversight and protection of natural resources during conflicts: The international community needs to increase oversight of “high-value” resources in international trade in order to minimize the potential for these resources to finance conflict. International sanctions should be the primary instrument dedicated to stopping the trade in conflict resources and the UN should require Member States to act against sanctions violators. At the same time, new legal instruments are required to protect natural resources and environmental services during violent conflict. 3. Address natural resources and the environment as part of the peacemaking and peacekeeping process: During peace mediation processes, wealth-sharing is one of the fundamental issues that can “make or break” a peace agreement. In most cases, this includes the sharing of natural resources, including minerals, timber, land and water. It is therefore critical that parties to a peace mediation process are given sufficient technical information and training to make informed decisions on the sustainable use of natural resources. Subsequent peacekeeping operations need to be aligned with national efforts to improve natural resource and environmental governance. 4. Include natural resources and environmental issues into integrated peacebuilding strategies: The UN often undertakes post-conflict operations with little or no prior knowledge of what natural resources exist in the affected country, or of what role they may have played in fuelling conflict. In many cases it is years into an intervention before the management of natural resources receives sufficient attention. A failure to respond to the environmental and natural resource needs of the population can complicate the task of fostering peace and even contribute to conflict relapse. 5. Carefully harness natural resources for economic recovery: Natural resources can only help strengthen the post-war economy and contribute to economic recovery if they are managed well. The international community should be prepared to help national authorities manage the extraction process and revenues in ways that do not increase risk of further conflict, or are unsustainable in the longer term. This must go hand in hand with ensuring accountability, transparency, and environmental sustainability in their management. 6. Capitalize on the potential for environmental cooperation to contribute to peacebuilding: Every state needs to use and protect vital natural resources such as forests, water, fertile land, energy and biodiversity. Environmental issues can thus serve as an effective platform or catalyst for enhancing dialogue, building confidence, exploiting shared interests and broadening cooperation between divided groups, as well as between states.

African resource wars cause destruction of the Congo River Basin.
Conflict studies expert Kevin Sites 4 writes  
In the Congo River Basin, conflict has been a recurring nuisance for the development of several countries. Natural resources play a significant role in feeding conflicts, many of which involve securing control and access to natural resources. Communities and forests pay the price. Wars in the Congo River Basin involve groups of combatants that are always on the move, gaining temporary control over towns and settlements, but who are almost never able to subdue the surrounding areas.  The constant movement of militias and the unpredictability of their actions have a devastating impact on human lives.  Estimates of war-related deaths in eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) range from 3.3 million to 4.5 million. To avoid conflict, refugees and displaced rural populations avoid major roads and move into the forests and protected areas, where they are less likely to encounter soldiers and rebels.1  How natural resources fuel war Natural resources such as timber, as well as other commodities such as diamonds, all play roles in motivating these wars because of their characteristics (accessibility, weight-to-value ratios and the ability to loot, conceal and sell them later)2.  In the DRC, rebel groups, government troops and their foreign allies have used the country’s diamonds, gold, timber, ivory, coltan and cobalt to pay for their war-related expenses.3  Perpetuating conflict… A United Nations panel of experts on the illegal exploitation of natural resources of the DRC recently stated that "illegal exploitation remains one of the main sources of funding for groups involved in perpetuating conflict".  According to the panel, neighbouring countries such as Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi and Zimbabwe have all helped themselves to the DRC's gold, diamonds, timber and coltan; systematically stripping factories, farms and banks in the process.4  What are the impacts of conflict? A breakdown in the rule of law and other controls during and immediately after conflicts.  Mass movements of people and human rights abuses.  Decline in agricultural production, trade and food availability as conditions become unsafe to carry out such activities and transport is disrupted.  Increased dependence on wild natural resources (such as bushmeat) for survival when other livelihoods are made impossible: As refugees seek means to sustain themselves away from their home areas and hold their families together, they often invade poorly protected areas in search of housing materials, bush foods and products that they can sell.  Protected areas also often contain more wildlife than other areas and can thus provide a ready supply of meat for rebels or small armies.  Moreover, when it becomes too dangerous for the staff in protected zones to continue patrols, the frequency of illegal mining of gold and diamonds, hunting for ivory and bushmeat, felling of timber and agricultural encroachment often increases.5

The Congo River Basin is extremely important for the environment, and human survival.
Jean Didier Boukongou 5 writes  
This is not a revival of “good savage” ideology which is useful for the “civilized world,” but it is simply a matter of understanding that the forests of the Congo basin is the entire humanity’s precious “lung.” Beyond the traditional quarrels1 of the sycophants of environmental protection and the relevance of advocated public programs2, one notices the intensification of multilateral initiatives, which try to respond both to the stakes of protecting the Congo basin as well as to the challenge of preserving life on Earth. Nevertheless, even the advocates of sustainable development cannot forget that “bio-humanity” is a naturally complex vision of society. As far as one can go back in time, and on the principle of the divine message, man will always return to nature. This implies an organization and structuralization of spaces, which cannot be strictly limited to the protection of the fauna and flora. Consequently, international concern about the ecosystem of the Congo basin is neither the result of sudden philanthropy, nor the outcome of triumphant environmentalism. The region is a dynamic geopolitical area, where forests are a source of oil and conflicts. I think that it is fundamental not to separate the issue of forests from the less media-covered question of the rich oil and mineral resources in the hinterland and maritime zones of Central Africa. The predators are in the forests and on the political scene, and they are searching for democratic legitimacy3. Thus, I’m calling for combining the “green” debate with the “political” debate in order to promote better governance of the geopolitical basin of the Congo, give rise to concrete and multilateral awareness of the problems of Central Africa which aren’t only environmental but also political. It is a matter of emphasizing political and civil implications, on one hand, and legal instruments and institutional frameworks, on the other, in order to assure a better progressive transition in Central Africa from “Black governance” (in other words, oil-based governance) to “green governance”. A Geopolitical Basin The geographic entity called the “Congo basin” includes territories extending from the end of the Sahelian areas of Chad and Sudan and the edge of the plains along the Zambezi. The voluntarily extensive vision of this basin challenges the thesis that this forest area is confined to narrow post-colonial zones in Central African States, which doesn’t challenge the principles of international law relating to boundaries. This basin is a vast forest area that covers approximately 2,300,000 sq. km., or 26 percent of the world’s rainforests4. The forests are well known for their exceptional biodiversity and contribute, in an important way, to countering the greenhouse effect by absorbing the carbon dioxide which is emitted into the atmosphere5. This is the natural environment of more than half of the world’s wildlife and vegetable species. Some consider it the compost of numerous diseases, such as the terrible Ebola fever.The Congo basin regroups several countries (Cameroon, the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Burundi, Rwanda, Angola and Chad), which form (with Sao Tome e Principe) the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS). On the one side, one may identify the Congo basin area itself to the ECCAS, and on the other, consider it as the logical construction of a regional area where sustainable governance of ecosystems should contribute, via the mobility of people, to economic links and ecological flows, to restoring and strengthening peace. One must remember that during the Millenium Summit held in New York in 2000 the Heads of State and Government declared their intention not to spare “any effort in order to assure that the entire humanity, and especially our children and grandchildren, will not live on a planet irreversibly degraded by human activities whose resources can no longer meet their requirements6.” This appeal is in line with the dynamics of building the concept of sustainable development, advocated by the UICN7 in 1980 and resumed in the Bundtland report in 19878. States have to cooperate in a spirit of world partnership in order to preserve, protect and restore the integrity of the ecosystem. Of course, according to Resolutions 1803 (XVII) and 1514 (XV)9 of the United Nations General Assembly and Principle 2 of the Rio Declaration, “States have the sovereign right to exploit their own resources according to their environment and development policies.” In other words, they can implement their proper environmental policies. But these actions do not produce concrete effects. The degradation of the environment and certain natural or industrial disasters directly affect the Earth as a continuous portion of space. It is only on this scale that adequate initiatives can be taken in order to obtain durable and adequate results.  International CooperationActually, environmental protection has become one of the most important issues in contemporary world relations. International cooperation is necessary to protect humanity’s common heritage. No country can do it on its own, because this is a common responsibility. Therefore, the quality of air and the atmosphere depends on world coordination in many domains. The protection of the quality of the waters of a boundary river, or of a lake common to several countries, requires international coordination and cooperation. As the International Court of Justice reminded in the case Gabcikovo-Nagymaros: “During ages, man did not stop influencing nature for economic and other purposes. In the past it often accomplished this without taking into account the effects on the environment. Due to the new horizons opened by science and the increasing awareness of the risks of these interventions for humanity – whether it is for the present or for future generations – new standards and requirements have been put in place, enounced in a substantial number of instruments over the past two decades. These new standards must be taken in consideration and these new requirements appropriately appreciated, not only when States envisage launching new activities, but also when they pursue projects that have already been launched. The concept of sustainable development expresses the need for reconciling economic development and environmental protection10.” Since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 the pressure exercised by NGOs and the international financial backers prompted governments to adjust their institutional frameworks and to work out coherent policies, in particular environmental action plans relating to the national, regional and international dimension. At the sub-regional level, such initiatives led to setting up mechanisms and processes such as the Conference of Ministers for Forests of Central Africa (COMIFAC)11, Conference on Central Africa’s Moist Forest Ecosystem (CEFDHAC) and the Africa Forest Law Enforcement and Governance Process (AFLEG)12. Organized in March, 1999 in Yaoundé, the summit of leaders of Central African States on the conservation and sustainable management of rain forests confirmed the Rio commitment to lead common policies for sustainable management of forested ecosystems. This regional dynamics led to the elaboration and adoption of a “convergence plan” for the Congo basin, whose main objective is the “conservation, restoration, development and durable use of biologic resources in the framework of management adapted to the social and cultural economic development of populations and the protection of the global environment13.” This convergence plan covers a ten-year period (2004-2013 and will globally cost an estimated US$ 1.5 billion, or 840 billion CFA Francs14. Regional dynamics led to international participation in efforts to respond to this universal concern, and the Johannesburg summit on sustainable development in September 200215 paved the way to a multilateral initiative: the United States of America and South Africa inspired, along with many other actors, the idea of a multilateral partnership for the protection of forests in the Congo basin. Considered as the left lung of the earth, these forests are a vegetable and wildlife reserve inextricably bound to human life16. According to Walter Kansteiner, they are a “world treasure,” a “world lung” necessary for preserving biologic diversity.

Tournament: NFL Quals | Round: 6 | Opponent: Needham AR Alec Robbins | Judge: Idk
Garrett Hardin 68 explains the tragedy of the commons
Garrett Hardin. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” 1968. http://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/v1003/lectures/population/Tragedy20of20the20Commons.pdf
The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy. As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” This utility has one negative and one positive component. 1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly 11. 2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of 21. Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another. . . . But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. Some would say that this is a platitude. Would that it were! In a sense, it was learned thousands of years ago, but natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial (8). The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers. Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed. 

Thus, I affirm today’s resolution, developing countries should prioritize environmental protection over resource extraction when the two conflict.

English Language and Usage defines “should” as “ought to.”
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/4972/difference-between-should-and-ought-to

I value morality, as “should” is a normative term, establishing what is right or wrong.

Every individual has a right to their own body, which entails respect for property rights. Zev Tractenberg 7 writes
Associate Professor of Philosophy at Oklahoma University.  ““This habitable earth of ours:” Locke on humanity in the environment”
Locke’s solution rests on his “self-ownership” thesis. He holds that there is an exception to the original condition of common ownership of the goods of the earth: each person has an exclusive right to his or her own body. Locke appeals to that exclusive right to explain how individuals can obtain an exclusive right to what begins as a commonly owned item in nature. The key is his observation that people must physically transform nature in order to consume those items they need to survive: the apple must be picked from the tree before it can be eaten. The physical activity of the person—the labor of his or her body—is “mixed” with the item, marking it off as no longer common, but rather as exclusive, private property. We must leave aside the puzzles associated with the mixing metaphor; 4 let us simply note that Locke invests our relationship to certain external objects (our property) with the moral authority of our autonomous selfhood—our right over our own bodies. Note also that, for Locke, both the general entitlement to some property or other, as needed to support survival, and the specific entitlement to one’s own body, hence to the items one appropriates through labor, stem directly from God. Therefore he characterizes property as a natural right, justified in terms of natural law. Locke’s account is particularly vivid with respect to items that are hunted or gathered from nature. But the relatively low-impact harvesting of readily available natural products is short of the fuller sense of habitation his theory provides. For, he uses the labor theory to justify property rights in the habitat itself: beyond spontaneous products that can be foraged, agricultural labor grounds ownership of the transformed land. “As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property” (Locke 2T, § 31).

The right to private property entails a duty to not waste the property we own.
Peter Railton 3
John Stephenson Perrin Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  “Locke, Stock, and Peril: Natural Property Rights, Pollution, and Risk” in Facts, Values, Norms.
A simple, appealing picture of morality informs much contemporary thought and action. On this view, individuals have certain natural rights that give them freedom to act in certain ways and oblige others not to interfere. The archetype of such a right is the right of private property. If Harlan has exclusive ownership of a pumpkin, it is his to do with as he pleases, and no one may rightfully take it from him or hinder him in his enjoyment of it. His right entitles him to exclude others from making any use of his pumpkin to which he does not consent. Of course, Harlan’s property right is limited by similar rights of others. He cannot, without permission, rightfully lob his pumpkin onto another’s porch. He is free to transfer his pumpkin to another, or to give him use of it, and although such contracts or gifts, once made, bring with them new obligations to carry out promises rendered, these further limits are self-imposed. In the classic, Lockean form of this view, individuals have some property rights wholly independent of civil law: property in one’s own body and its capacities, and a right to appropriate common property for one’s own use by mixing one’s own labor with it, so long as one does not waste and “enough and as good” is left in common for others.2 These initial, “natural” property rights form the basis for whatever further property rights individuals may acquire by harvesting the fruits of nature or exchanging goods or labor with others. In the fullness of time, some individuals may acquire more extensive property entitlements than others and may transfer this wealth to whomever they please, but all retain an equal, natural right not to be harmed in person or (other) property.3 From this Lockean view emerges an image of moral space akin to a map at a registrar of deeds. Individual entitlements or rights determine a patchwork of boundaries within which people are free to live as they choose so long as they respect the boundaries of others.4 To learn one’s moral obligations one need only consult the map. Would a given act involve crossing another’s boundary?5 If so, it is prohibited; if not, permitted.6 This Lockean view is often called antipaternalistic because it holds that individuals are entitled to final say over what happens within their own boundaries. It is also often called libertarian, since it is so centrally concerned with preserving a field of individual freedom of choice. It is not, however, equivalent to the view that we should maximize individual freedom of choice: that is an aggregative, social goal, foreign to the Lockean picture. If the choices individuals make within their boundaries, and the mutual arrangements they make across their boundaries, do not result in a social scheme with maximum individual freedom, that is perfectly acceptable. Individual entitlements and decisions define the limits within which any social goal or policy may legitimately be pursued, including the policy of promoting freedom.

Thus the standard is consistency with Lockean property rights.

I advocate that developing countries should accept the Precautionary Principle on resource extraction issues. The Precautionary Principle is not a specific policy action but a decision rule which guides future policies. The Precautionary Principle is defined by the Wingspread Statement, which Tickner et al. 99 explain
Joel Tickner (Lowell Center for Sustainable Production), Carolyn Raffensperger and Nancy Meyers (SEHN). “The precautionary principle in action: A handbook.” Science and Environmental Health Network. 1999.
The first major effort in the United States to bring the precautionary principle to the level of day-to-day environmental and public health decision-making at the state or federal level was a January 1998 conference of activists, scholars, scientists, and lawyers at Wingspread, home of the Johnson Foundation in Racine, Wisconsin. Convened by the Science and Environmental Health Network (SEHN), participants discussed methods to implement the precautionary principle and barriers to that implementation.  The Wingspread definition of precaution (see Appendix) has three elements: threats of harm; scientific uncertainty; and preventive, precautionary action. The litmus test for knowing when to apply the precautionary principle is the combination of threat of harm and scientific uncertainty. Some would say the threatened harm must be serious or irreversible, but others point out that this does not allow for the cumulative effects of relatively small insults.  If there is certainty about cause and effect, as in the case of lead and children's health, then acting is no longer precautionary, although it might be preventive. In essence, the precautionary principle provides a rationale for taking action against a practice or substance in the absence of scientific certainty rather than continuing the suspect practice while it is under study, or without study. Instead of asking what level of harm is acceptable, a precautionary approach asks: How much contamination can be avoided? What are the alternatives to this product or activity, and are they safer? Is this activity even necessary? The precautionary principle focuses on options and solutions rather than risk. It forces the initiator of an activity to address fundamental questions of how to behave in a more environmentally sensitive manner. The precautionary principle also serves as a "speed bump" to new technology, ensuring that decisions about new activities are made thoughtfully and in the light of potential consequences. 

The PP prioritizes environmental protection.
Founder of the Science and Environmental Health Network Carolyn Raffensperger 4
Carolyn Raffensperger (the founding executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network. An environmental lawyer, she specializes in the fundamental changes in law and policy necessary for the protection and restoration of public health and the environment. Raffensperger is co-editor of Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing the Precautionary Principle, the most comprehensive exploration to date of the history, theory and implementation of the Precautionary Principle). “Precautionary Precepts: The Power and Potential of the Precautionary Principle.” 2004.http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2004/09012004/september04interviewraffen.html
It is quite simple. It has three building blocks. One is scientific uncertainty. The second is the likelihood or the plausibility of harm. The third element is precautionary action. The mandate of the Precautionary Principle is to take preventive action in the face of uncertainty to prevent harm. The focus is no longer on measuring and managing harm, but preventing harm. Critics of the Precautionary Principle say that it is going to stop all action or stop all progress, and yet the Precautionary Principle invites action: it says you've got to take action. That has in many ways galvanized us; it gives us a way of operationalizing environmental protection.

The PP is key to solving environmental harms. We can’t afford to wait for scientific
certainty. The Science and Environmental Health Network 98
Science and Environmental Health Network. “The Precautionary Principle: A Fact Sheet.” March 1998. http://www.sehn.org/Volume_3-1.html
What is the precautionary principle? A comprehensive definition of the precautionary principle was spelled out in a January 1998 meeting of scientists, lawyers, policy makers and environmentalists at Wingspread, headquarters of the Johnson Foundation in Racine, Wisconsin. The Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle, summarizes the principle this way: "When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically." Key elements of the principle include taking precaution in the face of scientific uncertainty; exploring alternatives to possibly harmful actions; placing the burden of proof on proponents of an activity rather than on victims or potential victims of the activity; and using democratic processes to carry out and enforce the principle - including the public right to informed consent. Is there some special meaning for "precaution"? It's the common sense idea behind many adages: "Be careful." "Better safe than sorry." "Look before you leap." "First do no harm." What about "scientific uncertainty"? Why should we take action before science tells us what is harmful or what is causing harm? Sometimes if we wait for proof it is too late. Scientific standards for demonstrating cause and effect are very high. For example, smoking was strongly suspected of causing lung cancer long before the link was demonstrated conclusively - that is, to the satisfaction of scientific standards of cause and effect. By then, many smokers had died of lung cancer. But many other people had already quit smoking because of the growing evidence that smoking was linked to lung cancer. These people were wisely exercising precaution despite some scientific uncertainty. Often a problem - such as a cluster of cancer cases or global warming - is too large, its causes too diverse, or the effects too long term to be sorted out with scientific experiments that would prove cause and effect. It's hard to take these problems into the laboratory. Instead, we have to rely on observations, case studies or predictions based on current knowledge. According to the precautionary principle, when substantial scientific evidence of any kind gives us good reason to believe that an activity, technology or substance may be harmful, we should act to prevent harm. If we always wait for scientific certainty, people may suffer and die, and damage to the natural world may be irreversible. We have lots of environmental regulations. Aren't we already exercising precaution? In some cases, to some extent, yes. When federal money is to be used in a major project, such as building a road on forested land or developing federal waste programs, the planners must produce an "environmental impact statement" to show how it will affect the surroundings. Then the public has a right to help determine whether the study has been thorough and all the alternatives considered. That is a precautionary action. But most environmental regulations, such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Superfund Law, are aimed at cleaning up pollution and controlling the amount of it released into the environment. They regulate toxic substances as they are emitted rather than limiting their use or production in the first place. These laws have served an important purpose - they have given us cleaner air, water and land. But they are based on the assumption that humans and ecosystems can absorb a certain amount of contamination without being harmed. We are now learning how difficult it is to know what levels of contamination, if any, are safe. Many of our food and drug laws and practices are more precautionary. Before a drug is introduced into the marketplace, the manufacturer must demonstrate that it is safe and effective. Then people must be told about risks and side effects before they use it. But there are some major loopholes in our regulations. If the precautionary principle were universally applied, many toxic substances, contaminants, and unsafe practices would not be produced or used in the first place. The precautionary principle concentrates on prevention rather than cure. How would the precautionary principle change that without bringing the economy to a halt? It would encourage the exploration of alternatives - better, safer, cheaper ways to do things- and the development of "cleaner" products and technologies. Sometimes simply slowing down in order to learn more about potential harm is the best alternative. It would shift the burden of proof from the public to proponents of a technology. The principle would ensure that the public knows about and has a say in the deployment of technologies that may be hazardous. Proponents would have to demonstrate through an open process that a technology was safe or necessary and that no better alternatives were available. 

My first contention is that Locke’s view of property rights entails environmental protection.

To resist the tragedy of the commons, developing countries must prioritize sustainability. Zev Tractenberg 7
Associate Professor of Philosophy at Oklahoma University.  ““This habitable earth of ours:” Locke on humanity in the environment”
Finally, the usufructory character of property points toward the third way Locke can be used to lend support to sustainability—by way of a re-interpretation of his theory of the state. The system of individual appropriation envisioned by the standard reading of Locke leads, via the mechanism of the tragedy of the commons, to unsustainable harvests and eventual resource crashes—as in the over-fishing case just mentioned. But if we take into account the role Locke assigns the state, we can see that he would actually fully support a public management policy aimed at sustainable yield. The standard idea that Locke supports a minimal state dedicated solely to the protection of natural property rights misses two crucial points. On the one hand, it misconstrues Locke’s conception of property, taking it to be absolute instead of usufructory; on the other it ignores Locke’s repeated assertions that the state must act to protect the common (or public) good (2T, §§ 89, 131, 134, 135, 142). Framing individual property as usufructory highlights the interdependence of property rights: each individual’s ability to exercise his or her right relies on the condition of the underlying system that generates the goods in question. Protecting each individual’s property thus requires the maintenance of the underlying system—in a word, requires that the earth be used sustainably. In particular, each individual’s rights must be protected against unsustainable exercises by other individuals of their rights. Thus, Locke licenses the state to coordinate individuals’ exercise of property rights, so that their aggregate affect is not harmful. Though the state may not deprive anyone of his or her property, Locke acknowledges that “the prince, or senate, has power to make laws, for the regulating of property between the subjects one amongst another” (2T, § 139 (my emphasis)). Locke must think that this power may operate to restrain adverse impacts in the future as well as in the present. Because people across time have equal moral footing, that is, the state may regulate individuals so that their actions do not interfere with the rights of people later in time.12 Precisely in virtue of assigning the state the role of preserving property, that is, Locke’s theory can be interpreted as assigning it the role of enforcing a policy of sustainability.

My second contention is that our obligation to protect future generations from environmental destruction is a litmus test for any view of morality.
 Professor Stephen Bickham 81 writes
Stephen Bickham (Professor of Philosophy at Mansfield State College). “Future Generations and Contemporary Ethical Theory.” 1981. http://profs-polisci.mcgill.ca/muniz/intergen/Bickham20-20Future20generations20and20contemporary20ethical20theory.pdf
There exists today in philosophy a question of our ethical obligations to future generations. Several different aspects of this question render it philosophically unusual. For one thing the substantive answer to the question is not in dispute. Were someone to suggest seriously that we have no ethical obligations to future generations and mean by this that we need take no care for what living conditions on the planet will be in a hundred years - that whether there would exist then, say, a lethal level of radioactivity in the atmosphere, it would be no concern of ours - we should regard that individual as lacking one of the most basic of human ethical sensibilities. Of course we have some serious responsibility for the future, though this does not commit us to the more particular position that we have ethical obligations to future generations. The question does not, thus, require an answer at the general level, nor am I prepared here to demarcate specifically the content of our responsibility for the future, though I shall treat of others' attempts to do so. I am interested rather in why this question should seem so mysterious at this time as to generate a dispute or issue within the philosophical community. Thus my focus will be interior to philosophy. I hope to show how the assumptions involved in raising this question in this way make it difficult for us to address the new realities with which the question is concerned. Why is this question a current one in philosophy? From a somewhat sociological perspective it is significant that John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, perhaps the most influential ethical treatise of the seventies, is the first person who seems to have dealt with the question in its current form.' I shall examine Rawls' position in detail later, but basically he treats justice among generations as involving each generation's passing on to the next a suitable accumulation of intellectual, economic, and educational "capital" so that the next can have the werewithal to continue or to establish just institutions, as well as support a reasonable standard of living.2 While the immense philosophical popularity of A Theory of Justice brought the current question to the attention of the philosophical community, most philosophers writing of the issue of ethical obligation to future generations since Rawls have seen the problem in an environmental rather than an economic context? It is clear that our relatively new capacity for possibly permanent devastation of the environment has created a new ethical situation which requires a reassessment of our responsibility to the future. Environmental pollution itself is nothing new. I am sitting a quarter of a mile from a river which has contained no life for about 80 years due to pollution from mine acid waste. In my county virtually every marketable tree was cut down between 1895 and 1915. But until now there just have not been enough people nor an advanced enough technology to threaten a large environment with permanent destruction or impairment. Trees grow back and mine acid waste pollution can be stopped, though it is expensive to do so. But we simply do not know how to render radioactive waste from power plants nonradioactive, or to replace the ozone layer in the atmosphere should this become depleted, or to develop an effective, economical replacement for iron. It is quite simple. We did not have the responsibility for the future that we do now before we had the capacity to destroy it. As I said earlier, our responsibility for the future in a broad sense is well recognized. What is not understood is how this responsibility is to be rationally grounded in an ethical theory. But it is becoming clear to ethicists that the question of our obligations to the future can be seen as a litmus test for an ethical theory. No theory can really be adequate to the contemporary situation which cannot found such obligations on its own principles. The problem is that each of the major, current ethical theories has difficulty doing this. I shall examine briefly the deontological theory and at more length the utilitarian and contractarian theories to illustrate why this is so. 

My third contention is that resource extraction doesn’t benefit developing economies, and environmental damage uniquely harms productive investment.
Singh and Bourgouin 13
Jewellord Nem Singh and France Bourgouin (editors of this book). “Resource Governance and Developmental States in the Global South.” Palgrave Macmillan. November 2013. http://www.palgrave.com/PDFs/9781137286789.pdf
Natural resource capital represents a particular type of capital. Most obviously, it is cyclically prone to windfall booms and busts. Historically, resource commodities have been subjected to external shocks and sharp flux in commodity prices, as was seen with the severe contraction of demands for certain minerals in the wakes of the two World Wars and the Great Depression (Bulmer, 1994). With global market integration, commodity prices have increasingly become susceptible to speculation in the international minerals markets, which adversely affect the production processes (Webb, 1999). From both an economic as well as a policy viewpoint, extractive resources’ relative absence of value added together with their price volatility on world markets make them an unreliable source of income for national governments (Auty, 1993; Humphreys et al., 2007; Sachs and Warner, 1997, 2001). Moreover, booming resource sectors are believed to draw capital and labour away from a country’s manufacturing and agricultural sectors, thereby raising their production costs (Ross, 2001: 305) and leading to the appreciation of real exchange rates caused by the sharp rise in commodity exports, an observation referred to as the Dutch Disease . Hence, resource-led development is considered unlikely as booms fail to bring investments into the more stable and dynamic sectors of the economy, such as manufacturing, but instead, direct investment and factor inputs towards the resource sector. Similarly, the open access exploitation hypothesis suggests that not only does extraction under open access conditions generate few resource rents to be reinvested but it also leads to over-exploitation of natural capital in the long run, thus curbing the development potential of the resource sector. For others, unfavourable environmental conditions may directly inhibit the efficient generation of natural resource rents and sustainable returns through the reinvestment of rents into other productive assets, as well as indirectly through a long-lasting influence on patterns of political and legal institutional development (Auty, 2001, 1993; Barbier, 2005, 2003; Easterly and Levine, 2003). The observed inability of developing states to transform resource wealth into productive capital over past decades has become the central preoccupation of economists and political scientists alike, not to mention of scholars of development. The dominant view is that the revenues generated from natural capital are not comparable to income that can be reinvested as profits. Unlike in the productive sectors of the economy, windfall profits from extraction do not multiply and as the resources upon which they are based are de facto depletable, extractive industries are unsustainable over the long run (Humphreys et al., 2007; Karl, 2007 ). In this regard, the recent tendency of turning resource revenues into sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) that cannot be spent in the domestic economy has become the prescriptive response of the World Bank to reduce the deleterious effects of uncertainty in the resource sector. 

Finally, respecting the environment is our paramount moral obligation.
Professor Herschel Elliott 3
Herschel Elliott (Penn State Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering
Fate And Control Of Pollutants In Soils And Water), “Tributes to Garrett Hardin The Revolutionary Import of Garrett Hardin's Work.” The Garrett Hardin Society. July, 2003. http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/tributes/tr_elliot_2003jul.html
An ethics capable of being practiced in a finite world must be founded on the moral obligation never to cause the environment to break down. This obligation stipulates a necessary condition for moral life. It can be stated as the environmental principle, namely, to preserve the endurance and the resilience of the earth's system of living things. This principle cannot be justified by appeals to reason or the infallible revelations of God. It cannot be justified by valid inferences from human-centered definitions and universal moral principles. And it is not subject to scholarly rebuttal by professionals in moral philosophy. Rather, it is a factual necessity. Any ethics which denies the environmental principle is doomed to fail. People who live by an ethics which denies it simply die out. In effect, the moral certainty of the environmental principle is proved by the absurdity of its denial.

Tournament: Harrison RR | Round: 5 | Opponent: Monticello DA Daniel Aguirre | Judge: Carlos Astacio and Ben Koh
Epistemology is an arbitrary starting point for philosophy – ontology comes first.
Bryant 11
Levi Bryant (Professor of Philosophy at Collin College in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, he coined the term “object-oriented ontology” in 2009). “The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology.” The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, eds. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman. 2011.
In the following paper I would like to attempt a philosophical experiment.1 Traditionally, and especially since the seventeenth century, philosophy has been obsessed with questions of where to begin in thought. In particular, this question of beginnings has taken the form of questions about foundations. Since philosophy aims at a particular sort of knowledge, it has been natural since Descartes and Locke to begin philosophical investigation with an inquiry into the nature, conditions, and limits of knowledge. The thesis here would be that prior to any claims about the nature of reality, prior to any speculation about objects or being, we must first secure a foundation for knowledge and our access to beings. Philosophy, the story goes, must begin with an analysis of ourselves. By way of analogy, what could be more obvious than first examining the fitness or suitability of our tools before building something? Where, for Aristotle, metaphysics was first philosophy, for us Moderns and Post-Moderns, epistemology has become first philosophy. Indeed, ‘metaphysics’ itself has become a dirty word. Philosophy thus becomes the project of critique, occupied primarily with questions of access2 or the conditions under which knowledge is possible. However, as promising as this point of entry appears, when we look about the battlefield of contemporary philosophy it very much appears that the project of critique today finds itself at a point of impasse in which it has largely exhausted its possibilities. Paraphrasing a title of a famous book by Paul Ricoeur, we could say that everywhere we look in both Continental and Anglo-American thought we encounter a ‘conflict of critiques’, without the means of deciding the truth or priority of these various critiques and which constitutes the proper point of entry into philosophical thought. The Kantians tell us that we must first reflexively analyze the a priori structure of mind to determine how it conditions and structures phenomena. The phenomenologists tell us that we must first reflexively analyze the lived structure of intentionality and our being-inthe- world to determine the givenness of the given. The Foucauldians tell us that we must analyze the manner in which power and discursive constructions produce reality. The Derrideans and Lacanians tell us that we must analyze the manner in which language produces the objects of our world. The Marxists tell us that we must analyze history and social forces to determine the manner in which the world is produced. The Gadamerians tell us that we must analyze our historically informed understanding inherited through the wandering of the texts through which we are made. The Wittgensteinians tell us that we must analyze ordinary language to determine how it produces the various pseudo-problems of philosophy. The list could be multiplied indefinitely. And among all of these orientations we find disputes within each particular orientation of thought as to how the project of critique is to be properly completed. How is one to choose among all these competing orientations of critique? Each mode of critique appears equally plausible and equally implausible, such that any choice takes on the appearance of being an arbitrary decision based on temperament, political orientation, and interest without any necessitating ground of its own.3 Faced with such a bewildering philosophical situation, what if we were to imagine ourselves as proceeding naively and pre-critically as first philosophers, pretending that the last three hundred years of philosophy had not taken place or that the proper point of entry into philosophical speculation was not the question of access? In proceeding in this way we would not deny ourselves the right to refer to the history of philosophy; just as any plant refers to the soil from whence it came, philosophy too comes from its soil. Rather, this experiment would instead refuse the imperative to begin with the project of critique. In short, what if we were to ‘bracket’ the project of critique and questions of access, and proceed in our speculations as the beginning student of philosophy might begin? This, of course, is impossible as the history of philosophy is, as Husserl might put it, sedimented in our consciousness. Nonetheless, we can still attempt such an experiment to see where it might lead. At the very least, such a naive and pre-critical beginning might give us the resources to pose differently the philosophical questions we have inherited, thereby opening up new possibilities of thought and a line of flight from a framework that has largely exhausted itself and become rote. The Question of Beginnings and the Ontic Principle As first philosophers that refuse the project of critique and questions of access, we can begin by asking ourselves with what must we begin? What is the most fundamental and general claim we can make about the nature of beings? It will be noted that this question is already more basic than any question about our knowledge of beings for, as Heidegger made clear, questions of knowledge are already premised on a pre-ontological comprehension of being. In posing our question in this way, it is necessary to proceed in the spirit of Alfred North Whitehead with respect to his ‘conceptual scheme’ in Process and Reality. As Whitehead remarks, Philosophy will not regain its proper status until the gradual elaboration of categoreal schemes, definitely stated at each stage of progress, is recognized as its proper objective. There may be rival schemes, inconsistent among themselves; each with its own merits and its own failures. It will then be the purpose of research to conciliate the differences. Metaphysical categories are not dogmatic statements of the obvious; they are tentative formulations of the ultimate generalities.4 Consequently, in asking after the fundamental and the general, we are not making dogmatic statements predicated on claims of absolute certainty or ‘apodicity’, but rather are proposing tentative formulations subject to further clarification, revision, and even falsification. Where critical orientations of thought seek to secure knowledge in advance, we speculative, neo-pre-critical philosophers will see any secure foundation we might discover as an outcome of inquiry rather than as an ???? governing our inquiry from the outset. In other words, we speculative, neo-pre-critical philosophers will not proceed like Hamlet, demanding that everything be clear before we act. 

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Prefer the Ontic Principle. Physical realities of objects are relevant ontologically and not because of human consciousness. This controls the internal link to epistemology.
Bryant 11
Levi Bryant (Professor of Philosophy at Collin College in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, he coined the term “object-oriented ontology” in 2009). “The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology.” The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, eds. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman. 2011.
Leaving aside, for a moment, the question of what, precisely, difference is, or how this principle is to be understood, we can ask ourselves what consequences would follow were we to adopt this principle? However, prior to asking ourselves what philosophical consequences follow from the Ontic Principle, we can first ask ourselves whether there is any philosophical warrant in treating this principle as a fundamental principle. A. First, it must be granted that difference has an epistemic priority in the order of knowledge. In its most naive formulation, prior to any questions of access or the relation between mind and world, subjects and objects, knowledge is concerned above all with questions of difference. The naive, incipient knower that has never yet heard of critique first wonders what differences characterize the object or event, what differences are abiding and what differences are changing, and what relations productive of differences there are between and among objects. In posing the question of knowledge in terms of the relation between subject and object, mind and world, or in terms of questions of access, epistemology forgets that it presupposes difference as the ground of all these distinctions. Paraphrasing Heidegger, it could be said that epistemology always and everywhere proceeds on the basis of a pre-epistemological comprehension of difference. This pre-epistemological comprehension of difference guides and directs both the manner in which the various epistemologies pose the question of knowledge and the sorts of epistemological theories they develop. Consequently, prior to even posing questions of knowledge, of how we can know, whether we can know, and what we can know, the would-be knower is already situated among differences. Here we encounter one reason that the Ontic Principle is formulated as it is. Situated among differences, we must say that there are (es gibt, il y a) differences. However, this thereness is indifferent to human existence. It is not a thereness for us, but a thereness of being. The incipient knower would like to know something of these differences. She would like to know which differences in the object make a difference, what ordered relations there are between differences of differing objects, and so on. It is this ‘thereness’ of difference that first provokes wonder and inquiry into beings. Noting that differences come-to-be and pass-away, the incipient knower wishes to know something of this coming-to-be and passing-away and whether or not there are any enduring differences. Thus, far from difference having a status posterior to questions of knowledge, the thereness of difference is given and is what first provokes inquiry and questions of knowledge. Paradoxically it therefore follows that epistemology cannot be first philosophy. Insofar as the question of knowledge presupposes a pre-epistemological comprehension of difference, the question of knowledge always comes second in relation to the metaphysical or ontological priority of difference. As such, there can be no question of securing the grounds of knowledge in advance or prior to an actual engagement with difference. Every epistemology or critical orientation favors its particular differences that it strives to guarantee, and these differences are always pre-epistemological or of a metaphysical sort. Thus, for example, Kant does not first engage in a critical reflection on the nature and limits of our faculties and then proceed to ground physics and mathematics, but rather first begins with the truth of physics and mathematics and then proceeds to determine how the structure of our faculties renders this knowledge possible. As I will attempt to show further on, difference requires no grounding from mind. B. Second, difference has an ontological or metaphysical priority. Hegel famously argued that when we attempt to think ‘being, pure being’ we end up thinking nothing. 8 Being as such amounts to nothing precisely because it does not offer or donate any differences for thought. Hegel develops a similar critique of Kant’s thing-in-itself in the Phenomenology.9 We disagree with Hegel on two points, while nonetheless retaining the basic lesson of his argument that the concepts of pure being and the concept of things-in-themselves are incoherent. On the one hand, for Hegel the issue is what we are able to think when we attempt to think pure being or things-in-themselves, whereas for us the issue is not what is thinkable but rather what beings and things themselves are regardless of whether or not anyone thinks them. The question of ontology and metaphysics is not the question of what beings are for-us, nor of our access to beings, nor of how we relate to being. No. Ontology or metaphysics asks after the being of beings simpliciter, regardless of whether or not any humans relate to beings. Second, for Hegel our attempt to think pure being leads us to the negation of being or the thought of nothingness. In attempting to think ‘being pure being’ we are led to think nothing. This observation leads Hegel to inscribe negativity in the heart of being. However, this inscription only arises when we begin one step removed from being, treating being in terms of our relation to being rather than in terms of being simpliciter. For us this is an illicit move. Xavier Zubiri makes this point compellingly in his magnificent On Essence.10 Zubiri asks, can it be said that to be, that reality itself, is constitutively affected by negativity? This is impossible. Reality is that which is, and, in that which is, there is distilled all its reality, no matter how limited, fragmentary and insufficient it might be. The negative, as such, has no physical reality whatsoever … Of two real things we say, and we see with truth, that the one ‘is not’ the other. This ‘is not’ does not, however, affect the physical reality of each of the two things, but it affects this physical reality only insofar as it is present to an intelligence, which, when it compares those things, sees that the one ‘is not’ the other.11 The plant does not ‘negate’ the soil or seed from whence it comes, and to speak in this way is to speak metaphorically and without precision. Therefore, we cannot share the thesis that omni determinatio est negatio. It is only from the standpoint of a consciousness regarding objects and comparing them to one another that the differences composing objects are taken by reference to what objects are not. Ontological, as opposed to epistemic difference is, by contrast, positive, affirmative, and differentiated without being negative. The temperature of boiling water is not the negation of other degrees. Philosophy perpetually conflates these epistemic and ontological registers, requiring us to untangle them with the greatest care if we are to understand anything of the real. Where Hegel demands the inclusion of the subject in every relation—his famous identity of substance and subject—we are content to let difference belong to the things themselves with or without the inclusion of the subject in the relation to things. However, with regard to pure being and things-in-themselves, we have learned Hegel’s lesson. There is no ‘pure being’, no ‘being as such’, for being and beings only are in and through their differences. Likewise, when we are told that the thing-in-itself is beyond all knowledge, that it has none of the properties presented to us in phenomena, this thesis is to be rejected on the grounds that it conceives the things-in-themselves as things making no differences. Yet there can be no coherence in the notion of an in-different being for ‘to be’ is to make a difference. 

The Ontic Principle renders anthropocentric ontologies incoherent. Humans are not the only beings that contribute to difference.
Bryant 9
Levi Bryant (Professor of Philosophy at Collin College in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, he coined the term “object-oriented ontology” in 2009). “The Ontic Principle: The Fundamental Principle of  Any Future Object-Oriented Philosophy.” Larval Subjects. January 9th, 2009. http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/01/09/the-ontic-principle-the-fundamental-principle-of-any-future-object-oriented-philosophy/
What then would be the affirmation, the declaration, at the heart of object-oriented philosophy? What the Speculative Realists, and realists and materialist in general, seem to be declaring, regardless of the diversity of their various positions, is an ontic principle about the nature of beings or entities. This principle can be stated in exceedingly simple terms that are nonetheless rife with profound consequences. Very simply it states: The Ontic Principle: There is no difference that does not make a difference. Alternatively it could be articulated as “Latour’s Principle”, as Latour is one of the few philosophers to have clearly stated this principle in fundamental terms. As stated by Latour the principle would run: Latour’s Principle: There is no transportation without translation. Given the current hegemonic forms of theory reigning today, the importance of the Ontic Principle can be more clearly articulated in terms of Latour’s formulation, for Latour’s formulation– especially as articulated in the magnificent Reassembling the Social –most deeply hits at the heart of basic assumptions about language, culture, and society at the heart of questions asked by the most celebrated theoretical options of our day. When Latour refers to “transportation” he is referring to the relationship between two “actors” (Latour’s all purpose word for entities or objects, whether they’re living or physical, human or non-human, animal or mineral, etc.). Thus for example, in Lacanian terms, transportation might refer to the relation between a signifier and an entity such as the two doors as described in his famous example from “The Instance of the Letter”. For Lacan, the two doors are nothing more than bearers or vehicles of the signifiers /Ladies/ and /Gentlemen/, such that any talk of the entities involved, the doors themselves, the people that use these doors, etc., is irrelevant. In other words, in a manner similar to the relationship between concepts and intuitions in Kant, the being of the doors is exhausted in their function as bearers of these two diacritically defined signifiers. The doors themselves contribute nothing to being. Just as Saussure argued that the signifier is not to be located in the sound, the articulation, but rather the pure differential among phonemes that has only an ideal existence, the only function served by the doors in Lacan is as a material embodiment or actualization of this ideal, diacritical relation. To be sure, Lacan will argue that there is also the real and the imaginary. Yet in all cases these will be defined negatively as functions of the signifier. As Žižek endlessly repeats, the real is not something other than the symbolic, but is a particular twist within the symbolic itself. plato2A similar moment occurs in Plato’s famous analogy of the divided line as developed in Book VI of the Republic. When Plato articulates the first stage of belief moving beyond doxa into the domain of genuine episteme, the first level of true knowledge is to be found in dianoia and, in particular, mathematical reasoning. The ontological correlate of dianoia or discursive reasoning is to be found in the domain of mathematical objects. However, if Plato places discursive reasoning and mathematical objects beneath noesis or direct intuition of the forms, then this is because in Plato discursive reasoning still relies on diagrams (icons as Peirce would put it), mathematical writing, inscription, etc. Just as Lacan will later renounce the imaginary dimension of mathematics by virtue of its reliance on images, Plato too sees the mathematical as a partially corrupted version of the “real” objects: The Forms. Thus, while each lower level on the divided line does, indeed, contribute some difference, this difference is always articulated in negative terms as a departure from true reality or as something that depends on something else, something mediated through something else, in its being. geo4If eikasia or imagining is the lowest level of knowledge, then this is because it is mediated in a variety of ways, requiring a medium within which the image can be produced (e.g., a pond), a catalyst of reflection (e.g., sunlight), an object to be reflected (e.g., that tree over there), and the form in which the object participates (e.g., the form of a tree). Each mediation is also a degradation, departing further from the Form or true reality which is treated as the only form that matters. Not only, as Deleuze remarks in the sublime eleventh chapter of Expressionism and Philosophy, is the entity (the reflection) reduced to a mere bearer or transport of the Form (what Deleuze there refers to as the “participated”), but this participation is actually treated as a violence or degradation of the form or the only difference that truly matters. When Latour declares that “there is no transportation without translation” his point is that there is no relation between entities that does not involve some labor of translation. To illustrate this declaration– and such principles can only really be declarations or fundamental commitments –we would do well to begin by taking the term “translation” rather literally. Suppose we are discussing Toscano’s translation of Badiou’s Logiques des mondes (pssst, Alberto, when’s it finally coming out?). Logiques des mondes cannot simply be transported into English, but rather English must be made to speak French and French must be made to speak English. The transportation of a text from one language to another language is not a transport that occurs without remainder, without any transformation, but requires an entire labor that produces something new in the process that is a simulacrum of the original (in Deleuze’s sense, not Baudrillard’s sense), but also different as well. The medium of English contributes something that wasn’t there before, just as the French also functions as a catalyst for all sorts of unforeseen adventures in English. To say that there is no transportation without translation is to say that there is no entity, no being, that does not contribute a difference in the process of being transported into something else or in interacting with something else. Henceforth, should one adopt the Ontic or Latour’s Principle, it follows that no entity can any longer be treated as a mere bearer or vehicle of another entity. If an entity is treated as a mere vehicle of another entity, whether that entity transporting itself be the symbolic, categories, essences, forms, language, the “transcendental”, the “police”, the social, power, etc., then we should immediately consign the position to flames; recognizing simultaneously that the position in question is both itself an entity and therefore an actor and that it is fundamentally mistaken ontologically. As a result of this position we are able to articulate the most fundamental anti-humanism yet imagined, for immediately humans are disbarred from having a central or hegemonic position in the order of beings insofar as they only contribute one difference among others. The difference contributed by the human, whether in the form of a transcendental subject, Dasein, society, or language is neither more nor less than the difference or translation contributed in the encounter of a tree and lightning. As a result, we get an ontology far more exotic than those so far imagined– should it be called an “onticology”? –for difference, that which makes the difference, can come from anything from the smallest particle of matter to a collective naming itself the Aztecs, to the individuals that make up that collective, the pots they use, the rivers in the region, volcanoes, etc., etc., etc.. All of this must be counted. If this principle must be called the Ontic Principle, then this is because it sings the hymns of all beings, rather than striving to reduce all beings to one being, seeing all the others as nothing but derivative corruptions. Granting this– and when has philosophy ever been anything more than a meditation on difference in one form or another? When has the question ever been anything other than “what are the differences”? –philosophy then becomes a meditation on those various ways in which difference makes a difference. For how could difference be difference if it did not first differ from itself?

Rejecting anthropocentrism is also an epistemic priority. Alternative forms of knowledge production are key.
Das 14
Satyajit Das (expert on financial derivatives and risk). “Anthropocentricity.” 2014: What Scientific Idea Is Ready for Retirement?” Edge. 2014. http://edge.org/response-detail/25391
Parallax describes the apparent change in the direction of a moving object caused by alteration in the observer's position. In the graphic work of M.C. Escher, human faculties are similarly deceived and an impossible reality made plausible. While not strictly a scientific theorem, anthropocentrism, the assessment of reality through an exclusively human perspective, is deeply embedded in science and culture. Improving knowledge requires abandoning anthropocentricity or, at least, acknowledging its existence. Anthropocentrism's limits derive from the physical constraints of human cognition and specific psychological attitudes. Being human entails specific faculties, intrinsic attitudes, values and belief systems that shape enquiry and understanding. The human mind has evolved a specific physical structure and bio-chemistry that shapes thought processes. The human cognitive system determines our reasoning and therefore our knowledge. Language, logic, mathematics, abstract thought, cultural beliefs, history and memories create a specific human frame of reference, which may restrict what we can know or understand. There may be other forms of life and intelligence. The ocean has revealed creatures that live from chemo-synthesis in ecosystems around deep-sea hydrothermal vents, without access to sunlight. Life forms based on materials other than carbon may also be feasible. An entirely radical set of cognitive frameworks and alternative knowledge cannot be discounted. Like a train that can only run on tracks that determine direction and destination, human knowledge may ultimately be constrained by what evolution has made us. Knowledge was originally driven by the need to master the natural environment to meet basic biological needs—survival and genetic propagation. It was also needed to deal with the unknown and forces beyond human control. Superstition, religion, science and other belief systems evolved to meets these human needs. In the eighteenth century, medieval systems of aristocratic and religious authority were supplanted by a new model of scientific method, rational discourse, personal liberty and individual responsibility. But this did not change the basic underlying drivers. Knowledge is also influenced by human factors—fear and greed, ambition, submission and tribal collusion, altruism and jealousy, as well as complex power relationships and inter-personal group dynamics. Behavioural science illustrates the inherent biases in human thought. Announcing a boycott of certain "luxury" scientific journals, 2013 Nobel laureate Dr. Randy Schekman argued that to preserve their pre-eminence they acted like "fashion designers who create limited-edition handbags or suits…knowing scarcity stokes demand". He argued that science is being distorted by perverse incentives whereby scientists who publish in important journals with a high "impact factor" can expect promotion, pay rises and professional accolades. Understanding operates within these biological and attitudinal constraints. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: "every philosophy hides a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding place, every word is a mask". Understanding of fundamental issues remains limited. The cosmological nature and origins of the universe are contested. The physical source and nature of matter and energy are debated. The origins and evolution of biological life remain unresolved. Resistance to new ideas frequently restricts the development of knowledge. The history of science is a succession of controversies—a non geo-centric universe, continental drift, theory of evolution, quantum mechanics and climate change. Science, paradoxically, seems to also have inbuilt limits. Like an inexhaustible Russian doll, quantum physics is an endless succession of seemingly infinitely divisible particles. Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle posits that human knowledge about the world is always incomplete, uncertain and highly contingent. Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems of mathematical logic establish inherent limitations of all but the most trivial axiomatic systems of arithmetic. Experimental methodology and testing is flawed. Model predictions are often unsatisfactory. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb observed: "You can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations … there is no such thing as a controlled experiment." Challenging anthropocentrism does not mean abandoning science or rational thought. It does not mean reversion to primitive religious dogma, messianic phantasms or obscure mysticism. Transcending anthropocentricity may allow new frames of reference expanding the boundary of human knowledge. It may allow human beings to think more clearly, consider different perspectives and encourage possibilities outside the normal range of experience and thought. It may also allow a greater understanding of our existential place within nature and in the order of things. As William Shakespeare's Hamlet cautioned a friend: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy". But fundamental biology may not allow the required change of reference framework. While periodically humbled by the universe, human beings remain enamoured, for the most part, with the proposition that they are the apogee of development. But as Mark Twain observed in Letters from Earth: "He took a pride in man; man was his finest invention; man was his pet, after the housefly." Writing in The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, the late English author Douglas Adams speculated that the earth was a powerful computer and human beings were its biological components designed by hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings to answer the ultimate questions about the universe and life. To date, science has not produced a conclusive refutation of this whimsical proposition. Whether or not we can go beyond anthropocentrism, it is a reminder of our limits. As Martin Rees, Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, at Cambridge and Astronomer Royal, noted:  "Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae."  

Hyperobjects, objects that are massively distributed in time and space, have an influence on our physical space, generating a difference that is impossible to ignore. Morton 13
Timothy Morton (Rita Shea Guffey Chair of English at Rice University). “Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.” Pgs. 27 and 28. 2013.
I do not access hyperobjects across a distance, there some transparent medium. Hyperobjects are here, right here in my social and experiential space. Like faces pressed against a window, they leer at me menacingly: their very nearness is what menaces. From the center of the galaxy, a supermassive black hole impinges on my awareness, as if it were sitting in the car next to me at the traffic lights. Every day, global warming burns the skin on the back of my neck, making me itch with physical discomfort and inner anxiety. Evolution unfolds in my genome as my cells divide and mutate, as my body clones itself, as one of my sperm cells mixes it up with an egg. As I reach for the iPhone charger plugged into the dashboard, I reach into evolution, into the extended phenotype that doesn’t stop at the edge of my skin but continues into all the spaces my humanness has colonized. On every right side mirror of every American car is engraved an ontological slogan that is highly appropriate for our time: OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. Not only do I fail to access hyperobjects at a distance, but it also becomes clearer with every passing day that “distance” is only a psychic and ideological construct designed to protect me from the nearness of things. There is a reason why they call it “the schizophrenic defense” when someone has a psychotic break. Could it be that the very attempt to distance is not a product of some true assessment of things, but is and was always a defense mechanism against a threatening proximity? So is that environmentalist speech that demands we “get back to Nature”—that is, achieve a greater intimacy with things—only half right? Is there is nothing to “get back to,” since the problem is not that things are truly distant, but that they are in our face—they are our face? Is this very environmentalism caught up in warding off the threatening nearness of things? That the concept Nature is an “object in mirror” whose referents are much, much closer than a view from the front seat of an SUV careering across the Tibetan plateau; or from behind a camera while I stand in the Arches National Park, Utah; or even as I unzip my tent flap in the middle of “it”? In the sections that compose part 1, I attempt to specify hyperobjects with greater and greater accuracy. There is a logic to the sequence, beginning with this section, in which I describe hyperobjects as viscous. While hyperobjects are near, they are also very uncanny. Some days, global warming fails to heat me up. It is strangely cool or violently stormy. My intimate sensation of prickling heat at the back of my beck is only a distorted print of the hot hand of global warming. I do not feel “at home” in the biosphere. Yet it surrounds me and penetrates me, like the Force in Star Wars. The more I know about global warming, the more I realize how pervasive it is. The more I discover about evolution, the more I realize how my entire physical being is caught in its meshwork. Immediate, intimate symptoms of hyperobjects are vivid and often painful, yet they carry with them a trace of unreality. I am not sure where I am anymore. I am at home in feeling not at home. Hyperobjects, not some hobbit hole, not some national myth of the homeland, have finally forced me to see the truth in Heidegger. The more I struggle to understand hyperobjects, the more I discover that I am stuck to them. They are all over me. They are me. I feel like Neo in The Matrix, lifting to his face in horrified wonder his hand coated in the mirrorlike substance into which the doorknob has dissolved, as his virtual body begins to disintegrate. “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” The mirror itself has become part of my flesh. Or rather, I have become part of the mirror’s flesh, reflecting hyperobjects everywhere. I can see data on the mercury and other toxins in my blood. At Taipei Airport, a few weeks after the Fukushima disaster, I am scanned for radiation since I have just transited in Tokyo. Every attempt to pull myself free by some act of cognition renders me more hopelessly stuck to hyperobjects. Why? 

Ignore permissibility and presumption because non-zero credence in the existence of morality means there’s always a risk of offense in favor of one moral action.

Thus the standard is respecting the physical reality of hyperobjects. 

Thus the advocacy: Developing countries should accept the Precautionary Principle when environmental protection and resource extraction conflict. I reserve the right to clarify.
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The PP is key to acknowledging the importance of hyperobjects.
Morton 13
Timothy Morton (Rita Shea Guffey Chair of English at Rice University). “Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.” Pgs. 27 and 28. 2013.
What we need is more like what Judge Nicolas Zambrano finaly did in the case, which was to suspend the endless construction of (necessarily incomplete statistical) data, and specify that precisely because there is a gap in our knowledge—what do these heavy hydrocarbons do exactly?—to determine that the best action is to act as if the threat were real. To specify them not as assemblages of relations but as a unit, as an entity with unknown powers, a unique entity consisting of all kinds of other entities, all kinds of complex hydrocarbons, but an entity nonetheless, just like any other in its Tardis-like inconsistency. To respect the Kantian gap between phenomenon and thing on which modernity and modern science is based. And yet to respect it still more than the deniers, who endlessly look for more data, more proof. This is a philosophical war, a war that Blake calls a “mental fight.” The tactic of Judge Zambrano was in effect to specify the oil as an entity in its own right rather than as an assemblage or set of relations: an object-oriented tactic. Precisely because the hyperobject is withdrawn—it is mathematizable to humans as reams and reams of data—its appearance is in doubt: its appearance as cancer, its appearance as sores covering the body of a newborn baby. And for precisely this reason, precaution must be the guiding principle. No further proof is required, since the search for proof is already contaminated by an unwillingness to acknowledge the hyperobject, an unwillingness we may readily call denial. The burden of proof is shifted to the defendant: Chevron must not prove that oil does not have a harmful effect. This is a judo move within a post-Humean age in which scientific causality just is statistical. Toxicity is a category that emerges from the Humean science of statistical causality. You can’t directly specify it since there is no single criterion for it—its object withdraws, yet every day we see people dying of cancer from the mutagenic effects of radiation and hydrocarbons. Moreover, only about twenty-five of the thousands of hydrocarbons in existence on Earth have been studied as to their toxic effects. So Chevron can parsimoniously claim that there is no proof. Figuring out exactly what the causal links are, even if possible, would result in further delay and further damage to nonhuman and human life. It is like Lingis and the cigarette in the sequoia forest. Reasoning as the search for proof only delays, and its net effect is denial. This doesn’t mean that a cigarette is an umbrella, or that the effects of heavy aromatic hydrocarbons are to cause cotton candy to sprout on banana trees. It means that things are liars who tell the truth, like “This sentence is false”; the larger the things are, the more obvious this feature becomes. Ethics and politics in a post-modern age after Hume and Kant must be based in attunement to directives coming from entities, which boils down to accepting and listening to true lies. Any ethical or political decision thus feels like an uncanny leap into a void, where we are unsure of ourselves, precisely because there is so much data. 

An object-oriented ethic prioritizes EP.
Bryant 12
Levi Bryant (Professor of Philosophy at Collin College in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, he coined the term “object-oriented ontology” in 2009). “Flat Ontology/Flat Ethics.” Larval Subjects. June 1st, 2012. http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/06/01/flat-ontologyflat-ethics/
I think that Eileen Joy, in a comment over at Alex Reid’s Digital Digs, best articulates what the aims of an object-oriented ethics (OOE) might look like. Responding to one of his recent posts, she writes: For me personally, turning one’s attention to animals, objects, post/humanism and so on is precisely about thickening our capacity to imagine more capacious forms of “living with”; it is precisely about developing more radical forms of welcoming and generosity to others, who include humans as well as trees, rocks, dogs, cornfields, ant colonies, pvc pipes, and sewer drains; it is precisely about amplifying the ability of our brains to pick up more communication signals from more “persons” (who might be a human or a cloud or a cave) whose movements, affects, and thoughts are trying to tell us something about our interconnectedness and co-implicated interdependence with absolutely everything (or perhaps even about a certain implicit alienation between everything in the world, which is nevertheless useful to understand better: take your pick); it is precisely about working toward a more capacious vision of what we mean by “well-being,” when we decide to attend to the well-being of humans and other “persons” (who might be economic markets or the weather or trash or homeless cats) who are always enmeshed with each other in various “vibrant” networks, assemblages, meshes, cascades, systems, whathaveyou. And just for me — likely, just for me– it is also about love, with love defined, not as something that goes in one direction from one person to another person or object (carrying with it various demands and expectations and self-centered desires), but rather, as a type of collective labor that works at creating “fields” for persons and objects to emerge into view that otherwise would remain hidden (and perhaps also remain abjectified), and which persons and objects could then be allowed the breathing/living room to unfold in various self-directed ways, even if that’s not what you could have predicted in advance nor supposedly what you “want” it to do (in other words: ethics as a form of attention that is directed toward the “for-itself” propulsions of other persons and objects, human and inhuman). So, for me, work in post/humanism, and in OOO, is attentive to the world, which includes and does not exile (or gleefully kill off) the human (although it certainly asks that we expand our angles of vision beyond just the human-centered ones); it is both political and ethical; and it is interested in what I would even call the “tender” attention to and care of things, human and inhuman (I think that the work of Bennett, Bogost, Morton, Harman, Steven Shaviro, Jeffrey Cohen, Stacy Alaimo, Julian Yates, Myra Hird, Freya Matthews, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Levi Bryant, and many, many others who *never* get cited in these discussions, especially the women working in materialism, science/gender studies, queer ecology, environmental humanities, etc.) especially exemplifies this “tender” attention to and care of all of the “items” of the world. Any enlargement of our capacity to think about the agential, signaling, and other capacities of as many items/objects/persons, etc. of this world represents, in my mind, an enlargement, and not a shrinking, of our ethical attention. It’s asking for a richer, thicker ontology, which gives is more to be responsible for (after all, that’s partly where the specialness of humans comes in), but also: more to enjoy. It seems to me that the sort of ethico-political vision that Joy here proposes has two faces. On the one hand, there is that face directed towards our contatus, our endeavor to persist in our being and flourish. Recognizing our interconnection with nonhuman things and our impact on nonhuman things is not simply some hippy-dippy thesis that “we’re one with the universe”. No. It is a matter of self-interest. It’s the recognition that 1) we are dependent on this ecosystem to flourish, 2) that these relations upon which we are dependent are fragile and can be broken, and 3) that these things can also exercise oppressive power over us, undermining our ability to flourish or live well. As Spinoza saw, we always act with other bodies. Some of these bodies enhance our power of acting, while others diminish it. By and large, ethical thought has been blind to our relations with nonhumans, focusing only on questions of how we should treat and live with other humans. Yet this completely obscures our real ethical circumstances or conditions. Today, more than ever, our collective survival depends on broadening the domain of what counts as sites of political and ethical concern, and that means taking into account our relationship to nonhumans. 

Focusing on hyperobjects is more practical than pure critique and discourse-focus for achieving actual change. Bryant 12
Levi Bryant (Professor of Philosophy at Collin College). “McKenzie Wark: How Do You Occupy an Abstraction?” 2012. http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/08/04/mckenzie-wark-how-do-you-occupy-an-abstraction/
Here I’m also inclined to say that we need to be clear about system references in our political theorizing and action. We think a lot about the content of our political theorizing and positions, but I don’t think we think a lot about how our political theories are supposed to actually act in the world. As a result, much contemporary leftist political theory ends up in a performative contradiction. It claims, following Marx, that it’s aim is not to represent the world but to change it, yet it never escapes the burrows of academic journals, conferences, and presses to actually do so. Like the Rat-Man’s obsessional neurosis where his actions in returning the glasses were actually designed to fail, there seems to be a built in tendency in these forms of theorization to unconsciously organize their own failure. And here I can’t resist suggesting that this comes as no surprise given that, in Lacanian terms, the left is the position of the hysteric and as such has “a desire for an unsatisfied desire”. In such circumstances the worst thing consists in getting what you want. We on the left need to traverse our fantasy so as to avoid this sterile and self-defeating repetition; and this entails shifting from the position of political critique (hysterical protest), to political construction– actually envisioning and building alternatives. So what’s the issue with system-reference? The great autopoietic sociological systems theorist, Niklas Luhmann, makes this point nicely. For Luhmann, there are intra-systemic references and inter-systemic references. Intra-systemic references refer to processes that are strictly for the sake of reproducing or maintaining the system in question. Take the example of a cell. A cell, for-itself, is not for anything beyond itself. The processes that take place within the cell are simply for continuing the existence of the cell across time. While the cell might certainly emit various chemicals and hormones as a result of these processes, from its own intra-systemic perspective, it is not for the sake of affecting these other cells with those hormones. They’re simply by-products. Capitalism or economy is similar. Capitalists talk a good game about benefiting the rest of the world through the technologies they produce, the medicines they create (though usually it’s government and universities that invent these medicines), the jobs they create, etc., but really the sole aim of any corporation is identical to that of a cell: to endure through time or reproduce itself through the production of capital. This production of capital is not for anything and does not refer to anything outside itself. These operations of capital production are intra-systemic. By contrast, inter-systemic operations would refer to something outside the system and its auto-reproduction. They would be for something else. Luhmann argues that every autopoietic system has this sort of intra-systemic dimension. Autopoietic systems are, above all, organized around maintaining themselves or enduring. This raises serious questions about academic political theory. Academia is an autopoietic system. As an autopoietic system, it aims to endure, reproduce itself, etc. It must engage in operations or procedures from moment to moment to do so. These operations consist in the production of students that eventually become scholars or professors, the writing of articles, the giving of conferences, the production of books and classes, etc. All of these are operations through which the academic system maintains itself across time. The horrifying consequence of this is that the reasons we might give for why we do what we do might (and often) have little to do with what’s actually taking place in system continuance. We say that our articles are designed to demolish capital, inequality, sexism, homophobia, climate disaster, etc., but if we look at how this system actually functions we suspect that the references here are only intra-systemic, that they are only addressing the choir or other academics, that they are only about maintaining that system, and that they never proliferate through the broader world. Indeed, our very style is often a big fuck you to the rest of the world as it requires expert knowledge to be comprehended, thereby insuring that it can have no impact on broader collectives to produce change. Seen in this light, it becomes clear that our talk about changing the world is a sort of alibi, a sort of rationalization, for a very different set of operations that are taking place. Just as the capitalist says he’s trying to benefit the world, the academic tries to say he’s trying to change the world when all he’s really doing is maintaining a particular operationally closed autopoietic system. How to break this closure is a key question for any truly engaged political theory. And part of breaking that closure will entail eating some humble pie. Adam Kotsko wrote a wonderful and hilarious post on the absurdities of some political theorizing and its self-importance today. We’ve failed horribly with university politics and defending the humanities, yet in our holier-than-thou attitudes we call for a direct move to communism. Perhaps we need to reflect a bit on ourselves and our strategies and what political theory should be about. Setting all this aside, I think there’s a danger in Wark’s claims about abstraction (though I think he’s asking the right sort of question). The danger in treating hyperobjects like capitalism as being everywhere and nowhere is that our ability to act becomes paralyzed. As a materialist, I’m committed to the thesis that everything is ultimately material and requires some sort of material embodiment. If that’s true, it follows that there are points of purchase on every object, even where that object is a hyperobject. This is why, given the current form that power takes or the age of hyperobjects, I believe that forms of theory such as new materialism, object-oriented ontology, and actor-network theory are more important than ever (clearly the Whiteheadians are out as they see everything as internally related, as an organism, and therefore have no way of theorizing change and political engagement; they’re quasi-Hegelian, justifying even the discord in the world as a part of “god’s” selection and harmonization of intensities). The important thing to remember is that hyperobjects like capitalism are unable to function without a material base. They require highways, shipping routes, trains and railroads, fiber optic cables for communication, and a host of other things besides. Without what Shannon Mattern calls “infrastructure”, it’s impossible for this particular hyperobject exists. Every hyperobject requires its arteries. Information, markets, trade, require the paths along which they travel and capitalism as we know it today would not be possible without its paths. The problem with so much political theory today is that it focuses on the semiosphere in the form of ideologies, discourses, narratives, laws, etc., ignoring the arteries required for the semiosphere to exercise its power. For example, we get OWS standing in front of Wall Street protesting– engaging in a speech act –yet one wonders if speech is an adequate way of addressing the sort of system we exist in. Returning to system’s theory, is the system of capital based on individual decisions of bankers and CEO’s, or does the system itself have its own cognition, it’s own mode of action, that they’re ineluctably trapped in? Isn’t there a sort of humanist prejudice embodied in this form of political engagement? It has value in that it might create larger collectives of people to fight these intelligent aliens that live amongst us (markets, corporations, etc), but it doesn’t address these aliens themselves because it doesn’t even acknowledge their existence. What we need is a politics adequate to hyperobjects, and that is above all a politics that targets arteries. OOO, new materialism, and actor-network theory are often criticized for being “apolitical” by people who are fascinated with political declarations, who are obsessed with showing that your papers are in order, that you’ve chosen the right team, and that see critique and protest as the real mode of political engagement. But it is not clear what difference these theorists are making and how they are escaping intra-systemic self-reference and auto-reproduction. But the message of these orientations is “to the things themselves!”, “to the assemblages themselves!” “Quit your macho blather about where you stand, and actually map power and how it exercises itself!” And part of this re-orientation of politics, if it exists, consists in rendering deconstruction far more concrete. Deconstruction would no longer show merely the leaks in any system and its diacritical oppositions, it would go to the things themselves. What does that mean? It means that deconstruction would practice onto-cartography or identify the arteries by which capitalism perpetuates itself and find ways to block them. You want to topple the 1 and get their attention? Don’t stand in front of Wall Street and bitch at bankers and brokers, occupy a highway. Hack a satellite and shut down communications. Block a port. Erase data banks, etc. Block the arteries; block the paths that this hyperobject requires to sustain itself. This is the only way you will tilt the hands of power and create bargaining power with government organs of capital and corporations. You have to hit them where they live, in their arteries. Did anyone ever change their diet without being told that they would die? Your critique is an important and indispensable step, but if you really wish to produce change you need to find ways to create heart attacks and aneurysms. Short of that, your activity is just masturbation. But this requires coming to discern where the arteries are and doing a little less critique of cultural artifacts and ideologies. Yet choose your targets carefully. The problem with the Seattle protests was that they chose idiotic targets and simply acted on impotent rage. A window is not an artery. It doesn’t organize a flow of communication and capital. It’s the arteries that you need to locate. I guess this post will get Homeland Security after me.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 4 | Opponent: Collegiate NE Nathan Ewing-Crystal | Judge: Charles Rutter
Policymakers must maximize utility. 4 reasons.

A. Act-omission distinction doesn’t apply to states.
Sunstein and Vermuele 5
Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermuele, “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life?Life Tradeoffs,” Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper No. 85 (March 2005), p. 17.
The most fundamental point is that unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice between or among possible policies for regulating third parties. The distinction between acts and omissions may not be intelligible in this context, and even if it is, the distinction does not make a morally relevant difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do anything or refusing to act. Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized private action – for example, private killing – becomes obscure when government formally forbids private action but chooses a set of policy instruments that does not adequately or fully discourage it.

B. The traditional Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics holds that light waves instantaneously collapse into particles, which is a finite length over zero time, which is impossible. Only the Many-Worlds Interpretation escapes this dilemma and is thus more consistent with the rest of physics. Vaidman 2
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2002. "Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.”
The reason for adopting the Many-Worlds Interpretation MWI is that it avoids the collapse of the quantum wave. (Other non-collapse theories are not better than MWI for various reasons, e.g., nonlocality of Bohmian mechanics; and the disadvantage of all of them is that they have some additional structure.) The collapse postulate is a physical law that differs from all known physics in two aspects: it is genuinely random and it involves some kind of action at a distance. According to the collapse postulate the outcome of a quantum experiment is not determined by the initial conditions of the Universe prior to the experiment: only the probabilities are governed by the initial state. Moreover, Bell 1964 has shown that there cannot be a compatible local-variables theory that will make deterministic predictions. There is no experimental evidence in favor of collapse and against the MWI. We need not assume that Nature plays dice. The MWI is a deterministic theory for a physical Universe and it explains why a world appears to be indeterministic for human observers.

MWI undermines the notion of personal identity. Vaidman 2
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2002. "Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics."
“I” am an object, such as Earth, cat, etc. “I” is defined at a particular time by a complete (classical) description of the state of my body and of my brain. “I” and “Lev” do not name the same things (even though my name is Lev). At the present moment there are many different me’s “Lev”s in different worlds (not more than one in each world), but it is meaningless to say that now there is another “I”. I have a particular, well defined past: I correspond to a particular “Lev” in 2002, but I do not have a well defined future: I correspond to a multitude of me’s “Lev”s in 2010. In the framework of the MWI it is meaningless to ask: Which Lev in 2010 will I be? I will correspond to them all. Every time I perform a quantum experiment (with several possible results) it only seems to me that I obtain a single definite result. Indeed, Lev who obtains this particular result thinks this way. However, this Lev cannot be identified as the only Lev after the experiment. Lev before the experiment corresponds to all “Lev”s obtaining all possible results. Although this approach to the concept of personal identity seems somewhat unusual, it is plausible in the light of the critique of personal identity by Parfit 1986. Parfit considers some artificial situations in which a person splits into several copies, and argues that there is no good answer to the question: Which copy is me? He concludes that personal identity is not what matters when I divide. 

In the absence of personal identity, only end states can matter. Shoemaker 99
Shoemaker, David (Dept of Philosophy, U Memphis). “Utilitarianism and Personal Identity.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 33: 183–199, 1999. http://www.csun.edu/~ds56723/jvipaper.pdf
Extreme reductionism might lend support to utilitarianism in the following way. Many people claim that we are justified in maximizing the good in our own lives, but not justified in maximizing the good across sets of lives, simply because each of us is a single, deeply unified person, unified by the further fact of identity, whereas there is no such corresponding unity across sets of lives. But if the only justification for the different treatment of individual lives and sets of lives is the further fact, and this fact is undermined by the truth of reductionism, then nothing justifies this different treatment. There are no deeply unified subjects of experience. What remains are merely the experiences themselves, and so any ethical theory distinguishing between individual lives and sets of lives is mistaken. If the deep, further fact is missing, then there are no unities. The morally significant units should then be the states people are in at particular times, and an ethical theory that focused on them and attempted to improve their quality, whatever their location, would be the most plausible. Utilitarianism is just such a theory.

C. Knowledge reduces to merely true belief. “Reliable” sources of justification aren’t necessary for the goal of epistemology, or finding true beliefs. Sartwell 91
Crispin Sartwell. Knowledge Without Justification. 1991. http://www.crispinsartwell.com/know.htm
It is widely held that our epistemic goal with regard to particular propositions is achieving true beliefs and avoiding false ones about propositions with which we are epistemically concerned. (We have seen that Alston, for one, endorses that view.) That is, it is widely admitted that on any good account of justification, there must be reason to think that the beliefs justified on the account are likely to be true. Indeed, proponents of all the major conceptions of justification hold this position. For example, the foundationalist Paul Moser writes:   Epistemic justification is essentially related to the so-called cognitive goal of truth, insofar as an individual belief is epistemically justified only if it is appropriately directed toward the goal of truth. More specifically, on the present conception, one is epistemically justified in believing a proposition only if one has good reason to believe it is true.(22)     The reliabilist Alvin Goldman claims, similarly, that a condition on an account of justification is that beliefs justified on the account be likely to be true; he says that a plausible conception of justification will be "truth-linked."(23) And the coherentist Laurence BonJour puts it even more strongly:   If epistemic justification were not conducive to truth in this way, if finding epistemically justified beliefs did not substantially increase the likelihood of finding true ones, epistemic justification would be irrelevant to our main cognitive goal and of dubious worth. It is only if we have some reason to think that epistemic justification constitutes a path to truth that we as cognitive human beings have any motive for preferring epistemically justified beliefs to epistemically unjustified ones. Epistemic justification is therefore in the final analysis only an instrumental value, not an intrinsic one.(24)     In fact, it is often enough taken to be the distinguishing mark of the fact that we are epistemically concerned with a proposition that we are concerned with its truth or falsity. That is what, on the view of many philosophers, distinguishes epistemic from moral or prudential constraints on belief, what distinguishes inquiry from other belief-generating procedures. (If the theory I gave in the first chapter is right, ther are no non-epistemic belief-generating procedures in this sense. That fact merely underscores the present point.) I have argued that a plausible normative epistemology will be teleological. And I have claimed that the conception which accounts of knowledge are attempting to analyze or describe is that of the epistemic telos with regard to particular propositions. It would follow that, if a philosopher holds that the epistemic telos is merely true belief, that philosopher implicitly commits himself, his own asservations to the contrary, to the view that knowledge is merely true belief.  I think that this is the case. I think, that is, that in the above passages, these philosophers have committed themselves implicitly to the view that knowledge is merely true belief, and that justification is a criterion rather than a logically necessary condition of knowledge. By a criterion, to repeat, I mean a test for whether some item has some property that is not itself a logically necessary condition of that item's having that property. Justification on the present view is, first of all, a means by which we achieve knowledge, that is, by which we arrive at true beliefs, and second, it provides a test of whether someone has knowledge, that is, whether her beliefs are true. So again, the present view does not make accounts of justification trivial, or unconnected with the assessment of claims to know. If our epistemic goal with regard to particular propositions is true belief, then justification (a) gives procedures by which true beliefs are obtained, and (b) gives standards for evaluating the products of such procedures with regard to that goal. From the point of view of (a), justification prescribes techniques by which knowledge is gained. From the point of view of (b) it gives a criterion for knowledge. But in neither case does it describe a logically necessary condition for knowledge.  Another way of putting the matter is like this. If we describe justification as of merely instrumental value with regard to arriving at truth, as BonJour does explicitly, we can no longer maintain both that knowledge is the telos of inquiry and that justification is a necessary condition of knowledge. It is incoherent to build a specification of what are regarded merely as means of achieving some goal into the description of the goal itself; in such circumstances the goal can be described independently of the means. So if justification is demanded because it is instrumental to true belief, it cannot also be maintained that knowledge is justified true belief.  I will now certainly be accused of begging the question by assuming that knowledge is the goal of inquiry. There is justice in this claim in that I have not gone very far toward establishing the point. But I would ask my accusers at this point whether they can do better in describing the conception which theories of knowledge set out to analyze or describe without begging the question in favor of some such theory. And I ask also, if knowledge is not the overarching epistemic telos with regard to particular propositions, why such tremendous emphasis has been placed on the theory of knowledge in the history of philosophy, and just what function that notion serves within that history. If knowledge is not the overarching purpose of inquiry, then why is the notion important, and why should we continue to be concerned in normative epistemology above all with what knowledge is and how it can be achieved? If we want to withold the term `knowledge' from mere true belief, but also want to hold that mere true belief is the purpose of inquiry, then I suggest that what remains is a mere verbal dispute. That is, if we treat mere true belief as the purpose of inquiry, but do not equate it with knowledge, then I do not think that knowledge is any longer central to normative epistemology. And I would insist that we are not going to understand what `knowledge' means in the tradition, in Plato and Descartes, for example, if we do not regard them as holding knowledge to be the goal of inquiry. In fact, if it is allowed that mere true belief is the telos of inquiry, but that we should still reserve the term `knowledge' for justified true belief (and perhaps something more), I will simply abandon the term `knowledge' to the epistemology of justification. But first of all, as I suggested in the third chapter, I think that `knowledge' will now merely be a technical term with a stipulated definition. And second, I do not think it will be central to epistemology, since it no longer represents our epistemic goal. And third, I think the stipulated definition will either be redundant (if justification is held to be truth conducive) or, as I will argue, incoherent (if it is not).  Now it may well be held that justification is of more than instrumental value, because if we are not justified in believing p, though p is true and we in fact believe it, we may have false beliefs that lead us to p, and we may continue to generate false beliefs in the future. All of this is true, but it is irrelevant to the present point. Recall that I have characterized knowledge as our epistemic goal with regard to particular propositions. Insofar as p is concerned, this goal has been realized if p is true and we believe it. Insofar as we have also such goals as continuing to generate true beliefs, rendering our system of beliefs coherent, and so forth, it is desirable to have justified beliefs. But with regard to any particular proposition, our goal has been reached if we believe that proposition and it is true.  But I do not want simply to let the matter rest on a supposed agreement among some contemporary epistemologists that our epistemic goal with regard to particular propositions is true belief. Such epistemologists are agreed that knowledge is at least justified true belief. I think that Alston is right to think that the only plausible way to construe this claim is that knowledge is at least true belief based on adequate grounds, or true belief reached from a strong position. So perhaps the figures in question, on reflection, would describe the epistemic telos not as true belief but as true belief based on adequate grounds, or true belief reached from a strong position.  Only it must now be asked, why do we want to have adequate grounds? Why do we want to be in a strong position? This question ought to be misguided if true belief based on adequate grounds or true belief reached from a strong position is in fact the purpose of inquiry. For there is no good answer to the question of why we desire our ultimate ends. But the question is hardly misguided. In fact, we cannot even specify what it is to have adequate grounds except that these grounds tend to establish that the proposition in question is true; we cannot even specify what it is to be in a strong position except as being in a strong position to get the truth. This indicates that the purpose of inquiry can be formulated without reference to the notions of ground or position. Thus, on the views in question, believing the truth is in fact our overarching epistemic telos with regard to particular propositions, on the only plausible conception of justification. Hence, on these views, knowledge is merely true belief. 

Util coheres with the fact that knowledge reduces to mere true belief.
Petersen 11
Steve Petersen (Niagara University). “Utilitarian Epistemology.” February 10th, 2011. http://stevepetersen.net/professional/petersen-utilitarian-epistemology.pdf
To ask “why is knowledge of more instrumental value than mere true belief?” is, on this picture, like asking “why are earned pro?ts of more instrumental value than monetary windfalls?” The answer to the ?nancial version of this question is clearly that the earnings are not more valuable. By analogy, then, neither is knowledge. The epistemic utilitarian embraces this conclusion and denies the intuition that knowledge is better than mere true belief, even on the instrumental version of the value question. The reason, illustrated by the analogy, is fairly simple: like anything but welfare, epistemic states are at best of instrumental value, and (as we noted earlier) generalizations about instrumental value only make sense under uncertainty. Generally charity is more valuable than murder, but to the classical utilitarian (and to the classical utilitarian alone) it is not sensible to ask “why is a charityable act more valuable than a murder that results in the same amount of utility?” To assume there is an answer here begs the question against the utilitarian. The same goes, one step down the instrumental chain, for the question “why are earnings more valuable than windfalls?” Under uncertainty, investments with high expected monetary value are in an important, instrumental sense more valuable than those with poor expected monetary value, but this question builds in the assumption that both result in the same monetary value (given of course that all else is equal). Finally, the same goes for knowledge and lucky-but-true belief; in the description of the case, both have gotten the relevant epistemic (instrumental) good. To stipulate that, despite the odds, luck-sensitive belief formation nonetheless resulted in a true belief is just like stipulating that the murder under consideration ended up net bene?tting people, or that the stupid casino bet ended up paying off. 

D. Revisionary intuitionism is true and leads to util.
Yudkowsky 8
Eliezer Yudkowsky (research fellow of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute; he also writes Harry Potter fan fiction). “The ‘Intuitions’ Behind ‘Utilitarianism.’” 28 January 2008. LessWrong. http://lesswrong.com/lw/n9/the_intuitions_behind_utilitarianism/
I haven't said much about metaethics - the nature of morality - because that has a forward dependency on a discussion of the Mind Projection Fallacy that I haven't gotten to yet. I used to be very confused about metaethics. After my confusion finally cleared up, I did a postmortem on my previous thoughts. I found that my object-level moral reasoning had been valuable and my meta-level moral reasoning had been worse than useless. And this appears to be a general syndrome - people do much better when discussing whether torture is good or bad than when they discuss the meaning of "good" and "bad". Thus, I deem it prudent to keep moral discussions on the object level wherever I possibly can. Occasionally people object to any discussion of morality on the grounds that morality doesn't exist, and in lieu of jumping over the forward dependency to explain that "exist" is not the right term to use here, I generally say, "But what do you do anyway?" and take the discussion back down to the object level. Paul Gowder, though, has pointed out that both the idea of choosing a googolplex dust specks in a googolplex eyes over 50 years of torture for one person, and the idea of "utilitarianism", depend on "intuition". He says I've argued that the two are not compatible, but charges me with failing to argue for the utilitarian intuitions that I appeal to. Now "intuition" is not how I would describe the computations that underlie human morality and distinguish us, as moralists, from an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness and/or a rock. But I am okay with using the word "intuition" as a term of art, bearing in mind that "intuition" in this sense is not to be contrasted to reason, but is, rather, the cognitive building block out of which both long verbal arguments and fast perceptual arguments are constructed. I see the project of morality as a project of renormalizing intuition. We have intuitions about things that seem desirable or undesirable, intuitions about actions that are right or wrong, intuitions about how to resolve conflicting intuitions, intuitions about how to systematize specific intuitions into general principles. Delete all the intuitions, and you aren't left with an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness, you're left with a rock. Keep all your specific intuitions and refuse to build upon the reflective ones, and you aren't left with an ideal philosopher of perfect spontaneity and genuineness, you're left with a grunting caveperson running in circles, due to cyclical preferences and similar inconsistencies. "Intuition", as a term of art, is not a curse word when it comes to morality - there is nothing else to argue from. Even modus ponens is an "intuition" in this sense - it's just that modus ponens still seems like a good idea after being formalized, reflected on, extrapolated out to see if it has sensible consequences, etcetera. So that is "intuition". However, Gowder did not say what he meant by "utilitarianism". Does utilitarianism say... That right actions are strictly determined by good consequences? That praiseworthy actions depend on justifiable expectations of good consequences? That probabilities of consequences should normatively be discounted by their probability, so that a 50 probability of something bad should weigh exactly half as much in our tradeoffs? That virtuous actions always correspond to maximizing expected utility under some utility function? That two harmful events are worse than one? That two independent occurrences of a harm (not to the same person, not interacting with each other) are exactly twice as bad as one? That for any two harms A and B, with A much worse than B, there exists some tiny probability such that gambling on this probability of A is preferable to a certainty of B? If you say that I advocate something, or that my argument depends on something, and that it is wrong, do please specify what this thingy is... anyway, I accept 3, 5, 6, and 7, but not 4; I am not sure about the phrasing of 1; and 2 is true, I guess, but phrased in a rather solipsistic and selfish fashion: you should not worry about being praiseworthy. Now, what are the "intuitions" upon which my "utilitarianism" depends? This is a deepish sort of topic, but I'll take a quick stab at it. First of all, it's not just that someone presented me with a list of statements like those above, and I decided which ones sounded "intuitive". Among other things, if you try to violate "utilitarianism", you run into paradoxes, contradictions, circular preferences, and other things that aren't symptoms of moral wrongness so much as moral incoherence. After you think about moral problems for a while, and also find new truths about the world, and even discover disturbing facts about how you yourself work, you often end up with different moral opinions than when you started out. This does not quite define moral progress, but it is how we experience moral progress. As part of my experienced moral progress, I've drawn a conceptual separation between questions of type Where should we go? and questions of type How should we get there? (Could that be what Gowder means by saying I'm "utilitarian"?) The question of where a road goes - where it leads - you can answer by traveling the road and finding out. If you have a false belief about where the road leads, this falsity can be destroyed by the truth in a very direct and straightforward manner. When it comes to wanting to go to a particular place, this want is not entirely immune from the destructive powers of truth. You could go there and find that you regret it afterward (which does not define moral error, but is how we experience moral error). But, even so, wanting to be in a particular place seems worth distinguishing from wanting to take a particular road to a particular place. Our intuitions about where to go are arguable enough, but our intuitions about how to get there are frankly messed up. After the two hundred and eighty-seventh research study showing that people will chop their own feet off if you frame the problem the wrong way, you start to distrust first impressions. When you've read enough research on scope insensitivity - people will pay only 28 more to protect all 57 wilderness areas in Ontario than one area, people will pay the same amount to save 50,000 lives as 5,000 lives... that sort of thing... Well, the worst case of scope insensitivity I've ever heard of was described here by Slovic: Other recent research shows similar results. Two Israeli psychologists asked people to contribute to a costly life-saving treatment. They could offer that contribution to a group of eight sick children, or to an individual child selected from the group. The target amount needed to save the child (or children) was the same in both cases. Contributions to individual group members far outweighed the contributions to the entire group. There's other research along similar lines, but I'm just presenting one example, 'cause, y'know, eight examples would probably have less impact. If you know the general experimental paradigm, then the reason for the above behavior is pretty obvious - focusing your attention on a single child creates more emotional arousal than trying to distribute attention around eight children simultaneously. So people are willing to pay more to help one child than to help eight. Now, you could look at this intuition, and think it was revealing some kind of incredibly deep moral truth which shows that one child's good fortune is somehow devalued by the other children's good fortune. But what about the billions of other children in the world? Why isn't it a bad idea to help this one child, when that causes the value of all the other children to go down? How can it be significantly better to have 1,329,342,410 happy children than 1,329,342,409, but then somewhat worse to have seven more at 1,329,342,417? Or you could look at that and say: "The intuition is wrong: the brain can't successfully multiply by eight and get a larger quantity than it started with. But it ought to, normatively speaking." And once you realize that the brain can't multiply by eight, then the other cases of scope neglect stop seeming to reveal some fundamental truth about 50,000 lives being worth just the same effort as 5,000 lives, or whatever. You don't get the impression you're looking at the revelation of a deep moral truth about nonagglomerative utilities. It's just that the brain doesn't goddamn multiply. Quantities get thrown out the window. If you have $100 to spend, and you spend $20 each on each of 5 efforts to save 5,000 lives, you will do worse than if you spend $100 on a single effort to save 50,000 lives. Likewise if such choices are made by 10 different people, rather than the same person. As soon as you start believing that it is better to save 50,000 lives than 25,000 lives, that simple preference of final destinations has implications for the choice of paths, when you consider five different events that save 5,000 lives. (It is a general principle that Bayesians see no difference between the long-run answer and the short-run answer; you never get two different answers from computing the same question two different ways. But the long run is a helpful intuition pump, so I am talking about it anyway.) The aggregative valuation strategy of "shut up and multiply" arises from the simple preference to have more of something - to save as many lives as possible - when you have to describe general principles for choosing more than once, acting more than once, planning at more than one time. Aggregation also arises from claiming that the local choice to save one life doesn't depend on how many lives already exist, far away on the other side of the planet, or far away on the other side of the universe. Three lives are one and one and one. No matter how many billions are doing better, or doing worse. 3 = 1 + 1 + 1, no matter what other quantities you add to both sides of the equation. And if you add another life you get 4 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. That's aggregation. When you've read enough heuristics and biases research, and enough coherence and uniqueness proofs for Bayesian probabilities and expected utility, and you've seen the "Dutch book" and "money pump" effects that penalize trying to handle uncertain outcomes any other way, then you don't see the preference reversals in the Allais Paradox as revealing some incredibly deep moral truth about the intrinsic value of certainty. It just goes to show that the brain doesn't goddamn multiply. The primitive, perceptual intuitions that make a choice "feel good" don't handle probabilistic pathways through time very skillfully, especially when the probabilities have been expressed symbolically rather than experienced as a frequency. So you reflect, devise more trustworthy logics, and think it through in words. When you see people insisting that no amount of money whatsoever is worth a single human life, and then driving an extra mile to save $10; or when you see people insisting that no amount of money is worth a decrement of health, and then choosing the cheapest health insurance available; then you don't think that their protestations reveal some deep truth about incommensurable utilities. Part of it, clearly, is that primitive intuitions don't successfully diminish the emotional impact of symbols standing for small quantities - anything you talk about seems like "an amount worth considering". And part of it has to do with preferring unconditional social rules to conditional social rules. Conditional rules seem weaker, seem more subject to manipulation. If there's any loophole that lets the government legally commit torture, then the government will drive a truck through that loophole. So it seems like there should be an unconditional social injunction against preferring money to life, and no "but" following it. Not even "but a thousand dollars isn't worth a 0.0000000001 probability of saving a life". Though the latter choice, of course, is revealed every time we sneeze without calling a doctor. The rhetoric of sacredness gets bonus points for seeming to express an unlimited commitment, an unconditional refusal that signals trustworthiness and refusal to compromise. So you conclude that moral rhetoric espouses qualitative distinctions, because espousing a quantitative tradeoff would sound like you were plotting to defect. On such occasions, people vigorously want to throw quantities out the window, and they get upset if you try to bring quantities back in, because quantities sound like conditions that would weaken the rule. But you don't conclude that there are actually two tiers of utility with lexical ordering. You don't conclude that there is actually an infinitely sharp moral gradient, some atom that moves a Planck distance (in our continuous physical universe) and sends a utility from 0 to infinity. You don't conclude that utilities must be expressed using hyper-real numbers. Because the lower tier would simply vanish in any equation. It would never be worth the tiniest effort to recalculate for it. All decisions would be determined by the upper tier, and all thought spent thinking about the upper tier only, if the upper tier genuinely had lexical priority. As Peter Norvig once pointed out, if Asimov's robots had strict priority for the First Law of Robotics ("A robot shall not harm a human being, nor through inaction allow a human being to come to harm") then no robot's behavior would ever show any sign of the other two Laws; there would always be some tiny First Law factor that would be sufficient to determine the decision. Whatever value is worth thinking about at all, must be worth trading off against all other values worth thinking about, because thought itself is a limited resource that must be traded off. When you reveal a value, you reveal a utility. I don't say that morality should always be simple. I've already said that the meaning of music is more than happiness alone, more than just a pleasure center lighting up. I would rather see music composed by people than by nonsentient machine learning algorithms, so that someone should have the joy of composition; I care about the journey, as well as the destination. And I am ready to hear if you tell me that the value of music is deeper, and involves more complications, than I realize - that the valuation of this one event is more complex than I know.  But that's for one event. When it comes to multiplying by quantities and probabilities, complication is to be avoided - at least if you care more about the destination than the journey. When you've reflected on enough intuitions, and corrected enough absurdities, you start to see a common denominator, a meta-principle at work, which one might phrase as "Shut up and multiply." Where music is concerned, I care about the journey. When lives are at stake, I shut up and multiply. It is more important that lives be saved, than that we conform to any particular ritual in saving them. And the optimal path to that destination is governed by laws that are simple, because they are math. And that's why I'm a utilitarian - at least when I am doing something that is overwhelmingly more important than my own feelings about it - which is most of the time, because there are not many utilitarians, and many things left undone.

However, preference util is best. Impartiality is key and entails the consideration of everyone’s preferences. 2 reasons.

A. Preference util is required by the logical consistency of moral statements.
Singer 09
Peter Singer Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, Princeton, “The Groundwork of Utilitarian Morals: Reconsidering Hare’s Argument for Utilitarianism,” draft prepared for the Conference on Issues in Modern Philosophy: “The Foundations of Morality,” NYU Philosophy Department, November 7, 2009, 34.
Hare was a non-cognitivist. He held that moral judgments do not describe the world, and in that sense cannot be true or false, as ordinary descriptive statements can be. They are prescriptions, which means they belong to the broad family of imperatives. In Freedom and Reason, published in 1963, Hare argues that the freedom we have to make up our own minds about what is right or wrong lies in the fact that we choose what we shall prescribe. That choice, however, is not unconstrained. Reason enters the picture both because there can be logical relations between prescriptions, and because moral judgments are universalizable. If I say “Shut all the windows!” and “Leave the central window open!” I contradict myself. I also contradict myself if I say “All tax cheats ought to be imprisoned” and “I am a tax cheat, but I ought not to be imprisoned.” Universalizability means that, in Hare’s words: One cannot with logical consistency, where a and b are are two individuals, say that a ought, in a certain situation specified in universal terms without reference to individuals, to act in a certain way, also specified in universal terms, but that b ought not to act in a similarly specified way in a similarly specified situation. This is because in any ‘ought’-statement there is implicit a principle which says that the statement applies to all precisely similar situations. This means that if I say ‘This is what ought to be done; but there could be a situation exactly like this one in its non-moral properties, but in which the corresponding person, who was exactly like the person who ought to do it in this situation, ought not to do it’, I contradict myself. Moral judgments, in other words, cannot be based on just any reason. In particular, we cannot make exceptions for ourselves. If I claim that you ought to give to the poor, I must either agree that I too ought to give to the poor, or I must find a reason why it is not the case that I ought to give to the poor, and this reason must be specifiable without reference to individuals. That reason might be that you are a billionaire and I am struggling to keep up with my mortgage payments. But it cannot be that I am the one who will benefit if I keep all my money, whereas you will benefit if you keep all your money. Although Hare’s words sometimes gave the impression that he understood universalizability to be a requirement of reason (for example: “to universalize is to give the reason”) his considered position leaves room for amoralism, and the amoralist, in his view, need not be inconsistent or irrational. Moral language excludes non-universalizable judgments, but there is no logical requirement that one use moral language, or guide one’s life by universalizable principles. If that is right, the significance of any conclusions that we may be able to reach by drawing out the implications of universalizability will be weakened. One can always escape those conclusions by refusing to make moral judgments. Nevertheless, since many of us do want to use terms like “ought” and “right,” the possibility of rational amoralism does not render pointless the exercise of exploring the implications of universalizability, and seeing what normative conclusions may follow from its application.  When I prescribe something, using moral language, my prescription commits me to a substantive moral judgment about all relevantly similar cases. This includes hypothetical cases in which I am in a different position from my actual one. So to make a moral judgment, I must put myself in the position of the other person affected by my proposed action – or to be more precise, in the position of all those affected by my action. Whether I can accept the judgment – that is, whether I can prescribe it universally – will then depend on whether I could accept it if I had to live the lives of all those affected by the action.  That sounds as if universalizable moral judgments will have to be based on considering the preferences or interests of all affected – which would mean that we can arrive very rapidly at a form of utilitarianism based on maximizing the satisfaction of preferences or interests. But Hare did not arrive at utilitarianism so swiftly. In Freedom and Reason he raises the issue of whether it is wrong for a woman to take a well-paid job undressing herself a at a strip club. The stripper prefers the work to anything else she can get, and those in the audience enjoy the performance. As far as interests are concerned, Hare tells us, “since everybody gets what he or she wants, nobody’s interests are harmed.” Nevertheless, that does not settle the moral issue, Hare tells us, because “it is a question not of interests but of ideals.” Some hold ideas of how a person should behave – or perhaps, how a woman should behave - that are incompatible with undressing for the sexual enjoyment of strangers. Hare considers the possibility of confining the moral terms to questions concerning the impact of our actions on other people’s interests, but he rejects such a “terminological fiat” on the grounds that such a restriction “would truncate moral philosophy by preventing it saying anything about ideals.” In the same work, Hare makes a similar statement about a Nazi who asserts that all Jews should be killed. This prescription commits the Nazi to prescribing that he himself should be killed, in the hypothetical case in which he discovers that he is a Jew. Since, we assume, the interests of Jews in continuing to live are greater than the interests of Nazis in killing them, no one would prefer to live the lives of all those affected by the prescription that all Jews be killed. Nevertheless, Hare says, a Nazi could be so fanatical about his belief in racial purity that he would think that he should be killed, even if he were a Jew. If he accepts that, he is not violating universalizability. Instead, in Hare’s words, “the fanatic nails his flag to the content of the ideal, irrespective of its holder.” Development of Hare’s Argument: Final Form In “Ethical Theory and Utilitarianism,” published in 1976, Hare took the argument an important step further. He had, he wrote discovered how “to deal in an agreeably clear way with the problem of the fanatic, who has given me so much trouble in the past.” Here is how he thought this could be done: In so far as, in order to prescribe universally, I have to strip away (qua author of the moral decision) all my present desires etc., I shall have to strip away, among them, all the ideals that I have; for an ideal is a kind of desire or liking (in the generic sense in which I am using those terms) … This does not mean that I have to give up having ideals, nor even that I must stop giving any consideration to my ideals when I make my moral decisions; it means only that I am not allowed to take them into account qua author of the moral decision. It is, of course, only when I can take my ideals into account qua ideals – that is, as something other than interests – that ideals can trump interests. If I can only take them into account as some kind of desire or liking, the content of the ideal no longer matters. Ideals are then treated simply as another kind of preference. When Hare revisits the example of the fanatical Nazi, he shows how this works. Now, he says: …the only sort of fanatic that is going to bother us is the person whose ideals are so intensely pursued that the weight that has to be given to them, considered impartially, outbalances the combined weights of all the ideals, desires, likings, etc. that have to be frustrated in order to achieve them. No actual Nazi could possibly have desired the extermination of Jews with sufficient intensity to outweigh all the desires of the Jews to continue to live, so this kind of fanatic is quite fantastic. Since our moral intuitions in fantastic situations are, Hare argues, unreliable, such fanatics need not trouble us. 

B. People must abstract from their social position, entailing impartially considering everyone’s interests. Moral statements by definition are impartial.
Harsanyi 77
John Harsanyi (utilitarian). “Morality and the Theory of Rational Behavior.” Social Research. Vol. 44, No. 4. Winter 1997. http://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/gender/Harsanyi.pdf
This equiprobability model of moral value judgments gives us both a powerful analytical criterion and a very convenient heuristic criterion for deciding practical moral problems. If we want to decide between two alternative moral standards A and B, all we have to do is ask ourselves the question, ‘Would I prefer to live in a society conforming to standard A or in a society conforming to standard B? – assuming I would not know in advance what my actual social position would be in either society but rather would have to assume to have an equal chance of ending up in any one of the possible positions.’ Admittedly, this criterion – or any conceivable moral criterion – will still leave each of us with the great moral responsibility, and the often very difficult intellectual task, of actually choosing between these two alternative moral standards in terms of this criterion. But by using this criterion we will know at least what the actual intellectual problem is that we are trying to solve in choosing between them. My equiprobability model was first published in 1953, and was extended in 1955. Vickrey had suggested a similar idea, but my work was independent of his. Later John Rawls again independently proposed a very similar model, which he called the ‘original position’, based on the ‘veil of ignorance’. But while my own model served as a basis for a utilitarian theory, Rawls derived very nonutilitarian conclusions from his own. Yet the difference does not lie in the nature of the two models, which are based on almost identical qualitative assumptions. Rather, the difference lies in the decision-theoretical analysis applied to the two models. One difference is that Rawls avoids any use of numerical probabilities. But the main difference is that Rawls makes the technical mistake of basing his analysis on a highly irrational decision rule, the maximin principle, which was fairly fashionable thirty years ago but which lost its attraction a few years later when its absurd practical implications were realised. Our model of moral value judgments can also be described as follows. Each individual has two very different sets of preferences. On the one hand, he has his personal preferences, which guide his everyday behaviour and which are expressed in his utility function U. Most people’s personal preferences will not be completely selfish. But they will assign higher weights to their own interests and to the interests of their family, their friends, and other personal associates than they will assign to the interests of complete strangers. On the other hand, each individual will also have moral preferences which may or may not have much influence on his everyday behaviour but which will guide his thinking in those – possibly very rare – moments when he forces a special impersonal and impartial attitude, that is, a moral attitude, upon himself. His moral preferences, unlike his personal preferences, will by definition always assign the same weight to all individuals’ interests, including his own. These moral preferences will be expressed by his social-welfare function W. Typically, different individuals will have very different utility functions Ui but, as can be seen from Equation (1) above, in theory they will tend to have identical social-welfare functions – but only if they agree in their factual assumptions on the nature of the individual utility functions Ui and on the conversion rations between different individuals’ utilities (as decided by interpersonal utility comparisons) – which, of course, may not be the case. By definition, a moral value judgment is always an expression of one’s moral preferences. Any evaluative statement one may make will automatically lose its status of a moral value judgment if it is unduly influenced by one’s personal interests and personal preferences.

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Given the MWI, preference util requires considering the evolutionarily robust aesthetic preferences of everyone in the multiverse.
Tomasik 14
Brian Tomasik (“I work on researching the best ways to reduce suffering in the future, examining crucial considerations in science, politics, sociology, and philosophy that bear on this topic. You can read more on my website: Essays On Reducing Suffering. I graduated from Swarthmore College in 2009, where I studied computer science, mathematics, statistics, and economics. I wrote a thesis on multitask feature selection and published additional papers on machine learning and international trade. From 2009-2013, I worked in the relevance division of Bing at Microsoft, improving ranking algorithms for web results through feature engineering, data mining, and architectural innovation. I built end-to-end three of Bing's production ranking models, which served over 5 billion searches on Bing and Yahoo every month.”). “Multiverse-Wide Preference Utilitarianism.” LessWrong. January 30th, 2014. http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jll/multiversewide_preference_utilitarianism/
According to Max Tegmark's "Parallel Universes," there's probably an exact copy of you reading this article within 101028 meters away and in practice, probably much closer. As Tegmark explains, this claim assumes only basic physics that most cosmologists take for granted. Even nearer than this distance are many people very similar to you but with minor variations -- e.g., with brown eyes instead of blue, or who prefer virtue ethics over deontology. In fact, all possible people exist somewhere in the multiverse, if only due to random fluctuations of the type that produce Boltzmann brains. Nick Bostrom calls these "freak observers." Just as there are art maximizers, there are also art minimizers who find art disgusting and want to eliminate as much of it as possible. For them, the thought of art triggers their brains' disgust centers instead of beauty centers. However, the distribution of organisms across the multiverse is not uniform. For instance, we should expect suffering reducers to be much more common than suffering increasers because organisms evolve to dislike suffering by themselves, their kin, and their reciprocal trading partners. Societies -- whether human or alien -- should often develop norms against cruelty for collective benefit. Human values give us some hints about what values across the multiverse look like, because human values are a kind of maximum likelihood estimator for the mode of the multiversal distribution. Of course, we should expect some variation about the mode. Even among humans, some cultural norms are distinct and others are universal. Probably values like not murdering, not causing unnecessary suffering, not stealing, etc. are more common among aliens than, say, the value of music or dance, which might be human-specific spandrels. Still, aliens may have their own spandrels that they call "art," and they might value those things. Like human values, alien values might be mostly self-directed toward their own wellbeing, especially in their earlier Darwinian phases. Unless we meet the aliens face-to-face, we can't improve their welfare directly. However, the aliens may also have some outward-directed aesthetic and moral values that apply across space and time, like the value of art as seen by the art-maximizing cities on Mars in the previous section. If so, we can affect the satisfaction of these preferences by our actions, and presumably they should be included in preference-utilitarian calculations. As an example, suppose there were 10 civilizations. All 10 valued reducing suffering and social equality. 5 of the 10 also valued generating knowledge. Only 1 of the 10 valued creating paintings and poetry. Suppose our civilization values all of those things. Perhaps previously we were going to spend money on creating more poetry, because our citizens value that highly. However, upon considering that poetry would not satisfy the preferences of the other civilizations, we might switch more toward knowledge and especially toward suffering reduction and equality promotion. In general, considering the distribution of outward-directed preferences across the multiverse should lead us to favor more those preferences of ours that are more evolutionarily robust, i.e., that we predict more civilizations to have settled upon. One corollary is that we should care less about values that we have due to particular, idiosyncratic historical contingencies, such as who happened to win some very closely contested war, or what species were killed by a random asteroid strike. Values based on more inevitable historical trends should matter relatively more strongly.

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Aesthetic preferences are important to our util calc even if they don’t directly correspond to pleasurable experiences.
Tomasik 14
Brian Tomasik (“I work on researching the best ways to reduce suffering in the future, examining crucial considerations in science, politics, sociology, and philosophy that bear on this topic. You can read more on my website: Essays On Reducing Suffering. I graduated from Swarthmore College in 2009, where I studied computer science, mathematics, statistics, and economics. I wrote a thesis on multitask feature selection and published additional papers on machine learning and international trade. From 2009-2013, I worked in the relevance division of Bing at Microsoft, improving ranking algorithms for web results through feature engineering, data mining, and architectural innovation. I built end-to-end three of Bing's production ranking models, which served over 5 billion searches on Bing and Yahoo every month.”). “Multiverse-Wide Preference Utilitarianism.” LessWrong. January 30th, 2014. http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jll/multiversewide_preference_utilitarianism/
In practice, most of people's preferences concern their own hedonic wellbeing. Some also concern the wellbeing of their children and friends, although often these preferences are manifested through direct happiness or suffering in oneself (e.g., being on the edge of your seat with anxiety when your 14-year-old daughter hasn't come home by midnight). However, some preferences are beyond hedonic experience by oneself. This is true of preferences about how the world will be after one dies, or whether the money you donated to that charity actually gets used well even if you wouldn't find out either way. It's true of many moral convictions. For instance, I want to actually reduce expected suffering rather than hook up to a machine that makes me think I reduced expected suffering and then blisses me out for the rest of my life. It's also true of some aesthetic preferences, such as the view that it would be good for art, music, and knowledge to exist even if no one was around to experience them. Certainly these non-hedonic preferences have hedonic effects. If I learned that I was going to be hooked up to a machine that would erase my moral convictions and bliss me out for the rest of my life, I would feel upset in the short run. However, almost certainly this aversive feeling would be outweighed by my pleasure and lack of suffering in the long run. So my preference conflicts with egoistic hedonism in this case. (My preference not to be blissed out is consistent with hedonistic utilitarianism, rather than hedonistic egoism, but hedonistic utilitarianism is a kind of moral system that exists outside the realm of hedonic preferences of an individual organism.) Because preference utilitarians believe that preference violations can be harmful even if they aren't accompanied by negative hedonic experience, there are some cases in which doing something that other people disapprove of is bad even if they never find out. For example, Muslims strongly oppose defacing the Quran. This means that, barring countervailing factors, it would be prima facie bad to deface a Quran in the privacy of your own home even if no one else knew about it. 

Thus the standard is maximizing aesthetic preference satisfaction.

I advocate that developing countries should accept the Precautionary Principle on resource extraction issues. I reserve the right to clarify.

I contend prioritizing environmental protection is key to satisfying aesthetic preferences.

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Evolution proves. People have an aesthetic preference for the beauty of the environment.
Chamberlin 2k
Andrew Chamberlin (Department of Archaeology and Prehistory, University of Sheffield). “On the Evolution of Human Aesthetic Preferences.” Research Articles. 2000. http://www.assemblage.group.shef.ac.uk/5/chamberl.html
The archaeological record of the last Ice Age, particularly after about 40,000 years ago, documents the emergence of clearly symbolic behaviour, including burials that were furnished with grave goods, the invention of parietal and portable representational art, the use of items of body ornamentation and possible instances of numerical or calendrical notation (Pfeiffer, 1982). This kind of material cultural evidence has informed and stimulated the discussion of the evolution of modern human cognitive abilities, but there is also an important aesthetic dimension to human culture, and as Kaplan (1992) has emphasised, evolutionary explanations of human aesthetic preferences benefit from integrated approaches that consider both cognitive and emotional responses. On both theoretical and empirical grounds it is likely that human emotional adaptations evolved much earlier than strictly symbolic capacities, given that 99 of the five million year timespan of hominid evolution preceded the emergence of material evidence for symbolic behaviour. Thus the study of human aesthetic preferences may provide a window into an extensive epoch in the early evolution of the human psyche. In this paper I review some human visual aesthetic preferences that may have originated in our species’ distant evolutionary past. These preferences include evolved responses to natural landscapes, symmetry preferences, and criteria of facial attractiveness. In the discussion that follows I employ a very general definition of aesthetics, best summarised as "mental appreciation of the shape or embellishment imposed on raw materials" (cf. Dissanayake, 1992), in which the term "appreciation" primarily denotes an involuntary emotional response to a stimulus, rather than the deliberate intellectual stance adopted by the modern professional or philosophical aesthete.    Landscape Preferences and the Hominid Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness An innate human preference for visual landscapes that have properties resembling those of savanna habitats (i.e. low-relief, sparsely-wooded tropical grasslands: Figure 1a and b) has been attributed to selection pressures operating during early human evolution (Balling and Falk, 1982; Orians and Heerwagen, 1992). According to Orians and Heerwagen, present-day humans express a rapid and often unconscious affective response to those general properties of a landscape that are perceived on initial visual encounter. Preferred landscapes are those containing features indicative of environmental conditions favourable for survival, such as an abundance of subsistence resources or a minimal threat from predators. The preference for savanna-style visual landscapes is most strongly expressed in children (Balling and Falk, 1982), and is also manifest in the deliberate design of artificial landscapes as exemplified by modern (i.e. post-Renaissance) ornamental parks and gardens (Kaplan, 1992). A more specific hypothesis of landscape preference stems from "prospect-refuge theory", which predicts that within a given landscape preferred locations are found at interfaces between prospect-dominant and refuge-dominant areas (Appleton, 1996). These vantage points combine unimpeded visual prospects with a ready opportunity for concealment and/or withdrawal to a safe refuge. Thus a treeless landscape is less visually attractive than a habitat containing isolated trees that can provide opportunities to hide or escape from potential predators. 

Prioritizing environmental protection over resource extraction is key.
Halsey 13
Daniel Halsey (PRI certified permaculture designer and teacher for the Permaculture Research Institute, Bachelor of Science degree in Temperate Climate Polyculture Design and Masters degree in Horticulture Professional Studies). “Aesthetics and the New Culture, Permaculture.” The Permaculture Research Institute. September 18th, 2013. http://permaculturenews.org/2013/09/18/aesthetics-and-the-new-culture-permaculture/
In serious ecological design, I believe, we need to redirect our vision to the functional aesthetic of natural systems. In the design process we must follow all the steps in the scale of permanence and apply our design process in a manner that redefines our personal aesthetic to a more natural expectation. Using a structure of decision-making, from large-scale patterns to details as they are justified, does this. Following an organic design process allows us to discover the design solutions rather than impose them. In order to do ecological design in a sustainable manner we follow a functional aesthetic as nature does. What we perceive as beauty in nature is the functional anesthetic that is the result of billions of choices as solutions to efficiency and fitness of living organisms. These patterns that repeat in our vision show us the most efficient use of space, resources, transportation of resources, and resilience. Organism fitness is directly related to its ability to thrive in its niche. Each cell, each genetic mutation, either increases or decreases the fitness of the affected organism. The simplicity of design for the most efficient use of space, resources, and structural resilience, must also be sufficient to allow the system to survive changes in a niche, be they as in our world, climactic, geological, meteorological, or through competition with other systems. When we as Permaculture designers begin to read the land, we want to make sure that we are being imprinted by the land so that our design is not imprinted (forced) on the land. That is why the assessment process, in site-assessment, cannot be motivated by extraction of resources. We are only looking for available resources that we may enhance, restore, and integrate in a design that will increase the fitness of the land and its ability to buffer extreme events, which may deplete its resources. Within the boundaries of the property for which we are making a master plan, we are the new genetic code. We are like a virus in its most positive sense. We as ecological designers can supply a “new genetic code” bringing increased resilience to a property. We can help the land restore itself to natural fertility. We can assist the land in developing deeper and richer organic material on its horizon. As stated in many permaculture articles, we accelerate succession. We must see ourselves as a steward of the land, not its master. By increasing the ecological services availableto the natural systems we create increased resources for ourselves. We are the primary livestock in this natural system, yet as the stewards of this land we know that if we were to vacate the property, the natural systems will be more resilient, deeper in organic materials, and at a higher state of natural restoration than if we had never appeared. There will be increased diversity of flora and fauna and increased levels of complexity in the ecology. 

The PP is key to solving environmental harms. We can’t afford to wait for scientific certainty. SEHN 98
Science and Environmental Health Network. “The Precautionary Principle: A Fact Sheet.” March 1998. http://www.sehn.org/Volume_3-1.html
What is the precautionary principle? A comprehensive definition of the precautionary principle was spelled out in a January 1998 meeting of scientists, lawyers, policy makers and environmentalists at Wingspread, headquarters of the Johnson Foundation in Racine, Wisconsin. The Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle, summarizes the principle this way: "When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically." Key elements of the principle include taking precaution in the face of scientific uncertainty; exploring alternatives to possibly harmful actions; placing the burden of proof on proponents of an activity rather than on victims or potential victims of the activity; and using democratic processes to carry out and enforce the principle - including the public right to informed consent. Is there some special meaning for "precaution"? It's the common sense idea behind many adages: "Be careful." "Better safe than sorry." "Look before you leap." "First do no harm." What about "scientific uncertainty"? Why should we take action before science tells us what is harmful or what is causing harm? Sometimes if we wait for proof it is too late. Scientific standards for demonstrating cause and effect are very high. For example, smoking was strongly suspected of causing lung cancer long before the link was demonstrated conclusively - that is, to the satisfaction of scientific standards of cause and effect. By then, many smokers had died of lung cancer. But many other people had already quit smoking because of the growing evidence that smoking was linked to lung cancer. These people were wisely exercising precaution despite some scientific uncertainty. Often a problem - such as a cluster of cancer cases or global warming - is too large, its causes too diverse, or the effects too long term to be sorted out with scientific experiments that would prove cause and effect. It's hard to take these problems into the laboratory. Instead, we have to rely on observations, case studies or predictions based on current knowledge. According to the precautionary principle, when substantial scientific evidence of any kind gives us good reason to believe that an activity, technology or substance may be harmful, we should act to prevent harm. If we always wait for scientific certainty, people may suffer and die, and damage to the natural world may be irreversible. We have lots of environmental regulations. Aren't we already exercising precaution? In some cases, to some extent, yes. When federal money is to be used in a major project, such as building a road on forested land or developing federal waste programs, the planners must produce an "environmental impact statement" to show how it will affect the surroundings. Then the public has a right to help determine whether the study has been thorough and all the alternatives considered. That is a precautionary action. But most environmental regulations, such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Superfund Law, are aimed at cleaning up pollution and controlling the amount of it released into the environment. They regulate toxic substances as they are emitted rather than limiting their use or production in the first place. These laws have served an important purpose - they have given us cleaner air, water and land. But they are based on the assumption that humans and ecosystems can absorb a certain amount of contamination without being harmed. We are now learning how difficult it is to know what levels of contamination, if any, are safe. Many of our food and drug laws and practices are more precautionary. Before a drug is introduced into the marketplace, the manufacturer must demonstrate that it is safe and effective. Then people must be told about risks and side effects before they use it. But there are some major loopholes in our regulations. If the precautionary principle were universally applied, many toxic substances, contaminants, and unsafe practices would not be produced or used in the first place. The precautionary principle concentrates on prevention rather than cure. How would the precautionary principle change that without bringing the economy to a halt? It would encourage the exploration of alternatives - better, safer, cheaper ways to do things- and the development of "cleaner" products and technologies. Sometimes simply slowing down in order to learn more about potential harm is the best alternative. It would shift the burden of proof from the public to proponents of a technology. The principle would ensure that the public knows about and has a say in the deployment of technologies that may be hazardous. Proponents would have to demonstrate through an open process that a technology was safe or necessary and that no better alternatives were available. 

?
Case outweighs theory.
Embracing environmentalism in round is key to rethinking our lifestyles, so it has an out of round impact.
Babb 14
Stephen Babb (coaches for Harvard Westlake). “What Happened to Environmentalism Impacts?” Victory Briefs. January 17th, 2014. http://victorybriefs.com/vbd/2014/1/what-happened-to-environmentalism-impacts
We’re actually not all that committed to environmentalism Though it’s fundamentally beyond the scope of this small contribution, there’s probably something to be said about our underlying attitudes toward the environment. Whether we admit it or not, we are children of a very developed world. We enjoy the products of environmentally-tainted production on a daily basis. Our economy and freedom of movement are premised on a series of planet-dirtying practices. On some level, that has to affect our willingness to tell the story of environmentalism, to re-issue the edicts that publicly temper our very real commitments to development. We’re all aware of what’s happening to the environment, but we’re only sometimes willing to do very much about it. The difference between the Right and Left on this point is far more a function of ideology than output. Despite the stark disagreements between the two sides, there remains a nearly universal unwillingness to seriously alter our daily routines on behalf of the environment. What little we do is often done for us by corporations steered by consumer choice. Indeed, the most effort we typically exert on behalf of the environment is choosing one brand over another. So maybe it shouldn’t be all that surprising that debaters are choosing strategy over the environment. The topic has given our community a ready-made soapbox for the reaffirmation of the environmentalist creed.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 4 | Opponent: Collegiate NE Nathan Ewing-Crystal | Judge: Charles Rutter
Policymakers must maximize utility. 4 reasons.

A. Act-omission distinction doesn’t apply to states.
Sunstein and Vermuele 5
Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermuele, “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life?Life Tradeoffs,” Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper No. 85 (March 2005), p. 17.
The most fundamental point is that unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice between or among possible policies for regulating third parties. The distinction between acts and omissions may not be intelligible in this context, and even if it is, the distinction does not make a morally relevant difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do anything or refusing to act. Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized private action – for example, private killing – becomes obscure when government formally forbids private action but chooses a set of policy instruments that does not adequately or fully discourage it.

B. The traditional Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics holds that light waves instantaneously collapse into particles, which is a finite length over zero time, which is impossible. Only the Many-Worlds Interpretation escapes this dilemma and is thus more consistent with the rest of physics. Vaidman 2
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2002. "Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.”
The reason for adopting the Many-Worlds Interpretation MWI is that it avoids the collapse of the quantum wave. (Other non-collapse theories are not better than MWI for various reasons, e.g., nonlocality of Bohmian mechanics; and the disadvantage of all of them is that they have some additional structure.) The collapse postulate is a physical law that differs from all known physics in two aspects: it is genuinely random and it involves some kind of action at a distance. According to the collapse postulate the outcome of a quantum experiment is not determined by the initial conditions of the Universe prior to the experiment: only the probabilities are governed by the initial state. Moreover, Bell 1964 has shown that there cannot be a compatible local-variables theory that will make deterministic predictions. There is no experimental evidence in favor of collapse and against the MWI. We need not assume that Nature plays dice. The MWI is a deterministic theory for a physical Universe and it explains why a world appears to be indeterministic for human observers.

MWI undermines the notion of personal identity. Vaidman 2
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2002. "Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics."
“I” am an object, such as Earth, cat, etc. “I” is defined at a particular time by a complete (classical) description of the state of my body and of my brain. “I” and “Lev” do not name the same things (even though my name is Lev). At the present moment there are many different me’s “Lev”s in different worlds (not more than one in each world), but it is meaningless to say that now there is another “I”. I have a particular, well defined past: I correspond to a particular “Lev” in 2002, but I do not have a well defined future: I correspond to a multitude of me’s “Lev”s in 2010. In the framework of the MWI it is meaningless to ask: Which Lev in 2010 will I be? I will correspond to them all. Every time I perform a quantum experiment (with several possible results) it only seems to me that I obtain a single definite result. Indeed, Lev who obtains this particular result thinks this way. However, this Lev cannot be identified as the only Lev after the experiment. Lev before the experiment corresponds to all “Lev”s obtaining all possible results. Although this approach to the concept of personal identity seems somewhat unusual, it is plausible in the light of the critique of personal identity by Parfit 1986. Parfit considers some artificial situations in which a person splits into several copies, and argues that there is no good answer to the question: Which copy is me? He concludes that personal identity is not what matters when I divide. 

In the absence of personal identity, only end states can matter. Shoemaker 99
Shoemaker, David (Dept of Philosophy, U Memphis). “Utilitarianism and Personal Identity.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 33: 183–199, 1999. http://www.csun.edu/~ds56723/jvipaper.pdf
Extreme reductionism might lend support to utilitarianism in the following way. Many people claim that we are justified in maximizing the good in our own lives, but not justified in maximizing the good across sets of lives, simply because each of us is a single, deeply unified person, unified by the further fact of identity, whereas there is no such corresponding unity across sets of lives. But if the only justification for the different treatment of individual lives and sets of lives is the further fact, and this fact is undermined by the truth of reductionism, then nothing justifies this different treatment. There are no deeply unified subjects of experience. What remains are merely the experiences themselves, and so any ethical theory distinguishing between individual lives and sets of lives is mistaken. If the deep, further fact is missing, then there are no unities. The morally significant units should then be the states people are in at particular times, and an ethical theory that focused on them and attempted to improve their quality, whatever their location, would be the most plausible. Utilitarianism is just such a theory.

C. Knowledge reduces to merely true belief. “Reliable” sources of justification aren’t necessary for the goal of epistemology, or finding true beliefs. Sartwell 91
Crispin Sartwell. Knowledge Without Justification. 1991. http://www.crispinsartwell.com/know.htm
It is widely held that our epistemic goal with regard to particular propositions is achieving true beliefs and avoiding false ones about propositions with which we are epistemically concerned. (We have seen that Alston, for one, endorses that view.) That is, it is widely admitted that on any good account of justification, there must be reason to think that the beliefs justified on the account are likely to be true. Indeed, proponents of all the major conceptions of justification hold this position. For example, the foundationalist Paul Moser writes:   Epistemic justification is essentially related to the so-called cognitive goal of truth, insofar as an individual belief is epistemically justified only if it is appropriately directed toward the goal of truth. More specifically, on the present conception, one is epistemically justified in believing a proposition only if one has good reason to believe it is true.(22)     The reliabilist Alvin Goldman claims, similarly, that a condition on an account of justification is that beliefs justified on the account be likely to be true; he says that a plausible conception of justification will be "truth-linked."(23) And the coherentist Laurence BonJour puts it even more strongly:   If epistemic justification were not conducive to truth in this way, if finding epistemically justified beliefs did not substantially increase the likelihood of finding true ones, epistemic justification would be irrelevant to our main cognitive goal and of dubious worth. It is only if we have some reason to think that epistemic justification constitutes a path to truth that we as cognitive human beings have any motive for preferring epistemically justified beliefs to epistemically unjustified ones. Epistemic justification is therefore in the final analysis only an instrumental value, not an intrinsic one.(24)     In fact, it is often enough taken to be the distinguishing mark of the fact that we are epistemically concerned with a proposition that we are concerned with its truth or falsity. That is what, on the view of many philosophers, distinguishes epistemic from moral or prudential constraints on belief, what distinguishes inquiry from other belief-generating procedures. (If the theory I gave in the first chapter is right, ther are no non-epistemic belief-generating procedures in this sense. That fact merely underscores the present point.) I have argued that a plausible normative epistemology will be teleological. And I have claimed that the conception which accounts of knowledge are attempting to analyze or describe is that of the epistemic telos with regard to particular propositions. It would follow that, if a philosopher holds that the epistemic telos is merely true belief, that philosopher implicitly commits himself, his own asservations to the contrary, to the view that knowledge is merely true belief.  I think that this is the case. I think, that is, that in the above passages, these philosophers have committed themselves implicitly to the view that knowledge is merely true belief, and that justification is a criterion rather than a logically necessary condition of knowledge. By a criterion, to repeat, I mean a test for whether some item has some property that is not itself a logically necessary condition of that item's having that property. Justification on the present view is, first of all, a means by which we achieve knowledge, that is, by which we arrive at true beliefs, and second, it provides a test of whether someone has knowledge, that is, whether her beliefs are true. So again, the present view does not make accounts of justification trivial, or unconnected with the assessment of claims to know. If our epistemic goal with regard to particular propositions is true belief, then justification (a) gives procedures by which true beliefs are obtained, and (b) gives standards for evaluating the products of such procedures with regard to that goal. From the point of view of (a), justification prescribes techniques by which knowledge is gained. From the point of view of (b) it gives a criterion for knowledge. But in neither case does it describe a logically necessary condition for knowledge.  Another way of putting the matter is like this. If we describe justification as of merely instrumental value with regard to arriving at truth, as BonJour does explicitly, we can no longer maintain both that knowledge is the telos of inquiry and that justification is a necessary condition of knowledge. It is incoherent to build a specification of what are regarded merely as means of achieving some goal into the description of the goal itself; in such circumstances the goal can be described independently of the means. So if justification is demanded because it is instrumental to true belief, it cannot also be maintained that knowledge is justified true belief.  I will now certainly be accused of begging the question by assuming that knowledge is the goal of inquiry. There is justice in this claim in that I have not gone very far toward establishing the point. But I would ask my accusers at this point whether they can do better in describing the conception which theories of knowledge set out to analyze or describe without begging the question in favor of some such theory. And I ask also, if knowledge is not the overarching epistemic telos with regard to particular propositions, why such tremendous emphasis has been placed on the theory of knowledge in the history of philosophy, and just what function that notion serves within that history. If knowledge is not the overarching purpose of inquiry, then why is the notion important, and why should we continue to be concerned in normative epistemology above all with what knowledge is and how it can be achieved? If we want to withold the term `knowledge' from mere true belief, but also want to hold that mere true belief is the purpose of inquiry, then I suggest that what remains is a mere verbal dispute. That is, if we treat mere true belief as the purpose of inquiry, but do not equate it with knowledge, then I do not think that knowledge is any longer central to normative epistemology. And I would insist that we are not going to understand what `knowledge' means in the tradition, in Plato and Descartes, for example, if we do not regard them as holding knowledge to be the goal of inquiry. In fact, if it is allowed that mere true belief is the telos of inquiry, but that we should still reserve the term `knowledge' for justified true belief (and perhaps something more), I will simply abandon the term `knowledge' to the epistemology of justification. But first of all, as I suggested in the third chapter, I think that `knowledge' will now merely be a technical term with a stipulated definition. And second, I do not think it will be central to epistemology, since it no longer represents our epistemic goal. And third, I think the stipulated definition will either be redundant (if justification is held to be truth conducive) or, as I will argue, incoherent (if it is not).  Now it may well be held that justification is of more than instrumental value, because if we are not justified in believing p, though p is true and we in fact believe it, we may have false beliefs that lead us to p, and we may continue to generate false beliefs in the future. All of this is true, but it is irrelevant to the present point. Recall that I have characterized knowledge as our epistemic goal with regard to particular propositions. Insofar as p is concerned, this goal has been realized if p is true and we believe it. Insofar as we have also such goals as continuing to generate true beliefs, rendering our system of beliefs coherent, and so forth, it is desirable to have justified beliefs. But with regard to any particular proposition, our goal has been reached if we believe that proposition and it is true.  But I do not want simply to let the matter rest on a supposed agreement among some contemporary epistemologists that our epistemic goal with regard to particular propositions is true belief. Such epistemologists are agreed that knowledge is at least justified true belief. I think that Alston is right to think that the only plausible way to construe this claim is that knowledge is at least true belief based on adequate grounds, or true belief reached from a strong position. So perhaps the figures in question, on reflection, would describe the epistemic telos not as true belief but as true belief based on adequate grounds, or true belief reached from a strong position.  Only it must now be asked, why do we want to have adequate grounds? Why do we want to be in a strong position? This question ought to be misguided if true belief based on adequate grounds or true belief reached from a strong position is in fact the purpose of inquiry. For there is no good answer to the question of why we desire our ultimate ends. But the question is hardly misguided. In fact, we cannot even specify what it is to have adequate grounds except that these grounds tend to establish that the proposition in question is true; we cannot even specify what it is to be in a strong position except as being in a strong position to get the truth. This indicates that the purpose of inquiry can be formulated without reference to the notions of ground or position. Thus, on the views in question, believing the truth is in fact our overarching epistemic telos with regard to particular propositions, on the only plausible conception of justification. Hence, on these views, knowledge is merely true belief. 

Util coheres with the fact that knowledge reduces to mere true belief.
Petersen 11
Steve Petersen (Niagara University). “Utilitarian Epistemology.” February 10th, 2011. http://stevepetersen.net/professional/petersen-utilitarian-epistemology.pdf
To ask “why is knowledge of more instrumental value than mere true belief?” is, on this picture, like asking “why are earned pro?ts of more instrumental value than monetary windfalls?” The answer to the ?nancial version of this question is clearly that the earnings are not more valuable. By analogy, then, neither is knowledge. The epistemic utilitarian embraces this conclusion and denies the intuition that knowledge is better than mere true belief, even on the instrumental version of the value question. The reason, illustrated by the analogy, is fairly simple: like anything but welfare, epistemic states are at best of instrumental value, and (as we noted earlier) generalizations about instrumental value only make sense under uncertainty. Generally charity is more valuable than murder, but to the classical utilitarian (and to the classical utilitarian alone) it is not sensible to ask “why is a charityable act more valuable than a murder that results in the same amount of utility?” To assume there is an answer here begs the question against the utilitarian. The same goes, one step down the instrumental chain, for the question “why are earnings more valuable than windfalls?” Under uncertainty, investments with high expected monetary value are in an important, instrumental sense more valuable than those with poor expected monetary value, but this question builds in the assumption that both result in the same monetary value (given of course that all else is equal). Finally, the same goes for knowledge and lucky-but-true belief; in the description of the case, both have gotten the relevant epistemic (instrumental) good. To stipulate that, despite the odds, luck-sensitive belief formation nonetheless resulted in a true belief is just like stipulating that the murder under consideration ended up net bene?tting people, or that the stupid casino bet ended up paying off. 

D. Revisionary intuitionism is true and leads to util.
Yudkowsky 8
Eliezer Yudkowsky (research fellow of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute; he also writes Harry Potter fan fiction). “The ‘Intuitions’ Behind ‘Utilitarianism.’” 28 January 2008. LessWrong. http://lesswrong.com/lw/n9/the_intuitions_behind_utilitarianism/
I haven't said much about metaethics - the nature of morality - because that has a forward dependency on a discussion of the Mind Projection Fallacy that I haven't gotten to yet. I used to be very confused about metaethics. After my confusion finally cleared up, I did a postmortem on my previous thoughts. I found that my object-level moral reasoning had been valuable and my meta-level moral reasoning had been worse than useless. And this appears to be a general syndrome - people do much better when discussing whether torture is good or bad than when they discuss the meaning of "good" and "bad". Thus, I deem it prudent to keep moral discussions on the object level wherever I possibly can. Occasionally people object to any discussion of morality on the grounds that morality doesn't exist, and in lieu of jumping over the forward dependency to explain that "exist" is not the right term to use here, I generally say, "But what do you do anyway?" and take the discussion back down to the object level. Paul Gowder, though, has pointed out that both the idea of choosing a googolplex dust specks in a googolplex eyes over 50 years of torture for one person, and the idea of "utilitarianism", depend on "intuition". He says I've argued that the two are not compatible, but charges me with failing to argue for the utilitarian intuitions that I appeal to. Now "intuition" is not how I would describe the computations that underlie human morality and distinguish us, as moralists, from an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness and/or a rock. But I am okay with using the word "intuition" as a term of art, bearing in mind that "intuition" in this sense is not to be contrasted to reason, but is, rather, the cognitive building block out of which both long verbal arguments and fast perceptual arguments are constructed. I see the project of morality as a project of renormalizing intuition. We have intuitions about things that seem desirable or undesirable, intuitions about actions that are right or wrong, intuitions about how to resolve conflicting intuitions, intuitions about how to systematize specific intuitions into general principles. Delete all the intuitions, and you aren't left with an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness, you're left with a rock. Keep all your specific intuitions and refuse to build upon the reflective ones, and you aren't left with an ideal philosopher of perfect spontaneity and genuineness, you're left with a grunting caveperson running in circles, due to cyclical preferences and similar inconsistencies. "Intuition", as a term of art, is not a curse word when it comes to morality - there is nothing else to argue from. Even modus ponens is an "intuition" in this sense - it's just that modus ponens still seems like a good idea after being formalized, reflected on, extrapolated out to see if it has sensible consequences, etcetera. So that is "intuition". However, Gowder did not say what he meant by "utilitarianism". Does utilitarianism say... That right actions are strictly determined by good consequences? That praiseworthy actions depend on justifiable expectations of good consequences? That probabilities of consequences should normatively be discounted by their probability, so that a 50 probability of something bad should weigh exactly half as much in our tradeoffs? That virtuous actions always correspond to maximizing expected utility under some utility function? That two harmful events are worse than one? That two independent occurrences of a harm (not to the same person, not interacting with each other) are exactly twice as bad as one? That for any two harms A and B, with A much worse than B, there exists some tiny probability such that gambling on this probability of A is preferable to a certainty of B? If you say that I advocate something, or that my argument depends on something, and that it is wrong, do please specify what this thingy is... anyway, I accept 3, 5, 6, and 7, but not 4; I am not sure about the phrasing of 1; and 2 is true, I guess, but phrased in a rather solipsistic and selfish fashion: you should not worry about being praiseworthy. Now, what are the "intuitions" upon which my "utilitarianism" depends? This is a deepish sort of topic, but I'll take a quick stab at it. First of all, it's not just that someone presented me with a list of statements like those above, and I decided which ones sounded "intuitive". Among other things, if you try to violate "utilitarianism", you run into paradoxes, contradictions, circular preferences, and other things that aren't symptoms of moral wrongness so much as moral incoherence. After you think about moral problems for a while, and also find new truths about the world, and even discover disturbing facts about how you yourself work, you often end up with different moral opinions than when you started out. This does not quite define moral progress, but it is how we experience moral progress. As part of my experienced moral progress, I've drawn a conceptual separation between questions of type Where should we go? and questions of type How should we get there? (Could that be what Gowder means by saying I'm "utilitarian"?) The question of where a road goes - where it leads - you can answer by traveling the road and finding out. If you have a false belief about where the road leads, this falsity can be destroyed by the truth in a very direct and straightforward manner. When it comes to wanting to go to a particular place, this want is not entirely immune from the destructive powers of truth. You could go there and find that you regret it afterward (which does not define moral error, but is how we experience moral error). But, even so, wanting to be in a particular place seems worth distinguishing from wanting to take a particular road to a particular place. Our intuitions about where to go are arguable enough, but our intuitions about how to get there are frankly messed up. After the two hundred and eighty-seventh research study showing that people will chop their own feet off if you frame the problem the wrong way, you start to distrust first impressions. When you've read enough research on scope insensitivity - people will pay only 28 more to protect all 57 wilderness areas in Ontario than one area, people will pay the same amount to save 50,000 lives as 5,000 lives... that sort of thing... Well, the worst case of scope insensitivity I've ever heard of was described here by Slovic: Other recent research shows similar results. Two Israeli psychologists asked people to contribute to a costly life-saving treatment. They could offer that contribution to a group of eight sick children, or to an individual child selected from the group. The target amount needed to save the child (or children) was the same in both cases. Contributions to individual group members far outweighed the contributions to the entire group. There's other research along similar lines, but I'm just presenting one example, 'cause, y'know, eight examples would probably have less impact. If you know the general experimental paradigm, then the reason for the above behavior is pretty obvious - focusing your attention on a single child creates more emotional arousal than trying to distribute attention around eight children simultaneously. So people are willing to pay more to help one child than to help eight. Now, you could look at this intuition, and think it was revealing some kind of incredibly deep moral truth which shows that one child's good fortune is somehow devalued by the other children's good fortune. But what about the billions of other children in the world? Why isn't it a bad idea to help this one child, when that causes the value of all the other children to go down? How can it be significantly better to have 1,329,342,410 happy children than 1,329,342,409, but then somewhat worse to have seven more at 1,329,342,417? Or you could look at that and say: "The intuition is wrong: the brain can't successfully multiply by eight and get a larger quantity than it started with. But it ought to, normatively speaking." And once you realize that the brain can't multiply by eight, then the other cases of scope neglect stop seeming to reveal some fundamental truth about 50,000 lives being worth just the same effort as 5,000 lives, or whatever. You don't get the impression you're looking at the revelation of a deep moral truth about nonagglomerative utilities. It's just that the brain doesn't goddamn multiply. Quantities get thrown out the window. If you have $100 to spend, and you spend $20 each on each of 5 efforts to save 5,000 lives, you will do worse than if you spend $100 on a single effort to save 50,000 lives. Likewise if such choices are made by 10 different people, rather than the same person. As soon as you start believing that it is better to save 50,000 lives than 25,000 lives, that simple preference of final destinations has implications for the choice of paths, when you consider five different events that save 5,000 lives. (It is a general principle that Bayesians see no difference between the long-run answer and the short-run answer; you never get two different answers from computing the same question two different ways. But the long run is a helpful intuition pump, so I am talking about it anyway.) The aggregative valuation strategy of "shut up and multiply" arises from the simple preference to have more of something - to save as many lives as possible - when you have to describe general principles for choosing more than once, acting more than once, planning at more than one time. Aggregation also arises from claiming that the local choice to save one life doesn't depend on how many lives already exist, far away on the other side of the planet, or far away on the other side of the universe. Three lives are one and one and one. No matter how many billions are doing better, or doing worse. 3 = 1 + 1 + 1, no matter what other quantities you add to both sides of the equation. And if you add another life you get 4 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. That's aggregation. When you've read enough heuristics and biases research, and enough coherence and uniqueness proofs for Bayesian probabilities and expected utility, and you've seen the "Dutch book" and "money pump" effects that penalize trying to handle uncertain outcomes any other way, then you don't see the preference reversals in the Allais Paradox as revealing some incredibly deep moral truth about the intrinsic value of certainty. It just goes to show that the brain doesn't goddamn multiply. The primitive, perceptual intuitions that make a choice "feel good" don't handle probabilistic pathways through time very skillfully, especially when the probabilities have been expressed symbolically rather than experienced as a frequency. So you reflect, devise more trustworthy logics, and think it through in words. When you see people insisting that no amount of money whatsoever is worth a single human life, and then driving an extra mile to save $10; or when you see people insisting that no amount of money is worth a decrement of health, and then choosing the cheapest health insurance available; then you don't think that their protestations reveal some deep truth about incommensurable utilities. Part of it, clearly, is that primitive intuitions don't successfully diminish the emotional impact of symbols standing for small quantities - anything you talk about seems like "an amount worth considering". And part of it has to do with preferring unconditional social rules to conditional social rules. Conditional rules seem weaker, seem more subject to manipulation. If there's any loophole that lets the government legally commit torture, then the government will drive a truck through that loophole. So it seems like there should be an unconditional social injunction against preferring money to life, and no "but" following it. Not even "but a thousand dollars isn't worth a 0.0000000001 probability of saving a life". Though the latter choice, of course, is revealed every time we sneeze without calling a doctor. The rhetoric of sacredness gets bonus points for seeming to express an unlimited commitment, an unconditional refusal that signals trustworthiness and refusal to compromise. So you conclude that moral rhetoric espouses qualitative distinctions, because espousing a quantitative tradeoff would sound like you were plotting to defect. On such occasions, people vigorously want to throw quantities out the window, and they get upset if you try to bring quantities back in, because quantities sound like conditions that would weaken the rule. But you don't conclude that there are actually two tiers of utility with lexical ordering. You don't conclude that there is actually an infinitely sharp moral gradient, some atom that moves a Planck distance (in our continuous physical universe) and sends a utility from 0 to infinity. You don't conclude that utilities must be expressed using hyper-real numbers. Because the lower tier would simply vanish in any equation. It would never be worth the tiniest effort to recalculate for it. All decisions would be determined by the upper tier, and all thought spent thinking about the upper tier only, if the upper tier genuinely had lexical priority. As Peter Norvig once pointed out, if Asimov's robots had strict priority for the First Law of Robotics ("A robot shall not harm a human being, nor through inaction allow a human being to come to harm") then no robot's behavior would ever show any sign of the other two Laws; there would always be some tiny First Law factor that would be sufficient to determine the decision. Whatever value is worth thinking about at all, must be worth trading off against all other values worth thinking about, because thought itself is a limited resource that must be traded off. When you reveal a value, you reveal a utility. I don't say that morality should always be simple. I've already said that the meaning of music is more than happiness alone, more than just a pleasure center lighting up. I would rather see music composed by people than by nonsentient machine learning algorithms, so that someone should have the joy of composition; I care about the journey, as well as the destination. And I am ready to hear if you tell me that the value of music is deeper, and involves more complications, than I realize - that the valuation of this one event is more complex than I know.  But that's for one event. When it comes to multiplying by quantities and probabilities, complication is to be avoided - at least if you care more about the destination than the journey. When you've reflected on enough intuitions, and corrected enough absurdities, you start to see a common denominator, a meta-principle at work, which one might phrase as "Shut up and multiply." Where music is concerned, I care about the journey. When lives are at stake, I shut up and multiply. It is more important that lives be saved, than that we conform to any particular ritual in saving them. And the optimal path to that destination is governed by laws that are simple, because they are math. And that's why I'm a utilitarian - at least when I am doing something that is overwhelmingly more important than my own feelings about it - which is most of the time, because there are not many utilitarians, and many things left undone.

However, preference util is best. Impartiality is key and entails the consideration of everyone’s preferences. 2 reasons.

A. Preference util is required by the logical consistency of moral statements.
Singer 09
Peter Singer Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, Princeton, “The Groundwork of Utilitarian Morals: Reconsidering Hare’s Argument for Utilitarianism,” draft prepared for the Conference on Issues in Modern Philosophy: “The Foundations of Morality,” NYU Philosophy Department, November 7, 2009, 34.
Hare was a non-cognitivist. He held that moral judgments do not describe the world, and in that sense cannot be true or false, as ordinary descriptive statements can be. They are prescriptions, which means they belong to the broad family of imperatives. In Freedom and Reason, published in 1963, Hare argues that the freedom we have to make up our own minds about what is right or wrong lies in the fact that we choose what we shall prescribe. That choice, however, is not unconstrained. Reason enters the picture both because there can be logical relations between prescriptions, and because moral judgments are universalizable. If I say “Shut all the windows!” and “Leave the central window open!” I contradict myself. I also contradict myself if I say “All tax cheats ought to be imprisoned” and “I am a tax cheat, but I ought not to be imprisoned.” Universalizability means that, in Hare’s words: One cannot with logical consistency, where a and b are are two individuals, say that a ought, in a certain situation specified in universal terms without reference to individuals, to act in a certain way, also specified in universal terms, but that b ought not to act in a similarly specified way in a similarly specified situation. This is because in any ‘ought’-statement there is implicit a principle which says that the statement applies to all precisely similar situations. This means that if I say ‘This is what ought to be done; but there could be a situation exactly like this one in its non-moral properties, but in which the corresponding person, who was exactly like the person who ought to do it in this situation, ought not to do it’, I contradict myself. Moral judgments, in other words, cannot be based on just any reason. In particular, we cannot make exceptions for ourselves. If I claim that you ought to give to the poor, I must either agree that I too ought to give to the poor, or I must find a reason why it is not the case that I ought to give to the poor, and this reason must be specifiable without reference to individuals. That reason might be that you are a billionaire and I am struggling to keep up with my mortgage payments. But it cannot be that I am the one who will benefit if I keep all my money, whereas you will benefit if you keep all your money. Although Hare’s words sometimes gave the impression that he understood universalizability to be a requirement of reason (for example: “to universalize is to give the reason”) his considered position leaves room for amoralism, and the amoralist, in his view, need not be inconsistent or irrational. Moral language excludes non-universalizable judgments, but there is no logical requirement that one use moral language, or guide one’s life by universalizable principles. If that is right, the significance of any conclusions that we may be able to reach by drawing out the implications of universalizability will be weakened. One can always escape those conclusions by refusing to make moral judgments. Nevertheless, since many of us do want to use terms like “ought” and “right,” the possibility of rational amoralism does not render pointless the exercise of exploring the implications of universalizability, and seeing what normative conclusions may follow from its application.  When I prescribe something, using moral language, my prescription commits me to a substantive moral judgment about all relevantly similar cases. This includes hypothetical cases in which I am in a different position from my actual one. So to make a moral judgment, I must put myself in the position of the other person affected by my proposed action – or to be more precise, in the position of all those affected by my action. Whether I can accept the judgment – that is, whether I can prescribe it universally – will then depend on whether I could accept it if I had to live the lives of all those affected by the action.  That sounds as if universalizable moral judgments will have to be based on considering the preferences or interests of all affected – which would mean that we can arrive very rapidly at a form of utilitarianism based on maximizing the satisfaction of preferences or interests. But Hare did not arrive at utilitarianism so swiftly. In Freedom and Reason he raises the issue of whether it is wrong for a woman to take a well-paid job undressing herself a at a strip club. The stripper prefers the work to anything else she can get, and those in the audience enjoy the performance. As far as interests are concerned, Hare tells us, “since everybody gets what he or she wants, nobody’s interests are harmed.” Nevertheless, that does not settle the moral issue, Hare tells us, because “it is a question not of interests but of ideals.” Some hold ideas of how a person should behave – or perhaps, how a woman should behave - that are incompatible with undressing for the sexual enjoyment of strangers. Hare considers the possibility of confining the moral terms to questions concerning the impact of our actions on other people’s interests, but he rejects such a “terminological fiat” on the grounds that such a restriction “would truncate moral philosophy by preventing it saying anything about ideals.” In the same work, Hare makes a similar statement about a Nazi who asserts that all Jews should be killed. This prescription commits the Nazi to prescribing that he himself should be killed, in the hypothetical case in which he discovers that he is a Jew. Since, we assume, the interests of Jews in continuing to live are greater than the interests of Nazis in killing them, no one would prefer to live the lives of all those affected by the prescription that all Jews be killed. Nevertheless, Hare says, a Nazi could be so fanatical about his belief in racial purity that he would think that he should be killed, even if he were a Jew. If he accepts that, he is not violating universalizability. Instead, in Hare’s words, “the fanatic nails his flag to the content of the ideal, irrespective of its holder.” Development of Hare’s Argument: Final Form In “Ethical Theory and Utilitarianism,” published in 1976, Hare took the argument an important step further. He had, he wrote discovered how “to deal in an agreeably clear way with the problem of the fanatic, who has given me so much trouble in the past.” Here is how he thought this could be done: In so far as, in order to prescribe universally, I have to strip away (qua author of the moral decision) all my present desires etc., I shall have to strip away, among them, all the ideals that I have; for an ideal is a kind of desire or liking (in the generic sense in which I am using those terms) … This does not mean that I have to give up having ideals, nor even that I must stop giving any consideration to my ideals when I make my moral decisions; it means only that I am not allowed to take them into account qua author of the moral decision. It is, of course, only when I can take my ideals into account qua ideals – that is, as something other than interests – that ideals can trump interests. If I can only take them into account as some kind of desire or liking, the content of the ideal no longer matters. Ideals are then treated simply as another kind of preference. When Hare revisits the example of the fanatical Nazi, he shows how this works. Now, he says: …the only sort of fanatic that is going to bother us is the person whose ideals are so intensely pursued that the weight that has to be given to them, considered impartially, outbalances the combined weights of all the ideals, desires, likings, etc. that have to be frustrated in order to achieve them. No actual Nazi could possibly have desired the extermination of Jews with sufficient intensity to outweigh all the desires of the Jews to continue to live, so this kind of fanatic is quite fantastic. Since our moral intuitions in fantastic situations are, Hare argues, unreliable, such fanatics need not trouble us. 

B. People must abstract from their social position, entailing impartially considering everyone’s interests. Moral statements by definition are impartial.
Harsanyi 77
John Harsanyi (utilitarian). “Morality and the Theory of Rational Behavior.” Social Research. Vol. 44, No. 4. Winter 1997. http://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/gender/Harsanyi.pdf
This equiprobability model of moral value judgments gives us both a powerful analytical criterion and a very convenient heuristic criterion for deciding practical moral problems. If we want to decide between two alternative moral standards A and B, all we have to do is ask ourselves the question, ‘Would I prefer to live in a society conforming to standard A or in a society conforming to standard B? – assuming I would not know in advance what my actual social position would be in either society but rather would have to assume to have an equal chance of ending up in any one of the possible positions.’ Admittedly, this criterion – or any conceivable moral criterion – will still leave each of us with the great moral responsibility, and the often very difficult intellectual task, of actually choosing between these two alternative moral standards in terms of this criterion. But by using this criterion we will know at least what the actual intellectual problem is that we are trying to solve in choosing between them. My equiprobability model was first published in 1953, and was extended in 1955. Vickrey had suggested a similar idea, but my work was independent of his. Later John Rawls again independently proposed a very similar model, which he called the ‘original position’, based on the ‘veil of ignorance’. But while my own model served as a basis for a utilitarian theory, Rawls derived very nonutilitarian conclusions from his own. Yet the difference does not lie in the nature of the two models, which are based on almost identical qualitative assumptions. Rather, the difference lies in the decision-theoretical analysis applied to the two models. One difference is that Rawls avoids any use of numerical probabilities. But the main difference is that Rawls makes the technical mistake of basing his analysis on a highly irrational decision rule, the maximin principle, which was fairly fashionable thirty years ago but which lost its attraction a few years later when its absurd practical implications were realised. Our model of moral value judgments can also be described as follows. Each individual has two very different sets of preferences. On the one hand, he has his personal preferences, which guide his everyday behaviour and which are expressed in his utility function U. Most people’s personal preferences will not be completely selfish. But they will assign higher weights to their own interests and to the interests of their family, their friends, and other personal associates than they will assign to the interests of complete strangers. On the other hand, each individual will also have moral preferences which may or may not have much influence on his everyday behaviour but which will guide his thinking in those – possibly very rare – moments when he forces a special impersonal and impartial attitude, that is, a moral attitude, upon himself. His moral preferences, unlike his personal preferences, will by definition always assign the same weight to all individuals’ interests, including his own. These moral preferences will be expressed by his social-welfare function W. Typically, different individuals will have very different utility functions Ui but, as can be seen from Equation (1) above, in theory they will tend to have identical social-welfare functions – but only if they agree in their factual assumptions on the nature of the individual utility functions Ui and on the conversion rations between different individuals’ utilities (as decided by interpersonal utility comparisons) – which, of course, may not be the case. By definition, a moral value judgment is always an expression of one’s moral preferences. Any evaluative statement one may make will automatically lose its status of a moral value judgment if it is unduly influenced by one’s personal interests and personal preferences.

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Given the MWI, preference util requires considering the evolutionarily robust aesthetic preferences of everyone in the multiverse.
Tomasik 14
Brian Tomasik (“I work on researching the best ways to reduce suffering in the future, examining crucial considerations in science, politics, sociology, and philosophy that bear on this topic. You can read more on my website: Essays On Reducing Suffering. I graduated from Swarthmore College in 2009, where I studied computer science, mathematics, statistics, and economics. I wrote a thesis on multitask feature selection and published additional papers on machine learning and international trade. From 2009-2013, I worked in the relevance division of Bing at Microsoft, improving ranking algorithms for web results through feature engineering, data mining, and architectural innovation. I built end-to-end three of Bing's production ranking models, which served over 5 billion searches on Bing and Yahoo every month.”). “Multiverse-Wide Preference Utilitarianism.” LessWrong. January 30th, 2014. http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jll/multiversewide_preference_utilitarianism/
According to Max Tegmark's "Parallel Universes," there's probably an exact copy of you reading this article within 101028 meters away and in practice, probably much closer. As Tegmark explains, this claim assumes only basic physics that most cosmologists take for granted. Even nearer than this distance are many people very similar to you but with minor variations -- e.g., with brown eyes instead of blue, or who prefer virtue ethics over deontology. In fact, all possible people exist somewhere in the multiverse, if only due to random fluctuations of the type that produce Boltzmann brains. Nick Bostrom calls these "freak observers." Just as there are art maximizers, there are also art minimizers who find art disgusting and want to eliminate as much of it as possible. For them, the thought of art triggers their brains' disgust centers instead of beauty centers. However, the distribution of organisms across the multiverse is not uniform. For instance, we should expect suffering reducers to be much more common than suffering increasers because organisms evolve to dislike suffering by themselves, their kin, and their reciprocal trading partners. Societies -- whether human or alien -- should often develop norms against cruelty for collective benefit. Human values give us some hints about what values across the multiverse look like, because human values are a kind of maximum likelihood estimator for the mode of the multiversal distribution. Of course, we should expect some variation about the mode. Even among humans, some cultural norms are distinct and others are universal. Probably values like not murdering, not causing unnecessary suffering, not stealing, etc. are more common among aliens than, say, the value of music or dance, which might be human-specific spandrels. Still, aliens may have their own spandrels that they call "art," and they might value those things. Like human values, alien values might be mostly self-directed toward their own wellbeing, especially in their earlier Darwinian phases. Unless we meet the aliens face-to-face, we can't improve their welfare directly. However, the aliens may also have some outward-directed aesthetic and moral values that apply across space and time, like the value of art as seen by the art-maximizing cities on Mars in the previous section. If so, we can affect the satisfaction of these preferences by our actions, and presumably they should be included in preference-utilitarian calculations. As an example, suppose there were 10 civilizations. All 10 valued reducing suffering and social equality. 5 of the 10 also valued generating knowledge. Only 1 of the 10 valued creating paintings and poetry. Suppose our civilization values all of those things. Perhaps previously we were going to spend money on creating more poetry, because our citizens value that highly. However, upon considering that poetry would not satisfy the preferences of the other civilizations, we might switch more toward knowledge and especially toward suffering reduction and equality promotion. In general, considering the distribution of outward-directed preferences across the multiverse should lead us to favor more those preferences of ours that are more evolutionarily robust, i.e., that we predict more civilizations to have settled upon. One corollary is that we should care less about values that we have due to particular, idiosyncratic historical contingencies, such as who happened to win some very closely contested war, or what species were killed by a random asteroid strike. Values based on more inevitable historical trends should matter relatively more strongly.

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Aesthetic preferences are important to our util calc even if they don’t directly correspond to pleasurable experiences.
Tomasik 14
Brian Tomasik (“I work on researching the best ways to reduce suffering in the future, examining crucial considerations in science, politics, sociology, and philosophy that bear on this topic. You can read more on my website: Essays On Reducing Suffering. I graduated from Swarthmore College in 2009, where I studied computer science, mathematics, statistics, and economics. I wrote a thesis on multitask feature selection and published additional papers on machine learning and international trade. From 2009-2013, I worked in the relevance division of Bing at Microsoft, improving ranking algorithms for web results through feature engineering, data mining, and architectural innovation. I built end-to-end three of Bing's production ranking models, which served over 5 billion searches on Bing and Yahoo every month.”). “Multiverse-Wide Preference Utilitarianism.” LessWrong. January 30th, 2014. http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/jll/multiversewide_preference_utilitarianism/
In practice, most of people's preferences concern their own hedonic wellbeing. Some also concern the wellbeing of their children and friends, although often these preferences are manifested through direct happiness or suffering in oneself (e.g., being on the edge of your seat with anxiety when your 14-year-old daughter hasn't come home by midnight). However, some preferences are beyond hedonic experience by oneself. This is true of preferences about how the world will be after one dies, or whether the money you donated to that charity actually gets used well even if you wouldn't find out either way. It's true of many moral convictions. For instance, I want to actually reduce expected suffering rather than hook up to a machine that makes me think I reduced expected suffering and then blisses me out for the rest of my life. It's also true of some aesthetic preferences, such as the view that it would be good for art, music, and knowledge to exist even if no one was around to experience them. Certainly these non-hedonic preferences have hedonic effects. If I learned that I was going to be hooked up to a machine that would erase my moral convictions and bliss me out for the rest of my life, I would feel upset in the short run. However, almost certainly this aversive feeling would be outweighed by my pleasure and lack of suffering in the long run. So my preference conflicts with egoistic hedonism in this case. (My preference not to be blissed out is consistent with hedonistic utilitarianism, rather than hedonistic egoism, but hedonistic utilitarianism is a kind of moral system that exists outside the realm of hedonic preferences of an individual organism.) Because preference utilitarians believe that preference violations can be harmful even if they aren't accompanied by negative hedonic experience, there are some cases in which doing something that other people disapprove of is bad even if they never find out. For example, Muslims strongly oppose defacing the Quran. This means that, barring countervailing factors, it would be prima facie bad to deface a Quran in the privacy of your own home even if no one else knew about it. 

Thus the standard is maximizing aesthetic preference satisfaction.

I advocate that developing countries should accept the Precautionary Principle on resource extraction issues. I reserve the right to clarify.

I contend prioritizing environmental protection is key to satisfying aesthetic preferences.

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Evolution proves. People have an aesthetic preference for the beauty of the environment.
Chamberlin 2k
Andrew Chamberlin (Department of Archaeology and Prehistory, University of Sheffield). “On the Evolution of Human Aesthetic Preferences.” Research Articles. 2000. http://www.assemblage.group.shef.ac.uk/5/chamberl.html
The archaeological record of the last Ice Age, particularly after about 40,000 years ago, documents the emergence of clearly symbolic behaviour, including burials that were furnished with grave goods, the invention of parietal and portable representational art, the use of items of body ornamentation and possible instances of numerical or calendrical notation (Pfeiffer, 1982). This kind of material cultural evidence has informed and stimulated the discussion of the evolution of modern human cognitive abilities, but there is also an important aesthetic dimension to human culture, and as Kaplan (1992) has emphasised, evolutionary explanations of human aesthetic preferences benefit from integrated approaches that consider both cognitive and emotional responses. On both theoretical and empirical grounds it is likely that human emotional adaptations evolved much earlier than strictly symbolic capacities, given that 99 of the five million year timespan of hominid evolution preceded the emergence of material evidence for symbolic behaviour. Thus the study of human aesthetic preferences may provide a window into an extensive epoch in the early evolution of the human psyche. In this paper I review some human visual aesthetic preferences that may have originated in our species’ distant evolutionary past. These preferences include evolved responses to natural landscapes, symmetry preferences, and criteria of facial attractiveness. In the discussion that follows I employ a very general definition of aesthetics, best summarised as "mental appreciation of the shape or embellishment imposed on raw materials" (cf. Dissanayake, 1992), in which the term "appreciation" primarily denotes an involuntary emotional response to a stimulus, rather than the deliberate intellectual stance adopted by the modern professional or philosophical aesthete.    Landscape Preferences and the Hominid Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness An innate human preference for visual landscapes that have properties resembling those of savanna habitats (i.e. low-relief, sparsely-wooded tropical grasslands: Figure 1a and b) has been attributed to selection pressures operating during early human evolution (Balling and Falk, 1982; Orians and Heerwagen, 1992). According to Orians and Heerwagen, present-day humans express a rapid and often unconscious affective response to those general properties of a landscape that are perceived on initial visual encounter. Preferred landscapes are those containing features indicative of environmental conditions favourable for survival, such as an abundance of subsistence resources or a minimal threat from predators. The preference for savanna-style visual landscapes is most strongly expressed in children (Balling and Falk, 1982), and is also manifest in the deliberate design of artificial landscapes as exemplified by modern (i.e. post-Renaissance) ornamental parks and gardens (Kaplan, 1992). A more specific hypothesis of landscape preference stems from "prospect-refuge theory", which predicts that within a given landscape preferred locations are found at interfaces between prospect-dominant and refuge-dominant areas (Appleton, 1996). These vantage points combine unimpeded visual prospects with a ready opportunity for concealment and/or withdrawal to a safe refuge. Thus a treeless landscape is less visually attractive than a habitat containing isolated trees that can provide opportunities to hide or escape from potential predators. 

Prioritizing environmental protection over resource extraction is key.
Halsey 13
Daniel Halsey (PRI certified permaculture designer and teacher for the Permaculture Research Institute, Bachelor of Science degree in Temperate Climate Polyculture Design and Masters degree in Horticulture Professional Studies). “Aesthetics and the New Culture, Permaculture.” The Permaculture Research Institute. September 18th, 2013. http://permaculturenews.org/2013/09/18/aesthetics-and-the-new-culture-permaculture/
In serious ecological design, I believe, we need to redirect our vision to the functional aesthetic of natural systems. In the design process we must follow all the steps in the scale of permanence and apply our design process in a manner that redefines our personal aesthetic to a more natural expectation. Using a structure of decision-making, from large-scale patterns to details as they are justified, does this. Following an organic design process allows us to discover the design solutions rather than impose them. In order to do ecological design in a sustainable manner we follow a functional aesthetic as nature does. What we perceive as beauty in nature is the functional anesthetic that is the result of billions of choices as solutions to efficiency and fitness of living organisms. These patterns that repeat in our vision show us the most efficient use of space, resources, transportation of resources, and resilience. Organism fitness is directly related to its ability to thrive in its niche. Each cell, each genetic mutation, either increases or decreases the fitness of the affected organism. The simplicity of design for the most efficient use of space, resources, and structural resilience, must also be sufficient to allow the system to survive changes in a niche, be they as in our world, climactic, geological, meteorological, or through competition with other systems. When we as Permaculture designers begin to read the land, we want to make sure that we are being imprinted by the land so that our design is not imprinted (forced) on the land. That is why the assessment process, in site-assessment, cannot be motivated by extraction of resources. We are only looking for available resources that we may enhance, restore, and integrate in a design that will increase the fitness of the land and its ability to buffer extreme events, which may deplete its resources. Within the boundaries of the property for which we are making a master plan, we are the new genetic code. We are like a virus in its most positive sense. We as ecological designers can supply a “new genetic code” bringing increased resilience to a property. We can help the land restore itself to natural fertility. We can assist the land in developing deeper and richer organic material on its horizon. As stated in many permaculture articles, we accelerate succession. We must see ourselves as a steward of the land, not its master. By increasing the ecological services availableto the natural systems we create increased resources for ourselves. We are the primary livestock in this natural system, yet as the stewards of this land we know that if we were to vacate the property, the natural systems will be more resilient, deeper in organic materials, and at a higher state of natural restoration than if we had never appeared. There will be increased diversity of flora and fauna and increased levels of complexity in the ecology. 

The PP is key to solving environmental harms. We can’t afford to wait for scientific certainty. SEHN 98
Science and Environmental Health Network. “The Precautionary Principle: A Fact Sheet.” March 1998. http://www.sehn.org/Volume_3-1.html
What is the precautionary principle? A comprehensive definition of the precautionary principle was spelled out in a January 1998 meeting of scientists, lawyers, policy makers and environmentalists at Wingspread, headquarters of the Johnson Foundation in Racine, Wisconsin. The Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle, summarizes the principle this way: "When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically." Key elements of the principle include taking precaution in the face of scientific uncertainty; exploring alternatives to possibly harmful actions; placing the burden of proof on proponents of an activity rather than on victims or potential victims of the activity; and using democratic processes to carry out and enforce the principle - including the public right to informed consent. Is there some special meaning for "precaution"? It's the common sense idea behind many adages: "Be careful." "Better safe than sorry." "Look before you leap." "First do no harm." What about "scientific uncertainty"? Why should we take action before science tells us what is harmful or what is causing harm? Sometimes if we wait for proof it is too late. Scientific standards for demonstrating cause and effect are very high. For example, smoking was strongly suspected of causing lung cancer long before the link was demonstrated conclusively - that is, to the satisfaction of scientific standards of cause and effect. By then, many smokers had died of lung cancer. But many other people had already quit smoking because of the growing evidence that smoking was linked to lung cancer. These people were wisely exercising precaution despite some scientific uncertainty. Often a problem - such as a cluster of cancer cases or global warming - is too large, its causes too diverse, or the effects too long term to be sorted out with scientific experiments that would prove cause and effect. It's hard to take these problems into the laboratory. Instead, we have to rely on observations, case studies or predictions based on current knowledge. According to the precautionary principle, when substantial scientific evidence of any kind gives us good reason to believe that an activity, technology or substance may be harmful, we should act to prevent harm. If we always wait for scientific certainty, people may suffer and die, and damage to the natural world may be irreversible. We have lots of environmental regulations. Aren't we already exercising precaution? In some cases, to some extent, yes. When federal money is to be used in a major project, such as building a road on forested land or developing federal waste programs, the planners must produce an "environmental impact statement" to show how it will affect the surroundings. Then the public has a right to help determine whether the study has been thorough and all the alternatives considered. That is a precautionary action. But most environmental regulations, such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Superfund Law, are aimed at cleaning up pollution and controlling the amount of it released into the environment. They regulate toxic substances as they are emitted rather than limiting their use or production in the first place. These laws have served an important purpose - they have given us cleaner air, water and land. But they are based on the assumption that humans and ecosystems can absorb a certain amount of contamination without being harmed. We are now learning how difficult it is to know what levels of contamination, if any, are safe. Many of our food and drug laws and practices are more precautionary. Before a drug is introduced into the marketplace, the manufacturer must demonstrate that it is safe and effective. Then people must be told about risks and side effects before they use it. But there are some major loopholes in our regulations. If the precautionary principle were universally applied, many toxic substances, contaminants, and unsafe practices would not be produced or used in the first place. The precautionary principle concentrates on prevention rather than cure. How would the precautionary principle change that without bringing the economy to a halt? It would encourage the exploration of alternatives - better, safer, cheaper ways to do things- and the development of "cleaner" products and technologies. Sometimes simply slowing down in order to learn more about potential harm is the best alternative. It would shift the burden of proof from the public to proponents of a technology. The principle would ensure that the public knows about and has a say in the deployment of technologies that may be hazardous. Proponents would have to demonstrate through an open process that a technology was safe or necessary and that no better alternatives were available. 

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Case outweighs theory.
Embracing environmentalism in round is key to rethinking our lifestyles, so it has an out of round impact.
Babb 14
Stephen Babb (coaches for Harvard Westlake). “What Happened to Environmentalism Impacts?” Victory Briefs. January 17th, 2014. http://victorybriefs.com/vbd/2014/1/what-happened-to-environmentalism-impacts
We’re actually not all that committed to environmentalism Though it’s fundamentally beyond the scope of this small contribution, there’s probably something to be said about our underlying attitudes toward the environment. Whether we admit it or not, we are children of a very developed world. We enjoy the products of environmentally-tainted production on a daily basis. Our economy and freedom of movement are premised on a series of planet-dirtying practices. On some level, that has to affect our willingness to tell the story of environmentalism, to re-issue the edicts that publicly temper our very real commitments to development. We’re all aware of what’s happening to the environment, but we’re only sometimes willing to do very much about it. The difference between the Right and Left on this point is far more a function of ideology than output. Despite the stark disagreements between the two sides, there remains a nearly universal unwillingness to seriously alter our daily routines on behalf of the environment. What little we do is often done for us by corporations steered by consumer choice. Indeed, the most effort we typically exert on behalf of the environment is choosing one brand over another. So maybe it shouldn’t be all that surprising that debaters are choosing strategy over the environment. The topic has given our community a ready-made soapbox for the reaffirmation of the environmentalist creed.

Tournament: Harvard RR | Round: 3 | Opponent: Harrison DD Danny Debois | Judge: Scott Wheeler and Ben Holguin
Advantage 1 is the World Trade Organization

The WTO is using its trade authority to challenge environmental protection and prioritize resource extraction.
Global Exchange 11
Global Exchange (international human rights organization dedicated to promoting social, economic and environmental justice around the world). “Top Reasons to Oppose the WTO.” 2011. http://www.globalexchange.org/resources/wto/oppose
5. The WTO Is Destroying the Environment The WTO is being used by corporations to dismantle hard-won local and national environmental protections, which are attacked as “barriers to trade.” The very first WTO panel ruled that a provision of the US Clean Air Act, requiring both domestic and foreign producers alike to produce cleaner gasoline, was illegal. The WTO declared illegal a provision of the Endangered Species Act that requires shrimp sold in the US to be caught with an inexpensive device allowing endangered sea turtles to escape. The WTO is attempting to deregulate industries including logging, fishing, water utilities, and energy distribution, which will lead to further exploitation of these natural resources. 

The Precautionary Principle challenges WTO authority over environmental issues. This is key to generating momentum to shut down the WTO.
Mokhiber and Weissman 99
Russell Mokhiber (editor of Corporate Crime Reporter) and Robert Weissman (editor of Multinational Monitor). “Top 10 Reasons to Shutter the WTO.” Mother Jones. November 24th, 1999. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/1999/11/top-10-reasons-shutter-wto
The WTO eviscerates the Precautionary Principle. WTO rules generally block countries from acting in response to potential risk -- requiring a probability before governments can move to resolve harms to human health or the environment. The WTO squashes diversity. WTO rules establish international health, environmental and other standards as a global ceiling through a process of "harmonization;" countries or even states and cities can only exceed them by overcoming high hurdles. The WTO operates in secrecy. Its tribunals rule on the "legality" of nations' laws, but carry out their work behind closed doors. The WTO limits governments' ability to use their purchasing dollar for human rights, environmental, worker rights and other non-commercial purposes. In general, WTO rules state that governments can make purchases based only on quality and cost considerations. The WTO disallows bans on imports of goods made with child labor. In general, WTO rules do not allow countries to treat products differently based on how they were produced -- irrespective of whether made with brutalized child labor, with workers exposed to toxics or with no regard for species protection. The WTO legitimizes life patents. WTO rules permit and in some cases require patents or similar exclusive protections for life forms. Some of these problems, such as the WTO's penchant for secrecy, could potentially be fixed, but the core problems -- prioritization of commercial over other values, the constraints on democratic decision-making and the bias against local economies -- cannot, for they are inherent in the WTO itself. Because of these unfixable problems, the World Trade Organization should be shut down, sooner rather than later. That doesn't mean interim steps shouldn't be taken. It does mean that beneficial reforms will focus not on adding new areas of competence to the WTO or enhancing its authority, even if the new areas appear desirable (such as labor rights or competition). Instead, the reforms to pursue are those that reduce or limit the WTO's power -- for example, by denying it the authority to invalidate laws passed pursuant to international environmental agreements, limiting application of WTO agricultural rules in the Third World, or eliminating certain subject matters (such as essential medicines or life forms) from coverage under the WTO's intellectual property agreement. These measures are necessary and desirable in their own right, and they would help generate momentum to close down the WTO. 

?
The PP conflicts with WTO trade agreements. Full reconciliation is impossible.
Borjeson 7
Natasja Borjeson (Sodertorn University College, Department of Life Sciences). “WTO, GMO, and the Precautionary Principle – the conflict between trade liberalization and environmental protection.” 2007. http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:15723/FULLTEXT01.pdf
The Precautionary Principle is one of the most important and well-known environmental policies governing trade, both nationally and internationally. The scope of this study will however be limited to the definition presented in Sandin 1999, where the author has identified four common elements of the principle from a number of definitions: “if there is a threat, which is uncertain, then some kind of action is mandatory” (Sandin 1999 quoted in Sandin et al 2002: 290). Or in other words: “on some occasions, measures against a possible hazard Principlerelated variables Outcome of GMO-dispute Process of GMO-dispute Politicallyand economically related variables Case-related variables Aims and actions of the WTO Aims and actions based on the Precautionary Principle 15 should be taken even if the available evidence is not enough to conclude the existence of the hazard as a scientific fact” (Sandin et al 2002: 288). Note however that an evaluation of the Precautionary Principle will not be done as such, seeing as the case-study is too limited in scope for this purpose and will therefore mainly be descriptive. The principle will be explored more thoroughly in section 4.5 Key Provisions of the Precautionary Principle. The WTO agreements on trade include a number of multilateral agreements aimed at liberalizing international trade and certainly not all of them are referred to within this study. More precisely, the principle governing the de-regulated trade is one of the principles stated in the preamble of the agreements establishing the world trade organization. Namely: “entering into reciprocal and mutually advantageous arrangements directed to the substantial reduction of tariffs and other barriers to trade and to the elimination of discriminatory treatment in international trade relations (…), to develop an integrated, more viable and durable multilateral trading system”. In relation to the Precautionary Principle, the WTO agreements state that the right to take precautionary measures is only approved if they are not applied in a manner which would result in “arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination between countries, or a disguised restriction on international trade” (www.wto.org). Hence when the term WTO agreements on trade is used these are “the principles” being referred to. A more detailed exposition of the agreements will be given in the section 4.3 Key provisions on the WTO agreements on trade. Since this study concerns one case, this together with the purposive limitation of material makes the results less useful when generalizing and applying the findings of this study to a larger context and since this is a qualitative study the findings could be subject to other interpretations (Creswell 1994: 111). However, it makes a contribution to the ongoing debate on the concerned matter as the case-study has a high representativity when discussing the matter of subject. Although Rational Choice theory is used to explain causality, a complete causal approach will not be used. Since the study only handles one case and only one set of variables (the principle-related) a qualitative evaluation of the influence on the outcome by the independent variables concerned: the Precautionary Principle and the WTO agreements on trade will be done instead. Moreover, since the study is limited to one case it will not be possible to test the regularity of the variables. What it can however, is to study the presumable correlation in a case where the two conflicting principles are involved. The second phrase in research question nr 2: How were the two principles balanced in the outcome and why, might however be too difficult to fully answer with this limited approach. 16 Practical limitations An important methodological aspect of any scientific study concerns its validity and if the chosen indicators correspond to the chosen theoretical concepts (Yin 2003: 34). A validity fault could follow the purposive limitation of the factors being studied; in the concerned case this could be the result of focus being on the principle-related variables and not on all of the factors influencing the process and outcome. This limitation might result in the study not covering the conflict in its whole and leads to the question: will the study measure what it intends to measure, even when being limited to the chosen variables? The occurring regularity of the two principles in the process of the dispute together with legislative measures being based upon them indicates validity throughout the study. Moreover, the long process surrounding the conflict implies that this study focuses on a central and relevant issue. Another methodological aspect concerns the reliability of the study and the handling of the material used (Yin 2003: 38). One way to get around this uncertainty is by external reliability verification: to have another person read the material used and then to compare the results to see if these concur. This has however not been done in this study and consequently there is really no way getting around this problem. What has been done however, is internal reliability verification where the material has been read several times in order to be as sure as possible of what was actually said and concluded. A practical limitation of this study is time. Another is cost. The limited time-frame has put restrictions both on the research objective and the material used; interviews could for example have been a fruitful complement to the documents. Another practical limitation concerns the documents used. The case-study does not provide an examination of the submissions made by all complaining parties. This clearly puts limitations to both the study and its findings, but it has nonetheless been necessary to put a limit to the sources used. The documents used in the case-study are 1) the First Written Submission by the United States, 2) the First Written Submission by the European Communities and 3) the final Reports of the Dispute Settlement Panel. The reason for only looking at the US Submission and not the submissions of all the complaining parties in more detail is, again, the limited timeframe. Nevertheless, the material chosen is enough to illustrate the principle-related conflict. Finally, the issue being covered is in many ways a legal issue. I am however not a legal expert and the study will not be conducted within the realm of science of international law. Last there is the issue of my own personal bias and limits as a researcher, as has so clearly been pointed out: “the ethnographer enters the field with an open mind, not an empty head” 17 (Fetterman 1989 as quoted in Creswell 1994: 44). I might overlook certain issues and be limited in my knowledge of others. Hopefully those weaknesses will be overcome by the study being exposed to peer-review along with help from my supervisor. 2.4 Earlier research This study will be done in the context of environmental social science. It has been acknowledged that social sciences play an important part in environmental science and that it is of importance that they participate and are incorporated in research on sustainable development (www.formas.se). Sustainable development is however a very broad focus area and there really is no point in giving a thorough exposition on all of the previous research concerning it. So, the research focused on in this section mainly concerns the conflict between the trade related and environmentally protecting regimes and the incompatibility between them and the principles concerned. Furthermore, it touches the subject of how the Precautionary Principle stands in conflict with matters of trade. The earlier research consists of relevant articles on the matter, mostly articles within the realm of law and international agreements. The media of articles are chosen since they often are the bearers of the most recent information and new findings on a certain subject matter within a research area. They are also the easiest to find and duplicate (Creswell 1994: 28). There is no lack of writings on the conflict between environmental international regimes and agreements concerned with the matter of trade and the topic is clearly being discussed on the international arena (Schoenbaum 2000: 866). The two regimes principally regulating the international trade with genetically modified organisms are the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety and the World Trade Organization Agreements on trade. Previous studies have begun mapping where the regimes are in in-coherence with each other and the reasons to why one prevails over the other when faced in matters of dispute. When addressing the potential conflict between the two principles: the Precautionary Principle and the WTO agreements on trade, it has been found that also these two contradict. It has been proposed that while under the current WTO agreements and with the current definitions of the Precautionary Principle, no full reconciliation of the Precautionary Principle and trade liberalisation is possible (Matthee and Vermersch 2000: 69). Earlier studies have also concluded that one of the key issues in this debate is the extent to which the Precautionary Principle should be applied. It has been shown that the Biosafety Protocol and agreements under the umbrella of the WTO agreements on trade contradict each other on this 18 point and that this will lead to future conflicts (Schoenbaum 2000: 866). Trade- and environmental agreements aspire to be mutually supportive, but achieving this requires substantial harmonisation between the two. It has been found that each of the agreements treats the Precautionary Principle differently and the idea has been presented that there is a great risk that parties in trade disputes in GMOs will use either agreement depending on each party’s status in each agreement (http://ideas.repec.org). The area of research is only in its beginning and we are still to discover what the outcome of the GMO-case is going to have in practice. As stated earlier in the text, the outcome on the matter by the WTO Dispute Panel might very well come to have far reaching implications for the global governance of GMOs, possibilities for environmental protection and for international trade relations. To conclude: it has been found that there is an incoherence between the regimes governing environmental protection and international trade and that this incoherence applies to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety and the WTO agreements on trade. The two internationally recognized principals: the Precautionary Principle and the WTO agreements are found to be in conflict and it has been proposed that no reconciliation between them in their current form is possible. It is further emphasized that there is a need to address this issue because the contradiction on how to use the Precautionary Principle will lead to further conflicts and this will undoubtedly result in obstacles on the road to sustainable development. Here is where the importance of this study comes into the picture. If we are to achieve a sustainable development within the realm of trade there is a need to continue the research on the incoherence between the regimes and concerned principles and what implications this incoherence might have. Furthermore, there is a need to discuss this conflict and what difficulties the outcome of the conflict imposes on the handling of environmental problems through policy making. There is also a need to further observe how the disagreement on how the Precautionary Principle should be applied displays in actual conflicts, as in the case presented within this study, the GMO related trade conflict between the EC and the US, Canada and Argentina. To further point on the significance of this study and its relevance, it has in recent strategies for Swedish socio-environmental research been stated that the research objectives concerning division of power and goal conflicts are of high importance for socioenvironmental research. Questions like who has the actual power in environmental politics and how are goal conflicts displayed and manifested on national and international level are seen as at the core of the issue (www.formas.se) and these questions will to some extent be discussed within this study. 

WTO trade agreements enable rich countries to manipulate developing countries.
Walker 11
Aurelie Walker (trade policy advisor at the Fairtrade Foundation. Aurelie has specialised in EU trade relations with Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific. She has worked as trade negotiator for an East African government, as advisor to business and government in Southern Africa on the Economic Partnership Agreement negotiations and for European Institutions and think tanks. Aurelie now advocates on behalf on Fairtrade producers on international trade issues). “The WTO has failed developing nations.” The Guardian. November 14th, 2011. http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/nov/14/wto-fails-developing-countries
But the WTO membership has failed to deliver the promised pro-development changes. Finding "development" in the Doha Development Round today is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Developing countries have been completely sidelined by the economic and political interests of global powers. Here are 10 examples of how the WTO has failed the poor: 1. Cotton: the Fairtrade Foundation revealed last year how the $47bn in subsidies paid to rich-country producers in the past 10 years has created barriers for the 15 million cotton farmers across west Africa trying to trade their way out of poverty, and how 5 million of the world's poorest farming families have been forced out of business and into deeper poverty because of those subsidies. 2. Agricultural subsidies: beyond cotton, WTO members have failed even to agree how to reduce the huge subsidies paid to rich world farmers, whose overproduction continues to threaten the livelihoods of developing world farmers. 3. Trade agreements: the WTO has also failed to clarify the deliberately ambiguous rules on concluding trade agreements that allow the poorest countries to be manipulated by the rich states. In Africa, in negotiations with the EU, countries have been forced to eliminate tariffs on up to 90 of their trade because no clear rules exist to protect them. 4. Special treatment: the rules for developing countries, called "special and differential treatment" rules, were meant to be reviewed to make them more precise, effective and operational. But the WTO has failed to work through the 88 proposals that would fill the legal vacuum. 5. Medicine: the poorest in developing countries are unable to access affordable medicine because members have failed to clarify ambiguities between the need for governments to protect public health on one hand and on the other to protect the intellectual property rights of pharmaceutical companies. 6. Legal costs: the WTO pledged to improve access to its expensive and complex legal system, but has failed. In 15 years of dispute settlement under the WTO, 400 cases have been initiated. No African country has acted as a complainant and only one least developed country has ever filed a claim. 7. Protectionist economic policies: one of the WTO's five core functions agreed at its inception in 1995 was to achieve more coherence in global economic policy-making. Yet the WTO failed to curb the speedy increase in the number of protectionist measures applied by G20 countries in response to the global economic crisis over the past two years – despite G20 leaders' repeated affirmations of their "unwavering" commitment to resist all forms of protectionist measures. 8. Natural disaster: the WTO fails to alleviate suffering when it has the opportunity to do so. In the case of natural disaster, the membership will have taken almost two years to agree and implement temporary trade concessions for Pakistan, where severe flooding displaced 20 million people in 2010 and caused $10bn of damage. Those measures, according to the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, would have boosted Pakistan's exports to the EU by at least €100m this year. 9. Decision-making: the WTO makes most of its decisions by consensus – and achieving consensus between 153 countries is nearly impossible. But this shows another failure of the WTO: to break the link between market size and political weight that would give small and poor countries a voice in the trade negotiations. 10. Fair trade: 10 years after the start of the Doha Development Round, governments have failed to make trade fair. As long as small and poor countries remain without a voice, the role of campaigning organisations, such as Traidcraft and Fairtrade Foundation, which are working together to eliminate cotton subsidies, will remain critical. The WTO has failed to live up to its promises over the past decade, which reveals a wider systemic problem in the global community. True and lasting solutions to global economic problems can only come when the model of global competitiveness between countries becomes one of genuine cooperation. 

WTO manipulation of developing countries causes disease, hunger, and income inequality.
Global Exchange 11
Global Exchange (international human rights organization dedicated to promoting social, economic and environmental justice around the world). “Top Reasons to Oppose the WTO.” 2011. http://www.globalexchange.org/resources/wto/oppose
  Joshua,  Foreign Policy web editor, “The End of the World”, 11-13-09,
 6. The WTO is Killing People The WTO’s fierce defense of ‘Trade Related Intellectual Property’ rights (TRIPs)—patents, copyrights and trademarks—comes at the expense of health and human lives. The WTO has protected for pharmaceutical companies’ ‘right to profit’ against governments seeking to protect their people’s health by providing lifesaving medicines in countries in areas like sub-saharan Africa, where thousands die every day from HIV/AIDS. Developing countries won an important victory in 2001 when they affirmed the right to produce generic drugs (or import them if they lacked production capacity), so that they could provide essential lifesaving medicines to their populations less expensively. Unfortunately, in September 2003, many new conditions were agreed to that will make it more difficult for countries to produce those drugs. Once again, the WTO demonstrates that it favors corporate profit over saving human lives. 7. The WTO is Increasing Inequality Free trade is not working for the majority of the world. During the most recent period of rapid growth in global trade and investment (1960 to 1998) inequality worsened both internationally and within countries. The UN Development Program reports that the richest 20 percent of the world’s population consume 86 percent of the world’s resources while the poorest 80 percent consume just 14 percent. WTO rules have hastened these trends by opening up countries to foreign investment and thereby making it easier for production to go where the labor is cheapest and most easily exploited and environmental costs are low. 8. The WTO is Increasing Hunger Farmers produce enough food in the world to feed everyone – yet because of corporate control of food distribution, as many as 800 million people worldwide suffer from chronic malnutrition. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, food is a human right. In developing countries, as many as four out of every five people make their living from the land. But the leading principle in the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture is that market forces should control agricultural policies-rather than a national commitment to guarantee food security and maintain decent family farmer incomes. WTO policies have allowed dumping of heavily subsidized industrially produced food into poor countries, undermining local production and increasing hunger. 9. The WTO Hurts Poor, Small Countries in Favor of Rich Powerful Nations The WTO supposedly operates on a consensus basis, with equal decision-making power for all. In reality, many important decisions get made in a process whereby poor countries’ negotiators are not even invited to closed door meetings – and then ‘agreements’ are announced that poor countries didn’t even know were being discussed. Many countries do not even have enough trade personnel to participate in all the negotiations or to even have a permanent representative at the WTO. This severely disadvantages poor countries from representing their interests. Likewise, many countries are too poor to defend themselves from WTO challenges from the rich countries, and change their laws rather than pay for their own defense. 10. The WTO Undermines Local Level Decision-Making and National Sovereignty The WTO’s “most favored nation” provision requires all WTO member countries to treat each other equally and to treat all corporations from these countries equally regardless of their track record. Local policies aimed at rewarding companies who hire local residents, use domestic materials, or adopt environmentally sound practices are essentially illegal under the WTO. Developing countries are prohibited from creating local laws that developed countries once pursued, such as protecting new, domestic industries until they can be internationally competitive. California Governor Gray Davis vetoed a “Buy California” bill that would have granted a small preference to local businesses because it was WTO-illegal. Conforming with the WTO required entire sections of US laws to be rewritten. Many countries are even changing their laws and constitutions in anticipation of potential future WTO rulings and negotiations. 11. There are Alternatives to the WTO Citizen organizations have developed alternatives to the corporate-dominated system of international economic governance. Together we can build the political space that nurtures a democratic global economy that promotes jobs, ensures that every person is guaranteed their human rights to food, water, education, and health care, promotes freedom and security, and preserves our shared environment for future generations. 12. The Tide is Turning Against Free Trade and the WTO! International opposition to the WTO is growing. Massive protests in Seattle of 1999 brought over 50,000 people together to oppose the WTO—and succeeded in shutting the meeting down. When the WTO met in 2001, the Trade negotiators were unable meet their goals of expanding the WTO’s reach. In Cancún, Mexico and Hong Kong, China, the WTO met thousands of activists in protest, scoring a major victory for democracy. Developing countries refused to give in to the rich countries’ agenda of WTO expansion - and caused the talks to collapse!

Pandemic disease is likely and causes extinction. Free trade uniquely triggers the impact.
Keating 9
Joshua,  Foreign Policy web editor, “The End of the World”, 11-13-09, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/11/13/the_end_of_the_world?page=full
How it could happen: Throughout history, plagues have brought civilizations to their knees. The Black Death killed more off more than half of Europe's population in the Middle Ages. In 1918, a flu pandemic killed an estimated 50 million people, nearly 3 percent of the world's population, a far greater impact than the just-concluded World War I. Because of globalization, diseases today spread even faster - witness the rapid worldwide spread of H1N1 currently unfolding. A global outbreak of a disease such as ebola virus -- which has had a 90 percent fatality rate during its flare-ups in rural Africa -- or a mutated drug-resistant form of the flu virus on a global scale could have a devastating, even civilization-ending impact. How likely is it? Treatment of deadly diseases has improved since 1918, but so have the diseases. Modern industrial farming techniques have been blamed for the outbreak of diseases, such as swine flu, and as the world’s population grows and humans move into previously unoccupied areas, the risk of exposure to previously unknown pathogens increases.  More than 40 new viruses have emerged since the 1970s, including ebola and HIV. Biological weapons experimentation has added a new and just as troubling complication.

WTO regulations kill cultural diversity of indigenous peoples.
FOE 3
Friends of the Earth International. “The world trade system: How it works and what’s wrong with it.” August 2003.
7. The WTO is eroding cultural diversity: The WTO TRIPs Agreement allows companies to expropriate knowledge from local peoples in developing countries who, in many cases, have been cultivators, researchers and protectors of plants for thousands of years. The TRIPs Agreement permits (primarily Northern) transnational companies to claim traditional plant varieties or plant uses as ‘inventions’ that must be respected the world over. Culture could also be further eroded if issues surrounding the entertainment business - for example, films, broadcasting, music and publishing - are included under the General Agreement on Trade in Services. 

Thus the advocacy: Developing countries should accept the Precautionary Principle on resource extraction issues. I reserve the right to clarify, so no theory violations until he checks in cross-ex.

Moral uncertainty is high now, but there’s room for improvement. Parfit 84
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). P. 453.
Some people believe that there cannot be progress in Ethics, since everything has been already said. Like Rawls and Nagel, I believe the opposite. How many people have made Non-Religious Ethics their life's work? Before the recent past, very few. In most civilizations, most people have believed in the existence of a God, or of several gods. A large minority were in fact Atheists, whatever they pretended. But, before the recent past, very few Atheists made Ethics their life’s work. Buddha may be among this few, as may Confucius, and a few Ancient Greeks and Romans. After more than a thousand years, there were a few more between the Sixteenth and Twentieth centuries. Hume was an atheist who made Ethics part of his life's work. Sidgwick was another. After Sidgwick, there were several atheists who were professional moral philosophers. But most of these did not do Ethics. They did Meta-Ethics. They did not ask which outcomes would be good or bad, or which acts would be right or wrong. They asked, and wrote about, only the meaning of moral language, and the question of objectivity. Non-Religious Ethics has been systematically studied, by many people, only since the 1960s. Compared with the other sciences, Non-Religious Ethics is the youngest and the least advanced.

Adopt a parliamentary model to account for moral uncertainty. This entails minimizing existential risks. Bostrom 9
Bostrom, Nick (Existentialist of a different sort). “Moral uncertainty – toward a solution?” 1 January 2009. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/moral-uncertainty-towards-a-solution.html
It seems people are overconfident about their moral beliefs.  But how should one reason and act if one acknowledges that one is uncertain about morality – not just applied ethics but fundamental moral issues? if you don't know which moral theory is correct?
It doesn't seem you can’t simply plug your uncertainty into expected utility decision theory and crank the wheel; because many moral theories state that you should not always maximize expected utility.
Even if we limit consideration to consequentialist theories, it still is hard to see how to combine them in the standard decision theoretic framework.  For example, suppose you give X probability to total utilitarianism and (100-X) to average utilitarianism.  Now an action might add 5 utils to total happiness and decrease average happiness by 2 utils.  (This could happen, e.g. if you create a new happy person that is less happy than the people who already existed.)  Now what do you do, for different values of X?
The problem gets even more complicated if we consider not only consequentialist theories but also deontological theories, contractarian theories, virtue ethics, etc.  We might even throw various meta-ethical theories into the stew: error theory, relativism, etc.
I'm working on a paper on this together with my colleague Toby Ord.  We have some arguments against a few possible "solutions" that we think don't work.  On the positive side we have some tricks that work for a few special cases.  But beyond that, the best we have managed so far is a kind of metaphor, which we don't think is literally and exactly correct, and it is a bit under-determined, but it seems to get things roughly right and it might point in the right direction:
The Parliamentary Model.  Suppose that you have a set of mutually exclusive moral theories, and that you assign each of these some probability.  Now imagine that each of these theories gets to send some number of delegates to The Parliament.  The number of delegates each theory gets to send is proportional to the probability of the theory.  Then the delegates bargain with one another for support on various issues; and the Parliament reaches a decision by the delegates voting.  What you should do is act according to the decisions of this imaginary Parliament.  (Actually, we use an extra trick here: we imagine that the delegates act as if the Parliament's decision were a stochastic variable such that the probability of the Parliament taking action A is proportional to the fraction of votes for A.  This has the effect of eliminating the artificial 50 threshold that otherwise gives a majority bloc absolute power.  Yet – unbeknownst to the delegates – the Parliament always takes whatever action got the most votes: this way we avoid paying the cost of the randomization!)
The idea here is that moral theories get more influence the more probable they are; yet even a relatively weak theory can still get its way on some issues that the theory think are extremely important by sacrificing its influence on other issues that other theories deem more important.  For example, suppose you assign 10 probability to total utilitarianism and 90 to moral egoism (just to illustrate the principle).  Then the Parliament would mostly take actions that maximize egoistic satisfaction; however it would make some concessions to utilitarianism on issues that utilitarianism thinks is especially important.  In this example, the person might donate some portion of their income to existential risks research and otherwise live completely selfishly.
I think there might be wisdom in this model.  It avoids the dangerous and unstable extremism that would result from letting one’s current favorite moral theory completely dictate action, while still allowing the aggressive pursuit of some non-commonsensical high-leverage strategies so long as they don’t infringe too much on what other major moral theories deem centrally important.

I don’t need to win that weighing values is possible. Extinction precludes all values, so it is wrong under any moral code. Seeley 86
Robert A., Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, The Handbook of Non-Violence, p. 269-70
In moral reasoning prediction of consequences is nearly always impossible. One balances the risks of an action against its benefits; one also considers what known damage the action would do. Thus a surgeon in deciding whether to perform an operation weighs the known effects (the loss of some nerve function, for example) and risks (death) against the benefits, and weighs also the risks and benefits of not performing surgery. Morally, however, human extinction is unlike any other risk. No conceivable human good could be worth the extinction of the race, for in order to be a human good it must be experienced by human beings. Thus extinction is one result we dare not-may not-risk. Though not conclusively established, the risk of extinction is real enough to make nuclear war utterly impermissible under any sane moral code.

The standard is maximizing happiness.

First, revisionary intuitionism is true and leads to util.
Yudkowsky 8
Eliezer Yudkowsky (research fellow of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute; he also writes Harry Potter fan fiction). “The ‘Intuitions’ Behind ‘Utilitarianism.’” 28 January 2008. LessWrong. http://lesswrong.com/lw/n9/the_intuitions_behind_utilitarianism/
I haven't said much about metaethics - the nature of morality - because that has a forward dependency on a discussion of the Mind Projection Fallacy that I haven't gotten to yet. I used to be very confused about metaethics. After my confusion finally cleared up, I did a postmortem on my previous thoughts. I found that my object-level moral reasoning had been valuable and my meta-level moral reasoning had been worse than useless. And this appears to be a general syndrome - people do much better when discussing whether torture is good or bad than when they discuss the meaning of "good" and "bad". Thus, I deem it prudent to keep moral discussions on the object level wherever I possibly can. Occasionally people object to any discussion of morality on the grounds that morality doesn't exist, and in lieu of jumping over the forward dependency to explain that "exist" is not the right term to use here, I generally say, "But what do you do anyway?" and take the discussion back down to the object level. Paul Gowder, though, has pointed out that both the idea of choosing a googolplex dust specks in a googolplex eyes over 50 years of torture for one person, and the idea of "utilitarianism", depend on "intuition". He says I've argued that the two are not compatible, but charges me with failing to argue for the utilitarian intuitions that I appeal to. Now "intuition" is not how I would describe the computations that underlie human morality and distinguish us, as moralists, from an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness and/or a rock. But I am okay with using the word "intuition" as a term of art, bearing in mind that "intuition" in this sense is not to be contrasted to reason, but is, rather, the cognitive building block out of which both long verbal arguments and fast perceptual arguments are constructed. I see the project of morality as a project of renormalizing intuition. We have intuitions about things that seem desirable or undesirable, intuitions about actions that are right or wrong, intuitions about how to resolve conflicting intuitions, intuitions about how to systematize specific intuitions into general principles. Delete all the intuitions, and you aren't left with an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness, you're left with a rock. Keep all your specific intuitions and refuse to build upon the reflective ones, and you aren't left with an ideal philosopher of perfect spontaneity and genuineness, you're left with a grunting caveperson running in circles, due to cyclical preferences and similar inconsistencies. "Intuition", as a term of art, is not a curse word when it comes to morality - there is nothing else to argue from. Even modus ponens is an "intuition" in this sense - it's just that modus ponens still seems like a good idea after being formalized, reflected on, extrapolated out to see if it has sensible consequences, etcetera. So that is "intuition". However, Gowder did not say what he meant by "utilitarianism". Does utilitarianism say... That right actions are strictly determined by good consequences? That praiseworthy actions depend on justifiable expectations of good consequences? That probabilities of consequences should normatively be discounted by their probability, so that a 50 probability of something bad should weigh exactly half as much in our tradeoffs? That virtuous actions always correspond to maximizing expected utility under some utility function? That two harmful events are worse than one? That two independent occurrences of a harm (not to the same person, not interacting with each other) are exactly twice as bad as one? That for any two harms A and B, with A much worse than B, there exists some tiny probability such that gambling on this probability of A is preferable to a certainty of B? If you say that I advocate something, or that my argument depends on something, and that it is wrong, do please specify what this thingy is... anyway, I accept 3, 5, 6, and 7, but not 4; I am not sure about the phrasing of 1; and 2 is true, I guess, but phrased in a rather solipsistic and selfish fashion: you should not worry about being praiseworthy. Now, what are the "intuitions" upon which my "utilitarianism" depends? This is a deepish sort of topic, but I'll take a quick stab at it. First of all, it's not just that someone presented me with a list of statements like those above, and I decided which ones sounded "intuitive". Among other things, if you try to violate "utilitarianism", you run into paradoxes, contradictions, circular preferences, and other things that aren't symptoms of moral wrongness so much as moral incoherence. After you think about moral problems for a while, and also find new truths about the world, and even discover disturbing facts about how you yourself work, you often end up with different moral opinions than when you started out. This does not quite define moral progress, but it is how we experience moral progress. As part of my experienced moral progress, I've drawn a conceptual separation between questions of type Where should we go? and questions of type How should we get there? (Could that be what Gowder means by saying I'm "utilitarian"?) The question of where a road goes - where it leads - you can answer by traveling the road and finding out. If you have a false belief about where the road leads, this falsity can be destroyed by the truth in a very direct and straightforward manner. When it comes to wanting to go to a particular place, this want is not entirely immune from the destructive powers of truth. You could go there and find that you regret it afterward (which does not define moral error, but is how we experience moral error). But, even so, wanting to be in a particular place seems worth distinguishing from wanting to take a particular road to a particular place. Our intuitions about where to go are arguable enough, but our intuitions about how to get there are frankly messed up. After the two hundred and eighty-seventh research study showing that people will chop their own feet off if you frame the problem the wrong way, you start to distrust first impressions. When you've read enough research on scope insensitivity - people will pay only 28 more to protect all 57 wilderness areas in Ontario than one area, people will pay the same amount to save 50,000 lives as 5,000 lives... that sort of thing... Well, the worst case of scope insensitivity I've ever heard of was described here by Slovic: Other recent research shows similar results. Two Israeli psychologists asked people to contribute to a costly life-saving treatment. They could offer that contribution to a group of eight sick children, or to an individual child selected from the group. The target amount needed to save the child (or children) was the same in both cases. Contributions to individual group members far outweighed the contributions to the entire group. There's other research along similar lines, but I'm just presenting one example, 'cause, y'know, eight examples would probably have less impact. If you know the general experimental paradigm, then the reason for the above behavior is pretty obvious - focusing your attention on a single child creates more emotional arousal than trying to distribute attention around eight children simultaneously. So people are willing to pay more to help one child than to help eight. Now, you could look at this intuition, and think it was revealing some kind of incredibly deep moral truth which shows that one child's good fortune is somehow devalued by the other children's good fortune. But what about the billions of other children in the world? Why isn't it a bad idea to help this one child, when that causes the value of all the other children to go down? How can it be significantly better to have 1,329,342,410 happy children than 1,329,342,409, but then somewhat worse to have seven more at 1,329,342,417? Or you could look at that and say: "The intuition is wrong: the brain can't successfully multiply by eight and get a larger quantity than it started with. But it ought to, normatively speaking." And once you realize that the brain can't multiply by eight, then the other cases of scope neglect stop seeming to reveal some fundamental truth about 50,000 lives being worth just the same effort as 5,000 lives, or whatever. You don't get the impression you're looking at the revelation of a deep moral truth about nonagglomerative utilities. It's just that the brain doesn't goddamn multiply. Quantities get thrown out the window. If you have $100 to spend, and you spend $20 each on each of 5 efforts to save 5,000 lives, you will do worse than if you spend $100 on a single effort to save 50,000 lives. Likewise if such choices are made by 10 different people, rather than the same person. As soon as you start believing that it is better to save 50,000 lives than 25,000 lives, that simple preference of final destinations has implications for the choice of paths, when you consider five different events that save 5,000 lives. (It is a general principle that Bayesians see no difference between the long-run answer and the short-run answer; you never get two different answers from computing the same question two different ways. But the long run is a helpful intuition pump, so I am talking about it anyway.) The aggregative valuation strategy of "shut up and multiply" arises from the simple preference to have more of something - to save as many lives as possible - when you have to describe general principles for choosing more than once, acting more than once, planning at more than one time. Aggregation also arises from claiming that the local choice to save one life doesn't depend on how many lives already exist, far away on the other side of the planet, or far away on the other side of the universe. Three lives are one and one and one. No matter how many billions are doing better, or doing worse. 3 = 1 + 1 + 1, no matter what other quantities you add to both sides of the equation. And if you add another life you get 4 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. That's aggregation. When you've read enough heuristics and biases research, and enough coherence and uniqueness proofs for Bayesian probabilities and expected utility, and you've seen the "Dutch book" and "money pump" effects that penalize trying to handle uncertain outcomes any other way, then you don't see the preference reversals in the Allais Paradox as revealing some incredibly deep moral truth about the intrinsic value of certainty. It just goes to show that the brain doesn't goddamn multiply. The primitive, perceptual intuitions that make a choice "feel good" don't handle probabilistic pathways through time very skillfully, especially when the probabilities have been expressed symbolically rather than experienced as a frequency. So you reflect, devise more trustworthy logics, and think it through in words. When you see people insisting that no amount of money whatsoever is worth a single human life, and then driving an extra mile to save $10; or when you see people insisting that no amount of money is worth a decrement of health, and then choosing the cheapest health insurance available; then you don't think that their protestations reveal some deep truth about incommensurable utilities. Part of it, clearly, is that primitive intuitions don't successfully diminish the emotional impact of symbols standing for small quantities - anything you talk about seems like "an amount worth considering". And part of it has to do with preferring unconditional social rules to conditional social rules. Conditional rules seem weaker, seem more subject to manipulation. If there's any loophole that lets the government legally commit torture, then the government will drive a truck through that loophole. So it seems like there should be an unconditional social injunction against preferring money to life, and no "but" following it. Not even "but a thousand dollars isn't worth a 0.0000000001 probability of saving a life". Though the latter choice, of course, is revealed every time we sneeze without calling a doctor. The rhetoric of sacredness gets bonus points for seeming to express an unlimited commitment, an unconditional refusal that signals trustworthiness and refusal to compromise. So you conclude that moral rhetoric espouses qualitative distinctions, because espousing a quantitative tradeoff would sound like you were plotting to defect. On such occasions, people vigorously want to throw quantities out the window, and they get upset if you try to bring quantities back in, because quantities sound like conditions that would weaken the rule. But you don't conclude that there are actually two tiers of utility with lexical ordering. You don't conclude that there is actually an infinitely sharp moral gradient, some atom that moves a Planck distance (in our continuous physical universe) and sends a utility from 0 to infinity. You don't conclude that utilities must be expressed using hyper-real numbers. Because the lower tier would simply vanish in any equation. It would never be worth the tiniest effort to recalculate for it. All decisions would be determined by the upper tier, and all thought spent thinking about the upper tier only, if the upper tier genuinely had lexical priority. As Peter Norvig once pointed out, if Asimov's robots had strict priority for the First Law of Robotics ("A robot shall not harm a human being, nor through inaction allow a human being to come to harm") then no robot's behavior would ever show any sign of the other two Laws; there would always be some tiny First Law factor that would be sufficient to determine the decision. Whatever value is worth thinking about at all, must be worth trading off against all other values worth thinking about, because thought itself is a limited resource that must be traded off. When you reveal a value, you reveal a utility. I don't say that morality should always be simple. I've already said that the meaning of music is more than happiness alone, more than just a pleasure center lighting up. I would rather see music composed by people than by nonsentient machine learning algorithms, so that someone should have the joy of composition; I care about the journey, as well as the destination. And I am ready to hear if you tell me that the value of music is deeper, and involves more complications, than I realize - that the valuation of this one event is more complex than I know.  But that's for one event. When it comes to multiplying by quantities and probabilities, complication is to be avoided - at least if you care more about the destination than the journey. When you've reflected on enough intuitions, and corrected enough absurdities, you start to see a common denominator, a meta-principle at work, which one might phrase as "Shut up and multiply." Where music is concerned, I care about the journey. When lives are at stake, I shut up and multiply. It is more important that lives be saved, than that we conform to any particular ritual in saving them. And the optimal path to that destination is governed by laws that are simple, because they are math. And that's why I'm a utilitarian - at least when I am doing something that is overwhelmingly more important than my own feelings about it - which is most of the time, because there are not many utilitarians, and many things left undone.

Second, reductionism.

Brain studies prove personal identity doesn’t exist. Parfit 84
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).
Some recent medical cases provide striking evidence in favour of the Reductionist View. Human beings have a lower brain and two upper hemispheres, which are connected by a bundle of fibres. In treating a few people with severe epilepsy, surgeons have cut these fibres. The aim was to reduce the severity of epileptic fits, by confining their causes to a single hemisphere. This aim was achieved. But the operations had another unintended consequence. The effect, in the words of one surgeon, was the creation of ‘two separate spheres of consciousness.’ This effect was revealed by various psychological tests. These made use of two facts. We control our right arms with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. And what is in the right halves of our visual fields we see with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. When someone’s hemispheres have been disconnected, psychologists can thus present to this person two different written questions in the two halves of his visual field, and can receive two different answers written by this person’s two hands.

In the absence of personal identity, only end states can matter. Shoemaker 99
Shoemaker, David (Dept of Philosophy, U Memphis). “Utilitarianism and Personal Identity.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 33: 183–199, 1999. http://www.csun.edu/~ds56723/jvipaper.pdf
Extreme reductionism might lend support to utilitarianism in the following way. Many people claim that we are justified in maximizing the good in our own lives, but not justified in maximizing the good across sets of lives, simply because each of us is a single, deeply unified person, unified by the further fact of identity, whereas there is no such corresponding unity across sets of lives. But if the only justification for the different treatment of individual lives and sets of lives is the further fact, and this fact is undermined by the truth of reductionism, then nothing justifies this different treatment. There are no deeply unified subjects of experience. What remains are merely the experiences themselves, and so any ethical theory distinguishing between individual lives and sets of lives is mistaken. If the deep, further fact is missing, then there are no unities. The morally significant units should then be the states people are in at particular times, and an ethical theory that focused on them and attempted to improve their quality, whatever their location, would be the most plausible. Utilitarianism is just such a theory.
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Third, util is epistemologically necessary. Everyone values happiness whether they want to or not. Even people who claim they’re skeptics wouldn’t shoot themselves in the foot.

Fourth, respect for human worth would justify util. Cummiskey 90
Cummiskey, David. Associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. “Kantian Consequentiaism.” Ethics 100 (April 1990), University of Chicago. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract “social entity.” It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive “overall social good.” Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that “to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has.” But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the principle that “rational nature exists as an end in itself”. Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have an equal value, then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many rational beings as possible. In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a non- value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kant’s normative theory is based on an unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have “dignity, that is, an unconditional and incomparable worth” that transcends any market value, but persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others. The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others.

Fifth, act-omission distinction doesn’t apply to states.
Sunstein and Vermuele 05
Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermuele, “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life?Life Tradeoffs,” Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper No. 85 (March 2005), p. 17.
The most fundamental point is that unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice between or among possible policies for regulating third parties. The distinction between acts and omissions may not be intelligible in this context, and even if it is, the distinction does not make a morally relevant difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do anything or refusing to act. Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized private action – for example, private killing – becomes obscure when government formally forbids private action but chooses a set of policy instruments that does not adequately or fully discourage it.

And sixth, knowledge reduces to merely true belief. “Reliable” sources of justification aren’t necessary for the goal of epistemology, or finding true beliefs. Sartwell 91
Crispin Sartwell. Knowledge Without Justification. 1991. http://www.crispinsartwell.com/know.htm
It is widely held that our epistemic goal with regard to particular propositions is achieving true beliefs and avoiding false ones about propositions with which we are epistemically concerned. (We have seen that Alston, for one, endorses that view.) That is, it is widely admitted that on any good account of justification, there must be reason to think that the beliefs justified on the account are likely to be true. Indeed, proponents of all the major conceptions of justification hold this position. For example, the foundationalist Paul Moser writes:   Epistemic justification is essentially related to the so-called cognitive goal of truth, insofar as an individual belief is epistemically justified only if it is appropriately directed toward the goal of truth. More specifically, on the present conception, one is epistemically justified in believing a proposition only if one has good reason to believe it is true.(22)     The reliabilist Alvin Goldman claims, similarly, that a condition on an account of justification is that beliefs justified on the account be likely to be true; he says that a plausible conception of justification will be "truth-linked."(23) And the coherentist Laurence BonJour puts it even more strongly:   If epistemic justification were not conducive to truth in this way, if finding epistemically justified beliefs did not substantially increase the likelihood of finding true ones, epistemic justification would be irrelevant to our main cognitive goal and of dubious worth. It is only if we have some reason to think that epistemic justification constitutes a path to truth that we as cognitive human beings have any motive for preferring epistemically justified beliefs to epistemically unjustified ones. Epistemic justification is therefore in the final analysis only an instrumental value, not an intrinsic one.(24)     In fact, it is often enough taken to be the distinguishing mark of the fact that we are epistemically concerned with a proposition that we are concerned with its truth or falsity. That is what, on the view of many philosophers, distinguishes epistemic from moral or prudential constraints on belief, what distinguishes inquiry from other belief-generating procedures. (If the theory I gave in the first chapter is right, ther are no non-epistemic belief-generating procedures in this sense. That fact merely underscores the present point.) I have argued that a plausible normative epistemology will be teleological. And I have claimed that the conception which accounts of knowledge are attempting to analyze or describe is that of the epistemic telos with regard to particular propositions. It would follow that, if a philosopher holds that the epistemic telos is merely true belief, that philosopher implicitly commits himself, his own asservations to the contrary, to the view that knowledge is merely true belief.  I think that this is the case. I think, that is, that in the above passages, these philosophers have committed themselves implicitly to the view that knowledge is merely true belief, and that justification is a criterion rather than a logically necessary condition of knowledge. By a criterion, to repeat, I mean a test for whether some item has some property that is not itself a logically necessary condition of that item's having that property. Justification on the present view is, first of all, a means by which we achieve knowledge, that is, by which we arrive at true beliefs, and second, it provides a test of whether someone has knowledge, that is, whether her beliefs are true. So again, the present view does not make accounts of justification trivial, or unconnected with the assessment of claims to know. If our epistemic goal with regard to particular propositions is true belief, then justification (a) gives procedures by which true beliefs are obtained, and (b) gives standards for evaluating the products of such procedures with regard to that goal. From the point of view of (a), justification prescribes techniques by which knowledge is gained. From the point of view of (b) it gives a criterion for knowledge. But in neither case does it describe a logically necessary condition for knowledge.  Another way of putting the matter is like this. If we describe justification as of merely instrumental value with regard to arriving at truth, as BonJour does explicitly, we can no longer maintain both that knowledge is the telos of inquiry and that justification is a necessary condition of knowledge. It is incoherent to build a specification of what are regarded merely as means of achieving some goal into the description of the goal itself; in such circumstances the goal can be described independently of the means. So if justification is demanded because it is instrumental to true belief, it cannot also be maintained that knowledge is justified true belief.  I will now certainly be accused of begging the question by assuming that knowledge is the goal of inquiry. There is justice in this claim in that I have not gone very far toward establishing the point. But I would ask my accusers at this point whether they can do better in describing the conception which theories of knowledge set out to analyze or describe without begging the question in favor of some such theory. And I ask also, if knowledge is not the overarching epistemic telos with regard to particular propositions, why such tremendous emphasis has been placed on the theory of knowledge in the history of philosophy, and just what function that notion serves within that history. If knowledge is not the overarching purpose of inquiry, then why is the notion important, and why should we continue to be concerned in normative epistemology above all with what knowledge is and how it can be achieved? If we want to withold the term `knowledge' from mere true belief, but also want to hold that mere true belief is the purpose of inquiry, then I suggest that what remains is a mere verbal dispute. That is, if we treat mere true belief as the purpose of inquiry, but do not equate it with knowledge, then I do not think that knowledge is any longer central to normative epistemology. And I would insist that we are not going to understand what `knowledge' means in the tradition, in Plato and Descartes, for example, if we do not regard them as holding knowledge to be the goal of inquiry. In fact, if it is allowed that mere true belief is the telos of inquiry, but that we should still reserve the term `knowledge' for justified true belief (and perhaps something more), I will simply abandon the term `knowledge' to the epistemology of justification. But first of all, as I suggested in the third chapter, I think that `knowledge' will now merely be a technical term with a stipulated definition. And second, I do not think it will be central to epistemology, since it no longer represents our epistemic goal. And third, I think the stipulated definition will either be redundant (if justification is held to be truth conducive) or, as I will argue, incoherent (if it is not).  Now it may well be held that justification is of more than instrumental value, because if we are not justified in believing p, though p is true and we in fact believe it, we may have false beliefs that lead us to p, and we may continue to generate false beliefs in the future. All of this is true, but it is irrelevant to the present point. Recall that I have characterized knowledge as our epistemic goal with regard to particular propositions. Insofar as p is concerned, this goal has been realized if p is true and we believe it. Insofar as we have also such goals as continuing to generate true beliefs, rendering our system of beliefs coherent, and so forth, it is desirable to have justified beliefs. But with regard to any particular proposition, our goal has been reached if we believe that proposition and it is true.  But I do not want simply to let the matter rest on a supposed agreement among some contemporary epistemologists that our epistemic goal with regard to particular propositions is true belief. Such epistemologists are agreed that knowledge is at least justified true belief. I think that Alston is right to think that the only plausible way to construe this claim is that knowledge is at least true belief based on adequate grounds, or true belief reached from a strong position. So perhaps the figures in question, on reflection, would describe the epistemic telos not as true belief but as true belief based on adequate grounds, or true belief reached from a strong position.  Only it must now be asked, why do we want to have adequate grounds? Why do we want to be in a strong position? This question ought to be misguided if true belief based on adequate grounds or true belief reached from a strong position is in fact the purpose of inquiry. For there is no good answer to the question of why we desire our ultimate ends. But the question is hardly misguided. In fact, we cannot even specify what it is to have adequate grounds except that these grounds tend to establish that the proposition in question is true; we cannot even specify what it is to be in a strong position except as being in a strong position to get the truth. This indicates that the purpose of inquiry can be formulated without reference to the notions of ground or position. Thus, on the views in question, believing the truth is in fact our overarching epistemic telos with regard to particular propositions, on the only plausible conception of justification. Hence, on these views, knowledge is merely true belief. 

Util coheres with the fact that knowledge reduces to mere true belief.
Petersen 11
Steve Petersen (Niagara University). “Utilitarian Epistemology.” February 10th, 2011. http://stevepetersen.net/professional/petersen-utilitarian-epistemology.pdf
To ask “why is knowledge of more instrumental value than mere true belief?” is, on this picture, like asking “why are earned pro?ts of more instrumental value than monetary windfalls?” The answer to the ?nancial version of this question is clearly that the earnings are not more valuable. By analogy, then, neither is knowledge. The epistemic utilitarian embraces this conclusion and denies the intuition that knowledge is better than mere true belief, even on the instrumental version of the value question. The reason, illustrated by the analogy, is fairly simple: like anything but welfare, epistemic states are at best of instrumental value, and (as we noted earlier) generalizations about instrumental value only make sense under uncertainty. Generally charity is more valuable than murder, but to the classical utilitarian (and to the classical utilitarian alone) it is not sensible to ask “why is a charityable act more valuable than a murder that results in the same amount of utility?” To assume there is an answer here begs the question against the utilitarian. The same goes, one step down the instrumental chain, for the question “why are earnings more valuable than windfalls?” Under uncertainty, investments with high expected monetary value are in an important, instrumental sense more valuable than those with poor expected monetary value, but this question builds in the assumption that both result in the same monetary value (given of course that all else is equal). Finally, the same goes for knowledge and lucky-but-true belief; in the description of the case, both have gotten the relevant epistemic (instrumental) good. To stipulate that, despite the odds, luck-sensitive belief formation nonetheless resulted in a true belief is just like stipulating that the murder under consideration ended up net bene?tting people, or that the stupid casino bet ended up paying off. 

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Infinite values don’t paralyze calculation. Lauwers and Vallentyne 04
Luc Lauwers (Center for Economic Studies, K.U.Leuven) Peter Vallentyne (Department of Philosophy, University of Missouri-Columbia). “Infinite Utilitarianism: More Is Always Better*.” Economics and Philosophy 20 (2004): 307-330.
Zero Independence holds that the ranking of two worlds is determined by the pattern of differences in local value. This, we claim, is highly plausible in the context of finitely additive value theories. In the finite case, finitely additive value theories always satisfy Zero Independence. Although they typically get expressed as judging a world as at least as good as another (having the same locations) if and only if its total value is at least as great, the reference to the total is not needed. An equivalent statement is that one world as at least as good as the second if and only if the sum of the differences in value is at least as great as zero. Only the pattern of differences matters. Even in the infinite case, Zero Independence is “partially” implied by Sum and Loose Pareto. Sum ranks U as at least as good as V if and only if Sum ranks U-V as at least as good as its zero world. Moreover, if two worlds U and V satisfy the antecedent clause of Loose Pareto, then Loose Pareto ranks U as at least as good as V if and only if it ranks U-V above its zero world. Zero Independence is thus, we claim, highly plausible for finitely additive theories.
Zero Independence is equivalent to a condition in social choice theory known as Translation Scale Invariance when it is restricted to the case where locations are the same.  This latter condition holds that interlocational comparisons of zero points are irrelevant to the ranking of worlds. The zero point for value at each location, that is, can be set independently of how it is set for other locations (although, of course, when comparing two worlds, the zero point used for a given location in one world must also be used for that location in the second world). For example, if a location has values of 10 in world U and 5 in world V, both measured on the basis of some particular zero point (the same for both worlds), those values could be changed to 7 and 2 (by making the zero point 3 units higher for that location), and this, according to Translation Scale Invariance, would not alter how the two worlds are ranked.
Zero Independence is equivalent to Translation Scale Invariance (restricted to the case where locations are the same), since any change in the zero points for the locations in worlds U and V can, for some W, be represented by U+W and V+W. (For example, if there are just two people, and the first person’s zero point is decreased by two units, and the second person’s zero point is increased by one unit, then the resulting two representations of the value of U and V are simply U+W and V+W, where W is 2,-1.) Zero Independence and Translation Scale Invariance thus each hold that U ? V if and only if U+W ? V+W.
Translation Scale Invariance (and hence, Zero Independence) is highly plausible for finitely additive value theories. (Recall that our goal is to defend a particular extension of finite additivity, not to defend finite additivity against non-additive theories.) If there is no natural zero point that separates positive from negative value (if there is just more or less value with no natural separating point), then any particular zero point is arbitrary (not representing a real aspect of value). In this case, interlocational comparisons of zero-points are uncontroversially irrelevant. If, on the other hand, there is a natural zero for value, it is still plausible for finitely additive value theories to hold that it is irrelevant for ranking worlds. What matters (e.g., from a utilitarian perspective), as argued above, are the differences in value at each location between two worlds—not the absolute level of values at locations. No interlocational comparison of zero points is needed for this purpose.

Cost-benefit analysis is feasible. Ignore any util calc indicts. Hardin 90
Hardin, Russell (Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences @ NYU). May 1990. Morality within the Limits of Reason. University Of Chicago Press. pp. 4. ISBN 978-0226316208.
One of the cuter charges against utilitarianism is that it is irrational in the following sense. If I take the time to calculate the consequences of various courses of action before me, then I will ipso facto have chosen the course of action to take, namely, to sit and calculate, because while I am calculating the other courses of action will cease to be open to me. It should embarrass philosophers that they have ever taken this objection seriously. Parallel considerations in other realms are dismissed with eminently good sense. Lord Devlin notes, “If the reasonable man ‘worked to rule’ by perusing to the point of comprehension every form he was handed, the commercial and administrative life of the country would creep to a standstill.” James March and Herbert Simon escape the quandary of unending calculation by noting that often we satisfice, we do not maximize: we stop calculating and considering when we find a merely adequate choice of action. When, in principle, one cannot know what is the best choice, one can nevertheless be sure that sitting and calculating is not the best choice. But, one may ask, How do you know that another ten minutes of calculation would not have produced a better choice? And one can only answer, You do not. At some point the quarrel begins to sound adolescent. It is ironic that the point of the quarrel is almost never at issue in practice (as Devlin implies, we are almost all too reasonable in practice to bring the world to a standstill) but only in the principled discussions of academics.
?
The aff doesn’t have to implement a specific policy. Decision rules like the PP are key to the most accurate interp for the topic.
Nebel 14
Jake Nebel (TOC semifinalist in 2009, philosophy student at Oxford, winner of the Marshall Scholarship from Princeton University). “Topicality, Implementation, and What We Ought To Prioritize.” January 28th, 2014. http://victorybriefs.com/vbd/2014/1/topicality-implementation-and-what-we-ought-to-prioritize
I hear that many affirmatives on this topic defend the implementation of a particular policy or set of policies in developing countries. The classic framing of this issue has been in terms of an Aims vs. Implementation dichotomy, which has carried over from the Jan/Feb 2013 topic about valuing rehabilitation above retribution. In this article, I’ll explain why I think that is a false dichotomy, and how you can strategically get past this framing of the issue. The most important word in the resolution, for the purposes of this disagreement, is ‘prioritize.’ This is because a topical affirmative advocacy has to do the thing that the resolution says ought to be done. In this case, that’s prioritization. Now, if you just stop there, you might have the following thought: if a topical advocacy just needs to prioritize environmental protection (EP) over resource extraction (RE), then implementing some particular policy that prioritizes EP over RE is, ceteris paribus, topical. But that’s not a good inference. The reason is that what has to do the prioritizing in order to be topical is the agent. Your advocacy must be that the agent prioritize EP over RE, whatever that means. In this case, that agent is ‘developing countries.’ Just because an agent implements some policy or set of policies that prioritize EP over RE does not mean that the agent itself prioritizes EP over RE. This may seem like a picky distinction, but consider some examples. Suppose I chose to spend time with my friends tonight, rather than work on a paper. This choice might prioritize friendship over work. But this choice does not make it the case that I prioritize friendship over work. I might actually be the kind of person who prioritizes work over friendship, so that I almost always choose to write a paper when I could instead hang out with friends, but this night is the rare opportunity when I hang out with my friends. So, just because some choice or action prioritizes one thing over another does not entail that the agent prioritizes one thing over another. If we assume that an advocacy is topical only if it makes it the case that the agent does what the resolution says it ought to do, then this means that implementing a particular policy that prioritizes EP over RE is not enough to be topical. (That is, absent evidence about this policy having the effect of changing developing countries’ priorities as a whole. But then this advocacy might only be effects-topical.)

Tournament: Harvard RR | Round: 4 | Opponent: Whitman DM Daisy Massey | Judge: JScog and Ryan Davis
Action theory precedes ethics. We need a basic account of what an action is and its relation to intention before ethics can be sound. Anscombe 58
G.E.M. Anscombe. “Modern Moral Philosophy.” Philosophy, Vol. 33, No. 124 (Jan., 1958), pp. 1-19 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal Institute of Philosophy.
That I owe the grocer such-and-such a sum would be one of a set of facts which would be "brute" in relation to the description "I am a bilker." "Bilking" is of course a species of "dishonesty" or "injustice." (Naturally the consideration will not have any effect on my actions unless I want to commit or avoid acts of injustice.) So far, in spite of their strong associations, I conceive "bilking," "injustice" and "dishonesty" in a merely "factual" way. That I can do this for "bilking" is obvious enough; "justice" I have no idea how to define, except that its sphere is that of actions which relate to someone else, but "injustice," its defect, can for the moment be offered as a generic name covering various species. E.g.: "bilking," "theft" (which is relative to whatever property institutions exist), "slander," "adultery," "punishment of the innocent." In present-day philosophy an explanation is required how an unjust man is a bad man, or an unjust action a bad one; to give such an explanation belongs to ethics; but it cannot even be begun until we are equipped with a sound philosophy of psychology. For the proof that an unjust man is a bad man would require a positive account of justice as a "virtue." This part of the subject-matter of ethics is, however, completely closed to us until we have an account of what type of characteristic a virtue is-a problem, not of ethics, but of conceptual analysis-and how it relates to the actions in which it is instanced: a matter which I think Aristotle did not succed in really making clear. For this we certainly need an account at least of what a human action is at all, and how its description as "doing such-and-such" is affected by its motive and by the intention or intentions in it; and for this an account of such concepts is required. 

However, actions are not always pre-determined by intention. Many of our actions are influenced by the creative dimension of freedom. Creativity arises through spontaneous action in reaction to shifts in circumstances caused by natural forces.
Connolly 13
William Connolly (Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University). The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. Duke University Press. 2013.
As individual and collective agents of multiple types, we exercise one dimension of freedom when we pursue existing desires and another when we reflexively reconsider them and seek outlets to act upon revised desires. But those desires are not merely given in the first instance, and the reflexive process in the second does not always render explicit what was already “implicit” in operative assumptions and desires. There is often more pluripotentiality in the rush of desire forward to consolidation in action than is captured by the lazy idea of the implicit. There is also pluripotentiality during those fecund moments when an entire constituency coalesces under new circumstances, with the change in “circumstances” often shaped by rapid shifts in nonhuman force fields with which they are involved. In such circumstances the creative element of freedom comes into play. To put the point briefly, neither the tradition of negative freedom nor that of positive freedom comes to terms sufficiently with the role of creativity in freedom. Creativity here means, as a first cut action by the present upon ambiguities arising from the past oriented toward the future in a way that is not entirely reducible to the past as either implicit in the present or an aggregation of blind causes that produce the future. It might involve an exploratory movement back and forth between different parties in a cloudy situation that issues in a new result none intended at the start. These initiatives may then be consolidated by disciplinary processes and tactics that help to sediment them into the soft tissues of cultural life. Reflexivity, you might say, begins to do its work after the uncanny, creative element in freedom has begun to unfold, for good or ill. Creative processes flow through and over us, and reflexivity doubles the creative adventure. Actions are thus not entirely controlled by pre-existing intentions; rather the creative dimension helps to compose and refine intentions as they become consolidated in action. To articulate the creative dimension of freedom, then, is to insert a fundamental qualification or hesitation into the ideas of both the masterful agent and agency as the activation of intentions already there. The creative element is located somewhere between active and passive agency. When creative freedom is underway in an unsettled context we may find ourselves allowing or encouraging a new thought, desire, or strategy to crystallize out of the confusion and nest of proto-thoughts that precede it. An agent, individual or collective, can help to open the portals of creativity, but it cannot will that which is creative to come into being by intending the result before it arrives. Real creativity is thus tinged with uncertainty and mystery. The creative dimension of freedom discloses an ambiguity that haunts extant ideas of intention, desire, agency, and reflexivity. It exposes the ambiguity of agency in the practice of freedom. This ambiguity may find expression, say, in a basketball game as an accomplished player under intense defensive pressure spontaneously fires up the first jump shot ever attempted amid the flow of action. The shot, initially lacking a name, surprises the shooter and mystifies defenders. It was not implicit in the athlete’s repertoire; it emerged in the pressure of action. After being repeated, named, and perfected through relentless training, it may spread like wildfire across the basketball landscape, as that type of shot did in the 1950s in the United States. Everything else in the game now shifts to some degree too. Other players, coaches, and referees now adopt creative responses to it, generating changes in the game through a mélange of partisan mutual adjustments that no individual or organization intended at the outset. Or take a young point guard who spontaneously completes a fast break with a blind, behind-the-back pass and then finds himself negotiating with his coach to decide just when such passes can be allowed in the future. Such modes of creative, mutual adjustment, neither simply assignable to one player or coach, nor fitting neatly into extant notions of preformed intention, nor reducible to a reflexive dialectic, occur all the time in multiple domains. They form part of the essence of freedom. 

2 additional warrants.

A. Creativity is key to value to life. Connolly 13
William Connolly (Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University). The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. Duke University Press. 2013.
If creativity finds expression in the human estate, it will sometimes do so at surprising moments during a disruption in a practice, opening the door to a scientific invention, a new concept, a political initiative, a new social movement, an artistic innovation, market spontaneity, a language change, a cooking invention, teaching improvisation, a new type of film scene, a musical production, the use of new media, or the invention of a new product. And so on endlessly. Our identification with life – our tacit sense of belonging to a human predicament worthy of embrace – is partly rooted in reflexive reconsideration of established desires and ends. But it is grounded too in those uncanny experiences of creativity by means of which something new enters the world. This may be one of the reasons people cleave to the sweetness of life. It ties the sweetness of life to a vitality of being, even more than to a preordained end, purpose, or “fullness” with which it is officially invested. The intimate relation between freedom and creativity is why freedom is never sufficiently grasped by the idea of a lack to be fulfilled, successful action upon preset desires, or the drive to render the implicit explicit. The experience of uncertainty or incompleteness is sometimes an occasion of fecundity. 

B. The creative dimension of freedom is key to acts of protest that shape discourse.
Connolly 13
William Connolly (Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University). The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. Duke University Press. 2013.
The basketball example already suggests that creativity and spontaneity are not confined to economic markets. So consider politics. Take that moment in feudal Ireland in which peasants exploited by a landlord named Thomas Boycott creatively organized an entire community to stop using his products, fomenting an innovative strategy of protest that also produced a creative innovation in language. We call such now well-honed strategies boycotts today. It is unlikely that any of those who joined the meetings to resist Thomas Boycott intended to invent a boycott before participating in that collective process of gestation. Or consider the dispersed, illegal minority that organized and sustained an underground railroad to provide those striving to escape plantation slavery a route marked by periodic tunnels, river crossings, overground trails, and save houses. Or follow the life of Frederick Douglass as he assembled creative strategies to learn how to read in a state when it was illegal to acquire such a skill. Or those who “invented” and participated in the first teach-in in American at the University of Michigan to protest the Vietnam War and to educate ill-informed citizens about its effects. Or that governor in Michigan who ordered the National Guard not to crush the 1937 sit-down strike, itself creatively organized by workers in Flint, but to protect the workers who had introduced the innovation.  Or those protesters in Egypt who creatively used Twitter, cell phones, and Facebook to organize themselves and outwit the police. Or the gays at Stonewall who organized a series of protests after yet another violent police raid. Or Mahatma Gandhi, who roused a whole country to nonviolent resistance to free India from English imperialism. Or those students, professors, and investors in several countries who organized investment boycotts to oppose apartheid. Or multiple minorities within territorial states who have gradually found themselves shifting from seeking tolerance in a state organized around a hegemonic center to demanding a more decentered mode of pluralism that forges an ethos of agonistic respect between and among minorities of several types. And consider the shifts in language occasioned by such creative innovations, through which a new term or phrase is introduced into a web of discourse that had heretofore seemed complete to many. Terms such as boycott, underground railroad, safe house, teach-in, sit-down strike, sit-in, Twitter, Stonewall, agonistic respect, and nonviolent resistance consolidate such innovations, rendering them ready-made possibilities to consider in the future. To the extent such innovative terms stick, they augment the supply of future actions and set a state for new alternatives yet to riff upon them. The array of strategies becomes augmented, even as authorities prepare to respond in new ways to their most recent iterations. There are certainly negative innovations too, such as becoming a scab, inventing fracking, inventing the Guantanamo Gulag, or organizing a neoliberal Tea Party to protest a new regime right after the last regime has presided over an economic meltdown. But noble innovations must also be listed from time to time, particularly as you engage a philosophy of neoliberalism that both celebrates spontaneity and limits its application so severely. Good night, Professor Friedman. Good morning, Mr. Hayek.
Neoliberalism destroys creativity, rendering the system unsustainable. Striking a balance between creativity and reflexivity is key to a new culture outside of neoliberalism. Connolly 13
William Connolly (Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University). The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. Duke University Press. 2013.
The danger of “serfdom” today, you might say, is the emergence of a regime in which a few corporate overlords monopolize creativity to sustain a bankrupt way of life; in which military, prison, and security budgets are increased significantly to cling to American hegemony in a world unfavorable to it; in which the element of creativity is squeezed out of work life for many citizens; in which the ideology of freedom is winnowed to a set of consumer choices between preset options; and in which compensatory drives to extremism in secular dogmatism and religious faith intensify. Moderate neoliberalism cannot sustain itself under these circumstances. Its erstwhile proponents are today pressed either to allow a new priority to course through them or to give themselves to an extremism many have heretofore hesitated to accept. But is there not also a tension in the positive account pursued here? Yes. If you embrace both an ethos of responsibility encoded into multiple interacting practices and the creative element in freedom, you have introduced a tension between these two valuefs. Any theory that acknowledges only one value, as radical neoliberals tend to do in one way and holists in another, is not worth its salt. The question is how to negotiate the tension. Perhaps the best hope is to keep one eye on each of these values. We keep the door open to creativity in the practices of art, citizen movements, entrepreneurial innovations, court interpretations, sports activity, scientific experiments, religious movements, consumption choices, state modes of regulation, and the like as we also commit ourselves to debate the quality of these innovations situationally with one eye on their probable effects upon the interim future. That is one reason the elements of care for the world and reflexivity are so important to a culture that prizes the element of creativity. There is no guarantee we will always get the balance right, particularly in a world that is periodically jolted by surprises. But at least we will have committed ourselves to pay due attention to the several elements in play, keeping in mind that both the element of creativity and participating with dignity in a larger system help to make life worth living.

Independently, neoliberalism precludes ethics by reducing decision-making to economic self-interest.
Sachikonye 10
Tawanda Sachakonye (Rhodes University). “A Foucauldian Critique of Neo-liberalism.” January 2010. http://eprints.ru.ac.za/1812/3/Sachikonye-MA-TR10-48.pdf
In terms of individual citizens neo-liberal government promotes the notion of the responsible citizen. Thus, the ideal individual in neo-liberal society practises personal responsibility by making informed rational decisions. Neo-liberal democracy therefore ?aspires to construct prudent subjects whose moral quality is based on the fact that they rationally assess the costs and benefits of a certain act as opposed to other alternative acts? (Lemke, 2001: 201). Neo-liberal governments together with corporations create conditions in which the responsible rational individual can become a successful entrepreneur or consumer. The success or failure of the individual depends on his or her skill and work ethic. Hence, life for an individual in neo-liberal society becomes one of personal responsibility to a greater extent. Giroux 53 argues that under neo-liberalism the state no longer assumes responsibility for social needs and rather focuses on initiating various ?deregulations and privatizations‘, whilst relinquishing all social responsibility to the ?market and private philanthropy‘ (2004). The neo-liberal state has no real obligation towards its citizens except to provide the necessary conditions for entrepreneurship and consumerism. As a result, a kind of Darwinist ‘survival of the fittest’ ethic becomes apparent; Giroux argues that: ?social Darwinism has been resurrected from the ashes of the 19th century sweatshops and can now be seen in full bloom in most reality TV programs and in the unfettered self-interests that now drives popular culture. As narcissism is replaced by unadulterated materialism, public concerns collapse into utterly private considerations and where public space does exist it is mainly used as a confessional for private woes, a cut throat game of winner take all, or an advertisement for consumerism? (2004) 54 . This is a sentiment that is echoed by Bourdieu 55 , who states that this form of moral Darwinism establishes what he terms the ‘cult of the winner’ and ultimately institutes a survival of the fittest mentality that is underpinned by cynicism and self interest (1998). The neo-liberal state utilises knowledge like market research as a technique of power. This is similar to how the government in the 17 th century viewed statistics as the ?science of the state‘ and a component of the technology of government (Smart, 2002: 129). The neoliberal government can now use market research to indirectly control its citizens as well as gather information about their personal lives. Market research with its use of modern technology and accurate data supersedes census studies and statistics. Dufour writes: ?vast numbers of market researchers are therefore always taking the pulse of consumers and surveying their sexual and emotional lives, so as to anticipate their needs and to give their desires possible names and credible destinations? (2008: 58). The collecting of such information and the use of it to control citizens fits the Foucauldian critique. The field of marketing is a highly efficient technology of neo-liberal governance; it becomes a mechanism through which neo-liberal government can regulate a consumer society and provide specific products to cater for the varied needs of different individuals. Dufour notes: ?there is no such thing as a small profit. A profit can be made from babies who ?want‘ their favourite shampoo, senior citizens who ?want‘ to occupy their spare time and invest their savings, poor adolescents who ?want‘ cheap brand names and rich adolescents who ?want‘ their own cars. They must all be satisfied. ?I‘ is now central to every advert? (2008: 58). Neo-liberalism dominates society through subtle means. Thus, neo-liberalism does not seek ?to assert itself by placing disciplinary controls on life‘ (Dufour, 2008: 157). Neo-liberalism has permeated society by using subtle ?political technologies‘. These mechanisms of power transcend the old overt ?technologies‘: religion, the police and family, and are more flexible in that they are less reliant on coercion and are less costly, as noted by Dufour (2008: 157). The new political technologies of neo-liberal governance include: the internet, multimedia software, the fields of marketing and management, as well as telecommunications technology governance have yielded more control, management and surveillance than any traditional government could have hoped for. Neo-liberal governance has also managed to dehumanise human society by forcing the complexity of human difference into the narrow confines of entrepreneurialism, consumerism and the logic of self interest. Fine and Leopold write: ?are we the manipulated mannequins of the advertising industry, the sovereignless victims of profit-hungry corporate capital, rational economic man and women trading off one commodity against another according to their relative prices and utilities?? (1993: 3). This is indeed a grim question to fathom but one which neo-liberal governance has made pertinent. 

Thus the standard is resisting neoliberalism.

I advocate that less industrialized economies accept the Precautionary Principle on resource extraction issues. I reserve the right to clarify.

The World Trade Organization is using its trade authority to challenge environmental protection and prioritize resource extraction.
Global Exchange 11
Global Exchange (international human rights organization dedicated to promoting social, economic and environmental justice around the world). “Top Reasons to Oppose the WTO.” 2011. http://www.globalexchange.org/resources/wto/oppose
5. The WTO Is Destroying the Environment The WTO is being used by corporations to dismantle hard-won local and national environmental protections, which are attacked as “barriers to trade.” The very first WTO panel ruled that a provision of the US Clean Air Act, requiring both domestic and foreign producers alike to produce cleaner gasoline, was illegal. The WTO declared illegal a provision of the Endangered Species Act that requires shrimp sold in the US to be caught with an inexpensive device allowing endangered sea turtles to escape. The WTO is attempting to deregulate industries including logging, fishing, water utilities, and energy distribution, which will lead to further exploitation of these natural resources. 

The PP challenges WTO authority over environmental issues. This is key to generating momentum to shut down the WTO.
Mokhiber and Weissman 99
Russell Mokhiber (editor of Corporate Crime Reporter) and Robert Weissman (editor of Multinational Monitor). “Top 10 Reasons to Shutter the WTO.” Mother Jones. November 24th, 1999. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/1999/11/top-10-reasons-shutter-wto
The WTO eviscerates the Precautionary Principle. WTO rules generally block countries from acting in response to potential risk -- requiring a probability before governments can move to resolve harms to human health or the environment. The WTO squashes diversity. WTO rules establish international health, environmental and other standards as a global ceiling through a process of "harmonization;" countries or even states and cities can only exceed them by overcoming high hurdles. The WTO operates in secrecy. Its tribunals rule on the "legality" of nations' laws, but carry out their work behind closed doors. The WTO limits governments' ability to use their purchasing dollar for human rights, environmental, worker rights and other non-commercial purposes. In general, WTO rules state that governments can make purchases based only on quality and cost considerations. The WTO disallows bans on imports of goods made with child labor. In general, WTO rules do not allow countries to treat products differently based on how they were produced -- irrespective of whether made with brutalized child labor, with workers exposed to toxics or with no regard for species protection. The WTO legitimizes life patents. WTO rules permit and in some cases require patents or similar exclusive protections for life forms. Some of these problems, such as the WTO's penchant for secrecy, could potentially be fixed, but the core problems -- prioritization of commercial over other values, the constraints on democratic decision-making and the bias against local economies -- cannot, for they are inherent in the WTO itself. Because of these unfixable problems, the World Trade Organization should be shut down, sooner rather than later. That doesn't mean interim steps shouldn't be taken. It does mean that beneficial reforms will focus not on adding new areas of competence to the WTO or enhancing its authority, even if the new areas appear desirable (such as labor rights or competition). Instead, the reforms to pursue are those that reduce or limit the WTO's power -- for example, by denying it the authority to invalidate laws passed pursuant to international environmental agreements, limiting application of WTO agricultural rules in the Third World, or eliminating certain subject matters (such as essential medicines or life forms) from coverage under the WTO's intellectual property agreement. These measures are necessary and desirable in their own right, and they would help generate momentum to close down the WTO. 

The WTO promotes global neoliberalism. US influence over the WTO drives the support of brutal dictators.
Makwana 6
Rajesh Makwana (executive director of Share the World’s Resources). “Neoliberalism and Economic Globalization.” Share the World’s Resources, NGO with consultative status in the UN. November 23rd, 2006. http://www.stwr.org/globalization/neoliberalism-and-economic-globalization.html
The thrust of international policy behind the phenomenon of economic globalization is neoliberal in nature. Being hugely profitable to corporations and the wealthy elite, neoliberal policies are propagated through the IMF, World Bank and WTO. Neoliberalism favours the free-market as the most efficient method of global resource allocation. Consequently it favours large-scale, corporate commerce and the privatization of resources. There has been much international attention recently on neoliberalism. Its ideologies have been rejected by influential countries in Latin America and its moral basis is now widely questioned. Recent protests against the WTO, IMF and World Bank were essentially protests against the neoliberal policies that these organizations implement, particularly in low-income countries. The neoliberal experiment has failed to combat extreme poverty, has exacerbated global inequality, and is hampering international aid and development efforts. This article presents an overview of neoliberalism and its effect on low income countries. Introduction  After the Second World War, corporate enterprises helped to create a wealthy class in society which enjoyed excessive political influence on their government in the US and Europe. Neoliberalism surfaced as a reaction by these wealthy elites to counteract post-war policies that favoured the working class and strengthened the welfare state. Neoliberal policies advocate market forces and commercial activity as the most efficient methods for producing and supplying goods and services. At the same time they shun the role of the state and discourage government intervention into economic, financial and even social affairs. The process of economic globalization is driven by this ideology; removing borders and barriers between nations so that market forces can drive the global economy. The policies were readily taken up by governments and still continue to pervade classical economic thought, allowing corporations and affluent countries to secure their financial advantage within the world economy. The policies were most ardently enforced in the US and Europe in the1980s during the Regan–Thatcher–Kohl era. These leaders believed that expanding the free-market and private ownership would create greater economic efficiency and social well-being. The resulting deregulation, privatization and the removal of border restrictions provided fertile ground for corporate activity, and over the next 25 years corporations grew rapidly in size and influence. Corporations are now the most productive economic units in the world, more so than most countries. With their huge financial, economic and political leverage, they continue to further their neoliberal objectives. There is a consensus between the financial elite, neoclassical economists and the political classes in most countries that neoliberal policies will create global prosperity. So entrenched is their position that this view determines the policies of the international agencies (IMF, World Bank and WTO), and through them dictates the functioning of the global economy. Despite reservations from within many UN agencies, neoliberal policies are accepted by most development agencies as the most likely means of reducing poverty and inequality in the poorest regions. There is a huge discrepancy between the measurable result of economic globalization and its proposed benefits. Neoliberal policies have unarguably generated massive wealth for some people, but most crucially, they have been unable to benefit those living in extreme poverty who are most in need of financial aid. Excluding China, annual economic growth in developing countries between 1960 and 1980 was 3.2. This dropped drastically between 1980 and 2000 to a mere 0.7 . This second period is when neoliberalism was most prevalent in global economic policy. (Interestingly, China was not following the neoliberal model during these periods, and its economic growth per capita grew to over 8 between 1980 and 2000.) Neoliberalism has also been unable to address growing levels of global inequality. Over the last 25 years, the income inequalities have increased dramatically, both within and between countries. Between 1980 and 1998, the income of richest 10 as share of poorest 10 became 19 more unequal; and the income of richest 1 as share of poorest 1 became 77 more unequal (again, not including China). The shortcomings of neoliberal policy are also apparent in the well documented economic disasters suffered by countries in Latin America and South Asia in the 1990s. These countries were left with no choice but to follow the neoliberal model of privatization and deregulation, due to their financial problems and pressure from the IMF. Countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina and Bolivia have since rejected foreign corporate control and the advice of the IMF and World Bank. Instead they have favoured a redistribution of wealth, the re-nationalization of industry and have prioritized the provision of healthcare and education. They are also sharing resources such as oil and medical expertise throughout the region and with other countries around the world. The dramatic economic and social improvement seen in these countries has not stopped them from being demonized by the US. Cuba is a well known example of this propaganda. Deemed to be a danger to ‘freedom and the American way of life’, Cuba has been subject to intense US political, economic and military pressure in order to tow the neoliberal line. Washington and the mainstream media in the US have recently embarked on a similar propaganda exercise aimed at Venezuela’s president Chavez. This over-reaction by Washington to ‘economic nationalism’ is consistent with their foreign policy objectives which have not changed significantly for the past 150 years. Securing resources and economic dominance has been and continues to be the USA’s main economic objective. According to Maria Páez Victor: “Since 1846 the United States has carried out no fewer than 50 military invasions and destabilizing operations involving 12 different Latin American countries. Yet, none of these countries has ever had the capacity to threaten US security in any significant way. The US intervened because of perceived threats to its economic control and expansion. For this reason it has also supported some of the region’s most vicious dictators such as Batista, Somoza, Trujillo, and Pinochet.” As a result of corporate and US influence, the key international bodies that developing countries are forced to turn to for assistance, such as the World Bank and IMF, are major exponents of the neoliberal agenda. The WTO openly asserts its intention to improve global business opportunities; the IMF is heavily influenced by the Wall Street and private financiers, and the World Bank ensures corporations benefit from development project contracts. They all gain considerably from the neo-liberal model. 

Neoliberal ideology makes extinction inevitable. It sidelines concerns of ecological sustainability through unhindered pursuit of resource extraction and leads to war.
Bristow 10
Gillian Bristow (School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University), Resilient regions: re-‘place’ing regional competitiveness, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 2010, 3, 153–167
In recent years, regional development strategies have been subjugated to the hegemonic discourse of competitiveness, such that the ultimate objective for all regional development policy-makers and practitioners has become the creation of economic advantage through superior productivity performance, or the attraction of new ?rms and labour (Bristow, 2005). A major consequence is the developing ‘ubiquiti?cation’ of regional development strategies (Bristow, 2005; Maskell and Malmberg, 1999). This re?ects the status of competitiveness as a key discursive construct (Jessop, 2008) that has acquired hugely signi?cant rhetorical power for certain interests intent on reinforcing capitalist relations (Bristow, 2005; Fougner, 2006). Indeed, the competitiveness hegemony is such that many policies previously considered only indirectly relevant to unfettered economic growth tend to be hijacked in support of competitiveness agendas (for example Raco, 2008; also Dannestam, 2008).  This paper will argue, however, that a particularly narrow discourse of ‘competitiveness’ has been constructed that has a number of negative connotations for the ‘resilience’ of regions. Resilience is de?ned as the region’s ability to experience positive economic success that is socially inclusive, works within environmental limits and which can ride global economic punches (Ashby et al., 2009). As such, resilience clearly resonates with literatures on sustainability, localisation and diversi?cation, and the developing understanding of regions as intrinsically diverse entities with evolutionary and context-speci?c development trajectories (Hayter, 2004). In contrast, the dominant discourse of competitiveness is ‘placeless’ and increasingly associated with globalised, growth-?rst and environmentally malign agendas (Hudson, 2005).  However, this paper will argue that the relationships between competitiveness and resilience are more complex than might at ?rst appear. Using insights from the Cultural Political Economy (CPE) approach, which focuses on understanding the construction, development and spread of hegemonic policy discourses, the paper will argue that the dominant discourse of competitiveness used in regional development policy is narrowly constructed and is thus insensitive to contingencies of place and the more nuanced role of competition within economies. This leads to problems of resilience that can be partly overcome with the development of a more contextualised approach to competitiveness. The paper is now structured as follows. It begins by examining the developing understanding of resilience in the theorising and policy discourse around regional development. It then describes the CPE approach and utilises its framework to explain both how a narrow conception of competitiveness has come to dominate regional development policy and how resilience inter-plays in subtle and complex ways with competitiveness and its emerging critique. The paper then proceeds to illustrate what resilience means for regional development ?rstly, with reference to the Transition Towns concept, and then by developing a typology of regional strategies to show the different characteristics of policy approaches based on competitiveness and resilience. Regional resilience Resilience is rapidly emerging as an idea whose time has come in policy discourses around localities and regions, where it is developing widespread appeal owing to the peculiarly powerful combination of transformative pressures from below, and various catalytic, crisis-induced imperatives for change from above. It features strongly in policy discourses around environmental management and sustainable development (see Hudson, 2008a), but has also more recently emerged in relation to emergency and disaster planning with, for example ‘Regional Resilience Teams’ established in the English regions to support and co-ordinate civil protection activities around various emergency situations such as the threat of a swine ?u pandemic.  The discourse of resilience is also taking hold in discussions around desirable local and regional development activities and strategies. The recent global ‘credit crunch’ and the accompanying in-crease in livelihood insecurity has highlighted the advantages of those local and regional economies that have greater ‘resilience’ by virtue of being less dependent upon globally footloose activities, hav-ing greater economic diversity, and/or having a de-termination to prioritise and effect more signi?cant structural change (Ashby et al, 2009; Larkin and Cooper, 2009). Indeed, resilience features particular strongly in the ‘grey’ literature spawned by thinktanks, consul-tancies and environmental interest groups around the consequences of the global recession, catastrophic climate change and the arrival of the era of peak oil for localities and regions with all its implications for the longevity of carbon-fuelled economies, cheap, long-distance transport and global trade. This popularly labelled ‘triple crunch’ (New Economics Foundation, 2008) has powerfully illuminated the potentially disastrous material consequences of the voracious growth imperative at the heart of neoliberalism and competitiveness, both in the form of resource constraints (especially food security) and in the inability of the current system to manage global ?nancial and ecological sustainability. In so doing, it appears to be galvinising previously disparate, fractured debates about the merits of the current system, and challenging public and political opinion to develop a new, global concern with frugality, egalitarianism and localism (see, for example Jackson, 2009; New Economics Foundation, 2008). 

Engaging the state is key. Pure critique can’t solve, and the aff is a form of engagement without being statist. Connolly 8
William Connolly (Professor of Political Science at John Hopkins) Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. 2008.
Before turning to possible strategies to promote these objectives, we need to face an objection posed by one segment of the left: "Don't you depend a lot upon the state, when it must be viewed as the enemy?" My response is threefold. First, there is no way to take on global warming without engaging the state in the effort as well as international agencies, and global warming is a key danger of this epoch. Second, it is less the state itself and more its existing subsidies and priorities that are at issue. If you were to oppose both the market and the state you might reduce the democratic left to pure critique, with no presentation of positive possibilities and strategies. But critique is always important and never enough, as the left has begun to rediscover and as the American right has known for forty years. Third, although one must acknowledge the issues of cumbersome state bureaucracy, corporate crony¬ism, and state corruption, all three increased radically when the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine achieved hegemony, and they will get worse unless eco-egalitarians enter the fray at the interceded levels of micropolitics, microeconomic experiments, and the state. It is unwise to act as if the state must always be what it has become. Challenging the media is critical in this respect, making it become a watchdog of corporations, the state, religious movements, and the multiple imbrications between them. My view, as be¬comes clear in the next few pages, is that no interim agenda on the left can proceed far without finding expression in state policy, and state policy must draw inspiration from microeconomic experiments initially launched outside its canopy: microeconomic experiments and creative state policies must in¬form each other. We thus seek to include the state without becoming statist. Those who invest hope in revolutionary overthrow may oppose such a com¬bination. I suspect that revolution, were it to occur, would undermine rather than vitalize democratic culture.29

Prefer aff interpretations. Key to clash. O’Donnell 4
Timothy M. O’Donnell (Director of Debate University of Mary Washington) “And the Twain Shall Meet: Affirmative Framework Choice and the Future of Debate”  2004.
AFC preserves the value of the first affirmative constructive speech. This speech is the starting point for the debate. It is a function of necessity. The debate must begin somewhere if it is to begin at all. Failure to grant AFC is a denial of the service rendered by the affirmative team’s labor when they crafted this speech. Further, if the affirmative does not get to pick the starting point, renders the opening speech act is essentially rendered meaningless while the rest of the debate becomes a debate about what we should be debating about. 

The aff doesn’t have to implement a specific policy. Decision rules like the PP are key to the most accurate interp for the topic.
Nebel 14
Jake Nebel (TOC semifinalist in 2009, philosophy student at Oxford, winner of the Marshall Scholarship from Princeton University). “Topicality, Implementation, and What We Ought To Prioritize.” January 28th, 2014. http://victorybriefs.com/vbd/2014/1/topicality-implementation-and-what-we-ought-to-prioritize
I hear that many affirmatives on this topic defend the implementation of a particular policy or set of policies in developing countries. The classic framing of this issue has been in terms of an Aims vs. Implementation dichotomy, which has carried over from the Jan/Feb 2013 topic about valuing rehabilitation above retribution. In this article, I’ll explain why I think that is a false dichotomy, and how you can strategically get past this framing of the issue. The most important word in the resolution, for the purposes of this disagreement, is ‘prioritize.’ This is because a topical affirmative advocacy has to do the thing that the resolution says ought to be done. In this case, that’s prioritization. Now, if you just stop there, you might have the following thought: if a topical advocacy just needs to prioritize environmental protection (EP) over resource extraction (RE), then implementing some particular policy that prioritizes EP over RE is, ceteris paribus, topical. But that’s not a good inference. The reason is that what has to do the prioritizing in order to be topical is the agent. Your advocacy must be that the agent prioritize EP over RE, whatever that means. In this case, that agent is ‘developing countries.’ Just because an agent implements some policy or set of policies that prioritize EP over RE does not mean that the agent itself prioritizes EP over RE. This may seem like a picky distinction, but consider some examples. Suppose I chose to spend time with my friends tonight, rather than work on a paper. This choice might prioritize friendship over work. But this choice does not make it the case that I prioritize friendship over work. I might actually be the kind of person who prioritizes work over friendship, so that I almost always choose to write a paper when I could instead hang out with friends, but this night is the rare opportunity when I hang out with my friends. So, just because some choice or action prioritizes one thing over another does not entail that the agent prioritizes one thing over another. If we assume that an advocacy is topical only if it makes it the case that the agent does what the resolution says it ought to do, then this means that implementing a particular policy that prioritizes EP over RE is not enough to be topical. (That is, absent evidence about this policy having the effect of changing developing countries’ priorities as a whole. But then this advocacy might only be effects-topical.) People might respond with a definition of EP or RE in terms of policies. This definition might show that the objects to be prioritized are sets of policies, or some common feature of policies, rather than an abstract aim. But the relevant question is not Aims vs. Implementation: that framing of the topic only persists because of Jan/Feb 2013, on which people defined 'rehabilitation' and 'retribution' as either an aim or a kind of policy. But Aims vs. Implementation is not the correct contrast. The correct contrasts are Aims vs. Policies, and Prioritization vs. Implementation. The point is that prioritizing some kind of policy is not the same as implementing some policy from that set. Aims vs. Policies is a matter of the direct object, whereas Prioritization vs. Implementation is a matter of the verb. We can agree that EP and RE are sets or kinds of policies, but think that the resolution is about which we ought to prioritize, not which we ought to implement. However, this does not mean that the anti-policy side completely wins. People who wish to defend an anti-policy interpretation often make their interpretations too strong, by suggesting that no questions of implementation are relevant. That seems to me false. To see why, consider a variation on my earlier example about hanging out with my friends or writing a paper. Suppose I used to prioritize work over friendship, but I now prioritize friendship over work. It seems that I am now more likely to spend time with my friends, when this trades off with writing a paper, than I used to be. This is because an agent’s priorities shape her decisions. They don’t guarantee that an agent will always choose any particular action that better reflects those priorities. But they will lead to different patterns of actions on the whole. If this is right, then the most accurate Aims-based interpretation of the topic allows that the affirmative advocacy leads to the implementation of policies that prioritize EP over RE as an effect, although the affirmative can’t advocate any particular policy. Implementation of particular policies is an effect, which can be used to garner advantages or disadvantages, but cannot be the affirmative advocacy. And any particular effect of that kind can only be known with some uncertain probability; it cannot be assumed to occur as a matter of fiat. 

RE is neolib. Corporations and states suppress environmentally-focused protest by indigenous groups with violence.
Downey et al. 10
Liam Downey, Eric Bonds, and Katherine Clark (University of Colorado at Boulder). “Natural Resource Extraction, Armed Violence, and Environmental Degradation.” Organ Environ. 2010 December ; 23(4): 417–445. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3169238/pdf/nihms317120.pdf
Of course, transportation technology alone does not ensure access to affordable raw materials, especially when those materials are located in other nations or in areas controlled by other groups. Thus, since World War II and the breakup of Europe’s colonial empires,4 wealthy nations and corporations, which consume the bulk of the world’s natural resources (Hawken, Lovins, and Lovins, 1999; Speth, 2005), have relied on a combination of mechanisms that they control, including ideology (e.g., neoliberalism; Goldman, 2005), debt (Bello et al., 1999; Clark and Foster, 2009), agricultural research institutes (Foster, 1994), export credit (Evans, Goodman, and Lansbury, 2002), political risk insurance (Moody, 2005, 2007), the WTO (Wallach and Woodall, 2004), the World Bank, and the IMF (Bello et al., 1999; Goldman, 2005), to ensure their continued access to and control over vital raw materials. Among other things, these institutions, organizations, and ideologies have worked collectively to open the economies of developing nations to corporate investment, increase the flow of natural resources from developing to developed nations, create new legal structures and government institutions that facilitate foreign involvement in developing nation economies, and garner developing nation support for corporate activities, including resource extraction activities, within their borders (Bello et al., 1999; Goldman, 2005; Harrison, 2004; Moody, 2007; Potter, 2000; Structural Adjustment Participatory Review International Network, 2004; Toussaint, 2005; Vorley, 2004; Wallach and Woodall, 2004). However, nations and societies are not monolithic entities, and regardless of whether a government willingly or unwillingly engages in specific resource extraction activities, whether these activities are organized by local or foreign companies, or whether they occur in developed or developing nations or in nations with strong or weak legal and property rights regimes, it is likely that in many cases individuals and groups will protest, resist, or rebel against these activities. For example, protestors might be worried about local environmental degradation or health problems that result from resource extraction activities, they might be aggrieved by any loss of livelihood that they and their community may experience as a result of these activities, or they may be forced to relocate in order to make way for resource extraction (Structural Adjustment Participatory Review International Network, 2004). Similarly, workers hired by resource extraction firms may protest poor working conditions, local residents may receive few of the benefits but all of the burdens associated with resource extraction activities, or local residents may be indigenous, colonized, or otherwise marginalized people who resent government and outsider intrusion into their lives (Evans et al., 2002; Gedicks, 2001; Moody, 2007). In such instances, local and national governments, resource extraction firms, or rebels who control natural resources may feel that they have no choice but to use violence or the threat of violence to protect their resource extraction activities. Violent actions and threats of violence might include the forced relocation of local residents; the use of police, military, or mercenary forces to break up protests, arrest protestors and provide mine security; and the repression of local indigenous people from whose ranks protestors have emerged or might emerge. Violent actions might also include military conflict with groups that threaten resource extraction activities and foreign military aid and training to local police and military forces. Of course, armed violence may occur even in the absence of protest. For example, forced labor may be used to decrease labor costs or because working conditions are horrendous, and forced removal may occur in the absence of protest to either forestall protest or because there is no way to extract resources with people living on or near the extraction site. In either case, violence or threatened violence will likely be necessary because most people do not want to be forced to work or leave their homes. The use or threatened use of violence to gain or maintain access to vital raw materials may also occur in situations in which a resource that is viewed as being critical to national survival and economic prosperity, such as oil or water, is located in an area controlled by others in which mechanisms such as trade liberalization or structural adjustment have not effectively guaranteed permanent supplies of or control over the resource (see Klare, 2001, 2004, for detailed discussions of this type of situation). In such cases, governments might resort to actions such as militarily enforced trade sanctions, counterterrorism activities, proxy wars, military threats, invasion, or providing military aid and training to local police and military forces. Finally, because land and water transport is potentially subject to piracy or military disruption, governments may devote military resources toward protecting specific resource shipments (such as U.S. protection of Kuwaiti shipping during the Iraq–Iran war in the 1980s) or providing security for roads, railroads, and naval shipping lanes (Klare, 2001, 2004).5

Tournament: Lexington | Round: 5 | Opponent: Lexington PC | Judge: Ryan Davis, Courtney Nunley
God exists – 5 reasons.

First, Pascal’s Wager means any risk of God outweighs neg offense. Kreeft 94 writes
Kreeft, Peter (Professor of philosophy at Boston College). Handbook of Christian Apologetics. 1994.
But the only chance of doing infinite justice is if God exists and we believe, while the only chance of doing infinite injustice is if God exists and we do not believe. If God does not exist, there is no one there to do infinite justice or infinite injustice to.

Second is the Cosmological argument. Kreeft 94 writes
Kreeft, Peter (Professor of philosophy at Boston College). Handbook of Christian Apologetics. 1994.
Everything that is has some adequate or sufficient reason why it is. Philosophers call this the Principle of Sufficient Reason. We use it every day, in common sense and in science as well as in philosophy and theology. If we saw a rabbit suddenly appear on an empty table, we would not blandly say, "Hi, rabbit. You came from nowhere, didn't you?" No, we would look for a cause, assuming there has to be one. Did the rabbit fall from the ceiling? Did a magician put it there when we weren't looking? If there seems to be no physical cause, we look for a psychological cause: perhaps someone hypnotized us. As a last resort, we look for a supernatural cause, a miracle, but there must be some cause. We never deny the Principle of Sufficient Reason itself. No one believes the Pop Theory: that things just pop into existence for no reason at all. Perhaps we will never find the cause but there must be a cause for everything that comes into existence. Now the whole universe is a vast, interlocking chain of things that come into existence. Each of these things must therefore have a cause. My parents caused me, my grandparents caused them, et cetera. But it is not that simple. I would not be here without billions of causes, from the Big Bang through the cooling of the galaxies and the evolution of the protein molecule to the marriages of my ancestors. The universe is a vast and complex chain of causes. But does the universe as a whole have a cause? Is there a first cause, an uncaused cause, a transcendent cause of the whole chain of causes? If not, then there is an infinite regress of causes, with no first link in the great cosmic chain. If so, then there is an eternal, necessary, independent, self-explanatory being with nothing above it, before it, or supporting it. It would have to explain itself as well as everything else, for if it needed something else as its explanation, its reason, its cause, then it would not be the first and uncaused cause. Such a being would have to be God, of course. If we can prove there is such a first cause, we will have proved there is a God. Why must there be a first cause? Because if there isn’t then the whole universe is unexplained and we have violated our Principle of Sufficient Reason for everything. If there is no first cause, each particular thing in the universe is explained in the short run, or proximately, by some other thing, but nothing is explained in the long run, or ultimately, and the universe as a whole is not explained. 

Third is the ontological argument. Plantinga 74 writes
Plantinga, Alvin. (Emeritus professor @ U Notre Dame). God, Freedom, and Evil. (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).
There is a possible world in which maximal greatness is instantiated. And the analogues of (27) and (28) spell out what is involved in maximal greatness: (30) Necessarily, a being is maximally great only if it has maximal excellence in every world. And (31) Necessarily, a being has maximal excellence in every world only if it has omniscience, omnipotence, and moral perfection in every world. Notice that (30) and (31) do not imply that there are possible but nonexistent beings -- any more than does, for example, (32) Necessarily, a thing is a unicorn only if it has one horn. But if (29) is true, then there is a possible world W such that if it had been actual, then there would have existed a being that was omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect; this being, furthermore, would have had these qualities in every possible world. So it follows that if W had been actual, it would have been impossible that there be no such being. That is, if W had been actual, (33) “There is no omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect being” would have been an impossible proposition. 

?
Fourth is the argument from mathematical reality. Goldstein 10 writes
Goldstein, Rebecca (PhD in philosophy from Princeton, visiting professor of philosophy at Trinity College). 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction. Pantheon Books: New York (January 2010). Goldstein only explains the argument from mathematical reality; she doesn’t endorse it.
Mathematical truths are necessarily true. (There is no possible world in which, say, 2 plus 2 does not equal 4, or in which the square root of 2 can be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers.) The truths that describe our physical world, no matter how fundamental, are empirical, requiring observational evidence. (So, for example, we await some empirical means to test string theory, in order to find out whether we live in a world of eleven dimensions.) Truths that require empirical evidence are not necessary truths. (We require empirical evidence because there are possible worlds in which these are not truths, and so we have to test that ours is not such a world.) The truths of our physical world are not necessary truths (from 2 and 3).The truths of our physical world cannot explain mathematical truths because (from 1 and 4). Mathematical truths exist on a different plane of existence from physical truths (from 5). Only something which itself exists on a different plane of existence from the physical can explain mathematical truths (from 6). 8. Therefore Only god can explain mathematical truths (from 7).

Fifth, Christianity is most likely correct. Only the existence of the Christian God can explain historical facts. For example, in the Old Testament there were over 300 prophesies made about Jesus hundreds of years before his birth, and every one was correct. The probability of any one man fulfilling just 8 of these prophesies by present day was found to be 1 in 10 to the 17th power. Stoner and Newman 44 write
Peter Stoner (Chairman of the Departments of Mathematics and Astronomy at Pasadena City College and Chairman of the science division, Westmont College) and Robert C. Newman (Professor of New Testament at the Biblical Theological Seminary of Hatfield, Director of the Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute, under-graduate degree in physics from Duke University, and doctorate in theoretical astrophysics from Cornell University. He has done scientific research for the U.S. Weather Bureau and the Franklin Institute.) Science Speaks: Scientific Proof of the Accuracy of Prophecy and the Bible, 1944.
Suppose that we take 1017 silver dollars and lay them on the face of Texas. They will cover all of the state two feet deep. Now mark one of these silver dollars and stir the whole mass thoroughly, all over the state. Blindfold a man and tell a man him that he can travel as far as he wishes, but he must pick up one silver dollar and say that this is the right one. What chance would he have of getting the right one? Just the same chance that the prophets would have had of writing these eight prophecies and having them all come true in any one man, from their day to the present time, providing they wrote using their own wisdom. 

When considering all 300 plus prophecies, the odds are even smaller.

Stoner and Newman 44 write
Peter Stoner (Chairman of the Departments of Mathematics and Astronomy at Pasadena City College and Chairman of the science division, Westmont College) and Robert C. Newman (Professor of New Testament at the Biblical Theological Seminary of Hatfield, Director of the Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute, under-graduate degree in physics from Duke University, and doctorate in theoretical astrophysics from Cornell University. He has done scientific research for the U.S. Weather Bureau and the Franklin Institute.) Science Speaks: Scientific Proof of the Accuracy of Prophecy and the Bible, 1944.

There are more than three hundred prophecies dealing with Christ's first advent. If this number is correct, and it no doubt is, you could set your estimates ridiculously low on the whole three hundred prophecies and still obtain tremendous evidence of inspiration.
For example you may place all of your estimates at one in four. You may say that one man in four has been born in Bethlehem: that one of these children in four was taken to Egypt, to avoid slaughter; that one in four of these came back and made his home in Nazareth; that one in four of these was a carpenter; that one in four of these was betrayed for thirty pieces of silver; that one in four of these has been crucified on a cross; that one in four was then buried in a rich man's tomb; yes, even that one in four rose from the dead on the third day; and so on for all of the three hundred prophecies and from them I will build a number much larger than the one we obtained from the forty-eight prophecies. 

The existence of God commits one to theological voluntarism. God’s will is the source of moral goodness – 8 reasons. Murphy 12 writes
Murphy, Mark (McDevitt Chair of Religious Philosophy at Georgetown University). “Theological Voluntarism.” 12 August 2012. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voluntarism-theological/
Some of the considerations in favor of metaethical theological voluntarism are historical. Both theists and nontheists have been impressed by the extent to which at least some First, moral concepts developed in tandem with theological concepts, and it may therefore be the case that there could be no adequate explication of some moral concepts without appeal to theological ones. On this view, it is not merely historical accident that at least some moral concepts had their origin in contexts of theistic belief and practice; rather, these concepts have their origin essentially in such contexts, and become distorted and unintelligible when exported from those contexts (see, for example, Anscombe 1958).
Theological considerations in favor of theological voluntarism Some of the considerations in favor of theological voluntarism have their source in matters regarding the divine nature. Several such arguments are summarized in Idziak 1979 (pp. 8–10). Some appeal to omnipotence: Second, since God is both omnipotent and impeccable, theological voluntarism must be true: for if God cannot act in a way that is morally wrong, then God's power would be limited by other normative states of affairs were theological voluntarism not the case. Some appeal to God's freedom: Third, since God is free and impeccable, theological voluntarism must be true: for if moral requirements existed prior to God's willing them, requirements that an impeccable God could not violate, God's liberty would be compromised. Fourth, Some appeal to God's status as supremely lovable and deserving of allegiance: if theism is true, then means the world of value must be a theocentric one, and so any moral view that does not place God at its center is bound to be inadequate. Even if individually insufficient as justifications for adopting theological voluntarism, collectively they may suggest some desiderata for a moral view: that God must be at the center of a moral theory, and, in particular, that the realm of the moral must be dependent on God's free choices. It seems that any moral theory that met these desiderata would count as a version of theological voluntarism. Metaethical considerations in favor of theological voluntarism A third set of considerations in favor of theological voluntarism has its source in metaethics proper, in the attempt to provide adequate philosophical accounts of the various formal features exhibited by moral concepts, properties, and states of affairs. One might claim, that is, that theological voluntarism makes the best sense of the formal features of morality that both theists and nontheists acknowledge. Consider first the normativity of morals. Fifth, Both theists and nontheists have been impressed by the weirdness of normativity, with its very otherness, and have thought that whatever we say about normativity, it will have to be a story not about natural properties but nonnatural ones (cf. Moore 1903, section 13). John Mackie, an atheist, and George Mavrodes, a theist, have both drawn from this the same moral: if there is a God, then the normativity of morality can be understood in theistic terms; otherwise, the normativity of morality is unintelligible (Mavrodes 1986; Mackie 1977, p. 48). As Robert Adams has suggested, given the serious difficulties present in understanding moral properties as natural properties, it is worthwhile taking seriously the hypothesis that morality is not just a nonnatural matter but a supernatural one (Adams 1973, p. 105). For the standard objections against understanding normativity as a nonnatural property concern our inability to say anything further about that nonnatural property itself and about our ability to grasp that property (see, e.g., M. Smith 1994, pp. 21–25). But if morality is to be understood in terms of God's commands, we can give an informative account of what these unusual properties are; and if it is understood in terms of God's commands, then we can give an informative account of how God, being the creator and sustainer of us rational beings, can ensure that we can have an adequate epistemic grasp of the moral domain (Adams 1979a, pp. 137–138). Sixth, Consider next the impartiality of morals. The domain of the moral, unlike the domain of value generally, is governed by the requirements of impartiality. To use Sidgwick's phrase, the point of view of morality is not one's personal point of view but rather “the point of view … of the Universe” (Sidgwick 1907, p. 382). But, to remark on the perfectly obvious, the Universe does not have a point of view. Various writers have employed fictions to try to provide some sense to this idea: Adam Smith's impartial and benevolent spectator, Firth's ideal observer, and Rawls' contractors who see the world sub specie aeternitatis come to mind most immediately (Smith 1759, Pt III, Ch 8; Firth 1958; and Rawls 1971, p. 587). But theological voluntarism can provide a straightforward understanding of the impartiality of morals by appealing to the claim that the demands of morality arises from the demands of someone who in fact has an impartial and supremely deep love for all of the beings that are morality's proper objects. Seventh, Consider next the overridingness of morals. The domain of the moral, it is commonly thought, consists in a range of values that can demand absolute allegiance, in the sense that it is never reasonable to act contrary to what those values finally require. One deep difficulty with this view, formulated in a number of ways but perhaps most memorably by Sidgwick (1907, pp. 497–509), is that it is hard to see how moral value automatically trumps other kinds of value (e.g. prudential value) when they conflict. But if the domain of the moral is to be understood in terms of the will of a being who can make it possible that, or even ensure that, the balance of reasons is always in favor of acting in accordance with the moral demand, then the overridingness of morals becomes far easier to explain. Consider next the content of morals. There is a strong case to be made that Eighth, moral judgments cannot have just any content: they must be concerned, somehow, with what exhibits respect for certain beings, or with what promotes their interests (cf. Foot 1958, pp. 510–512; M. Smith 1994, p. 40). Theological voluntarism has a ready explanation for the content of morals being what it is: it is that moral demands arise from a being that loves that being's creation.

Thus the standard is what would Jesus do?

Ignore permissibility and presumption because moral uncertainty means we’ll always have a non-zero credence in the existence of morality, so there’s always a risk of offense in favor of one action.

Even if I lose that Christianity is the correct theology, WWJD is still the best moral standard.

First, secular ethical theories all reduce to virtue ethics. It’s the only way to make morality motivational. Kawall 09 writes
“In Defense of the Primacy of Virtues,” Jason Kawall. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy. Vol 3, Num. 2. 2009.
One of the major problems that ethical theories face today is to determine the precise connection between the recognition of ethical dilemmas by a moral agent and his subsequent motivation to act. Frequently, philosophers argue, it is not enough for a moral agent to know ethical principles that apply only to universalized situations; something else has to occur for the agent to truly jump into gear. Simply knowing theoretical ethical principles does not provide the agent with the fine-tuned perception necessary to actually recognize a specific situation as deserving of action. This is one of the reasons why rule-based systems of ethics are problematic, as they already assume that the moral agent has discerned ethical salience in a given situation. However, that is not necessarily the case. In other words, knowing that “one should be benevolent to those less fortunate” does not give any specific information as to what action to take when one is faced with a homeless person on the street, for instance. In such a situation, one first has to recognize that the other person has a good of his or her own, is in need, and thus deserving of help. In the same way, the rule does not provide information regarding what form the aid should take: should one simply give the person money for food? Or should one try to help in more profound ways, such as finding him or her a job etc.? All these scenarios already depend on the moral perception of the moral agent; that is, the situation first has to be perceived to be a moral one, for otherwise moral activity is not at all required. As Blum puts it: The point is that perception occurs prior to deliberation, and prior to taking the situation to be one in which one needs to deliberate. It is precisely because the situation is seen in a certain way that the agent takes it as one in which he feels moved to deliberate. 40 Therefore, the significance of moral perception for subsequent action is undeniable. The question now becomes: What is moral perception and how does it develop in a moral agent? Clearly, rules and regulations in and by themselves are not guides to moral perception, since they only prescribe how to act once a moral situation is already perceived as requiring action. Therefore, deontological and utilitarian theories of ethics generally begin too far down the road, as they already presuppose the moral perception of the moral agent. The principles provided can only be applied if the situation has been recognized as a moral one. However, moral perception appears to be a component of the characteristics and dispositions of a person, as they are an integral part of how a person dwells in and interacts with the world. Thus, moral perception, which is essential and prior to any moral judgment, is closely linked to ethical theories of virtue, as the virtues are generally regarded to shape an agent’s understanding of his or her moral environment.

Fostering virtue requires role models. Therefore, a moral agent ought to emulate virtuous people. Carhart 09 writes
Carhart, Rebecca (Philosophy Major @ Taylor University). “Pacifism and Virtue Ethics.” LYCEUM. Volume XI, No. 1 (Fall 2009)http://lyceumphilosophy.com/?q=node/126

Another strength of virtue ethics is that it emphasizes the development of personal character through the teaching and practice of virtues. A key component of this process is the imitation of individuals who are recognized as examples of virtuous character. A pacifist would thus emphasize studying the lives of figures recognized for their peace-promoting standards in order to develop the same positive traits as those people. Different individuals may be upheld as examples of different virtues, and the same may be true for vices. According to William Frankena, the recognition of a moral ideal is critical in motivating one to be a certain kind of person (1993). One interesting implication of these concepts is a high valuation of history, art, and other disciplines that offer insight into human character. Considerations of particular people and whole societies may lead to an understanding of how actions are shaped by character and values, knowledge that is valuable in making practical decisions.

Jesus is the best role model. He represents the perfection of all virtues.
Mahatma Gandhi writes
Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi (virtuous person). No date. Reprinted in Favorite Heroes and Holy People: Chosen by People from All Walks of Life. Compiled by Deborah Cassidi. Continuum Books: London and New York (2008).
 All ellipses were in the original text. Love is the strongest force the world possesses. And yet it is the humblest imaginable. The more efficient a force is, the more silent and subtle it is. Love is the subtlest force in the world. When I read the Sermon on the Mount, especially such passages as ‘Resist not evil,’ I was simply overjoyed and found my own opinion confirmed where I least expected it. The message of Jesus Christ, as I understand it, is contained in the Sermon on the Mount… which competes, on almost equal terms, with the Bhagavad Gita for the domination of my heart. It is that sermon which had endeared Jesus to me. The gentle figure of Christ, so patient, so kind, so loving, so full of forgiveness that he taught his followers not to retaliate when abused or struck but to turn the other cheek… it was a beautiful example, I thought, of the perfect man.

Second, practicing religion is key to Eudaimonia. Atheists get all angsty.

BBC 08 writes
BBC. “Religion 'linked to happy life.'” 18 March 2008.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7302609.stm
A belief in God could lead to a more contented life, research suggests. Religious people are better able to cope with shocks such as losing a job or divorce, claims the study presented to a Royal Economic Society conference. Data from thousands of Europeans revealed higher levels of "life satisfaction" in believers. However, researcher Professor Andrew Clark said other aspects of a religious upbringing unrelated to belief may influence future happiness. This is not the first study to draw links between religion and happiness, with a belief among many psychologists that some factor in either belief, or its observance, offering benefits. Professor Clark, from the Paris School of Economics, and co-author Dr Orsolya Lelkes from the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research, used information from household surveys to analyse the attitudes of Christians - both Catholic and Protestant - not only to their own happiness, but also to issues such as unemployment. Their findings, they said, suggested that religion could offer a "buffer" which protected from life's disappointments.

I advocate that developing countries should accept the Precautionary Principle on resource extraction issues. I reserve the right to clarify.

The PP is key to solving environmental harms. We can’t afford to wait for scientific certainty. SEHN 98 writes
Science and Environmental Health Network. “The Precautionary Principle: A Fact Sheet.” March 1998. http://www.sehn.org/Volume_3-1.html
What is the precautionary principle? A comprehensive definition of the precautionary principle was spelled out in a January 1998 meeting of scientists, lawyers, policy makers and environmentalists at Wingspread, headquarters of the Johnson Foundation in Racine, Wisconsin. The Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle, summarizes the principle this way: "When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically." Key elements of the principle include taking precaution in the face of scientific uncertainty; exploring alternatives to possibly harmful actions; placing the burden of proof on proponents of an activity rather than on victims or potential victims of the activity; and using democratic processes to carry out and enforce the principle - including the public right to informed consent. Is there some special meaning for "precaution"? It's the common sense idea behind many adages: "Be careful." "Better safe than sorry." "Look before you leap." "First do no harm." What about "scientific uncertainty"? Why should we take action before science tells us what is harmful or what is causing harm? Sometimes if we wait for proof it is too late. Scientific standards for demonstrating cause and effect are very high. For example, smoking was strongly suspected of causing lung cancer long before the link was demonstrated conclusively - that is, to the satisfaction of scientific standards of cause and effect. By then, many smokers had died of lung cancer. But many other people had already quit smoking because of the growing evidence that smoking was linked to lung cancer. These people were wisely exercising precaution despite some scientific uncertainty. Often a problem - such as a cluster of cancer cases or global warming - is too large, its causes too diverse, or the effects too long term to be sorted out with scientific experiments that would prove cause and effect. It's hard to take these problems into the laboratory. Instead, we have to rely on observations, case studies or predictions based on current knowledge. According to the precautionary principle, when substantial scientific evidence of any kind gives us good reason to believe that an activity, technology or substance may be harmful, we should act to prevent harm. If we always wait for scientific certainty, people may suffer and die, and damage to the natural world may be irreversible. We have lots of environmental regulations. Aren't we already exercising precaution? In some cases, to some extent, yes. When federal money is to be used in a major project, such as building a road on forested land or developing federal waste programs, the planners must produce an "environmental impact statement" to show how it will affect the surroundings. Then the public has a right to help determine whether the study has been thorough and all the alternatives considered. That is a precautionary action. But most environmental regulations, such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Superfund Law, are aimed at cleaning up pollution and controlling the amount of it released into the environment. They regulate toxic substances as they are emitted rather than limiting their use or production in the first place. These laws have served an important purpose - they have given us cleaner air, water and land. But they are based on the assumption that humans and ecosystems can absorb a certain amount of contamination without being harmed. We are now learning how difficult it is to know what levels of contamination, if any, are safe. Many of our food and drug laws and practices are more precautionary. Before a drug is introduced into the marketplace, the manufacturer must demonstrate that it is safe and effective. Then people must be told about risks and side effects before they use it. But there are some major loopholes in our regulations. If the precautionary principle were universally applied, many toxic substances, contaminants, and unsafe practices would not be produced or used in the first place. The precautionary principle concentrates on prevention rather than cure. How would the precautionary principle change that without bringing the economy to a halt? It would encourage the exploration of alternatives - better, safer, cheaper ways to do things- and the development of "cleaner" products and technologies. Sometimes simply slowing down in order to learn more about potential harm is the best alternative. It would shift the burden of proof from the public to proponents of a technology. The principle would ensure that the public knows about and has a say in the deployment of technologies that may be hazardous. Proponents would have to demonstrate through an open process that a technology was safe or necessary and that no better alternatives were available. 

The PP solves econ collapse by promoting sustainable resource management.
Raffensperger 4 writes
Carolyn Raffensperger (the founding executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network. An environmental lawyer, she specializes in the fundamental changes in law and policy necessary for the protection and restoration of public health and the environment. Raffensperger is co-editor of Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing the Precautionary Principle, the most comprehensive exploration to date of the history, theory and implementation of the Precautionary Principle). “Precautionary Precepts: The Power and Potential of the Precautionary Principle.” 2004.http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2004/09012004/september04interviewraffen.html
If you start with the premise that the foundation of an economy is capital, then you're going to do everything you can to protect capital. You'll see the differences in taxation -- in the United States, for example, we tax labor much more than capital and interest on capital, because we don't value labor very much. It's capital that is the big economic driver. That's one view. I believe by contrast that it is really our common resources -- the air, the water, the street in front of my house, the library, the public schools, the national parks, the public health (not my individual health, but public health) -- that is the generative ground of the economy. Without clean air, without clean water, without the ocean front, without all of those other things that I mentioned, the economy would collapse. Without the roads, for example, we couldn't move our farm products to market. So the commons and the common resources are the basis of the economy, the foundation of America and they must be protected. 

I contend that Jesus would value the precautionary principle. 

First, all Ten Commandments justify environmental protection as per the PP.
Cloer 11 writes
Dan Cloer (staff writer). “Precautionary Principles.” Vision, a Biblical magazine. Spring 2011 Issue. http://www.vision.org/visionmedia/current-science-articles/precautionary-principle/44634.aspx
Applying the precautionary principle, then, becomes a game of number crunching and never-ending ruminations. The debate is sure to go on until we have to do something. Even then, would the expedient course be the right course? An often overlooked set of principles can help us accurately gauge actions and their impact on others. When we come to accept that the biblical Commandments provide valid insights into a way of thinking that guards against unwanted, dangerous and often destructive consequences, these 10 statements become a powerful guide to behavior that does not produce unwanted consequences. Unfortunately, the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1–17 and Deuteronomy 5:6–21) are often viewed as merely a list of “thou shalt nots.” This is not surprising; the majority are restrictive in nature, but not because they exist to take the fun out life. They are actually protective; knowing what not to do directs one down the better path. Several are simply instructive (telling the reader to know, remember or honor, for example). As Jesus explained, the Commandments provide a holistic outline of how to manage one’s relationships with God and with fellow man. They provide a baseline or metric from which one can evaluate one’s actions in the world. They give insight into the very nature of God (Matthew 5:17–48; Matthew 19:16–22; Luke 10:25–37; 2 Peter 1:4). The first four are reminders that humankind does not own creation but that we have an obligation to our Creator. The other six are a summation of what could be called the simplest precautionary principle: to care for another as one cares for self (Matthew 22:35–40). Thinking beyond self is at the core of the Commandments. Providing a guide for right relationships—with both God and fellow man—is their purpose. Not only do they protect others, but they give context to our lives by helping us see all of creation as an integrated whole. Because the human tendency for selfishness and disregard for others remains, however, the Commandments are a constant reminder of better options that are always available, always possible and never outdated. Raw materials to support industrialization and the invention of new synthetic materials (including new organisms and bioreactors requiring new feedstocks) will be subject to increasing global competition in the coming decades. In view of this, a set of green commandments would prove invaluable for helping us think through the consequences of our actions. Suggestions that reach deeper than “change from incandescent to LED” or “use ceramic rather than plastic” will be needed as we navigate the transitions ahead. With this in mind, the Commandments are reconfigured below as behaviors that would lead us away from unintended consequences in our increasingly globalized relationships. 1. All of our tools of creation originate with God. Use all things with care. 2. God exists outside of created objects. God is not in what you build, nor does what you build make you God. 3. We acknowledge and honor God by our right actions; belief in God requires certain behaviors that see the world in increasingly inclusive ways. 4. All creation follows specific cycles. The Sabbaths are for the benefit of all. 5. Humans practice honoring God by honoring the human family. 6. Failing to care for fellow man is wrong; it is tantamount to murder. 7. Seek purity in all things. 8. Strive to give. 9. Deception destroys relationships. 10. Seek contentment, not consumption. 

Second, Scripture proves. Jesus obligates us to promote sustainability.
Phillips 11 writes
Jenny Phillips (Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in New York, NY). “Jesus and Natural Resources.” 2008.
In the first instructions given to humans, we are told to rule the creation (Genesis 1:28), and to take care of and look after the Garden of Eden (See Genesis 2:15). To rule the creation is to be a wise and benevolent ruler, looking out for the welfare of all parts of the earth. To take care of the garden is to help it flourish while providing food for people and animals. It is clear that discerning ways to balance the use of natural resources in a sustainable way is God’s work.“The kingdom is also like what happened when a man went away and put his three servants in charge of all he owned” (Matthew 25:14, CEV). God created a world in which life can flourish, and entrusted humans with its care. The apocalyptic story often known as the Parable of the Talents, or A Story about Three Servants (Matthew 25:14-30; cf. “A Story about Ten Servants” in Luke 19:11-27) is an allegory for our temporary stewardship of the created world. In the story, a master puts his servants in charge of all he owns, giving each of them money to keep while he is away. Two servants invest and grow the money, while the third hides the money in the ground, not helping it to grow at all. The master praises the first two servants, and banishes the third. Likewise, Jesus suggests that humans are called to do more than simply conserve God’s resources—rather, they are to help them flourish and increase (Matthew 25:14-30). People of faith must fully commit themselves to caring for the land and helping all of creation to flourish until the master returns. 

Prioritizing environmental protection over resource extraction is key to solving African wars.
UNEP 9 writes
United Nations Environment Programme. “From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment.” 2009. http://www.unep.org/pdf/pcdmb_policy_01.pdf
Since 1990 at least eighteen violent conflicts have been fuelled by the exploitation of natural resources. In fact, recent research suggests that over the last sixty years at least forty percent of all intrastate conflicts have a link to natural resources. Civil wars such as those in Liberia, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo have centred on “high-value” resources like timber, diamonds, gold, minerals and oil. Other conflicts, including those in Darfur and the Middle East, have involved control of scarce resources such as fertile land and water. As the global population continues to rise, and the demand for resources continues to grow, there is significant potential for conflicts over natural resources to intensify in the coming decades. In addition, the potential consequences of climate change for water availability, food security, prevalence of disease, coastal boundaries, and population distribution may aggravate existing tensions and generate new conflicts. Environmental factors are rarely, if ever, the sole cause of violent conflict. Ethnicity, adverse economic conditions, low levels of international trade and conflict in neighbouring countries are all significant drivers of violence. However, the exploitation of natural resources and related environmental stresses can be implicated in all phases of the conflict cycle, from contributing to the outbreak and perpetuation of violence to undermining prospects for peace. In addition, the environment can itself fall victim to conflict, as direct and indirect environmental damage, coupled with the collapse of institutions, can lead to environmental risks that threaten people’s health, livelihoods and security. Because the way that natural resources and the environment are governed has a determining influence on peace and security, these issues can also contribute to a relapse into conflict if they are not properly managed in post-conflict situations. Indeed, preliminary findings from a retrospective analysis of intrastate conflicts over the past sixty years indicate that conflicts associated with natural resources are twice as likely to relapse into conflict in the first five years. Nevertheless, fewer than a quarter of peace negotiations aiming to resolve conflicts linked to natural resources have addressed resource management mechanisms. The recognition that environmental issues can contribute to violent conflict underscores their potential significance as pathways for cooperation, transformation and the consolidation of peace in war-torn societies. Natural resources and the environment can contribute to peacebuilding through economic development and the generation of employment, while cooperation over the management of shared natural resources provides new opportunities for peacebuilding. These factors, however, must be taken into consideration from the outset. Indeed, deferred action or poor choices made early on are easily “locked in,” establishing unsustainable trajectories of recovery that can undermine the fragile foundations of peace. Integrating environment and natural resources into peacebuilding is no longer an option – it is a security imperative. The establishment of the UN Peacebuilding Commission provides an important chance to address environmental risks and capitalize on potential opportunities in a more consistent and coherent way. In this context, UNEP recommends that the UN Peacebuilding Commission and the wider international community consider the following key recommendations for integrating environment and natural resource issues into peacebuilding interventions and conflict prevention: 1. Further develop UN capacities for early warning and early action: The UN system needs to strengthen its capacity to deliver early warning and early action in countries that are vulnerable to conflicts over natural resources and environmental issues. At the same time, the effective governance of natural resources and the environment should be viewed as an investment in conflict prevention. 2. Improve oversight and protection of natural resources during conflicts: The international community needs to increase oversight of “high-value” resources in international trade in order to minimize the potential for these resources to finance conflict. International sanctions should be the primary instrument dedicated to stopping the trade in conflict resources and the UN should require Member States to act against sanctions violators. At the same time, new legal instruments are required to protect natural resources and environmental services during violent conflict. 3. Address natural resources and the environment as part of the peacemaking and peacekeeping process: During peace mediation processes, wealth-sharing is one of the fundamental issues that can “make or break” a peace agreement. In most cases, this includes the sharing of natural resources, including minerals, timber, land and water. It is therefore critical that parties to a peace mediation process are given sufficient technical information and training to make informed decisions on the sustainable use of natural resources. Subsequent peacekeeping operations need to be aligned with national efforts to improve natural resource and environmental governance. 4. Include natural resources and environmental issues into integrated peacebuilding strategies: The UN often undertakes post-conflict operations with little or no prior knowledge of what natural resources exist in the affected country, or of what role they may have played in fuelling conflict. In many cases it is years into an intervention before the management of natural resources receives sufficient attention. A failure to respond to the environmental and natural resource needs of the population can complicate the task of fostering peace and even contribute to conflict relapse. 5. Carefully harness natural resources for economic recovery: Natural resources can only help strengthen the post-war economy and contribute to economic recovery if they are managed well. The international community should be prepared to help national authorities manage the extraction process and revenues in ways that do not increase risk of further conflict, or are unsustainable in the longer term. This must go hand in hand with ensuring accountability, transparency, and environmental sustainability in their management. 6. Capitalize on the potential for environmental cooperation to contribute to peacebuilding: Every state needs to use and protect vital natural resources such as forests, water, fertile land, energy and biodiversity. Environmental issues can thus serve as an effective platform or catalyst for enhancing dialogue, building confidence, exploiting shared interests and broadening cooperation between divided groups, as well as between states.

African resource wars cause destruction of the Congo River Basin.
Sites 4 writes
Kevin Sites (Conflict Studies Expert @ World Wildlife Fund). "Conflict in the Green Heart of Africa." http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/where_we_work/congo_basin_forests/problems/conflict/
In the Congo River Basin, conflict has been a recurring nuisance for the development of several countries. Natural resources play a significant role in feeding conflicts, many of which involve securing control and access to natural resources. Communities and forests pay the price. Wars in the Congo River Basin involve groups of combatants that are always on the move, gaining temporary control over towns and settlements, but who are almost never able to subdue the surrounding areas.  The constant movement of militias and the unpredictability of their actions have a devastating impact on human lives.  Estimates of war-related deaths in eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) range from 3.3 million to 4.5 million. To avoid conflict, refugees and displaced rural populations avoid major roads and move into the forests and protected areas, where they are less likely to encounter soldiers and rebels.1  How natural resources fuel war Natural resources such as timber, as well as other commodities such as diamonds, all play roles in motivating these wars because of their characteristics (accessibility, weight-to-value ratios and the ability to loot, conceal and sell them later)2.  In the DRC, rebel groups, government troops and their foreign allies have used the country’s diamonds, gold, timber, ivory, coltan and cobalt to pay for their war-related expenses.3  Perpetuating conflict… A United Nations panel of experts on the illegal exploitation of natural resources of the DRC recently stated that "illegal exploitation remains one of the main sources of funding for groups involved in perpetuating conflict".  According to the panel, neighbouring countries such as Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi and Zimbabwe have all helped themselves to the DRC's gold, diamonds, timber and coltan; systematically stripping factories, farms and banks in the process.4  What are the impacts of conflict? A breakdown in the rule of law and other controls during and immediately after conflicts.  Mass movements of people and human rights abuses.  Decline in agricultural production, trade and food availability as conditions become unsafe to carry out such activities and transport is disrupted.  Increased dependence on wild natural resources (such as bushmeat) for survival when other livelihoods are made impossible: As refugees seek means to sustain themselves away from their home areas and hold their families together, they often invade poorly protected areas in search of housing materials, bush foods and products that they can sell.  Protected areas also often contain more wildlife than other areas and can thus provide a ready supply of meat for rebels or small armies.  Moreover, when it becomes too dangerous for the staff in protected zones to continue patrols, the frequency of illegal mining of gold and diamonds, hunting for ivory and bushmeat, felling of timber and agricultural encroachment often increases.5

The Congo River Basin is extremely vital to the environment, and its destruction ensures extinction.
Boukongou 5 writes
Jean Didier Boukongou (Professor at Central African Catholic University, Cameroon). “The Protection of the Congo basin: A Multilateral Challenge.” 2005. www.african-geopolitics.org/show.aspx?ArticleId=3836#_ftn1
This is not a revival of “good savage” ideology which is useful for the “civilized world,” but it is simply a matter of understanding that the forests of the Congo basin is the entire humanity’s precious “lung.” Beyond the traditional quarrels1 of the sycophants of environmental protection and the relevance of advocated public programs2, one notices the intensification of multilateral initiatives, which try to respond both to the stakes of protecting the Congo basin as well as to the challenge of preserving life on Earth. Nevertheless, even the advocates of sustainable development cannot forget that “bio-humanity” is a naturally complex vision of society. As far as one can go back in time, and on the principle of the divine message, man will always return to nature. This implies an organization and structuralization of spaces, which cannot be strictly limited to the protection of the fauna and flora. Consequently, international concern about the ecosystem of the Congo basin is neither the result of sudden philanthropy, nor the outcome of triumphant environmentalism. The region is a dynamic geopolitical area, where forests are a source of oil and conflicts. I think that it is fundamental not to separate the issue of forests from the less media-covered question of the rich oil and mineral resources in the hinterland and maritime zones of Central Africa. The predators are in the forests and on the political scene, and they are searching for democratic legitimacy3. Thus, I’m calling for combining the “green” debate with the “political” debate in order to promote better governance of the geopolitical basin of the Congo, give rise to concrete and multilateral awareness of the problems of Central Africa which aren’t only environmental but also political. It is a matter of emphasizing political and civil implications, on one hand, and legal instruments and institutional frameworks, on the other, in order to assure a better progressive transition in Central Africa from “Black governance” (in other words, oil-based governance) to “green governance”. A Geopolitical Basin The geographic entity called the “Congo basin” includes territories extending from the end of the Sahelian areas of Chad and Sudan and the edge of the plains along the Zambezi. The voluntarily extensive vision of this basin challenges the thesis that this forest area is confined to narrow post-colonial zones in Central African States, which doesn’t challenge the principles of international law relating to boundaries. This basin is a vast forest area that covers approximately 2,300,000 sq. km., or 26 percent of the world’s rainforests4. The forests are well known for their exceptional biodiversity and contribute, in an important way, to countering the greenhouse effect by absorbing the carbon dioxide which is emitted into the atmosphere5. This is the natural environment of more than half of the world’s wildlife and vegetable species. Some consider it the compost of numerous diseases, such as the terrible Ebola fever.The Congo basin regroups several countries (Cameroon, the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Burundi, Rwanda, Angola and Chad), which form (with Sao Tome e Principe) the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS). On the one side, one may identify the Congo basin area itself to the ECCAS, and on the other, consider it as the logical construction of a regional area where sustainable governance of ecosystems should contribute, via the mobility of people, to economic links and ecological flows, to restoring and strengthening peace. One must remember that during the Millenium Summit held in New York in 2000 the Heads of State and Government declared their intention not to spare “any effort in order to assure that the entire humanity, and especially our children and grandchildren, will not live on a planet irreversibly degraded by human activities whose resources can no longer meet their requirements6.” This appeal is in line with the dynamics of building the concept of sustainable development, advocated by the UICN7 in 1980 and resumed in the Bundtland report in 19878. States have to cooperate in a spirit of world partnership in order to preserve, protect and restore the integrity of the ecosystem. Of course, according to Resolutions 1803 (XVII) and 1514 (XV)9 of the United Nations General Assembly and Principle 2 of the Rio Declaration, “States have the sovereign right to exploit their own resources according to their environment and development policies.” In other words, they can implement their proper environmental policies. But these actions do not produce concrete effects. The degradation of the environment and certain natural or industrial disasters directly affect the Earth as a continuous portion of space. It is only on this scale that adequate initiatives can be taken in order to obtain durable and adequate results.  International CooperationActually, environmental protection has become one of the most important issues in contemporary world relations. International cooperation is necessary to protect humanity’s common heritage. No country can do it on its own, because this is a common responsibility. Therefore, the quality of air and the atmosphere depends on world coordination in many domains. The protection of the quality of the waters of a boundary river, or of a lake common to several countries, requires international coordination and cooperation. As the International Court of Justice reminded in the case Gabcikovo-Nagymaros: “During ages, man did not stop influencing nature for economic and other purposes. In the past it often accomplished this without taking into account the effects on the environment. Due to the new horizons opened by science and the increasing awareness of the risks of these interventions for humanity – whether it is for the present or for future generations – new standards and requirements have been put in place, enounced in a substantial number of instruments over the past two decades. These new standards must be taken in consideration and these new requirements appropriately appreciated, not only when States envisage launching new activities, but also when they pursue projects that have already been launched. The concept of sustainable development expresses the need for reconciling economic development and environmental protection10.” Since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 the pressure exercised by NGOs and the international financial backers prompted governments to adjust their institutional frameworks and to work out coherent policies, in particular environmental action plans relating to the national, regional and international dimension. At the sub-regional level, such initiatives led to setting up mechanisms and processes such as the Conference of Ministers for Forests of Central Africa (COMIFAC)11, Conference on Central Africa’s Moist Forest Ecosystem (CEFDHAC) and the Africa Forest Law Enforcement and Governance Process (AFLEG)12. Organized in March, 1999 in Yaoundé, the summit of leaders of Central African States on the conservation and sustainable management of rain forests confirmed the Rio commitment to lead common policies for sustainable management of forested ecosystems. This regional dynamics led to the elaboration and adoption of a “convergence plan” for the Congo basin, whose main objective is the “conservation, restoration, development and durable use of biologic resources in the framework of management adapted to the social and cultural economic development of populations and the protection of the global environment13.” This convergence plan covers a ten-year period (2004-2013 and will globally cost an estimated US$ 1.5 billion, or 840 billion CFA Francs14. Regional dynamics led to international participation in efforts to respond to this universal concern, and the Johannesburg summit on sustainable development in September 200215 paved the way to a multilateral initiative: the United States of America and South Africa inspired, along with many other actors, the idea of a multilateral partnership for the protection of forests in the Congo basin. Considered as the left lung of the earth, these forests are a vegetable and wildlife reserve inextricably bound to human life16. According to Walter Kansteiner, they are a “world treasure,” a “world lung” necessary for preserving biologic diversity.

Aff gets RVIs on I meets and counter-interps because
(a) 1AR timeskew means I can’t cover theory and still have a fair shot on substance.
(b) no risk theory would give neg a free source of no risk offense which allows him to moot the AC.

I’m willing to clarify or alter my advocacy in cross-ex.

Gutcheck against dumb theory. Competing interps leads to a race to the bottom where every round comes down to theory, killing substantive education. Intervention is inevitable in blippy theory debates.

Tournament: Sunvite RR | Round: 1 | Opponent: Bronx ID | Judge: Tom Evnen and Chris Castillo
Action theory precedes ethics. We need a basic account of what an action is before ethics can be sound. Anscombe 58 writes
G.E.M. Anscombe. “Modern Moral Philosophy.” Philosophy, Vol. 33, No. 124 (Jan., 1958), pp. 1-19 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal Institute of Philosophy.
That I owe the grocer such-and-such a sum would be one of a set of facts which would be "brute" in relation to the description "I am a bilker." "Bilking" is of course a species of "dishonesty" or "injustice." (Naturally the consideration will not have any effect on my actions unless I want to commit or avoid acts of injustice.) So far, in spite of their strong associations, I conceive "bilking," "injustice" and "dishonesty" in a merely "factual" way. That I can do this for "bilking" is obvious enough; "justice" I have no idea how to define, except that its sphere is that of actions which relate to someone else, but "injustice," its defect, can for the moment be offered as a generic name covering various species. E.g.: "bilking," "theft" (which is relative to whatever property institutions exist), "slander," "adultery," "punishment of the innocent." In present-day philosophy an explanation is required how an unjust man is a bad man, or an unjust action a bad one; to give such an explanation belongs to ethics; but it cannot even be begun until we are equipped with a sound philosophy of psychology. For the proof that an unjust man is a bad man would require a positive account of justice as a "virtue." This part of the subject-matter of ethics is, however, completely closed to us until we have an account of what type of characteristic a virtue is-a problem, not of ethics, but of conceptual analysis-and how it relates to the actions in which it is instanced: a matter which I think Aristotle did not succed in really making clear. For this we certainly need an account at least of what a human action is at all, and how its description as "doing such-and-such" is affected by its motive and by the intention or intentions in it; and for this an account of such concepts is required. 

This justifies practical reason. Unity of action can only be explained by reason, not desire. Rodl 2k writes
Rödl, Sebastian. Self-Consciousness, Harvard University Press, 2000
Calculation from desire does not yield a premise for instrumental reasoning because its conclusion represents a changeable state, while an instrumental reasoning proceeds from a thought that represents something with the temporality of a movement.  But the instrumental syllogism is a necessary form of practical reasoning, for practical reasoning arrives at a thought on which a movement may rest.  And if a movement rests on thought, then the unity of its phases, which constitutes it as a movement, must rest on thought.  So it does if I reason that from the same thought now, “I want to do B.  So let me do X”, and then, “I want to do B.  So let me do Y”, and so on.  As “I want to do B” expresses the same thought all the while that I am doing B and until I have done it, the unity of the phases of my doing B consists in the fact that they all hang on that thought.  By contrast, if “I want to do B” represented a changeable state I would not reason from the same thought, now to doing A1, and then to doing A2.  In consequence, my doing A1 and my doing A2 would bear no unity.  These would not be phases of a movement, and I would not, in doing A1 and A2, be doing B.

And, only practical reason is unconditionally binding. We can always question why our desires matter, but asking whether we have a reason to act for reasons would be self-defeating because the question itself concedes the authority of reasons.

Violations of freedom lead to self-contradiction. Engstrom No Date writes
Engstrom, Stephen (Professor of Ethics at UPitt). “Universal Legislation As the Form of Practical Knowledge.” No date.
Given the preceding considerations, it’s a straightforward matter to see how a maxim of action that assaults the freedom of others with a view to furthering one’s own ends results in a contradiction when we attempt to will it as a universal law in accordance with the foregoing account of the formula of universal law. Such a maxim would lie in a practical judgment that deems it good on the whole to act to limit others’ outer freedom, and hence their self-sufficiency, their capacity to realize their ends, where doing so augments, or extends, one’s own outer freedom and so also one’s own self-sufficiency. 19In this passage, Kant mentions assaults on property as well as on freedom. But since property is a specific, socially instituted form of freedom, I have omitted mention of it to focus on the primitive case. Now on the interpretation we’ve been entertaining, applying the formula of universal law involves considering whether it’s possible for every person—every subject capable of practical judgment—to shares the practical judgment asserting the goodness of every person’s acting according to the maxim in question. Thus in the present case the application of the formula involves considering whether it’s possible for every person to deem good every person’s acting to limit others’ freedom, where practicable, with a view to augmenting their own freedom. Since here all persons are on the one hand deeming good both the limitation of others’ freedom and the extension of their own freedom, while on the other hand, insofar as they agree with the similar judgments of others, also deeming good the limitation of their own freedom and the extension of others’ freedom, they are all deeming good both the extension and the limitation of both their own and others’ freedom.

Thus, the standard is creating a system of equal freedom.
There are 3 additional warrants.

1. Equality. Human equality mandates a system of equal freedom.
   Ripstein 9 writes
   Arthur Ripstein (University of Toronto). “Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy.” 2009.
   Kant offers different formulations of innate right, each of which elaborates an aspect of the idea that one person must not be subject to the choice of another, which Kant glosses in terms of one person being a mere means for another. This familiar Kantian theme is explained in terms of the classic distinction, from Roman law, between persons and things. A person is a being capable of setting its own purposes. A thing is something that can be used in the pursuit of whatever purposes the person who has it might have. The classic example of a person being treated as a mere thing is the slave, for a slave is entirely at the disposal of his or her master. The slave’s problem is that he is subject to the master’s choice: the master gets to decide what to do with the slave and what the slave will do. The slave does not set his own ends, but is merely a means for ends set by someone else. To call it “the” problem is not too strong: if the other problems a slave has—low welfare, limited options, and so on—were addressed by a benevolent master, the relationship of slavery would perhaps be less bad, but it would not thereby be any less wrong. The right to be your own master is neither a right to have things go well for you nor a right to have a wide range of options. Instead, it is explicitly contrastive and interpersonal: to be your own master is to have no other master. It is not a claim about your relation to yourself, only about your relation to others. The right to equal freedom, then, is just the right that no person be the master of another. The idea of being your own master is also equivalent to an idea of equality, since none has, simply by birth, either the right to command others or the duty to obey them. So the right to equality does not, on its own, require that people be treated in the same way in some respect, such as welfare or resources, but only that no person is the master of another. Another person is not entitled to decide for you even if he knows better than you what would make your life go well, or has a pressing need that only you can satisfy.

Human equality is a basic assumption of any moral system. Gosepath 11
Gosepath, Stefan, "Equality", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/equality/
This fundamental idea of equal respect for all persons and of the equal worth or equal dignity of all human beings (Vlastos 1962) is accepted as a minimal standard by all leading schools of modern Western political and moral culture. Any political theory abandoning this notion of equality will not be found plausible today. In a period in which metaphysical, religious and traditional views have lost their general plausibility (Habermas 1983, p. 53, 1992, pp. 39-44), it appears impossible to peacefully reach a general agreement on common political aims without accepting that persons must be treated as equals. As a result, moral equality constitutes the ‘egalitarian plateau’ for all contemporary political theories (Kymlicka 1990, p.5).

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2. Human Worth. Only a system of equal freedom respects the right of human beings to set their own purposes.
Ripstein 9 writes
Arthur Ripstein (University of Toronto). “Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy.” 2009.
The same right to be your own master within a system of equal freedom also generates what Kant calls an “internal duty” of rightful honor, which “consists in asserting one’s worth as a human being in relation to others, a duty expressed by the saying do not make yourself into a mere means for others but be at the same time an end for them.”14 Kant says that this duty can be “explained. as obligation from the right of humanity in our own person.” Kant’s characterization of this as an “internal duty” may seem out of place, given his earlier characterization of the Universal Principle of Right in terms of restrictions on each person’s conduct in light of the freedom of others. But the duty of rightful honor is also relational: it is a duty because it is a limit on the exercise of a person’s freedom that is imposed by the Universal Principle of Right. Just as the rights of others restrict your freedom, so that you cannot acquire a right to anything by acting in ways inconsistent with the innate right of another person, so, too, the humanity in your own person restricts the ways in which you can exercise your freedom by entering into arrangements with others. Your innate right prevents you from being bound by others more than you can in turn bind them; your duty of rightful honor prevents you from making yourself bound by others in those ways. Rightful honor does not warn you away from some juridical possibility that would somehow be demeaning or unworthy. You do not wrong yourself if you enter into a binding arrangement inconsistent with the humanity in your own person. Instead, your duty of rightful honor says that no such arrangement can be binding, so no other person could be entitled to enforce a claim of right against you that presupposes that you have acted contrary to rightful honor. Rightful honor does not demand that you behave selfishly, or refrain from helping another person with some particular project, or make another person’s ends your own. To do any of these things is just to adopt some particular purpose, and so is an exercise of your freedom. In later chapters, we will see that rightful honor prevents you from giving up your capacity to set your own purposes, and so prevents others from asserting claims of right that assume that you did. In private right your rightful honor prevents you from entering into an enforceable contract of slavery, even if you were to believe the arrangement to be to your advantage. In public right, it prevents officials from making arrangements on your behalf that are inconsistent with your innate right. Rightful honor also provides the link from private right to public right by imposing a duty on each to leave the state of nature, which Kant characterizes as a condition in which everyone is subject to the choice of others. 

Human worth is the source of all value.
Christine Korsgaard 96 writes
Korsgaard, Christine (Prof of Philo @ Harvard). “The Sources of Normativity.” 1996.
This is just a fancy new model of an argument that first appeared in a much simpler form, Kant’s argument for his Formula of Humanity. The form of relativism with which Kant began was the most elementary one we encounter - the relativity of value to human desires and interests. He started from the fact that when we make a choice we must regard its object as good. His point is the one I have been making - that being human we must endorse our impulses before we can act on them. Kant asked what it is that makes these objects good, and, rejecting one form of realism, he decided that the goodness wais not in the objects themselves. Were it not for our desires and inclinations, we would not find their objects good. Kant saw that we take things to be important because they are important to us - and he concluded that we must therefore take ourselves to be important. In this way, the value of humanity itself is implicit in every human choice. If normative skepticism is to be avoided - if there is any such thing as a reason for action - then humanity as the source of all reasons and values must be valued for its own sake.

Put away Cummiskey. This notion of value precludes aggregation.
Korsgaard 93 writes
Korsgaard, Christine.  Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. “The reasons we can share: An attack on the distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral values.” Cambridge University Press, 1993. Previously published in Social Philosophy and Policy 10, no. 1: 24-51. http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3196321/Korsgaard_ReasonsShare.pdf?sequence=2

The difference between these two interpretations of neutral value is naturally associated with two other differences. First, the two views will normally involve a different priority-ordering between subjective or relative and objective or neutral values. According to Objective Realism, subjective values are derived from objective ones: an individual comes to value something by perceiving that it has (objective) value. Our relation to values, on this account, is epistemological, a relation of discovery or perception. According to Intersubjectivism, objective values are derived or - better - constructed from subjective ones. Our individual, subjective interests become intersubjective values when, because of the attitude we take towards one another, we come to share each other’s ends. On this view, our relation to values is one of creation or construction. The second and related difference concerns the possibility of adding and subtracting value across the boundaries between persons. On an Intersubjectivist interpretation, neutral reasons are shared, but they are always initially subjective or agent-relative reasons. So on this view, everything that is good or bad is so because it is good or bad for someone. This makes it natural for an Intersubjectivist to deny that values can be added across the boundaries between people. My happiness is good for me and yours is good for you, but the sum of these two values is not good for anyone, and so the Intersubjectivist will deny that the sum, as such, is a value. But an Objective Realist, who thinks that the value is in the object rather than in its relation to the subject, may think that we can add. Two people’s happinesses, both good in themselves, will be better than one. Since consequentialism depends upon the possibility that values may be added, an Objective realist about value may be a consequentialist, while an Intersubjectivist will not be a consequentialist.

3. The State of Nature. The right to freedom is the foundation of government authority. The state exists to create a system of equal freedom for all. This is the only legitimate use of state coercion and link turns social contract frameworks.

Korsgaard 8 writes
Korsgaard, Christine M. 2008. Taking the law into our own hands: Kant on the right to revolution. In The Constitution of Agency, 233-262. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Originally published in Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls, eds. Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman, and Christine M. Korsgaard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Why is it permissible for others to force or coerce you to conform to the duties of justice? The Universal Principle of Justice in effect says that the only restriction on freedom is consistency with the freedom of everyone else. Anything that is consistent with universal freedom is just, and you therefore have a right to do it. If someone tries to interfere with that right, he is interfering with your freedom and so violating the Universal Principle of Justice. Violations of the Universal Principle of Justice may be opposed by coercion for the simple reason that anything that hinders a hindrance to freedom is consistent with freedom, and anything that is consistent with universal freedom is just. It follows that rights are coercively enforceable. Indeed, coercive enforceability is not something attached to rights; it is constitutive of their very nature (MPJ 6:232). To have a right just is to have the executive authority to enforce a certain claim. This in turn is the foundation of the executive or coercive authority of the political state.
Kant’s political philosophy is a social contract theory, in obvious ways in the tradition of Locke. But the differences are important. In Locke’s view, individuals have rights in the state of nature, and may enforce those rights. But when each person determines and enforces his own rights the result is social disorder. Since this disorder is contrary to our interests, people join together into a political state, transferring our executive authority to a government. 

Ignore permissibility and presumption because moral uncertainty means we’ll always have a non-zero credence in the existence of morality, so there’s always a risk of offense in favor of one action.

I advocate that developing countries should accept the Precautionary Principle on resource extraction issues. I reserve the right to clarify.

The PP is key to solving environmental harms. We can’t afford to wait for scientific certainty. SEHN 98 writes
Science and Environmental Health Network. “The Precautionary Principle: A Fact Sheet.” March 1998. http://www.sehn.org/Volume_3-1.html

What is the precautionary principle? A comprehensive definition of the precautionary principle was spelled out in a January 1998 meeting of scientists, lawyers, policy makers and environmentalists at Wingspread, headquarters of the Johnson Foundation in Racine, Wisconsin. The Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle, summarizes the principle this way: "When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically." Key elements of the principle include taking precaution in the face of scientific uncertainty; exploring alternatives to possibly harmful actions; placing the burden of proof on proponents of an activity rather than on victims or potential victims of the activity; and using democratic processes to carry out and enforce the principle - including the public right to informed consent. Is there some special meaning for "precaution"? It's the common sense idea behind many adages: "Be careful." "Better safe than sorry." "Look before you leap." "First do no harm." What about "scientific uncertainty"? Why should we take action before science tells us what is harmful or what is causing harm? Sometimes if we wait for proof it is too late. Scientific standards for demonstrating cause and effect are very high. For example, smoking was strongly suspected of causing lung cancer long before the link was demonstrated conclusively - that is, to the satisfaction of scientific standards of cause and effect. By then, many smokers had died of lung cancer. But many other people had already quit smoking because of the growing evidence that smoking was linked to lung cancer. These people were wisely exercising precaution despite some scientific uncertainty. Often a problem - such as a cluster of cancer cases or global warming - is too large, its causes too diverse, or the effects too long term to be sorted out with scientific experiments that would prove cause and effect. It's hard to take these problems into the laboratory. Instead, we have to rely on observations, case studies or predictions based on current knowledge. According to the precautionary principle, when substantial scientific evidence of any kind gives us good reason to believe that an activity, technology or substance may be harmful, we should act to prevent harm. If we always wait for scientific certainty, people may suffer and die, and damage to the natural world may be irreversible. We have lots of environmental regulations. Aren't we already exercising precaution? In some cases, to some extent, yes. When federal money is to be used in a major project, such as building a road on forested land or developing federal waste programs, the planners must produce an "environmental impact statement" to show how it will affect the surroundings. Then the public has a right to help determine whether the study has been thorough and all the alternatives considered. That is a precautionary action. But most environmental regulations, such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Superfund Law, are aimed at cleaning up pollution and controlling the amount of it released into the environment. They regulate toxic substances as they are emitted rather than limiting their use or production in the first place. These laws have served an important purpose - they have given us cleaner air, water and land. But they are based on the assumption that humans and ecosystems can absorb a certain amount of contamination without being harmed. We are now learning how difficult it is to know what levels of contamination, if any, are safe. Many of our food and drug laws and practices are more precautionary. Before a drug is introduced into the marketplace, the manufacturer must demonstrate that it is safe and effective. Then people must be told about risks and side effects before they use it. But there are some major loopholes in our regulations. If the precautionary principle were universally applied, many toxic substances, contaminants, and unsafe practices would not be produced or used in the first place. The precautionary principle concentrates on prevention rather than cure. How would the precautionary principle change that without bringing the economy to a halt? It would encourage the exploration of alternatives - better, safer, cheaper ways to do things- and the development of "cleaner" products and technologies. Sometimes simply slowing down in order to learn more about potential harm is the best alternative. It would shift the burden of proof from the public to proponents of a technology. The principle would ensure that the public knows about and has a say in the deployment of technologies that may be hazardous. Proponents would have to demonstrate through an open process that a technology was safe or necessary and that no better alternatives were available. 

The PP solves econ collapse by promoting sustainable resource management.
Raffensperger 4 writes
Carolyn Raffensperger (the founding executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network. An environmental lawyer, she specializes in the fundamental changes in law and policy necessary for the protection and restoration of public health and the environment. Raffensperger is co-editor of Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing the Precautionary Principle, the most comprehensive exploration to date of the history, theory and implementation of the Precautionary Principle). “Precautionary Precepts: The Power and Potential of the Precautionary Principle.” 2004. http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2004/09012004/september04interviewraffen.html
If you start with the premise that the foundation of an economy is capital, then you're going to do everything you can to protect capital. You'll see the differences in taxation -- in the United States, for example, we tax labor much more than capital and interest on capital, because we don't value labor very much. It's capital that is the big economic driver. That's one view. I believe by contrast that it is really our common resources -- the air, the water, the street in front of my house, the library, the public schools, the national parks, the public health (not my individual health, but public health) -- that is the generative ground of the economy. Without clean air, without clean water, without the ocean front, without all of those other things that I mentioned, the economy would collapse. Without the roads, for example, we couldn't move our farm products to market. So the commons and the common resources are the basis of the economy, the foundation of America and they must be protected. 

The PP recognizes our obligation to future generations.
Raffensperger 4 writes
Carolyn Raffensperger (the founding executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network. An environmental lawyer, she specializes in the fundamental changes in law and policy necessary for the protection and restoration of public health and the environment. Raffensperger is co-editor of Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing the Precautionary Principle, the most comprehensive exploration to date of the history, theory and implementation of the Precautionary Principle). “Precautionary Precepts: The Power and Potential of the Precautionary Principle.” 2004. http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2004/09012004/september04interviewraffen.html
The Hawaiian and other state constitutions, as well as a lot of common law, say that states have a responsibility to manage natural resources and common assets as a matter of the public trust -- these are to be held in trust for this and future generations. In a lawsuit, Hawaii was challenged on how it was applying this constitutional provision. Hawaii said that in order to manage the commons and the common wealth, we've got to use the Precautionary Principle. If we're going to pass the natural resource -- in this case water -- on to our children in as good as shape as we got it, we're going to have to act in the face of uncertainty. So you get a longer timeframe, you get an argument against privatization, and you get a requirement to use the Precautionary Principle. 

Contention 1 is Equal Freedom

Sub-point A is the original community of land.

Environmental protection is a material prerequisite to a system of equal freedom.
Ataner 12 writes
Attila Ataner (B.A., J.D.). “Kant on Freedom, Property Rights, and Environmental Protection.” Thesis submitted to McMaster University to partially fill a requirement for a masters degree in the arts. October 2o12.
Brackets in original. My second line of argument in rejecting the claim that unowned lands are freely destructible, i.e., the view that our freedoms over and against the natural environment are unlimited, is as follows. Given, as we have seen above, Kant’s claims pertaining to humanity’s possession of the earth ab initio being an “original possession in common” or an “original community of land in general”, I deny that the natural environment can ever be thought of as truly res nullius, or, more appropriately, that land can be terra nullius in some absolute sense. This claim, while I cannot fully develop it here, rests simply on Kant’s general conception of land, which has unusual, often overlooked, implications within his overall framework. Briefly put, as we have seen, Kant claims that our possession in common of the finite surface of the earth is a (material) precondition of (the possibility of) our collective coexistence under Right, or, relatedly, that the unity of all places on the earth’s finite surface is a condition of the possibility of a united will among a plurality of unavoidably interacting persons. (For, as we have already noted, if the surface of the earth were infinite and unbounded, we would not necessarily come into contact with each other; hence, the united will, the sole condition pursuant to which rightful relations among all can be established, would carry no normative necessity. As Edwards puts it succinctly, if somewhat obscurely, Kant’s “idea of original community of land is a conceptual representation that picks out the objective correlate of the idea of universal will.”) The upshot of Kant’s line of reasoning, essentially, is that, as a collective, we inhabit the surface of the earth (and, by extension, the natural environment) in a manner parallel to the way in which we inhabit our bodies as individuals: in order to exist as free persons, we have to subsist as individuals in finite bodies; in order to co-exist as free persons under conditions of Right dictated by a united will (the only possible way in which we can co-exist as mutually free persons, mediated by the dictates of practical reason in its external aspect and the idea of the social contract, etc.), we have to subsist collectively within a finite (confined) space, namely upon the spherical surface the earth that unites all lands upon it. In either case, freedom as such can only have reality under certain material, empirical (pre)conditions. But, if the integrity of our finite bodies is necessary to our individual freedom, then we have to also admit that the integrity of the finite surface of the earth (and by extension, the natural environment) is essential to our collective co-existence as free persons. For, imagine if each of us were free to destroy some bit of the finite surface of the earth; in that case, it would, in principle, be permissible to destroy all surfaces of the earth. However, if we, through collective cumulative action, were to destroy the earth’s (finite) surface, we would have nothing, no space, to subsist upon, either collectively or individually. As such, it is hardly coherent to say that the destruction of portions of the surface of the earth must be permissible under laws of freedom; and, the incoherence of the destruction of land (as a matter of Right) in this regard is exactly parallel to the incoherence of suicide (as a matter of Virtue). 

Sub-point B is property rights.

A system of equal freedom would protect property rights, requiring environmental protection of owned land. Ataner 12 writes
Attila Ataner (B.A., J.D.). “Kant on Freedom, Property Rights, and Environmental Protection.” Thesis submitted to McMaster University to partially fill a requirement for a masters degree in the arts. October 2o12.
Now, at this stage I reiterate my basic claim, per the environmentalist agenda, which is that the destruction of owned objects is outside the scope of owners’ legitimate freedoms. My rationale for this claim is as follows. As we have seen, Kant (along with Hegel) insists that property ownership must be possible as a matter of Right; otherwise our freedom, our capacity to act effectively in the world, would be radically inhibited. This simply follows from the Juridical Postulate, pursuant to which any unowned object (res nullius) must be available for acquisition. But if property is so utterly crucial to freedom, if the rightful use of evidently usable things is so very vital to our ability to have actual presence and effective agency in the world, then the destruction of evidently usable things (even where they are already owned) would appear to contradict the core logic, the underlying rationale, of property, for the simple reason that destruction renders usable things no longer usable. The logic of freedom (the “laws of freedom”) as applied to property rights suggests that ownership of things is supposed to enhance the freedom of owners; otherwise, as Ripstein notes, they would have rightful use only of their own bodies, which in itself is a severely limited means of effecting one’s purposes. In this vein, the destruction of one’s own finite, non-renewable resources is patently self-contradictory: for example, it is simply not rational for a land-owner to destroy (for example, to permanently poison or flood or irradiate) the land he they inhabits. Would not such a land-owner, to use Kant’s own language, “be putting usable objects namely his own land beyond any possibility of being used” and would he not, in other words, “annihilate it, the land in a practical respect and make them into res nullius”? We can also make our point with a series of questions: If “freedom requires that you be able to have usable things fully at your disposal, to use as you see fit, and so to decide which purposes to pursue with them”,131 then is not the destruction of usable things in contradiction with the requirements of freedom? How are you supposed to pursue any further purposes if you have made it your purpose to destroy the things within which you pursue your purposes? Clearly, given the Kantain perspective on the meaning of property, the (permanent) destruction of finite, non-renewable natural resources, such as land, is incoherent: one simply cannot invoke the right of property, or the freedoms that it is supposed to enable, to justify destroying such resources. Similarly, suppose Hegel is right to say that property permits the suppression of the “pure subjectivity of personality”, or that in possessing property I become “an actual will”, or that property “gives my will existence”, such that “not until he has property does the person exist as reason”. In that case, wouldn’t the destruction of property result in a failed actualization of the will? Suppose, again, we have a land-owner who wishes to poison his lands, rendering them unfit for future use: is such a person actualizing his will freely and effectively, or is he undercutting his own (future) ability to act freely and effectively? I maintain that, for both Kant and Hegel, the destruction of property holdings, especially of finite depletable resources, is fundamentally incompatible with the core rationale of property as a freedom-maximizing institution. Put differently, the destructive, dissipating or non-sustainable use of finite, depletable natural resources, especially land, constitutes a transgression of freedom because such use is radically inconsistent with the conditions under which alone “the greatest use of freedom” is possible. That is, Kant’s core tenet regarding the necessity of property acquisition as a function of our extended freedom in the world dictates that the character of usable things as usable, as means fit for the realization of human purposes, must be maintained in perpetuity. 

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Sub-point c is future generations.

Rational agents have a duty to protect future generations by promoting life-sustaining conditions. Godofsky 10 writes
Jessica Godofsky (student at The College of New Jersey). “FUTURE GENERATIONS AND THE RIGHT TO SURVIVAL: A DEONTOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE MORAL OBLIGATIONS OF PRESENT TO FUTURE PEOPLE.” TCNJ Journal of Student Scholarship. April 2010. http://joss.pages.tcnj.edu/files/2012/04/2010-Godofsky.pdf
While the natural right to life entails a duty not to cause the death of another, the right to survival requires the physical conditions needed to sustain that life. To be a human being is to act and intend to survive, whereas animals and plants survive through instinct, reflex and learned behaviors. By acting and intending to survive through free will, human beings employ reason to preserve their lives. According to Kant, this establishes our infinite worth and our ability to claim rights and possess obligatory duties. Ian Barbour argues that the fundamental equality of persons is derived from the “common nature of persons as rational beings” and the “universality of basic human capacities” which have been established to allow human beings to assert their natural right to survival (2006:113). We can also expect that future human beings will engage in rational, deliberate action to preserve their existence collectively as we currently do. Present people can assume moral responsibility for future people, then, because we are united as a species through our capacity for rational agency, rather than through a contractual, reciprocal relationship. Present people can use rational thought to identify what living conditions are necessary for future survival because we share evident physiological and biological interests as a distinct species. I reject Stephen Gardiner?s claim that “future generations have no control over what the present generation does with that capacity…they could not in principle have any such control. They are not around to present a claim, nor to represent their interests…they have no bargaining power” (Gardiner 2002:403). In fact, Golding claims that “future generations are members of our moral community because…our social ideal is relevant to them, given what they are and their conditions of their life” (1972:361). Therefore, we can tie the natural right to survival to the fact that we can distinguish the basic conditions of living using rational deliberation to realize our present “social ideal,” even if this social ideal becomes more and more obscure as generations become more distant. Although future generations are certainly not able to consent to a social contract, they do have a natural right to survival using rational agency to do so. This establishes the moral obligation of present generations to treat them and their interests with equal consideration. These future people cannot make claims according to a social contract, but as Golding notes, “have a claim…whether or not they make the claim, demands, or are even able to make a claim” because we recognize them as members of our moral community with “an entitlement upon them to receive what is claimed from me” (1972:360). Therefore, while we do not necessarily owe future generations such moral consideration, we are morally obliged to act with regard to them (Hubin 1976:71). Although Golding defines it as “a conception of the good life for man,” in this argument is related to the natural right to survival and the conditions needed to do so (1972:360). That being said, “the potential for agency and autonomy that is attributed to future generations mandates the recognition of their rights to a natural world that is not destroyed and eroded either in the quantum of its resources or in their richness and diversity” (Jayal 2003:301). To ensure this right, present generations must create a social ideal based on physical, life-sustaining circumstances that will provide future generations with the opportunity to live a healthy life and fulfill their central interests. According to John Rawls, “the different temporal position of persons and generations does not in itself justify treating them differently” (1973:295). Thus, we have a duty to ensure the survival of future generations and must act to protect this right.  

Our obligation to protect future generations from environmental destruction is a litmus test for any moral theory. Bickham 81 writes
Stephen Bickham (Professor of Philosophy at Mansfield State College). “Future Generations and Contemporary Ethical Theory.” 1981. http://profs-polisci.mcgill.ca/muniz/intergen/Bickham20-20Future20generations20and20contemporary20ethical20theory.pdf
There exists today in philosophy a question of our ethical obligations to future generations. Several different aspects of this question render it philosophically unusual. For one thing the substantive answer to the question is not in dispute. Were someone to suggest seriously that we have no ethical obligations to future generations and mean by this that we need take no care for what living conditions on the planet will be in a hundred years - that whether there would exist then, say, a lethal level of radioactivity in the atmosphere, it would be no concern of ours - we should regard that individual as lacking one of the most basic of human ethical sensibilities. Of course we have some serious responsibility for the future, though this does not commit us to the more particular position that we have ethical obligations to future generations. The question does not, thus, require an answer at the general level, nor am I prepared here to demarcate specifically the content of our responsibility for the future, though I shall treat of others' attempts to do so. I am interested rather in why this question should seem so mysterious at this time as to generate a dispute or issue within the philosophical community. Thus my focus will be interior to philosophy. I hope to show how the assumptions involved in raising this question in this way make it difficult for us to address the new realities with which the question is concerned. Why is this question a current one in philosophy? From a somewhat sociological perspective it is significant that John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, perhaps the most influential ethical treatise of the seventies, is the first person who seems to have dealt with the question in its current form.' I shall examine Rawls' position in detail later, but basically he treats justice among generations as involving each generation's passing on to the next a suitable accumulation of intellectual, economic, and educational "capital" so that the next can have the werewithal to continue or to establish just institutions, as well as support a reasonable standard of living.2 While the immense philosophical popularity of A Theory of Justice brought the current question to the attention of the philosophical community, most philosophers writing of the issue of ethical obligation to future generations since Rawls have seen the problem in an environmental rather than an economic context? It is clear that our relatively new capacity for possibly permanent devastation of the environment has created a new ethical situation which requires a reassessment of our responsibility to the future. Environmental pollution itself is nothing new. I am sitting a quarter of a mile from a river which has contained no life for about 80 years due to pollution from mine acid waste. In my county virtually every marketable tree was cut down between 1895 and 1915. But until now there just have not been enough people nor an advanced enough technology to threaten a large environment with permanent destruction or impairment. Trees grow back and mine acid waste pollution can be stopped, though it is expensive to do so. But we simply do not know how to render radioactive waste from power plants nonradioactive, or to replace the ozone layer in the atmosphere should this become depleted, or to develop an effective, economical replacement for iron. It is quite simple. We did not have the responsibility for the future that we do now before we had the capacity to destroy it. As I said earlier, our responsibility for the future in a broad sense is well recognized. What is not understood is how this responsibility is to be rationally grounded in an ethical theory. But it is becoming clear to ethicists that the question of our obligations to the future can be seen as a litmus test for an ethical theory. No theory can really be adequate to the contemporary situation which cannot found such obligations on its own principles. The problem is that each of the major, current ethical theories has difficulty doing this. I shall examine briefly the deontological theory and at more length the utilitarian and contractarian theories to illustrate why this is so. 

Aff gets RVIs on I meets and counter-interps because
(a) 1AR timeskew means I can’t cover theory and still have a fair shot on substance.
(b) no risk theory would give neg a free source of no risk offense which allows him to moot the AC.

Neg burden is to defend a competitive post-fiat advocacy. Offense-defense is key to fairness and real world education. This means ignore skepticism.
Nelson 8 writes
Adam F. Nelson, J.D.1. Towards a Comprehensive Theory of Lincoln-Douglas Debate. 2008.
And the truth-statement model of the resolution imposes an absolute burden of proof on the affirmative: if the resolution is a truth-claim, and the af?rmative has the burden of proving that claim, in so far as intuitively we tend to disbelieve truthclaims until we are persuaded otherwise, the af?rmative has the burden to prove that statement absolutely true. Indeed, one of the most common theory arguments in LD is conditionality, which argues it is inappropriate for the af?rmative to claim only proving the truth of part of the resolution is suf?cient to earn the ballot. Such a model of the resolution also gives the negative access to a range of strategies that many students, coaches, and judges ?nd ridiculous or even irrelevant to evaluation of the resolution.
If the negative need only prevent the affirmative from proving the truth of the resolution, it is logically sufficient to negate to deny our ability to make truth-statements or to prove normative morality does not exist or to deny the reliability of human senses or reason. Yet, even though most coaches appear to endorse the truth-statement model of the resolution, they complain about the use of such negative strategies, even though they are a necessary consequence of that model. And, moreover, such strategies seem fundamentally unfair, as they provide the negative with functionally in?nite ground, as there are a nearly in?nite variety of such skeptical objections to normative claims, while continuing to bind the af?rmative to a much smaller range of options: advocacy of the resolution as a whole.
Instead, it seems much more reasonable to treat the resolution as a way to equitably divide ground: the affirmative advocating the desirability of a world in which people adhere to the value judgment implied by the resolution and the negative advocating the desirability of a world in which people adhere to a value judgment mutually exclusive to that implied by the resolution. By making the issue one of desirability of Under competing world-views rather than of truth, the affirmative gains access to increased flexibility regarding how he or she chooses to defend that world, while the negative retains equal flexibility while being denied access to those skeptical arguments indicted above. Our ability to make normative claims is irrelevant to a discussion of the desirability of making two such claims. Unless there is some significant harm in making such statements, some offensive reason to reject making them that can be avoided by an advocacy mutually exclusive with that of the affirmative such objections are not a reason the negative world is more desirable, and therefore not a reason to negate. Note this is precisely how things have been done in policy debate for some time: a team that runs a kritik is expected to offer some impact of the mindset they are indicting and some alternative that would solve for that impact. A team that simply argued some universal, unavoidable, problem was bad and therefore a reason to negate would not be very successful. It is about time LD started treating such arguments the same way.
Such a model of the resolution has additional benefits as well. First, it forces both debaters to offer offensive reasons to prefer their worldview, thereby further enforcing a parallel burden structure. This means debaters can no longer get away with arguing the resolution is by definition true of false. The “truth” of the particular vocabulary of the resolution is irrelevant to its desirability. Second, it is intuitive. When people evaluate the truth of ethical claims, they consider their implications in the real world. They ask themselves whether a world in which people live by that ethical rule is better than one in which they don’t. Such debates don’t happen solely in the abstract. We want to know how the various options affect us and the world we live in.

I’m willing to clarify or alter my advocacy in cross-ex.

Err aff on theory. There was a 5 neg side bias at Strake Jesuit based on prelims and elims according to Joy of Tournaments. This also means presume aff if presumption matters.

Finally, the neg must defend one unconditional advocacy. Conditionality is bad because it makes the neg a moving target which kills 1AR strategy. He’ll kick it if I cover it and extend it if I undercover it, meaning I have no strategic options. Also, it’s unreciprocal because I can’t kick the AC.

Tournament: Sunvite | Round: 2 | Opponent: Oxbridge NV | Judge: Tom Evnen
Different cards I read:

Human Worth Good

Morality must be grounded on a conception of absolute good. 

Lee 8 writes
“The Nature and Basis of Human Dignity,” Patrick Lee, John N. and Jamie D. McAleer Professor of Bioethics, Institute of Bioethics @ Franciscan University of Steubenville, and Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University. Ratio Juris. Vol. 21 No. 2 June 2008 (173–93)
The basis of this point can be explained, at least in part, in the following way. When one chooses an actsion, one chooses it for a reason, that is, for the sake of some good one thinks this action will help to realize. That good may itself be a way of realizing some further good, and that good a means to another, and so on. But the chain of instrumental goods cannot be in?nite. So, there must be some ultimate reasons for one’s choices, some goods which one recognizes as reasons for choosing which need no further support, which are not mere means to some further good. 

The ultimate good is the value of humans as ends in themselves.

Hill 91 writes
Hill, Thomas. Jr. “Self-regarding suicide: A modified Kantian view” in Autonomy and Self-Respect. Cambridge University Press. 1991. Pg. 102-103.
The second argument is roughly this: Most valuable things have value only because valued by human beings. Their value is derivative from the fact that they serve our interests and desires. Even pleasure, which we value for its own sake, has only derivative value, that is, value dependent on the contingent on the fact that human beings want it. Now if valuers confer derivative value on things by their preferences and choices, those valuers must themselves have value. In fact, they must have value independent of, and superior to, the derivative values they create. The guiding analogy is how we value ends. We value certain means because they serve certain intermediate ends, which in turn we value because they contribute finally to our ultimate ends, that is, what we value for its own sake. The value of the means and the intermediate ends is derivative from the value of the ultimate ends; unless we value the ultimate end, the means and intermediate ends would be worthless to us. So, it seems, the source of derivative value must itself be valuable for its own sake. Since the ultimate source of the value of our contingent ends, such as health, wealth, and even pleasure, is their being valued by human beings, human beings, as valuers, must be valued for their own sakes.

PP Good

Environmental uncertainty is high now. We must take it into account.
Tickner et al. 99 writes
Joel Tickner (Lowell Center for Sustainable Production), Carolyn Raffensperger and Nancy Meyers (SEHN). “The precautionary principle in action: A handbook.” Science and Environmental Health Network. 1999.
In the open, dynamic environments in which humans live and operate, knowledge often has limits, and scientific certainty is difficult to attain. Uncertainty itself comes in many varieties, nonscientific as well as scientific. Some kinds of uncertainty can be addressed and reduced; others cannot. When we make judgments affecting the environment and public health, understanding what we do not know, and why, is as important as pinning down facts. Uncertainties can be placed in the following categories: Parameter uncertainty refers to missing or ambiguous information in specific informational components of an analysis. Parameter uncertainty can often be reduced by gathering more information or using better techniques to gather and analyze it. However, if it is due to variability, this may not be the case. In environmental releases, individuals not only receive various exposures; they also vary in their susceptibility to harm. Attempts to measure and control exposure to hazards may inadequately protect many in the population. Model uncertainty refers to gaps in scientific theory or imprecision in the models used to bridge information gaps, for example, in a dose-response model. Models are constructed to explain current or past events or predict the future. They are only as good as the information used to build them which is necessarily incomplete when models refer to open and interdependent environmental systems. Models can be improved as they incorporate more, and more precise, information. Systemic or epistemic uncertainty refers to the unknown effects of cumulative, multiple, and/or interactive exposures. Systemic uncertainty can be an important confounding factor in large-scale or long-term analyses. Smokescreen uncertainty refers to the strategies of those who create risks and have a stake in concealing the effects of a specific substance or activity. They may refrain from studying a hazard, conceal knowledge of effects, or design studies to create uncertainty. Critics of regulation often use uncertainty to avoid it. Politically induced uncertainty refers to deliberate ignorance on the part of agencies charged with protecting health and the environment. The agency may decide not to study a hazard, limit the scope of its analysis or alternatives to solve a problem, downplay uncertainty in its decisions, or hide uncertainty in quantitative models.  Indeterminacy means that the uncertainties involved are of such magnitude and variety that they may never be significantly reduced.  Ignorance has two faces: Positively, it is a humble admission that we don't know how much we don't know. Negatively, it is the practice of making decisions without considering uncertainties.

Tournament: Lexington | Round: Octas | Opponent: Immaculate Heart AS | Judge: Emily Massey, Devin Kasinki, Courtney Nunley
A. Debaters must not offer theoretical reasons to prefer a framework.
B. Her Shaw ev violates.
The standards are education, time skew, and theory proliferation.
Fairness is a voter. Drop the debater.

Tournament: TOC | Round: 3 | Opponent: Greenhill MM Mitali Mathur | Judge: Nikhil Bontha
Conflicting moral side-constraints would paralyze state action, so states must use util to weigh deontological violations. 

And, respect for human worth would justify util. Cummiskey 90
Cummiskey, David. Associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. “Kantian Consequentiaism.” Ethics 100 (April 1990), University of Chicago. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract “social entity.” It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive “overall social good.” Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that “to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has.” But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the principle that “rational nature exists as an end in itself”. Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have an equal value, then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many rational beings as possible. In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a non- value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kant’s normative theory is based on an unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have “dignity, that is, an unconditional and incomparable worth” that transcends any market value, but persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others. The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others.

Thus the standard is maximizing happiness.

Advocacy: On balance, developing countries should accept the Precautionary Principle when environmental protection and resource extraction conflict. 

Advantage 1 is Food Crises

Prioritizing resource extraction makes collapse of civilization and food crises inevitable. Sustainable development solves.
Luntz 3-19
Stephen Luntz (staff writer). Citing Safa Motesharrei, graduate student in mathematics at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center.  “According to a NASA Funding Study, We’re Pretty Much Screwed.” I Fucking Love Science. March 19th, 2014. http://www.iflscience.com/environment/according-nasa-funded-study-were-pretty-much-screwed#cWych02cH9mk6Tm6.16
Our industrial civilization faces the same threats of collapse that earlier versions such as the Mayans experienced, a study to be published in Ecological Economics has warned. The idea is far from new, but the authors have put new rigor to the study of how so many previous societies collapsed, and why ours could follow.  Lead author Mr Safa Motesharrei is no wild-eyed conspiracy theorist. Motesharrei is a graduate student in mathematics at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, a National Science Foundation-supported institution, and the research was done with funding from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.  "The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent," the forthcoming paper states  Two key social features are identified that contributed to the collapse of every civilization studied: “The stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity," and "The economic stratification of society into Elites rich and Masses (or "Commoners") poor".  If these look familiar, so do the factors that make up the resource side of the equation, with climatic change, and scarcity of water and energy key among them, although for others climate variation was a matter of bad luck, rather than their own actions.  The model Motesharrei used, Human And Nature Dynamics (HANDY), explores the relationship between population and resources, drawing heavily on predator-prey models used by ecologists. Four key factors were included in the model: Elites, Commoners, nature and wealth. Equations of how these interact were created with varying inputs. The outcomes were not pretty. The timing and shape of collapses varied, but the societies that most closely resembled our own doomed themselves, through overuse of resources exacerbated by economic stratification.  In one scenario many commoners do make it into the elite population at year 750, but the “scarcity of workers” caused a collapse by year 1000. In another so many of the Earth's resources are consumed that society, and the ecology of the planet, are doomed by the year 500.  “It is important to note that in both of these scenarios, the Elites — due to their wealth — do not suffer the detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners,” the paper notes.  If those year numbers seem comfortingly far off, be aware that the year zero in these models is well behind us. Nevertheless, contrary to much of the reporting, the model does not provide a useful timeline for when we can expect to see the world we live in turn into something that resembles a post-apocalyptic nightmare, although studies of the convergence of climate and resource challenges suggest we may witness drastic food crises within a little over a decade.  In every economic bubble people looking back to past crashes are told “this time it is different”. Certainly some things have changed for modern civilization compared to the others Motesharrei has looked at. Technological developments that provide access to greater resources is the most frequently mentioned difference. Motesharrei responds, “Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use.”  One advantage we do have, however, is much greater knowledge of what has gone wrong in the past, and therefore the capacity to build models like HANDY. In a presentation of an earlier draft of this work in 2012 Motesharrei noted, “Simple models provide a great intuition and can teach us invaluable points. It is crucial to have a measure that can give us an early warning of collapse. Carrying Capacity tells us when overshoot happens, and this can be defined by noticing the decline in wealth.”  Some coverage of the announcement has described disaster as inevitable, but that is not the paper's conclusion at all. “Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion,” it argues.  Although the study has reportedly passed peer review it is yet to be published. It received global attention after a pre-release version was provided to The Guardian. 

Food crises independently escalate to World War 3. Calvin 98
William CALVIN, theoretical neurophysiologist at the University of Washington, Atlantic Monthly, January, The Great Climate Flip-Flop, Vol 281, No. 1, 1998, p. 47-64
The population-crash scenario is surely the most appalling. Plummeting crop yields would cause some powerful countries to try to take over their neighbors or distant lands -- if only because their armies, unpaid and lacking food, would go marauding, both at home and across the borders. The better-organized countries would attempt to use their armies, before they fell apart entirely, to take over countries with significant remaining resources, driving out or starving their inhabitants if not using modern weapons to accomplish the same end: eliminating competitors for the remaining food. This would be a worldwide problem -- and could lead to a Third World War -- but Europe's vulnerability is particularly easy to analyze. The last abrupt cooling, the Younger Dryas, drastically altered Europe's climate as far east as Ukraine. Present-day Europe has more than 650 million people. It has excellent soils, and largely grows its own food. It could no longer do so if it lost the extra warming from the North Atlantic.

Sustainable development independently solves extinction. Barry 13
Dr. Glen Barry 13, Political ecologist with expert proficiencies in old forest protection, climate change, and environmental sustainability policy, Ph.D. in "Land Resources" and Masters of Science in "Conservation Biology and Sustainable Development” from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “ECOLOGY SCIENCE: Terrestrial Ecosystem Loss and Biosphere Collapse,” Forests.org, February 4, 2013, pg. http://forests.org/blog/2013/02/ecology-science-terrestrial-ec.asp
Science needs to do a better job of considering worst-case scenarios regarding continental- and global-scale ecological collapse. The loss of biodiversity, ecosystems, and landscape connectivity reviewed here shows clearly that ecological collapse is occurring at spatially extensive scales. The collapse of the biosphere and complex life, or eventually even all life, is a possibility that needs to be better understood and mitigated against. A tentative case has been presented here that terrestrial ecosystem loss is at or near a planetary boundary. It is suggested that a 66 of Earth's land mass must be maintained in terrestrial ecosystems, to maintain critical connectivity necessary for ecosystem services across scales to continue, including the biosphere. Yet various indicators show that around 50 of Earth's terrestrial ecosystems have been lost and their services usurped by humans. Humanity may have already destroyed more terrestrial ecosystems than the biosphere can bear. There exists a major need for further research into how much land must be maintained in a natural and agroecological state to meet landscape and bioregional sustainable development goals while maintaining an operable biosphere. It is proposed that a critical element in determining the threshold where terrestrial ecosystem loss becomes problematic is where landscape connectivity of intact terrestrial ecosystems erodes to the point where habitat patches exist only in a human context. Based upon an understanding of how landscapes percolate across scale, it is recommended that 66 of Earth's surface be maintained as ecosystems; 44 as natural intact ecosystems (2/3 of 2/3) and 22 as agroecological buffer zones. Thus nearly half of Earth must remain as large, connected, intact, and naturally evolving ecosystems, including old-growth forests, to provide the context and top-down ecological regulation of both human agroecological, and reduced impact and appropriately scaled industrial activities. Given the stakes, it is proper for political ecologists and other Earth scientists to willingly speak bluntly if we are to have any chance of averting global ecosystem collapse. A case has been presented that Earth is already well beyond carrying capacity in terms of amount of natural ecosystem habitat that can be lost before the continued existence of healthy regional ecosystems and the global biosphere itself may not be possible. Cautious and justifiably conservative science must still be able to rise to the occasion of global ecological emergencies that may threaten our very survival as a species and planet. Those knowledgeable about planetary boundaries – and abrupt climate change and terrestrial ecosystem loss in particular – must be more bold and insistent in conveying the range and possible severity of threats of global ecosystem collapse, while proposing sufficient solutions. It is not possible to do controlled experiments on the Earth system; all we have is observation based upon science and trained intuition to diagnose the state of Earth's biosphere and suggest sufficient ecological science–based remedies. If Gaia is alive, she can die. Given the strength of life-reducing trends across biological systems and scales, there is a need for a rigorous research agenda to understand at what point the biosphere may perish and Earth die, and to learn what configuration of ecosystems and other boundary conditions may prevent her from doing so. We see death of cells, organisms, plant communities, wildlife populations, and whole ecosystems all the time in nature – extreme cases being desertification and ocean dead zones. There is no reason to dismiss out of hand that the Earth System could die if critical thresholds are crossed. We need as Earth scientists to better understand how this may occur and bring knowledge to bear to avoid global ecosystem and biosphere collapse or more extreme outcomes such as biological homogenization and the loss of most or even all life. To what extent can a homogenized Earth of dandelions, rats, and extremophiles be said to be alive, can it ever recover, and how long can it last? The risks of global ecosystem collapse and the need for strong response to achieve global ecological sustainability have been understated for decades. If indeed there is some possibility that our shared biosphere could be collapsing, there needs to be further investigation of what sorts of sociopolitical responses are valid in such a situation. Dry, unemotional scientific inquiry into such matters is necessary – yet more proactive and evocative political ecological language may be justified as well. We must remember we are speaking of the potential for a period of great dying in species, ecosystems, humans, and perhaps all being. It is not clear whether this global ecological emergency is avoidable or recoverable. It may not be. But we must follow and seek truth wherever it leads us.
Planetary boundaries have been quite anthropocentric, focusing upon human safety and giving relatively little attention to other species and the biosphere's needs other than serving humans. Planetary boundaries need to be set that, while including human needs, go beyond them to meet the needs of ecosystems and all their constituent species and their aggregation into a living biosphere. Planetary boundary thinking needs to be more biocentric. I concur with Williams (2000) that what is needed is an Earth System–based conservation ethic – based upon an "Earth narrative" of natural and human history – which seeks as its objective the "complete preservation of the Earth's biotic inheritance." Humans are in no position to be indicating which species and ecosystems can be lost without harm to their own intrinsic right to exist, as well as the needs of the biosphere. For us to survive as a species, logic and reason must prevail (Williams 2000). Those who deny limits to growth are unaware of biological realities (Vitousek 1986). There are strong indications humanity may undergo societal collapse and pull down the biosphere with it. The longer dramatic reductions in fossil fuel emissions and a halt to old-growth logging are put off, the worse the risk of abrupt and irreversible climate change becomes, and the less likely we are to survive and thrive as a species. Human survival – entirely dependent upon the natural world – depends critically upon both keeping carbon emissions below 350 ppm and maintaining at least 66 of the landscape as natural ecological core areas and agroecological transitions and buffers. Much of the world has already fallen below this proportion, and in sum the biosphere's terrestrial ecosystem loss almost certainly has been surpassed, yet it must be the goal for habitat transition in remaining relatively wild lands undergoing development such as the Amazon, and for habitat restoration and protection in severely fragmented natural habitat areas such as the Western Ghats. The human family faces an unprecedented global ecological emergency as reckless growth destroys the ecosystems and the biosphere on which all life depends. Where is the sense of urgency, and what are proper scientific responses if in fact Earth is dying? Not speaking of worst-case scenarios – the collapse of the biosphere and loss of a living Earth, and mass ecosystem collapse and death in places like Kerala – is intellectually dishonest. We must consider the real possibility that we are pulling the biosphere down with us, setting back or eliminating complex life. The 66 / 44 / 22 threshold of terrestrial ecosystems in total, natural core areas, and agroecological buffers gets at the critical need to maintain large and expansive ecosystems across at least 50 of the land so as to keep nature connected and fully functional. We need an approach to planetary boundaries that is more sensitive to deep ecology to ensure that habitable conditions for all life and natural evolutionary change continue. A terrestrial ecosystem boundary which protects primary forests and seeks to recover old-growth forests elsewhere is critical in this regard. In old forests and all their life lie both the history of Earth's life, and the hope for its future. The end of their industrial destruction is a global ecological imperative. Much-needed dialogue is beginning to focus on how humanity may face systematic social and ecological collapse and what sort of community resilience is possible. There have been ecologically mediated periods of societal collapse from human damage to ecosystems in the past (Kuecker and Hall 2011). What makes it different this time is that the human species may have the scale and prowess to pull down the biosphere with them. It is fitting at this juncture for political ecologists to concern themselves with both legal regulatory measures, as well as revolutionary processes of social change, which may bring about the social norms necessary to maintain the biosphere. Rockström and colleagues (2009b) refer to the need for "novel and adaptive governance" without using the word revolution. Scientists need to take greater latitude in proposing solutions that lie outside the current political paradigms and sovereign powers. Even the Blue Planet Laureates' remarkable analysis (Brundtland et al. 2012), which notes the potential for climate change, ecosystem loss, and inequitable development patterns neither directly states nor investigates in depth the potential for global ecosystem collapse, or discusses revolutionary responses. UNEP (2012) notes abrupt and irreversible ecological change, which they say may impact life-support systems, but are not more explicit regarding the profound human and ecological implications of biosphere collapse, or the full range of sociopolitical responses to such predictions. More scientific investigations are needed regarding alternative governing structures optimal for pursuit and achievement of bioregional, continental, and global sustainability if we are maintain a fully operable biosphere forever. An economic system based upon endless growth that views ecosystems necessary for planetary habitability primarily as resources to be consumed cannot exist for long. Planetary boundaries offer a profoundly difficult challenge for global governance, particularly as increased scientific salience does not appear to be sufficient to trigger international action to sustain ecosystems (Galaz et al. 2012). If indeed the safe operating space for humanity is closing, or the biosphere even collapsing and dying, might not discussion of revolutionary social change be acceptable? Particularly, if there is a lack of consensus by atomized actors, who are unable to legislate the required social change within the current socioeconomic system. By not even speaking of revolutionary action, we dismiss any means outside the dominant growth-based oligarchies. In the author's opinion, it is shockingly irresponsible for Earth System scientists to speak of geoengineering a climate without being willing to academically investigate revolutionary social and economic change as well. It is desirable that the current political and economic systems should reform themselves to be ecologically sustainable, establishing laws and institutions for doing so. Yet there is nothing sacrosanct about current political economy arrangements, particularly if they are collapsing the biosphere. Earth requires all enlightened and knowledgeable voices to consider the full range of possible responses now more than ever.
One possible solution to the critical issues of terrestrial ecosystem loss and abrupt climate change is a massive and global, natural ecosystem protection and restoration program – funded by a carbon tax – to further establish protected large and connected core ecological sustainability areas, buffers, and agro-ecological transition zones throughout all of Earth's bioregions. Fossil fuel emission reductions must also be a priority. It is critical that humanity both stop burning fossil fuels and destroying natural ecosystems, as fast as possible, to avoid surpassing nearly all the planetary boundaries. In summation, we are witnessing the collective dismantling of the biosphere and its constituent ecosystems which can be described as ecocidal. The loss of a species is tragic, of an ecosystem widely impactful, yet with the loss of the biosphere all life may be gone. Global ecosystems when connected for life's material flows provide the all-encompassing context within which life is possible. The miracle of life is that life begets life, and the tragedy is that across scales when enough life is lost beyond thresholds, living systems die. 

Food crisis causes conflict and instability which kills compromise over AI.
Tomasik 13
Brian Tomasik (graduated from Swarthmore, former Bing programmer). “Crop Cultivation and Wild Animals.” Essays on Reducing Suffering. 2008-2013, Last update: December 12th, 2013. http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/crop-cultivation-and-wild-animals.html
As a general rule, less crop cultivation now probably implies more food stability in the future. One clear example is in the area of topsoil loss as discussed above. John Crawford explains: water will reach a crisis point. This issue is already causing conflicts in India, China, Pakistan and the Middle East and before climate change and food security really hit, the next wars are likely to be fought over unsustainable irrigation. Even moderately degraded soil will hold less than half of the water than healthy soil in the same location. If you're irrigating a crop, you need water to stay in the soil close to the plant roots. ... Soil erosion is most serious in China, Africa, India and parts of South America. If the food supply goes down, then obviously, the price goes up. The crisis points will hit the poorest countries hardest, in particular those which rely on imports: Egypt, for example, is almost entirely dependent on imports of wheat. The capacity of the planet to produce food is already causing conflict. A lot of people argue that food price hikes caused the Arab spring, and may even have contributed to the recent violence following the release of an anti-Islam film. In general, consumption of more food crops implies higher prices on the world market. From "Food Insecurity and Violent Conflict: Causes, Consequences, and Addressing the Challenges" by Henk-Jan Brinkman and Cullen S. Hendrix (p. 4): is food insecurity itself a cause of conflict? Based on a review of recent research, the answer is a highly qualified yes. Food insecurity, especially when caused by higher food prices, heightens the risk of democratic breakdown, civil conflict, protest, rioting, and communal conflict. The evidence linking food insecurity to interstate conflict is less strong, though there is some historical evidence linking declining agricultural yields to periods of regional conflict in Europe and Asia. That said, the effects of these rebellions on democracy can be both negative and positive (p. 7): Food insecurity, proxied by low availability of calories for consumption per capita, makes democratic breakdown more likely, especially in higher-income countries, where people expect there to be larger social surpluses that could be invested to reduce food insecurity (Reenock, Bernhard and Sobek, 2007). Though statistical evidence is lacking, rising food prices have been implicated in the wave of demonstrations and transitions from authoritarian rule to fledgling democracy in some countries across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011. There are some historical precedents for this: a bad harvest in 1788 led to high food prices in France, which caused rioting and contributed to the French revolution in 1789; and the wave of political upheaval that swept Europe in 1848 was at least in part a response to food scarcity, coming after three below-average harvests across the continent (Berger and Spoerer 2001). Most of these conflicts occur in poor countries and so are less likely to influence AGI arms races among major world powers. Still, it seems plausible that the destabilizing consequences of environmental degradation are net harmful for compromise prospects among the big players in AGI development in the long term. 

International conflict risks an AI arms race involving military robotics.
Tomasik 4-3
Brian Tomasik (graduated from Swarthmore, former programmer at Bing). “International Cooperation vs. AI Arms Race.” Last updated April 3rd, 2014. http://utilitarian-essays.com/ai-arms-race.html#section7
Government AI development could go wrong in several ways. Probably most on LW feel the prevailing scenario is that governments would botch the process by not realizing the risks at hand. It's also possible that governments would use the AI for malevolent, totalitarian purposes. It seems that both of these bad scenarios would be exacerbated by international conflict. Greater hostility means countries are more inclined to use AI as a weapon. Indeed, whoever builds the first AI can take over the world, which makes building AI the ultimate arms race. A USA-China race is one reasonable possibility. Arms races encourage risk-taking -- being willing to skimp on safety measures to improve your odds of winning ("Racing to the Precipice"). In addition, the weaponization of AI could lead to worse expected outcomes in general. CEV seems to have less hope of success in a Cold War scenario. ("What? You want to include the evil Chinese in your CEV??") With a pure CEV, presumably it would eventually count Chinese values even if it started with just Americans, because people would become more enlightened during the process. However, when we imagine more crude democratic decision outcomes, this becomes less likely. 5. Ways to avoid an arms race Averting an AI arms race seems to be an important topic for research. It could be partly informed by the Cold War and other nuclear arms races, 'President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev signing the INF Treaty in the East Room of the White House.' By White House Photographic Office Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reagan_and_Gorbachev_signing.jpg as well as by other efforts at nonproliferation of chemical and biological weapons. Forthcoming robotic and nanotech weapons might be even better analogues of AI arms races than nuclear weapons because these newer technologies can be built more secretly and used in a more targeted fashion. Apart from more robust arms control, other factors might help: Improved international institutions like the UN, allowing for better enforcement against defection by one state. In the long run, a scenario of global governance would likely be ideal for strengthening international cooperation, just like nation states reduce intra-state violence. Better construction and enforcement of nonproliferation treaties. Improved game theory and international-relations scholarship on the causes of arms races and how to avert them. (For instance, arms races have sometimes been modeled as iterated prisoner's dilemmas with imperfect information.) How to improve verification, which has historically been a weak point for nuclear arms control. (The concern is that if you haven't verified well enough, the other side might be arming while you're not.) Moral tolerance and multicultural perspective, aiming to reduce people's sense of nationalism. (In the limit where neither Americans nor Chinese cared which government won the race, there would be no point in having the race.) Improved trade, democracy, and other forces that historically have reduced the likelihood of war. 6. Are these efforts cost-effective? World peace is hardly a goal unique to effective altruists (EAs), so we shouldn't necessarily expect low-hanging fruit. On the other hand, projects like nuclear nonproliferation seem relatively underfunded even compared with anti-poverty charities. I suspect more direct MIRI-type research has higher expected value, but among EAs who don't want to fund MIRI specifically, encouraging donations toward international cooperation could be valuable, since it's certainly a more mainstream cause. I wonder if GiveWell would consider studying global cooperation specifically beyond its indirect relationship with catastrophic risks. 7. Should we publicize AI arms races? When I mentioned this topic to a friend, he pointed out that we might not want the idea of AI arms races too widely known, because then governments might take the concern more seriously and therefore start the race earlier -- giving us less time to prepare and less time to work on FAI in the meanwhile. From David Chalmers, "The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis" (footnote 14): When I discussed these issues with cadets and staff at the West Point Military Academy, the question arose as to whether the US military or other branches of the government might attempt to prevent the creation of AI or AI+, due to the risks of an intelligence explosion. The consensus was that they would not, as such prevention would only increase the chances that AI or AI+ would first be created by a foreign power. One might even expect an AI arms race at some point, once the potential consequences of an intelligence explosion are registered. According to this reasoning, although AI+ would have risks from the standpoint of the US government, the risks of Chinese AI+ (say) would be far greater. We should take this information-hazard concern seriously and remember the unilateralist's curse. If it proves to be fatal for explicitly discussing AI arms races, we might instead encourage international cooperation without explaining why. Fortunately, it wouldn't be hard to encourage international cooperation on grounds other than AI arms races if we wanted to do so. Also note that a government-level arms race could easily be preferable to a Wild West race among a dozen private AI developers where coordination and compromise would be not just difficult but potentially impossible. Of course, if we did decide it was best for governments to take AI arms races seriously, this would also encourage private developers to step on the gas pedal. That said, once governments do recognize the problem, they may be able to impose moratoria on private development. How concerned should we be about accidentally accelerating arms races by talking about them? My gut feeling is it's not too risky, because It's hard to contain the basic idea. Super-powerful AI is already well known not just by governments but even in popular movies. Developing verification measures, technology restrictions, and so on require governments knowing what technology they're dealing with. If governments can think about these issues ahead of time (decades before strong AI becomes feasible), they're more likely to go for cooperation and less likely to panic and build up their own defenses, because they see that there's time for negotiations to potentially work before losing that much ground. Right now most AI research appears to be done in public, so there's not a huge cost for a given country in delaying at this point. Most risk analysts don't express concerns like these too much when talking about military arms races. Of course, there's selection bias; maybe most of the military does think it's dangerous to talk about these issues in public, and we only hear form the minority that defects from this view. But I've never heard criticism against people who talk too much about arms races in public, except this one comment from my friend. Talking about arms-race scenarios specifically makes it much more clear why we need global governance and improved cooperation. It's more persuasive than just saying, "Wouldn't it be great if the world could sing Kumbaya?" That said, I remain open to being persuaded otherwise, and it seems important to think more carefully about how careful to be here. The good news is that the information hazards are unlikely to be disastrous, because all of this material is already publicly available somewhere. In other words, the upsides and downsides of making a bad judgment seem roughly on the same order of magnitude. 8. How do our prospects look? In Technological change and nuclear arms control (1986), Ted Greenwood suggests that arms control has historically had little counterfactual impact: In no case has an agreement inhibited technological change that the United States both actually wanted to pursue at the time of agreement and was capable of pursuing during the intended duration of the agreement. Only in one area of technological innovation (i.e., SALT II constraints on the number of multiple independently-targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs, on existing missiles) is it possible that such agreements actually inhibited Soviet programs, although in another (test of new light ICBMs intercontinental ballistic missiles) their program is claimed by the United States to violate the SALT II Treaty that the Soviets have stated they will not undercut. In "Why Military Technology Is Difficult to Restrain" (1987), Greenwood adds that the INF Treaty was arguably more significant, but it still didn't stop technological development, just a particular application of known technology. In other domains we also see competition prevail over cooperation, such as in most markets, where usually there are at least several companies vying for customers. Of course, this is partly by social design, because we have anti-trust laws. Competition in business makes companies worse off while making consumers better off. Likewise, competition to build a quick, hacky AI makes human nations worse off while perhaps making the unsafe AIs better off. If we care some about the unsafe AIs for their own sakes as intelligent preference-satisfying agents, then this is less of a loss than it at first appears, but it still seems like there's room to expand the pie, and reduce suffering, if everyone takes things more slowly. Maybe the best hope comes from the possibility of global unification. There is just one US government, with a monopoly on military development. If instead we had just one world government with a similar monopoly, arms races would not be necessary. Nationalism has been a potent force for gluing countries together and if channeled into internationalism, perhaps it could help to bind together a unified globe. Of course, we shouldn't place all our hopes on a world government and need to prepare for arms-control mechanisms that can also work with the present-day nation-state paradigm. 9. Robot arms races Robots require AI that contains clear goal systems and an ability to act effectively in the world. Thus, they seem like a reasonable candidate for where artificial general intelligence will first emerge. Facebook's image-classification algorithms and Google's search algorithms don't need general intelligence, with many human-like cognitive faculties, as much as a smart robot does. Military robotics seems like one of the most likely reasons that a robot arms race might develop. Indeed, to some degree there's already an arms race to build drones and autonomous weapons systems. Mark Gubrud: Killer robots are not the only element of the global technological arms race, but they are currently the most salient, rapidly-advancing and fateful. If we continue to allow global security policies to be driven by advancing technology, then the arms race will continue, and it may even reheat to Cold War levels, with multiple players this time. Robotic armed forces controlled by AI systems too complex for anyone to understand will be set in confrontation with each other, and sooner or later, our luck will run out. 

AI arms race causes extinction, outweighs nuclear war, and turns other moral theories.
Shulman and Armstrong 11
Carl Shulman (Singularity Institute of Artificial Intelligence) and Stuart Armstrong (InhibOx, an organization dedicated to developing and delivering the best services and technologies in computer-aided drug discovery ). “Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment.” April 13th, 2011. http://singularityhypothesis.blogspot.com/2011/04/arms-races-and-intelligence-explosions.html
II. An AI arms race may be “winner-take-all” The threat of an AI arms race does not appear to be primarily about the direct application of AI to warfare. While automated combat systems such as drone aircraft have taken on greatly increased roles in recent years (Singer, 2009; Arkin, 2009), they do not greatly disrupt the balance of power between leading militaries: slightly lagging states can use older weapons, including nuclear weapons, to deter or defend against an edge in drone warfare. Instead, the military impact of an intelligence explosion would seem to lie primarily in the extreme acceleration in the development of new capabilities. A state might launch an AI Manhattan Project to gain a few months or years of sole access to advanced AI systems, and then initiate an intelligence explosion to greatly increase the rate of progress. Even if rivals remain only a few months behind chronologically, they may therefore be left many technological generations behind until their own intelligence explosions. It is much more probable that such a large gap would allow the leading power to safely disarm its nuclear-armed rivals than that any specific technological generation will provide a decisive advantage over the one immediately preceding it. If states do take AI potential seriously, how likely is it that a government's “in-house” systems will reach the the point of an intelligence explosion months or years before competitors? Historically, there were substantial delays between the the first five nuclear powers tested bombs in 1945, 1949. 1952, 1960, and 1964. The Soviet Union's 1949 test benefited from extensive espionage and infiltration of the Manhattan Project, and Britain's 1952 test reflected formal joint participation in the Manhattan Project. If the speedup in progress delivered by an intelligence explosion were large, such gaps would allow the leading power to solidify a monopoly on the technology and military power, at much lower cost in resources and loss of life than would have been required for the United States to maintain its nuclear monopoly of 1945-1949. To the extent that states distrust their rivals with such complete power, or wish to exploit it themselves, there would be strong incentives to vigorously push forward AI research, and to ensure government control over systems capable of producing an intelligence explosion. In this paper we will discuss factors affecting the feasibility of such a localized intelligence explosion, particularly the balance between internal rates of growth and the diffusion of or exchange of technology, and consider historical analogs including the effects of the Industrial Revolution on military power and nuclear weapons. III. Accidental risks and negative externalities A second critical difference between the nuclear and AI cases is in the expected danger of development, as opposed to deployment and use. Manhattan Project scientists did consider the possibility that a nuclear test would unleash a self-sustaining chain reaction in the atmosphere and destroy all human life, conducting informal calculations at the time suggesting that this was extremely improbable. A more formal process conducted after the tests confirmed the earlier analysis (Konopinski, Marvin, and Teller, 1946), although it would not have provided any protection had matters been otherwise. The historical record thus tells us relatively little about the willingness of military and civilian leaders to forsake or delay a decisive military advantage to avert larger risks of global catastrophe. In contrast, numerous scholars have argued that advanced AI poses a nontrivial risk of catastrophic outcomes, including human extinction. (Bostrom, 2002; Chalmers, 2010; Friedman, 2008; Hall, 2007; Kurzweil, 2005; Moravec, 1999; Posner, 2004; Rees, 2004; Yudkowsky, 2008). Setting aside anthropomorphic presumptions of rebelliousness, a more rigorous argument (Omohundro, 2007) relies on the instrumental value of such behavior for entities with a wide variety of goals that are easier to achieve with more resources and with adequate defense against attack. Many decision algorithms could thus appear benevolent when in weak positions during safety testing, only to cause great harm when in more powerful positions, e.g. after extensive self-improvement. Given abundant time and centralized careful efforts to ensure safety, it seems very probable that these risks could be avoided: development paths that seemed to pose a high risk of catastrophe could be relinquished in favor of safer ones. However, the context of an arms race might not permit such caution. A risk of accidental AI disaster would threaten all of humanity, while the benefits of being first to develop AI would be concentrated, creating a collective action problem insofar as tradeoffs between speed and safety existed. A first-pass analysis suggests a number of such tradeoffs. Providing more computing power would allow AIs to either operate at superhumanly fast timescales or to proliferate very numerous copies. Doing so would greatly accelerate progress, but also render it infeasible for humans to engage in detailed supervision of AI activities. To make decisions on such timescales AI systems would require decision algorithms with very general applicability, making it harder to predict and constrain their behavior. Even obviously risky systems might be embraced for competitive advantage, and the powers with the most optimistic estimates or cavalier attitudes regarding risk would be more likely to take the lead. IV. Barriers to AI arms control Could an AI arms race be regulated using international agreements similar to those governing nuclear technology? In some ways, there are much stronger reasons for agreement: the stability of nuclear deterrence, and the protection afforded by existing nuclear powers to their allies, mean that the increased threat of a new nuclear power is not overwhelming. No nuclear weapons have been detonated in anger since 1945. In contrast, simply developing AI capable of producing an intelligence explosion puts all states at risk from the effects of accidental catastrophe, or the military dominance engendered by a localized intelligence explosion. However, AI is a dual-use technology, with incremental advances in the field offering enormous economic and humanitarian gains that far outweigh near-term drawbacks. Restricting these benefits to reduce the risks of a distant, novel, and unpredictable advance would be very politically challenging. Superhumanly intelligent AI promises even greater rewards: advances in technology that could vastly improve human health, wealth, and welfare while addressing other risks such as climate change. Efforts to outright ban or relinquish AI technology would seem to require strong evidence of very high near-term risks. However, agreements might prove highly beneficial if they could avert an arms race and allow for more controlled AI development with more rigorous safety measures, and sharing of the benefits among all powers. Such an agreement would face increased problems of verification and enforcement. Where nuclear weapons require rare radioactive materials, large specialized equipment, and other easily identifiable inputs, AI research can proceed with only skilled researchers and computing hardware. Verification of an agreement would require incredibly intrusive monitoring of scientific personnel and computers throughout the territory of participating states. Further, while violations of nuclear arms control agreements can be punished after the fact, a covert intelligence explosion could allow a treaty violator to withstand later sanctions. These additional challenges might be addressed in light of the increased benefits of agreement, but might also become tractable thanks to early AI systems. If those systems do not themselves cause catastrophe but do provide a decisive advantage to some powers, they might be used to enforce safety regulations thereafter, providing a chance to “go slow” on subsequent steps. V. Game-theoretic model of an AI arms race In the full paper, we present a simple game-theoretic model of a risky AI arms race. In this model, the risk of accidental catastrophe depends on the number of competitors, the magnitude of random noise in development times, the exchange rate between risk and development speed, and the strength of preferences for developing safe AI first. VI. Ethical implications and responses The above analysis highlights two important possible consequences of advanced AI: a disruptive change in international power relations and a risk of inadvertent disaster. From an ethical point of view, the accidental risk deserves special attention since it threatens human extinction, not only killing current people but also denying future generations existence. (Matheny, 2007; Bostrom, 2003). While AI systems would outlive humanity, AI systems might lack key features contributing to moral value, such as individual identities, play, love, and happiness (Bostrom, 2005; Yudkowsky, 2008). Extinction risk is a distinctive feature of AI risks: even a catastrophic nuclear war or engineered pandemic that killed billions would still likely allow survivors to eventually rebuild human civilization, while AIs killing billions would likely not leave survivors. (Sandberg and Bostrom, 2008). However, a national monopoly on an AI intelligence explosion could also have permanent consequences if it was used to stably establish its position. Permanent totalitarianism is one possibility (Caplan, 2008). We conclude by discussing some possible avenues for reducing these long-term risks.  

Advantage 2 is Warming

The PP is key to solve warming – overcomes cognitive biases which kill reform.
Dana 9
David Dana (Northwestern University School of Law). “The Contextual Rationality of the Precautionary Principle.” Faculty Working Paper. 2009.
Critics of the PP have argued that it is indeterminate and hence basically useless because it can never reveal how much precaution is due in a given case. But many principles and practices are indeterminate in their precise results and policy implications.23 As long as invocation of the PP will draw more attention to huge costs associated with highly uncertain but terrible scenarios, and as long as we believe that heuristic biases will otherwise cause too little attention to be paid to those scenarios, invocation of the PP in the climate change context helpful in producing a more balanced discourse — whatever the ultimate policy choices. Invocation of the PP, by itself, may be enough to balance the policy discourse on climate change, even if policymakers continue to use traditional quantified CBA, and just include a numerical probability for catastrophic climate change in the absence of regulatory action and a numerical estimate of the expected costs of such catastrophic change. The PP can serve as a means of framing the quantitative CBAs as only a partial and potentially misleading picture of the danger of choosing regulatory inaction. A more aggressive but nonetheless justifiable deployment of the PP would be to use it as part of the rationale for not quantifying the probability and expected costs of catastrophic scenarios. This refusal to quantify could be scientifically justified given how little we know about the real probability distribution of catastrophic scenarios.24 It would also counteract the tendency to overweigh the certain costs of prevention and mitigation, and to excessively discount or ignore the future costs from regulatory inaction. Why would leaving open-ended (and hence ambiguous) the probability of catastrophic climate change scenarios be likely to result in a relatively heavier weighing of the uncertain costs than would probably occur if some sort of numerical probability distribution were assigned to catastrophic scenarios? From a pure rational choice perspective, perhaps it should not occur. The psychological literature nevertheless suggests that while people are risk-seeking in the avoidance of certain losses as against the avoidance of possible losses when there is numerical probability or probability distribution for the possible losses, people are risk-seeking in the avoidance of truly ambiguous possible losses —that is, losses that are so uncertain that no numerical estimate of the probability or probability distribution of their occurrence is available. Although there is disagreement regarding the definition of "ambiguity" and "ambiguity aversion," the basic idea is that ambiguity is "an intermediate state between ignorance (i.e., complete lack of knowledge) and risk (in which a probability distribution is specified)",25 and that people are more averse to an ambiguous bet than to a quantified risk of loss. The depth and robustness of the phenomenon of ambiguity aversion is, to be sure, a matter of debate,26 as is the robustness of the tendency for risk-seeking in the avoidance of certain losses. But if people are "irrationally" risk-seeking in avoiding both certain losses and ambiguous losses, then a decision framed as a choice between the avoidance of a certain loss on the one hand and the avoidance of an ambiguous loss on the other may be one where irrational biases cancel out where there is no departure from what rational choice theory would dictate.27 In other words, where the choices is between the certain losses entailed in prevention and mitigation efforts and the ambiguous losses associated with catastrophic scenarios, heuristic biases may, on net, not distort the decision-making.

Warming causes extinction. Flournoy 12
Don Flournoy 12, Citing Feng Hsu, PhD NASA Scientist @ the Goddard Space Flight Center and Don is a PhD and MA from UT, former Dean of the University College @ Ohio University, former Associate Dean at SUNY and Case Institute of Technology, Former Manager for University/Industry Experiments for the NASA ACTS Satellite, currently Professor of Telecommunications @ Scripps College of Communications, Ohio University, “Solar Power Satellites,” January 2012, Springer Briefs in Space Development, p. 10-11
In the Online Journal of Space Communication , Dr. Feng Hsu, a  NASA scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center, a research center in the forefront of science of space and Earth, writes, “The evidence of global warming is alarming,” noting the potential for a catastrophic planetary climate change is real and troubling (Hsu 2010 ) . Hsu and his NASA colleagues were engaged in monitoring and analyzing climate changes on a global scale, through which they received first-hand scientific information and data relating to global warming issues, including the dynamics of polar ice cap melting. After discussing this research with colleagues who were world experts on the subject, he wrote: I now have no doubt global temperatures are rising, and that global warming is a serious problem confronting all of humanity. No matter whether these trends are due to human interference or to the cosmic cycling of our solar system, there are two basic facts that are crystal clear: (a) there is overwhelming scientific evidence showing positive correlations between the level of CO2 concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere with respect to the historical fluctuations of global temperature changes; and (b) the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientific community is in agreement about the risks of a potential catastrophic global climate change. That is, if we humans continue to ignore this problem and do nothing, if we continue dumping huge quantities of greenhouse gases into Earth’s biosphere, humanity will be at dire risk (Hsu 2010 ) . As a technology risk assessment expert, Hsu says he can show with some confidence that the planet will face more risk doing nothing to curb its fossil-based energy addictions than it will in making a fundamental shift in its energy supply. “This,” he writes, “is because the risks of a catastrophic anthropogenic climate change can be potentially the extinction of human species, a risk that is simply too high for us to take any chances” (Hsu 2010 ).

Contention 3 is Solvency

The PP is the best middle ground between industry and regulation. Sachs 11
Noah Sachs (Associate Professor, University of Richmond School of Law and Director, Robert R. Merhige, Jr. Center for Environmental Studies). “Rescuing the Strong Precautionary Principle from its Critics.” University of Illinois Law Review. August 1st, 2011.
Critics are overlooking that the Principle can provide a workable accommodation between the needs of industry and the need to ensure harm prevention and adherence to ecological limits. Specifically, putting government in a risk gatekeeping role serves several important purposes, including: • Ensuring that the applicant is competent to engage in the activity and has the required expertise and resources; • Regulating the location of potentially risky activities and ensuring that they occur in places where risks to the public are minimized; • Ensuring that activities presenting serious threats to public health or the environment can be prohibited (or have safety precautions placed on them) before harm occurs; • Ensuring, through establishing a uniform review process for every applicant, that the cumulative amount of a risky activity does not exceed limits that would be damaging to the environment or human health; and • Minimizing risks while further research is conducted and making that research the responsibility of firms that will benefit the most from the activity. I am not trying to defend every permitting and licensing scheme, of course. Government permitting programs can be burdensome and prone to political favoritism and rent-seeking behavior. They are often complex. If inadequately funded and staffed, a governmental review may be no more than a fig leaf of risk management (witness the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and the lax oversight of the Minerals Management Service). But the long-standing practice in U.S. law of establishing government agencies as ex ante gatekeepers for risk does suggest that the Strong Precautionary Principle cannot be so easily dismissed. It is not as alien to U.S. law and values as the critics would have us believe, and it hardly seems “paralyzing” in the many contexts in which it has been applied.

General indicts to the PP are irrelevant
Dana 9
David Dana (Northwestern University School of Law). “The Contextual Rationality of the Precautionary Principle.” Faculty Working Paper. 2009.
Is the precautionary principle (PP) incoherent and therefore irrational to use as a guide or tool in policymaking? A number of thoughtful scholars have argued as much, and their arguments, on their own terms, make a good deal of sense. These scholars, however, are arguing about the PP in the abstract, asking whether it coheres as a matter of abstract logic, and it may not – indeed it probably does not. But the PP does make sense in particular, and very important, contexts. Rather than asking whether the PP is rational in general, we should be asking whether or not there are contexts in which it is rational to use the PP as a policy tool. According to one much-cited formulation, the PP means that "when an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically."1 Different versions of the PP build on the idea of "precautionary measures,” and what this actually means or encompasses. In its strong forms, the PP prescribes that an activity or product posing a risk to human health or the environment should be flatly prohibited until it is scientifically proven that the activity or product, in fact, will not harm human health or the environment. In its weak forms, the PP can take 1 “Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle” (1998), online: www.gdrc.org/u-gov/precaution- 3.html. 2 the form of a mere cautious attitude, democratic inclusion, and/or additional efforts at fact-finding, but no particular regulatory prohibitions or restrictions. In academic discourse, the critics of PP tend to emphasize its strong forms, apparently because these forms of PP lead to hard-to-defend results in certain cases. Conversely, academic defenders of PP tend to emphasize its weaker forms, apparently because these forms of PP can be squared with almost any decision and never lead to hard-to-defend results.2 This article defines the PP primarily based on what it is not: it is not quantitative cost-benefit or cost-cost analysis of the sort we associate with the Office of Management and Budget in the United States and U.S. policymaking and policy discourse generally.3 In this definition, the PP is a form of analysis in which the costs of a possible environmental or health risk are not quantified, or if they are, any quantification is likely to be inadequate to capture the full extent of the costs of not taking regulatory measures to mitigate or avoid the risk. So defined, the PP is a more "rational" approach compared to cost-benefit or cost-cost because, in certain contexts, the costs associated with an environmental or health risk will tend to be relatively under-weighed without the application of the PP to account for non-quantifiable risk. After a brief discussion of the rationality and utility of the PP in Part II, this article addresses two important contexts in which it is rational to apply the PP. Part III 2 For a thoughtful overview and treatment of the PP, see Douglass A. Kysar, “It Might Have Been: Risk, Precaution and Opportunity Costs” (2006) 22 J. Land Use and Envtl. L. 1. For a discussion of the definitional issues surrounding the PP, see David A. Dana, “A Behavioral Economic Defense of the Precautionary Principle” (2003) 97 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1315. . 3 For a good comparative discussion of the PP and CBA, see generally Gregory N. Mandel and James Thuo Gathii, “Cost-Benefit Analysis Versus the Precautionary Principle: Beyond Cass R. Sustein’s Law of Fear” (2006) 2006 U. Ill. L. Rev. 1037. 3 examines climate change, especially as it would affect developed northern hemisphere countries, and Part IV discusses emerging nanotechnology, as it is used in a wide array of consumer products. These contexts are very different, and so too is the contextual justification for the PP. In the context of climate change, the heuristic bias in favour of avoiding certain losses may lead to an under-weighing of catastrophic scenarios of climate change, at least in the context of U.S. policymaking. Part III of this article explores how prospect theory (also called loss aversion), ambiguity aversion, cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and the PPT may interact in this context. Part IV discusses the case of emerging technologies, in which the products are developed and marketed by for-profit entities that have strong monetary incentives to explore and document the benefits of the products and much weaker incentives to explore and document any possible adverse environmental or health effects associated with the products. In the CBA framework, regulators tend to weigh known benefits against known costs or at least known risks. So framed, this weighing may pay too little attention to unknown costs and unknown risks that have intentionally not been explored by market actors. In both the cases of climate change and emerging technologies, application of the PP can correct what would otherwise be a tendency to under-weigh the costs of not taking action to prevent or mitigate possible environmental and health risks. The PP can justify directing less attention to “bottom line” quantitative estimates of the costs of unmitigated climate change and more attention to avoiding terrible but highly uncertain 4 climate change scenarios.4 With nanotechnology, the PP can function as a means of focusing less attention on whether or not nanotechnology is harmful or safe given current knowledge and more attention to developing ways to produce more and better knowledge about the risks posed by nanotechnology. The debate over the PP versus CBA has often been too abstract and lacking in context. A more productive approach would be to instead ask when – in what contexts — does it make sense to apply the PP and when does it not? This article is an initial contribution to that re-framed debate. 

The PP is key to sustainability. Grant and Quiggin 13
Simon Grant and John Quiggin (University of Queensland, School of Economics). “Bounded awareness, heuristics, and the Precautionary Principle.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. July 17th, 2013.
6. Concluding comments Informally stated, the Precautionary Principle has strong intuitive appeal, particularly in the context of environmental regulation. In dealing with complex, fragile and poorly understood natural systems, it seems to make sense ‘to err on the side of caution.’ However, this way of putting things points out the difficulties in formalizing the Precautionary Principle. ‘To err’ means to commit an error, and it is obviously difficult to include a prescription for error in a formal theory of decision under uncertainty. Yet decisions are prone to errors arising from an incomplete understanding of the problem at hand, and of the likelihood that some contingencies will not be taken into account. It seems desirable to take account of this reality in formulating a procedure for making decisions. In this paper, we have addressed the question in relation to the standard Bayesian model of decision theory, developed in the framework of an extensive-form game. We have argued that the Precautionary Principle is best understood, not as a modification of Bayesian decision theory, but rather as a heuristic constraint on the application of that theory; that is, as a response to the recognition that the outcomes of decisions may be affected by unforeseen contingencies. Heuristic constraints such as the Precautionary Principle must be satisfied before it is appropriate to apply the tools of Bayesian decision theory. The Precautionary Principle is most commonly applied in relation to interactive decisions, involving judgments as to whether or not to proceed with projects or innovations that may pose unforeseen risks. In this context, the Precautionary Principle may be regarded as a procedural rule that places the burden of proof on proponents of activities subject to poorly-understood risks. Under the Precautionary Principle, proponents must convince policy makers not only that the expected benefits exceed the expected costs but also that the project will not be subject to any significant unanticipated adverse outcomes.

Next is theory pre-empts.

1. Debating about the PP is key to topic education.
   Schettler and Raffensperger 4
   Ted Schettler (SEHN's Science Director, received his MD from Case-Western Reserve University and a masters degree in public health from the Harvard School of Public Health. He practiced medicine for many years in New England.Ted has worked extensively with community groups and non-governmental organizations throughout the US and internationally, addressing many aspects of human health and the environment. He has served on advisory committees of the US EPA and National Academy of Sciences.) and Carolyn Raffensperger (executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network. In 1982 she left a career as an archaeologist in the desert Southwest to join the environmental movement. She first worked for the Sierra Club where she addressed an array of environmental issues, including forest management, river protection, pesticide pollutants, and disposal of radioactive waste. She began working for SEHN in December 1994. As an environmental lawyer she specializes in the fundamental changes in law and policy necessary for the protection and restoration of public health and the environment). “Why is a precautionary approach needed?” The precautionary principle: protecting public health, the environment and the future of our children. WHO. 2004. http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/91173/E83079.pdf
   Proof is a value-laden concept that integrates statistics, empirical observation, inference, research design and research agendas into a political and social context. This section discusses the uses and misuses of some of the criteria commonly used to establish proof. Strict criteria may be useful for establishing “facts”, but by the time a fact or causal relationship has been established by rigorous standards of proof, considerable avoidable harm may already have occurred. The effects of lead exposure on children’s brain development or asbestos on lung cancer risk are examples. In each case, people were damaged over many decades, long after substantial evidence of serious health effects was established, while lead and asbestos advocates contested epidemiological “proof” of causation. Guided by the precautionary principle, people are as concerned with the weight of the available evidence as they are with establishing facts by rigorous standards of proof. The weight of the evidence can guide preventive action, whereas waiting for proof may allow damage to occur. By convention, a considerable amount of consistent evidence is necessary to establish factual “proof” of a cause-and-effect relationship. Traditionally, in a study of the relationship between two variables, a correlation is said to be statistically significant only if the results show the two to be linked, 5. Why is a precautionary approach needed? 71 independent of other factors, with greater than 95 likelihood that the positive results of the study did not occur by chance. But correlation does not establish causation. In epidemiology, a series of additional criteria, for example, those of Hill (1965), are usually added before causation can be claimed. Hill criteria include not only establishment of a statistically significant correlation between two variables but also require that the causal variable precede the effect, a dose–response relationship, elimination of sources of bias and confounding, coherence with other studies and understanding of a plausible biological mechanism. Tobacco smoking, for example, was known to be associated with lung cancer for more than 50 years before a plausible biological mechanism was finally described. At that point, denying that tobacco “causes” cancer became impossible. People’s adherence to conventions or choices among criteria expresses their willingness to make type I or type II errors. A type I error is the mistake of concluding that an association or phenomenon exists when, in truth, it does not. Conversely, a type II error is the mistake of failing to recognize an association or phenomenon when it does exist. Each kind of error has consequences. Type II errors may, for example, lead people to allow a harmful activity to go forward and are the inevitable result of a consistent bias towards avoiding type I errors. Type I errors will result in invalid concerns about a product or activity and may lead to unnecessary restrictions. Establishing type I and type II error rates is a choice that reflects certain biases and is largely done by convention, often without considering the consequences. For example, by convention, interpretations of scientific data generally favour type II over type I errors. People generally require strong evidence that something is scientifically “true” before being willing to say so. An historical basis for error bias A general theme that has gained currency in many countries is that people are autonomous individuals who are free to live as they wish and do as they want, provided that they do not cause harm to others. This concept has set up a tension between the individual and society at large in terms of establishing the limits of tolerance and defining harm. In On Liberty, first published in 1859, John Stuart Mill (1978 (1859)) explored the nature and limits of power that can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual. He concluded that the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his or her will, is to prevent harm to others. Mill was concerned that, in a democratic society, the majority would set the limits to tolerance – that the majority would interfere with the creative individual’s inclination to invent and develop and to explore new frontiers. He also worried that the majority would go so far as to define “harm”, using inappropriate assertions of “harm” as a blockade to progress. In short, he feared the “tyranny of the majority” and their inclination to favour the status quo. This tension is at the heart of many of today’s policy debates. Not only must harm be defined but people also have to decide how to act or how to legitimately exercise power when the probability of harm (risk) is uncertain. Though decisions must be based on what is known at the time, if “proof” of harm is required before limiting an activity or choosing an alternative, as Mill would have, there is a risk of failing to prevent harm. Seeing how Mill’s fears are reflected in today’s policies in many countries throughout the world is easy. In general, the burden of proof of harm falls on the general public or individuals who assert that another party has injured them. High standards of “proof” add to this burden, even when the weight of the evidence suggests that harm has occurred or is likely. In other words, a bias towards type II errors – established by convention in interpreting scientific data – has also crept into social, political and judicial policy. Asking whether such a bias is appropriate for preventing harm or for choosing among optional human activities is fully legitimate. Further, it may be legitimately ask how such a bias is likely to influence the ways that human activities alter complex ecological systems that define the world to be left to future generations – a consideration at the core of sustainability. 

Topic education has an out of round impact. EP is undervalued now.
Babb 14
Stephen Babb (coaches for Harvard Westlake). “What Happened to Environmentalism Impacts?” Victory Briefs. January 17th, 2014. http://victorybriefs.com/vbd/2014/1/what-happened-to-environmentalism-impacts
We’re actually not all that committed to environmentalism Though it’s fundamentally beyond the scope of this small contribution, there’s probably something to be said about our underlying attitudes toward the environment. Whether we admit it or not, we are children of a very developed world. We enjoy the products of environmentally-tainted production on a daily basis. Our economy and freedom of movement are premised on a series of planet-dirtying practices. On some level, that has to affect our willingness to tell the story of environmentalism, to re-issue the edicts that publicly temper our very real commitments to development. We’re all aware of what’s happening to the environment, but we’re only sometimes willing to do very much about it. The difference between the Right and Left on this point is far more a function of ideology than output. Despite the stark disagreements between the two sides, there remains a nearly universal unwillingness to seriously alter our daily routines on behalf of the environment. What little we do is often done for us by corporations steered by consumer choice. Indeed, the most effort we typically exert on behalf of the environment is choosing one brand over another. So maybe it shouldn’t be all that surprising that debaters are choosing strategy over the environment. The topic has given our community a ready-made soapbox for the reaffirmation of the environmentalist creed.  

2. Err aff on theory because of time skew and neg side bias. Negs won 12 more rounds at VBT according to Tabroom, and Fantasy Debate confirms 7 neg side bias. 

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3. Aff should defend a principle, not a particular EP policy. This is the most accurate interp of the topic.
Nebel 14
Jake Nebel (TOC semifinalist in 2009, philosophy student at Oxford, winner of the Marshall Scholarship from Princeton University). “Topicality, Implementation, and What We Ought To Prioritize.” January 28th, 2014. http://victorybriefs.com/vbd/2014/1/topicality-implementation-and-what-we-ought-to-prioritize
I hear that many affirmatives on this topic defend the implementation of a particular policy or set of policies in developing countries. The classic framing of this issue has been in terms of an Aims vs. Implementation dichotomy, which has carried over from the Jan/Feb 2013 topic about valuing rehabilitation above retribution. In this article, I’ll explain why I think that is a false dichotomy, and how you can strategically get past this framing of the issue. The most important word in the resolution, for the purposes of this disagreement, is ‘prioritize.’ This is because a topical affirmative advocacy has to do the thing that the resolution says ought to be done. In this case, that’s prioritization. Now, if you just stop there, you might have the following thought: if a topical advocacy just needs to prioritize environmental protection (EP) over resource extraction (RE), then implementing some particular policy that prioritizes EP over RE is, ceteris paribus, topical. But that’s not a good inference. The reason is that what has to do the prioritizing in order to be topical is the agent. Your advocacy must be that the agent prioritize EP over RE, whatever that means. In this case, that agent is ‘developing countries.’ Just because an agent implements some policy or set of policies that prioritize EP over RE does not mean that the agent itself prioritizes EP over RE. This may seem like a picky distinction, but consider some examples. Suppose I chose to spend time with my friends tonight, rather than work on a paper. This choice might prioritize friendship over work. But this choice does not make it the case that I prioritize friendship over work. I might actually be the kind of person who prioritizes work over friendship, so that I almost always choose to write a paper when I could instead hang out with friends, but this night is the rare opportunity when I hang out with my friends. So, just because some choice or action prioritizes one thing over another does not entail that the agent prioritizes one thing over another. If we assume that an advocacy is topical only if it makes it the case that the agent does what the resolution says it ought to do, then this means that implementing a particular policy that prioritizes EP over RE is not enough to be topical. (That is, absent evidence about this policy having the effect of changing developing countries’ priorities as a whole. But then this advocacy might only be effects-topical.) People might respond with a definition of EP or RE in terms of policies. This definition might show that the objects to be prioritized are sets of policies, or some common feature of policies, rather than an abstract aim. But the relevant question is not Aims vs. Implementation: that framing of the topic only persists because of Jan/Feb 2013, on which people defined 'rehabilitation' and 'retribution' as either an aim or a kind of policy. But Aims vs. Implementation is not the correct contrast. The correct contrasts are Aims vs. Policies, and Prioritization vs. Implementation. The point is that prioritizing some kind of policy is not the same as implementing some policy from that set. Aims vs. Policies is a matter of the direct object, whereas Prioritization vs. Implementation is a matter of the verb. We can agree that EP and RE are sets or kinds of policies, but think that the resolution is about which we ought to prioritize, not which we ought to implement. However, this does not mean that the anti-policy side completely wins. People who wish to defend an anti-policy interpretation often make their interpretations too strong, by suggesting that no questions of implementation are relevant. That seems to me false. To see why, consider a variation on my earlier example about hanging out with my friends or writing a paper. Suppose I used to prioritize work over friendship, but I now prioritize friendship over work. It seems that I am now more likely to spend time with my friends, when this trades off with writing a paper, than I used to be. This is because an agent’s priorities shape her decisions. They don’t guarantee that an agent will always choose any particular action that better reflects those priorities. But they will lead to different patterns of actions on the whole. If this is right, then the most accurate Aims-based interpretation of the topic allows that the affirmative advocacy leads to the implementation of policies that prioritize EP over RE as an effect, although the affirmative can’t advocate any particular policy. Implementation of particular policies is an effect, which can be used to garner advantages or disadvantages, but cannot be the affirmative advocacy. And any particular effect of that kind can only be known with some uncertain probability; it cannot be assumed to occur as a matter of fiat. 

4. Gutcheck against dumb theory. Competing interps leads to a race to the bottom where every round comes down to theory, killing substantive education. Intervention is inevitable in blippy theory debates.

5. Wiki solves predictability. It’s the TOC. I’ve been reading PP for five months, so you should have cards by now.

6. Predictable limits. Specific policies blow the lid off the topic. There are infinite solvency mechanisms for EP and this topic is already very broad. General principle means negs get stock ground like the fossil fuels DA regardless of the aff. 

Predictable limits are key to fairness since negs can’t do in-depth prep against affs if they have to prep 100 case negs.

Limits are an independent voter. Harris 13
Scott Harris (Director of Debate at U Kansas, 2006 National Debate Coach of the Year, Vice President of the American Forensic Association, 2nd speaker at the NDT in 1981). “This ballot.” 5 April 2013. CEDA Forums. http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=4762.0;attach=1655
I understand that there has been some criticism of Northwestern’s strategy in this debate round.  This criticism is premised on the idea that they ran framework instead of engaging Emporia’s argument about home and the Wiz.  I think this criticism is unfair.  Northwestern’s framework argument did engage Emporia’s argument.  Emporia said that you should vote for the team that performatively and methodologically made debate a home.  Northwestern’s argument directly clashed with that contention.  My problem in this debate was with aspects of the execution of the argument rather than with the strategy itself.  It has always made me angry in debates when people have treated topicality as if it were a less important argument than other arguments in debate. Topicality is a real argument.  It is a researched strategy.  It is an argument that challenges many affirmatives.  The fact that other arguments could be run in a debate or are run in a debate does not make topicality somehow a less important argument.  In reality, for many of you that go on to law school you will spend much of your life running topicality arguments because you will find that words in the law matter.  The rest of us will experience the ways that word choices matter in contracts, in leases, in writing laws and in many aspects of our lives.  Kansas ran an affirmative a few years ago about how the location of a comma in a law led a couple of districts to misinterpret the law into allowing individuals to be incarcerated in jail for two days without having any formal charges filed against them.  For those individuals the location of the comma in the law had major consequences.  Debates about words are not insignificant.  Debates about what kinds of arguments we should or should not be making in debates are not insignificant either.  The limits debate is an argument that has real pragmatic consequences.  I found myself earlier this year judging Harvard’s eco-pedagogy aff and thought to myself—I could stay up tonight and put a strategy together on eco-pedagogy, but then I thought to myself—why should I have to?  Yes, I could put together a strategy against any random argument somebody makes employing an energy metaphor but the reality is there are only so many nights to stay up all night researching.  I would like to actually spend time playing catch with my children occasionally or maybe even read a book or go to a movie or spend some time with my wife.  A world where there are an infinite number of affirmatives is a world where the demand to have a specific strategy and not run framework is a world that says this community doesn’t care whether its participants have a life or do well in school or spend time with their families.  I know there is a new call abounding for interpreting this NDT as a mandate for broader more diverse topics.  The reality is that will create more work to prepare for the teams that choose to debate the topic but will have little to no effect on the teams that refuse to debate the topic.  Broader topics that do not require positive government action or are bidirectional will not make teams that won’t debate the topic choose to debate the topic.  I think that is a con job.  I am not opposed to broader topics necessarily.  I tend to like the way high school topics are written more than the way college topics are written.  I just think people who take the meaning of the outcome of this NDT as proof that we need to make it so people get to talk about anything they want to talk about without having to debate against topicality or framework arguments are interested in constructing a world that might make debate an unending nightmare and not a very good home in which to live.  Limits, to me, are a real impact because I feel their impact in my everyday existence.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 2 | Opponent: Cypress Woods NS Natasha Stewart | Judge: Steven Adler
WTO rules interfere with human rights protections. Global Exchange 11
Global Exchange (international human rights organization dedicated to promoting social, economic and environmental justice around the world). “Top Reasons to Oppose the WTO.” 2011. http://www.globalexchange.org/resources/wto/oppose
3. The WTO Tramples Labor and Human Rights WTO rules put the “rights” of corporations to profit over human and labor rights. The WTO encourages a ‘race to the bottom’ in wages by pitting workers against each other rather than promoting internationally recognized labor standards. The WTO has ruled that it is illegal for a government to ban a product based on the way it is produced, such as with child labor. It has also ruled that governments cannot take into account “non commercial values” such as human rights, or the behavior of companies that do business with vicious dictatorships such as Burma when making purchasing decisions. 

Human rights norms solve global WMD conflict.
Burke-White 4
William W. Burke-White (Lecturer in Public and International Affairs and Senior Special Assistant to the Dean at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University and Ph.D. at Cambridge). “Human Rights and National Security: The Strategic Correlation.” The Harvard Human Rights Journal, Spring, 17 Harv. Hum. Rts. J. 249, Lexis. 2004.
This Article presents a strategic--as opposed to ideological or normative--argument that the promotion of human rights should be given a more prominent place in U.S. foreign policy. It does so by suggesting a correlation between the domestic human rights practices of states and their propensity to engage in aggressive international conduct. Among the chief threats to U.S. national security are acts of aggression by other states. Aggressive acts of war may directly endanger the United States, as did the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, or they may require U.S. military action overseas, as in Kuwait fifty years later. Evidence from the post-Cold War period  *250  indicates that states that systematically abuse their own citizens' human rights are also those most likely to engage in aggression. To the degree that improvements in various states' human rights records decrease the likelihood of aggressive war, a foreign policy informed by human rights can significantly enhance U.S. and global security. Since 1990, a state's domestic human rights policy appears to be a telling indicator of that state's propensity to engage in international aggression. A central element of U.S. foreign policy has long been the preservation of peace and the prevention of such acts of aggression. 2 If the correlation discussed herein is accurate, it provides U.S. policymakers with a powerful new tool to enhance national security through the promotion of human rights. A strategic linkage between national security and human rights would result in a number of important policy modifications. First, it changes the prioritization of those countries U.S. policymakers have identified as presenting the greatest concern. Second, it alters some of the policy prescriptions for such states. Third, it offers states a means of signaling benign international intent through the improvement of their domestic human rights records. Fourth, it provides a way for a current government to prevent future governments from aggressive international behavior through the institutionalization of human rights protections. Fifth, it addresses the particular threat of human rights abusing states obtaining weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Finally, it offers a mechanism for U.S.-U.N. cooperation on human rights issues.

Tournament: Bronx | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Byram Hills Amos Jeng | Judge: JScog, JLiu, Siggy
I typically only run this as a response to NC theory.

A. Debaters must disclose on the NDCA Wiki.

Disclosure is key to small school inclusion.

Bietz 10
Bietz, Mike (former President of the National Debate Coaches Association; debate coach at Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles.) “The Case for Public Case Disclosure.” May 2010.

Since disclosure happens anyway, it ought to be open to all competitors regardless of the number of teammates, coaches or friends one has at any given tournament. The current “system” is exclusionary and often makes tournaments hurtful situations. It benefits large teams who either 1) bring many kids to tournaments or 2) have many judges in the judging pool, both of which go hand-in-hand. Finally, open disclosure provides the academic check and peer-review of research that is common in all of academia.
The Case for Disclosure

1. Friendlier Tournament Atmosphere.

One of the most frustrating things for me to watch is one debater being prepped out by a group of coaches or other debaters because they happened to know someone or are friendly with someone who either previously watched, judged or debated against them, while the other debater just sits there and waits, not having any idea what their opponent is arguing. I don’t find the prep-out to be intrinsically frustrating. In fact, I have no qualms with coaches who help their debaters prepare for rounds. I even have less of a problem with teammates who help each other. My concern is for the debater who isn’t as connected, or doesn’t have as many teammates.

We haven’t done our job to make the activity kid-friendly when we maintain a system that isn’t friendly and collegial and instead inherently favors those who are connected.

2. Democratization of Power

The common response I hear from those who are against open disclosure is that they think it will cause “more work” at tournaments because everyone will know what is being run, so there will be pressure to prep. This concern, ironically, comes from coaches who have large teams and, when it comes time to want to prep (say before a big outround), at their disposal is a large number of flows, friends who have judged or seen their opponents or any number of ways to find out what is being run.

Whether it is always used or not, the ability to exercise power at will is something that is reserved for those who are politically connected, have a large team or have a number of judges in the pool. An open case-list democratizes this power so that everyone has the ability to choose when she feels like prepping and when she doesn’t.

3. Academic Integrity

The idea of peer review is something that is not only accepted but is also expected in academia.

Debate is a high-stakes activity. For many of our students, it is one of (if not the) primary extra-curricular activity they will do in high school. For some of our students, the monetary and time costs associated are burdensome. Regardless of each individual’s commitment to the activity, academic integrity is not something we should take lightly.

If a student were to come to you with a case that uses evidence entirely from unnamed personal blog that cites no sources or provides no qualification, would you accept it as a “good case?” Probably not. However, we do not treat what is said or presented in rounds with the same rigor that we would expect from the evidence we want our students to use in their cases.

The ability for everyone to see what everyone else is quoting or using as evidence is important not only because it allows us to check to make sure that everything is done in an ethical and fair way, but also because it is academically proper to do so. We send the wrong message when we take this academic portion out of the competitive activity.

The reason why the high-stakes element of my argument is important is because we need to have a side-constraint placed on the competitiveness of debate. We need to encourage integrity. Peer-review is important to maintaining this integrity.

Concerns

I am genuinely eager to hear peoples’ concerns about open disclosure. A lot of people have the same objections, and I hope to respond to some of those. However, if you have concerns that are not raised here, I really hope you contact me so we can continue the discussion.

1. It harms the “little guy” because big teams will prep out everything.
   As I outlined above, big teams already get many, many more flows than the smaller teams just because they have more debaters, more judges and more coaches. Open disclosure gives everyone access to the same information. Additionally, it helps the “little guy” even more because for many of these debaters, the option of going to a lot of tournaments isn’t available. Open case disclosure gives lets them the ability to see what other teams are running prior to showing up to the tournament. Thus, there is an added benefit of equalizing not only information at a tournament, but also equalizing (to some degree) the playing-field for people who do not have the resources to travel as much.

Tournament: Mardi Gras | Round: 1 | Opponent: Needham AR Alec Robins | Judge: Parent
I affirm that placing political conditions on humanitarian aid to foreign countries is unjust.

Political conditions are political demands made against belligerents in a humanitarian crisis.
The Humanitarian Policy Group 2k explains the unique nature of political conditions
Humanitarian Policy Group. “Terms of Engagement: Conditions and Conditionality in Humanitarian Action.” Report of a conference organised by the Overseas Development Institute and the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Geneva, 3-4 May, 2000. http://www.odi.org.uk/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/303.pdf
A number of speakers attempted to introduce greater clarity to an often unclear subject. A distinction was made between the conditions that need to exist in order for humanitarian work to be principled and effective, and conditionality imposed to bring these conditions about. One speaker made a distinction between implicit humanitarian conditionality, in other words humanitarians only working where conditions were acceptable, and explicit political conditionality, i.e. donors imposing political demands on belligerents (see Section 2). Another speaker identified ‘ethical conditionality’, or withdrawing when the ‘net impact’ of aid was harmful, ‘legal conditionality’, or conditionality with the objective of enforcing compliance with international law, and ‘political conditionality’, which was to do with a donor’s foreign policy goals (see Section 7).

I value justice, defined as giving each their due, which also requires us to make ethical judgments.

Justice must be impartial. When giving each their due, one’s social status involving things like class, race, or the family one comes from are irrelevant to whether one deserves respect.

Since justice must be impartial, and thus universally applicable, we have an obligation to maximize satisfaction of preferences.
Professor of Philosophy Peter Singer 93
Peter Singer, “Practical Ethics,” Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 13-14
The universal aspect of ethics, I suggest, does provide a persuasive, although not conclusive, reason for taking a broadly utilitarian position. My reason for suggesting this is as follows. In accepting that ethical judgments must be made from a universal point of view, I am accepting that my own interests cannot, simply because they are my interests, count more than the interests of anyone else. Thus my very natural concern that my own interests be looked after must, when I think ethically, be extended to the interests of others. Now, imagine that I am trying to decide between two possible courses of action – perhaps whether to eat all the fruits I have collected myself, or to share them with others. Imagine, too, that I am deciding in a complete ethical vacuum, that I know nothing of any ethical considerations – I am, we might say, in a pre-ethical stage of thinking. How would I make up my mind? One thing that would be still relevant would be how the possible courses of action will affect my interests. Indeed, if we define ‘interests’ broadly enough, so that we count anything people desire as in their interests (unless it is incompatible with another desire or desires), then it would seem that at this pre-ethical stage, only one’s own interests can be relevant to the decision. Suppose I then begin to think ethically, to the extent of recognizing that my own interests cannot count for more, simply because they are my own, than the interests of others. In place of my own interests, I now have to take into account the interests of all those affected by my decision. This requires me to weigh up all these interests and adopt the course of action most likely to maximize the interests of those affected.

Thus my value criterion is maximizing preference satisfaction.

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My first contention is that impartially considering everyone’s preferences entails rejecting political conditionality.

The Humanitarian Policy Group 2k
Humanitarian Policy Group. “Terms of Engagement: Conditions and Conditionality in Humanitarian Action.” Report of a conference organised by the Overseas Development Institute and the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Geneva, 3-4 May, 2000. http://www.odi.org.uk/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/303.pdf
In terms of what might serve to define humanitarians, or eligibility for membership of the club, principles and codes were seen as the most useful (see Section 3). The core principles of humanity, impartiality, independence and neutrality were put forward, as was the Red Cross/NGO Code of Conduct. While some felt that the meaning of these principles were still not widely agreed on, there seemed to be consensus at least around the principle of impartiality, in that need alone determined response. Some speakers also argued that in reality the common ground was much greater than might appear during such ‘theological’ disputes, and that most humanitarians understood this philosophy ‘in their water’ if not in their head. But the UN in particular it was noted, will inevitably suffer from tensions between the conduct of its peacemaking and humanitarian mandates as the principles guiding these roles will legitimately conflict. That common principles appear to permit a wide variety of approaches to humanitarianism was evident from the different approaches present; from a practical, mortality-reduction focus to humanitarian action as political protest. It was also pointed out that principles change in reaction to new circumstances. The Code of Conduct for instance now reads like a dated document as it does not mention protection for instance, and it was suggested it should be revised and updated. This raised the issue of compliance to codes and principles. It was argued that even for major NGOs compliance was uncertain and a number of speakers felt that increased effort should be put into improving compliance mechanisms. A number of speakers remarked on the tensions between the somewhat abstract, timeless nature of some principles such as ‘impartiality’ and the need to reinterpret these to suit different contexts. But also that it is precisely in these grey areas that pragmatism can take over from principle. It was also pointed out that principles exist at different levels. Some are core, such as impartiality, others are more like tools that are in effect a form of abstracted and accumulated experience. It was also pointed out that principles are not just abstract, but have a sound practical value in the field, for instance in negotiating access. 3.2 Conditionality One particular issue of principle was the use of conditionality by humanitarians or donors. The use of conditionality is one possible response to belligerents ignoring their obligations under IHL. It is a response felt by many to become more likely as humanitarian and political boundaries are blurred, especially in conflicts where there is little political engagement and aid forms the primary vehicle for external engagement. A number of speakers attempted to introduce greater clarity to an often unclear subject. A distinction was made between the conditions that need to exist in order for humanitarian work to be principled and effective, and conditionality imposed to bring these conditions about. One speaker made a distinction between implicit humanitarian conditionality, in other words humanitarians only working where conditions were acceptable, and explicit political conditionality, i.e. donors imposing political demands on belligerents (see Section 2). Another speaker identified ‘ethical conditionally’, or withdrawing when the ‘net impact’ of aid was harmful, ‘legal conditionality’, or conditionality with the objective of enforcing compliance with international law, and ‘political conditionality’, which was to do with a donor’s foreign policy goals (see Section 7). There was however, consensus that conditionality should not be applied to humanitarian action; that it is both ethically and practically inappropriate. Ethically it runs counter to the very nature of humanitarianism. Practically it is unlikely to have much impact on belligerents anyway, owing to the small role that aid plays in their decision-making. However, there was also consensus that there are grey areas that need careful treatment. For example there is a subtle difference between withdrawing because conditions are no longer right for humanitarian action, and setting demands or conditions on the authorities for re-starting work. The latter can result in, in effect, ‘handing over the keys’ for restarting work to the belligerents. A second grey area is a result of the blurring of humanitarian and political boundaries, where the example of demanding equal access on the basis of gender for instance could be seen as political or humanitarian. There is also an unclear boundary between humanitarian aid and rehabilitation and development, where political conditionality is more acceptable. Whatever the form of conditionality, it was pointed out that those who impose it should be accountable for its consequences. 3.3 Terms of engagement with donors/ member states Donor governments have a dual role in the humanitarian system, being both donors to humanitarian organisations and member states of the UN with particular foreign policy goals. These two roles may not always be in harmony. It was stressed that donors in their role as political actors had the prime responsibility for international political action in dealing with conflict, and that many failures of humanitarian action, such as Burundi and Chechnya, should be seen as failures of political action. The issue was how this role relates to their funding of humanitarian action and so relations with humanitarian actors. In the past few years, this issue has been conditioned by two main concerns; the argument that as humanitarian action has political consequences, donors should try and use humanitarian aid for ‘good’ political goals. And secondly the demand that humanitarian action should be ‘coherent’ with external political intervention to manage a particular crisis. There was however, a surprising degree of consensus at the conference that this approach needed a reappraisal and that perhaps ‘complementarity’ between humanitarian and political intervention should be the goal rather than coherence. It was argued that it was unacceptable for humanitarian action, which is governed by an ethic of impartiality, to be ‘under the wing’ of a peace-making process, where the ethics of getting a deal are much looser and involve bribing, cajoling and a degree of realpolitique inappropriate for humanitarian action (see Section 6). It was also pointed out that in many conflicts the international political will to act has in fact been absent, so there has anyway been little to be coherent with. In these situations, ‘coherence’ meant in reality that aid became not a substitute for policy but the policy itself. Complementarity, as opposed to coherence, might at least expose the different roles of humanitarian and political action and emphasise that political solutions need political problems, not aid solutions masquerading as political solutions. 

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Impartial humanitarian action is necessary for protecting victims of conflict in Syria which has killed tens of thousands.
The Christian Science Monitor 13 provides the testimony of an anonymous humanitarian worker
The author works with an international aid organization in northern Syria. For security purposes, the author and her organization affiliation remain anonymous. “Making US humanitarian aid to Syria a political tool is ineffective – and dangerous.” Christian Science Monitor. June 13th, 2013. http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2013/0613/Making-US-humanitarian-aid-to-Syria-a-political-tool-is-ineffective-and-dangerous
The United Nations now says that nearly 93,000 people have been confirmed killed in the Syrian conflict, but the organization acknowledges that the actual number is likely higher. As conditions in Syria deteriorate into the greatest humanitarian crisis since the Darfur conflict, the aid response has been increasingly put under the microscope. Syrian citizens and opposition leaders have rightly argued that not enough is being done to meet humanitarian needs. And reporting from areas unreached by aid has left the impression of an absent aid effort altogether. Meanwhile major aid agencies – which would normally be highly visible on the ground and vocal in the media – have been uncharacteristically quiet. It is time to set the record straight. Aid workers are, in fact, working extensively across Syria, and have established significant humanitarian aid pipelines into the opposition held territories in the North. I know, because I have worked since last fall as a part of this effort. While security concerns and a country with divided leadership and loyalties have forced us, and virtually all of the groups providing relief in northern Syria, to maintain an extremely low profile, I am speaking out now because the flawed narrative of “absent aid” threatens to hurt the people of Syria and endanger the aid groups working to help them. Here’s why. Prominent policymakers and commentators have argued that in light of perceived aid failures, the United States should use its humanitarian aid toward explicitly political aims. Over the past few months, calls have been growing for routing US humanitarian aid through groups that are themselves party to the conflict. The intent is to use this relief as a political tool to support the main opposition alliance and to win the US political credit with the population at large. Beyond being ineffectual, proposed moves to use aid as a political tool would be dangerous. Humanitarian access to civilians in need relies on adherence to the core principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and operational independence. These are not abstract ideals; they are pragmatic tools central to the credibility and safety of Syrians we serve and humanitarian workers. Politicizing the aid effort would demolish these principles and put the Syrians we work with – not to mention my colleagues and me – at much greater risk. In each Syrian town where my aid agency works, we have invested months building the relationships with local militias, governing councils, and community groups that enable our staff to safely deliver aid. If any party to the conflict sees us as partial to one side or another, those relationships could quickly unravel, and our work would be severely threatened. It is also a myth that humanitarian aid in Syria is ineffective. Humanitarian assistance supported by the US government and other donors has ramped up substantially since last fall and is now making a difference for many hundreds of thousands of Syrians. My organization – since beginning work in Aleppo governorate last summer – has provided critical support to more than 400,000 people, and we are just one of several major aid agencies active in opposition-held areas. But, yes, we are not yet reaching all the people who need our help. The war poses a constant challenge, as the fighting limits access to many areas and frequently interrupts aid delivery. One of the most critical challenges, however, has been the peculiar situation in which the United Nations finds itself. Though active within Assad regime-controlled territories, the UN has been forced to the sidelines in opposition-held areas due to objections by the Syrian government and inaction by the UN Security Council. This has prevented the UN from playing its usual role in large aid efforts, leaving humanitarian agencies such as ours to coordinate those efforts independently. While more aid is needed, it cannot serve as a substitute for a viable political solution to the Syrian crisis. I was reminded of this recently while talking to a group of displaced women living in an elementary school classroom in northeastern Syria. They told me that while they are grateful for the aid, it is not going to stop the bombs from dropping. What they desire is a return to normalcy and a return to their homes. They are perplexed and jaded by the failure of international efforts to resolve the crisis, and putting a US brand on aid deliveries will not make up for that. The biggest step forward would be a resolution to the conflict; but short of that, could more be done to help Syrians? Absolutely, yes. The currently established humanitarian pipeline is limited by security issues, rendering it insufficient to meet the massive needs in the country. It is imperative that the region’s political players provide better, safer access for humanitarian groups. More aid needs to get into Syria and we must be able to move it around the country safely. Allowing the UN to operate at full capacity is vital to reaching more Syrians. The UN’s current push for a resolution from the Security Council to pressure the Assad government into providing humanitarian access across conflict lines is both admirable and essential. Finally, greater effort is needed to improve coordination of relief priorities between traditional Western donors and emerging major donors such as the Gulf States. 

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Political conditions are also undermining protection of human needs in Afghanistan. Mohammed Atmar 1
Mohammed Atmar (Program manager for Norwegian Church Aid Afghanistan Program). “Politicisation of Humanitarian Aid and its Consequences for Afghans.” February 1st, 2001. http://www.odi.org.uk/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/events-documents/3772.pdf
Over years of crisis in Afghanistan, the principle of impartiality of humanitarianism has systematically fallen victim to political considerations of donor states. In other words, 3 political expedience of the donor states has determined the purpose, extent and type of ‘humanitarian response’ rather than human needs alone. During the Cold War period, Afghanistan received the highest per capita aid in its history in a most unprincipled manner. The United States alone provided military and humanitarian aid worth over US$600 million per annum after 1986 (Girardet, et al 1998:118). According to independent studies, donors were prepared to accept up to 40 wastage (Goodhand, et al, 1999); and some others argue that only 20-30 of the humanitarian aid reached its intended beneficiaries and the rest went astray mostly feeding war efforts (Girardet, et al, 1998:119). While human needs were equally dire in the communist-held and resistance controlled areas of the country, the West was prepared to provide aid only to the latter. Humanitarian aid was thus mandated to play a complementary role as part of the wider Cold War politics to ‘make the Russians bleed’ (US official cited in Girardet, et al, 1998:120). With the withdrawal of the Red Army and despite the continued human suffering, the rapid fall in humanitarian budgets made it obvious that it was not the plight of the Afghans that mattered. 12. Currently, conditions for Afghans are typified by a chronic poverty, insecurity, illhealth, population displacement and horrendous human rights violations and deficit. With over four million refugees, Afghanistan still has one of the world’s biggest refugee caseloads and remains one of the most seriously mined countries in the world. It also has some of the worst human development indicators, ranking 170 out of 174 in UNDP’s 1995 Human Development Index. However, despite this, it seems that proportionality, by extension impartiality, of humanitarian response has been subordinated to political calculations of the donor states. An example of this can be seen in refugee related aid expenditures. Concerning the 2.6 million Afghan refugees in Iran and Pakistan, donors’ expenditure per refugee in terms of welfare, repatriation and reintegration was USD 10 in 1997, USD 3 in 1998 and USD 13 in 1999 (Atmar, et al 2000). These figures are dwarfed by expenditure in former Yugoslavia and Kosovo. 13. Between 1992-1999, the United Nations Annual Consolidated Appeals for assistance to Afghanistan received on average only 48 of its needs (Atmar et al 2000). Whilst the appeal for the current drought, which affects the life of half of the population of Afghanistan, three to four millions of them severely, remains abysmally under-funded. The UN Mine Action programme is one of the most successful in the world, yet in 2000 it was cut by half because of donor fatigue to provide funding. Around 300 Afghans lose their lives and limbs each month as a result of mine incidents. 14. In 1998, DFID, then one of the key donors to Afghanistan, asserted in a written answer to a parliamentary question that ‘The humanitarian situation inside Afghanistan— in terms of basic needs — is under reasonable control at the present time’ (cited in Macrae, et al 2000). Questioning the credibility of such a claim was a WHO report in the same year, indicating that maternal mortality rates had more than doubled since 1990 to 170 per 10,000 live births (Wiles et al 1999). In addition, donors have explicitly tied their assistance to progress on Taliban’s policies and practice, issues of terrorism, drugs and peace. In 1999, a meeting of the Afghanistan Support Group of the donor countries in Stockholm concluded that ‘the Taliban's continued harbouring of international terrorists was negatively affecting the provision of assistance' (cited in Macrae, et al 2000). Donors may have legitimate foreign policy concerns, the point is however that the core purpose of humanitarian action is and should be to save lives and when donors try to shape humanitarian assistance to achieve other objectives, this flies in the face of the humanitarian principles and is likely to result in the loss of lives. Blaming abusive authorities for the consequences may be justifiable but it is not a good reason for abdicating humanitarian responsibility at a time when most donor states claim to uphold human rights as key principle of their foreign policy. 

My second contention is that aid conditionality is an ineffective foreign policy tool.

The Humanitarian Policy Group 2k
Humanitarian Policy Group. “Terms of Engagement: Conditions and Conditionality in Humanitarian Action.” Report of a conference organised by the Overseas Development Institute and the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Geneva, 3-4 May, 2000. http://www.odi.org.uk/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/303.pdf
There is mounting evidence that conditionality is simply ineffective as a lever for promoting policy change by the belligerents.15 It assumes a very aidcentric view of conflict and reveals a misunderstanding of conflict dynamics, tending to overestimate the importance of aid to the decisionmaking of belligerents.16 _ In practice it is also very hard to operate. One of the key criteria for success is donor coordination and ‘credibility’ (i.e. that the threat will be carried through) and this is not often a feature of the humanitarian system; there are many pressures on individual donors and agencies to deliver resources. Moreover, the theoretical life-saving/life-sustaining distinction, with conditionality applied to the latter, has proved extremely problematic to implement in practice.17 

My third contention is that political conditions on humanitarian aid undermine political solutions. 

Political conditions have undermined a political solution to the humanitarian crisis in Palestine.
Former UN Special Representative Ross Mountain 11
Ross Mountain (Director General of DARA and Former Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary General in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 2010 he directed the UK's Humanitarian Emergency Response Review (HERR)). “Humanitarian aid for Palestinians shouldn’t be necessary.” The Guardian. September 22nd, 2011. http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/sep/22/humanitarian-aid-palestine-unnecessary-israel
As Friday's expected Palestinian bid for UN membership draws closer, an overlooked issue is the untenable situation of the Palestinian population, who are subjected to collective poverty, misery and desperation, and the role that international humanitarian assistance plays in this. Several years of experience in the Middle East and of closely following the humanitarian crisis in Palestine have convinced me that humanitarian aid would be unnecessary if a political solution were put in place, and it may even be perpetuating this manufactured crisis. Many humanitarian workers we have interviewed in the context of the Humanitarian Response Index in recent years have voiced concerns that international humanitarian assistance is simply serving as a sticking plaster to avert the absolute collapse of living conditions in Palestine as the political crisis deepens. The more than $7.2bn (Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2011) injected between 2000 and 2009 seems to have provided an excuse for the international community to avoid fully committing to establishing a just political resolution.  A political resolution is the only option that can solve this artificial crisis of protection, human rights and human dignity violations. But year after year we have seen how political decisions, or the lack thereof, undo humanitarian efforts. It is tragic that the main players, which include the Quartet (the UN, the US, the EU and Russia), are the most generous humanitarian donors while at the same time failing to achieve the political progress that would make their generosity needless. Meanwhile, things are made worse by restrictions applied by Israel, both for Palestinians and the humanitarian agencies operating there. Palestine is one of the most complex aid environments for humanitarian agencies, which need to overcome the obstacles and limitations imposed by the Israeli authorities. These include the restrictions on the movement of goods and people between zones and the bureaucratic procedures they entail, as well as the no-contact policy with Hamas stipulated by key donors. As a result, Palestine is a challenging and expensive environment to operate in. As one interviewee said, the no-contact policy "undermines the whole humanitarian response: creating parallel networks, wasting money, in addition to not using available services and resources". Another example of the multiple restrictions are the procedures demanded by the Israelis for the delivery of food supplies to Gaza, which cost the World Food Programme and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) $4m per year. In this context, humanitarian actors say donors are simply not doing enough. Many of the humanitarian organisations we met complained of donor passiveness in advocating for access and of their acceptance of additional operational costs – when at the same time they agreed that the Israeli blockade and occupation were the main obstacles to restoring a minimal level of livelihood and human dignity to the Palestinians. If the situation seems bad for aid agencies, consider the plight of the Palestinians, who have to endure the Israeli barrier and numerous closures; the arbitrary opening and closing of checkpoints, as well as the random acceptance of the differentiated passes and permits; settlement expansion; forced evictions; and demolitions across the occupied territories. The humanitarian crisis this causes, along with the constant fear of violence, has led to failing hopes and desperation. At a time when many donor governments are looking to maximise the results and value of their funding, the situation in Palestine shows just how far the response is from achieving efficiency, much less impact. The commitment of one donor to keep constructing what the Israeli authorities keep demolishing on account of a lack of valid building permits illustrates this game of doing, undoing and redoing. The huge amount of money spent on humanitarian assistance would be unnecessary if the international community pressured Israeli authorities to lift the blockade, respect international humanitarian law, and allow full access to humanitarian aid and recovery. As the political manoeuvring proceeds, there are ways to ameliorate the suffering of Palestinians. Donors can start by not placing political conditions on their assistance and challenging every party, both Israeli and Palestinian, that delays, controls or misuses aid. They should also avoid short-term funding cycles and grant humanitarian organisations the flexibility they need to implement long-term programmes to meet long-standing needs. But even if NGOs, the UN and donor agencies provided an exemplary response – and they should deploy all efforts to this end – the solution to the humanitarian crisis in the occupied territories remains political. The most efficient humanitarian response will always fall short if it continues to depend on the interests of Israel and the convenience of donor capitals. The international community, particularly the main humanitarian donor governments, must understand that their approach of providing large sums of money without calling for the end of the blockade and occupation is not the best way to help the Palestinians – in reality, it allows the protraction of the humanitarian crisis. The current period is critical. Donors need to back the agencies they fund with a real commitment to building a Palestinian state, something they all agree to. The absence of a solution will lead to more violence, a deeper humanitarian crisis and further instability, none of which will benefit the Palestinians or the Israelis. 

My fourth and final contention is that political conditions on humanitarian aid undermine rights.

Political conditions have exacerbated harms to women’s rights in Afghanistan. Mohammed Atmar 1
Mohammed Atmar (Program manager for Norwegian Church Aid Afghanistan Program). “Politicisation of Humanitarian Aid and its Consequences for Afghans.” February 1st, 2001. http://www.odi.org.uk/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/events-documents/3772.pdf
As a result of Taliban draconian restrictions on women’s work, education, movement and dress, probably in no other country have gender and wider issues of women’s rights sparked so much debate and international reaction as in Afghanistan. The sad reality however is that it has impacted negatively on the ability of the international assistance community to help enhance the basic rights of Afghan women, children and families. Immense pressure was mounted on donors and aid agencies from domestic constituencies, interest groups like Feminist Majority and Human Rights Special Rapporteurs alike advocating that humanitarian assistance to the country should be reduced to only life-saving spheres. 19. Given the lack of other policy instruments, humanitarian assistance has thus become the primary, if not the only, tool to fight gender ‘discrimination’ in the country. As a result massive politicisation in the form of ill-informed conditionalities by donors and aid agencies has ensued. For example, WFP, the largest food aid provider, made its food aid beyond lifesaving spheres conditional upon Taliban’s change of policy and practice to respond favourably to UN appeals on basic rights for women. ‘With strict programme conditions, set from Rome, on gender equality at both the project participation level as well as beneficiary level various (food aid) programmes have been curtailed or restricted because of the inability to fulfill Rome’s conditions. (Wiles, et al 1999). The losers were of course Afghan women and their families. 20. To meet donors’ conditions and their own ideological convictions, some humanitarians have also begun to work on changing the deep-rooted and long-held practices related to gender that pre-date Taliban, despite their short-term and project-based frames for humanitarian action.. Many perceive such ambitions at best naïve and at worst as an attempt 5 for ethical colonization. The new interventionist humanitarianism not only deprived many of badly needed assistance but also intensified tensions between Taliban and the assistance actors and between the latter and the Afghan recipients.

Tournament: Bump | Round: 3 | Opponent: Regis Patrick May | Judge: Rebecca Goldman Lanier

Util is axiomatic. Ignore all util indicts.

Bentham 81
Jeremy Bentham (founded util). “An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.” 1781. http://utilitarianism.com/jeremy-bentham/index.html#twelve
I. Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man one may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he they will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light. But enough of metaphor and declamation: it is not by such means that moral science is to be improved. II. The principle of utility is the foundation of the present work: it will be proper therefore at the outset to give an explicit and determinate account of what is meant by it. By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever. according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words to promote or to oppose that happiness. I say of every action whatsoever, and therefore not only of every action of a private individual, but of every measure of government. III. By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness, (all this in the present case comes to the same thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered: if that party be the community in general, then the happiness of the community: if a particular individual, then the happiness of that individual. IV. The interest of the community is one of the most general expressions that can occur in the phraseology of morals: no wonder that the meaning of it is often lost. When it has a meaning, it is this. The community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the community then is, what is it?— the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it. V. It is in vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what is the interest of the individual. A thing is said to promote the interest, or to be for the interest, of an individual, when it tends to add to the sum total of his pleasures: or, what comes to the same thing, to diminish the sum total of his pains. VI. An action then may be said to be conformable to then principle of utility, or, for shortness sake, to utility, (meaning with respect to the community at large) when the tendency it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any it has to diminish it. VII. A measure of government (which is but a particular kind of action, performed by a particular person or persons) may be said to be conformable to or dictated by the principle of utility, when in like manner the tendency which it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any which it has to diminish it. VIII. When an action, or in particular a measure of government, is supposed by a man to be conformable to the principle of utility, it may be convenient, for the purposes of discourse, to imagine a kind of law or dictate, called a law or dictate of utility: and to speak of the action in question, as being conformable to such law or dictate. IX. A man may be said to be a partizan of the principle of utility, when the approbation or disapprobation he annexes to any action, or to any measure, is determined by and proportioned to the tendency which he conceives it to have to augment or to diminish the happiness of the community: or in other words, to its conformity or unconformity to the laws or dictates of utility. X. Of an action that is conformable to the principle of utility one may always say either that it is one that ought to be done, or at least that it is not one that ought not to be done. One may say also, that it is right it should be done; at least that it is not wrong it should be done: that it is a right action; at least that it is not a wrong action. When thus interpreted, the words ought, and right and wrong and others of that stamp, have a meaning: when otherwise, they have none. XI. Has the rectitude of this principle been ever formally contested? It should seem that it had, by those who have not known what they have been meaning. Is it susceptible of any direct proof? it should seem not: for that which is used to prove everything else, cannot itself be proved: a chain of proofs must have their commencement somewhere. To give such proof is as impossible as it is needless. XII. Not that there is or ever has been that human creature at breathing, however stupid or perverse, who has not on many, perhaps on most occasions of his life, deferred to it. By the natural constitution of the human frame, on most occasions of their lives men in general people embrace this principle, without thinking of it: if not for the ordering of their own actions, yet for the trying of their own actions, as well as of those of others men. There have been, at the same time, not many perhaps, even of the most intelligent, who have been disposed to embrace it purely and without reserve. There are even few who have not taken some occasion or other to quarrel with it, either on account of their not understanding always how to apply it, or on account of some prejudice or other which they were afraid to examine into, or could not bear to part with. For such is the stuff that man is made of: in principle and in practice, in a right track and in a wrong one, the rarest of all human qualities is consistency. XIII. When a man attempts to combat the principle of utility, it is with reasons drawn, without his being aware of it, from that very principle itself. His arguments, if they prove anything, prove not that the principle is wrong, but that, according to the applications he supposes to be made of it, it is misapplied. Is it possible for a man to move the earth? Yes; but he must first find out another earth to stand upon. XIV. To disprove the propriety of it by arguments is impossible; but, from the causes that have been mentioned, or from some confused or partial view of it, a man may happen to be disposed not to relish it. Where this is the case, if he thinks the settling of his opinions on such a subject worth the trouble, let him take the following steps, and at length, perhaps, he may come to reconcile himself to it. 

Thus the standard is maximizing utility. There are seven additional warrants.

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First is doxastic freedom.

Belief formation is not voluntary. We have no freedom over our long-term beliefs.

Alston 89
William P. Alston. “The Deontological Conception of Epistemic Justification.” Epistemic Justification: Essays in the Theory of Knowledge, 1989. http://www.ditext.com/alston/deontological.html
Let's turn now to a critical examination of the basic control thesis, the thesis that one can take up at will whatever prepositional attitude one chooses. Those who have attacked this view are divided between those who hold that believing at will is logically impossible and those who hold that it is only psychologically impossible, a capacity that we in fact lack though one we conceivably could have had.16 I cannot see any sufficient reasons for the stronger claim, and so I shall merely contend that we are not so constituted as to be able to take up propositional attitudes at will. My argument for this, if it can be called that, simply consists in asking you to consider whether you have any such powers. Can you, at this moment, start to believe that the United States is still a colony of Great Britain, just by deciding to do so? If you find it too incredible that you should be sufficiently motivated to try to believe this, suppose that someone offers you $500,000,000 to believe it, and you are much more interested in the money than in believing the truth. Could you do what it takes to get that reward? Remember that we are speaking about believing at will. No doubt, there are things you could do that would increase the probability of your coming to believe this, but that will be discussed later. Can you switch propositional attitudes toward that proposition just by deciding to do so? It seems clear to me that I have no such power. Volitions, decisions, or choosings don't hook up with anything in the way of propositional attitude inauguration, just as they don't hook up with the secretion of gastric juices or cell metabolism. There could conceivably be individual differences in this regard. Some people can move their ears at will, while most of us cannot. However, I very much doubt that any human beings are endowed with the power of taking on propositional attitudes at will. The temptation to suppose otherwise may stem from conflating that power with others that we undoubtedly do have but that are clearly distinct. If I were to set out to bring myself into a state of belief that p, just by an act of will, I might assert that p with an expression of conviction, or dwell favorably on the idea that p, or imagine a sentence expressing p emblazoned in the heavens with an angelic chorus in the background intoning the Kyrie of Mozart's Coronation Mass. All this I can do at will, but none of this amounts to taking on a belief that p. It is all show, an elaborate pretence of believing. Having gone through all this, my doxastic attitudes will remain just as they were before; or if there is some change, it will be a result of these gyrations. We should not suppose that our inability to believe at will is restricted to propositions that are obviously false. The inability also extends, at least, to those that are obviously true. A few pages back we made the point that voluntary control attaches to contrary pairs, or to more complex arrays of alternatives. If the sphere of my effective voluntary control does not extend both to A and to not-A, then it attaches to neither. If I don't have the power to choose between A and not-A, then we are without sufficient reason to say that I did A at will, rather than just doing A, accompanied by a volition. It is even more obvious, if possible, that responsibility, obligation, and their kindred attach to doing A only if the agent has an effective choice between doing and not doing A. If I would still have done A whatever I willed, chose, or preferred, I can hardly be blamed for doing it. Thus, even if I willingly, or not unwillingly, form, for instance, perceptual beliefs in the way I do, it by no means follows that I form those beliefs at will, or that I have voluntary control over such belief formation, or that I can be held responsible or blameworthy for doing so. It would have to be true that I have effective voluntary control over whether I do or do not believe that the tree has leaves on it when I see a tree with leaves on it just before me in broad daylight with my eyesight working perfectly. And it is perfectly clear that in this situation I have no power at all to refrain from that belief. And so with everything else that seems perfectly obvious to us. We have just as little voluntary control over ordinary belief formed by introspection, memory, and simple uncontroversial inferences. 

Doxastic unfreedom undermines deontology and justifies util.

Petersen 11
Steve Petersen (Niagara University). “Utilitarian Epistemology.” February 10th, 2011. http://stevepetersen.net/professional/petersen-utilitarian-epistemology.pdf
These problems should sound like special cases of more general problems in the intersection of action theory and normative ethics. Is responsible choice in intention what is essential to positive evaluation? Is there such a thing as a choice for which we can be (truly) responsible in the ?rst place? The Kantian deontologist must answer both of these positively, but the utilitarian need not. This is especially good for the epistemic utilitarian, since the conceptual coherence of free will faces tougher challenges than usual at the doxastic level.14 Traditional libertarian views will ascribe some separate form of causation to agents from the natural causation to which we are accustomed, and as applied in epistemology this mysterious causation would foreclose on any scienti?c account of how we form beliefs. It is far too early in the science side of the game for such foreclosures, and indeed given how far the science already has come, such foreclosures would look entirely arbitrary.15 It is possible a compatibilist version of doxastic voluntarism would be sufficient for Kantian epistemic responsibility, but compatibilism, too, has worse than usual problems at the cognitive level. If we explain epistemic agency in terms of causal processes, our inclination to epistemic blame is even more likely to balk than in the ordinary action cases. A compatibilist approach to epistemic agency will require a close look at the causal mechanisms at the sub-propositional level that underwrite the formation of belief. These are not likely to be susceptible to, say, a Frankfurt-type account of freedom, since it will make little sense in most cases to speak of the agents’ desires (of any order) with respect to such ?ne details of cognition.16 Again, at the level of normative ethics the utilitarian has a typical strategy for handling these problems—one that can be carried straightforwardly into the epistemic realm. Since utilitarian value does not depend on the formation of free intentions, the utilitarian can consistently deny the existence of any robust free will, including doxastic freedom. The utilitarian also must deny the existence of what we might call “thick” moral responsibility—the moral responsibility of the retributivist, who claims that it can be just to punish even when net consequences of such punishment are bad.17 To the utilitarian, punishment and reward are only justi?ed, as anything, by its impact on welfare. The utilitarian thus has what we might call a “thin” notion of moral responsibility. Roughly speaking, for a utilitarian to say someone is responsible for an outcome is just to say that the person houses the most appropriate place to apply change in order to bring about more future utility with respect to that outcome. When Squeaky is responsible for murder, this means that efforts to redress current and future such harms are best concentrated on her. Squeaky is not morally responsible in the thick sense for the act; she does not deserve punishment for its own sake. Nonetheless it can be just to subject her to isolation and rehabilitation for the sake of future consequences. To the extent we discover that Charlie caused Squeaky to murder, that is the extent to which we discover Charlie is the more effective place to apply such change, and thus in the utilitarian sense we attribute him more of the moral responsibility for the crime.18 

Second, revisionary intuitionism.

Revisionary intuitionism is true and leads to util.

Yudkowsky 8
Eliezer Yudkowsky (research fellow of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute; he also writes Harry Potter fan fiction). “The ‘Intuitions’ Behind ‘Utilitarianism.’” 28 January 2008. LessWrong. http://lesswrong.com/lw/n9/the_intuitions_behind_utilitarianism/
I haven't said much about metaethics - the nature of morality - because that has a forward dependency on a discussion of the Mind Projection Fallacy that I haven't gotten to yet. I used to be very confused about metaethics. After my confusion finally cleared up, I did a postmortem on my previous thoughts. I found that my object-level moral reasoning had been valuable and my meta-level moral reasoning had been worse than useless. And this appears to be a general syndrome - people do much better when discussing whether torture is good or bad than when they discuss the meaning of "good" and "bad". Thus, I deem it prudent to keep moral discussions on the object level wherever I possibly can. Occasionally people object to any discussion of morality on the grounds that morality doesn't exist, and in lieu of jumping over the forward dependency to explain that "exist" is not the right term to use here, I generally say, "But what do you do anyway?" and take the discussion back down to the object level. Paul Gowder, though, has pointed out that both the idea of choosing a googolplex dust specks in a googolplex eyes over 50 years of torture for one person, and the idea of "utilitarianism", depend on "intuition". He says I've argued that the two are not compatible, but charges me with failing to argue for the utilitarian intuitions that I appeal to. Now "intuition" is not how I would describe the computations that underlie human morality and distinguish us, as moralists, from an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness and/or a rock. But I am okay with using the word "intuition" as a term of art, bearing in mind that "intuition" in this sense is not to be contrasted to reason, but is, rather, the cognitive building block out of which both long verbal arguments and fast perceptual arguments are constructed. I see the project of morality as a project of renormalizing intuition. We have intuitions about things that seem desirable or undesirable, intuitions about actions that are right or wrong, intuitions about how to resolve conflicting intuitions, intuitions about how to systematize specific intuitions into general principles. Delete all the intuitions, and you aren't left with an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness, you're left with a rock. Keep all your specific intuitions and refuse to build upon the reflective ones, and you aren't left with an ideal philosopher of perfect spontaneity and genuineness, you're left with a grunting caveperson running in circles, due to cyclical preferences and similar inconsistencies. "Intuition", as a term of art, is not a curse word when it comes to morality - there is nothing else to argue from. Even modus ponens is an "intuition" in this sense - it's just that modus ponens still seems like a good idea after being formalized, reflected on, extrapolated out to see if it has sensible consequences, etcetera. So that is "intuition". However, Gowder did not say what he meant by "utilitarianism". Does utilitarianism say... That right actions are strictly determined by good consequences? That praiseworthy actions depend on justifiable expectations of good consequences? That probabilities of consequences should normatively be discounted by their probability, so that a 50 probability of something bad should weigh exactly half as much in our tradeoffs? That virtuous actions always correspond to maximizing expected utility under some utility function? That two harmful events are worse than one? That two independent occurrences of a harm (not to the same person, not interacting with each other) are exactly twice as bad as one? That for any two harms A and B, with A much worse than B, there exists some tiny probability such that gambling on this probability of A is preferable to a certainty of B? If you say that I advocate something, or that my argument depends on something, and that it is wrong, do please specify what this thingy is... anyway, I accept 3, 5, 6, and 7, but not 4; I am not sure about the phrasing of 1; and 2 is true, I guess, but phrased in a rather solipsistic and selfish fashion: you should not worry about being praiseworthy. Now, what are the "intuitions" upon which my "utilitarianism" depends? This is a deepish sort of topic, but I'll take a quick stab at it. First of all, it's not just that someone presented me with a list of statements like those above, and I decided which ones sounded "intuitive". Among other things, if you try to violate "utilitarianism", you run into paradoxes, contradictions, circular preferences, and other things that aren't symptoms of moral wrongness so much as moral incoherence. After you think about moral problems for a while, and also find new truths about the world, and even discover disturbing facts about how you yourself work, you often end up with different moral opinions than when you started out. This does not quite define moral progress, but it is how we experience moral progress. As part of my experienced moral progress, I've drawn a conceptual separation between questions of type Where should we go? and questions of type How should we get there? (Could that be what Gowder means by saying I'm "utilitarian"?) The question of where a road goes - where it leads - you can answer by traveling the road and finding out. If you have a false belief about where the road leads, this falsity can be destroyed by the truth in a very direct and straightforward manner. When it comes to wanting to go to a particular place, this want is not entirely immune from the destructive powers of truth. You could go there and find that you regret it afterward (which does not define moral error, but is how we experience moral error). But, even so, wanting to be in a particular place seems worth distinguishing from wanting to take a particular road to a particular place. Our intuitions about where to go are arguable enough, but our intuitions about how to get there are frankly messed up. After the two hundred and eighty-seventh research study showing that people will chop their own feet off if you frame the problem the wrong way, you start to distrust first impressions. When you've read enough research on scope insensitivity - people will pay only 28 more to protect all 57 wilderness areas in Ontario than one area, people will pay the same amount to save 50,000 lives as 5,000 lives... that sort of thing... Well, the worst case of scope insensitivity I've ever heard of was described here by Slovic: Other recent research shows similar results. Two Israeli psychologists asked people to contribute to a costly life-saving treatment. They could offer that contribution to a group of eight sick children, or to an individual child selected from the group. The target amount needed to save the child (or children) was the same in both cases. Contributions to individual group members far outweighed the contributions to the entire group. There's other research along similar lines, but I'm just presenting one example, 'cause, y'know, eight examples would probably have less impact. If you know the general experimental paradigm, then the reason for the above behavior is pretty obvious - focusing your attention on a single child creates more emotional arousal than trying to distribute attention around eight children simultaneously. So people are willing to pay more to help one child than to help eight. Now, you could look at this intuition, and think it was revealing some kind of incredibly deep moral truth which shows that one child's good fortune is somehow devalued by the other children's good fortune. But what about the billions of other children in the world? Why isn't it a bad idea to help this one child, when that causes the value of all the other children to go down? How can it be significantly better to have 1,329,342,410 happy children than 1,329,342,409, but then somewhat worse to have seven more at 1,329,342,417? Or you could look at that and say: "The intuition is wrong: the brain can't successfully multiply by eight and get a larger quantity than it started with. But it ought to, normatively speaking." And once you realize that the brain can't multiply by eight, then the other cases of scope neglect stop seeming to reveal some fundamental truth about 50,000 lives being worth just the same effort as 5,000 lives, or whatever. You don't get the impression you're looking at the revelation of a deep moral truth about nonagglomerative utilities. It's just that the brain doesn't goddamn multiply. Quantities get thrown out the window. If you have $100 to spend, and you spend $20 each on each of 5 efforts to save 5,000 lives, you will do worse than if you spend $100 on a single effort to save 50,000 lives. Likewise if such choices are made by 10 different people, rather than the same person. As soon as you start believing that it is better to save 50,000 lives than 25,000 lives, that simple preference of final destinations has implications for the choice of paths, when you consider five different events that save 5,000 lives. (It is a general principle that Bayesians see no difference between the long-run answer and the short-run answer; you never get two different answers from computing the same question two different ways. But the long run is a helpful intuition pump, so I am talking about it anyway.) The aggregative valuation strategy of "shut up and multiply" arises from the simple preference to have more of something - to save as many lives as possible - when you have to describe general principles for choosing more than once, acting more than once, planning at more than one time. Aggregation also arises from claiming that the local choice to save one life doesn't depend on how many lives already exist, far away on the other side of the planet, or far away on the other side of the universe. Three lives are one and one and one. No matter how many billions are doing better, or doing worse. 3 = 1 + 1 + 1, no matter what other quantities you add to both sides of the equation. And if you add another life you get 4 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. That's aggregation. When you've read enough heuristics and biases research, and enough coherence and uniqueness proofs for Bayesian probabilities and expected utility, and you've seen the "Dutch book" and "money pump" effects that penalize trying to handle uncertain outcomes any other way, then you don't see the preference reversals in the Allais Paradox as revealing some incredibly deep moral truth about the intrinsic value of certainty. It just goes to show that the brain doesn't goddamn multiply. The primitive, perceptual intuitions that make a choice "feel good" don't handle probabilistic pathways through time very skillfully, especially when the probabilities have been expressed symbolically rather than experienced as a frequency. So you reflect, devise more trustworthy logics, and think it through in words. When you see people insisting that no amount of money whatsoever is worth a single human life, and then driving an extra mile to save $10; or when you see people insisting that no amount of money is worth a decrement of health, and then choosing the cheapest health insurance available; then you don't think that their protestations reveal some deep truth about incommensurable utilities. Part of it, clearly, is that primitive intuitions don't successfully diminish the emotional impact of symbols standing for small quantities - anything you talk about seems like "an amount worth considering". And part of it has to do with preferring unconditional social rules to conditional social rules. Conditional rules seem weaker, seem more subject to manipulation. If there's any loophole that lets the government legally commit torture, then the government will drive a truck through that loophole. So it seems like there should be an unconditional social injunction against preferring money to life, and no "but" following it. Not even "but a thousand dollars isn't worth a 0.0000000001 probability of saving a life". Though the latter choice, of course, is revealed every time we sneeze without calling a doctor. The rhetoric of sacredness gets bonus points for seeming to express an unlimited commitment, an unconditional refusal that signals trustworthiness and refusal to compromise. So you conclude that moral rhetoric espouses qualitative distinctions, because espousing a quantitative tradeoff would sound like you were plotting to defect. On such occasions, people vigorously want to throw quantities out the window, and they get upset if you try to bring quantities back in, because quantities sound like conditions that would weaken the rule. But you don't conclude that there are actually two tiers of utility with lexical ordering. You don't conclude that there is actually an infinitely sharp moral gradient, some atom that moves a Planck distance (in our continuous physical universe) and sends a utility from 0 to infinity. You don't conclude that utilities must be expressed using hyper-real numbers. Because the lower tier would simply vanish in any equation. It would never be worth the tiniest effort to recalculate for it. All decisions would be determined by the upper tier, and all thought spent thinking about the upper tier only, if the upper tier genuinely had lexical priority. As Peter Norvig once pointed out, if Asimov's robots had strict priority for the First Law of Robotics ("A robot shall not harm a human being, nor through inaction allow a human being to come to harm") then no robot's behavior would ever show any sign of the other two Laws; there would always be some tiny First Law factor that would be sufficient to determine the decision. Whatever value is worth thinking about at all, must be worth trading off against all other values worth thinking about, because thought itself is a limited resource that must be traded off. When you reveal a value, you reveal a utility. I don't say that morality should always be simple. I've already said that the meaning of music is more than happiness alone, more than just a pleasure center lighting up. I would rather see music composed by people than by nonsentient machine learning algorithms, so that someone should have the joy of composition; I care about the journey, as well as the destination. And I am ready to hear if you tell me that the value of music is deeper, and involves more complications, than I realize - that the valuation of this one event is more complex than I know.  But that's for one event. When it comes to multiplying by quantities and probabilities, complication is to be avoided - at least if you care more about the destination than the journey. When you've reflected on enough intuitions, and corrected enough absurdities, you start to see a common denominator, a meta-principle at work, which one might phrase as "Shut up and multiply." Where music is concerned, I care about the journey. When lives are at stake, I shut up and multiply. It is more important that lives be saved, than that we conform to any particular ritual in saving them. And the optimal path to that destination is governed by laws that are simple, because they are math. And that's why I'm a utilitarian - at least when I am doing something that is overwhelmingly more important than my own feelings about it - which is most of the time, because there are not many utilitarians, and many things left undone.

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Third, no act-omission distinction.

(a) ====Act-omission distinction does not apply to states.====
Sunstein and Vermuele 05
Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermuele, “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life?Life Tradeoffs,” Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper No. 85 (March 2005), p. 17.
The most fundamental point is that unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice between or among possible policies for regulating third parties. The distinction between acts and omissions may not be intelligible in this context, and even if it is, the distinction does not make a morally relevant difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do anything or refusing to act. Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized private action – for example, private killing – becomes obscure when government formally forbids private action but chooses a set of policy instruments that does not adequately or fully discourage it.

(b) ====The act-omission distinction is incoherent.====
Rachels 01
James Rachels (U Alabama Professor). “Killing and Letting Die.” Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2nd edition, ed. Lawrence Becker and Charlotte Becker (New York: Routledge, 2001), vol. 2, pp. 947-50. http://www.jamesrachels.org/killing.pdf
So what is the difference between causing and allowing? What real difference is marked by those words? The most obvious ways of attempting to draw the distinction won’t work. For example, suppose we say it is the difference between action and inaction--when we cause an outcome, we do something, but when we merely allow it to happen, we passively stand by and do nothing. This won’t work because, when we allow something to happen, we do perform at least one act: the act of allowing it to happen. The problem is that the distinction between doing something and not doing something is relative to the specification of what is or is not done--if I allow someone to die, I do not save him, but I do let him die. It is tempting to say the difference between action and inaction is the difference between moving one’s body or and not moving one’s body; but that does not help. When we allow something to happen, we are typically moving our bodies in all sorts of ways. If I allow you to die by running away, I may be moving my body very rapidly.

This means side constraint-based theories reduce to util because any reason not to violate a side constraint oneself is an equally good reason to minimize side constraint violations.

Fourth, util is the only moral system available to policy-makers.

 
Goodin 90
Robert Goodin, fellow in philosophy, Australian National Defense University, THE UTILITARIAN RESPONSE, 1990, p. 141-2
My larger argument turns on the proposition that there is something special about the situation of public officials that makes utilitarianism more probable for them than private individuals. Before proceeding with the large argument, I must therefore say what it is that makes it so special about public officials and their situations that make it both more necessary and more desirable for them to adopt a more credible form of utilitarianism. Consider, first, the argument from necessity. Public officials are obliged to make their choices under uncertainty, and uncertainty of a very special sort at that. All choices – public and private alike – are made under some degree of uncertainty, of course. But in the nature of things, private individuals will usually have more complete information on the peculiarities of their own circumstances and on the ramifications that alternative possible choices might have for them. Public officials, in contrast, they are relatively poorly informed as to the effects that their choices will have on individuals, one by one. What they typically do know are generalities: averages and aggregates. They know what will happen most often to most people as a result of their various possible choices, but that is all. That is enough to allows public policy-makers to use the utilitarian calculus – assuming they want to use it at all – to chose general rules or conduct.

Fifth, respect for human worth would justify util.

Cummiskey 90
Cummiskey, David. Associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. “Kantian Consequentiaism.” Ethics 100 (April 1990), University of Chicago. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract “social entity.” It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive “overall social good.” Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that “to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has.” But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the principle that “rational nature exists as an end in itself”. Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have an equal value, then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many rational beings as possible. In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a non- value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kant’s normative theory is based on an unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have “dignity, that is, an unconditional and incomparable worth” that transcends any market value, but persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others. The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others.

Sixth, reductionism.

Brain studies prove personal identity doesn’t exist.

Parfit 84
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).
Some recent medical cases provide striking evidence in favour of the Reductionist View. Human beings have a lower brain and two upper hemispheres, which are connected by a bundle of fibres. In treating a few people with severe epilepsy, surgeons have cut these fibres. The aim was to reduce the severity of epileptic fits, by confining their causes to a single hemisphere. This aim was achieved. But the operations had another unintended consequence. The effect, in the words of one surgeon, was the creation of ‘two separate spheres of consciousness.’ This effect was revealed by various psychological tests. These made use of two facts. We control our right arms with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. And what is in the right halves of our visual fields we see with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. When someone’s hemispheres have been disconnected, psychologists can thus present to this person two different written questions in the two halves of his visual field, and can receive two different answers written by this person’s two hands.

In the absence of personal identity, only end states can matter.

Shoemaker 99
Shoemaker, David (Dept of Philosophy, U Memphis). “Utilitarianism and Personal Identity.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 33: 183–199, 1999. http://www.csun.edu/~ds56723/jvipaper.pdf
Extreme reductionism might lend support to utilitarianism in the following way. Many people claim that we are justified in maximizing the good in our own lives, but not justified in maximizing the good across sets of lives, simply because each of us is a single, deeply unified person, unified by the further fact of identity, whereas there is no such corresponding unity across sets of lives. But if the only justification for the different treatment of individual lives and sets of lives is the further fact, and this fact is undermined by the truth of reductionism, then nothing justifies this different treatment. There are no deeply unified subjects of experience. What remains are merely the experiences themselves, and so any ethical theory distinguishing between individual lives and sets of lives is mistaken. If the deep, further fact is missing, then there are no unities. The morally significant units should then be the states people are in at particular times, and an ethical theory that focused on them and attempted to improve their quality, whatever their location, would be the most plausible. Utilitarianism is just such a theory.

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Seventh, universalizability justifies util.

Singer 93
Peter Singer, “Practical Ethics,” Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 13-14
The universal aspect of ethics, I suggest, does provide a persuasive, although not conclusive, reason for taking a broadly utilitarian position. My reason for suggesting this is as follows. In accepting that ethical judgments must be made from a universal point of view, I am accepting that my own interests cannot, simply because they are my interests, count more than the interests of anyone else. Thus my very natural concern that my own interests be looked after must, when I think ethically, be extended to the interests of others. Now, imagine that I am trying to decide between two possible courses of action – perhaps whether to eat all the fruits I have collected myself, or to share them with others. Imagine, too, that I am deciding in a complete ethical vacuum, that I know nothing of any ethical considerations – I am, we might say, in a pre-ethical stage of thinking. How would I make up my mind? One thing that would be still relevant would be how the possible courses of action will affect my interests. Indeed, if we define ‘interests’ broadly enough, so that we count anything people desire as in their interests (unless it is incompatible with another desire or desires), then it would seem that at this pre-ethical stage, only one’s own interests can be relevant to the decision. Suppose I then begin to think ethically, to the extent of recognizing that my own interests cannot count for more, simply because they are my own, than the interests of others. In place of my own interests, I now have to take into account the interests of all those affected by my decision. This requires me to weigh up all these interests and adopt the course of action most likely to maximize the interests of those affected.

Morality must take the form of a universal rule.

Singer 09
Peter Singer Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, Princeton, “The Groundwork of Utilitarian Morals: Reconsidering Hare’s Argument for Utilitarianism,” draft prepared for the Conference on Issues in Modern Philosophy: “The Foundations of Morality,” NYU Philosophy Department, November 7, 2009, 34.
When I prescribe  something, using moral language, my prescription it commits me to a substantive moral judgment about all relevantly similar cases. This includes hypothetical cases in which I am in a different position from my actual one. So to make a moral judgment, I must put myself in the position of the other person affected by my proposed action – or to be more precise, in the position of all those affected by my action. Whether I can accept the judgment – that is, whether I can prescribe it universally – will then depend on whether I could accept it if I had to live the lives of all those affected by the action.

Eighth, conflicting moral side-constraints would paralyze state action, so states must use util to weigh deontological violations.

Infinite values don’t paralyze calculation.

Lauwers and Vallentyne 04
Luc Lauwers (Center for Economic Studies, K.U.Leuven) Peter Vallentyne (Department of Philosophy, University of Missouri-Columbia). “Infinite Utilitarianism: More Is Always Better*.” Economics and Philosophy 20 (2004): 307-330.
Zero Independence holds that the ranking of two worlds is determined by the pattern of differences in local value. This, we claim, is highly plausible in the context of finitely additive value theories. In the finite case, finitely additive value theories always satisfy Zero Independence. Although they typically get expressed as judging a world as at least as good as another (having the same locations) if and only if its total value is at least as great, the reference to the total is not needed. An equivalent statement is that one world as at least as good as the second if and only if the sum of the differences in value is at least as great as zero. Only the pattern of differences matters. Even in the infinite case, Zero Independence is “partially” implied by Sum and Loose Pareto. Sum ranks U as at least as good as V if and only if Sum ranks U-V as at least as good as its zero world. Moreover, if two worlds U and V satisfy the antecedent clause of Loose Pareto, then Loose Pareto ranks U as at least as good as V if and only if it ranks U-V above its zero world. Zero Independence is thus, we claim, highly plausible for finitely additive theories.
Zero Independence is equivalent to a condition in social choice theory known as Translation Scale Invariance when it is restricted to the case where locations are the same.  This latter condition holds that interlocational comparisons of zero points are irrelevant to the ranking of worlds. The zero point for value at each location, that is, can be set independently of how it is set for other locations (although, of course, when comparing two worlds, the zero point used for a given location in one world must also be used for that location in the second world). For example, if a location has values of 10 in world U and 5 in world V, both measured on the basis of some particular zero point (the same for both worlds), those values could be changed to 7 and 2 (by making the zero point 3 units higher for that location), and this, according to Translation Scale Invariance, would not alter how the two worlds are ranked.
Zero Independence is equivalent to Translation Scale Invariance (restricted to the case where locations are the same), since any change in the zero points for the locations in worlds U and V can, for some W, be represented by U+W and V+W. (For example, if there are just two people, and the first person’s zero point is decreased by two units, and the second person’s zero point is increased by one unit, then the resulting two representations of the value of U and V are simply U+W and V+W, where W is 2,-1.) Zero Independence and Translation Scale Invariance thus each hold that U ? V if and only if U+W ? V+W.
Translation Scale Invariance (and hence, Zero Independence) is highly plausible for finitely additive value theories. (Recall that our goal is to defend a particular extension of finite additivity, not to defend finite additivity against non-additive theories.) If there is no natural zero point that separates positive from negative value (if there is just more or less value with no natural separating point), then any particular zero point is arbitrary (not representing a real aspect of value). In this case, interlocational comparisons of zero-points are uncontroversially irrelevant. If, on the other hand, there is a natural zero for value, it is still plausible for finitely additive value theories to hold that it is irrelevant for ranking worlds. What matters (e.g., from a utilitarian perspective), as argued above, are the differences in value at each location between two worlds—not the absolute level of values at locations. No interlocational comparison of zero points is needed for this purpose.

Cost-benefit analysis is feasible. Ignore any util calc indicts.

Hardin 90
Hardin, Russell (Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences @ NYU). May 1990. Morality within the Limits of Reason. University Of Chicago Press. pp. 4. ISBN 978-0226316208.
One of the cuter charges against utilitarianism is that it is irrational in the following sense. If I take the time to calculate the consequences of various courses of action before me, then I will ipso facto have chosen the course of action to take, namely, to sit and calculate, because while I am calculating the other courses of action will cease to be open to me. It should embarrass philosophers that they have ever taken this objection seriously. Parallel considerations in other realms are dismissed with eminently good sense. Lord Devlin notes, “If the reasonable man ‘worked to rule’ by perusing to the point of comprehension every form he was handed, the commercial and administrative life of the country would creep to a standstill.” James March and Herbert Simon escape the quandary of unending calculation by noting that often we satisfice, we do not maximize: we stop calculating and considering when we find a merely adequate choice of action. When, in principle, one cannot know what is the best choice, one can nevertheless be sure that sitting and calculating is not the best choice. But, one may ask, How do you know that another ten minutes of calculation would not have produced a better choice? And one can only answer, You do not. At some point the quarrel begins to sound adolescent. It is ironic that the point of the quarrel is almost never at issue in practice (as Devlin implies, we are almost all too reasonable in practice to bring the world to a standstill) but only in the principled discussions of academics.

Ignore permissibility and presumption because moral uncertainty means we’ll always have a non-zero credence in the existence of morality, so there’s always a risk of offense in favor of one action.

Contention 1 is Crime

Violating the ACP is key to convicting and punishing the guilty, which increases utility.

Private communications with an attorney enable the guilty to game the system.

Bentham 27
Jeremy Bentham (founded util). “Rationale of Judicial Evidence.” First edition, 1827. from The Works of Jeremy Bentham 473-479 (Browning ed. 1842), as quoted in 8 Wigmore, Evidence §2291, pp.549-551 (McNaughton rev. 1961) http://www.law.harvard.edu/publications/evidenceiii/articles/bentham.htm
When, in consulting with an law adviser, attorney or advocate, a man has confessed his delinquency, or disclosed some fact which, if stated in court, might tend to operate in proof of it, such law adviser is not to be suffered to be examined as to any such point. The law adviser is neither to be compelled nor so much as suffered, to betray the trust thus reposed in him. Not suffered? Why not? Oh, because to betray a trust is treachery; and an act of treachery is an immoral act. An immoral sort of act, is that sort of act, the tendency of which is, in some way or another, to lessen the quantity of happiness in society. In what way does the supposed cause in question tend to the production of any such effect? The conviction and punishment of the defendant, he being guilty, is by the supposition an act the tendency of which, upon the whole, is beneficial to society. Such is the proposition which for this purpose must be assumed. Some offences (it will be admitted by everybody) are of that sort and quality, that the acts by which they are punished do possess this beneficial tendency. Let the offence in question be of the number: it is of such only as are of that number that I speak. The good, then, that results from the conviction and punishment, in the case in question, is out of dispute: where, then, is the additional evil of it when produced by the cause in question? Nowhere. The evil consists in the punishment: but the punishment a man undergoes is not greater when the evidence on which the conviction and punishment are grounded happens to come out of the mouth of a law adviser of his, than if it had happened to come out of his own mouth, or that of a third person. But if such confidence, when reposed, is permitted to be violated, and if this be known (which, if such be the law, it will be,) the consequences will be, that no such confidence will be reposed. Not reposed? Well: and if it be not, wherein will consist the mischief? The man by the supposition is guilty; if not, by the supposition there is nothing to betray: let the law adviser say everything he has heard, everything he can have heard from his client, the client cannot have anything to fear from it. That it will often happen that in the case supposed no such confidence will be reposed, is natural enough: the first thing the advocate or attorney will say to his client, will be – Remember that, whatever you say to me, I shall be obliged to tell, if asked about it. What, then, will be the consequence? That a guilty person will not in general be able to derive quite so much assistance from his law adviser, in the way of concerting a false defence, as he may do at present.

The only available empirics prove no chilling effect.

Northrup 9
Daniel Northrup. “The Attorney-Client Privilege and Information Disclosed to an Attorney with the Intention That the Attorney Draft a Document To Be Released to Third Parties: Public Policy Calls for at Least the Strictest Application of the Attorney-Client Privilege.” Fordham Law Review. 2009. http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4512andcontext=flr
To justify the attorney-client privilege, clients must understand the privilege and rely on its protections when communicating with their attorneys. 282 Without understanding and reliance, inhibiting the search for truth is unnecessary and therefore unwarranted. 283 Statistical evidence, though sparse and methodologically limited, suggests that a substantial portion of the public neither understands nor relies on the privilege. 284 First, both the Yale study and the Tompkins County study found considerable confusion among laypersons as to the application and extent of the attorney-client privilege. 285 According to the Yale Study, a significant percentage of participants believed that lawyers could be compelled to testify in court.286 The Tompkins study similarly found that twenty-five percent of participants believed that confidentiality rules allowed more liberal disclosure than the law actually dictates. 287 Additionally, a large majority of the Tompkins County study participants inaccurately believed that lawyers are not required to protect confidential information more than doctors, and forty percent believed the same for accountants. This evidence suggests that a substantial percentage of clients do not understand the extent of the privilege. If clients are in fact relying on the attorney-client privilege, many are relying on a less stringent privilege than actually exists. In addition to not accurately understanding the privilege, a significant percentage of participants in the two studies do not appear to rely on the privilege. According to the Yale study, laypersons were equally divided on whether elimination of the attorney-client privilege would deter client disclosures. Participants found confidentiality to be more important to disclosure in all other professions in the survey, including accounting, for which no privilege exists. The Tompkins County study similarly found that only half of laypersons believed they would limit disclosure to attorneys if no firm obligation of confidentiality existed. These findings, though limited, suggest that the attorney-client privilege is not necessary for free disclosure, optimal legal representation, and law-abiding behavior for a significant percentage of clients. 

Prefer empirical studies that evaluate systemic impacts. Expert predictions alone should carry zero epistemological weight.

Menand 05
“Everybody’s An Expert,” Louis Menand, The New Yorker. December 5th, 2005.  http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/05/051205crbo_books1
Tetlock got a statistical handle on his task by putting most of the forecasting questions into a “three possible futures” form. The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth), or less of something (repression, recession). And he measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices. Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” he reports. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.” And the more famous the forecaster the more overblown the forecasts. “Experts in demand,” Tetlock says, “were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.”

Tournament: Bronx | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Byram Hills Amos Jeng | Judge: JScog, JLiu, Siggy
Advantage 1 is Equal Freedom

Studies prove CV increases turnout better than any other institutional factor.
Panagopoulos 8
Costas Panagopoulos (Panagopoulos is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy and the graduate program in Elections and Campaign Management at Fordham University. He was previously research associate at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, where he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in 2006). The Calculus of Voting in Compulsory Voting Systems.
Political Behavior, Vol. 30, No. 4 (December 2008), pp. 455-467. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40213328 

Studies consistently demonstrate that compulsory voting raises turnout. Tingsten (1937, p 205) concludes that, "the introduction of compulsory voting everywhere has been accompanied by a remarkable rise in participation." In fact, compulsory voting seems to stimulate turnout more than any other institutional factor, boosting participation rates by anywhere from 7 to 16 percentage points on average (Lijphart 1997; Powell 1980; Jackman 1987; Franklin 2001). 

High turnout is key to getting money out of campaign politics.
HLR 7
Harvard Law Review (no author). “The Case for Compulsory Voting in the United States.” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 121, No. 2 (December 2007), pp. 591-612
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40042668

In addition to the direct effect of compulsory voting on turnout, there are also several indirect benefits. First, compulsory voting would reduce the role of money in politics.35 Political parties would not spend as much money on their get-out-the-vote efforts since high turnout would already be ensured and would be fairly inelastic.36 Some of the get-out-the-vote money could be shifted to other forms of campaign spending, but not all of it. A significant amount of spending on getting out the vote comes from groups known as 527s (a reference to the tax code) and nonpartisan groups that are not subject to campaign finance laws.37 These groups are limited in their abilities to campaign expressly in favor of candidates.38 Presumably, these organizations would shift some funds from getting out the vote to issue ads (which are permissible), but the diminishing marginal effectiveness of those ads would limit this. With this implicit limit on spending, politicians and parties might focus somewhat less on fundraising and be less beholden to donors.39 

Funding bias is the largest barrier to equal representation. 
Pettit 99
Pettit, Philip (Aussie bloke). Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford University Press, USA (September 30, 1999). 

Before leaving this discussion of what inclusive democracy requires, there is one last and very important point to make. Perhaps the greatest problem with making any democratic system of government truly inclusive comes of the fact is that politicians need funds in order to win election, and that they and the parties they form have to depend on certain individuals and companies to finance their activities. Such dependency is bound to leave the politicians particularly alert to the interests of their financial supporters, and it means that, however formally satisfactory, the parliament and the government are going to cease to be substantively inclusive. Those who fund politicians and political parties can expect to have a greater voice in government than those who do not; those who do not contribute, or who have nothing to contribute, do not have the same chance of having their interests and ideas properly represented in the corridors of power. What to do in order to guard against this problem? There is no easy solution, but it is clear where policy researchers should be looking. The questions that have to be investigated are issues like the following. Is there a way of limiting private campaign contributions and of making allowable contributions effectively public? Is there a way of publicly funding political candidates, say on the basis of their past performance, the performance of their party, or the degree of community support that they can demonstrate? Is there a way of enabling citizens to direct a limited portion of the tax they pay, or of a state allowance due them, to the party of their choice? And finally, is there a means of banning or limiting political advertising, given that such advertising is particularly costly and not particularly desirable: as we well know, it easily reduces political debate to a Punch and Judy farce (Sunstein 1993£)? The problem of controlling the influence of the economically powerful on politicians, and more generally on government, is at once an age-old issue — it led some traditional republicans to propose severe limits on individual wealth — and a pressing contemporary problem. It comes up most strikingly in relation to campaign funds, but of course it also has a presence elsewhere. Economically powerful individuals and corporations can gain a special voice in the halls of government, for example, not just as a result of providing party funds, but also by virtue of the fact that their initiatives — say, initiatives in the location of industry — can have a dramatic effect on the fortunes of government. One of the greatest challenges for republican research must be to identify measures for effectively separating the worlds of government and business.
Advantage 2 is Polarization

Compulsory voting solves polarization in politics. 
Shineman 11
Victoria Shineman (Visiting Scholar, Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, Princeton University, PhD from NYU). “More on Mandatory Voting, Which Does *Not* Necessarily Make Electorate Less Informed.” 28 November 2011. The American Prospect. http://www.billmadden.com/activist360/2011/11/more-on-mandatory-voting-which-does-not-necessarily-make-electorate-less-informed/ 

The information effect also ties into the polarization debate. A person will vote when their perceived benefit of voting exceeds their perceived cost of voting. In a 2-party system, people on the extremes experience a bigger benefit differential between the two candidates, as compared to people in the middle. This suggests that extremists naturally have more at stake in an election, and so have a higher perceived benefit from voting. This difference increases with polarization, as the candidates are placed further apart.

When voting costs are high, it is difficult to motivate a centrist citizen to endure the cost of voting, since that actor has little to gain from affecting the outcome of the election. As voting costs decrease, the probability that a moderate can be incentivized to vote increases. Because CB effectually decreases the considered cost of voting, it should also increase the participation among moderates.

Polarization kills concern for warming in politics. 
Guber 13
Deborah Lynn Guber (University of Vermont). “A Cooling Climate for Change? Party Polarization and the Politics of Global Warming.” American Behavioral Scientist. Vol. 57, No. 1. January 2013. http://abs.sagepub.com/content/57/1/93.full.pdf+html

The history of global warming as a political issue is at least as interesting as its evolution as a scientific one. In the past 30 years, what began as an ill-defined condition has gradually emerged as a public problem worthy of attention on the national policy agenda. Yet it is increasingly apparent that those gains have come at a cost. Whereas once, the issue had been bolstered by majority support among average Americans— although never prominently or enthusiastically, to be sure—it is now characterized by a growing partisan divide. In a variety of ways, this article has explored the shifting terrain beneath the public’s views on climate change. Its most important conclusions can be summarized as follows. First, concern for global warming has declined sharply, but so, too, has concern for all other environmental problems. The comparison is an important one because it hints at a complex cause. Some of the ingredients likely relate to poor economic conditions; others, to issue-specific events and even to a broader political climate strained by because of partisan rancor among elites. The results found here must be understood, and to some extent softened, by these facts. Not every number associated with global warming in a poll relates to global warming alone. As students of political psychology have long recognized, public attitudes are created and sustained through a complex web of schema, within which the subject of global warming is but a single thread (Conover and Feldman, 1984). Second, whether we call them “influentials,” “legitimizers,” or “opinion leaders,” elites and the cues they provide to members of the mass public undoubtedly matter (Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955; Stewart, Smith, and Denton, 1994). In The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, John Zaller (1992) argues that “public attitudes toward major issues are a response to the relative intensity of competing political communications.” When elites unite, the public’s response is relatively nonideological. However, “when elites come to disagree along partisan or ideological lines,” as they did for Zaller during the latter stages of the Vietnam War, and as they did on global warming in the years following the release of the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth in 2007, “the public’s response will become ideological as well” (Zaller, 1992, p. 210). Surely, the efforts of Gore and others at the IPCC succeeded in capturing public and media attention, but strategies to increase issue salience often, and unwittingly, invite political opposition. The timing on climate change could not have been worse, since its opponents were already emboldened by a series of events virtually guaranteed to reorder the public’s priorities, ranging from 9/11 to soaring energy prices and a deep and prolonged economic recession (Guber and Bosso, 2009). In short, as Zaller would have predicted, party polarization among elites has now trickled down to the masses. Like the unraveling of a thread, opposing sides on global warming are now evident within the American mass public and, to a lesser extent, on a host of other more innocuous subjects ranging from air pollution to soil contamination by toxic waste and the loss of tropical rainforests. These differences are robust, even after controlling for demographic traits, such as age, education, income, race, and gender. Now that disagreements extend beyond policy preferences into virtually every aspect of environmental thought, it will be harder to sustain what had been called “the politics of consensus”—a fragile (if at times unproductive) equilibrium that for many years allowed discourse on the environment to focus on shared values while muting cleavages along ideological lines (Guber, 2003). For better or for worse, partisanship has now moved front and center in the debate on global warming. For the better, Levendusky (2010) offers an optimistic assessment. He believes that elite polarization can have a positive impact because it clarifies “where the parties stand on the issues of the day,” and thus “causes ordinary voters to adopt more consistent attitudes” (Levendusky, 2010, p. 111). On a subject that has rarely moved voters to action in the past (Guber, 2003), this could lead to an increase in green voting behavior in the future, although the net effect, both for and against, remains unpredictable. For this reason, activists are increasingly divided as to whether to pursue partisan or bipartisan strategies. A partisan approach might articulate differences in policy that could be used as a wedge to attract some votes, but it would likely sacrifice others by triggering opposing predispositions. In contrast, a bipartisan plan might actively seek and find middle ground and yet lock advocates into a far slower and more incremental process of policy change (Abbasi, 2006). Yet either way, there are significant dangers to consider, too. On global warming, in particular, there is troubling contrast between “hard policy” on one hand and admittedly “soft thinking” on the other (Wagner and Zeckhauser, 2012). As Walter Lippmann (1922, p. 273) famously wrote, people respond not to an objective reality but rather to the “pictures in their heads,” a metaphor that seems particularly well suited to issues where there is an obvious disconnect between scientific understanding and mass competence. As Levendusky (2010) admits, consistency is “more about the power of party cues than the presence of ideological thinking in the electorate” (p. 126). Allowing political parties and other players to frame the debate over climate change, “opens the door to elite manipulation of mass behavior, a troubling implication to say the least” (Levendusky, 2010, p. 126; see also Kinder and Herzog, 1993; Sniderman and Theriault, 2004). The infamous Luntz memo, written in 2002 to help Republican candidates reassure voters that they were committed to preserving and protecting the environment, despite a platform of policies to the contrary, underscores the importance of language and reminds us that rhetoric, classically understood, is key to winning policy debates (Luntz Research Companies, 2002; McCright and Dunlap, 2000). 

Ocean studies prove warming causes extinction. 
Sify 10
Citing Ove Hoegh-Gulberg, Professor @ University of Queensland and Director of the Global Change Institute AND Citing John Bruno, Associate Professor of Marine Science @ UNC (Sify News, “Could unbridled climate changes lead to human extinction?,” June 19th, http://www.sify.com/news/could-unbridled-climate-changes-lead-to-human-extinction-news-international-kgtrOhdaahc.html

Sydney: Scientists have sounded alarm bells about how growing concentrations of greenhouse gases are driving irreversible and dramatic changes in the way the oceans function, providing evidence that humankind could well be on the way to the next great extinction.  The findings of the comprehensive report: 'The impact of climate change on the world's marine ecosystems' emerged from a synthesis of recent research on the world's oceans, carried out by two of the world's leading marine scientists.  One of the authors of the report is Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, professor at The University of Queensland and the director of its Global Change Institute (GCI).  'We may see sudden, unexpected changes that have serious ramifications for the overall well-being of humans, including the capacity of the planet to support people. This is further evidence that we are well on the way to the next great extinction event,' says Hoegh-Guldberg.  'The findings have enormous implications for mankind, particularly if the trend continues. The earth's ocean, which produces half of the oxygen we breathe and absorbs 30 per cent of human-generated carbon dioxide, is equivalent to its heart and lungs. This study shows worrying signs of ill-health. It's as if the earth has been smoking two packs of cigarettes a day!,' he added.  'We are entering a period in which the ocean services upon which humanity depends are undergoing massive change and in some cases beginning to fail', he added. 

*Existential risk outweighs every other impact by orders of magnitude because of the lost potential for future generations.
 Bostrom 11
Nick Bostrom (Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford Martin School and Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford), “THE CONCEPT OF EXISTENTIAL RISK”, 2011 http://www.existential-risk.org/concept.html

Even if we use the most conservative of these estimates, which entirely ignores the possibility of space colonization and software minds, we find that the expected loss of an existential catastrophe is greater than the value of 1018 human lives.  This implies that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one millionth of one percentage point is at least ten times the value of a billion human lives.  The more technologically comprehensive estimate of 1054 human-brain-emulation subjective life-years (or 1052 lives of ordinary length) makes the same point even more starkly.  Even if we give this allegedly lower bound on the cumulative output potential of a technologically mature civilization a mere 1 chance of being correct, we find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives.

Moral uncertainty is high now, but there’s room for improvement.
Parfit 84
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). P. 453.

Some people believe that there cannot be progress in Ethics, since everything has been already said. Like Rawls and Nagel, I believe the opposite. How many people have made Non-Religious Ethics their life's work? Before the recent past, very few. In most civilizations, most people have believed in the existence of a God, or of several gods. A large minority were in fact Atheists, whatever they pretended. But, before the recent past, very few Atheists made Ethics their life’s work. Buddha may be among this few, as may Confucius, and a few Ancient Greeks and Romans. After more than a thousand years, there were a few more between the Sixteenth and Twentieth centuries. Hume was an atheist who made Ethics part of his life's work. Sidgwick was another. After Sidgwick, there were several atheists who were professional moral philosophers. But most of these did not do Ethics. They did Meta-Ethics. They did not ask which outcomes would be good or bad, or which acts would be right or wrong. They asked, and wrote about, only the meaning of moral language, and the question of objectivity. Non-Religious Ethics has been systematically studied, by many people, only since the 1960s. Compared with the other sciences, Non-Religious Ethics is the youngest and the least advanced.

Adopt a parliamentary model to account for moral uncertainty. This entails minimizing existential risks.
 Bostrom 9
Bostrom, Nick (Existentialist of a different sort). “Moral uncertainty – toward a solution?” 1 January 2009. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/moral-uncertainty-towards-a-solution.html 

It seems people are overconfident about their moral beliefs.  But how should one reason and act if one acknowledges that one is uncertain about morality – not just applied ethics but fundamental moral issues? if you don't know which moral theory is correct?
It doesn't seem you can’t simply plug your uncertainty into expected utility decision theory and crank the wheel; because many moral theories state that you should not always maximize expected utility.
Even if we limit consideration to consequentialist theories, it still is hard to see how to combine them in the standard decision theoretic framework.  For example, suppose you give X probability to total utilitarianism and (100-X) to average utilitarianism.  Now an action might add 5 utils to total happiness and decrease average happiness by 2 utils.  (This could happen, e.g. if you create a new happy person that is less happy than the people who already existed.)  Now what do you do, for different values of X?
The problem gets even more complicated if we consider not only consequentialist theories but also deontological theories, contractarian theories, virtue ethics, etc.  We might even throw various meta-ethical theories into the stew: error theory, relativism, etc.
I'm working on a paper on this together with my colleague Toby Ord.  We have some arguments against a few possible "solutions" that we think don't work.  On the positive side we have some tricks that work for a few special cases.  But beyond that, the best we have managed so far is a kind of metaphor, which we don't think is literally and exactly correct, and it is a bit under-determined, but it seems to get things roughly right and it might point in the right direction:
The Parliamentary Model.  Suppose that you have a set of mutually exclusive moral theories, and that you assign each of these some probability.  Now imagine that each of these theories gets to send some number of delegates to The Parliament.  The number of delegates each theory gets to send is proportional to the probability of the theory.  Then the delegates bargain with one another for support on various issues; and the Parliament reaches a decision by the delegates voting.  What you should do is act according to the decisions of this imaginary Parliament.  (Actually, we use an extra trick here: we imagine that the delegates act as if the Parliament's decision were a stochastic variable such that the probability of the Parliament taking action A is proportional to the fraction of votes for A.  This has the effect of eliminating the artificial 50 threshold that otherwise gives a majority bloc absolute power.  Yet – unbeknownst to the delegates – the Parliament always takes whatever action got the most votes: this way we avoid paying the cost of the randomization!)
The idea here is that moral theories get more influence the more probable they are; yet even a relatively weak theory can still get its way on some issues that the theory think are extremely important by sacrificing its influence on other issues that other theories deem more important.  For example, suppose you assign 10 probability to total utilitarianism and 90 to moral egoism (just to illustrate the principle).  Then the Parliament would mostly take actions that maximize egoistic satisfaction; however it would make some concessions to utilitarianism on issues that utilitarianism thinks is especially important.  In this example, the person might donate some portion of their income to existential risks research and otherwise live completely selfishly.
I think there might be wisdom in this model.  It avoids the dangerous and unstable extremism that would result from letting one’s current favorite moral theory completely dictate action, while still allowing the aggressive pursuit of some non-commonsensical high-leverage strategies so long as they don’t infringe too much on what other major moral theories deem centrally important.

I don’t need to win that weighing values is possible. Extinction precludes all values, so it is wrong under any moral code
 Seeley 86
Robert A., Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, The Handbook of Non-Violence, p. 269-70

In moral reasoning prediction of consequences is nearly always impossible. One balances the risks of an action against its benefits; one also considers what known damage the action would do. Thus a surgeon in deciding whether to perform an operation weighs the known effects (the loss of some nerve function, for example) and risks (death) against the benefits, and weighs also the risks and benefits of not performing surgery. Morally, however, human extinction is unlike any other risk. No conceivable human good could be worth the extinction of the race, for in order to be a human good it must be experienced by human beings. Thus extinction is one result we dare not-may not-risk. Though not conclusively established, the risk of extinction is real enough to make nuclear war utterly impermissible under any sane moral code.

No theory is so absolute that extinction is irrelevant. Even deon has a threshold. 
Korsgaard 02
Christine M. Korsgaard (Professor of Philosophy at Harvard). Internalism and the Sources of Normativity. Constructions of Practical Reason: Interviews on Moral and Political Philosophy, edited by Herlinde Pauer-Studer (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2002) http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~korsgaar/CPR.CMK.Interview.pdf

But actions are also events in the world (or correspond to events in the world, at least), and they too have consequences. There are a number of different ways in which one can deal with worries about what happens to the consequences in Kant’s ethical theory. It is worth pointing out that Kant himself not only did not ignore the consequences, but took the fact that good actions can have bad effects as the starting point for his religious philosophy. In his religious thought, Kant was concerned with the question how the moral agent has to envision the world, how he has to think of its metaphysics in order to cope with the fact that the actions morality demands may have terrible effects that we never intended, or may simply fail to have good ones.  I myself see the development of what Rawls has called “nonideal theory” to be the right way of taking care of a certain class of cases, in which the consequences of doing the right thing just seem too appalling for us to simply wash our hands of. But I do not want to say that just having bad consequences is enough to put an action into the realm of nonideal theory. I think there is a range of bad consequences that a decent person has to be prepared to live with, out of respect for other people’s right to manage their own lives and actions, and to contribute to shared decisions. But I also think that there are cases where our actions go wrong in such a way that they turn out in a sense not to be the actions we intended to do, or to instantiate the values we meant them to instantiate. I think that some of these cases can be dealt with by introducing the kind of double-level structure into moral philosophy that I have described in the essay on “The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing with Evil.” 3 But I also think there are cases that cannot be domesticated even in this way, cases in which, to put it paradoxically, the good person will do something “wrong.” I have written about that sort of case too, in “Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Kant on the Right to Revolution.” 4 

Infinite values don’t paralyze calculation. Lauwers and Vallentyne 04
Luc Lauwers (Center for Economic Studies, K.U.Leuven) Peter Vallentyne (Department of Philosophy, University of Missouri-Columbia). “Infinite Utilitarianism: More Is Always Better*.” Economics and Philosophy 20 (2004): 307-330.

Zero Independence holds that the ranking of two worlds is determined by the pattern of differences in local value. This, we claim, is highly plausible in the context of finitely additive value theories. In the finite case, finitely additive value theories always satisfy Zero Independence. Although they typically get expressed as judging a world as at least as good as another (having the same locations) if and only if its total value is at least as great, the reference to the total is not needed. An equivalent statement is that one world as at least as good as the second if and only if the sum of the differences in value is at least as great as zero. Only the pattern of differences matters. Even in the infinite case, Zero Independence is “partially” implied by Sum and Loose Pareto. Sum ranks U as at least as good as V if and only if Sum ranks U-V as at least as good as its zero world. Moreover, if two worlds U and V satisfy the antecedent clause of Loose Pareto, then Loose Pareto ranks U as at least as good as V if and only if it ranks U-V above its zero world. Zero Independence is thus, we claim, highly plausible for finitely additive theories.
Zero Independence is equivalent to a condition in social choice theory known as Translation Scale Invariance when it is restricted to the case where locations are the same.
See, for example, Bossert and Weymark (forthcoming 2003).
 This latter condition holds that interlocational comparisons of zero points are irrelevant to the ranking of worlds. The zero point for value at each location, that is, can be set independently of how it is set for other locations (although, of course, when comparing two worlds, the zero point used for a given location in one world must also be used for that location in the second world). For example, if a location has values of 10 in world U and 5 in world V, both measured on the basis of some particular zero point (the same for both worlds), those values could be changed to 7 and 2 (by making the zero point 3 units higher for that location), and this, according to Translation Scale Invariance, would not alter how the two worlds are ranked.
Zero Independence is equivalent to Translation Scale Invariance (restricted to the case where locations are the same), since any change in the zero points for the locations in worlds U and V can, for some W, be represented by U+W and V+W. (For example, if there are just two people, and the first person’s zero point is decreased by two units, and the second person’s zero point is increased by one unit, then the resulting two representations of the value of U and V are simply U+W and V+W, where W is 2,-1.) Zero Independence and Translation Scale Invariance thus each hold that U ? V if and only if U+W ? V+W.
Translation Scale Invariance (and hence, Zero Independence) is highly plausible for finitely additive value theories. (Recall that our goal is to defend a particular extension of finite additivity, not to defend finite additivity against non-additive theories.) If there is no natural zero point that separates positive from negative value (if there is just more or less value with no natural separating point), then any particular zero point is arbitrary (not representing a real aspect of value). In this case, interlocational comparisons of zero-points are uncontroversially irrelevant. If, on the other hand, there is a natural zero for value, it is still plausible for finitely additive value theories to hold that it is irrelevant for ranking worlds. What matters (e.g., from a utilitarian perspective), as argued above, are the differences in value at each location between two worlds—not the absolute level of values at locations. No interlocational comparison of zero points is needed for this purpose.

Cost-benefit analysis is feasible. Ignore any util calc indicts.Hardin 90
Hardin, Russell (Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences @ NYU). May 1990. Morality within the Limits of Reason. University Of Chicago Press. pp. 4. ISBN 978-0226316208.

One of the cuter charges against utilitarianism is that it is irrational in the following sense. If I take the time to calculate the consequences of various courses of action before me, then I will ipso facto have chosen the course of action to take, namely, to sit and calculate, because while I am calculating the other courses of action will cease to be open to me. It should embarrass philosophers that they have ever taken this objection seriously. Parallel considerations in other realms are dismissed with eminently good sense. Lord Devlin notes, “If the reasonable man ‘worked to rule’ by perusing to the point of comprehension every form he was handed, the commercial and administrative life of the country would creep to a standstill.” James March and Herbert Simon escape the quandary of unending calculation by noting that often we satisfice, we do not maximize: we stop calculating and considering when we find a merely adequate choice of action. When, in principle, one cannot know what is the best choice, one can nevertheless be sure that sitting and calculating is not the best choice. But, one may ask, How do you know that another ten minutes of calculation would not have produced a better choice? And one can only answer, You do not. At some point the quarrel begins to sound adolescent. It is ironic that the point of the quarrel is almost never at issue in practice (as Devlin implies, we are almost all too reasonable in practice to bring the world to a standstill) but only in the principled discussions of academics.

Ignore permissibility and presumption because moral uncertainty means we’ll always have a non-zero credence in the existence of morality, so there’s always a risk of offense in favor of one action.

The standard is maximizing happiness.

Revisionary intuitionism is true and leads to util.

Yudkowsky 8
Eliezer Yudkowsky (research fellow of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute; he also writes Harry Potter fan fiction). “The ‘Intuitions’ Behind ‘Utilitarianism.’” 28 January 2008. LessWrong. http://lesswrong.com/lw/n9/the_intuitions_behind_utilitarianism/

I haven't said much about metaethics - the nature of morality - because that has a forward dependency on a discussion of the Mind Projection Fallacy that I haven't gotten to yet. I used to be very confused about metaethics. After my confusion finally cleared up, I did a postmortem on my previous thoughts. I found that my object-level moral reasoning had been valuable and my meta-level moral reasoning had been worse than useless. And this appears to be a general syndrome - people do much better when discussing whether torture is good or bad than when they discuss the meaning of "good" and "bad". Thus, I deem it prudent to keep moral discussions on the object level wherever I possibly can. Occasionally people object to any discussion of morality on the grounds that morality doesn't exist, and in lieu of jumping over the forward dependency to explain that "exist" is not the right term to use here, I generally say, "But what do you do anyway?" and take the discussion back down to the object level. Paul Gowder, though, has pointed out that both the idea of choosing a googolplex dust specks in a googolplex eyes over 50 years of torture for one person, and the idea of "utilitarianism", depend on "intuition". He says I've argued that the two are not compatible, but charges me with failing to argue for the utilitarian intuitions that I appeal to. Now "intuition" is not how I would describe the computations that underlie human morality and distinguish us, as moralists, from an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness and/or a rock. But I am okay with using the word "intuition" as a term of art, bearing in mind that "intuition" in this sense is not to be contrasted to reason, but is, rather, the cognitive building block out of which both long verbal arguments and fast perceptual arguments are constructed. I see the project of morality as a project of renormalizing intuition. We have intuitions about things that seem desirable or undesirable, intuitions about actions that are right or wrong, intuitions about how to resolve conflicting intuitions, intuitions about how to systematize specific intuitions into general principles. Delete all the intuitions, and you aren't left with an ideal philosopher of perfect emptiness, you're left with a rock. Keep all your specific intuitions and refuse to build upon the reflective ones, and you aren't left with an ideal philosopher of perfect spontaneity and genuineness, you're left with a grunting caveperson running in circles, due to cyclical preferences and similar inconsistencies. "Intuition", as a term of art, is not a curse word when it comes to morality - there is nothing else to argue from. Even modus ponens is an "intuition" in this sense - it's just that modus ponens still seems like a good idea after being formalized, reflected on, extrapolated out to see if it has sensible consequences, etcetera. So that is "intuition". However, Gowder did not say what he meant by "utilitarianism". Does utilitarianism say... That right actions are strictly determined by good consequences? That praiseworthy actions depend on justifiable expectations of good consequences? That probabilities of consequences should normatively be discounted by their probability, so that a 50 probability of something bad should weigh exactly half as much in our tradeoffs? That virtuous actions always correspond to maximizing expected utility under some utility function? That two harmful events are worse than one? That two independent occurrences of a harm (not to the same person, not interacting with each other) are exactly twice as bad as one? That for any two harms A and B, with A much worse than B, there exists some tiny probability such that gambling on this probability of A is preferable to a certainty of B? If you say that I advocate something, or that my argument depends on something, and that it is wrong, do please specify what this thingy is... anyway, I accept 3, 5, 6, and 7, but not 4; I am not sure about the phrasing of 1; and 2 is true, I guess, but phrased in a rather solipsistic and selfish fashion: you should not worry about being praiseworthy. Now, what are the "intuitions" upon which my "utilitarianism" depends? This is a deepish sort of topic, but I'll take a quick stab at it. First of all, it's not just that someone presented me with a list of statements like those above, and I decided which ones sounded "intuitive". Among other things, if you try to violate "utilitarianism", you run into paradoxes, contradictions, circular preferences, and other things that aren't symptoms of moral wrongness so much as moral incoherence. After you think about moral problems for a while, and also find new truths about the world, and even discover disturbing facts about how you yourself work, you often end up with different moral opinions than when you started out. This does not quite define moral progress, but it is how we experience moral progress. As part of my experienced moral progress, I've drawn a conceptual separation between questions of type Where should we go? and questions of type How should we get there? (Could that be what Gowder means by saying I'm "utilitarian"?) The question of where a road goes - where it leads - you can answer by traveling the road and finding out. If you have a false belief about where the road leads, this falsity can be destroyed by the truth in a very direct and straightforward manner. When it comes to wanting to go to a particular place, this want is not entirely immune from the destructive powers of truth. You could go there and find that you regret it afterward (which does not define moral error, but is how we experience moral error). But, even so, wanting to be in a particular place seems worth distinguishing from wanting to take a particular road to a particular place. Our intuitions about where to go are arguable enough, but our intuitions about how to get there are frankly messed up. After the two hundred and eighty-seventh research study showing that people will chop their own feet off if you frame the problem the wrong way, you start to distrust first impressions. When you've read enough research on scope insensitivity - people will pay only 28 more to protect all 57 wilderness areas in Ontario than one area, people will pay the same amount to save 50,000 lives as 5,000 lives... that sort of thing... Well, the worst case of scope insensitivity I've ever heard of was described here by Slovic: Other recent research shows similar results. Two Israeli psychologists asked people to contribute to a costly life-saving treatment. They could offer that contribution to a group of eight sick children, or to an individual child selected from the group. The target amount needed to save the child (or children) was the same in both cases. Contributions to individual group members far outweighed the contributions to the entire group. There's other research along similar lines, but I'm just presenting one example, 'cause, y'know, eight examples would probably have less impact. If you know the general experimental paradigm, then the reason for the above behavior is pretty obvious - focusing your attention on a single child creates more emotional arousal than trying to distribute attention around eight children simultaneously. So people are willing to pay more to help one child than to help eight. Now, you could look at this intuition, and think it was revealing some kind of incredibly deep moral truth which shows that one child's good fortune is somehow devalued by the other children's good fortune. But what about the billions of other children in the world? Why isn't it a bad idea to help this one child, when that causes the value of all the other children to go down? How can it be significantly better to have 1,329,342,410 happy children than 1,329,342,409, but then somewhat worse to have seven more at 1,329,342,417? Or you could look at that and say: "The intuition is wrong: the brain can't successfully multiply by eight and get a larger quantity than it started with. But it ought to, normatively speaking." And once you realize that the brain can't multiply by eight, then the other cases of scope neglect stop seeming to reveal some fundamental truth about 50,000 lives being worth just the same effort as 5,000 lives, or whatever. You don't get the impression you're looking at the revelation of a deep moral truth about nonagglomerative utilities. It's just that the brain doesn't goddamn multiply. Quantities get thrown out the window. If you have $100 to spend, and you spend $20 each on each of 5 efforts to save 5,000 lives, you will do worse than if you spend $100 on a single effort to save 50,000 lives. Likewise if such choices are made by 10 different people, rather than the same person. As soon as you start believing that it is better to save 50,000 lives than 25,000 lives, that simple preference of final destinations has implications for the choice of paths, when you consider five different events that save 5,000 lives. (It is a general principle that Bayesians see no difference between the long-run answer and the short-run answer; you never get two different answers from computing the same question two different ways. But the long run is a helpful intuition pump, so I am talking about it anyway.) The aggregative valuation strategy of "shut up and multiply" arises from the simple preference to have more of something - to save as many lives as possible - when you have to describe general principles for choosing more than once, acting more than once, planning at more than one time. Aggregation also arises from claiming that the local choice to save one life doesn't depend on how many lives already exist, far away on the other side of the planet, or far away on the other side of the universe. Three lives are one and one and one. No matter how many billions are doing better, or doing worse. 3 = 1 + 1 + 1, no matter what other quantities you add to both sides of the equation. And if you add another life you get 4 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1. That's aggregation. When you've read enough heuristics and biases research, and enough coherence and uniqueness proofs for Bayesian probabilities and expected utility, and you've seen the "Dutch book" and "money pump" effects that penalize trying to handle uncertain outcomes any other way, then you don't see the preference reversals in the Allais Paradox as revealing some incredibly deep moral truth about the intrinsic value of certainty. It just goes to show that the brain doesn't goddamn multiply. The primitive, perceptual intuitions that make a choice "feel good" don't handle probabilistic pathways through time very skillfully, especially when the probabilities have been expressed symbolically rather than experienced as a frequency. So you reflect, devise more trustworthy logics, and think it through in words. When you see people insisting that no amount of money whatsoever is worth a single human life, and then driving an extra mile to save $10; or when you see people insisting that no amount of money is worth a decrement of health, and then choosing the cheapest health insurance available; then you don't think that their protestations reveal some deep truth about incommensurable utilities. Part of it, clearly, is that primitive intuitions don't successfully diminish the emotional impact of symbols standing for small quantities - anything you talk about seems like "an amount worth considering". And part of it has to do with preferring unconditional social rules to conditional social rules. Conditional rules seem weaker, seem more subject to manipulation. If there's any loophole that lets the government legally commit torture, then the government will drive a truck through that loophole. So it seems like there should be an unconditional social injunction against preferring money to life, and no "but" following it. Not even "but a thousand dollars isn't worth a 0.0000000001 probability of saving a life". Though the latter choice, of course, is revealed every time we sneeze without calling a doctor. The rhetoric of sacredness gets bonus points for seeming to express an unlimited commitment, an unconditional refusal that signals trustworthiness and refusal to compromise. So you conclude that moral rhetoric espouses qualitative distinctions, because espousing a quantitative tradeoff would sound like you were plotting to defect. On such occasions, people vigorously want to throw quantities out the window, and they get upset if you try to bring quantities back in, because quantities sound like conditions that would weaken the rule. But you don't conclude that there are actually two tiers of utility with lexical ordering. You don't conclude that there is actually an infinitely sharp moral gradient, some atom that moves a Planck distance (in our continuous physical universe) and sends a utility from 0 to infinity. You don't conclude that utilities must be expressed using hyper-real numbers. Because the lower tier would simply vanish in any equation. It would never be worth the tiniest effort to recalculate for it. All decisions would be determined by the upper tier, and all thought spent thinking about the upper tier only, if the upper tier genuinely had lexical priority. As Peter Norvig once pointed out, if Asimov's robots had strict priority for the First Law of Robotics ("A robot shall not harm a human being, nor through inaction allow a human being to come to harm") then no robot's behavior would ever show any sign of the other two Laws; there would always be some tiny First Law factor that would be sufficient to determine the decision. Whatever value is worth thinking about at all, must be worth trading off against all other values worth thinking about, because thought itself is a limited resource that must be traded off. When you reveal a value, you reveal a utility. I don't say that morality should always be simple. I've already said that the meaning of music is more than happiness alone, more than just a pleasure center lighting up. I would rather see music composed by people than by nonsentient machine learning algorithms, so that someone should have the joy of composition; I care about the journey, as well as the destination. And I am ready to hear if you tell me that the value of music is deeper, and involves more complications, than I realize - that the valuation of this one event is more complex than I know.  But that's for one event. When it comes to multiplying by quantities and probabilities, complication is to be avoided - at least if you care more about the destination than the journey. When you've reflected on enough intuitions, and corrected enough absurdities, you start to see a common denominator, a meta-principle at work, which one might phrase as "Shut up and multiply." Where music is concerned, I care about the journey. When lives are at stake, I shut up and multiply. It is more important that lives be saved, than that we conform to any particular ritual in saving them. And the optimal path to that destination is governed by laws that are simple, because they are math. And that's why I'm a utilitarian - at least when I am doing something that is overwhelmingly more important than my own feelings about it - which is most of the time, because there are not many utilitarians, and many things left undone.

There are eight additional warrants.

First is doxastic freedom. 

Belief formation is not voluntary. We have no freedom over our long-term beliefs. Alston 89
William P. Alston. “The Deontological Conception of Epistemic Justification.” Epistemic Justification: Essays in the Theory of Knowledge, 1989. http://www.ditext.com/alston/deontological.html

Let's turn now to a critical examination of the basic control thesis, the thesis that one can take up at will whatever prepositional attitude one chooses. Those who have attacked this view are divided between those who hold that believing at will is logically impossible and those who hold that it is only psychologically impossible, a capacity that we in fact lack though one we conceivably could have had.16 I cannot see any sufficient reasons for the stronger claim, and so I shall merely contend that we are not so constituted as to be able to take up propositional attitudes at will. My argument for this, if it can be called that, simply consists in asking you to consider whether you have any such powers. Can you, at this moment, start to believe that the United States is still a colony of Great Britain, just by deciding to do so? If you find it too incredible that you should be sufficiently motivated to try to believe this, suppose that someone offers you $500,000,000 to believe it, and you are much more interested in the money than in believing the truth. Could you do what it takes to get that reward? Remember that we are speaking about believing at will. No doubt, there are things you could do that would increase the probability of your coming to believe this, but that will be discussed later. Can you switch propositional attitudes toward that proposition just by deciding to do so? It seems clear to me that I have no such power. Volitions, decisions, or choosings don't hook up with anything in the way of propositional attitude inauguration, just as they don't hook up with the secretion of gastric juices or cell metabolism. There could conceivably be individual differences in this regard. Some people can move their ears at will, while most of us cannot. However, I very much doubt that any human beings are endowed with the power of taking on propositional attitudes at will. The temptation to suppose otherwise may stem from conflating that power with others that we undoubtedly do have but that are clearly distinct. If I were to set out to bring myself into a state of belief that p, just by an act of will, I might assert that p with an expression of conviction, or dwell favorably on the idea that p, or imagine a sentence expressing p emblazoned in the heavens with an angelic chorus in the background intoning the Kyrie of Mozart's Coronation Mass. All this I can do at will, but none of this amounts to taking on a belief that p. It is all show, an elaborate pretence of believing. Having gone through all this, my doxastic attitudes will remain just as they were before; or if there is some change, it will be a result of these gyrations. We should not suppose that our inability to believe at will is restricted to propositions that are obviously false. The inability also extends, at least, to those that are obviously true. A few pages back we made the point that voluntary control attaches to contrary pairs, or to more complex arrays of alternatives. If the sphere of my effective voluntary control does not extend both to A and to not-A, then it attaches to neither. If I don't have the power to choose between A and not-A, then we are without sufficient reason to say that I did A at will, rather than just doing A, accompanied by a volition. It is even more obvious, if possible, that responsibility, obligation, and their kindred attach to doing A only if the agent has an effective choice between doing and not doing A. If I would still have done A whatever I willed, chose, or preferred, I can hardly be blamed for doing it. Thus, even if I willingly, or not unwillingly, form, for instance, perceptual beliefs in the way I do, it by no means follows that I form those beliefs at will, or that I have voluntary control over such belief formation, or that I can be held responsible or blameworthy for doing so. It would have to be true that I have effective voluntary control over whether I do or do not believe that the tree has leaves on it when I see a tree with leaves on it just before me in broad daylight with my eyesight working perfectly. And it is perfectly clear that in this situation I have no power at all to refrain from that belief. And so with everything else that seems perfectly obvious to us. We have just as little voluntary control over ordinary belief formed by introspection, memory, and simple uncontroversial inferences. 

Doxastic unfreedom undermines deontology and justifies util. 
Petersen 11
Steve Petersen (Niagara University). “Utilitarian Epistemology.” February 10th, 2011. http://stevepetersen.net/professional/petersen-utilitarian-epistemology.pdf

These problems should sound like special cases of more general problems in the intersection of action theory and normative ethics. Is responsible choice in intention what is essential to positive evaluation? Is there such a thing as a choice for which we can be (truly) responsible in the ?rst place? The Kantian deontologist must answer both of these positively, but the utilitarian need not. This is especially good for the epistemic utilitarian, since the conceptual coherence of free will faces tougher challenges than usual at the doxastic level.14 Traditional libertarian views will ascribe some separate form of causation to agents from the natural causation to which we are accustomed, and as applied in epistemology this mysterious causation would foreclose on any scienti?c account of how we form beliefs. It is far too early in the science side of the game for such foreclosures, and indeed given how far the science already has come, such foreclosures would look entirely arbitrary.15 It is possible a compatibilist version of doxastic voluntarism would be sufficient for Kantian epistemic responsibility, but compatibilism, too, has worse than usual problems at the cognitive level. If we explain epistemic agency in terms of causal processes, our inclination to epistemic blame is even more likely to balk than in the ordinary action cases. A compatibilist approach to epistemic agency will require a close look at the causal mechanisms at the sub-propositional level that underwrite the formation of belief. These are not likely to be susceptible to, say, a Frankfurt-type account of freedom, since it will make little sense in most cases to speak of the agents’ desires (of any order) with respect to such ?ne details of cognition.16 Again, at the level of normative ethics the utilitarian has a typical strategy for handling these problems—one that can be carried straightforwardly into the epistemic realm. Since utilitarian value does not depend on the formation of free intentions, the utilitarian can consistently deny the existence of any robust free will, including doxastic freedom. The utilitarian also must deny the existence of what we might call “thick” moral responsibility—the moral responsibility of the retributivist, who claims that it can be just to punish even when net consequences of such punishment are bad.17 To the utilitarian, punishment and reward are only justi?ed, as anything, by its impact on welfare. The utilitarian thus has what we might call a “thin” notion of moral responsibility. Roughly speaking, for a utilitarian to say someone is responsible for an outcome is just to say that the person houses the most appropriate place to apply change in order to bring about more future utility with respect to that outcome. When Squeaky is responsible for murder, this means that efforts to redress current and future such harms are best concentrated on her. Squeaky is not morally responsible in the thick sense for the act; she does not deserve punishment for its own sake. Nonetheless it can be just to subject her to isolation and rehabilitation for the sake of future consequences. To the extent we discover that Charlie caused Squeaky to murder, that is the extent to which we discover Charlie is the more effective place to apply such change, and thus in the utilitarian sense we attribute him more of the moral responsibility for the crime.18 

Second, reductionism.

Brain studies prove that there’s no such thing as personal identity.Parfit 84
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).

Some recent medical cases provide striking evidence in favour of the Reductionist View. Human beings have a lower brain and two upper hemispheres, which are connected by a bundle of fibres. In treating a few people with severe epilepsy, surgeons have cut these fibres. The aim was to reduce the severity of epileptic fits, by confining their causes to a single hemisphere. This aim was achieved. But the operations had another unintended consequence. The effect, in the words of one surgeon, was the creation of ‘two separate spheres of consciousness.’ This effect was revealed by various psychological tests. These made use of two facts. We control our right arms with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. And what is in the right halves of our visual fields we see with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. When someone’s hemispheres have been disconnected, psychologists can thus present to this person two different written questions in the two halves of his visual field, and can receive two different answers written by this person’s two hands.

In the absence of personal identity, only end states matter. Shoemaker 99
 Shoemaker, David (Dept of Philosophy, U Memphis). “Utilitarianism and Personal Identity.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 33: 183–199, 1999. http://www.csun.edu/~ds56723/jvipaper.pdf

Extreme reductionism might lend support to utilitarianism in the following way. Many people claim that we are justified in maximizing the good in our own lives, but not justified in maximizing the good across sets of lives, simply because each of us is a single, deeply unified person, unified by the further fact of identity, whereas there is no such corresponding unity across sets of lives. But if the only justification for the different treatment of individual lives and sets of lives is the further fact, and this fact is undermined by the truth of reductionism, then nothing justifies this different treatment. There are no deeply unified subjects of experience. What remains are merely the experiences themselves, and so any ethical theory distinguishing between individual lives and sets of lives is mistaken. If the deep, further fact is missing, then there are no unities. The morally significant units should then be the states people are in at particular times, and an ethical theory that focused on them and attempted to improve their quality, whatever their location, would be the most plausible. Utilitarianism is just such a theory.

Third, my standard controls the link to any practical reason or contract frameworks because rational agents would consent to a universal law to maximize utility to increase the chance of their own interests being satisfied.

Fourth, the ultimate human good is happiness. Darwish 9
“Rethinking Utilitarianism,” Bahaa Darwish (Qatar University). Teaching Ethics 10 (1):87-109 (2009). http://www.uvu.edu/ethics/seac/Darwish20-20Rethinking20Utilitarianism.pdf

Let’s start with knowledge. It is clear that those who value knowledge for its own sake (for instance, highly motivated professionals) find pleasure in both the pursuit and attainment of knowledge, however exhausted they become in either case. So, granted that knowledge, for them, is a value that has intrinsic worth in itself, and is thus sought for itself, it is a value that yields their pleasure or happiness. The same can be said about the other values. Let’s take autonomy in the sense expressed by Hooker as “control over one’s own life” as another example. Here one needs to say no more than that the mere fact that people seek autonomy explains the satisfaction or the pleasure autonomy brings. Those who value autonomy, thus seek it for itself, cannot feel happy when their decisions are not in their hands, or when they do not have control over their own life. In short, they cannot be happy otherwise. Moore, who explicitly differs from the classical utilitarians in holding that pleasure is not the sole good, 20 says that “the most valuable things… are pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects,” 21 which seems to mean that such things are valued for the pleasures and the enjoyment they bring. These examples clearly show that though these values have intrinsic worth, they bring or constitute our pleasure.  

Fifth, respect for human worth would justify util. Cummiskey 90
Cummiskey, David. Associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. “Kantian Consequentiaism.” Ethics 100 (April 1990), University of Chicago. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810

We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract “social entity.” It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive “overall social good.” Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that “to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has.” But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the principle that “rational nature exists as an end in itself”. Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have an equal value, then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many rational beings as possible. In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a non- value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kant’s normative theory is based on an unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have “dignity, that is, an unconditional and incomparable worth” that transcends any market value, but persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others. The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others.

Sixth, util is the only moral system available to policy-makers.  Goodin 90
Robert Goodin, fellow in philosophy, Australian National Defense University, THE UTILITARIAN RESPONSE, 1990, p. 141-2

My larger argument turns on the proposition that there is something special about the situation of public officials that makes utilitarianism more probable for them than private individuals. Before proceeding with the large argument, I must therefore say what it is that makes it so special about public officials and their situations that make it both more necessary and more desirable for them to adopt a more credible form of utilitarianism. Consider, first, the argument from necessity. Public officials are obliged to make their choices under uncertainty, and uncertainty of a very special sort at that. All choices – public and private alike – are made under some degree of uncertainty, of course. But in the nature of things, private individuals will usually have more complete information on the peculiarities of their own circumstances and on the ramifications that alternative possible choices might have for them. Public officials, in contrast, they are relatively poorly informed as to the effects that their choices will have on individuals, one by one. What they typically do know are generalities: averages and aggregates. They know what will happen most often to most people as a result of their various possible choices, but that is all. That is enough to allows public policy-makers to use the utilitarian calculus – assuming they want to use it at all – to chose general rules or conduct.

Seventh, conflicting moral side-constraints would paralyze state action, so states must use util to weigh deontological violations.

Eighth, there’s no act-omission distinction. Gewirth 82
Gewirth (Department of Philosophy, Univ. of Chicago) 82 Alan, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications pg 183

To be responsible for inflicting lethal harms, a person need not intend or desire to produce such harms, either as an end or a means. It is sufficient if the harms come about as an unintended but foreseeable and controllable effect of what he does. For since he knows or has good reasons to believe what actions or policies under his control will lead to the harms in question he can control whether the harms will occur, so that it is within his power to prevent or at least lessen the probability of their occurrence by ceasing to engage in these actions. Thus, just as all persons have the right to informed control, so far as possible, over the conditions relevant to their incurring cancer and other serious harms, so the causal and moral responsibility for inflicting cancer can be attributed to persons who have informed control over other persons’ suffering the lethal harms of cancer.

Ignore permissibility and presumption because moral uncertainty means we’ll always have a non-zero credence in the existence of morality, so there’s always a risk of offense in favor of one action.

?
Err aff on framework. Default to util absent a clear reason to reject it. Sinnot-Armstrong 11
Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, "Consequentialism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/consequentialism/.

Even if consequentialists can accommodate or explain away common moral intuitions, that might seem only to answer objections without yet giving any positive reason to accept consequentialism. However, most people begin with the presumption that we morally ought to make the world better when we can. The question then is only whether any moral constraints or moral options need to be added to the basic consequentialist factor in moral reasoning. (Kagan 1989, 1998) If no objection reveals any need for anything beyond consequences, then consequences alone seem to determine what is morally right or wrong, just as consequentialists claim

Tournament: Bronx | Round: Octas | Opponent: PV Peninsula Akhil Jalan | Judge: Turner, Wang, Holguin
Every agent must recognize freedom as a necessary good.

Gewirth 84
Alan Gewirth (UChi Prof) “THE ONTOLOGICAL BASIS OF NATURAL LAW: A CRITIQUE AND AN ALTERNATIVE.” 29 American Journal of Jurisprudence. 95. 1984. HeinOnline.

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 regards as good. Hence, he 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 rights to these conditions. For if he were to deny that he has these rights, then he would have to admit that it is permissible for other persons to remove from him the very conditions of freedom and well-being that, as an agent, he 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 have the same general characteristics of agency on which he must ground his 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 

Freedom requires non-domination. Libertarian non-interference alone fails to protect freedom.
Pettit 99
Pettit, Philip (Aussie bloke). Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford University Press, USA (September 30, 1999). 

Whether it is furthered by courtesy of constitutional provision, or in virtue of an equal distribution of relevant resources, it should be stressed that non-domination is itself a form of power. It represents a control that a person enjoys in relation to their own destiny and such control constitutes one familiar type of power: the power of the agent who can prevent various ills happening to them (see appendix to this chapter). Another way of stressing the power-involving aspect of nondomination, to return to a theme of the last chapter, is to emphasize that non-domination involves a sort of immunity or security against interference on an arbitrary basis, not the mere absence of such interference. Suppose that for a certain range of choices I happen to enjoy the absence of all interference by arbitrary powers in the actual world: no one with such a power gets in the way of my making my preferred choice, and no one of that kind would get in the way had I chosen differently among the relevant options. It is possible, consistently with this supposition, that the non-interference I enjoy is extremely insecure and that I am a relatively powerless individual. I may enjoy it only for the very contingent reason that while there are agents around who dominate me—agents with an arbitrary power of interference— it happens that they like me and leave me alone; or it happens that I am able to ingratiate myself with them and placate them as they become ill-disposed towards me; or it happens that I am cunning and manage to keep out of their way when trouble is brewing; or whatever. In such a world, the price of my liberty is not eternal vigilance but, as Gore Vidal once said, eternal discretion.

Thus, the standard is non-domination, defined as minimizing the capacity for arbitrary interference. 3 More reasons.

First, nondomination is the primary moral good.

Pettit 99
Pettit, Philip (Professor at Princeton). Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford University Press, USA (September 30, 1999).

The first of the further benefits becomes visible when we reflect on a salient way in which arbitrary interference is worse than nonarbitrary. To suffer the reality or expectation of arbitrary interference is to suffer an extra malaise over and beyond that of having your choices intentionally curtailed. It is to have to endure a high level of uncertainty, since the arbitrary basis on which the interference occurs means that there is no predicting when it will strike. Such uncertainty makes planning much more difficult than it would be under a corresponding prospect of non-arbitrary interference. And, of course, it is also likely to produce a high level of anxiety. Freedom as non-domination requires us to reduce the capacities for arbitrary interference to which a person is exposed, while freedom as non-interference requires us to minimize the person's expectation of interference as such. But this means that, while the non-domination ideal would tend to require conditions where certainty is high, the non-interference ideal is consistent with a great loss on this front. It is quite possible that the maximal non-interference possible for someone will be available under an arrangement where that person has to suffer much uncertainty. But it is hardly conceivable that the same is true for the maximal non-domination that they might achieve. Imagine that we have a choice between leaving employers with a lot of power over employees, or men with a lot of power over women, and using state interference to reduce such power. Maximizing overall non-interference is perfectly compatible with taking the first option. While we do not guard against interference by the stronger under that option, we may not think that it is very likely to occur; and because we do not guard against interference by the stronger, we will count the absence of state interference as a great boon. Thus maximizing overall non-interference is perfectly compatible with forcing the individual employee or the individual woman to have to live with much uncertainty. What is true at the overall or aggregate level may also hold at the individual level. For related considerations may mean that maximizing the individual's own non-interference would require exposing them to a high level of uncertainty. Perhaps the recourse to the law would be so interventionist in their own lives and so ineffective in stopping interference by others that it would mean more interference, not less. Perhaps the way to maximize the person's expected non-interference is to leave them in subjection to others, then, in a position where they suffer much uncertainty. Their expectation of non-interference would be at a maximum, but at the maximal point envisaged the interference to which they are exposed would be the arbitrary sort that induces uncertainty: the sort that occasions anxiety and makes planning difficult. The project of increasing a person's freedom as non-domination could not tolerate this uncertainty, because it would baulk at accepting any degree of subjection to another. Devotees of freedom as nondomination emphasize the advantage of their ideal in this respect when they say that the unfree person is exposed to the inconstant, uncertain will of another and consequently suffers anxiety and wretchedness. 'Having always some unknown evil to fear, though it should never come, he has no perfect enjoyment of himself, or of any of the blessings of life' (Priestley 1993: 35). Their assumption is that if we try to further someone's freedom as non-domination then we will remove the spectre of such uncertainty. Maybe the person has to live by the standing rule of a constitution and a law, a rule that makes for a degree of coercion in their lives. But they do not have to live under constant fear of unpredictable interference, and so they can organize their affairs on a systematic basis and with a large measure of tranquillity. The second benefit associated with freedom as non-domination, and not with freedom as non-interference, becomes visible when we reflect on another way in which arbitrary interference is worse than non-arbitrary. To suffer the reality or expectation of arbitrary interference is not only to have to endure a high level of uncertainty. It is also to have to keep a weather eye on the powerful, anticipating what they will expect of you and trying to please them, or anticipating where they will be and trying to stay out of their way; it is to have strategic deference and anticipation forced upon you at every point. You can never sail on, unconcerned, in the pursuit of your own affairs; you have to navigate an area that is mined on all sides with dangers. Advancing someone's freedom as non-domination means reducing other people's capacities for arbitrary interference in their lives, and will reduce their need for strategic deference or anticipation, as it will reduce the level of uncertainty with which they have to live. But advancing someone's freedom as non-interference is not guaranteed to have this effect. For it may very well be that the best way to maximize someone's expectation of non-interference is to rely in good part on their native wit and cunning: to get them to look after their own freedom by forcing them to develop and exercise strategies of placating and anticipating the powerful. A world in which strategic flattery and avoidance is rampant—a world in which women become adept at placating their men folk, for example, or at not crossing their paths—may represent the best prospect for keeping interference as such at a minimum. Having to practise strategic deference and anticipation, however, like having to live with uncertainty, is a serious cost. For the strategic disposition imposed requires the agent to curtail their own choices: to tug the forelock at appropriate moments and, when that promises not to be enough, to keep out of sight. Such enforced self-denial, of course, does not represent a form of interference, even of arbitrary interference, for interference has to be intentionally perpetrated by another; that, indeed, is why the cause of freedom as non-interference can be promoted by an arrangement involving a lot of strategic deference and anticipation. But nonetheless it is clearly bad that people should have to resort to denying themselves various choices in order to achieve non-interference. And it is a clear advantage of the ideal of freedom as non-domination that in targeting arbitrary interference as the enemy, and in seeking to reduce the capacities of others to interfere arbitrarily in anyone's affairs, it presents a picture of the free life in which the need for strategy is minimized. The Third benefit associated with freedom as non-domination but not with freedom as non-interference is one that I have already highlighted in arguing that the fact that someone enjoys non-domination is likely to become a matter of common knowledge and to generate associated subjective and inter-subjective benefits. While someone's freedom as non-interference may be at a maximum in a situation where they have to recognize that they are vulnerable to the whim of another, and have an inferior social status to that other, the enjoyment of freedom as non-domination goes with the possibility of their seeing themselves as non-vulnerable in that way and as possessed of a comparable social standing with the other. They can look the other in the eye; they do not have to bow and scrape. That two people enjoy the same freedom as non-interference, that they even enjoy the same expectation of such freedom, is consistent with one of them, and only one of them, having the power to interfere in the life of the other. Consistently with possessing the power to interfere, the more powerful may have no interest in interfering; this may be because of indifference or preoccupation or devotion: it may even be because the less powerful people are good at keeping them happy or at keeping out of their way. Thus the powerful person may be as unlikely to interfere with others as the less powerful. But even if both parties enjoy equal non-interference, and an equal expectation of non-interference, they are likely to develop a shared awareness of the asymmetry of power, and indeed an awareness shared with others in the community: this was a major theme of the last chapter. And once it is a matter of common awareness that one of them is powerful enough to be able to interfere more or less arbitrarily in the life of the other, then that is going to affect their relative status. It is going to be a matter of common knowledge that the one is weaker than the other, vulnerable to the other, and to that extent subordinate to the other. Why should I be forced to think of myself in this way, it may be asked, if the other person is really no more likely to interfere with me than I with them? The answer takes us back to a consideration already mentioned in the last chapter. Seeing an option as an improbable choice for an agent, even as a vanishingly improbable choice, is different from seeing it as a choice that is not accessible to the agent: seeing it as a choice that is not within the agent's power. Thus the fact that another person is unlikely to interfere with me, just because they happen to have no interest in interfering, is consistent with their retaining access to the option of interfering with me. Now it is the attribution of accessible choices, not the attribution of probable choices, that determines how I and others view a person and, in particular, whether we view them as someone on whom I depend for enjoying non-interference (Pettit and Smith 1996). And so it is quite possible for me to be forced to think of myself as subordinate to someone who is no more likely to interfere with me than I am to interfere with them. More generally, it is possible for this way of thinking to be established as a matter of common recognition, so that my status, my standing in public perception, becomes that of a subordinate. Advancing someone's freedom as non-domination is bound to mean reducing this sort of subordination, as it is bound to mean reducing the uncertainty with which they have to live, and the strategy to which they have to have recourse. For while it is possible to enjoy the highest degree of non-interference available in a situation where you are subordinate to another, every increase in your non-domination is going to mean decreasing the subordination to which you are exposed. After all, increasing your non-domination means reducing the capacity of others for interfering with you on an arbitrary basis, and that means reducing their access to such interference. To sum up these reflections, then, freedom as non-domination may seem to do less well than freedom as non-interference in servicing unrestricted choice; after all, it is opposed only to arbitrary interference—specifically, to others having the capacity for such interference—not to interference as such. But freedom as non-domination does much better in three other respects, all of them of intuitively great importance. It promises to do better in delivering a person from uncertainty, and from the associated anxiety and inability to plan; from the need to exercise strategy with the powerful, having to defer to  them and anticipate their various moves; and from the subordination that goes with a common awareness that the person is exposed to the possibility of arbitrary interference by another: that there is another who can deploy such interference, even if they are not likely to do so. As against my line of argument so far, it may be said that those who espouse freedom as non-interference are not generally known for welcoming or even acknowledging the uncertainty, the strategy, and the subordination I have been documenting. How to explain this? The answer may be that those who espouse the ideal often take it for granted that it is best furthered by traditional, non-dominating institutions—say, by the institutions of the common law—that are most readily justified, as they were traditionally justified, by the desire to avoid arbitrariness. Thus what the people in question effectively embrace is not what they officially embrace: it is not freedom as noninterference, neat, but rather freedom as non-interference under the rule of such a common law.2 This constrained version of the non-interference ideal is close enough to the ideal of freedom as non-domination to make it seem that uncertainty, strategy, and subordination are ruled out. They are ruled out, it is true, in the forum where people's relations are effectively directed by the relevant legal injunctions. But the constrained ideal still falls short of freedom as non-domination, since it is consistent with allowing domination—and the attendant uncertainty, strategy, and subordination—within those spaces where the relevant legal injunction leaves people to other devices. Thus it is consistent, in a way that freedom as non-domination would not be, with domination occurring in the workplace or in the home or in any of a multitude of so-called private spaces. I do not think that anyone can be indifferent to the benefits that freedom as non-domination promises. To be able to live your life without uncertainty about the interference you will have to endure; to be able to live without having to stay on your toes in dealing with the powerful; and to be able to live without subordination to others: these are great and palpable goods and they make a powerful case for the instrumental attractions of freedom as non-domination. A primary good They make a case, indeed, not just for the instrumental attractions of the ideal but for its status, in John Rawls's (1971) phrase, as a primary good. A primary good is something that a person has instrumental reasons to want, no matter what else they want: something that promises results that are likely to appeal to them, no matter what they value and pursue. The considerations rehearsed so far show that advancing someone's freedom as non-domination is likely to help them escape from uncertainty, strategy, and subordination; certainly, it is more likely to do this than advancing their freedom as non-interference. But something stronger also holds true. Suppose we take steps to reduce a person's uncertainty about interference, to reduce their need for exercising a strategy of deference and anticipation with others, and to reduce the subordination associated with vulnerability. It is hard to see how we could take such steps without at the same time advancing their freedom as non-domination. Freedom as non-domination appears to be, not just a more or less sufficient instrument for promoting those effects, but a more or less necessarily associated factor. There is no promoting non-domination without promoting those effects; and there is no promoting those effects without promoting non-domination. This may not hold in every possible world, but it certainly seems to hold under plausible assumptions about how the actual world works. Given that freedom as non-domination is bound up in this way with the effects discussed, how could anyone fail to want it for themselves, or fail to recognize it as a value? Short of embracing some religiously or ideologically motivated doctrine of self-abasement, people will surely find their ends easier of attainment to the extent that they enjoy non-domination. Certainly they will find those ends easier of attainment if they are ends conceived and pursued under the pluralistic conditions that obtain in most developed democracies and, of course, in the international world at large. Freedom as non-domination is not just an instrumental good, then; it also enjoys the status, at least in relevant circumstances, of a primary good. This point is easily supported. For almost all the things that a person is likely to want, the pursuit of those things is going to be facilitated by their having an ability to make plans (Bratman 1987). But short of enjoying non-domination, the person's ability to make plans will be undermined by the sort of uncertainty we discussed. Hence, to the extent that it involves a reduction in uncertainty, non-domination has the firm attraction of a primary good. 

Second, nondomination comes first under util for state actors.
Pettit 99
Pettit, Philip (Professor at Princeton). Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford University Press, USA (September 30, 1999).

Republicanism is a consequentialist doctrine which assigns to government, in particular to governmental authorities, the task of promoting freedom as non-domination. But suppose that the authorities endorse this goal in a zealous, committed manner. Does that not raise the problem that they may seek in the name of the republican goal to breach the very forms that we, as system designers, think that the goal requires (Lyons 1982)? Does it not mean that they may often be motivated to take the law into their own hands—to dirty their hands (Coady 1993)—and to advance republican ends by non-republican means? It is often said that a utilitarian sheriff who is committed to promoting overall happiness might be required to frame an innocent person in order to avoid the worse consequences associated with a riot (McCloskey 1963). Is there not a parallel reason for thinking that republican officials who are committed to promoting overall nondomination will be subject to similar rule-breaking requirements? It would be a very serious problem if republicanism was morally infeasible in this way, for it would undermine the capacity of constitutional and institutional designers—ultimately it would undermine the capacity of a people—to plan for the effects they want to achieve. Whatever is to be said of the utilitarian goal of overall happiness, however, the republican goal of freedom as non-domination does not raise a serious problem of moral infeasibility (Braithwaite and Pettit 1990: 71-8). People enjoy freedom as non-domination to the extent that no other is in a position to interfere on an arbitrary basis in their lives. The zealous agents who break faith with an assigned brief in order to promote non-domination assume and achieve resources of arbitrary power, for they behave in a way that gives their own unchallenged judgement sway over others. And this assumption of resources affects, not just the non-domination of those affected in this or that case, but the non-domination of most of the society; zealous agents set themselves up over all, not just over some. If certain agents think that they can maximize non-domination by transgressing the obligations of their brief, then, they are almost certain to be mistaken. Whatever non-domination they hope to bring about by departing from their brief, it is unlikely to be greater than the massive domination they thereby perpetrate over the population in general. Against this, it may be objected that the sort of domination that official agents exercise over me and my like in virtue of covertly interfering with someone else is not itself harmful, so long as we remain unaware of the fact of being dominated. The agents may have reason to think, therefore, that it will be worth their while interfering if the chances of the interference becoming recognized are sufficiently small. I reply that no agent will ever be certain of not being caught out, and that the cost of being caught out is so enormous that, still, there is very unlikely to be a case for transgression sufficient to move a zealous agent. The cost of being caught out is that someone else will come to see that their lives are subject to the more or less arbitrary interference, not just of the agent in question, but of any other official agent: and, if someone else, then everyone else, since anyone who detects transgression is more than likely to make it public. What if the chance of being caught out is really very small indeed? Why shouldn't a zealous agent conclude that however great the cost of being apprehended, the improbability is such that he or she should bend the law in this case: bend the law, for example, as in covering up the offences of an important public personage, and seeking thereby to advance the interests of the country? There may be the very exceptional circumstances where zealotry is pardonable—pardonable and perhaps even commendable—but a very serious consideration argues against there being many. This is that the more unlikely it is that an agent will be apprehended, the clearer it will be to people at large that this case is an acid test of whether they are living under a proper rule of law or under the arbitrary sway of officials who put themselves, out of whatever high motives, above that law. Let apprehension be likely and people may well reckon that the errant official just nodded. Let apprehension be unlikely and they will all the more certainly think that the errant official typifies a general, dominating frame of mind. Short of catastrophic circumstances, then, there is unlikely to be any serious reason why a zealous agent should be tempted in the name of non-domination to break with the very rules of behaviour—the republican forms of government—that are designed to promote it. The considerations I have raised show that, given the power of official agents, and given their potential for domination, there is every reason why zealous agents should want to go out of their way to show people at large that there is no possibility of their taking the goal of nondomination into their own hands. There is every reason why they should look for institutional means of making it salient and credible that they are pre-committed to sticking with their brief, and to sticking with their brief even in cases where there is a prima facie case for zealous opportunism. There is every reason why they should want to make it salient and credible that their hands are tied: that they are agents with little or no independent discretion.

Util calculation is messy and leads to inaccurate decisions which turns all aff offense. Rules are more reliable. 
Chappell 5
Chappell 05 (Richard, PhD in Philosophy from Princeton, Philosophy, Et Cetera, http://www.philosophyetc.net/2005/06/indirect-utilitarianism.html)

Utilitarianism is a much maligned moral theory, in part because it's so easily abused. It's easy for people to misunderstand the theory, and use it, for example, to argue for totalitarianism. But of course utilitarianism properly understood recommends no such thing. In fact, it tends to support our common-sense moral intuitions. Strange as it may seem, utilitarianism recommends that we do not base our everyday moral decision-making on calculations of utility. Why is this? Well, utilitarianism says that we ought to do whatever would maximize utility. But attempting to reason in a utilitarian fashion tends to have disastrous consequences, and fails miserably to maximize utility. Therefore, we ought not to reason in a utilitarian manner. Instead, we should try to inculcate those dispositions and attitudes, and abide by those principles, that would tend to promote utility. That is, we should be honest, compassionate, loyal, trustworthy, averse to harming others, partial towards loved ones, and so forth. We should, in other words, be virtuous rather than scheming. J.L. Mackie (p.91) offers six utilitarian reasons for opposing "the direct use of utilitarian calculation as a practical working morality": 1. Shortage of time and energy will in general preclude such calculations. 2. Even if time and energy are available, the relevant information commonly is not. 3. An agent's judgment on particular issues is likely to be distorted by his own interests and special affections. 4. Even if he were intellectually able to determine the right choice, weakness of will would be likely to impair his putting of it into effect. 5. Even decisions that are right in themselves and actions based on them are liable to be misused as precedents, so that they will encourage and seem to legitimate wrong actions that are superficially similar to them. 6. And, human nature being what it is, a practical working morality must not be too demanding: it is worse than useless to set standards so high that there is no real chance that actions will even approximate to them. 

Third, Kantianism requires nondomination.
Ripstein 9
Arthur Ripstein. Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy. Harvard University Press. 2009.

The right to freedom as independence provides a model of interaction that reconciles the ability of separate persons to use their powers to pur- sue their own purposes. In so doing, it also provides a distinctive concepttion of the wrongs that interfere with this independence. Wrongdoing takes the form of domination. Both your right to independence and the violations of it can only be explicated by reference to the actions of others. Wrongs against your person are not outcomes that are bad for you which other people happen to cause. Unlike the familiar “harm principle” put forward by Mill, which focuses exclusively on out comes that can be characterized without reference to the acts that bring them about, the right to freedom focuses exclusively on the acts of others. It is not that somebody does something that causes something bad to happen to you; it is that somebody does something to you. The idea of freedom as nondomination has a distinguished history in political philosophy. Recent scholars have pointed out that Berlin’s dichotomy between negative and positive liberty leaves out a prominent idea of liberty, sometimes referred to as the “republican” or neo-Roman conception of liberty, according to which liberty consists in independence from others. These scholars argue that this conception was central to the political thought of the civic republicans of the Renaissance, who were centrally concerned with the dangers of despotism. On this reading, the early modern republicans did not object to despotism because it interfered with their negative or positive liberty (to use anachronistic terms they would not have recognized). A despot who was benevolent, or even prudent, might allow people, especially potentially powerful ones, opportunity to do what they wanted or be true to themselves. The objection was to the fact that it was up to the despot to decide, to his having the power, quite apart from the possibility that he would use it badly. Unless someone has a power, there is no danger of it being used badly, but the core concern of the civic republicans was the despot’s entitlement to use it, and the subjugation of his subjects that followed regardless of how it was used.18 Footnote 18. See generally Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), and Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). In “A Third Concept of Liberty,” Proceedings of the British Academy 117 (2002): 239, Skinner points out that Berlin’s idea of positive liberty is not an idea of self-mastery but of mastering yourself. Berlin is aware of this difference when he writes, “It is perfectly conceivable that a liberal-minded despot would allow his subjects a large mea sure of personal freedom.”19 Freedom as independence carries this same idea of independence further, to relations among citizens. It insists that everything that is wrong with being subject to the choice of a powerful ruler is also wrong with being subject to the choice of another private person. As a result, it can explain the nature of wrongdoing even when no harm ensues. One person is subject to another person’s choice; I use your means to advance purposes you have not set for yourself. Most familiar crimes are examples of one person interfering with the freedom of another by interfering with either her exercise of her powers or her ability to exercise them. They are small- scale versions of despotism or abuse of office.

Aff gets RVIs on I meets and counter-interps because
(a) 1AR timeskew means I can’t cover theory and still have a fair shot on substance.
(b) no risk theory would give neg a free source of no risk offense which allows him to moot the AC.

The neg must defend one unconditional advocacy. Conditionality is bad because it makes the neg a moving target which kills 1AR strategy. He’ll kick it if I cover it and extend it if I undercover it, meaning I have no strategic options. Also, it’s unreciprocal because I can’t kick the AC. 

Contention 1 is Social Exclusion

A. Status quo turnout de facto excludes the voice of the poor.
HLR 7
Harvard Law Review (no author). “The Case for Compulsory Voting in the United States.” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 121, No. 2 (December 2007), pp. 591-612
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40042668

There are serious questions about how legitimate a government is when the vast majority of citizens have not elected it.23 This concern goes beyond the question of whether or not low voter turnout affects substantive policy outcomes (which is unclear24). More fundamentally, there is a serious tension with the understanding "that within our constitutional tradition, democracy is prized because of the value of collective self-governance,"25 which is as much about procedure as it is about substance.26 Indeed, the level of voter turnout as a percentage of eligible voters in many recent elections would not even be sufficient to constitute a quorum for some of the most important American political institutions.27 But the most serious questions arise not from the sheer number of citizens whose voices are not counted,28 but from the fact that certain groups are uriderrepresented.29 Partly because of disparities in turnout rates by demographic categories, the center of political gravity has shifted toward the wealthiest white Americans.30 Government may not be giving adequate consideration to the priorities of the poor or of racial minorities.31 Many would dismiss these concerns about underrepresentation by pointing out that no one is denying the rights of nonwhites or the poor to vote; rather, individuals in those demographic groups are simply choosing not to exercise their rights. If they were sufficiently dissatisfied with the government, then presumably they would change their minds and vote. Given the rational basis for nonvoting discussed above, however, individual dissatisfaction is hardly guaranteed to encourage voting. Even a dissatisfied individual will be unlikely to vote if she realizes that her vote has a negligible chance of affecting the outcome of an election. Thus, even among relatively distinct demographic groups, a majority of whose members may be seriously dissatisfied with the national political leadership, collective action problems pose a substantial obstacle to any attempts to increase voter turnout.

Only CV increases turnout among the least well-off. Sanctions are key.

Hill and Louth 4
Dr. Lisa Hill and Jonathon Louth (Discipline of Politics, School of History and Politics, University of Adelaide). “Compulsory Voting Laws and Turnout: Efficacy and Appropriateness.” Refereed paper presented to the Australasian Political Studies Association Conference, University of Adelaide. 29 September - 1 October 2004

Compulsory voting laws appear to act as the most effective surrogate for the social norm of voting (Hasen, 1996, 2170; Hill, 2000, 2004). Making voting mandatory has the best chance of raising turnout because the most politically excluded members of society are probably beyond the reach of piecemeal ‘ergonomic’ and technical reforms such as those canvassed above. Many habitual abstainers appear to be so disconnected from the political system that only a radical reform like compulsory voting seems capable of drawing them back into civic life. Further, provided it is systematically administered in a congenial context, it seems to be the best guard against any post-materialistically induced decline in turnout. But law alone is not enough; appropriate sanctions must also be attached in order to ensure high turnout. Wolfgang Hirczy has shown that democratic regimes which impose penalties for non-voting have turnout of approximately ten to thirteen percentage points higher on average than those which do not (Hirczy, 1994, 64, 65). 

B. CV provides a legal check against discriminatory voting laws. Counter-plans can’t solve this.
Birch 9
Birch, Sarah (reader in politics at U of Essex). “Full Participation: A Comparative Study of Compulsory Voting.” Published by United Nations. 26 February 2009. http://i.unu.edu/media/unu.edu/publication/2224/full_participation_web.pdf

Compulsory voting is necessarily embedded in a complex set of regulations governing the conduct of elections, and these regulations shape each other. States where there is a legal obligation to attend the polls have reason to make voting as easy as possible for the citizenry, as this will lessen the costs of enforcement, and it will enhance the popular acceptability and legitimacy of the institution. It is therefore not surprising that mandatory voting is typically linked to an array of institutional mechanisms that facilitate electoral participation (though, as noted above, such mechanisms are not exclusive to states where electoral participation is required by law). 

C. CV reduces income inequality. 
Chong and Olivera 8
Alberto Chong (Research Department, Inter-American Development Bank) and Mauricio Olivera (Foundation for Higher Education and Development). “Does Compulsory Voting Help Equalize Incomes?” Economics and Politics. Vol. 20. November 2008. 

This paper explores the link between compulsory voting and income distribution using a cross-section of countries around the world. Our empirical cross-country analysis for 91 countries during the period 1960– 2000 shows that when compulsory voting can be strongly enforced the distribution of income improves as measured by the Gini coefficient and the bottom income quintiles of the population. Our findings are robust to changes and additions to our benchmark specification. Because poorer countries are the ones with relatively more unequal distribution of income it might make sense to promote such voting schemes in developing regions, such as Latin America. This, under the assumption that bureaucratic costs related with design and implementation are not excessive. 1. INTRODUCTION ONE CRUCIAL but largely overlooked feature of many democracies around the world has to do with the issue of compulsory voting. While democracies allow free will and free choice to societies, compulsory voting undermines such free will and free choice by not allowing voters to choose not to vote. Whereas this apparent contradiction comes from the idea that voter turnout should be increased, the key objective in pursuing such a mechanism is that with compulsory-voting rules the society is expected to become better represented. In fact, according to conventional wisdom, because the poor are less likely to go to the urns, elected leaders do not cater to their needs, which end up skewing the distribution of income against them. This is particularly true in developing countries. Whereas it is true that obligatory voting redefines the ownership of the electoral process, it questions the fundamental issue of free choice and puts the additional responsibility of the voting process on the government rather than on the voter. The potential benefits of compulsory-voting rules remain sufficiently attractive that policy-makers regularly reassess the convenience of adopting such voting schemes. 

The least well-off come first under the standard.
Pettit 99
Pettit, Philip (Aussie bloke). Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford University Press, USA (September 30, 1999). 

The primary consideration that leads me to defend structural egalitarianism is that the intensity of freedom as non-domination which a person enjoys in a society is a function of other people's powers as well as of their own. Take a person's powers to include all those factors that are liable to affect political, legal, financial, and social clout. The intensity of someone's freedom as non-domination—if you like, the level of their protection—is not just a function of the powers that enable the person to resist or deter arbitrary interference by others. It is also a function of the powers at the disposal of those others, for, depending on the nature and size of the powers of others, what their own powers enable them to achieve in the way of resistance and deterrence will vary. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The point is that a person's absolute score in relation to the intensity of non-domination is a function of their relative score in regard to powers: it is a function of their power-ratio in the society as a whole. The fact that each person's freedom as non-domination is a function of their relative powers has an immediate impact on the possibility of increasing the overall intensity of non-domination by introducing a greater inequality in its distribution. Any anti-equality initiative will make at least two parties less equal in their intensity of nondomination. It will do this either by increasing the advantaged person's powers or by decreasing the powers of the other party or by doing both at once: in whatever way, it will worsen the power-ratio of the disadvantaged party. But if the initiative is intended to raise the overall intensity of non-domination by the same margin by which it raises the intensity of non-domination of the favoured party, it is illdesigned. For the shift in the power-ratio that raises the advantaged party's absolute intensity of non-domination by interval A (for advantage) will serve at the same stroke to lower the disadvantaged person's intensity of non-domination, in absolute terms, by interval D (for disadvantage). The weaker party's absolute intensity of non-domination is a function of their relative powers, and the anti-equality initiative is bound to worsen it. An anti-equality initiative can succeed in maximizing the expected intensity of non-domination, then, only if the margin or margins by which it increases the expected non-domination of the advantaged compensate for the margins by which it decreases the expected nondomination of the disadvantaged. But there is no reason to think that A-margins are generally going to be larger than D-margins. There is no reason to think that those who benefit in absolute terms from an anti-equality initiative are going to enjoy an increase that compensates for the loss to those who suffer in absolute terms from that initiative. This observation already teaches us a relevant lesson. It means that, in the unlikely event that we are starting from an egalitarian base where everyone enjoys the same intensity of non-domination, it will make little or no sense to think of resorting to anti-equality initiatives in order to increase the overall intensity of non-domination enjoyed. The chances are that such a resort will reduce the overall intensity of non-domination at the same time as it makes its distribution less equal. But what if we are starting, as it is more plausible to suppose, from an inegalitarian base? Is there any reason, then, to think that anti-equality policies may increase the overall intensity of nondomination? No, there is not. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that in general any anti-equality intervention will be inferior to some pro-equality one. Here I am moved by a consideration additional to the consideration that a person's absolute intensity of nondomination is a function of their relative powers. The secondary consideration is, as we may put it, that the capacity of a person's power-ratio to produce intensity of non-domination is subject to diminishing marginal productivity. Where someone's power-ratio is poor, any improvement in their position will make for a comparatively large increase in their intensity of non-domination. Where the starting ratio is good, any improvement will make for a comparatively small increase in their intensity of non-domination. More generally, as the ratio in question improves, the function from ratio to intensity will decrease; it will take more and more of an improvement in the ratio to produce a given increase in non-domination. Improvements in the ratio are subject to diminishing marginal productivity in regard to the intensity of non-domination that they make possible. Imagine that we are dealing with just two individuals, A and B. Suppose that A is sufficiently well resourced to be generally able to resist interference from B or to deter B from interfering. Suppose, in other words, that A enjoys a high intensity of non-domination in the society constituted by A and B, not being subject to interference at will and with impunity from B. In such a case, it will not do much for A's non-domination to increase their powers even further; in fact, it may do nothing at all: A may be at a point where extra powers have zero marginal productivity.1 The increases may be more or less redundant, providing A with powers that are not really needed for the purposes of non-domination. The case contrasts with what those increases would have achieved had A been comparatively powerless and generally unable to resist B's interference or deter B from interfering. In such a situation, the value of the increases would have been much greater. The fact that improvements in a person's power-ratio are subject to diminishing marginal productivity in regard to intensity of nondomination means that if we are starting from an inegalitarian base, then no anti-equality initiative can hope to do as well in the production of overall non-domination as a corresponding pro-equality one. Any anti-equality intervention has to increase the difference in intensities of non-domination enjoyed by at least two individuals. That implies that it has to improve the power-ratio of a better-off individual rather than improving the power-ratio of a worse-off one. But since the function from power-ratio to intensity of non-domination is subject to diminishing marginal productivity, the anti-equality intervention must be generally expected not to do as well as the rival intervention that would have improved the power-ratio of the worseoff individual.2 The anti-equality intervention involves an expenditure in power-conferring resources that is designed to increase overall intensity of non-domination, and it appears that those resources would have been more efficiently spent on the less well-off individual than on the better-off.

Income inequality is the root cause of economic crisis.
Harkinson 11
Josh Harkinson (staff reporter). “Study: Income Inequality Kills Economic Growth.” Mother Jones. October 4th, 2011. http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/10/study-income-inequality-kills-economic-growth

Corporate chieftains often claim that fixing the US economy requires signing new free trade deals, lowering government debt, and attracting lots of foreign investment. But a major new study has found that those things matter less than an economic driver that CEOs hate talking about: equality. "Countries where income was more equally distributed tended to have longer growth spells," says economist Andrew Berg, whose study appears in the current issue of Finance and Development, the quarterly magazine of the International Monetary Fund. Comparing six major economic variables across the world's economies, Berg found that equality of incomes was the most important factor in preventing a major downturn. (See top chart.) Andrew Berg and Jonathan Ostry Andrew Berg and Jonathan OstryAndrew Berg and Jonathan Ostry In their study, Berg and coauthor Jonathan Ostry were less interested in looking at how to spark economic growth than how to sustain it. "Getting growth going is not that difficult; it's keeping it going that is hard," Berg explains. For example, the bailouts and stimulus pulled the US economy out of recession but haven't been enough to fuel a steady recovery. Berg's research suggests that sky-high income inequality in the United States could be partly to blame. So how important is equality? According to the study, making an economy's income distribution 10 percent more equitable prolongs its typical growth spell by 50 percent. In one case study, Berg looked at Latin America, which is historically much more economically stratified than emerging Asia and also has shorter periods of growth. He found that closing half of the inequality gap between Latin America and Asia would more than double the expected length of Latin America's growth spells. Increasing income inequality has the opposite effect: "We find that more inequality lowers growth," Berg says. (See bottom chart.) Berg and Ostry aren't the first economists to suggest that income inequality can torpedo the economy. Marriner Eccles, the Depression-era chairman of the Federal Reserve (and an architect of the New Deal), blamed the Great Crash on the nation's wealth gap. "A giant suction pump had by 1929-1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth," Eccles recalled in his memoirs. "In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When the credit ran out, the game stopped." Many economists believe a similar process has unfolded over the past decade. Median wages grew too little over the past 30 years to drive the kind of spending necessary to sustain the consumer economy. Instead, increasingly exotic forms of credit filled the gap, as the wealthy offered the middle class alluring credit card deals and variable-interest subprime loans. This allowed rich investors to keep making money and everyone else to feel like they were keeping up—until the whole system imploded. Income inequality has other economic downsides. Research suggests that unequal societies have a harder time getting their citizens to support government spending because they believe that it will only benefit elites. A population where many lack access to health care, education, and bank loans can't contribute as much to the economy. And, of course, income inequality goes hand-in-hand with crippling political instability, as we've seen during the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. History shows that "sustainable reforms are only possible when the benefits are widely shared," Berg says. "We hope that we don't have to relearn that the hard way." 

Economic crisis causes nuclear war. Royal 10
Jedediah, director of Cooperative Threat Reduction at the U.S. Department of Defense, Economics of War and Peace: Economic, Legal, and Political Perspectives, pg 213-215

Less intuitive is how periods of economic decline may increase the likelihood of external conflict. Political science literature has contributed a moderate degree of attention to the impact of economic decline and the security and defense behavior of interdependent states. Research in this vein has been considered at systemic, dyadic and national levels. Several notable contributions follow. First, on the systemic level, Pollins (2008) advances Modelski and Thompson’s (1996) work on leadership cycle theory, finding that rhythms in the global economy are associated with the rise and fall of a pre-eminent power and the often bloody transition from one pre-eminent leader to the next. As such, exogenous shocks such as economic crises could usher in a redistribution of relative power (see also Gilpin, 1981) that leads to uncertainty about power balances, increasing the risk of miscalculation (Fearon 1995). Alternatively, even a relatively certain redistribution of power could lead to a permissive environment for conflicts as a rising power may seek to challenge a declining power (Werner, 1999). Separately, Pollins (1996) also shows that global economic cycles combined with parallel leadership cycles impact the likelihood of conflict among major, medium and small powers, although he suggests that the causes and connections between global economic conditions and security conditions remains unknown. Second, on a dyadic level, Copeland’s (1996, 2000) theory of trade expectations suggest that “future expectation of trade” is a significant variable in understanding economic conditions and security behavior of states. He argues that interdependent states are likely to gain pacific benefits from trade so long as they have an optimistic view of future trade relations. However, if the expectations of future trade decline, particularly for difficult to replace item such as energy resources, the likelihood for conflict increases, as states will be inclined to use force to gain access to those resources. Crises could potentially be the trigger for decreased trade expectations either on its own or because it triggers protectionist moves by interdependent states. Third, others have considered the link between economic decline and external armed conflict at a national level. Blomberg and Hess (2002) find a strong correlation between internal conflict and external conflict, particularly during periods of economic downturn. They write, The linkages between internal and external conflict and prosperity are strong and mutually reinforcing. Economic conflict tends to spawn internal conflict, which in turn returns the favor. Moreover, the presence of a recession tends to amplify the extent to which international and external conflicts self-reinforce each other. (Blomberg and Hess, 2002, p. 89) Economic decline has also been linked with an increase in the likelihood of terrorism (Blomberg, Hess and Weerapana, 2004), which has the capacity to spill across borders and lead to external tensions. Furthermore, crises generally reduce the popularity of a sitting government. “Diversionary theory” suggests that, when facing unpopularity arising from economic decline, sitting governments have increased incentives to fabricate external military conflicts to create a “rally around the flag” effect. Wang (1996), DeRouen (1995) and Blomberg, Hess and Thacker (2006) find supporting evidence showing that economic decline and use of force are at least indirectly correlated. Gelpi (1997), Miller (1999), and Kisangani and Pickering (2009) suggest that the tendency towards diversionary tactics are greater for democratic states than autocratic states due to the fact the democratic leaders are generally more susceptible to being removed from office due to lack of domestic support. De DeRouen (2000) has provided evidence showing that periods of weak economic performance in the United States and thus weak Presidential popularity are statically linked to an increase in the use of force. In summary, recent economic scholarship positively correlates economic integration with an increase in the frequency of economic crises, whereas political science scholarship links economic decline with external conflict at systemic, dyadic and national levels. This implied connection between integration, crises and armed conflict has not featured prominently in economic-security debate and deserves more attention. This observation is not contradictory to other perspectives that link economic interdependence with a decrease in the likelihood of external conflict, such as those mentioned in the first paragraph of this chapter. Those studies tend to focus on dyadic interdependence instead of global interdependence and do not specifically consider the occurrence of and conditions created by economic crises. As such the view presented here should be considered ancillary to those views. 

Contention 2 is Turnout

Only CV fully solves turnout, and enforcement’s key. Best studies prove.
Hill and Louth 4
Dr. Lisa Hill and Jonathon Louth (Discipline of Politics, School of History and Politics, University of Adelaide). “Compulsory Voting Laws and Turnout: Efficacy and Appropriateness.” Refereed paper presented to the Australasian Political Studies Association Conference, University of Adelaide. 29 September - 1 October 2004

Some critics of compulsory voting refer to the minimal percentage difference of voter turnout between compulsory and voluntary voting electoral systems. We address studies in which the effectiveness of compulsory voting is either underplayed or miscalculated due to an inappropriate use of atypical cases or a methodological error known as the ‘ecological fallacy’. Specifically, treating all compulsory voting regimes as a synthetic group can give rise to inaccurate perceptions of the performance of individual regimes like Australia’s. After canvassing a number of alternatives methods for raising turnout we suggest that, provided the setting is congenial, and provided it is accompanied by appropriate levels of enforcement and institutional support, compulsory voting is the only institutional mechanism that is able, on its own, to raise turnout into to the 90range. Using a social norms approach we also suggest that turnout problems are best solved by mandatory means. There is a particular focus on the Australian case which is, arguably, the benchmark standard for compulsory voting performance.

Overwhelming scholarly consensus agrees.
Panagopoulos 8
Costas Panagopoulos (Panagopoulos is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy and the graduate program in Elections and Campaign Management at Fordham University. He was previously research associate at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, where he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in 2006). The Calculus of Voting in Compulsory Voting Systems.
Political Behavior, Vol. 30, No. 4 (December 2008), pp. 455-467. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40213328 

Studies consistently demonstrate that compulsory voting raises turnout. Tingsten (1937, p 205) concludes that, "the introduction of compulsory voting everywhere has been accompanied by a remarkable rise in participation." In fact, compulsory voting seems to stimulate turnout more than any other institutional factor, boosting participation rates by anywhere from 7 to 16 percentage points on average (Lijphart 1997; Powell 1980; Jackman 1987; Franklin 2001). 

CV is key. Reward systems are too expensive. HLR 7 
Harvard Law Review (no author). “The Case for Compulsory Voting in the United States.” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 121, No. 2 (December 2007), pp. 591-612
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40042668

Finally, there is the possibility of using rewards instead of punishments. There could be a tax break or a cash payout given to any eligible voter who votes (or qualifies as a conscientious objector).131 Using rewards is likely to be more costly than punishments, however, because it would be difficult to identify those people who would not vote in the absence of payment, requiring the government to pay all voters.132 

?
Compelled turnout is key to non-domination.
Lardy 4
Heather Lardy (University of Aberdeen). Is There a Right Not to Vote? Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Summer 2004), pp. 303-321. Oxford University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600594 .

It might be thought to follow from this that the right to vote necessarily protects also the freedom of individuals not to vote; after all, if the right preserves the liberty of an elector to consider voting meaningless, then surely it ought also to extend to the decision by that elector not to cast a vote at all. Compelling people to vote, it might be argued, violates the liberty which the right to vote protects just as much as (or more than) ascribing to the right the benefits of participating in an exercise in developmental or deliberative democracy. This, however, does not follow. As argued above, the liberty which the right to vote protects is concerned essentially with guaranteeing the formally equal democratic standing of all electors. This standing is not undermined, and may even be enhanced, by the circulation of conflicting ideas and beliefs about the value and meaning of individual electoral participation. Both a fierce critic of current electoral structures and someone who is either agnostic or positive about them may take part in elections as formal equals, and neither will suppose that her assessment of the system's democratic credentials either enhances or diminishes her standing as a formal political equal of the other. However, the practice of nonvoting does threaten to undermine the formally equal democratic status of electors. Non-voting is not only a matter of public concern; it is, like voting itself, a public act. It marks out non-voters, whose numbers are calculated and considered in the discussions of turnout which follow every election. It results in the attribution of extra weight to the votes of those who do participate, vesting them with a disproportionate influence. It is this which leads to the risk that active voters will come to dominate those who possess the franchise passively. Compulsion would not undermine the formally equal standing of voters, and would in fact be likely to do much to enhance it. This is so because it would trigger participation by individuals whose non-voting threatens to place them in a position in which they are vulnerable to attempts by the voting majority to ignore or override their interests. A compulsory voting law would have the effect of requiring political parties and leaders to take account of the electoral preferences of those groups of individuals currently experiencing the sort of political exclusion which accompanies persistent non-participation. This is necessary because, over time, it becomes all too easy for the voting public, and its elected governors, to overlook the unexpressed preferences of non-voters, falsely regarding their passivity as a purely private and personal choice. This danger would threaten the essential liberty which the idea of the right to vote represents. The right to vote is about freedom in the sense of non-domination, an idea articulated by Pettit as a central strand of this theory of republicanism.25 Liberty as non-domination requires an absence of arbitrary interference (or the threat of such interference). In this, it differs from freedom as non-interference, the standard presentation of negative liberty, which identifies any interference as a potential threat to individual freedom. Under freedom as non-domination, interference by public authority with individual liberty may well be consistent with the ideal of promoting a position in which all individuals can enjoy security from domination by others:26 

?
Generic coercion links don’t apply. The right not to vote presumes a false conception of freedom as non-interference which my framework indicts.
Lardy 4
Heather Lardy (University of Aberdeen). Is There a Right Not to Vote? Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Summer 2004), pp. 303-321. Oxford University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600594 .

Freedom as non-domination promises, not exemption from intentional interference, but exemption from intentional interference on an arbitrary basis: specifically, exemption from a capacity on the part of others for arbitrary interference. It is consistent, unlike freedom as non-interference, with a high level of non-arbitrary interference of the sort that a suitable system of law might impose.27 Pursuing freedom as non-domination reduces the amount of uncertainty individuals must live with, by reducing the capacity of authorities to interfere on an arbitrary basis. When non-interference is the ideal, individuals may be encouraged to promote that goal in inhibiting ways, such as, for example, displaying special deference or flattery to those in power.28 Further, the awareness that the more powerful retain the ability to interfere in an arbitrary fashion in the lives of the less powerful taints the freedom which the latter enjoy with a sense of insecurity. The 'shared awareness of the asymmetry of power' renders their status unequal, even if they are currently enjoying similar levels of freedom as noninterference.29 Freedom as non-domination avoids this danger by promoting the equal standing of all.30 The idea of the right to vote is similarly about individuals asserting a shared standing as formal political equals, which status carries an entitlement to participate in the choice of those who will exercise political power. Those they so choose have the potential thereafter to dominate those whom they rule. This risk is in part checked by general public acknowledgement of the formally equal status of voters and those whom they elect. Of course, this is an imperfect restraint: elected governments do dominate; and voters may come to accept this domination as just another undesirable feature of the imperfect practice of democracy. While it might be deemed quaint or just fanciful to suggest that voters are actually self-governing, their status as political equals, with a right not to be dominated by other voters (especially those elected to rule) expresses their possession of a liberty which exceeds the narrow vision of freedom as noninterference. The right to vote represents a freedom which cannot be diminished by being compelled because any exercise of the right, however it is initiated, contributes to the practice of freedom as non-domination. By voting, a person registers her status as a political equal, a full member of the democratic community. She does this even if she votes reluctantly or apathetically, or because compelled to do so by law. On this account, non-voting brings with it a serious risk of domination by those classes which do vote regularly, and by the governors whom they elect. To prevent this, voting may be compelled consistently with the idea of liberty as non-domination, and, therefore, with the idea of the right to vote. The right to vote is concerned about the virtue of electoral participation and identifies this virtue in the mere act of voting, without more.31 A reluctant voter, or one who is compelled by law to do so, nonetheless exercises the office of voter. Simply by voting, she displays the principal virtue with which the right to vote is concerned, namely active participation. From the perspective of the right to vote, it does not matter whether voting is done voluntarily or under compulsion. The act of casting a vote is enough: the right to vote does not require that it be done after thoughtful reflection or with an activist's zeal. Those who argue for a right not to vote presume an underlying theory of liberty as non-interference. They assume this perhaps because the right to vote tends to be presented as an ordinary negative liberty, protecting against interferences by agencies of state. It has been argued here that compulsory voting may only be represented as an interference with liberty by mischaracterizing the sort of freedom which the right to vote represents. The right to vote is about freedom as non-domination. It is for those who oppose compulsion to demonstrate how it would threaten the liberty to which the right to vote relates. The liberty which the right not to vote asserts can provide only an inaccurate and impoverished account of the relation between freedom and voting. The liberty which the right to vote represents protects individual decisions about how to vote, and about what value to attach to the act of voting. It does not, however, grant those whom it recognizes as electors a freedom not to vote at all. 

Even if consent matters, contestability outweighs. It’s the constitutive feature of democracy.
Pettit 99
Pettit, Philip (Aussie bloke). Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford University Press, USA (September 30, 1999). 

The authorities will exercise arbitrary power if the decisions they make can be based on their private, perhaps sectional, interests or on their private, perhaps sectional, ideas as to what their brief—their brief qua legislator, administrator, or judge—requires. If private inclination or private opinion can rule, then people will live at the mercy of the officials. The authorities will have the power, not just to interfere— that is inherent in a system of law—but to interfere on a relatively arbitrary basis. They will be in a position where they dominate ordinary people and, this being a matter of common knowledge, they will be in a position where ordinary people may be expected to have to bow and scrape to them. The promotion of freedom as non-domination requires, therefore, that something be done to ensure that public decision-making tracks the interests and the ideas of those citizens whom it affects; after all, non-arbitrariness is guaranteed by nothing more or less than the existence of such a tracking relationship. The decision-making must not represent an imposition of their will on us, as the citizens are likely to think about the matter. It must be a form of decision-making which we can own and identify with: a form of decision-making in which we can see our interests furthered and our ideas respected. Whether the decisions are taken in the legislature, in the administration, or in the courts, they must bear the marks of our ways of caring and our ways of thinkingWhat is required for one of us to be able to own a public decision in this way? A traditional line would say that we can own a decision in that manner only if we have consented to it, or to the policy it incorporates, in an explicit or at least an implicit fashion. But this comment is not much help. If explicit individual consent is required for nonarbitrariness, especially if the consent has to be unforced, then nonarbitrariness in public decisions becomes an inaccessible ideal. If implicit individual consent is thought to be enough, however, and an absence of protest is taken as evidence of implicit consent, then nonarbitrariness in public decisions becomes an ideal that is so accessible as to be empty: any decision that fails to drive me to the barricades will count as non-arbitrary from my point of view. Will it help if we move from individual to collective consent and stipulate that any public decision that attracts majority support, or that is in accord with a policy that attracts such support, is non-arbitrary? Surely not. Certain decisions and policies may attract majority support while representing the most arbitrary interference in the lives of various minorities. We have already seen in Chapter 2 that there is very little connection between non-arbitrariness of interference and consent to that interference, so that these observations should not come as a surprise. What I suggested in that earlier discussion is that non-arbitrariness requires not so much consent as contestability. Imagine that another agent can and does interfere with me but that I am able effectively to contest any interference that does not answer to my relevant interests and ideas. It is only if I can effectively contest any such interference— it is only if I can force it to account to my relevant interests and ideas— that the interference is not arbitrary and the interferer not dominating. The idea of contestability gives us a cue for the right response to our question. What might enable one of us to own a public decision? What might make it possible for such a decision not to have the aspect of an arbitrary act of interference? The answer which suggests itself is: the fact that we can more or less effectively contest the decision, if we find that it does not answer to our relevant interests or relevant ideas. The decision may materialize, like most public decisions, on a basis that is consensual only in a vanishingly weak sense. That does not matter, provided that it materializes under a dispensation of effective contestability. The non-arbitrariness of public decisions comes of their meeting, not the condition of having originated or emerged according to some consensual process, but the condition of being such that if they conflict with the perceived interests and ideas of the citizens, then the citizens can effectively contest them. What matters is not the historical origin of the decisions in some form of consent but their modal or counterfactual responsiveness to the possibility of contestation. Democracy To require public decision-making to be contestable, in particular to be contestable from within every quarter in the society, is to insist that the decision-making satisfy a certain democratic profile. Democracy, as ordinarily understood, is connected with consent; it is almost exclusively associated with the popular election of the personnel in government, or at least with the popular election of the members of the legislature. But democracy may be understood, without unduly forcing intuitions, on a model that is primarily contestatory rather than consensual. On this model, a government will be democratic, a government will represent a form of rule that is controlled by the people, to the extent that the people individually and collectively enjoy a permanent possibility of contesting what government decides (Shapiro 1990: 266).

People have a cognitive bias towards specific link chains. You should evaluate specific scenarios as innately less probable than broad, nonlinear impacts like non-domination.
Yudkowsky 6
Eliezer Yudkowsky, 8/31/2006. Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence Palo Alto, CA. “Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks, Forthcoming in Global Catastrophic Risks, eds. Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic, singinst.org/upload/cognitive-biases.pdf

4. The Conjunction Fallacy Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Rank the following statements from most probable to least probable: 1. Linda is a teacher in an elementary school. 2. Linda works in a bookstore and takes Yoga classes. 3. Linda is active in the feminist movement. 4. Linda is a psychiatric social worker. 5. Linda is a member of the League of Women Voters. 6. Linda is a bank teller. 7. Linda is an insurance salesperson. 8. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. 89 of 88 undergraduate subjects ranked (8) as more probable than (6) (Tversky and Kahneman 1982). Since the given description of Linda was chosen to be similar to a feminist and dissimilar to a bank teller, (8) is more representative of Linda’s description. However, ranking (8) as more probable than (6) violates the conjunction rule of probability theory which states that p(A and B) _ p(A). Imagine a sample of 1,000 women; surely more women in this sample are bank tellers than are feminist bank tellers. Could the conjunction fallacy rest on subjects interpreting the experimental instructions in an unanticipated way? Perhaps subjects think that by “probable” is meant the probability of Linda’s description given statements (6) and (8), rather than the probability of (6) and (8) given Linda’s description. Or perhaps subjects interpret (6) to mean “Linda is a bank teller and is not active in the feminist movement.” Although many creative alternative hypotheses have been invented to explain away the conjunction fallacy, the conjunction fallacy has survived all experimental tests meant to disprove it; see e.g. Sides et al. (2002) for a summary. For example, the following experiment excludes both of the alternative hypotheses proposed above: Consider a regular six-sided die with four green faces and two red faces. The die will be rolled 20 times and the sequence of greens (G) and reds (R) will be recorded. You are asked to select one sequence from a set of three and you will win $25 if the sequence you chose appears on successive rolls of the die. Please check the sequence of greens and reds on which you prefer to bet. 1. RGRRR 2. GRGRRR 3. GRRRRR 125 undergraduates at UBC and Stanford University played this gamble with real payoffs. 65 of subjects chose sequence (2) (Tversky and Kahneman 1983). Sequence (2) is most representative of the die, since the die is mostly green and sequence (2) contains the greatest proportion of green faces. However, sequence (1) dominates sequence (2) because (1) is strictly included in (2), to get (2) you must roll (1) preceded by a green face. In the above task, the exact probabilities for each event could in principle have been calculated by the students. However, rather than go to the effort of a numerical calculation, it would seem that (at least 65 of) the students made an intuitive guess, based on which sequence seemed most “representative” of the die. Calling this “the representativeness heuristic” does not imply that students deliberately decided that they would estimate probability by estimating similarity. Rather, the representativeness heuristic is what produces the intuitive sense that sequence (2) “seems more likely” than sequence (1). In other words the “representativeness heuristic” is a built-in feature of the brain for producing rapid probability judgments rather than a consciously adopted procedure. We are not aware of substituting judgment of representativeness for judgment of probability. The conjunction fallacy similarly applies to futurological forecasts. Two independent sets of professional analysts at the Second International Congress on Forecasting were asked to rate, respectively, the probability of “A complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the USA and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983” or “A Russian invasion of Poland, and a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the USA and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983.” The second set of analysts responded with significantly higher probabilities (Tversky and Kahneman 1983). In Johnson et al. (1993), MBA students at Wharton were scheduled to travel to Bangkok as part of their degree program. Several groups of students were asked how much they were willing to pay for terrorism insurance. One group of subjects was asked how much they were willing to pay for terrorism insurance covering the flight from Thailand to the US. A second group of subjects was asked how much they were willing to pay for terrorism insurance covering the round-trip flight. A third group was asked how much they were willing to pay for terrorism insurance that covered the complete trip to Thailand. These three groups responded with average willingness to pay of $17.19, $13.90, and $7.44 respectively. According to probability theory, adding additional detail onto a story must render the story less probable. It is less probable that Linda is a feminist bank teller than that she is a bank teller, since all feminist bank tellers are necessarily bank tellers.Yet human psychology seems to follow the rule that adding an additional detail can make the story more plausible. People might pay more for international diplomacy intended to prevent nanotechnological warfare by China, than for an engineering project to defend against nanotechnological attack from any source. The second threat scenario is less vivid and alarming, but the defense is more useful because it is more vague. More valuable still would be strategies which make humanity harder to extinguish without being specific to nanotechnologic threats—such as colonizing space, or see Yudkowsky (2008) on AI. Security expert Bruce Schneier observed (both before and after the 2005 hurricane in New Orleans) that the U.S. government was guarding specific domestic targets against “movie-plot scenarios” of terrorism, at the cost of taking away resources from emergency-response capabilities that could respond to any disaster (Schneier 2005). Overly detailed reassurances can also create false perceptions of safety: “X is not an existential risk and you don’t need to worry about it, because A, B, C, D, and E”; where the failure of any one of propositions A, B, C, D, or E potentially extinguishes the human species. “We don’t need to worry about nanotechnologic war, because a UN commission will initially develop the technology and prevent its proliferation until such time as an active shield is developed, capable of defending against all accidental and malicious outbreaks that contemporary nanotechnology is capable of producing, and this condition will persist indefinitely.” Vivid, specific scenarios can inflate our probability estimates of security, as well as misdirecting defensive investments into needlessly narrow or implausibly detailed risk scenarios. More generally, people tend to overestimate conjunctive probabilities and underestimate disjunctive probabilities (Tversky and Kahneman 1974). That is, people tend to overestimate the probability that, e.g., seven events of 90 probability will all occur. Conversely, people tend to underestimate the probability that at least one of seven events of 10 probability will occur. Someone judging whether to, e.g., incorporate a new startup, must evaluate the probability that many individual events will all go right (there will be sufficient funding, competent employees, customers will want the product) while also considering the likelihood that at least one critical failure will occur (the bank refuses a loan, the biggest project fails, the lead scientist dies). This may help explain why only 44 of entrepreneurial ventures2 survive after 4 years (Knaup 2005). Dawes (1988, 133) observes: “In their summations lawyers avoid arguing from disjunctions (‘either this or that or the other could have occurred, all of which would lead to the same conclusion’) in favor of conjunctions. Rationally, of course, disjunctions are much more probable than are conjunctions.” The scenario of humanity going extinct in the next century is a disjunctive event. It could happen as a result of any of the existential risks we already know about—or some other cause which none of us foresaw. Yet for a futurist, disjunctions make for an awkward and unpoetic-sounding prophecy.

Prefer empirical studies that evaluate systemic impacts like exclusion.
Expert predictions alone should carry zero epistemological weight. Menand 5
“Everybody’s An Expert,” Louis Menand, The New Yorker. December 5th, 2005.  http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/05/051205crbo_books1

Tetlock got a statistical handle on his task by putting most of the forecasting questions into a “three possible futures” form. The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth), or less of something (repression, recession). And he measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices. Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” he reports. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.” And the more famous the forecaster the more overblown the forecasts. “Experts in demand,” Tetlock says, “were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.”

?
Reject specific disad link chains. Linear scenario planning is more likely to cause extinction than solve it. Skyttner 5 
Lars Skyttner, professor of natural science – University of Gâvle, professor – Royal Swedish Military Academy, “Systems theory and the science of military command and control,” Kybernetes Vol. 34, Issue 7/8, 2005, p. 1240-1260

Today the socio-technical systems of the modern society are increasingly all embracing and tighter integrated. System-relations more and more stand out as untransparent, incomprehensible and unmanageable. Furthermore, the world around is so rapidly changed that circumstantial planning often is a thing of the past. The uncertainties regarding the nature of future combat therefore bring about great demands of flexibility and adaptability of our command and control systems. That qualities like information-advantage and a realistic surrounding-world apprehension call for increased integration of different sensors, arms and communication systems are nevertheless given. As given is that success in combat always is a function of how command is executed and how danger, stress, obscurity and general confusion which constantly exist will be handled. When the enemy no longer is seen in our binoculars and when we not even know who has released an attack against us, the need for creative thinking is of highest priority. Today an event of war even can lack the attacking component and imply hitherto unknown social phenomena. As compared with such circumstances, traditional military thinking could not be considered particularly successful. There tactical problems always have been reduced to easily recognizable situations with a well-learned standard response. Quite natural, critical thinking, questioning and creativity have not got a prominent role in this kind of education. Today the security policy situation of Sweden is radically different from the situation only ten years ago. New, extremely fragmented scenarios of a threat exist. A military threatening picture still exists even if it has deteriorated substantially after the end of the cold war. Russia still has attacking capability via distant and NBC-weapons. A military recovery in this country can result in nonmilitary information operations within a ten-year period. The development is difficult to judge but is coherent with the democratic development and the relations to the West. Just now the most probable threat comes from terrorism. The last years have signified a development towards an ever increasing extent of terrorist groups with better and better armaments. No doubt, some of these groups have NBC-weapons. Those who not have access to such weapons strive for them. Attacks resulting in thousands of victims among innocent people, today is a reality which has been demonstrated by the assault upon World Trade Centre. It is quite possible that such groups will choose to locate internal controversies to neutral ground like Stockholm with pertinent consequence like taking hostages, etc. When such things happen, the odds are against the anti terrorist forces. The terrorists only need to have success once while the combatting forces must be successful every time. A third kind of security policy threat are those which are information technology related. States as well as criminal gangs and terrorist organisations already today use IT-related systems as weapons apart from their ordinary use. Attacks can be targeted toward our own IT systems, electricity supply systems, telecommunications and economical systems. In our highly computerized society, a small group can cause damages which early required an army. That the danger of IT-attacks has increased can be related to the simple fact that the more something is exposed, the more the threatening picture is reinforced. A special problem in this context is the difficulty to discover if an attack exists at all. The defence against such information warfare will be a big problem in the foreseeable future for our vulnerable society. It is also not possible to leave out of account the threats coming from economical warfare. Even if the country today has a reasonably stable economy and is supported by the membership of EU, strongly increased fuel price during a period will destabilize society. Large-scale economical crimes pursued for example by the powerful drug mafia in Colombia can also be a real threat. This organisation has scarcely an interest to capture a geographical area. However, they want to consolidate and expand their economical flows. It is necessary to bear in mind that their financial annual turnover is bigger than most European countries. Consequently, it is necessary to realise that the old and exact security-policy classification into “war” and “peace” hardly is relevant today. A war-like terror action with disastrous consequence can happen without early warning in a situation which we apprehend to be in deepest peace. The goal can be to crush our basic values – not our geographical area. An enumeration of what the modern societies consider these values to be, can be the following: territorial integrity in the livingspace; political sovereignty and democracy; freedom of thought, religion and speech; a state governed by law with human rights and minority rights; free market economy; and the free university. In the protection of these values, the extensive invasion and mobilization defence with its mass army no longer has a justification. Not including the frontiers of land, sea and air combat, a new frontier has emerged where the battle is fought with global information systems. There the strategic goals have changed so that destruction has been replaced by manipulation, infiltration and assimilation. All this taken together is the reason why big-scale problem solving seldom work as before. The traditional way of managing war with a large quantity of troops fighting a well defined and localized enemy is barely no longer possible. The lack of success for traditional methods is visible also on civil frontiers like the war against poverty, the war against drugs, and the attempts to extinct AIDS. The new, multinational and complex threatening pictures which have replaced the old ones, can only be met with a smaller, more modern and flexible elite-force. The heavy striking-force with small command and intelligence resources will be reduced in favour of a network-defence based on the development within information and communication technology. The designation network will, however, not in the first instance represent the connecting of different technical systems. Instead it will represent a more flexible way of handling a new situation – to combine different entities and components for more complex tasks. One of its main duties will be peace-keeping international contributions. Another task will be to handle attacks realised with nerve-gas or bacteria. High-technological data-virus should also be possible to combat. The building up of such a defence will demand an entirely new way of thinking regarding decision-making, command and control and use of modern technology. Internationally, this kind of thinking has attracted great interest and got the designation “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA). The term is based on a number of technological breakthroughs which have occurred after the end of the cold war about 1990. In several ways, these have changed the ground for modern warfare. Here the most important achievements have been the information-technological progresses which will permit the use of lots of sensors and the capability to transfer and manage big information-flows. Realistic training with the aid of virtual three-dimensional computer scenarios (“Battlefield Computer Games”), has signified a pronounced increase in the combat-skill of tank-crews. Some important trends within the RMA-concept is presented below: Unmanned fighting vehicles and aircrafts. Automated, computerized technology will replace drivers and pilots. Start navigation, interpreting of the surrounding world, target-interpretation, target combatting and possible landing, is handled completely automatic. The opportunity of human handling and target combats remain. No consideration regarding the weight of the pilot, G-forces and life-supporting systems is necessary. The construction can be lighter, stronger, more rapid and cheaper. The instruction time can be shorter. Data-streams, threat-analyses and military preparedness. Miniaturized networks of cheap sensors deliver data from areas which earlier have not been accessible. Immediate processing creates information which is distributed via coded broadband to all units needing it. Chemical, bacteriological, radiological detection and protection. Micro sensors integrated in new protective clothes will dramatically increase the ability to move and increase freedom of action in contaminated areas. High sensibility and selectivity will make possible an immediate detection of the threat. Body-armour for fighting soldiers. Extremely strong and light bullet proof materials increase the survival on the battlefield. Field-equipment of lightweight type. New, lightweight materials will decrease the total carrying load for the soldier. Hence endurance and strength will increase. This holds well for uniforms, personal weapons, communication equipment and darkness-optics. New bio-treatment for augmented performance. Without the use of drugs, human staying power can be doubled. Lack of sleep and impaired vigilance now can be compensated for as well as the impact of physical damage. A science of command and control Today's military command and control embrace different kinds of affairs from battle conduct to more administrative activities. It takes place on different strata from lower tactical levels to the highest strategical level. In contrast to civil command and control it includes fundamental questions regarding life and death for involved persons. In battlefields the unmasked principle of causality always rules. There the connection between conclusions and orders and their consequences are terrifyingly short. A simple definition of the aim of command and control could be the coordination of human actions with different resources to get effects. In practise, this is often considered as something diffuse. Difficulties often arise when analysing the content and form of the activity. Problem solutions too often are seen as applied science without either theories or scientific method. Obstacles to attain a comprehensive view with hitherto used frames of reference have been experienced by both commanders and military theorists. With this background, an attempt to regard command and control as part of “The Art of War” may be understandable. As an art, it can only be developed and reach its fulfilment inside the born leader with his special creativity, intuition capability and the divine vestige, existing in very few persons. However, such a view will have some less successful consequences, especially for the education of higher commanders. The divine vestige is scarcely possible to gauge and the number of born leaders is not in enough supply for the demands of society. At all events it cannot be the foundation for the recruitment of general staff candidates. Here more measurable and tangible properties must be decisive. A more fruitful attitude therefore has appeared to be an integration of the problems of military management into a general scientific educational frame and denote it a science of command and control. The military competent at once realise that this area has two central questions at issue, on the one hand to make relevant decisions and on the other to carry them out adequately. With a slight reformulation it is possible to say that decision-making is to determine what should be done. The realization, the command, concerns how it should be done. Here the continuous existing aspect of time is present with its deadlines for thinking, planning, decision-making, taking measures, etc. This kind of activity always embraces the old truism of the equal importance of making the right things as doing things right. Regarding civil decision-making and execution, it often differs marginally (in principle) from the military counterpart. Thus, it is possible to speak of a general science of command and control. In English, the area is denoted by the words command, control, communication and information with the acronym C3I. Command implies goal-oriented conduct and action, executed by people over people who all are living creatures and thereby process information for their survival. The process of life is to adapt the own situation to an ever-changing environment and a relation between information and control. Control comprises the processing of information, programming, decision and communication. Two-way communication between the controller and the controlled feeds back the result of the action for necessary justification and new activity. In reality, the described control and command process is a very complex phenomenon. The physical and mental status of the decision-maker as well as deeply existing conceptions and preferences influence the procedure. Also organisational structures and technical equipment will influence the result. “Everything is connected to everything else”. Later in the text, it will be evident that the used English keywords can represent subsets of a comprehensive theory. Without this theory the term science in the label “A science of command and control” should be irrelevant. To synthesize a new subject field like command and control will imply the finding and understanding of the joint factors existing within different kinds of the area. It also demands definitions regarding basic terms and concepts as a starting point for problem-solving and various kinds of reasoning. Below some fundamental concept are presented. The theory of command and control is founded on a number of related academic areas. The integration of these creates the theoretical basis which allows a commander to understand the function of command and control. That is to master the prerequisite for relevant decisions and their transformation into reality. The science of command and control is the application of the theory in a real world. It indicates how a system of command and control should be designed and used for decision-making, execution, followup, and government in a mainly unpredictable and chaotic environment (especially the combat). A system of command and control is an integrated gathering of people, functions, procedures and equipment which together constitute the function of command and control. This system is the tool of the commander and secures that the capacity of the directed unity is utilized in the best manner in order to fulfill the goal. The research problem of the science of command and control can be formulated as: How should the intentions of the commander be converted into reality as completely as possible? Something which must be elucidated in the definitions above is the concept of a commander. The presumption that one can count with an unambiguous, conclusive commander as in military units, civil service departments or oil-tankers are not always correct. A committee, a board or some kind of collective often is the equivalent. This must be considered the rule when controversial political problems should be solved. The concept of a commander implies that somebody (sometimes several) can formulate a criterion for the best problem solution and take the responsibility for a decision. Likewise that this (or these) people finally shoulder the responsibility for execution even if this can be transferred to other instances. Today a science of command and control is necessary to adapt managing power and exercise of command to new kinds of organisations and new operational principles. The area is transformed at a rapid pace by social changes and new trends like the internationalisation of economies and knowledge production, globalization of media and knowledge mediation and also changed forms of cooperation and conflicts. Moreover, modern leadership is often executed at a distance which implies both possibilities and risks. Today's communication technology will permit operations (both surgical and military!) to be literally managed and controlled from the other side of the globe. Modern dispersed organisations thus have their specific problems which cannot be neglected. How should social relations be managed when the personal encounter becomes a rare event and directors are dematerialized to a voice in a satellite-mediated phone call? Regarding military command and control systems, they are today typically multi-component phenomena. The deciding functions are performed by people, simple decision-support systems in computer-based algorithms and advanced expert-systems. The decision-components are geographically dispersed dependent on the appearance of the environment but also for reason of survival. This distributed system gets its character by the quality of the sensors together with velocity and effectiveness of actual weapons. The need for a comprehensive theory For the military scientist it is obvious that studies in such a complex area as command and control scarcely are possible without the help of a theory of generalization, a meta-theory. Such a theory must be able to sum up and explain common factors and problems existing in all kinds of command and control. It must also be able to integrate different knowledge and reflections from various subject fields, which apparently do not seem to be related. In addition it must preferably furnish a hierarchy of theories and models where key-variables and their changes are intelligible and measurable. The supply of relevant models to facilitate studies, simulations and calculations defines the limits for both knowledge acquisition and information-dispersal. A meta-theory likewise must supply general definitions and a common language, joining all subareas which taken together, will constitute a science of command and control. The application must take place in an area which has an ever growing need for rapid decisions and the mastering of very complex processes despite tight margins, ambiguous and disturbed information. As a frame of reference it must also be able to answer the same questions like other scientific areas, namely: what theories represent the core of the field? which methods are used? which sources are used? and to what extent are these theories, methods and sources universally applicable? Does such a theory exist? From the viewpoint of the systems-scientist, the answer is affirmative. General Systems Theory (GST) studies patterns which do not relate to a specific area. It examines generalizations, applicable on specific problems, e.g. in command and control. As meta-discipline it can transfer its knowledge-structure to other areas without calling in question their content. It can supplement a great number of areas and integrate phenomena which had not been successfully handled. Above all this theory will support the generalist, who often is found to solve today's problem better than the specialist with his narrow limits. A popular formulation could be that systems theory creates a knowledge structure which facilitates the providing of fact to the right place and creates possibilities to see a connected whole. A locution is that its main task is to help scientists to elucidate the complexity of the existence, technologists to make use of it and generalists to learn to live with it.

Tournament: CFLs | Round: 3 | Opponent: Idk | Judge: Lay judges
NSA surveillance is key to solve terrorism. Expert testimony confirms.
Kimberly Dozier 13 writes
The director of the National Security Agency insisted on Tuesday that the government's sweeping surveillance programs have foiled some 50 terrorist plots worldwide in a forceful defense echoed by the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee. Army Gen. Keith Alexander said the two recently disclosed programs – one that gathers U.S. phone records and another that is designed to track the use of U.S.-based Internet servers by foreigners with possible links to terrorism – are critical in the terrorism fight. Intelligence officials have disclosed some details on two thwarted attacks, and Alexander promised additional information to the panel on thwarted attacks that the programs helped stop. He provided few additional details. The programs "assist the intelligence community to connect the dots," Alexander told the committee in a rare, open Capitol Hill hearing. Alexander got no disagreement from the leaders of the panel, who have been outspoken in backing the programs since Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former contractor with Booz Allen Hamilton, disclosed information to The Washington Post and the Guardian newspapers. Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chairman of the committee, and Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the panel's top Democrat, said the programs were vital to the intelligence community and assailed Snowden's actions as criminal. "It is at times like these where our enemies within become almost as damaging as our enemies on the outside," Rogers said. Ruppersberger said the "brazen disclosures" put the United States and its allies at risk. The general counsel for the intelligence community said the NSA cannot target phone conversations between callers inside the U.S. – even if one of those callers was someone they were targeting for surveillance when outside the country. The director of national intelligence's legal chief, Robert S. Litt, said that if the NSA finds it has accidentally gathered a phone call by a target who had traveled into the U.S. without their knowledge, they have to "purge" that from their system. The same goes for an accidental collection of any conversation because of an error. Litt said those incidents are then reported to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which "pushes back" and asks how it happened, and what the NSA is doing to fix the problem so it doesn't happen again. Rogers previewed the latest public airing of the NSA controversy the morning after President Barack Obama, who is attending the G-8 summit in Ireland, vigorously defended the surveillance programs in a lengthy interview Monday, calling them transparent – even though they are authorized in secret. "It is transparent," Obama told PBS' Charlie Rose in an interview. "That's why we set up the FISA court," the president added, referring to the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that authorizes two recently disclosed programs: one that gathers U.S. phone records and another that is designed to track the use of U.S.-based Internet servers by foreigners with possible links to terrorism. Obama said he has named representatives to a privacy and civil liberties oversight board to help in the debate over just how far government data gathering should be allowed to go – a discussion that is complicated by the secrecy surrounding the FISA court, with hearings held at undisclosed locations and with only government lawyers present. The orders that result are all highly classified. "We're going to have to find ways where the public has an assurance that there are checks and balances in place ... that their phone calls aren't being listened into; their text messages aren't being monitored, their emails are not being read by some big brother somewhere," the president said. A senior administration official said Obama had asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to determine what more information about the two programs could be made public, to help better explain them. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly. Snowden accused members of Congress and administration officials Monday of exaggerating their claims about the success of the data gathering programs, including pointing to the arrest of the would-be New York subway bomber, Najibullah Zazi, in 2009. In an online interview with The Guardian in which he posted answers to questions Monday, Snowden said that Zazi could have been caught with narrower, targeted surveillance programs – a point Obama conceded in his interview without mentioning Snowden. "We might have caught him some other way," Obama said. "We might have disrupted it because a New York cop saw he was suspicious. Maybe he turned out to be incompetent and the bomb didn't go off. But, at the margins, we are increasing our chances of preventing a catastrophe like that through these programs," he said. Obama repeated earlier assertions that the NSA programs were a legitimate counterterror tool and that they were completely noninvasive to people with no terror ties – something he hoped to discuss with the privacy and civil liberties board he'd formed. The senior administration official said the president would be meeting with the new privacy board in the coming days.

Tournament: CFLs | Round: 3 | Opponent: Idk | Judge: Lay judges
I affirm today’s resolution, that when in conflict, national security concerns ought to be valued above personal privacy.

As “ought” is “used to express duty or moral obligation” according to Random House Dictionary, the paramount value is morality.
Random House Dictionary. “Ought.” No date. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ought

To achieve the value of morality, the value criterion is upholding the common good.

Morality is based in our obligations to the community.
Professor of Government at Harvard Michael Sandel 9 writes
Michael Sandel (Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University). “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 2009.
Alasdair MacIntyre offers a powerful answer to this question. In his book After Virtue (1981), he gives an account of the way we, as more agents, arrive at our purposes and ends. As an alternative to the voluntarist conception of the person, MacIntyre advances a narrative conception. Human beings are storytelling beings. We live our lives as narrative quests. “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” All lived narratives, MacIntyre observes, have a certain teleological character. This does not mean that they have a fixed purpose or end laid down by some external authority. Teleology and unpredictability coexist. “Like characters in a fictional narrative we do not know what will happen next, but none the less our lives have a certain form which projects itself toward our future.” To live a life is to enact a narrative quest that aspires to a certain unity or coherence. When confronted with competing paths, I try to figure out which path will best make sense of my life as a whole, and of the things I care about. Moral deliberation is more about interpreting my life story than exerting my will. It involves choice, but the choice issues from the interpretation; it is not a sovereign act of will. At any given moment, others may see more clearly than I do which path, of the ones before me, fits best with the arc of my life; upon reflection, I may say that my friend knows me better than I know myself. The narrative account of moral agency has the virtue of allowing for this possibility. It also shows how moral deliberation involves reflection within and about the larger life stories of which my life is a part. As MacIntyre writes, “I am never able to see the good or exercise the virtues only qua individual.”  I can make sense of the narrative of my life only by coming to terms with the stories in which I find myself. For MacIntyre (as for Aristotle), the narrative, or teleological aspect of moral reflection is bound up with membership and belonging. ‘We all approach our own circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity. I am someone’s son or daughter, someone’s cousin or uncle; I am a citizen of this or that city, a member of this or that guild or profession; I belong to this clan, that tribe, this nation. Hence what is good for me has to be the good for one who inhabits these roles. As such, I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point. This is in part what gives my own life its moral particularity.’ 

The common good is most important since we have special obligations to citizens.
Michael Sandel 9 continues
Michael Sandel (Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University). “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 2009.
Unlike natural duties, voluntary obligations are particular, not universal, and arise from consent. If I’ve agreed to paint your house (in exchange for a wage, say, or to repay a favor), I have an obligation to do so. But I don’t have an obligation to paint everyone’s house. On the liberal conception, we must respect the dignity of all persons, but beyond this, we owe only what we agree to owe. Liberal justice requires that we respect people’s rights (as defined by the neutral framework), not that we advance their good. Whether we must concern ourselves with the good of other people depends on whether, and with whom, we have agreed to do so. One striking implication of this view is that “there is no political obligation, strictly speaking, for citizens generally.” Although those who run for office voluntarily incur a political obligation (that is, to serve their country if elected), the ordinary citizen does not. As Rawls writes, “it is not clear what is the requisite binding action or who has performed it.” So if the liberal account of obligation is right, the average citizen has no special obligations to his or her fellow citizens, beyond the universal, natural duty not to commit injustice. From the standpoint of the narrative conception of the person, the liberal account of obligation is too thin. It fails to account for the special responsibilities we have to one another as fellow citizens. More than this, it fails to capture those loyalties and responsibilities whose moral force consists partly in the fact that living by them is inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are – as members of this family or nation or people; as bearers of that history; as citizens of this republic. On the narrative account, these identities are not contingencies we should set aside when deliberating about morality and justice; they are part of who we are, and so rightly bear on our moral responsibilities. So one way of deciding between the voluntarist and narrative conceptions of the person is to ask if you think there is a third category of obligations – call them obligations of solidarity, or membership – that can’t be explained in contractarian terms. Unlike natural duties, obligations of solidarity are particular, not universal; they involve moral responsibilities we owe, not to rational beings as such, but to those with whom we share a certain history. But unlike voluntary obligations, they do not depend on an act of consent. Their moral weight derives instead from the situated aspect of moral reflection, from a recognition that my life story is implicated in the stories of others.

Contention 1 is Community

Prioritizing national security necessarily follows from upholding the common good.
Professor of philosophy Kenneth Himma 7 writes
Kenneth Himma (associate professor of philosophy at Seattle Pacific University). “Privacy Versus Security: Why Privacy is Not an Absolute Value or Right.” San Diego Law Review. 2007. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=994458
Even at this high level of generality, it is easy to see that a commutarian agenda that values a common good independent of the aggregation of individual goods, constituted by opportunities for satisfied autonomous preferences, will entail the position that security, construed as a collective notion like a social order in which serious crime and violence is uncommon—rather than as an aggregation of individual rights to life, property, et cetera—is a more important moral value, other things being equal, than privacy. If preserving the social values associated with community, or common good, is more important than individual rights, then it follows that security, properly construed, is more important than privacy in the sense that threats to security are more important from the standpoint of morality and deserve more legal protection than “comparable” threats to privacy, which is an interest that is unique to individuals and which reflects the individualism of neoliberal traditions.

Contention 2 is the Information Age

Personal privacy is mostly irrelevant due to the rise of social media.
Eric Sterner 14 writes
Eric Sterner (staff writer). “The security vs. privacy debate is already over, and privacy lost.” Washington Examiner. March 10th, 2014. http://washingtonexaminer.com/the-security-vs.-privacy-debate-is-already-over-and-privacy-lost/article/2545407
Unfortunately, the security vs. privacy debate is largely over. As cybertechnologies pervaded our daily lives, we surrendered privacy, usually voluntarily. Consequently, framing the decisions before us as a contest between privacy and security is misguided; privacy died with the information age. Information and communication technologies make life better. They improved economic productivity, efficiency, and economic growth. More personally, information digitization created opportunities to grow, relate to others, and generally realize one’s creative potential. Connected to the Internet, we create, post, and retrieve vast amounts of data, almost all of which is in the hands of third parties. These benefits come at a price. In order for the applications we use to improve their performance and offer us ever better services, they require information about us. We give it to them. Facebook's 1 billion active users, for example, share roughly 5 billion items a day, not counting the data Facebook collects about them. Consider Google's privacy policy. Google collects personal information, data about the services you use and how you use them, server logs (exactly the kind of thing the NSA was after), location information, data about the software you use, storage data and other identifying information that third parties may store on the hardware you use to access cyberspace. That is an awful lot of information when all you want to do is make a call, play a game or write a letter. This is not to single Google out for praise or condemnation. Its policy is a standard for the industry. Most companies use that information to make our lives better. Surrendering data enables us to better exploit the Internet. When amalgamated, doctors can track public health risks, improve medical research, promote energy efficiency and more. Unsurprisingly, our adversaries use the technology too.

Most Americans do not strongly value their personal privacy online. Sullivan 11 writes
Bob Sullivan (NBC technology correspondent). “Why should I care about digital privacy?” 3/10/11. MSNBC. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/41995926/ns/technology_and_science/t/why-should-i-care-about-digital-privacy/#.UePKCvmkpRY
Gary LosHuertos parked himself in a New York City cafe last fall and fired up a new tool for snooping on people as they use free wireless. Within minutes, he had managed to spy on more than a dozen people as they used Facebook. It was just an experiment by the Web software expert, but he wanted to make a point — so he used the victims' own Facebook accounts to send them each an unnerving warning message. He told them he'd hacked their accounts, and he knew where they were.
He expected cursing, anger, perhaps some furious typing. Instead, many of his recipients just went right on surfing. So he prodded them a second time.
"Really wasn't kidding about the insecurity thing," he wrote. "I won't send another message after this — it's up to you to take your security seriously. You're at the XYZ Street Starbucks on an insecure connection, and absolutely anyone here can access your account with the right (free) tool."
Twenty minutes passed. He could see that recipients had read his notes — he had full access to their accounts. But on they went, surfing as if no one was watching. One even shopped at Amazon, despite his specific warning about that site.
Even his incredibly spooky message didn't change their behavior.
"What's absolutely incomprehensible is that after someone has been alerted to the danger (from their own account!) that they would casually ignore the warning, and continue about their day," said LosHuertos in his blog about the incident.
Welcome to the world of privacy experts like Larry Ponemon and Alessandro Acquisti. Their chosen field of work is an area where research can be pretty depressing. Consumer behavior shows, repeatedly, that people just don't care about privacy, no matter how much lip service they might give to the topic. Ponemon's research shows that most U.S. adults — 60 percent —claim they care about privacy but will barely lift a finger in an effort to preserve it. They don't alter Facebook privacy settings, they don't complain when supermarkets demand their phone numbers and they certainly don't insist on encrypted e-mail. LosHuertos' experiment underscores this point well. Even people who have experienced a "privacy mugging" often don't change their behavior.

In the information age, the common good always takes precedence over privacy.
Amitai Etzioni 96 writes
Amitai Etzioni. “Less Privacy Is Good for Us (and You).” Responsive Community. Summer 1996.
Not so fast. Our ability to restore old-fashioned privacy is about the same as our ability to vanquish nuclear weapons. Once the genie of high-power computers and communication technologies has been let out of the bottle, no one can cork it again. We must either return to the Stone Age – pay cash, use carrier pigeons, forget insurance – or learn to live with shrunken privacy. Laws already on the books mainly foster a Prohibition-like effect: those keen to read your dossier do so sub rosa rather than in broad daylight. Most important, giving up some measure of privacy is exactly what the common good requires. And, with some good will, we can mitigate the intrusive consequences. Take first a non-inflammatory case. Would you like Americans to be required to put out garbage in see-through bags, as residents of Tokyo are? You would if you realized that transparent bags help ensure that people will separate glass and cans from the rest of their trash. (If a person is keen to hide, say, used condoms from neighbors, he can put them in a paper bag within the clear bag. But what about more provocative cases, such as fingerprinting those who receive welfare checks? Such a practice makes them feel like criminals, civil libertarians complain. But would you rather continue a system in which numerous individuals each collect several welfare, unemployment, and Social Security checks? Moreover, once fingerprinting is widely applied, the stigma will wane. Students are already routinely fingerprinted when they take the LSATs. Keeping computerized data about physicians who have been kicked out of hospitals maintains a record that shadows them long after they have paid their dues. But would you rather return to the world we had until recently, in which doctors who killed several patients due to gross negligence in New Jersey could cross the state lines and repeat their performance with impunity? (The databank records only that a physician has been forced to leave “for a cause”). 

Contention 3 — National security is a prerequisite to achieving privacy.

Kenneth Himma 7 continues
Kenneth Himma (associate professor of philosophy at Seattle Pacific University). “Privacy Versus Security: Why Privacy is Not an Absolute Value or Right.” San Diego Law Review. 2007. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=994458
The last argument I wish to make in this essay will be brief because it is extremely well known and has been made in a variety of academic and nonacademic contexts. The basic point here is that no right not involving security can be meaningfully exercised in the absence of efficacious protection of security. The right to property means nothing if the law fails to protect against threats to life and bodily security. Likewise, the right to privacy has little value if one feels constrained to remain in one’s home because it is so unsafe to venture away that one significantly risks death or grievous bodily injury. This is not merely a matter of describing common subjective preferences; this is rather an objective fact about privacy and security interests. If security interests are not adequately protected, citizens will simply not have much by way of privacy interests to protect. While it is true, of course, that people have privacy interests in what goes on inside the confines of their home, they also have legitimate privacy interests in a variety of public contexts that cannot be meaningfully exercised if one is afraid to venture out into those contexts because of significant threats to individual and collective security—such as would be the case if terrorist attacks became highly probable in those contexts. It is true, of course, that to say that X is a prerequisite for exercising a particular right Y does not obviously entail that X is morally more important than Y, but this is a reasonable conclusion to draw. If it is true that Y is meaningless in the absence of X, then it seems clear that X deserves, as a moral matter, more stringent protection than Y does. Since privacy interests lack significance in the absence of adequate protection of security interests, it seems reasonable to infer that security interests deserve, as a moral matter, more stringent protection than privacy interests. 

Contention 4 is Liberty

Prioritizing national security over personal privacy values our core civil liberties.
Executive Director of the Project for the New American Century Gary Schmitt 14 writes
Gary Schmitt (served as executive director and president of the New Citizenship Project before becoming the executive director of the Project for the New American Century from 1998 to 2005). “Privacy or Security: A False Choice.” The Weekly Standard. February 3rd, 2014. http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/privacy-or-security-false-choice_775317.html
Part of the problem—indeed, a key problem in the debate—is that we have subsumed civil liberties under the expansive banner of “privacy” and ignored just how complex the notion of privacy is in today’s world. When talking about civil liberties, it is well to remind ourselves that the kind of judicially authorized telephone data that NSA collects and that we are arguing about (numbers dialed and time stamps, but not content) has long been held by the courts not to violate the 4th Amendment’s proscription against “unreasonable searches” by the government. Nor have any of our other core liberties—such as, freedom of the press, religion, conscience and association, the right to vote, the right to move from state to state, and, yes, the right to bear arms—been undermined in any real way by the government or its intelligence agencies since 9/11. If anything, other than the aggravation of airport screening and tightened border controls, Americans are just as free today as they were on September 10, 2001. Privacy is a different matter. Americans want privacy in theory but give it away to all kinds of entities on a daily basis when they use the Internet for buying books or movie tickets, search the Internet for this or that, post their daily affairs on social media, or even commute to work using an EZPass which, while it allows John Doe the convenience of bypassing long lines at the toll plaza, records precisely when his car was on a certain stretch of highway and can be preserved in a searchable form, ad infinitum. If anything, the intelligence community is far more careful with the data it collects about Americans than are Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Because we’ve lost sight of what our core civil liberties are, we tend to forget those periods in American history where getting the balance between safety and liberty was far more difficult and problematic than it is today. During previous wars, American presidents have suspended the writ of habeas corpus, ignored the authority of the courts, censored publications, compromised mail, and interned over a hundred thousand Japanese immigrants and Japanese-American citizens in “war relocation camps.” We’re nowhere near that state today. It was all well and good that in his speech on January 17, the president said that “throughout American history, intelligence has helped secure our country and freedom.” That’s certainly true. But when President Obama then went on to offer up the “cautionary tale” of East Germany, where “vast unchecked surveillance turned citizens into informers and persecuted people for what they said in the privacy of their own homes,” he fed a fear among the American public that is neither responsible nor warranted by reality. 

Thus you affirm.

Tournament: Collegiate RR | Round: 1 | Opponent: LHP RS | Judge: Jonathan Alston, Jay Cumming
Formatted text here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/41613883/Collegiate20RR20R120AC.docx

Violations of freedom lead to self-contradiction. Engstrom writes
Engstrom, Stephen (Professor of Ethics at UPitt). “Universal Legislation As the Form of Practical Knowledge.” No date.

Given the preceding…own and others’ freedom.

Thus, the standard is creating a system of equal freedom.
There are 3 additional warrants.

1. Equality. Human equality mandates a system of equal freedom.
   Ripstein 9
   Arthur Ripstein (University of Toronto). “Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy.” 2009. 

The idea of…in our own person.” 

Human equality is a basic assumption of any moral system. Gosepath 11
Gosepath, Stefan, "Equality", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/equality/.

This fundamental idea…contemporary political theories (Kymlicka 1990, p.5).

2. Human Worth. Only a system of equal freedom respects the right of human beings to set their own purposes.
Ripstein 9 writes
Arthur Ripstein (University of Toronto). “Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy.” 2009. 

Kant offers different…master of another. 

Human worth is the source of all value.
Korsgaard 96
Korsgaard, Christine (Prof of Phil @ Harvard). “The Sources of Normativity.” 1996.

This is just a…valued for its own sake.

Put away Cummiskey. This notion of value precludes aggregation. Korsgaard 93
Chrissy K (the source of normativity). “The reasons we can share: An attack on the distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral values.” Cambridge University Press, 1993. Previously published in Social Philosophy and Policy 10, no. 1: 24-51. http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3196321/Korsgaard_ReasonsShare.pdf?sequence=2

The difference between…an intersubjectivist will not.

3. The State of Nature. The right to freedom is the foundation of government authority. The state exists to create a system of equal freedom for all. This is the only legitimate use of state coercion and link turns social contract frameworks.

Korsgaard 8
Korsgaard, Christine M. (expert at willing maxims) 2008. Taking the law into our own hands: Kant on the right to revolution. In The Constitution of Agency, 233-262. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Originally published in Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls, eds. Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman, and Christine M. Korsgaard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Why is it permissible…our executive authority to a government. 

I contend that compulsory voting creates a system of equal freedom.

Sub-point A is checks and balances.

CV provides a legal check against discriminatory voting laws. Counter-plans can’t solve this.
Birch 9
Birch, Sarah (reader in politics at U of Essex). “Full Participation: A Comparative Study of Compulsory Voting.” Published by United Nations. 26 February 2009. http://i.unu.edu/media/unu.edu/publication/2224/full_participation_web.pdf

Compulsory voting is…is required by law). 

B is turnout.

Studies prove CV increases turnout.
Panagopoulos 8
Costas Panagopoulos (Panagopoulos is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy and the graduate program in Elections and Campaign Management at Fordham University. He was previously research associate at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, where he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in 2006). The Calculus of Voting in Compulsory Voting Systems.
Political Behavior, Vol. 30, No. 4 (December 2008), pp. 455-467. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40213328 

Studies consistently demonstrate…points on average (Lijphart 1997; Powell 1980; Jackman 1987; Franklin 2001). 

CV is key. Reward systems are too expensive. HLR 7
Harvard Law Review (no author). “The Case for Compulsory Voting in the United States.” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 121, No. 2 (December 2007), pp. 591-612
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40042668

Finally, there is the…pay all voters.132 

Low turnout de facto excludes the voice of the poor.
HLR 7
Harvard Law Review (no author). “The Case for Compulsory Voting in the United States.” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 121, No. 2 (December 2007), pp. 591-612
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40042668

There are serious…attempts to increase voter turnout.

Independently, high turnout’s key to get money out of campaign politics.
HLR 7
Harvard Law Review (no author). “The Case for Compulsory Voting in the United States.” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 121, No. 2 (December 2007), pp. 591-612
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40042668

In addition to the direct effect…be less beholden to donors.39 

Funding bias is the largest barrier to equal representation; outweighs other offense.
Pettit 99
Pettit, Philip (Aussie bloke). Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford University Press, USA (September 30, 1999). 

Before leaving this discussion of…separating the worlds of government and business.

C. Libertarian notions of freedom fail in a state context. Engelen 7
Bart Engelen (Research Assistant of the Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders (Belgium), Centre for Economics and Ethics – Institute of Philosophy (K.U.Leuven), Centre for Economics and Ethics – K.U.Leuven, Naamsestraat 69, Leuven B – 3000, Belgium). “Why Compulsory Voting Can Enhance Democracy.” Acta Politica, 2007, 42, (23–39)

Libertarian opponents of compulsory voting…makes political decision-making practically impossible.

Neg burden is to defend a competitive post-fiat United States policy. Offense-defense is key to fairness and real world education. This means ignore skepticism.
Nelson 8
Adam F. Nelson, J.D.1. Towards a Comprehensive Theory of Lincoln-Douglas Debate. 2008.

And the truth-statement model…options affect us and the world we live in.

Tournament: Collegiate RR | Round: 3 | Opponent: Scarsdale TC Tomer Cherki | Judge: Dave McGinnis, Henry Curtis
Action theory precedes ethics. We need a basic account of what an action is before ethics can be sound. Anscombe 58 writes
G.E.M. Anscombe. “Modern Moral Philosophy.” Philosophy, Vol. 33, No. 124 (Jan., 1958), pp. 1-19 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal Institute of Philosophy.
That I owe the grocer such-and… is affected by its motive and by the intention or intentions in it; and for this an account of such concepts is required. 

This justifies practical reason. Unity of action can only be explained by reason, not desire. Rodl 2k writes
Rödl, Sebastian. Self-Consciousness, Harvard University Press, 2000
Calculation from desire does not…I would not, in doing A1 and A2, be doing B.

Violations of freedom lead to self-contradiction. Engstrom writes  
Engstrom, Stephen (Professor of Ethics at UPitt). “Universal Legislation As the Form of Practical Knowledge.” No date.
Given the preceding considerations, it’s a straightforward…limitation of both their own and others’ freedom.

Thus, the standard is creating a system of equal freedom.
There are 3 additional warrants.

1. Equality. Human equality mandates a system of equal freedom.
   Ripstein 9 writes
   Arthur Ripstein (University of Toronto). “Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy.” 2009.
   The idea of being your own master is also equivalent…that this duty can be “explained as obligation from the right of humanity in our own person.” 

Human equality is a basic assumption of any moral system. Gosepath 11
Gosepath, Stefan, and#34;Equalityand#34;, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2011/entries/equality/.
This fundamental idea of equal respect for all persons…for all contemporary political theories (Kymlicka 1990, p.5).

2. Human Worth. Only a system of equal freedom respects the right of human beings to set their own purposes.
Ripstein 9 writes
Arthur Ripstein (University of Toronto). “Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy.” 2009.
Kant offers different formulations of innate right, each…the right that no person be the master of another.

 Human worth is the source of all value.
Christine Korsgaard 96 writes
Korsgaard, Christine (Prof of Philo @ Harvard). “The Sources of Normativity.” 1996.
This is just a fancy new model of…humanity as the source of all reasons and values must be valued for its own sake.

Put away Cummiskey. This notion of value precludes aggregation.
Korsgaard 93 writes  
Korsgaard, Christine.  Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. “The reasons we can share: An attack on the distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral values.” Cambridge University Press, 1993. Previously published in Social Philosophy and Policy 10, no. 1: 24-51. http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3196321/Korsgaard_ReasonsShare.pdf?sequence=2
The difference between these two interpretations…while an Intersubjectivist will not be a consequentialist.

3. The State of Nature. The right to freedom is the foundation of government authority. The state exists to create a system of equal freedom for all. This is the only legitimate use of state coercion and link turns social contract frameworks.

Korsgaard 8 writes
Korsgaard, Christine M. 2008. Taking the law into our own hands: Kant on the right to revolution. In The Constitution of Agency, 233-262. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Originally published in Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls, eds. Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman, and Christine M. Korsgaard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Why is it permissible for others to force…people join together into a political state, transferring our executive authority to a government. 

I contend that compulsory voting creates a system of equal freedom.

Sub-point A is checks and balances.

CV provides a legal check against discriminatory voting laws. Counter-plans can’t solve this.
Birch 9 writes
Birch, Sarah (reader in politics at U of Essex). “Full Participation: A Comparative Study of Compulsory Voting.” Published by United Nations. 26 February 2009. http://i.unu.edu/media/unu.edu/publication/2224/full_participation_web.pdf
Compulsory voting is necessarily…electoral participation is required by law). 

B is turnout.

Studies prove CV increases turnout.
Panagopoulos 8 writes
Studies consistently demonstrate that compulsory voting raises turnout….7 to 16 percentage points on average (Lijphart 1997; Powell 1980; Jackman 1987; Franklin 2001). 

CV is key. Reward systems are too expensive. HLR 7 writes
Harvard Law Review (no author). “The Case for Compulsory Voting in the United States.” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 121, No. 2 (December 2007), pp. 591-612
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40042668

Finally, there is the possibility of…to pay all voters.132 

Low turnout de facto excludes the voice of the poor.
HLR 7 writes
Harvard Law Review (no author). “The Case for Compulsory Voting in the United States.” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 121, No. 2 (December 2007), pp. 591-612
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40042668

There are serious questions about how…a substantial obstacle to any attempts to increase voter turnout.

Independently, high turnout’s key to get money out of campaign politics.
HLR 7 writes
In addition to the direct effect of compulsory voting on turnout,…politicians and parties might focus somewhat less on fundraising and be less beholden to donors.39 

Funding bias is the largest barrier to equal representation; outweighs other offense.
Pettit 99 writes
Pettit, Philip (Aussie bloke). Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford University Press, USA (September 30, 1999). 

Before leaving this discussion of what inclusive democracy…the greatest challenges for republican research must be to identify measures for effectively separating the worlds of government and business.

C. There’s no right not to vote, which means CV isn’t a violation of freedom.

Korsgaard and Tomasi 13 writes
Korsgaard, Christine (the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy, Harvard) and Adam Tomasi (Sacred Heart High School sophomore). Facebook conversation. August 20th and 21st, 2013.
Adam Tomasi – 11:19 PM
Hi Professor Korsgaard! Would Kant be in favor of compulsory voting?
Thank you, Adam
Christine M. Korsgaard – 11:54 PM
I donand#39;t know but thereand#39;s no reason why not. All political offices have duties attached to them, and being a citizen is a political office.
Adam Tomasi – 11:55 PM
If you have time, I was wondering if you could clarify how citizenship is a political office! This is very interesting.
Christine M. Korsgaard – 12:33 AM
Political offices determine who makes which decisions on behalf of the state. Congress decides on the laws, the president decides on the cabinet, and on what to do in emergencies, and citizens decide who will occupy those higher positions. Being a citizen means you have responsibility for that. You should always vote, whether you have to or not, but there is no problem about making people live up to that responsibility.
Adam Tomasi – 12:35 AM
Last question -- even though compulsion might initially seem to treat them as a means, it really does not since citizens agree to their and#34;officeand#34;?
Christine M. Korsgaard – 1:32 AM
Yes
Adam Tomasi – 10:10 AM
Sounds good! Thank you so much.

D. Libertarian notions of freedom fail in a state context. Engelen 7 writes
Bart Engelen (Research Assistant of the Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders (Belgium), Centre for Economics and Ethics – Institute of Philosophy (K.U.Leuven), Centre for Economics and Ethics – K.U.Leuven, Naamsestraat 69, Leuven B – 3000, Belgium). “Why Compulsory Voting Can Enhance Democracy.” Acta Politica, 2007, 42, (23–39)
Libertarian opponents of compulsory voting emphasize that …makes political decision-making practically impossible.

Neg burden is to defend a competitive post-fiat United States policy. Offense-defense is key to fairness and real world education. This means ignore skepticism.
Nelson 8 writes
Adam F. Nelson, J.D.1. Towards a Comprehensive Theory of Lincoln-Douglas Debate. 2008.
And the truth-statement model of the resolution imposes…how the various options affect us and the world we live in.

Tournament: George Mason | Round: 2 | Opponent: Erica Fan | Judge: Not sure
“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” Because I agree with Thomas Jefferson, I affirm today’s resolution, Resolved: In the United States criminal justice system, truth seeking ought to take precedence over the attorney-client privilege.

Before I begin, I would like to offer the following resolutional analysis. Just because one issue takes precedence over another doesn’t mean the other is ignored entirely. For example, protecting the innocent takes precedence over punishing the guilty, but we do not always give ‘not guilty’ verdicts. Instead, we just adopt a higher standard such as “beyond a reasonable doubt.” 

I value ====morality====, as “ought” in the resolution denotes moral obligation. My value criterion for today’s round is ====increasing corporate accountability====. There are three reasons to prefer it. 

First, corporations exploit the criminal justice system and the constitution to perpetuate human rights abuses.

Human rights lawyer Katie Redford 13 writes
It’s certainly no news that today’s corporations enjoy unprecedented global power. Likewise, the corporate lobby’s campaign to stifle human rights activism has been steadily increasing. Since Citizens United, which extended First Amendment rights to corporations as “persons”, we’ve seen bold legal arguments against laws and regulations that would hold them accountable to fundamental human rights law. This year, for example, the Supreme Court held in Kiobel v. Shell that Nigerian survivors of torture and crimes against humanity could not seek justice against Shell in U.S. Courts. The “mere corporate presence” of Shell in the U.S. was not enough for the Court to allow the plaintiffs—lawful residents of the U.S.—to bring their case. Courtroom doors that have been open to the world’s powerless for over 30 years are now closing thanks to a concerted effort by the most powerful. Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could push this dangerous precedent even further. Largely outside the radar of the human rights community, DaimlerChrysler AG v. Bauman arises out of the company’s alleged participation in targeting labor activists in Argentina’s Dirty War, a period of terror that involved the murder, torture and disappearances of thousands of activists and political dissidents. The allegations are chilling: Mercedes-Benz Argentina identified workers within its plant as “subversives” to state security forces, knowing full well that, as a result, those workers would be abducted, tortured, murdered or “disappeared”.  Equally chilling is the prospect that the Supreme Court will enshrine corporate rights over human rights in law once again.  Like Shell in Kiobel, the question is whether the German company is legally present in the U.S. for purposes of jurisdiction. Daimler says that it has a constitutional right to be treated separate from its subsidiaries. Where that right exists in the constitution is up to anyone’s imagination. Unfortunately, it’s not just the Supreme Court that’s privileging corporate rights over human rights. The American Petroleum Institute (API) sued the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) earlier this year, arguing a First Amendment right to make secret payments to foreign governments. The case concerned Section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank Act which would require oil, gas and mining companies to disclose the payments they make to foreign governments, making this information available to the people living in resource-rich countries for the first time. Such transparency regulations prevents corruption and promotes human rights, not least access to vital information that citizens in resource-rich countries require to demand accountability from their own governments. Yet the API argued that the First Amendment allows them to conceal such payments, and the SEC is now revising their rule. Finally, we have seen the rise in SLAPP (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) suits by corporate defendants against the human rights attorneys and NGOs that have advocated against them. Perhaps the most extreme, but certainly not the only, example of this has been the tactics that Chevron has employed this year against all advocates criticizing their human rights and environmental abuses in Ecuador. Faced with an $18 billion judgment against it for environmental devastation in the Amazon, Chevron has relentlessly targeted the organizations, lawyers, journalists and activists who have campaigned or publicly spoken out about the company’s destructive operations in Ecuador. In spite of sanctions and other judicial admonishments, Chevron’s lawyers have continued to SLAPP activists with harassing subpoenas and depositions, undoubtedly aimed at chilling the future First Amendment activity that makes their company look bad. EarthRights has defended these organizations, like Amazon Watch, but in spite of successful defense, Chevron’s legal machine continues these abusive practices.  Sadly, these cases are not new or unique. Human rights advocates have always faced an uphill battle, especially when taking on corporate abuse. What is new is the way in which our highest courts are privileging corporations and their rights over those of actual human beings. SLAPP suits and corporate tactics aimed at discouraging human rights advocates from speaking out and demanding justice are time-tested. But the aggressiveness and vigor with which Chevron has been allowed to pursue such tactics is new, and other corporations are following suit. 

Second, my criterion is intuitive. It would obviously be wrong for someone to get underpaid simply because a business sought a larger profit margin. It would also be wrong for a business to discriminate based on sex or race in the workplace. If something were to contribute to questionable business practices, it must be rejected.

And third, information about corporations should be public. If consumers purchase from businesses, they need to know how those corporations do business so they can maintain their right to boycott illicit practices.

My thesis is that prioritizing truth seeking over the attorney-client privilege is essential to increasing corporate accountability.

My first contention is that corporations abuse attorney-client privilege.

Shell Oil uses the attorney-client privilege to hide suspect business practices.

John Donovan 13 writes
John Donovan (known as Shell’s #1 enemy, has worked to release public information about Shell for a long time). “Shell Fights to Keep Oil Futures Probe Documents Secret.” Royal Dutch Shell PLC. June 26th, 2013. http://royaldutchshellplc.com/2013/06/26/shell-fights-to-keep-oil-futures-probe-documents-secret/
A Shell insider source has brought to my attention certain current litigation in the USA in which Shell Oil Company has involvement as one of a number of third parties. Shell lawyers are panicking about the prospect of being compelled to hand over secret information to a US court hearing a case about alleged manipulation of the crude oil futures market. For obvious reasons, the timing is rather unfortunate for Shell. The case is: U.S. COMMODITY FUTURES TRADING COMMISSION, Plaintiff, -against- PARNON ENERGY INC., ARCADIA PETROLEUM LTD, ARCADIA ENERGY (SUISSE) SA, NICHOLAS J. WILDGOOSE AND JAMES T. DYER, Defendant. (Case 1:11-cv-03543-WH) In recent days lawyers acting for Shell have filed a flurry of documents with the court, all are bundled together in the pdf file I have compiled. As can be seen from these extracts from pages 4 and 5 of the 8 page submission, Shell really does not want to hand the information over. Extracts 1. Shell objects to each document request to the extent it seeks to impose obligations beyond those required by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the Local Rules for the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, and/or any other applicable rule or court order. 2. Shell objects to each document request to the extent it seeks the production of information that constitutes proprietary information, trade secrets or other confidential research, development or commercial information of Shell. Disclosure of such information would cause substantial economic harm to Shell. Further, such information is neither relevant to any issue in this lawsuit nor reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence. 3. Shell objects to each document request to the extent it seeks, or can be construed to seek, the disclosure of information protected from discovery by the attorney-client privilege, the evaluation privilege, the work-product doctrine or any other applicable privilege, exemption, or immunity recognized under federal, state, or intemationallaw. 4. Shell objects to each document request to the extent that it requires the production of documents for which Shell requested confidential treatment pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act under CFTC Rule 145.9, 17 C.F.R. § 145.9. 5. Shell objects to each document request to the extent that it is overly broad, unduly burdensome, vexatious, or harassing. 6. Shell objects to each document request to the extent it calls for a legal conclusion. 7. Shell objects to each document request to the extent that it seeks documents not relevant to the claims or defenses of any party and is not reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence. 8. Shell objects to each document request to the extent that it requires the production of documents that contain private information about individuals. 9. Shell reserves all objections that may be available to it at any hearing or trial or on any motion to the use or admissibility of any information provided or documents produced, as well as the right to object to further discovery relating to the subject matter of any information or document provided. Shell mentions the protection of trade secrets. In my experience, that is probably trade secrets Shell has stolen from someone else, inevitably a smaller company, or an individual who made the mistake of trusting Shell and its sham business principles.
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And, Mobil Oil Corp. has used to the attorney-client privilege to cover up damages from oil spills.

Myron Levin 91 writes
Myron Levin (Los Angeles Times staff writer). “Pipeline Spills Aren't Only Problems to Plague Mobil”, July 18, 1991
Mobil Oil Corp. has taken considerable heat for spills from its crude oil pipeline. But the line is not the only part of Mobil's far-flung operations to come under scrutiny.¶ In recent years, explosions and fires at the company's 62-year-old Torrance refinery killed several Mobil or contractor workers and injured many others. In 1989, amid a series of such accidents, the city of Torrance filed a lawsuit against Mobil, accusing it of operating the refinery in a "callous and indifferent" manner.¶ Mobil, saying it is committed to safe operations, settled the case last October, agreeing to take the unprecedented step of retaining an independent safety adviser to monitor conditions at the refinery.¶ A month later, Mobil was ordered to pay $1.375 million in damages to a former company official who said he had been fired for opposing a cover-up of environmental problems at a Mobil plant in Bakersfield.¶ The former official, Valcar Bowman, had been environmental affairs manager for the company's Mobil Chemical Co. subsidiary. In his lawsuit, filed in federal court in New Jersey, Bowman said he got into trouble for resisting efforts by company lawyers to sanitize environmental reports. He said the lawyers also tried to keep environmental reports away from top executives so they would be shielded from liability.¶ Bowman's firing came a few months after a raid on the Torrance refinery by investigators for the Los Angeles County district attorney. The investigators, seeking evidence of air pollution violations, seized numerous documents in the July, 1985, raid. No charges were ever filed, but Mobil lawyers feared their Bakersfield plant would be raided next.¶ So Mobil moved plant records to the office of its outside legal counsel, in order to cite attorney-client privilege to block release of the documents. Bowman, who objected to the move as unethical, claimed that got him fired.¶ Mobil, which has appealed the verdict, said Bowman was fired merely as a cost-cutting move--although the judge in the case said Mobil Chemical enjoyed record profits the year he was dismissed.¶ One of Bowman's witnesses was Philip Olson, a 20-year Mobil veteran who was environmental manager of the Torrance refinery for a time in the late 1970s.¶ Mobil at one time took a "pretty responsible" approach to environmental rules, Olson said in a telephone interview. But in the 1980s, the company "began to resist investments unless they were absolutely forced to make them," he said.¶ The change in attitude was due partly to the election of Ronald Reagan, who "bought the company line that . . . businesses were overregulated." After Reagan took office, Mobil postponed planned investments "until it could be sorted out what was going to be required and what wasn't," Olson said.¶ Olson acknowledged there was no love lost between him and his former employer. Following his retirement in 1987, Olson filed his own age discrimination suit against Mobil, which was dismissed.

My second contention is that truth-seeking promotes legitimacy of the criminal justice system.

Lawyers Laurence Steckman and Richard Granofsky 10 write
Laurence Steckman (“a partner in the New York office of Lester Schwab Katz and Dwyer, LLP, where his practice is focused on securities, commercial, and complex litigation”)and Richard Granofsky (“a partner in the New York office of Lester Schwab Katz and Dwyer, LLP, where he heads the firm’s professional liability department. His practice focuses on the defense of attorneys, accountants, and miscellaneous professionals and on employment practice liability and municipal claims.”). “THE ASSERTION OF ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGE BY COUNSEL IN LEGAL MALPRACTICE CASES: POLICY, PRIVILEGE, AND THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN CASES INVOLVING IMPLIED WAIVERS.” Tort Trial and Insurance Practice Law Journal, Spring/Summer 2010 (45:3-4). http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/tort_insurance_law_journal/tips_vol45_no3_4_Steckman.authcheckdam.pdf
A just legal system, however, is not necessarily one whose rules permit counsel the best chance of prevailing, regardless of the truth; and the concept of “best representation” within a legal system is not equivalent to representation that happens to create for the client the best chance of winning. The point is easily illustrated. Assume that a large percentage of corporations are engaging in illegal conduct with substantial, negative effects on the American economy and that an absolute interpretation of the attorney-client privilege would facilitate company avoidance of criminal penalties and civil damages in class action suits to the detriment of an enormous number of Americans. 273 It is likely that an absolute interpretation of the attorney-client privilege would facilitate better representation, at least in terms of accomplishing client litigation objectives. However, it would effectively undermine the legal system’s ability to protect injured parties by assuring that information vital to determining the truth about relevant events would be hidden. An absolute interpretation of the attorney-client privilege plainly imposes such costs on the legal system and, indeed, affects how society perceives the ability of the legal system to reach just ends: Strict rules help engrain the hired gun mentality in the professional ethos. In practice, lawyers and laymen alike come to view the profession as amoral “tools” of the client, meriting the right to earn a living, but little else. . . . To the extent strict rules cause lawyers to engage in “moral escapism,” . . . confidentiality also helps foster the public notion that lawyers lack integrity. . . . The image of the coconspiratorial lawyer helps explain why society considers the profession unsavory. . . . Clients and observers of the legal profession naturally come to look upon lawyers as “dissemblers, distorters who subordinate truth to winning, and as technicians who answer to but one command, that of their client.” 274 To similar effect, another commentator wrote thus: Lawyers themselves are recognizing that the public perception that lawyers twist words to meet their own goals and pay little attention to the truth, strikes at the very heart of the profession—as well as at the heart of the system of justice. Lawyers serve our system of justice, and if lawyers are dishonest, then there is a perception that the system, too, must be dishonest. 275 Although it is impossible to assess what effect that broad societal perception of this view might have on individual conduct, it is reasonable to believe the cost is substantial.
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My third and final contention is that truth-seeking does not decrease attorney-client communications.

J.D. candidate Inbal Hasbani 10 writes
Hasbani, Inbal (J.D. Candidate, Northwestern University School of Law, May 2010; B.A., Brown
University, 2003). "When the Law Preserves Injustice: Issues Raised by a Wrongful Incarceration Exception to Attorney-Client Confidentiality." J. Crim. L. and Criminology 100 (2010): 277
Without scientific proof of confidentiality's effects, many have doubted whether confidentiality is necessary to enhance client discussions. For example, Professor Harry Subin contends that if an attorney explains to his client that the best way to advocate on his behalf requires him to know all of the facts involved in the case, regardless of confidentiality, she is "likely to induce the client to disclose them, for nondisclosure jeopardizes the client's goals."5 Professor Lloyd Snyder adds that "clients will distort facts and withhold information from their lawyers no matter how strict or loose the rules of confidentiality may be."5 4 Then again, clients may speak candidly for a number of reasons, including, for example, an "urge to cleanse oneself through confession," or because of "some subconscious desire to seek help," or "the conclusion that one cannot obtain help otherwise"-forces that operate regardless of a confidentiality rule.5 5 According to Professor Snyder, "confidentiality rules can be an inducement to clients to be forthcoming with their lawyers only if they are aware of and understand the rules."56 Since most clients do not know or comprehend the rules, or the complexity of the exceptions, any exceptions to the confidentiality rule are unlikely to affect legal assistance. 7 Thus, the promise of absolute secrecy is not necessary in order to promote open discussion between clients and attorneys.

Empirical data shows that there is no deterrence of client disclosures even among individuals.

Daniel Northrup 9 writes
Daniel Northrup. “The Attorney-Client Privilege and Information Disclosed to an Attorney with the Intention That the Attorney Draft a Document To Be Released to Third Parties: Public Policy Calls for at Least the Strictest Application of the Attorney-Client Privilege.” Fordham Law Review. 2009. http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4512andcontext=flr
To justify the attorney-client privilege, clients must understand the privilege and rely on its protections when communicating with their attorneys. 282 Without understanding and reliance, inhibiting the search for truth is unnecessary and therefore unwarranted. 283 Statistical evidence, though sparse and methodologically limited, suggests that a substantial portion of the public neither understands nor relies on the privilege. 284 First, both the Yale study and the Tompkins County study found considerable confusion among laypersons as to the application and extent of the attorney-client privilege. 285 According to the Yale Study, a significant percentage of participants believed that lawyers could be compelled to testify in court.286 The Tompkins study similarly found that twenty-five percent of participants believed that confidentiality rules allowed more liberal disclosure than the law actually dictates. 287 Additionally, a large majority of the Tompkins County study participants inaccurately believed that lawyers are not required to protect confidential information more than doctors, and forty percent believed the same for accountants. This evidence suggests that a substantial percentage of clients do not understand the extent of the privilege. If clients are in fact relying on the attorney-client privilege, many are relying on a less stringent privilege than actually exists. In addition to not accurately understanding the privilege, a significant percentage of participants in the two studies do not appear to rely on the privilege. According to the Yale study, laypersons were equally divided on whether elimination of the attorney-client privilege would deter client disclosures. Participants found confidentiality to be more important to disclosure in all other professions in the survey, including accounting, for which no privilege exists. The Tompkins County study similarly found that only half of laypersons believed they would limit disclosure to attorneys if no firm obligation of confidentiality existed. These findings, though limited, suggest that the attorney-client privilege is not necessary for free disclosure, optimal legal representation, and law-abiding behavior for a significant percentage of clients. 

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Attorney-client privilege would not apply to corporate lawyers anyway. They are too interconnected in the company.

David Simon 56 writes
David Simon. “The Attorney-Client Privilege as Applied to Corporations.” Yale Law Journal. June 1956.
It is a basic principle that the privilege extends only to confidential communications made by the client to his lawyer acting as such. Accordingly, it does not protect disclosures made to a person who happens to be a lawyer but is not acting in that capacity. This aspect of the privilege raises difficulties when applied to lawyers who, as advisers to businessmen, participate in business decisions. The problem is particularly perplexing for the legal advisers of today's corporate giants. As it recently appeared in the examination of one bemused witness in regard to a claim of privilege by lawyers who handled contract negotiations for RCA, the negotiations "may have been carried on in their the lawyers' capacity as businessmen, but they were lawyers never? theless. . . . They sort of left their footprints all over this picture."49 Indeed, corporate attorneys are often employees, directors, or officers of their clients. Whether they be "outside" counsel or "house" counsel, they can rarely confine themselves to purely legal matters. Questions of policy, as well as execu? tive guidance for matters that are partly legal, often fall within their domain. There is hardly a corporate record or memorandum of any importance that does not pass through their hands at one time or another. Their key position in the business was succinctly stated by an anonymous "Wall Street lawyer": "Your modern corporate lawyer is a member of the command staff of a corporation. . . . It's like the organization of an army. We like to think of the legal division as G-2."50

The Supreme Court has deemed truth seeking the primary goal of the criminal justice system.

 David Harris 92 writes
David Harris. “The Constitution and Truth Seeking.” Fall 1992.
The criminal justice system, like most institutions, has many objectives. Nevertheless, one goal emerges as preeminent: finding the truth. 142 Indeed, unless finding the truth is a primary goal, the criminal law cannot serve as a legitimate regulator of conduct or moral guide.' 43 As Professor LaFave says, "the discovery of the truth is an essential goal of any criminal justice process that is to serve the ends of the substantive criminal law through effective enforcement of that law." 144 Without this goal, the criminal law would be cast adrift, the mere tool of power, authority or politics. Even in a criminal justice system which acknowledges other goals, as ours does, truth finding remains paramount. In fact, during the 1970s and 1980s, the Supreme Court made truth finding the explicit goal of criminal adjudication. 145

This is confirmed by recent Supreme Court precedents.

Jena Turner 9 writes
Jena Turner. “Truth Seeking and Criminal Procedure in the Supreme Court’s Last Term.” Concurring Opinions. July 2nd, 2009. http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2009/07/truthseeking-and-criminal-procedure-in-the-supreme-courts-last-term.html
As the Supreme Court’s term has just ended, I could not help but comment briefly on some of the Court’s pronouncements on criminal procedure. Because of my interest in comparative criminal procedure, I was curious to observe how in several recent opinions (Herring v. United States; Montejo v. Louisiana; Kansas v. Ventris), the Court suggested that “truthseeking” was a central concern of our criminal justice system and may trump individual liberties in certain cases. Specifically, the Court construed the Sixth Amendment right to counsel and the Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary rule more narrowly than before, out of concern that these individual rights and remedies interfere with the goal of truthseeking. For those familiar with the “inquisitorial” systems of continental Europe, the focus on truthseeking would sound familiar. European courts have long emphasized the preeminence of the search for truth in the criminal process. But is the adversarial American criminal justice system moving toward a new understanding of its goals, similar to that prevalent in inquisitorial systems? Are we moving away from our entrenched “anti-inquisitorialism“? 

Thus, I affirm.

Tournament: Bump | Round: 1 | Opponent: Lexington TMc Teddy McKenna | Judge: Justin Lee

MR 1.6 makes it difficult for lawyers to violate the ACP to rectify wrongful convictions now.

Moliterno 11
James Moliterno (Vincent Bradford Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University). “Rectifying Wrongful Convictions: May a Lawyer Reveal Her Client's Confidences to Rectify the Wrongful Conviction of Another?” Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly. Vol 38, Issue 4. Summer 2011. http://www.hastingsconlawquarterly.org/archives/v38/i4/moliterno.pdf
B. The Meaning of "Substantial Bodily Harm" Outside of Alaska and Massachusetts, may a lawyer reveal client confidences to rectify the wrongful conviction of another? Policy arguments and considerations aside, the doctrinal starting point is MR 1.6(b)(1).- If the daily life of the wrongly incarcerated is producing "reasonably certain ... substantial bodily harm," then the lawyer may reveal the client information necessary to prevent it. There is precious little authority specifically treating the application of the "substantial" bodily harm language of MR 1.6(b)(1). 

… ====There is way too much text in between these two things. The article is accessible, and I always offer full text to anyone that asks.====

Do all wrongfully convicted persons suffer substantial bodily harm? Doubtless the answer is no. Some who are wrongfully convicted are not sentenced to incarceration at all, as in the instance of some modest financial crimes or low-level drug crimes, for example. Without taking lightly the very significant difficulties that any conviction can occasion,H4 not all wrongly convicted persons suffer substantial bodily harm. In such instances, the doctrinal path to revelation under MR 1.6 (b)(1) is closed. Within the group of wrongfully convicted who are incarcerated there is wide variation of risk of substantial bodily harm, including assault, sexual assault, death, contraction of AIDS, and generalized harmful health effects of long-term incarceration."s At one end of the spectrum is the wrongfully convicted person awaiting execution. At the other end is the wrongfully convicted person who is sentenced to a very short term in a local jail or minimum security facility. The latter has had freedom of movement limited for a short time, but is less likely to suffer substantial bodily harm as a result of the wrongful conviction. The spectrum has a full range in between. As currently drafted, Model Rule 1.6(b)(1) is a somewhat unwieldy vehicle to support a doctrinal path that would allow a defense lawyer to remedy a wrongful conviction of another. There are wide variations in the harm to the wrongfully convicted based on the nature of the conviction, the length of the sentence, the nature of the incarceration, if any. To use 1.6(b)(1) for this purpose would require a case-by-case measurement of the level of harm being inflicted on the wrongfully convicted. The Restatement contemplates this approach by listing "imprisonment for a substantial period" among those conditions amounting to "serious bodily harm,"' but even if that interpretive guidance were added to the MR Comments or read into it by virtue of the Restatement's influence, a case-by-case inquiry would be required for the rule's application. 

Thus the plan: The American Bar Association should add an exception to Model Rule 1.6 to permit attorney disclosure of client communications to rectify any wrongful convictions. I reserve the right to clarify, so no theory violations until he checks in cross-ex.

Neg burden is to defend a competitive post-fiat United States policy. Offense-defense is key to fairness and real world education. This means ignore skepticism.

Nelson 8
Adam F. Nelson, J.D.1. Towards a Comprehensive Theory of Lincoln-Douglas Debate. 2008.
And the truth-statement model of the resolution imposes an absolute burden of proof on the affirmative: if the resolution is a truth-claim, and the af?rmative has the burden of proving that claim, in so far as intuitively we tend to disbelieve truthclaims until we are persuaded otherwise, the af?rmative has the burden to prove that statement absolutely true. Indeed, one of the most common theory arguments in LD is conditionality, which argues it is inappropriate for the af?rmative to claim only proving the truth of part of the resolution is suf?cient to earn the ballot. Such a model of the resolution also gives the negative access to a range of strategies that many students, coaches, and judges ?nd ridiculous or even irrelevant to evaluation of the resolution.
If the negative need only prevent the affirmative from proving the truth of the resolution, it is logically sufficient to negate to deny our ability to make truth-statements or to prove normative morality does not exist or to deny the reliability of human senses or reason. Yet, even though most coaches appear to endorse the truth-statement model of the resolution, they complain about the use of such negative strategies, even though they are a necessary consequence of that model. And, moreover, such strategies seem fundamentally unfair, as they provide the negative with functionally in?nite ground, as there are a nearly in?nite variety of such skeptical objections to normative claims, while continuing to bind the af?rmative to a much smaller range of options: advocacy of the resolution as a whole.
Instead, it seems much more reasonable to treat the resolution as a way to equitably divide ground: the affirmative advocating the desirability of a world in which people adhere to the value judgment implied by the resolution and the negative advocating the desirability of a world in which people adhere to a value judgment mutually exclusive to that implied by the resolution. By making the issue one of desirability of Under competing world-views rather than of truth, the affirmative gains access to increased flexibility regarding how he or she chooses to defend that world, while the negative retains equal flexibility while being denied access to those skeptical arguments indicted above. Our ability to make normative claims is irrelevant to a discussion of the desirability of making two such claims. Unless there is some significant harm in making such statements, some offensive reason to reject making them that can be avoided by an advocacy mutually exclusive with that of the affirmative such objections are not a reason the negative world is more desirable, and therefore not a reason to negate. Note this is precisely how things have been done in policy debate for some time: a team that runs a kritik is expected to offer some impact of the mindset they are indicting and some alternative that would solve for that impact. A team that simply argued some universal, unavoidable, problem was bad and therefore a reason to negate would not be very successful. It is about time LD started treating such arguments the same way.
Such a model of the resolution has additional benefits as well. First, it forces both debaters to offer offensive reasons to prefer their worldview, thereby further enforcing a parallel burden structure. This means debaters can no longer get away with arguing the resolution is by definition true of false. The “truth” of the particular vocabulary of the resolution is irrelevant to its desirability. Second, it is intuitive. When people evaluate the truth of ethical claims, they consider their implications in the real world. They ask themselves whether a world in which people live by that ethical rule is better than one in which they don’t. Such debates don’t happen solely in the abstract. We want to know how the various options affect us and the world we live in.

Aff gets RVIs on I meets and counter-interps because
(a) 1AR timeskew means I can’t cover theory and still have a fair shot on substance.
(b) no risk theory would give neg a free source of no risk offense which allows him to moot the AC.

Advantage 1 is Crime

Wrongful convictions that aren’t reported because of mandated lawyer silence kill perceived CJS legitimacy.

Moliterno 11 writes
James Moliterno (Vincent Bradford Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University). “Rectifying Wrongful Convictions: May a Lawyer Reveal Her Client's Confidences to Rectify the Wrongful Conviction of Another?” Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly. Vol 38, Issue 4. Summer 2011. http://www.hastingsconlawquarterly.org/archives/v38/i4/moliterno.pdf
The justice system has been shaken by revelations of wrongful convictions. Thus far, most of the attention has been paid to wrongful convictions in capital cases. These most grave cases receive more attention and resources than any others at the time of trial. Reason says that if there are significant numbers of wrongful convictions in capital cases, there are at least as high a percentage of wrongful convictions in less weighty matters where fewer defense and prosecution resources are expended at trial. Confidence in the justice system cannot long survive in the face of long-past revelations of wrongful convictions when silence was mandated by lawyer ethics law. The change advocated for in this paper is overdue and now needed if confidence in the justice system is to be preserved. 

?

Exceptions to the ACP are key to public perception of legitimacy.

Steckman and Granofsky 10 write
Laurence Steckman (“a partner in the New York office of Lester Schwab Katz and Dwyer, LLP, where his practice is focused on securities, commercial, and complex litigation”)and Richard Granofsky (“a partner in the New York office of Lester Schwab Katz and Dwyer, LLP, where he heads the firm’s professional liability department. His practice focuses on the defense of attorneys, accountants, and miscellaneous professionals and on employment practice liability and municipal claims.”). “THE ASSERTION OF ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGE BY COUNSEL IN LEGAL MALPRACTICE CASES: POLICY, PRIVILEGE, AND THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN CASES INVOLVING IMPLIED WAIVERS.” Tort Trial and Insurance Practice Law Journal, Spring/Summer 2010 (45:3-4). http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/tort_insurance_law_journal/tips_vol45_no3_4_Steckman.authcheckdam.pdf
A just legal system, however, is not necessarily one whose rules permit counsel the best chance of prevailing, regardless of the truth; and the concept of “best representation” within a legal system is not equivalent to representation that happens to create for the client the best chance of winning. The point is easily illustrated. Assume that a large percentage of corporations are engaging in illegal conduct with substantial, negative effects on the American economy and that an absolute interpretation of the attorney-client privilege would facilitate company avoidance of criminal penalties and civil damages in class action suits to the detriment of an enormous number of Americans. 273 It is likely that an absolute interpretation of the attorney-client privilege would facilitate better representation, at least in terms of accomplishing client litigation objectives. However, it would effectively undermine the legal system’s ability to protect injured parties by assuring that information vital to determining the truth about relevant events would be hidden. An absolute interpretation of the attorney-client privilege plainly imposes such costs on the legal system and, indeed, affects how society perceives the ability of the legal system to reach just ends: Strict rules help engrain the hired gun mentality in the professional ethos. In practice, lawyers and laymen alike come to view the profession as amoral “tools” of the client, meriting the right to earn a living, but little else. . . . To the extent strict rules cause lawyers to engage in “moral escapism,” . . . confidentiality also helps foster the public notion that lawyers lack integrity. . . . The image of the coconspiratorial lawyer helps explain why society considers the profession unsavory. . . . Clients and observers of the legal profession naturally come to look upon lawyers as “dissemblers, distorters who subordinate truth to winning, and as technicians who answer to but one command, that of their client.” 274 To similar effect, another commentator wrote thus: Lawyers themselves are recognizing that the public perception that lawyers twist words to meet their own goals and pay little attention to the truth, strikes at the very heart of the profession—as well as at the heart of the system of justice. Lawyers serve our system of justice, and if lawyers are dishonest, then there is a perception that the system, too, must be dishonest. 275 Although it is impossible to assess what effect that broad societal perception of this view might have on individual conduct, it is reasonable to believe the cost is substantial.

Perception of CJS legitimacy is key to solve crime.

Tyler 4
Professor Of Psychology at New York University. Enhancing Police Legitimacy Tom R. Tyler Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science , Vol. 593, To Better Serve and Protect: Improving Police Practices (May, 2004), pp. 84-99
One way to approach the relationship between the police and the public is to consider how the public impacts on the effectiveness of the police in their efforts to combat crime and maintain social order. Traditional discussions of the effective exercise of legal authority have focused on the ability of legal authorities to shape the behavior of the people within the communities they police. The ability of the police to secure compliance with their directives and with the law more generally-the ability to be authoritative-is widely identified as one key indicator of their viability as authorities (Easton1 975;Fuller 1971).To be effective as maintainers of social order, in other words, the police must be widely obeyed (Tyler 1990). This obedience must occur both during personal encounters between police officers and members of the public (Tyler and Huo 2002) and in people's everyday law-related behavior (Tyler 1990).

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Rectifying wrongful convictions is independently key to reducing crime and outweighs wrongful acquittals. Lab experiment proves.

Rizzolo and Stanca 12
Matteo Rizzolo (Free University of Bozen–Bolzano) and Luca Stanca (University of Milan–Bicocca). “Judicial Errors and Crime Deterrence: Theory and Experimental Evidence” Journal of Law and Economics, Vol. 55, No. 2 (May 2012), pp. 311-338. http://economix.fr/pdf/seminaires/lien/rizzolli_1.pdf
Judicial errors against innocent defendants represent an important issue not only theoretically but also empirically. Consider the case of mistaken convictions in criminal procedure. Although no country produces official statistics on judicial errors, there is evidence provided by various national and international organizations. 22 Gross et al. (2005) emphasize how most relevant data sets are based on exoneration cases:23 their own database lists 340 exonerations in the United States between 1989 and 2003. But counting only those who eventually obtain an official exoneration, they argue, may be just a glimpse of the “total number of miscarriages of justice in America that in the last fifteen years must be in the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands” (Gross et al. 2005, p. 551). It should also be emphasized that, although our argument is mainly framed in the context of criminal law, judicial errors can occur in any adjudicative process. Our analysis can therefore be relevant for the decisions made by several types organizations, such as administrative agencies, commercial trade associations, religious bodies, and professional sports leagues. The first aim of this paper was to extend the economic theory of crime deterrence to account for the role of type I errors. We argued that both risk aversion and loss aversion contribute to produce an asymmetry in the effects of the two types of judicial errors: wrongful convictions are expected to be more detrimental to deterrence than wrongful acquittals. Moreover, we formulated the hypothesis that this asymmetry can be reinforced for law-abiding individuals who are concerned about type I errors undermining the lawfulness of their behavior. The second aim was to provide an empirical test of the predictions of our extended model through a laboratory experiment. The experimental design was based on a theft game that simulated a simple crime, petty larceny. We exogenously manipulated the probability of type I and type II errors and compared across treatments the propensity of individuals to commit the crime. Our findings indicate that wrongful convictions have a significant effect on deterrence. In addition, consistent with the theoretical predictions, for a given expected relative gain from crime, type I errors have a stronger impact on deterrence than type II errors. We also find that this asymmetry in the effects of judicial errors can be explained entirely within the expected utility framework. Nonexpected utility factors, such as loss aversion and type I error aversion, are not found to play a significant role. Further work will explore how the effects of judicial errors are influenced by social preferences and emotions such as shame. Overall, the behavioral implications of the deterrence hypothesis pose important challenges to the economic theory of the public enforcement of law. Type I errors may jeopardize deterrence more than has been predicted in the literature. This makes an economic case for the public authority to place particular emphasis on type I errors wrongful convictions in order to achieve optimal deterrence. The results presented in this paper also have important implications for the law and economics literature. In particular, they provide an economic interpretation of the pro-defendant bias observed in the criminal procedures of modern democracies. More generally, they contribute to explaining the common wisdom that the conviction of an innocent individual should be considered to be far worse than the acquittal of a guilty individual. 

Crime kills soft power.

Falk 12
“When soft power is hard,” Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights. Al Jazzera Opinion. July 28th, 2012. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/07/201272212435524825.html
This unabashed avowal of imperial goals is the main thesis of the article, perhaps most graphically expressed in the following words: "The United States can increase the effectiveness of its military forces and make the world safe for soft power, America's inherent comparative advantage." As the glove fits the hand, soft power complements hard power within the wider enterprise of transforming the world in the United States' image, or at least in the ideal version of the United States' sense of self.
The authors acknowledge (rather parenthetically) that their strategy may not work if the US continues much longer to be seen unfavourably abroad as a national abode of drugs, crime, and violence, fiscal irresponsibility, family breakdown, and political gridlock. They make a rather meaningless plea to restore "a healthy democracy" at home as a prelude to the heavy lifting of democratising the world, but they do not pretend medical knowledge, and offer no prescriptions for restoring the health of the American body politic. And now, 16 years after their article appeared, it would appear that the adage, "disease unknown, cure unknown", applies.

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Soft power solves multiple scenarios for extinction.

Nye and Armitage 7
Joseph Nye (Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard, and previous dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government) and Richard Armitage (13th United States Deputy Secretary of State, the second-in-command at the State Department, serving from 2001 to 2005), “CSIS Reports – A Smarter, More Secure America”, 11/6, 2007 http://www.csis.org/component/option,com_csis_pubs/task,view/id,4156/type,1/
Soft power is the ability to attract people to our side without coercion. Legitimacy is central to soft power. If a people or nation believes American objectives to be legitimate, we are more likely to persuade them to follow our lead without using threats and bribes. Legitimacy can also reduce opposition to—and the costs of—using hard power when the situation demands. Appealing to others’ values, interests, and preferences can, in certain circumstances, replace the dependence on carrots and sticks. Cooperation is always a matter of degree, and it is profoundly influenced by attraction…The information age has heightened political consciousness, but also made political groupings less cohesive. Small, adaptable, transnational networks have access to tools of destruction that are increasingly cheap, easy to conceal, and more readily available. Although the integration of the global economy has brought tremendous benefits, threats such as pandemic disease and the collapse of financial markets are more distributed and more likely to arise without warning. The threat of widespread physical harm to the planet posed by nuclear catastrophe has existed for half a century, though the realization of the threat will become more likely as the number of nuclear weapons states increases. The potential security challenges posed by climate change raises the possibility of an entirely new set of threats for the United States to consider… States and non-state actors who improve their ability to draw in allies will gain competitive advantages in today’s environment. Those who alienate potential friends will stand at greater risk. China has invested in its soft power to ensure access to resources and to ensure against efforts to undermine its military modernization. Terrorists depend on their ability to attract support from the crowd at least as much as their ability to destroy the enemy’s will to fight.

Adopt a parliamentary model to account for moral uncertainty. This entails minimizing existential risks.

Bostrom 9
Bostrom, Nick (Existentialist of a different sort). “Moral uncertainty – toward a solution?” 1 January 2009. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/moral-uncertainty-towards-a-solution.html
It seems people are overconfident about their moral beliefs.  But how should one reason and act if one acknowledges that one is uncertain about morality – not just applied ethics but fundamental moral issues? if you don't know which moral theory is correct?
It doesn't seem you can’t simply plug your uncertainty into expected utility decision theory and crank the wheel; because many moral theories state that you should not always maximize expected utility.
Even if we limit consideration to consequentialist theories, it still is hard to see how to combine them in the standard decision theoretic framework.  For example, suppose you give X probability to total utilitarianism and (100-X) to average utilitarianism.  Now an action might add 5 utils to total happiness and decrease average happiness by 2 utils.  (This could happen, e.g. if you create a new happy person that is less happy than the people who already existed.)  Now what do you do, for different values of X?
The problem gets even more complicated if we consider not only consequentialist theories but also deontological theories, contractarian theories, virtue ethics, etc.  We might even throw various meta-ethical theories into the stew: error theory, relativism, etc.
I'm working on a paper on this together with my colleague Toby Ord.  We have some arguments against a few possible "solutions" that we think don't work.  On the positive side we have some tricks that work for a few special cases.  But beyond that, the best we have managed so far is a kind of metaphor, which we don't think is literally and exactly correct, and it is a bit under-determined, but it seems to get things roughly right and it might point in the right direction:
The Parliamentary Model.  Suppose that you have a set of mutually exclusive moral theories, and that you assign each of these some probability.  Now imagine that each of these theories gets to send some number of delegates to The Parliament.  The number of delegates each theory gets to send is proportional to the probability of the theory.  Then the delegates bargain with one another for support on various issues; and the Parliament reaches a decision by the delegates voting.  What you should do is act according to the decisions of this imaginary Parliament.  (Actually, we use an extra trick here: we imagine that the delegates act as if the Parliament's decision were a stochastic variable such that the probability of the Parliament taking action A is proportional to the fraction of votes for A.  This has the effect of eliminating the artificial 50 threshold that otherwise gives a majority bloc absolute power.  Yet – unbeknownst to the delegates – the Parliament always takes whatever action got the most votes: this way we avoid paying the cost of the randomization!)
The idea here is that moral theories get more influence the more probable they are; yet even a relatively weak theory can still get its way on some issues that the theory think are extremely important by sacrificing its influence on other issues that other theories deem more important.  For example, suppose you assign 10 probability to total utilitarianism and 90 to moral egoism (just to illustrate the principle).  Then the Parliament would mostly take actions that maximize egoistic satisfaction; however it would make some concessions to utilitarianism on issues that utilitarianism thinks is especially important.  In this example, the person might donate some portion of their income to existential risks research and otherwise live completely selfishly.
I think there might be wisdom in this model.  It avoids the dangerous and unstable extremism that would result from letting one’s current favorite moral theory completely dictate action, while still allowing the aggressive pursuit of some non-commonsensical high-leverage strategies so long as they don’t infringe too much on what other major moral theories deem centrally important.

Cost-benefit analysis is feasible. Ignore any util calc indicts.

Hardin 90
Hardin, Russell (Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences @ NYU). May 1990. Morality within the Limits of Reason. University Of Chicago Press. pp. 4. ISBN 978-0226316208.
One of the cuter charges against utilitarianism is that it is irrational in the following sense. If I take the time to calculate the consequences of various courses of action before me, then I will ipso facto have chosen the course of action to take, namely, to sit and calculate, because while I am calculating the other courses of action will cease to be open to me. It should embarrass philosophers that they have ever taken this objection seriously. Parallel considerations in other realms are dismissed with eminently good sense. Lord Devlin notes, “If the reasonable man ‘worked to rule’ by perusing to the point of comprehension every form he was handed, the commercial and administrative life of the country would creep to a standstill.” James March and Herbert Simon escape the quandary of unending calculation by noting that often we satisfice, we do not maximize: we stop calculating and considering when we find a merely adequate choice of action. When, in principle, one cannot know what is the best choice, one can nevertheless be sure that sitting and calculating is not the best choice. But, one may ask, How do you know that another ten minutes of calculation would not have produced a better choice? And one can only answer, You do not. At some point the quarrel begins to sound adolescent. It is ironic that the point of the quarrel is almost never at issue in practice (as Devlin implies, we are almost all too reasonable in practice to bring the world to a standstill) but only in the principled discussions of academics.

Plans solve for this particular topic’s ambiguity and ensure equal ground.

Hendrickson 13
Ed Hendrickson (former Meadows LD debater, octafinalist at the 2012 TOC). “Topic Analysis.” NFL Topic Analysis. 2013.
Complications with fiat might arise from a lack of a clear actor. We can just assert that the U.S. government does something, but that seems like a superficial response to what is a very challenging question. One might consider fiating with the courts, although the dramatic restructuring necessary to shift the United States criminal justice system to an inquisitorial system instead of an adversarial one seems insurmountable; likewise, fiating legislation that weakens 6th amendment protections to provide a less-than-dependable attorney seems to be more polemical than one might desire. I think that the easiest way to avoid these problems is to write plans that are narrower—instead of attempting to restructure the whole of the criminal justice system, a debater might consider weakening attorney-client privilege to include certain, tangible benefit (e.g. child abuse reporting, not in the case of corporations), while avoiding nebulous generalizations that are just as ambiguous as existing attorney-client relationships. Specificity is actually far better in this case, particularly for the negative. An affirmative which attempts to give too much leeway on what they fiat opens itself up to the criticism that attorney-client privilege was just as ambiguous before the plan as after.

No neg ground loss.

Hendrickson 13
Ed Hendrickson (former Meadows LD debater, octafinalist at the 2012 TOC). “Topic Analysis.” NFL Topic Analysis. 2013.
So the negative is likely to face one of two things: a very specific fiating affirmative or a very broad affirmative without fiat. The strategic value of reading a plan on this topic is tempered somewhat by the fact that negative arguments (with the exception of some of the kritikal arguments mentioned above) are fairly uniform: attorney-client privilege is essential to ensuring that clients get the best representation they can, which is a key component to the adversarial system of justice. This argument is a sort of one-size-fits-all negative. However, I would not disparage the idea of writing several PICs on this topic, assuming that the aff doesn’t fiat something very specific. This gives the negative turn ground that she would not normally have considering the simplicity of the two sides.

The standard is maximizing happiness.

First, the ultimate human good is happiness.

Darwish 9
“Rethinking Utilitarianism,” Bahaa Darwish (Qatar University). Teaching Ethics 10 (1):87-109 (2009). http://www.uvu.edu/ethics/seac/Darwish20-20Rethinking20Utilitarianism.pdf
Let’s start with knowledge. It is clear that those who value knowledge for its own sake (for instance, highly motivated professionals) find pleasure in both the pursuit and attainment of knowledge, however exhausted they become in either case. So, granted that knowledge, for them, is a value that has intrinsic worth in itself, and is thus sought for itself, it is a value that yields their pleasure or happiness. The same can be said about the other values. Let’s take autonomy in the sense expressed by Hooker as “control over one’s own life” as another example. Here one needs to say no more than that the mere fact that people seek autonomy explains the satisfaction or the pleasure autonomy brings. Those who value autonomy, thus seek it for itself, cannot feel happy when their decisions are not in their hands, or when they do not have control over their own life. In short, they cannot be happy otherwise. Moore, who explicitly differs from the classical utilitarians in holding that pleasure is not the sole good, 20 says that “the most valuable things… are pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects,” 21 which seems to mean that such things are valued for the pleasures and the enjoyment they bring. These examples clearly show that though these values have intrinsic worth, they bring or constitute our pleasure.  

Second, respect for human worth would justify util.

Cummiskey 90
Cummiskey, David. Associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. “Kantian Consequentiaism.” Ethics 100 (April 1990), University of Chicago. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract “social entity.” It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive “overall social good.” Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Robert Nozick, for example, argues that “to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has.” But why is this not equally true of all those whom we do not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, we fail to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? A morally good agent recognizes that the basis of all particular duties is the principle that “rational nature exists as an end in itself”. Rational nature as such is the supreme objective end of all conduct. If one truly believes that all rational beings have an equal value, then the rational solution to such a dilemma involves maximally promoting the lives and liberties of as many rational beings as possible. In order to avoid this conclusion, the non-consequentialist Kantian needs to justify agent-centered constraints. As we saw in chapter 1, however, even most Kantian deontologists recognize that agent-centered constraints require a non- value-based rationale. But we have seen that Kant’s normative theory is based on an unconditionally valuable end. How can a concern for the value of rational beings lead to a refusal to sacrifice rational beings even when this would prevent other more extensive losses of rational beings? If the moral law is based on the value of rational beings and their ends, then what is the rationale for prohibiting a moral agent from maximally promoting these two tiers of value? If I sacrifice some for the sake of others, I do not use them arbitrarily, and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have “dignity, that is, an unconditional and incomparable worth” that transcends any market value, but persons also have a fundamental equality that dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others. The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others.

?
Third, reductionism.

Brain studies prove there’s no such thing as personal identity.

Parfit 84
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).
Some recent medical cases provide striking evidence in favour of the Reductionist View. Human beings have a lower brain and two upper hemispheres, which are connected by a bundle of fibres. In treating a few people with severe epilepsy, surgeons have cut these fibres. The aim was to reduce the severity of epileptic fits, by confining their causes to a single hemisphere. This aim was achieved. But the operations had another unintended consequence. The effect, in the words of one surgeon, was the creation of ‘two separate spheres of consciousness.’ This effect was revealed by various psychological tests. These made use of two facts. We control our right arms with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. And what is in the right halves of our visual fields we see with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. When someone’s hemispheres have been disconnected, psychologists can thus present to this person two different written questions in the two halves of his visual field, and can receive two different answers written by this person’s two hands.

In the absence of personal identity, only end states can matter.

Shoemaker 99
Shoemaker, David (Dept of Philosophy, U Memphis). “Utilitarianism and Personal Identity.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 33: 183–199, 1999. http://www.csun.edu/~ds56723/jvipaper.pdf
Extreme reductionism might lend support to utilitarianism in the following way. Many people claim that we are justified in maximizing the good in our own lives, but not justified in maximizing the good across sets of lives, simply because each of us is a single, deeply unified person, unified by the further fact of identity, whereas there is no such corresponding unity across sets of lives. But if the only justification for the different treatment of individual lives and sets of lives is the further fact, and this fact is undermined by the truth of reductionism, then nothing justifies this different treatment. There are no deeply unified subjects of experience. What remains are merely the experiences themselves, and so any ethical theory distinguishing between individual lives and sets of lives is mistaken. If the deep, further fact is missing, then there are no unities. The morally significant units should then be the states people are in at particular times, and an ethical theory that focused on them and attempted to improve their quality, whatever their location, would be the most plausible. Utilitarianism is just such a theory.

Tournament: NSD | Round: 6 | Opponent: Mission San Jose SS Shivane Sabharwal | Judge: Charles McClung
Genealogy role of the ballot, endorsing a policy better than discourse-focus

See Open Source for R6 AC

Tournament: NSD | Round: 6 | Opponent: Mission San Jose SS Shivane Sabharwal | Judge: Charles McClung
Plan: The United States federal government should grant access to Pell grants to Black American inmates in the United States criminal justice system.

See Open Source

Tournament: NSD | Round: Quarters | Opponent: Del Mar VB Varun Bhave | Judge: PielstickLeoneCastillo
Neolib version

See Open Source

Tournament: NSD | Round: 1 | Opponent: LHP KP Krupali Patel | Judge: Ross Brown
Plan: The United States federal government should create a Reparations Superfund.

See Open Source

Tournament: George Mason | Round: 2 | Opponent: Erica Fan | Judge: Not sure
The 5th Amendment protection against self-incrimination doesn’t justify ACP.
Nelson and Tomasi 13 write
Adam Nelson (J.D.) and Adam Tomasi (Sacred Heart High School junior). Facebook conversation. November 12th, 2013.
Adam Tomasi – 11/12, 9:17 PM
Hi Mr. Nelson! I'm a huge fan of your article about world comparison in LD. I ended up seeing a comment of yours about the Nov/Dec topic on Adam Torson's Facebook, where you noted that the ACP isn't synonymous with the 5th Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. I was wondering if you could explain the distinction to me. Thank you! Adam Tomasi Sacred Heart High School Kingston, MA
Adam Nelson – 11/12, 10:20 PM
Hey Adam, The basics of the distinction are fairly simple. The 5th Amendment protects individuals from being forced to testify to information that may tend to incriminate themselves. Attorney-client privilege, on the other hand, protects certain communications between individuals and their lawyers. It prohibits lawyers from testifying to the contents of protected communications, unless they have the consent of their client. The specific communications protected by attorney-client privilege are defined by the laws of each state. I hope that helps. Just let me know if you'd like any further clarification. - Adam
Adam Tomasi – 11/12, 10:23 PM
Thank you for getting back to me! What I'm still confused about is why it wouldn't be self-incriminating for an individual to communicate with their attorney knowing that it will be released to the court, since knowing this they would be making their guilt apparent. Thank you, Adam
Adam Nelson – 11/12, 10:42 PM
The 5th Amendment privilege protects against a very specific thing: being forced to testify to information that may tend to incriminate yourself. The attorney-client privilege renders a much broader range of communications confidential. While it has the effect of prohibiting a lawyer from testifying to privileged information, the attorney is also barred from disclosing that information in other ways and in other contexts. Ordinarily, people cannot testify to things they heard outside of court, if they are offering that information to prove the truth of the thing they heard. That's called hearsay. But there's an exception to the hearsay rule that allows the court to admit hearsay when the information is contrary to the interest of the person who said it. That means, in the absence of attorney-client privilege, a lawyer could be forced to testify to information that might tend to incriminate their client. Only the client is covered by the 5th Amendment, not anyone who may have been told or overhead such statements. Attorney-client privilege, then, goes further, and protects the communications between a lawyer and their client. It allows the client to tell their lawyer things that may tend to incriminate without having to worry the lawyer may be compelled to testify to what they were told. - Adam
Adam Tomasi – 11/12, 10:43
Sounds good! Thank you again, Mr. Nelson.

Tournament: Yale | Round: Octas | Opponent: Stuyvesant SV | Judge: Chris Randall, Hannah Samson, Marcus Moretti
Politics must be based in equality of participation, not material needs. Basing politics in recognition of needs, not a plurality of perspectives, leads to oppressive government control. Borren 13 writes
Marieke Borren. “Feminism as Revolutionary Practice: From Justice and the Politics of Recognition to Freedom.” Hypatia vol. 28, no. 1 (Winter 2013). http://www.academia.edu/1199929/Feminism_as_revolutionary_Practice._Justice_the_Politics_of_Recognition_and_Identity_Politics
Arendt’s somewhat idiosyncratic use of the terms the social and society…is a political and normative notion that refers to an ideal or task, not a descriptive one that asserts the sameness of all people. 

Women must resist exclusion from the public sphere. This collective aim can be realized without a totalizing ideology.
Borren 13 writes
Marieke Borren. “Feminism as Revolutionary Practice: From Justice and the Politics of Recognition to Freedom.” Hypatia vol. 28, no. 1 (Winter 2013). http://www.academia.edu/1199929/Feminism_as_revolutionary_Practice._Justice_the_Politics_of_Recognition_and_Identity_Politics
Arendt could help feminists see that common empowerment is made possible not by a…the underutilization of a huge labor market potential are frequently brought into this debate. 

The fight against oppression is a question of not simply recognizing groups, but actively encouraging their participation. “Social justice” is not enough.
Borren 13 writes
Marieke Borren. “Feminism as Revolutionary Practice: From Justice and the Politics of Recognition to Freedom.” Hypatia vol. 28, no. 1 (Winter 2013). http://www.academia.edu/1199929/Feminism_as_revolutionary_Practice._Justice_the_Politics_of_Recognition_and_Identity_Politics
Feminist (and other) critics of Arendt might indeed be right in claiming that Arendt underestimates the…phenomenon of freedom that Arendt celebrates also plays an important role in the feminist movement. 

Thus the plan: The Government of Pakistan should make voting compulsory. Evidence clarifies intent. I reserve the right to clarify.

Advantage 1 is Patriarchy

Women are precluded from voting in Pakistan. Men have subordinated them through a cult of domesticity.
AP 13 writes
Associated Press. “Women in Pakistan town can't vote. Why? Because men say so.” USA Today. May 5th, 2013. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/05/05/in-pakistan-town-men-have-spoken-no-women-vote/2137223/
MATEELA, Pakistan (AP) — For decades, not a single woman in this dusty Pakistani village…an independent group working to increase voter participation, met with residents, trying to encourage them to let women vote. 

?
Recent by-elections prove. Turnout in Pakistan is low, particularly among women.
Mahmood 8-24 writes
Nisar Mahmood. “Low turnout seen across KP in by-polls.” The News (Pakistani news company). August 24th, 2013. http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-2-197693-Low-turnout-seen-across-KP-in-by-polls
PESHAWAR: Turnout in the August 22 by-elections remained low…turnout at PK-42 Hangu was also low compared to the May 11 general election. 

Discrimination is the root cause. Many women are actively prevented from voting.
WNV 8-22 writes
World News Views. “By-polls underway; women barred from voting in some areas.” August 22nd, 2013. http://worldnewsviews.com/2013/08/22/by-polls-underway-women-barred-from-voting-in-some-areas/
ISLAMABAD: By-polling in 41 national and provincial assembly…low voter turnout was reported from most parts of the country. According to media reports, few people turned up for voting due to a general lack of interest in the by-election. 

CV in Pakistan empowers women and solves for political apathy.
Jabbar 11 writes
Javed Jabbar (former senator and federal minister). “Make voting compulsory.” DAWN Newspaper (Pakistani paper). August 15th, 2011. http://beta.dawn.com/news/651996/make-voting-compulsory
PAKISTAN has an electoral democracy but not a representative democracy. Post-1971, in eight…ballot papers could include the option: ‘none of the above’. During a meeting of a Pildat (Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency) electoral reform group with Prime Minister Gilani in March 2010, this writer in his individual capacity suggested the introduction of compulsory voting. The head of government instantly endorsed the idea. He asked officials present to ascertain its feasibility. Now, over 16 months later as new, more accurate electoral rolls are being prepared, it is time to develop a consensus about this measure along with other electoral reforms. Though the political scene may remain in flux, compulsory voting will build a stable and sustained democracy while strengthening democratic values and practices. 

CV in Pakistan solves voter turnout and link turns social contract frameworks.
Yamin 12 writes
Dr. Saira Yamin (associate professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies). “The case for compulsory voting.” The Express Tribune. July 23rd, 2012. http://tribune.com.pk/story/412078/the-case-for-compulsory-voting/
Is there a case for compulsory voting in Pakistan? As the next general elections draw nearer, the Election Commission of…competitive and challenging economic and political global landscape, a more robust democratic image would serve its interests well.

Tournament: Yale | Round: 1 | Opponent: TBD | Judge: TBD
Cites will be posted after the plan is broken.

Plan: The Government of Pakistan should make voting compulsory.

Tournament: Bronx RR | Round: 3 | Opponent: Harrison DD | Judge: Struver and Dunay
Philosophy is comparative. Decision-making requires weighing the risk of each ethical theory rather than accepting one absolutely.
Ross 6
Jacob Ross. Rejecting Ethical Deflationism. Ethics. 2006.

It is possible to believe a proposition or theory to a greater or lesser degree, and degrees of belief or credence may be represented on a scale from zero to one, inclusive. And the same is true of acceptance. For while some have insisted that acceptance is an all-or-nothing phenomenon, if one understands accepting a proposition or theory as employing it as a premise in practical reasoning, then acceptance, like belief, can admit of degrees. For in practical reasoning we can treat a proposition or theory as having any probability between zero and one, inclusive. We may refer to this quantity as one’s “degree of acceptance” in the proposition or theory in question. Thus, in solving a given practical problem, it is possible to take a number of alternative theories into consideration by assigning a nonzero probability to each, or in other words, by partially accepting each. I might, for example, aim to choose the option that would be optimal if there was a .5 chance that utilitarianism is true and a .5 chance that Kantianism is true. If I did this, I would have a degree of acceptance of .5 in each of these theories. For any such set of alternative theories, we may refer to one’s respective degrees of acceptance in these theories as an “acceptance distribution.” 

Default to expert consensus on philosophy.
Bourget and Chalmers 13
David Bourget and David J. Chalmers (Australian National University, editors of PhilPapers). What Do Philosophers Believe? May 15, 2013.
http://philpapers.org/archive/BOUWDP 

Second, one could argue that these sociological facts can play an evidential role in answering philosophical questions. On this view, the prevalence of views among philosophers can serve as a guide to their truth. After all, philosophers had had the bene?t of years of re?ection on these questions and might be taken as experts on them. In science, we often take the prevalence of scienti?c views among experts as strong evidence about which views are correct (consider questions about evolution or climate change, for example). It could be suggested that expert views should play a similar role with respect to philosophical questions. Many will be skeptical about this analogy, however. It is arguable that there is less convergence over time in philosophy than in science, for example. So we do not make the evidential claim here. 

You should give each of the major ethical theories a reasonable degree of confidence. Polls show that professional philosophers are split evenly between them.
Bourget and Chalmers 13
David Bourget and David J. Chalmers (Australian National University, editors of PhilPapers). What Do Philosophers Believe? May 15, 2013.
http://philpapers.org/archive/BOUWDP 

931 of the 1,972 members of the target faculty group completed the Survey (a 47 response rate). Including the uncontrolled survey group, 3,226 individuals from all populations completed the survey. The following list summarizes the results for the target faculty group, collapsing answers that "accept" and "lean toward" for a given view and collapsing all "other" answers. More ?ne-grained results can be found in Appendix 1. 1. A priori knowledge: yes 71.1; no 18.4; other 10.5. 112. Abstract objects: Platonism 39.3; nominalism 37.7; other 23.0. 3. Aesthetic value: objective 41.0; subjective 34.5; other 24.5. 4. Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes 64.9; no 27.1; other 8.1. 5. Epistemic justi?cation: externalism 42.7; internalism 26.4; other 30.8. 6. External world: non-skeptical realism 81.6; skepticism 4.8; idealism 4.3; other 9.2. 7. Free will: compatibilism 59.1; libertarianism 13.7; no free will 12.2; other 14.9. 8. God: atheism 72.8; theism 14.6; other 12.6. 9. Knowledge claims: contextualism 40.1; invariantism 31.1; relativism 2.9; other 25.9. 10. Knowledge: empiricism 35.0; rationalism 27.8; other 37.2. 11. Laws of nature: non-Humean 57.1; Humean 24.7; other 18.2. 12. Logic: classical 51.6; non-classical 15.4; other 33.1. 13. Mental content: externalism 51.1; internalism 20.0; other 28.9. 14. Meta-ethics: moral realism 56.4; moral anti-realism 27.7; other 15.9. 15. Metaphilosophy: naturalism 49.8; non-naturalism 25.9; other 24.3. 16. Mind: physicalism 56.5; non-physicalism 27.1; other 16.4. 17. Moral judgment: cognitivism 65.7; non-cognitivism 17.0; other 17.3. 18. Moral motivation: internalism 34.9; externalism 29.8; other 35.3. 19. Newcomb’s problem: two boxes 31.4; one box 21.3; other 47.4. 20. Normative ethics: deontology 25.9; consequentialism 23.6; virtue ethics 18.2; other 32.3. 21. Perceptual experience: representationalism 31.5; qualia theory 12.2; disjunctivism 11.0; sense-datum theory 3.1; other 42.2. 22. Personal identity: psychological view 33.6; biological view 16.9; further-fact view 12.2; other 37.3. 23. Politics: egalitarianism 34.8; communitarianism 14.3; libertarianism 9.9; other 41.0. 24. Proper names: Millian 34.5; Fregean 28.7; other 36.8. 1225. Science: scienti?c realism 75.1; scienti?c anti-realism 11.6; other 13.3. 26. Teletransporter: survival 36.2; death 31.1; other 32.7. 27. Time: B-theory 26.3; A-theory 15.5; other 58.2. 28. Trolley problem: switch 68.2; don’t switch 7.6; other 24.2. 29. Truth: correspondence 50.8; de?ationary 24.8; epistemic 6.9; other 17.5. 30. Zombies: conceivable but not metaphysically possible 35.6; metaphysically possible 23.3; inconceivable 16.0; other 25.1. 

This also precludes skep triggers and presumption because lack of moral consensus means the neg can never prove 100 defense on the standard. If you do presume, presumption goes aff to compensate for time skew.

The standard is non-domination, defined as minimizing the capacity for arbitrary interference.

First, nondomination is the primary moral good.

Pettit 99
Pettit, Philip (Professor at Princeton). Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford University Press, USA (September 30, 1999).

The first of the further benefits becomes visible when we reflect on a salient way in which arbitrary interference is worse than nonarbitrary. To suffer the reality or expectation of arbitrary interference is to suffer an extra malaise over and beyond that of having your choices intentionally curtailed. It is to have to endure a high level of uncertainty, since the arbitrary basis on which the interference occurs means that there is no predicting when it will strike. Such uncertainty makes planning much more difficult than it would be under a corresponding prospect of non-arbitrary interference. And, of course, it is also likely to produce a high level of anxiety. Freedom as non-domination requires us to reduce the capacities for arbitrary interference to which a person is exposed, while freedom as non-interference requires us to minimize the person's expectation of interference as such. But this means that, while the non-domination ideal would tend to require conditions where certainty is high, the non-interference ideal is consistent with a great loss on this front. It is quite possible that the maximal non-interference possible for someone will be available under an arrangement where that person has to suffer much uncertainty. But it is hardly conceivable that the same is true for the maximal non-domination that they might achieve. Imagine that we have a choice between leaving employers with a lot of power over employees, or men with a lot of power over women, and using state interference to reduce such power. Maximizing overall non-interference is perfectly compatible with taking the first option. While we do not guard against interference by the stronger under that option, we may not think that it is very likely to occur; and because we do not guard against interference by the stronger, we will count the absence of state interference as a great boon. Thus maximizing overall non-interference is perfectly compatible with forcing the individual employee or the individual woman to have to live with much uncertainty. What is true at the overall or aggregate level may also hold at the individual level. For related considerations may mean that maximizing the individual's own non-interference would require exposing them to a high level of uncertainty. Perhaps the recourse to the law would be so interventionist in their own lives and so ineffective in stopping interference by others that it would mean more interference, not less. Perhaps the way to maximize the person's expected non-interference is to leave them in subjection to others, then, in a position where they suffer much uncertainty. Their expectation of non-interference would be at a maximum, but at the maximal point envisaged the interference to which they are exposed would be the arbitrary sort that induces uncertainty: the sort that occasions anxiety and makes planning difficult. The project of increasing a person's freedom as non-domination could not tolerate this uncertainty, because it would baulk at accepting any degree of subjection to another. Devotees of freedom as nondomination emphasize the advantage of their ideal in this respect when they say that the unfree person is exposed to the inconstant, uncertain will of another and consequently suffers anxiety and wretchedness. 'Having always some unknown evil to fear, though it should never come, he has no perfect enjoyment of himself, or of any of the blessings of life' (Priestley 1993: 35). Their assumption is that if we try to further someone's freedom as non-domination then we will remove the spectre of such uncertainty. Maybe the person has to live by the standing rule of a constitution and a law, a rule that makes for a degree of coercion in their lives. But they do not have to live under constant fear of unpredictable interference, and so they can organize their affairs on a systematic basis and with a large measure of tranquillity. The second benefit associated with freedom as non-domination, and not with freedom as non-interference, becomes visible when we reflect on another way in which arbitrary interference is worse than non-arbitrary. To suffer the reality or expectation of arbitrary interference is not only to have to endure a high level of uncertainty. It is also to have to keep a weather eye on the powerful, anticipating what they will expect of you and trying to please them, or anticipating where they will be and trying to stay out of their way; it is to have strategic deference and anticipation forced upon you at every point. You can never sail on, unconcerned, in the pursuit of your own affairs; you have to navigate an area that is mined on all sides with dangers. Advancing someone's freedom as non-domination means reducing other people's capacities for arbitrary interference in their lives, and will reduce their need for strategic deference or anticipation, as it will reduce the level of uncertainty with which they have to live. But advancing someone's freedom as non-interference is not guaranteed to have this effect. For it may very well be that the best way to maximize someone's expectation of non-interference is to rely in good part on their native wit and cunning: to get them to look after their own freedom by forcing them to develop and exercise strategies of placating and anticipating the powerful. A world in which strategic flattery and avoidance is rampant—a world in which women become adept at placating their men folk, for example, or at not crossing their paths—may represent the best prospect for keeping interference as such at a minimum. Having to practise strategic deference and anticipation, however, like having to live with uncertainty, is a serious cost. For the strategic disposition imposed requires the agent to curtail their own choices: to tug the forelock at appropriate moments and, when that promises not to be enough, to keep out of sight. Such enforced self-denial, of course, does not represent a form of interference, even of arbitrary interference, for interference has to be intentionally perpetrated by another; that, indeed, is why the cause of freedom as non-interference can be promoted by an arrangement involving a lot of strategic deference and anticipation. But nonetheless it is clearly bad that people should have to resort to denying themselves various choices in order to achieve non-interference. And it is a clear advantage of the ideal of freedom as non-domination that in targeting arbitrary interference as the enemy, and in seeking to reduce the capacities of others to interfere arbitrarily in anyone's affairs, it presents a picture of the free life in which the need for strategy is minimized. The Third benefit associated with freedom as non-domination but not with freedom as non-interference is one that I have already highlighted in arguing that the fact that someone enjoys non-domination is likely to become a matter of common knowledge and to generate associated subjective and inter-subjective benefits. While someone's freedom as non-interference may be at a maximum in a situation where they have to recognize that they are vulnerable to the whim of another, and have an inferior social status to that other, the enjoyment of freedom as non-domination goes with the possibility of their seeing themselves as non-vulnerable in that way and as possessed of a comparable social standing with the other. They can look the other in the eye; they do not have to bow and scrape. That two people enjoy the same freedom as non-interference, that they even enjoy the same expectation of such freedom, is consistent with one of them, and only one of them, having the power to interfere in the life of the other. Consistently with possessing the power to interfere, the more powerful may have no interest in interfering; this may be because of indifference or preoccupation or devotion: it may even be because the less powerful people are good at keeping them happy or at keeping out of their way. Thus the powerful person may be as unlikely to interfere with others as the less powerful. But even if both parties enjoy equal non-interference, and an equal expectation of non-interference, they are likely to develop a shared awareness of the asymmetry of power, and indeed an awareness shared with others in the community: this was a major theme of the last chapter. And once it is a matter of common awareness that one of them is powerful enough to be able to interfere more or less arbitrarily in the life of the other, then that is going to affect their relative status. It is going to be a matter of common knowledge that the one is weaker than the other, vulnerable to the other, and to that extent subordinate to the other. Why should I be forced to think of myself in this way, it may be asked, if the other person is really no more likely to interfere with me than I with them? The answer takes us back to a consideration already mentioned in the last chapter. Seeing an option as an improbable choice for an agent, even as a vanishingly improbable choice, is different from seeing it as a choice that is not accessible to the agent: seeing it as a choice that is not within the agent's power. Thus the fact that another person is unlikely to interfere with me, just because they happen to have no interest in interfering, is consistent with their retaining access to the option of interfering with me. Now it is the attribution of accessible choices, not the attribution of probable choices, that determines how I and others view a person and, in particular, whether we view them as someone on whom I depend for enjoying non-interference (Pettit and Smith 1996). And so it is quite possible for me to be forced to think of myself as subordinate to someone who is no more likely to interfere with me than I am to interfere with them. More generally, it is possible for this way of thinking to be established as a matter of common recognition, so that my status, my standing in public perception, becomes that of a subordinate. Advancing someone's freedom as non-domination is bound to mean reducing this sort of subordination, as it is bound to mean reducing the uncertainty with which they have to live, and the strategy to which they have to have recourse. For while it is possible to enjoy the highest degree of non-interference available in a situation where you are subordinate to another, every increase in your non-domination is going to mean decreasing the subordination to which you are exposed. After all, increasing your non-domination means reducing the capacity of others for interfering with you on an arbitrary basis, and that means reducing their access to such interference. To sum up these reflections, then, freedom as non-domination may seem to do less well than freedom as non-interference in servicing unrestricted choice; after all, it is opposed only to arbitrary interference—specifically, to others having the capacity for such interference—not to interference as such. But freedom as non-domination does much better in three other respects, all of them of intuitively great importance. It promises to do better in delivering a person from uncertainty, and from the associated anxiety and inability to plan; from the need to exercise strategy with the powerful, having to defer to  them and anticipate their various moves; and from the subordination that goes with a common awareness that the person is exposed to the possibility of arbitrary interference by another: that there is another who can deploy such interference, even if they are not likely to do so. As against my line of argument so far, it may be said that those who espouse freedom as non-interference are not generally known for welcoming or even acknowledging the uncertainty, the strategy, and the subordination I have been documenting. How to explain this? The answer may be that those who espouse the ideal often take it for granted that it is best furthered by traditional, non-dominating institutions—say, by the institutions of the common law—that are most readily justified, as they were traditionally justified, by the desire to avoid arbitrariness. Thus what the people in question effectively embrace is not what they officially embrace: it is not freedom as noninterference, neat, but rather freedom as non-interference under the rule of such a common law.2 This constrained version of the non-interference ideal is close enough to the ideal of freedom as non-domination to make it seem that uncertainty, strategy, and subordination are ruled out. They are ruled out, it is true, in the forum where people's relations are effectively directed by the relevant legal injunctions. But the constrained ideal still falls short of freedom as non-domination, since it is consistent with allowing domination—and the attendant uncertainty, strategy, and subordination—within those spaces where the relevant legal injunction leaves people to other devices. Thus it is consistent, in a way that freedom as non-domination would not be, with domination occurring in the workplace or in the home or in any of a multitude of so-called private spaces. I do not think that anyone can be indifferent to the benefits that freedom as non-domination promises. To be able to live your life without uncertainty about the interference you will have to endure; to be able to live without having to stay on your toes in dealing with the powerful; and to be able to live without subordination to others: these are great and palpable goods and they make a powerful case for the instrumental attractions of freedom as non-domination. A primary good They make a case, indeed, not just for the instrumental attractions of the ideal but for its status, in John Rawls's (1971) phrase, as a primary good. A primary good is something that a person has instrumental reasons to want, no matter what else they want: something that promises results that are likely to appeal to them, no matter what they value and pursue. The considerations rehearsed so far show that advancing someone's freedom as non-domination is likely to help them escape from uncertainty, strategy, and subordination; certainly, it is more likely to do this than advancing their freedom as non-interference. But something stronger also holds true. Suppose we take steps to reduce a person's uncertainty about interference, to reduce their need for exercising a strategy of deference and anticipation with others, and to reduce the subordination associated with vulnerability. It is hard to see how we could take such steps without at the same time advancing their freedom as non-domination. Freedom as non-domination appears to be, not just a more or less sufficient instrument for promoting those effects, but a more or less necessarily associated factor. There is no promoting non-domination without promoting those effects; and there is no promoting those effects without promoting non-domination. This may not hold in every possible world, but it certainly seems to hold under plausible assumptions about how the actual world works. Given that freedom as non-domination is bound up in this way with the effects discussed, how could anyone fail to want it for themselves, or fail to recognize it as a value? Short of embracing some religiously or ideologically motivated doctrine of self-abasement, people will surely find their ends easier of attainment to the extent that they enjoy non-domination. Certainly they will find those ends easier of attainment if they are ends conceived and pursued under the pluralistic conditions that obtain in most developed democracies and, of course, in the international world at large. Freedom as non-domination is not just an instrumental good, then; it also enjoys the status, at least in relevant circumstances, of a primary good. This point is easily supported. For almost all the things that a person is likely to want, the pursuit of those things is going to be facilitated by their having an ability to make plans (Bratman 1987). But short of enjoying non-domination, the person's ability to make plans will be undermined by the sort of uncertainty we discussed. Hence, to the extent that it involves a reduction in uncertainty, non-domination has the firm attraction of a primary good. 

Second, nondomination comes first under util for state actors.
Pettit 99
Pettit, Philip (Professor at Princeton). Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford University Press, USA (September 30, 1999).

Republicanism is a consequentialist doctrine which assigns to government, in particular to governmental authorities, the task of promoting freedom as non-domination. But suppose that the authorities endorse this goal in a zealous, committed manner. Does that not raise the problem that they may seek in the name of the republican goal to breach the very forms that we, as system designers, think that the goal requires (Lyons 1982)? Does it not mean that they may often be motivated to take the law into their own hands—to dirty their hands (Coady 1993)—and to advance republican ends by non-republican means? It is often said that a utilitarian sheriff who is committed to promoting overall happiness might be required to frame an innocent person in order to avoid the worse consequences associated with a riot (McCloskey 1963). Is there not a parallel reason for thinking that republican officials who are committed to promoting overall nondomination will be subject to similar rule-breaking requirements? It would be a very serious problem if republicanism was morally infeasible in this way, for it would undermine the capacity of constitutional and institutional designers—ultimately it would undermine the capacity of a people—to plan for the effects they want to achieve. Whatever is to be said of the utilitarian goal of overall happiness, however, the republican goal of freedom as non-domination does not raise a serious problem of moral infeasibility (Braithwaite and Pettit 1990: 71-8). People enjoy freedom as non-domination to the extent that no other is in a position to interfere on an arbitrary basis in their lives. The zealous agents who break faith with an assigned brief in order to promote non-domination assume and achieve resources of arbitrary power, for they behave in a way that gives their own unchallenged judgement sway over others. And this assumption of resources affects, not just the non-domination of those affected in this or that case, but the non-domination of most of the society; zealous agents set themselves up over all, not just over some. If certain agents think that they can maximize non-domination by transgressing the obligations of their brief, then, they are almost certain to be mistaken. Whatever non-domination they hope to bring about by departing from their brief, it is unlikely to be greater than the massive domination they thereby perpetrate over the population in general. Against this, it may be objected that the sort of domination that official agents exercise over me and my like in virtue of covertly interfering with someone else is not itself harmful, so long as we remain unaware of the fact of being dominated. The agents may have reason to think, therefore, that it will be worth their while interfering if the chances of the interference becoming recognized are sufficiently small. I reply that no agent will ever be certain of not being caught out, and that the cost of being caught out is so enormous that, still, there is very unlikely to be a case for transgression sufficient to move a zealous agent. The cost of being caught out is that someone else will come to see that their lives are subject to the more or less arbitrary interference, not just of the agent in question, but of any other official agent: and, if someone else, then everyone else, since anyone who detects transgression is more than likely to make it public. What if the chance of being caught out is really very small indeed? Why shouldn't a zealous agent conclude that however great the cost of being apprehended, the improbability is such that he or she should bend the law in this case: bend the law, for example, as in covering up the offences of an important public personage, and seeking thereby to advance the interests of the country? There may be the very exceptional circumstances where zealotry is pardonable—pardonable and perhaps even commendable—but a very serious consideration argues against there being many. This is that the more unlikely it is that an agent will be apprehended, the clearer it will be to people at large that this case is an acid test of whether they are living under a proper rule of law or under the arbitrary sway of officials who put themselves, out of whatever high motives, above that law. Let apprehension be likely and people may well reckon that the errant official just nodded. Let apprehension be unlikely and they will all the more certainly think that the errant official typifies a general, dominating frame of mind. Short of catastrophic circumstances, then, there is unlikely to be any serious reason why a zealous agent should be tempted in the name of non-domination to break with the very rules of behaviour—the republican forms of government—that are designed to promote it. The considerations I have raised show that, given the power of official agents, and given their potential for domination, there is every reason why zealous agents should want to go out of their way to show people at large that there is no possibility of their taking the goal of nondomination into their own hands. There is every reason why they should look for institutional means of making it salient and credible that they are pre-committed to sticking with their brief, and to sticking with their brief even in cases where there is a prima facie case for zealous opportunism. There is every reason why they should want to make it salient and credible that their hands are tied: that they are agents with little or no independent discretion.

Third, Kantianism requires nondomination.
Ripstein 9
Arthur Ripstein. Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy. Harvard University Press. 2009.

The right to freedom as independence provides a model of interaction that reconciles the ability of separate persons to use their powers to pur- sue their own purposes. In so doing, it also provides a distinctive concepttion of the wrongs that interfere with this independence. Wrongdoing takes the form of domination. Both your right to independence and the violations of it can only be explicated by reference to the actions of others. Wrongs against your person are not outcomes that are bad for you which other people happen to cause. Unlike the familiar “harm principle” put forward by Mill, which focuses exclusively on out comes that can be characterized without reference to the acts that bring them about, the right to freedom focuses exclusively on the acts of others. It is not that somebody does something that causes something bad to happen to you; it is that somebody does something to you. The idea of freedom as nondomination has a distinguished history in political philosophy. Recent scholars have pointed out that Berlin’s dichotomy between negative and positive liberty leaves out a prominent idea of liberty, sometimes referred to as the “republican” or neo-Roman conception of liberty, according to which liberty consists in independence from others. These scholars argue that this conception was central to the political thought of the civic republicans of the Renaissance, who were centrally concerned with the dangers of despotism. On this reading, the early modern republicans did not object to despotism because it interfered with their negative or positive liberty (to use anachronistic terms they would not have recognized). A despot who was benevolent, or even prudent, might allow people, especially potentially powerful ones, opportunity to do what they wanted or be true to themselves. The objection was to the fact that it was up to the despot to decide, to his having the power, quite apart from the possibility that he would use it badly. Unless someone has a power, there is no danger of it being used badly, but the core concern of the civic republicans was the despot’s entitlement to use it, and the subjugation of his subjects that followed regardless of how it was used.18 Footnote 18. See generally Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), and Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). In “A Third Concept of Liberty,” Proceedings of the British Academy 117 (2002): 239, Skinner points out that Berlin’s idea of positive liberty is not an idea of self-mastery but of mastering yourself. Berlin is aware of this difference when he writes, “It is perfectly conceivable that a liberal-minded despot would allow his subjects a large mea sure of personal freedom.”19 Freedom as independence carries this same idea of independence further, to relations among citizens. It insists that everything that is wrong with being subject to the choice of a powerful ruler is also wrong with being subject to the choice of another private person. As a result, it can explain the nature of wrongdoing even when no harm ensues. One person is subject to another person’s choice; I use your means to advance purposes you have not set for yourself. Most familiar crimes are examples of one person interfering with the freedom of another by interfering with either her exercise of her powers or her ability to exercise them. They are small- scale versions of despotism or abuse of office.

I contend that compulsory voting is key to non-domination.

A. Social Exclusion

Status quo turnout de facto excludes the voice of the poor.
HLR 7
Harvard Law Review (no author). “The Case for Compulsory Voting in the United States.” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 121, No. 2 (December 2007), pp. 591-612
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40042668

There are serious questions about how legitimate a government is when the vast majority of citizens have not elected it.23 This concern goes beyond the question of whether or not low voter turnout affects substantive policy outcomes (which is unclear24). More fundamentally, there is a serious tension with the understanding "that within our constitutional tradition, democracy is prized because of the value of collective self-governance,"25 which is as much about procedure as it is about substance.26 Indeed, the level of voter turnout as a percentage of eligible voters in many recent elections would not even be sufficient to constitute a quorum for some of the most important American political institutions.27 But the most serious questions arise not from the sheer number of citizens whose voices are not counted,28 but from the fact that certain groups are uriderrepresented.29 Partly because of disparities in turnout rates by demographic categories, the center of political gravity has shifted toward the wealthiest white Americans.30 Government may not be giving adequate consideration to the priorities of the poor or of racial minorities.31 Many would dismiss these concerns about underrepresentation by pointing out that no one is denying the rights of nonwhites or the poor to vote; rather, individuals in those demographic groups are simply choosing not to exercise their rights. If they were sufficiently dissatisfied with the government, then presumably they would change their minds and vote. Given the rational basis for nonvoting discussed above, however, individual dissatisfaction is hardly guaranteed to encourage voting. Even a dissatisfied individual will be unlikely to vote if she realizes that her vote has a negligible chance of affecting the outcome of an election. Thus, even among relatively distinct demographic groups, a majority of whose members may be seriously dissatisfied with the national political leadership, collective action problems pose a substantial obstacle to any attempts to increase voter turnout.

Only CV increases turnout among the least well-off. Sanctions are key.

Hill and Louth 4
Dr. Lisa Hill and Jonathon Louth (Discipline of Politics, School of History and Politics, University of Adelaide). “Compulsory Voting Laws and Turnout: Efficacy and Appropriateness.” Refereed paper presented to the Australasian Political Studies Association Conference, University of Adelaide. 29 September - 1 October 2004

Compulsory voting laws appear to act as the most effective surrogate for the social norm of voting (Hasen, 1996, 2170; Hill, 2000, 2004). Making voting mandatory has the best chance of raising turnout because the most politically excluded members of society are probably beyond the reach of piecemeal ‘ergonomic’ and technical reforms such as those canvassed above. Many habitual abstainers appear to be so disconnected from the political system that only a radical reform like compulsory voting seems capable of drawing them back into civic life. Further, provided it is systematically administered in a congenial context, it seems to be the best guard against any post-materialistically induced decline in turnout. But law alone is not enough; appropriate sanctions must also be attached in order to ensure high turnout. Wolfgang Hirczy has shown that democratic regimes which impose penalties for non-voting have turnout of approximately ten to thirteen percentage points higher on average than those which do not (Hirczy, 1994, 64, 65). 

CV provides a legal check against discriminatory voting laws. Counter-plans can’t solve this.
Birch 9
Birch, Sarah (reader in politics at U of Essex). “Full Participation: A Comparative Study of Compulsory Voting.” Published by United Nations. 26 February 2009. http://i.unu.edu/media/unu.edu/publication/2224/full_participation_web.pdf

Compulsory voting is necessarily embedded in a complex set of regulations governing the conduct of elections, and these regulations shape each other. States where there is a legal obligation to attend the polls have reason to make voting as easy as possible for the citizenry, as this will lessen the costs of enforcement, and it will enhance the popular acceptability and legitimacy of the institution. It is therefore not surprising that mandatory voting is typically linked to an array of institutional mechanisms that facilitate electoral participation (though, as noted above, such mechanisms are not exclusive to states where electoral participation is required by law). 

The least well-off come first under the standard.
Pettit 99
Pettit, Philip (Aussie bloke). Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford University Press, USA (September 30, 1999). 

The primary consideration that leads me to defend structural egalitarianism is that the intensity of freedom as non-domination which a person enjoys in a society is a function of other people's powers as well as of their own. Take a person's powers to include all those factors that are liable to affect political, legal, financial, and social clout. The intensity of someone's freedom as non-domination—if you like, the level of their protection—is not just a function of the powers that enable the person to resist or deter arbitrary interference by others. It is also a function of the powers at the disposal of those others, for, depending on the nature and size of the powers of others, what their own powers enable them to achieve in the way of resistance and deterrence will vary. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The point is that a person's absolute score in relation to the intensity of non-domination is a function of their relative score in regard to powers: it is a function of their power-ratio in the society as a whole. The fact that each person's freedom as non-domination is a function of their relative powers has an immediate impact on the possibility of increasing the overall intensity of non-domination by introducing a greater inequality in its distribution. Any anti-equality initiative will make at least two parties less equal in their intensity of nondomination. It will do this either by increasing the advantaged person's powers or by decreasing the powers of the other party or by doing both at once: in whatever way, it will worsen the power-ratio of the disadvantaged party. But if the initiative is intended to raise the overall intensity of non-domination by the same margin by which it raises the intensity of non-domination of the favoured party, it is illdesigned. For the shift in the power-ratio that raises the advantaged party's absolute intensity of non-domination by interval A (for advantage) will serve at the same stroke to lower the disadvantaged person's intensity of non-domination, in absolute terms, by interval D (for disadvantage). The weaker party's absolute intensity of non-domination is a function of their relative powers, and the anti-equality initiative is bound to worsen it. An anti-equality initiative can succeed in maximizing the expected intensity of non-domination, then, only if the margin or margins by which it increases the expected non-domination of the advantaged compensate for the margins by which it decreases the expected nondomination of the disadvantaged. But there is no reason to think that A-margins are generally going to be larger than D-margins. There is no reason to think that those who benefit in absolute terms from an anti-equality initiative are going to enjoy an increase that compensates for the loss to those who suffer in absolute terms from that initiative. This observation already teaches us a relevant lesson. It means that, in the unlikely event that we are starting from an egalitarian base where everyone enjoys the same intensity of non-domination, it will make little or no sense to think of resorting to anti-equality initiatives in order to increase the overall intensity of non-domination enjoyed. The chances are that such a resort will reduce the overall intensity of non-domination at the same time as it makes its distribution less equal. But what if we are starting, as it is more plausible to suppose, from an inegalitarian base? Is there any reason, then, to think that anti-equality policies may increase the overall intensity of nondomination? No, there is not. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that in general any anti-equality intervention will be inferior to some pro-equality one. Here I am moved by a consideration additional to the consideration that a person's absolute intensity of nondomination is a function of their relative powers. The secondary consideration is, as we may put it, that the capacity of a person's power-ratio to produce intensity of non-domination is subject to diminishing marginal productivity. Where someone's power-ratio is poor, any improvement in their position will make for a comparatively large increase in their intensity of non-domination. Where the starting ratio is good, any improvement will make for a comparatively small increase in their intensity of non-domination. More generally, as the ratio in question improves, the function from ratio to intensity will decrease; it will take more and more of an improvement in the ratio to produce a given increase in non-domination. Improvements in the ratio are subject to diminishing marginal productivity in regard to the intensity of non-domination that they make possible. Imagine that we are dealing with just two individuals, A and B. Suppose that A is sufficiently well resourced to be generally able to resist interference from B or to deter B from interfering. Suppose, in other words, that A enjoys a high intensity of non-domination in the society constituted by A and B, not being subject to interference at will and with impunity from B. In such a case, it will not do much for A's non-domination to increase their powers even further; in fact, it may do nothing at all: A may be at a point where extra powers have zero marginal productivity.1 The increases may be more or less redundant, providing A with powers that are not really needed for the purposes of non-domination. The case contrasts with what those increases would have achieved had A been comparatively powerless and generally unable to resist B's interference or deter B from interfering. In such a situation, the value of the increases would have been much greater. The fact that improvements in a person's power-ratio are subject to diminishing marginal productivity in regard to intensity of nondomination means that if we are starting from an inegalitarian base, then no anti-equality initiative can hope to do as well in the production of overall non-domination as a corresponding pro-equality one. Any anti-equality intervention has to increase the difference in intensities of non-domination enjoyed by at least two individuals. That implies that it has to improve the power-ratio of a better-off individual rather than improving the power-ratio of a worse-off one. But since the function from power-ratio to intensity of non-domination is subject to diminishing marginal productivity, the anti-equality intervention must be generally expected not to do as well as the rival intervention that would have improved the power-ratio of the worseoff individual.2 The anti-equality intervention involves an expenditure in power-conferring resources that is designed to increase overall intensity of non-domination, and it appears that those resources would have been more efficiently spent on the less well-off individual than on the better-off.

B. Funding Bias

CV is key to get money out of campaign politics.
HLR 7
Harvard Law Review (no author). “The Case for Compulsory Voting in the United States.” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 121, No. 2 (December 2007), pp. 591-612
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40042668

In addition to the direct effect of compulsory voting on turnout, there are also several indirect benefits. First, compulsory voting would reduce the role of money in politics.35 Political parties would not spend as much money on their get-out-the-vote efforts since high turnout would already be ensured and would be fairly inelastic.36 Some of the get-out-the-vote money could be shifted to other forms of campaign spending, but not all of it. A significant amount of spending on getting out the vote comes from groups known as 527s (a reference to the tax code) and nonpartisan groups that are not subject to campaign finance laws.37 These groups are limited in their abilities to campaign expressly in favor of candidates.38 Presumably, these organizations would shift some funds from getting out the vote to issue ads (which are permissible), but the diminishing marginal effectiveness of those ads would limit this. With this implicit limit on spending, politicians and parties might focus somewhat less on fundraising and be less beholden to donors.39 

Funding bias is the largest barrier to equal representation; outweighs other offense.
Pettit 99
Pettit, Philip (Aussie bloke). Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford University Press, USA (September 30, 1999). 

Before leaving this discussion of what inclusive democracy requires, there is one last and very important point to make. Perhaps the greatest problem with making any democratic system of government truly inclusive comes of the fact is that politicians need funds in order to win election, and that they and the parties they form have to depend on certain individuals and companies to finance their activities. Such dependency is bound to leave the politicians particularly alert to the interests of their financial supporters, and it means that, however formally satisfactory, the parliament and the government are going to cease to be substantively inclusive. Those who fund politicians and political parties can expect to have a greater voice in government than those who do not; those who do not contribute, or who have nothing to contribute, do not have the same chance of having their interests and ideas properly represented in the corridors of power. What to do in order to guard against this problem? There is no easy solution, but it is clear where policy researchers should be looking. The questions that have to be investigated are issues like the following. Is there a way of limiting private campaign contributions and of making allowable contributions effectively public? Is there a way of publicly funding political candidates, say on the basis of their past performance, the performance of their party, or the degree of community support that they can demonstrate? Is there a way of enabling citizens to direct a limited portion of the tax they pay, or of a state allowance due them, to the party of their choice? And finally, is there a means of banning or limiting political advertising, given that such advertising is particularly costly and not particularly desirable: as we well know, it easily reduces political debate to a Punch and Judy farce (Sunstein 1993£)? The problem of controlling the influence of the economically powerful on politicians, and more generally on government, is at once an age-old issue — it led some traditional republicans to propose severe limits on individual wealth — and a pressing contemporary problem. It comes up most strikingly in relation to campaign funds, but of course it also has a presence elsewhere. Economically powerful individuals and corporations can gain a special voice in the halls of government, for example, not just as a result of providing party funds, but also by virtue of the fact that their initiatives — say, initiatives in the location of industry — can have a dramatic effect on the fortunes of government. One of the greatest challenges for republican research must be to identify measures for effectively separating the worlds of government and business.

C. Turnout

Only CV fully solves turnout, and enforcement’s key. Best studies prove.
Hill and Louth 4
Dr. Lisa Hill and Jonathon Louth (Discipline of Politics, School of History and Politics, University of Adelaide). “Compulsory Voting Laws and Turnout: Efficacy and Appropriateness.” Refereed paper presented to the Australasian Political Studies Association Conference, University of Adelaide. 29 September - 1 October 2004

Some critics of compulsory voting refer to the minimal percentage difference of voter turnout between compulsory and voluntary voting electoral systems. We address studies in which the effectiveness of compulsory voting is either underplayed or miscalculated due to an inappropriate use of atypical cases or a methodological error known as the ‘ecological fallacy’. Specifically, treating all compulsory voting regimes as a synthetic group can give rise to inaccurate perceptions of the performance of individual regimes like Australia’s. After canvassing a number of alternatives methods for raising turnout we suggest that, provided the setting is congenial, and provided it is accompanied by appropriate levels of enforcement and institutional support, compulsory voting is the only institutional mechanism that is able, on its own, to raise turnout into to the 90range. Using a social norms approach we also suggest that turnout problems are best solved by mandatory means. There is a particular focus on the Australian case which is, arguably, the benchmark standard for compulsory voting performance.

Overwhelming scholarly consensus agrees.
Panagopoulos 8
Costas Panagopoulos (Panagopoulos is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy and the graduate program in Elections and Campaign Management at Fordham University. He was previously research associate at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, where he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in 2006). The Calculus of Voting in Compulsory Voting Systems.
Political Behavior, Vol. 30, No. 4 (December 2008), pp. 455-467. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40213328 

Studies consistently demonstrate that compulsory voting raises turnout. Tingsten (1937, p 205) concludes that, "the introduction of compulsory voting everywhere has been accompanied by a remarkable rise in participation." In fact, compulsory voting seems to stimulate turnout more than any other institutional factor, boosting participation rates by anywhere from 7 to 16 percentage points on average (Lijphart 1997; Powell 1980; Jackman 1987; Franklin 2001). 

CV is key. Reward systems are too expensive. HLR 7
Harvard Law Review (no author). “The Case for Compulsory Voting in the United States.” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 121, No. 2 (December 2007), pp. 591-612
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40042668

Finally, there is the possibility of using rewards instead of punishments. There could be a tax break or a cash payout given to any eligible voter who votes (or qualifies as a conscientious objector).131 Using rewards is likely to be more costly than punishments, however, because it would be difficult to identify those people who would not vote in the absence of payment, requiring the government to pay all voters.132 

?
Compelled turnout is key to non-domination.
Lardy 4
Heather Lardy (University of Aberdeen). Is There a Right Not to Vote? Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Summer 2004), pp. 303-321. Oxford University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600594 .

It might be thought to follow from this that the right to vote necessarily protects also the freedom of individuals not to vote; after all, if the right preserves the liberty of an elector to consider voting meaningless, then surely it ought also to extend to the decision by that elector not to cast a vote at all. Compelling people to vote, it might be argued, violates the liberty which the right to vote protects just as much as (or more than) ascribing to the right the benefits of participating in an exercise in developmental or deliberative democracy. This, however, does not follow. As argued above, the liberty which the right to vote protects is concerned essentially with guaranteeing the formally equal democratic standing of all electors. This standing is not undermined, and may even be enhanced, by the circulation of conflicting ideas and beliefs about the value and meaning of individual electoral participation. Both a fierce critic of current electoral structures and someone who is either agnostic or positive about them may take part in elections as formal equals, and neither will suppose that her assessment of the system's democratic credentials either enhances or diminishes her standing as a formal political equal of the other. However, the practice of nonvoting does threaten to undermine the formally equal democratic status of electors. Non-voting is not only a matter of public concern; it is, like voting itself, a public act. It marks out non-voters, whose numbers are calculated and considered in the discussions of turnout which follow every election. It results in the attribution of extra weight to the votes of those who do participate, vesting them with a disproportionate influence. It is this which leads to the risk that active voters will come to dominate those who possess the franchise passively. Compulsion would not undermine the formally equal standing of voters, and would in fact be likely to do much to enhance it. This is so because it would trigger participation by individuals whose non-voting threatens to place them in a position in which they are vulnerable to attempts by the voting majority to ignore or override their interests. A compulsory voting law would have the effect of requiring political parties and leaders to take account of the electoral preferences of those groups of individuals currently experiencing the sort of political exclusion which accompanies persistent non-participation. This is necessary because, over time, it becomes all too easy for the voting public, and its elected governors, to overlook the unexpressed preferences of non-voters, falsely regarding their passivity as a purely private and personal choice. This danger would threaten the essential liberty which the idea of the right to vote represents. The right to vote is about freedom in the sense of non-domination, an idea articulated by Pettit as a central strand of this theory of republicanism.25 Liberty as non-domination requires an absence of arbitrary interference (or the threat of such interference). In this, it differs from freedom as non-interference, the standard presentation of negative liberty, which identifies any interference as a potential threat to individual freedom. Under freedom as non-domination, interference by public authority with individual liberty may well be consistent with the ideal of promoting a position in which all individuals can enjoy security from domination by others:26 

?
Generic coercion links don’t apply. The right not to vote presumes a false conception of freedom as non-interference which my framework indicts.
Lardy 4
Heather Lardy (University of Aberdeen). Is There a Right Not to Vote? Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Summer 2004), pp. 303-321. Oxford University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600594 .

Freedom as non-domination promises, not exemption from intentional interference, but exemption from intentional interference on an arbitrary basis: specifically, exemption from a capacity on the part of others for arbitrary interference. It is consistent, unlike freedom as non-interference, with a high level of non-arbitrary interference of the sort that a suitable system of law might impose.27 Pursuing freedom as non-domination reduces the amount of uncertainty individuals must live with, by reducing the capacity of authorities to interfere on an arbitrary basis. When non-interference is the ideal, individuals may be encouraged to promote that goal in inhibiting ways, such as, for example, displaying special deference or flattery to those in power.28 Further, the awareness that the more powerful retain the ability to interfere in an arbitrary fashion in the lives of the less powerful taints the freedom which the latter enjoy with a sense of insecurity. The 'shared awareness of the asymmetry of power' renders their status unequal, even if they are currently enjoying similar levels of freedom as noninterference.29 Freedom as non-domination avoids this danger by promoting the equal standing of all.30 The idea of the right to vote is similarly about individuals asserting a shared standing as formal political equals, which status carries an entitlement to participate in the choice of those who will exercise political power. Those they so choose have the potential thereafter to dominate those whom they rule. This risk is in part checked by general public acknowledgement of the formally equal status of voters and those whom they elect. Of course, this is an imperfect restraint: elected governments do dominate; and voters may come to accept this domination as just another undesirable feature of the imperfect practice of democracy. While it might be deemed quaint or just fanciful to suggest that voters are actually self-governing, their status as political equals, with a right not to be dominated by other voters (especially those elected to rule) expresses their possession of a liberty which exceeds the narrow vision of freedom as noninterference. The right to vote represents a freedom which cannot be diminished by being compelled because any exercise of the right, however it is initiated, contributes to the practice of freedom as non-domination. By voting, a person registers her status as a political equal, a full member of the democratic community. She does this even if she votes reluctantly or apathetically, or because compelled to do so by law. On this account, non-voting brings with it a serious risk of domination by those classes which do vote regularly, and by the governors whom they elect. To prevent this, voting may be compelled consistently with the idea of liberty as non-domination, and, therefore, with the idea of the right to vote. The right to vote is concerned about the virtue of electoral participation and identifies this virtue in the mere act of voting, without more.31 A reluctant voter, or one who is compelled by law to do so, nonetheless exercises the office of voter. Simply by voting, she displays the principal virtue with which the right to vote is concerned, namely active participation. From the perspective of the right to vote, it does not matter whether voting is done voluntarily or under compulsion. The act of casting a vote is enough: the right to vote does not require that it be done after thoughtful reflection or with an activist's zeal. Those who argue for a right not to vote presumes an underlying theory of liberty as non-interference. They assume this perhaps because the right to vote tends to be presented as an ordinary negative liberty, protecting against interferences by agencies of state. It has been argued here that compulsory voting may only be represented as an interference with liberty by mischaracterizing the sort of freedom which the right to vote represents. The right to vote is about freedom as non-domination. It is for those who oppose compulsion to demonstrate how it would threaten the liberty to which the right to vote relates. The liberty which the right not to vote asserts can provide only an inaccurate and impoverished account of the relation between freedom and voting. The liberty which the right to vote represents protects individual decisions about how to vote, and about what value to attach to the act of voting. It does not, however, grant those whom it recognizes as electors a freedom not to vote at all. 

Even if consent matters, contestability outweighs. It’s the constitutive feature of democracy.
Pettit 99
Pettit, Philip (Aussie bloke). Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford University Press, USA (September 30, 1999). 

The authorities will exercise arbitrary power if the decisions they make can be based on their private, perhaps sectional, interests or on their private, perhaps sectional, ideas as to what their brief—their brief qua legislator, administrator, or judge—requires. If private inclination or private opinion can rule, then people will live at the mercy of the officials. The authorities will have the power, not just to interfere— that is inherent in a system of law—but to interfere on a relatively arbitrary basis. They will be in a position where they dominate ordinary people and, this being a matter of common knowledge, they will be in a position where ordinary people may be expected to have to bow and scrape to them. The promotion of freedom as non-domination requires, therefore, that something be done to ensure that public decision-making tracks the interests and the ideas of those citizens whom it affects; after all, non-arbitrariness is guaranteed by nothing more or less than the existence of such a tracking relationship. The decision-making must not represent an imposition of their will on us, as the citizens are likely to think about the matter. It must be a form of decision-making which we can own and identify with: a form of decision-making in which we can see our interests furthered and our ideas respected. Whether the decisions are taken in the legislature, in the administration, or in the courts, they must bear the marks of our ways of caring and our ways of thinkingWhat is required for one of us to be able to own a public decision in this way? A traditional line would say that we can own a decision in that manner only if we have consented to it, or to the policy it incorporates, in an explicit or at least an implicit fashion. But this comment is not much help. If explicit individual consent is required for nonarbitrariness, especially if the consent has to be unforced, then nonarbitrariness in public decisions becomes an inaccessible ideal. If implicit individual consent is thought to be enough, however, and an absence of protest is taken as evidence of implicit consent, then nonarbitrariness in public decisions becomes an ideal that is so accessible as to be empty: any decision that fails to drive me to the barricades will count as non-arbitrary from my point of view. Will it help if we move from individual to collective consent and stipulate that any public decision that attracts majority support, or that is in accord with a policy that attracts such support, is non-arbitrary? Surely not. Certain decisions and policies may attract majority support while representing the most arbitrary interference in the lives of various minorities. We have already seen in Chapter 2 that there is very little connection between non-arbitrariness of interference and consent to that interference, so that these observations should not come as a surprise. What I suggested in that earlier discussion is that non-arbitrariness requires not so much consent as contestability. Imagine that another agent can and does interfere with me but that I am able effectively to contest any interference that does not answer to my relevant interests and ideas. It is only if I can effectively contest any such interference— it is only if I can force it to account to my relevant interests and ideas— that the interference is not arbitrary and the interferer not dominating. The idea of contestability gives us a cue for the right response to our question. What might enable one of us to own a public decision? What might make it possible for such a decision not to have the aspect of an arbitrary act of interference? The answer which suggests itself is: the fact that we can more or less effectively contest the decision, if we find that it does not answer to our relevant interests or relevant ideas. The decision may materialize, like most public decisions, on a basis that is consensual only in a vanishingly weak sense. That does not matter, provided that it materializes under a dispensation of effective contestability. The non-arbitrariness of public decisions comes of their meeting, not the condition of having originated or emerged according to some consensual process, but the condition of being such that if they conflict with the perceived interests and ideas of the citizens, then the citizens can effectively contest them. What matters is not the historical origin of the decisions in some form of consent but their modal or counterfactual responsiveness to the possibility of contestation. Democracy To require public decision-making to be contestable, in particular to be contestable from within every quarter in the society, is to insist that the decision-making satisfy a certain democratic profile. Democracy, as ordinarily understood, is connected with consent; it is almost exclusively associated with the popular election of the personnel in government, or at least with the popular election of the members of the legislature. But democracy may be understood, without unduly forcing intuitions, on a model that is primarily contestatory rather than consensual. On this model, a government will be democratic, a government will represent a form of rule that is controlled by the people, to the extent that the people individually and collectively enjoy a permanent possibility of contesting what government decides (Shapiro 1990: 266).

Aff gets RVIs on I meets and counter-interps because
(a) 1AR timeskew means I can’t cover theory and still have a fair shot on substance.
(b) no risk theory would give neg a free source of no risk offense which allows him to moot the AC.

The neg must defend one unconditional advocacy. Conditionality is bad because it makes the neg a moving target which kills 1AR strategy. He’ll kick it if I cover it and extend it if I undercover it, meaning I have no strategic options. Also, it’s unreciprocal because I can’t kick the AC. 

Neg burden is to defend a competitive post-fiat advocacy. Offense-defense is key to fairness and real world education. This means ignore skepticism.
Nelson 8
Adam F. Nelson, J.D.1. Towards a Comprehensive Theory of Lincoln-Douglas Debate. 2008.

And the truth-statement model of the resolution imposes an absolute burden of proof on the affirmative: if the resolution is a truth-claim, and the af?rmative has the burden of proving that claim, in so far as intuitively we tend to disbelieve truthclaims until we are persuaded otherwise, the af?rmative has the burden to prove that statement absolutely true. Indeed, one of the most common theory arguments in LD is conditionality, which argues it is inappropriate for the af?rmative to claim only proving the truth of part of the resolution is suf?cient to earn the ballot. Such a model of the resolution also gives the negative access to a range of strategies that many students, coaches, and judges ?nd ridiculous or even irrelevant to evaluation of the resolution.
If the negative need only prevent the affirmative from proving the truth of the resolution, it is logically sufficient to negate to deny our ability to make truth-statements or to prove normative morality does not exist or to deny the reliability of human senses or reason. Yet, even though most coaches appear to endorse the truth-statement model of the resolution, they complain about the use of such negative strategies, even though they are a necessary consequence of that model. And, moreover, such strategies seem fundamentally unfair, as they provide the negative with functionally in?nite ground, as there are a nearly in?nite variety of such skeptical objections to normative claims, while continuing to bind the af?rmative to a much smaller range of options: advocacy of the resolution as a whole.
Instead, it seems much more reasonable to treat the resolution as a way to equitably divide ground: the affirmative advocating the desirability of a world in which people adhere to the value judgment implied by the resolution and the negative advocating the desirability of a world in which people adhere to a value judgment mutually exclusive to that implied by the resolution. By making the issue one of desirability of Under competing world-views rather than of truth, the affirmative gains access to increased flexibility regarding how he or she chooses to defend that world, while the negative retains equal flexibility while being denied access to those skeptical arguments indicted above. Our ability to make normative claims is irrelevant to a discussion of the desirability of making two such claims. Unless there is some significant harm in making such statements, some offensive reason to reject making them that can be avoided by an advocacy mutually exclusive with that of the affirmative such objections are not a reason the negative world is more desirable, and therefore not a reason to negate. Note this is precisely how things have been done in policy debate for some time: a team that runs a kritik is expected to offer some impact of the mindset they are indicting and some alternative that would solve for that impact. A team that simply argued some universal, unavoidable, problem was bad and therefore a reason to negate would not be very successful. It is about time LD started treating such arguments the same way.
Such a model of the resolution has additional benefits as well. First, it forces both debaters to offer offensive reasons to prefer their worldview, thereby further enforcing a parallel burden structure. This means debaters can no longer get away with arguing the resolution is by definition true of false. The “truth” of the particular vocabulary of the resolution is irrelevant to its desirability. Second, it is intuitive. When people evaluate the truth of ethical claims, they consider their implications in the real world. They ask themselves whether a world in which people live by that ethical rule is better than one in which they don’t. Such debates don’t happen solely in the abstract. We want to know how the various options affect us and the world we live in.

?
Truth-testing devolves into offense-defense. The words in the topic prove it’s a question of offense-defense. Two reasons:

• • 1. “Resolved” means “firmly determined to do something,” so “Resolved” statements are always questions of what to do, not what to believe. Therefore, negating the truth of a resolved statement means proving that we shouldn’t do that action.
       Oxford Dictionary. No date. http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/resolved

2. Oxford Dictionary defines “Affirm” as 

declare one’s support for; uphold or defend:the referendum affirmed the republic’s right to secede
Oxford Dictionary. No date. http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/affirm

Therefore, affirming the topic is equivalent to endorsing it as an advocacy.

CV increases informed voting. Empirics prove.
Shineman 10
Victoria Anne Shineman (Visiting Scholar, Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, Princeton University). “Compulsory Voting as Compulsory Balloting: How Mandatory Balloting Laws Increase Informed Voting Without Increasing Uninformed Voting.” 2010. https://files.nyu.edu/vas281/public/Shineman_CompulsoryVotingAsCompulsoryBalloting.pdf 

This paper argues that mandatory balloting laws, as practiced, will weakly increase the informedness of the active electorate. A formal model presents voting as a 2-stage decision, where an actor must first decide whether to attend the polls and cast a ballot, and then decides whether to cast a valid vote on the ballot. Both stages of voting are optional under voluntary balloting (VB), whereas compulsory balloting (CB) is defined as a legal requirement to cast a ballot, enforced through a sanction for noncompliance. By offsetting some or all of the cost of balloting from the decision calculus of voting, CB laws increase incentives for informed voting among informed and initially uninformed actors. Furthermore, by issuing a penalty only for not casting a ballot, CB laws do not increase incentives for uninformed voting. The predictions of the model are tested through a laboratory experiment which simulates multiple rounds of a 2-stage voting game under VB and CB. The cutpoint predictions of the model are not fully realized, but behavior responds on the margin as predicted, and the substantive hypotheses of the model are confirmed: CB increases informed voting but does not increase uninformed voting. The net effect is that CB increases the expected information quality in the electorate, and therefore makes the socially optimal outcome more likely. However, it does this by incurring additional social costs. 

Lab experiments are best.
Shineman 10
Victoria Anne Shineman (Visiting Scholar, Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, Princeton University). “Compulsory Voting as Compulsory Balloting: How Mandatory Balloting Laws Increase Informed Voting Without Increasing Uninformed Voting.” 2010. https://files.nyu.edu/vas281/public/Shineman_CompulsoryVotingAsCompulsoryBalloting.pdf 

A laboratory experiment was designed to evaluate the CB Model. The experimental setting is ideal because it enables precise measurement and allows for a randomized treatment assignment while simultaneously providing complete control for the stakes of the election and the costs of information, balloting, and voting. As such, an experimental design enables a direct test of the rational cut point predictions. All references to graphical regions refer to the regions indicated in Graph 1. The value of B is constant at 100 throughout the experiment and the value of Cnb varies across treatments.

Tournament: Yale | Round: Quarters | Opponent: Christopher Columbus NA | Judge: Jonathan Massey, Ben Koh, Mark Gorthey
Ought is defined as moral obligation by Dictionary.com
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ought

Studies prove CV increases turnout better than any other institutional factor.
Panagopoulos 8 writes
Costas Panagopoulos (Panagopoulos is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy and the graduate program in Elections and Campaign Management at Fordham University. He was previously research associate at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, where he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in 2006). The Calculus of Voting in Compulsory Voting Systems.
Studies consistently demonstrate that compulsory voting…any other institutional factor, boosting participation rates by anywhere from 7 to 16 percentage points on average (Lijphart 1997; Powell 1980; Jackman 1987; Franklin 2001). 

CV spills over to solve exclusion generally.
Birch 9 writes
Birch, Sarah (reader in politics at U of Essex). “Full Participation: A Comparative Study of Compulsory Voting.” Published by United Nations. 26 February 2009. http://i.unu.edu/media/unu.edu/publication/2224/full_participation_web.pdf
Compulsory voting is necessarily embedded in a…mechanisms that facilitate electoral participation (though, as noted above, such mechanisms are not exclusive to states where electoral participation is required by law). 

Neg burden is to defend a competitive post-fiat policy. Offense-defense is key to fairness and real world education. This means ignore skepticism. Nelson 08 writes
Adam F. Nelson, J.D.1. Towards a Comprehensive Theory of Lincoln-Douglas Debate. 2008.
And the truth-statement model of the resolution imposes an absolute burden…
consider their implications in the real world. They ask themselves whether a world in which people live by that ethical rule is better than one in which they don’t. Such debates don’t happen solely in the abstract. We want to know how the various options affect us and the world we live in.

Prefer aff interpretations. Key to clash. O’Donnell 4 writes
“And the Twain Shall Meet: Affirmative Framework Choice and the Future of Debate” Timothy M. O’Donnell (Director of Debate University of Mary Washington) 2004.
AFC preserves the value of the first affirmative constructive…debate about what we should be debating about.

Tournament: Yale | Round: Semis | Opponent: Collegiate AO | Judge: Diana Li, Jonathon Bowyer, Grant Weisberg
Advantage 1 is Equal Freedom

Studies prove CV increases turnout better than any other institutional factor.
Panagopoulos 8 writes
Costas Panagopoulos (Panagopoulos is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy and the graduate program in Elections and Campaign Management at Fordham University. He was previously research associate at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, where he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in 2006). The Calculus of Voting in Compulsory Voting Systems.
Studies consistently demonstrate that compulsory voting raises turnout…boosting participation rates by anywhere from 7 to 16 percentage points on average (Lijphart 1997; Powell 1980; Jackman 1987; Franklin 2001). 

High turnout is key to getting money out of campaign politics.
HLR 7 writes
Harvard Law Review (no author). “The Case for Compulsory Voting in the United States.” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 121, No. 2 (December 2007), pp. 591-612
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40042668
In addition to the direct effect of compulsory voting on turnout, there are also…politicians and parties might focus somewhat less on fundraising and be less beholden to donors.39 

Funding bias is the largest barrier to equal representation. Pettit 99 writes
Pettit, Philip (Aussie bloke). Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford University Press, USA (September 30, 1999).
Before leaving this discussion of what inclusive democracy requires, there is one last and…greatest challenges for republican research must be to identify measures for effectively separating the worlds of government and business.

Libertarian notions of freedom fail in a state context.
Engelen 7 writes
Bart Engelen (Research Assistant of the Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders (Belgium), Centre for Economics and Ethics – Institute of Philosophy (K.U.Leuven), Centre for Economics and Ethics – K.U.Leuven, Naamsestraat 69, Leuven B – 3000, Belgium). “Why Compulsory Voting Can Enhance Democracy.” Acta Politica, 2007, 42, (23–39)
Libertarian opponents of compulsory voting emphasize that ‘in a free society¶…makes political decision-making practically impossible.

Advantage 2 is Water Wars

Water scarcity breaks down the Indus Waters Treaty which causes war.
CFR 11 writes report based on travel in the region by the Committee’s staff and the work of experts in government, academia, and other international institutions “Avoiding Water Wars: Water Scarcity and Central Asia’s Growing Importance for Stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Feb 22nd 2011, http://www.foreign.senate.gov/press/chair/release/?id=0b32e452-9c4c-4417-82ee-d201bcefc8ae
The National Intelligence Council echoed these concerns in their Global Trends 2025: A Trans- formed World, finding that with ‘‘water becoming more scarce in Asia and the Middle East, cooperation to manage changing water resources is likely to become more difficult… breakdown in the treaty’s utility in resolving water conflicts could have serious ramifications for regional stability.

Pakistan faces massive water scarcity now, and this risks war with India. Corruption is the root cause.
Aslam 13 writes
Malik Shahan Aslam (Senior Member of the CSS Forum, Civil Service of Pakistan). “Water scarcity.” Pakistan Observer. March 25th, 2013. http://pakobserver.net/201303/25/detailnews.asp?id=201494
Monday, March 25, 2013 - Pakistan is dangerously exposed to devastating floods because of no new dams have been built for…people are experiencing many problems due to corruption, feudalistic hegemony , abuse of powers and lack of political will to solve major issue of the country. 

CV ensures democratic legitimacy which solves corruption.
Yamin 12 writes
Dr. Saira Yamin (associate professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies). “The case for compulsory voting.” The Express Tribune. July 23rd, 2012. http://tribune.com.pk/story/412078/the-case-for-compulsory-voting/
Is there a case for compulsory voting in Pakistan? As the next general elections draw nearer, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP)…greater legitimacy when higher numbers of people participate in electing them. It would clearly place Pakistan’s democratically elected leadership on surer footing and a steadier path. On another note, as Pakistan continues to navigate an increasingly competitive and challenging economic and political global landscape, a more robust democratic image would serve its interests well. 

CV spills over to solve exclusion generally.
Birch 9 writes
Birch, Sarah (reader in politics at U of Essex). “Full Participation: A Comparative Study of Compulsory Voting.” Published by United Nations. 26 February 2009. http://i.unu.edu/media/unu.edu/publication/2224/full_participation_web.pdf
Compulsory voting is necessarily embedded in a complex set of regulations…mandatory voting is typically linked to an array of institutional mechanisms that facilitate electoral participation (though, as noted above, such mechanisms are not exclusive to states where electoral participation is required by law). 

IndoPak water war goes nuclear – cooperation impossible. Zahoor 11 writes
Musharaf Zahoor, is researcher at Department of Nuclear Politics, National Defence University, Islamabad, “Water crisis can trigger nuclear war in South Asia,” 2011, http://www.siasat.pk/forum/showthread.php?77008-Water-Crisis-can-Trigger-Nuclear-War-in-South-Asia
South Asia is among one of those regions where water needs are growing disproportionately to…any military confrontation in the region can result in a nuclear catastrophe. The rivers flowing from Kashmir are Pakistan's lifeline, which are essential for the livelihood of 170 million people of the country and the cohesion of federative units. The failure of dialogue will leave no option but to achieve the ends through military means.

Plan: The Government of Pakistan should make voting compulsory. Evidence clarifies intent. I reserve the right to clarify.

Existential risk outweighs every other impact by orders of magnitude because of the lost potential for future generations. Bostrom 11
Nick Bostrom (Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford Martin School and Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford), “THE CONCEPT OF EXISTENTIAL RISK”, 2011 http://www.existential-risk.org/concept.html
Even if we use the most conservative of these estimates, which entirely ignores…a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives.

Moral uncertainty is high now, but there’s room for improvement. Parfit 84 writes
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). P. 453.
Some people believe that there cannot be progress in Ethics, since everything has been already said. Like Rawls and Nagel, I believe the opposite. How many people…Ethics is the youngest and the least advanced.

Adopt a parliamentary model to account for moral uncertainty. This entails minimizing existential risks. Bostrom 9 writes
Bostrom, Nick (Existentialist of a different sort). “Moral uncertainty – toward a solution?” 1 January 2009. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/moral-uncertainty-towards-a-solution.html
It seems people are overconfident about their moral beliefs.  But how should one reason and act if one acknowledges that one is uncertain about morality – not just applied ethics but…current favorite moral theory completely dictate action, while still allowing the aggressive pursuit of some non-commonsensical high-leverage strategies so long as they don’t infringe too much on what other major moral theories deem centrally important.

Infinite values don’t paralyze calculation. Lauwers and Vallentyne 04 write
Luc Lauwers (Center for Economic Studies, K.U.Leuven) Peter Vallentyne (Department of Philosophy, University of Missouri-Columbia). “Infinite Utilitarianism: More Is Always Better*.” Economics and Philosophy 20 (2004): 307-330.
Zero Independence holds that the ranking of two worlds is…at each location between two worlds—not the absolute level of values at locations. No interlocational comparison of zero points is needed for this purpose.

Cost-benefit analysis is feasible. Ignore any util calc indicts. Hardin 90 writes
Hardin, Russell (Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences @ NYU). May 1990. Morality within the Limits of Reason. University Of Chicago Press. pp. 4. ISBN 978-0226316208.
One of the cuter charges against utilitarianism is that it is irrational in the following…too reasonable in practice to bring the world to a standstill) but only in the principled discussions of academics.

Debating specific nuclear scenarios is key to stave off actual nuclear war.
Harvard Nuclear Study Group 83 writes
Harvard Nuclear Study Group, 1983 (“Living With Nuclear Weapons,” p. 47)
The question is grisly, but nonetheless it must be asked. Nuclear war cannot be avoided simply by…nuclear scenarios can help identify problems not understood or dangers not yet prevented because they have not been foreseen.

?
Prefer aff interpretations. Key to clash. O’Donnell 4 writes
“And the Twain Shall Meet: Affirmative Framework Choice and the Future of Debate” Timothy M. O’Donnell (Director of Debate University of Mary Washington) 2004.
AFC preserves the value of the first affirmative constructive speec… debate about what we should be debating about. 

The standard is maximizing happiness.

Brain studies prove that there’s no such thing as personal identity. Parfit 84 writes
Derek Parfit. Reasons and Persons. 1984.
Some recent medical cases provide striking evidence in favour of…and can receive two different answers written by this person’s two hands.

In the absence of personal identity, only end states matter. Shoemaker 99
Shoemaker, David (Dept of Philosophy, U Memphis). “Utilitarianism and Personal Identity.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 33: 183–199, 1999. http://www.csun.edu/~ds56723/jvipaper.pdf
Extreme reductionism might lend support to utilitarianism in the following…would be the most plausible. Utilitarianism is just such a theory.

Tournament: Valley | Round: 3 | Opponent: Brentwood SS | Judge: Charles Rutter
Advantage 1 is Informed Voting

CV increases informed voting. Empirics prove.
Shineman 10 writes
Victoria Anne Shineman (Visiting Scholar, Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, Princeton University). “Compulsory Voting as Compulsory Balloting: How Mandatory Balloting Laws Increase Informed Voting Without Increasing Uninformed Voting.” 2010. https://files.nyu.edu/vas281/public/Shineman_CompulsoryVotingAsCompulsoryBalloting.pdf
This paper argues that mandatory balloting laws, as … likely. However, it does this by incurring additional social costs. 

Lab experiments are best.
Shineman 10 writes
Victoria Anne Shineman (Visiting Scholar, Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, Princeton University). “Compulsory Voting as Compulsory Balloting: How Mandatory Balloting Laws Increase Informed Voting Without Increasing Uninformed Voting.” 2010. https://files.nyu.edu/vas281/public/Shineman_CompulsoryVotingAsCompulsoryBalloting.pdf
A laboratory experiment was …experiment and the value of Cnb varies across treatments. 

Advantage 2 is Defense Spending

The defense budget is bloated now, and forces the US to pay tons of interest on its debt. Lazarro 11 writes
Joseph Lazarro (U.S. Editor, served as Managing Editor of New York-based financial news web sites WallStreetEurope.com/WallStreetItalia.com, 1999-2004, and as Economics/Markets Editor for AOL’s DailyFinance.com, 2008-2011). “Imperial Overstretch: Is A Bloated Defense Budget Weakening the U.S.?” International Business Times. November 20th, 2011. http://www.ibtimes.com/imperial-overstretch-bloated-defense-budget-weakening-us-213116
However, unfortunately in the decades … amount in interest to pay-down that defense debt. 

Large interest payments on defense debt risk extinction. Khalilzad 11 writes
Zalmay Khalilzad, the United States ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations during the presidency of George W. Bush and the director of policy planning at the Defense Department from 1990 to 1992, February 8, 2011, “The Economy and National Security; If we don’t get our economic house in order, we risk a new era of multi-polarity,” 2011, http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/259024/economy-and-national-security-zalmay-khalilzad
Without faster economic growth and actions … most significant barrier facing Chinese hegemony and aggression.

?
Empirics prove. CV leads to a decrease in defense spending.
O’Toole and Strobl 94 writes
Francis O’Toole and Eric Strobl (Department of Economics, Trinity College, Dublin). “Compulsory Voting and Government Spending.” Trinity Economic Paper Series Technical Paper No. 94/4 JEL Classification D72 and H30. 1994. http://www.tcd.ie/Economics/TEP/1994/199420Technical20Papers/94-4.pdf
Adopting either the median voter model or the … in this paper allows the data to tell us its own story. 

Thus the plan: The USFG should model Australia’s system of compulsory voting.

The standard is maximizing happiness.

Revisionary intuitionism is true and leads to util.

Yudkowsky 8 writes
Eliezer Yudkowsky (research fellow of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute; he also writes Harry Potter fan fiction). “The ‘Intuitions’ Behind ‘Utilitarianism.’” 28 January 2008. LessWrong. http://lesswrong.com/lw/n9/the_intuitions_behind_utilitarianism/
I haven't said much about metaethics - the nature of …because there are not many utilitarians, and many things left undone.

There are eight additional warrants.

First is doxastic freedom. 

Belief formation is not voluntary. We have no freedom over our long-term beliefs. Alston 89
William P. Alston. “The Deontological Conception of Epistemic Justification.” Epistemic Justification: Essays in the Theory of Knowledge, 1989. http://www.ditext.com/alston/deontological.html
Let's turn now to a critical …introspection, memory, and simple uncontroversial inferences. 

Doxastic unfreedom undermines deontology and justifies util.
Petersen 11
Steve Petersen (Niagara University). “Utilitarian Epistemology.” February 10th, 2011. http://stevepetersen.net/professional/petersen-utilitarian-epistemology.pdf
These problems should sound like special … sense we attribute him more of the moral responsibility for the crime.18 

Second, reductionism.

Brain studies prove that there’s no such thing as personal identity. Parfit 84 writes
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).
Some recent medical cases provide … receive two different answers written by this person’s two hands.

?
In the absence of personal identity, only end states matter. Shoemaker 99
Shoemaker, David (Dept of Philosophy, U Memphis). “Utilitarianism and Personal Identity.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 33: 183–199, 1999. http://www.csun.edu/~ds56723/jvipaper.pdf
Extreme reductionism might lend support to … the most plausible. Utilitarianism is just such a theory.

Third, my standard controls the link to any practical reason or contract frameworks because rational agents would consent to a universal law to maximize utility to increase the chance of their own interests being satisfied.

Fourth, the ultimate human good is happiness. Darwish 9
“Rethinking Utilitarianism,” Bahaa Darwish (Qatar University). Teaching Ethics 10 (1):87-109 (2009). http://www.uvu.edu/ethics/seac/Darwish20-20Rethinking20Utilitarianism.pdf
Let’s start with knowledge. It is clear that those … worth, they bring or constitute our pleasure.  

Fifth, respect for human worth would justify util. Cummiskey 90
Cummiskey, David. Associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. “Kantian Consequentiaism.” Ethics 100 (April 1990), University of Chicago. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing … force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others.

Sixth, util is the only moral system available to policy-makers.  Goodin 90
Robert Goodin, fellow in philosophy, Australian National Defense University, THE UTILITARIAN RESPONSE, 1990, p. 141-2
My larger argument turns on the proposition that … use it at all – to chose general rules or conduct.

Seventh, conflicting moral side-constraints would paralyze state action, so states must use util to weigh deontological violations.

Eighth, there’s no act-omission distinction. Gewirth 82 writes
Gewirth (Department of Philosophy, Univ. of Chicago) 82 Alan, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications pg 183
To be responsible for … who have informed control over other persons’ suffering the lethal harms of cancer.

Default to util absent a clear reason to reject it. Sinnot-Armstrong 11 writes
Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, "Consequentialism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/consequentialism/.
Even if consequentialists can accommodate or explain … or wrong, just as consequentialists claim

?
Prefer aff interpretations. Key to clash. O’Donnell 4 writes
“And the Twain Shall Meet: Affirmative Framework Choice and the Future of Debate” Timothy M. O’Donnell (Director of Debate University of Mary Washington) 2004.
AFC preserves the value … we should be debating about.

Tournament: Valley Varsity RR | Round: 2 | Opponent: Hockaday CN | Judge: Eric Palmer, Graham Tierney
Plan: The USFG should model Australia’s system of compulsory voting.

Advantage 1 is Equal Freedom

CV is key to get money out of campaign politics.
HLR 7
Harvard Law Review (no author). “The Case for Compulsory Voting in the United States.” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 121, No. 2 (December 2007), pp. 591-612
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40042668

In addition to the direct effect of compulsory …and be less beholden to donors.39 

Funding bias is the largest barrier to equal representation. Pettit 99
Pettit, Philip (Aussie bloke). Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford University Press, USA (September 30, 1999). 

Before leaving this discussion of what inclusive …effectively separating the worlds of government and business.

Libertarian notions of freedom cause serial policy failure in a state context.
Engelen 7
Bart Engelen (Research Assistant of the Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders (Belgium), Centre for Economics and Ethics – Institute of Philosophy (K.U.Leuven), Centre for Economics and Ethics – K.U.Leuven, Naamsestraat 69, Leuven B – 3000, Belgium). “Why Compulsory Voting Can Enhance Democracy.” Acta Politica, 2007, 42, (23–39)

Libertarian opponents of compulsory voting emphasize …decision-making practically impossible.

Advantage 2 is the Tea Party

Low Democratic turnout uniquely advantages the Tea Party in the 2014 midterm elections.
Bouie 12
Jamelle Bouie (Staff Writer At The American Prospect). “Why The Tea Party Will Find Success In 2014.” November 23rd, 2012. 

As both an ideological movement and …to expand its influence in the next round of elections.

US modeling of Australia’s CV benefits Democrats because of higher turnout. Empirics prove. Australia’s CV substantially increases turnout.
Jones 3-12
David Jones (Warminster, has a master’s degree in journalism and 35 years’ experience writing and editing for business magazines and newspapers). “Voting is a responsibility that should have the force of law.” Philly Burbs. March 12, 2013. http://www.phillyburbs.com/news/local/courier_times_news/opinion/guest/voting-is-a-responsibility-that-should-have-the-force-of/article_cbecb24e-e067-5568-87ce-ce10a15a3e76.html?TNNoMobile

An estimated 93 million American citizens …be wise to favor compulsory voting.

Tea party influence causes strikes on Iran. Mead 11
Walter Russell Mead (Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities @ Bard College). “The Tea Party and American Foreign Policy: What Populism Means for Globalism.” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2011Volume 9o • Number 2

Any increase in Jacksonian political …than embrace visionary “win-win” global schemes. Pg. 42-43 

 Strike against Iran causes extinction. Hirsch 5
Nov 21, Jorge, – physics professor, Ph.D., University of Chicago http://www.antiwar.com/orig/hirsch.php?articleid=8089

The Bush administration has …Earth's population many times over.

Existential risk outweighs every other impact by orders of magnitude because of the lost potential for future generations. Bostrom 11
Nick Bostrom (Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford Martin School and Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford), “THE CONCEPT OF EXISTENTIAL RISK”, 2011 http://www.existential-risk.org/concept.html

Even if we use the most conservative of … much as a billion human lives.

Moral uncertainty is high now, but there’s room for improvement. Parfit 84
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). P. 453.

Some people believe that…youngest and the least advanced.

Adopt a parliamentary model to account for moral uncertainty. This entails minimizing existential risks. Bostrom 9
Bostrom, Nick (Existentialist of a different sort). “Moral uncertainty – toward a solution?” 1 January 2009. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/moral-uncertainty-towards-a-solution.html 

It seems people are overconfident about …theories deem centrally important.

I don’t need to win that weighing values is possible. Extinction precludes all values, so it is wrong under any moral code. Seeley 86
Robert A., Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, The Handbook of Non-Violence, p. 269-70

In moral reasoning prediction of consequences …impermissible under any sane moral code.

The nature of the US government is to minimize existential risks.
Abraham Lincoln 64
Lincoln, Abraham (16th POTUS). Letter to A.G. Hodges. 4 April 1864.

I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, …Constitution all together.

Cost-benefit analysis is feasible. Ignore any util calc indicts. Hardin 90
Hardin, Russell (Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences @ NYU). May 1990. Morality within the Limits of Reason. University Of Chicago Press. pp. 4. ISBN 978-0226316208.

One of the cuter charges against utilitarianism is…the principled discussions of academics.

Neg burden is to defend a competitive post-fiat United States policy. Offense-defense is key to fairness and real world education. This means ignore skepticism.
Nelson 8
Adam F. Nelson, J.D.1. Towards a Comprehensive Theory of Lincoln-Douglas Debate. 2008.

And the truth-statement model of the …various options affect us and the world we live in.

Tournament: Valley RR | Round: 3 | Opponent: Collegiate AO | Judge: Alex Kramer, Clay Spence
Advantage 1 is Equal Freedom

Studies prove CV increases turnout better than any other institutional factor.
Panagopoulos 8 writes
Costas Panagopoulos (Panagopoulos is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy and the graduate program in Elections and Campaign Management at Fordham University. He was previously research associate at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, where he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in 2006). The Calculus of Voting in Compulsory Voting Systems.
Political Behavior, Vol. 30, No. 4 (December 2008), pp. 455-467. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40213328
Studies consistently demonstrate that compulsory voting raises turnout…boosting participation rates by anywhere from 7 to 16 percentage points on average (Lijphart 1997; Powell 1980; Jackman 1987; Franklin 2001). 

High turnout is key to getting money out of campaign politics.
HLR 7 writes
Harvard Law Review (no author). “The Case for Compulsory Voting in the United States.” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 121, No. 2 (December 2007), pp. 591-612
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40042668
In addition to the direct effect of compulsory voting on turnout, there are also several indirect benefits. First, compulsory voting would reduce…politicians and parties might focus somewhat less on fundraising and be less beholden to donors.39 

Funding bias is the largest barrier to equal representation. Pettit 99 writes
Pettit, Philip (Aussie bloke). Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford University Press, USA (September 30, 1999).
Before leaving this discussion of what inclusive democracy requires, there is one last and very important point …greatest challenges for republican research must be to identify measures for effectively separating the worlds of government and business.

Specifically, women are structurally precluded from voting in Pakistan.
AP 13 writes
Associated Press. “Women in Pakistan town can't vote. Why? Because men say so.” USA Today. May 5th, 2013. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/05/05/in-pakistan-town-men-have-spoken-no-women-vote/2137223/
MATEELA, Pakistan (AP) — For decades, not a single woman in this dusty Pakistani village surrounded by…an independent group working to increase voter participation, met with residents, trying to encourage them to let women vote. 

CV in Pakistan empowers women and solves for political apathy.
Jabbar 11 writes
Javed Jabbar (former senator and federal minister). “Make voting compulsory.” DAWN Newspaper (Pakistani paper). August 15th, 2011. http://beta.dawn.com/news/651996/make-voting-compulsory
PAKISTAN has an electoral democracy but not a representative democracy. Post-1971, in eight general elections, the voter turnout has…a stable and sustained democracy while strengthening democratic values and practices. 

Advantage 2 is Water Wars

Pakistan faces massive water scarcity now, and this risks war with India. Corruption is the root cause.
Aslam 13 writes
Malik Shahan Aslam (Senior Member of the CSS Forum, Civil Service of Pakistan). “Water scarcity.” Pakistan Observer. March 25th, 2013. http://pakobserver.net/201303/25/detailnews.asp?id=201494
Monday, March 25, 2013 - Pakistan is dangerously exposed to devastating floods because of no new dams have been built for the last 47 years” stated by the former chairman of the Indus River System Authority .Water scarcity is the real growing threat to Pakistan….due to corruption, feudalistic hegemony , abuse of powers and lack of political will to solve major issue of the country. 

CV ensures democratic legitimacy which solves corruption.
Yamin 12 writes
Dr. Saira Yamin (associate professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies). “The case for compulsory voting.” The Express Tribune. July 23rd, 2012. http://tribune.com.pk/story/412078/the-case-for-compulsory-voting/
Is there a case for compulsory voting in Pakistan? As the next general elections draw nearer, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) should…governments have greater legitimacy when higher numbers of people participate in electing them. It would clearly place Pakistan’s democratically elected leadership on surer footing and a steadier path. On another note, as Pakistan continues to navigate an increasingly competitive and challenging economic and political global landscape, a more robust democratic image would serve its interests well. 

CV spills over to solve exclusion generally.
Birch 9 writes
Birch, Sarah (reader in politics at U of Essex). “Full Participation: A Comparative Study of Compulsory Voting.” Published by United Nations. 26 February 2009. http://i.unu.edu/media/unu.edu/publication/2224/full_participation_web.pdf
Compulsory voting is necessarily embedded in a complex set…mechanisms that facilitate electoral participation (though, as noted above, such mechanisms are not exclusive to states where electoral participation is required by law). 

Water scarcity breaks down the Indus Waters Treaty which causes war.
CFR 11 writes
report based on travel in the region by the Committee’s staff and the work of experts in government, academia, and other international institutions “Avoiding Water Wars: Water Scarcity and Central Asia’s Growing Importance for Stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Feb 22nd 2011, http://www.foreign.senate.gov/press/chair/release/?id=0b32e452-9c4c-4417-82ee-d201bcefc8ae
The National Intelligence Council echoed these concerns in their Global Trends 2025: A Trans- formed World, finding that with ‘‘water…breakdown in the treaty’s utility in resolving water conflicts could have serious ramifications for regional stability.

?
IndoPak water war goes nuclear – cooperation impossible. Zahoor 11 writes
Musharaf Zahoor, is researcher at Department of Nuclear Politics, National Defence University, Islamabad, “Water crisis can trigger nuclear war in South Asia,” 2011, http://www.siasat.pk/forum/showthread.php?77008-Water-Crisis-can-Trigger-Nuclear-War-in-South-Asia
South Asia is among one of those regions where water needs are growing disproportionately to its availability. The high increase in population besides large-scale cultivation has turned South Asia into a water scarce region. The two nuclear neighbors Pakistan and India share the waters of Indus Basin. All the…nuclear doctrines of both the countries clearly points out that any military confrontation in the region can result in a nuclear catastrophe. The rivers flowing from Kashmir are Pakistan's lifeline, which are essential for the livelihood of 170 million people of the country and the cohesion of federative units. The failure of dialogue will leave no option but to achieve the ends through military means.

Independently, water scarcity causes Pakistan collapse
RT 12 writes
Russia today, citing an intelligence report from The Office of the Director of National Intelligence “Global 'water war' threat by 2030 - US intelligence,” March 22nd 2012 http://rt.com/news/water-conflict-terrorism-rivers-239/
And while the prospect of “water wars” has been touted for decades, it may start to become reality…with “more powerful upstream nations impeding or cutting off downstream flow.”

Pakistan collapse triggers multiple scenarios for nuclear war. Pitt 9
5/8/09, William Pitt (a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know" and "The Greatest Sedition Is Silence"), “Unstable Pakistan Threatens the World,” http://www.arabamericannews.com/news/index.php?mod=articleandcat=commentaryandarticle=2183

But a suicide bomber in Pakistan rammed a car packed with explosives into a jeep filled with troops…Obama administration appears to be gravely serious about addressing the situation. So should we all.

Plan: The Government of Pakistan should make voting compulsory.

Existential risk outweighs every other impact by orders of magnitude because of the lost potential for future generations. Bostrom 11
Nick Bostrom (Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford Martin School and Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford), “THE CONCEPT OF EXISTENTIAL RISK”, 2011 http://www.existential-risk.org/concept.html
Even if we use the most conservative of these estimates, which entirely ignores…reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives.

Moral uncertainty is high now, but there’s room for improvement. Parfit 84 writes
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). P. 453.
Some people believe that there cannot be progress in Ethics, since everything has been…Non-Religious Ethics is the youngest and the least advanced.

?
Adopt a parliamentary model to account for moral uncertainty. This entails minimizing existential risks. Bostrom 9 writes
Bostrom, Nick (Existentialist of a different sort). “Moral uncertainty – toward a solution?” 1 January 2009. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/moral-uncertainty-towards-a-solution.html
It seems people are overconfident about their moral beliefs.  But how should one reason and act if one…one’s current favorite moral theory completely dictate action, while still allowing the aggressive pursuit of some non-commonsensical high-leverage strategies so long as they don’t infringe too much on what other major moral theories deem centrally important.

Cost-benefit analysis is feasible. Ignore any util calc indicts. Hardin 90 writes
Hardin, Russell (Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences @ NYU). May 1990. Morality within the Limits of Reason. University Of Chicago Press. pp. 4. ISBN 978-0226316208.
One of the cuter charges against utilitarianism is that it is irrational…to bring the world to a standstill) but only in the principled discussions of academics.

Debating specific nuclear scenarios is key to stave off actual nuclear war.
Harvard Nuclear Study Group 83 writes
Harvard Nuclear Study Group, 1983 (“Living With Nuclear Weapons,” p. 47)
The question is grisly, but nonetheless it must be asked. Nuclear war cannot be avoided simply by refusing…identify problems not understood or dangers not yet prevented because they have not been foreseen.

The standard is maximizing happiness.

First, the ultimate human good is happiness. Darwish 9
“Rethinking Utilitarianism,” Bahaa Darwish (Qatar University). Teaching Ethics 10 (1):87-109 (2009). http://www.uvu.edu/ethics/seac/Darwish20-20Rethinking20Utilitarianism.pdf
Let’s start with knowledge. It is clear that those who value knowledge for its own…though these values have intrinsic worth, they bring or constitute our pleasure.  

Second, respect for human worth would justify util. Cummiskey 90
Cummiskey, David. Associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. “Kantian Consequentiaism.” Ethics 100 (April 1990), University of Chicago. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract…some must sometimes give way for the sake of others. The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others.

Third, util is the only moral system available to policy-makers.  Goodin 90
Robert Goodin, fellow in philosophy, Australian National Defense University, THE UTILITARIAN RESPONSE, 1990, p. 141-2

My larger argument turns on the proposition that there is something special about the situation of public officials that…allow public policy-makers to use the utilitarian calculus – assuming they want to use it at all – to chose general rules or conduct.

Tournament: Yale | Round: 3 | Opponent: Walt Whitman DM | Judge: Abhi Elisetty
Revisionary intuitionism leads to util.

Yudkowsky 8 writes
Eliezer Yudkowsky (research fellow of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute; he also writes Harry Potter fan fiction). “The ‘Intuitions’ Behind ‘Utilitarianism.’” 28 January 2008. LessWrong. http://lesswrong.com/lw/n9/the_intuitions_behind_utilitarianism/
I haven't said much about metaethics - the nature of morality - because that has a forward dependency on a discussion of the Mind Projection Fallacy…that's why I'm a utilitarian - at least when I am doing something that is overwhelmingly more important than my own feelings about it - which is most of the time, because there are not many utilitarians, and many things left undone.

Thus the standard is maximizing happiness. There are eight additional warrants.

First is doxastic freedom. 

Belief formation is not voluntary. We have no freedom over our long-term beliefs. Alston 89
William P. Alston. “The Deontological Conception of Epistemic Justification.” Epistemic Justification: Essays in the Theory of Knowledge, 1989. http://www.ditext.com/alston/deontological.html
Let's turn now to a critical examination of the basic control…ordinary belief formed by introspection, memory, and simple uncontroversial inferences. 

Doxastic unfreedom undermines deontology and justifies util.
Petersen 11
Steve Petersen (Niagara University). “Utilitarian Epistemology.” February 10th, 2011. http://stevepetersen.net/professional/petersen-utilitarian-epistemology.pdf
These problems should sound like special cases of more general…moral responsibility for the crime.18 

Second, reductionism.

Brain studies prove that there’s no such thing as personal identity.
Parfit 84 writes
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).
Some recent medical cases provide striking evidence…and can receive two different answers written by this person’s two hands.

In the absence of personal identity, only end states matter. Shoemaker 99
Shoemaker, David (Dept of Philosophy, U Memphis). “Utilitarianism and Personal Identity.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 33: 183–199, 1999. http://www.csun.edu/~ds56723/jvipaper.pdf
Extreme reductionism might lend support to utilitarianism in the…Utilitarianism is just such a theory.

Fourth, the ultimate human good is happiness. Darwish 09
“Rethinking Utilitarianism,” Bahaa Darwish (Qatar University). Teaching Ethics 10 (1):87-109 (2009). http://www.uvu.edu/ethics/seac/Darwish20-20Rethinking20Utilitarianism.pdf
Let’s start with knowledge. It is clear that those who value knowledge for its own…these values have intrinsic worth, they bring or constitute our pleasure.  

Fifth, respect for human worth would justify util. Cummiskey 90
Cummiskey, David. Associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. “Kantian Consequentiaism.” Ethics 100 (April 1990), University of Chicago. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2381810
We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals…give way for the sake of others. The concept of the end-in-itself does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others.

Sixth, util is the only moral system available to policy-makers.  Goodin 90
Robert Goodin, fellow in philosophy, Australian National Defense University, THE UTILITARIAN RESPONSE, 1990, p. 141-2
My larger argument turns on the proposition that there is something…allow public policy-makers to use the utilitarian calculus – assuming they want to use it at all – to chose general rules or conduct.

Eighth, there’s no act-omission distinction. Gewirth 82 writes  
Gewirth (Department of Philosophy, Univ. of Chicago) 82 Alan, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications pg 183
To be responsible for inflicting lethal harms, a person need not…attributed to persons who have informed control over other persons’ suffering the lethal harms of cancer.

Err aff on framework.
Default to util absent a clear reason to reject it. Sinnot-Armstrong 11 writes
 Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, "Consequentialism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/consequentialism/.
Even if consequentialists can accommodate or explain away common moral…consequences alone seem to determine what is morally right or wrong, just as consequentialists claim

Thus the plan: The USFG should model Australia’s system of compulsory voting. I reserve the right to clarify.

?
Advantage 1 is Polarization

Compulsory voting solves polarization in politics. Shineman 11 writes
Victoria Shineman (Visiting Scholar, Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, Princeton University, PhD from NYU). “More on Mandatory Voting, Which Does *Not* Necessarily Make Electorate Less Informed.” 28 November 2011. The American Prospect. http://www.billmadden.com/activist360/2011/11/more-on-mandatory-voting-which-does-not-necessarily-make-electorate-less-informed/
The information effect also ties into the polarization…increase the participation among moderates.

Polarization kills concern for warming in politics. Guber 13 writes
Deborah Lynn Guber (University of Vermont). “A Cooling Climate for Change? Party Polarization and the Politics of Global Warming.” American Behavioral Scientist. Vol. 57, No. 1. January 2013. http://abs.sagepub.com/content/57/1/93.full.pdf+html
The history of global warming as a political issue is at least…is key to winning policy debates (Luntz Research Companies, 2002; McCright and Dunlap, 2000). 

Ocean studies prove warming causes extinction. Sify 10 writes
Citing Ove Hoegh-Gulberg, Professor @ University of Queensland and Director of the Global Change Institute AND Citing John Bruno, Associate Professor of Marine Science @ UNC (Sify News, “Could unbridled climate changes lead to human extinction?,” June 19th, http://www.sify.com/news/could-unbridled-climate-changes-lead-to-human-extinction-news-international-kgtrOhdaahc.html
Sydney: Scientists have sounded alarm bells about how growing…upon which humanity depends are undergoing massive change and in some cases beginning to fail', he added. 

Adopt a parliamentary model to account for moral uncertainty. This entails minimizing existential risks. Bostrom 9 writes
Bostrom, Nick (Existentialist of a different sort). “Moral uncertainty – toward a solution?” 1 January 2009. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/moral-uncertainty-towards-a-solution.html
It seems people are overconfident about their moral beliefs.  But how should one reason and act if one…current favorite moral theory completely dictate action, while still allowing the aggressive pursuit of some non-commonsensical high-leverage strategies so long as they don’t infringe too much on what other major moral theories deem centrally important.

I don’t need to win that weighing values is possible. Extinction precludes all values, so it is wrong under any moral code. Seeley 86
In moral reasoning prediction of consequences is nearly always impossible. One balances the…nuclear war utterly impermissible under any sane moral code.

Cost-benefit analysis is feasible. Ignore any util calc indicts.
Hardin 90 writes
Hardin, Russell (Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences @ NYU). May 1990. Morality within the Limits of Reason. University Of Chicago Press. pp. 4. ISBN 978-0226316208.
One of the cuter charges against utilitarianism is that it is…to bring the world to a standstill) but only in the principled discussions of academics.